The Bay Area’s first Black female news anchor and reporter has died. Belva Davis was 92 when she died Wednesday morning at home in Oakland. 

The Berkeley High School graduate became, in the 1960s, the first Black female news anchor and reporter in the Bay Area and the first on the West Coast. 

She was inducted into the Silver Circle in 1989 and the Gold Circle in 2013. She received the Governors’ Award in 1995.

Beginning in the 1960s, Belva worked at KTVU, KPIX, KRON and KQED. 

Her husband is Bill Moore, a retired long-term photographer at KTVU.

Belva’s death is confirmed by Gary Kauf, a longtime family friend of Davis and Moore. Gary is a former longtime reporter and producer at KTVU.  

Belva Davis spent more than 50 years in Bay Area journalism (print, radio and television). Among Belva’s accomplishments, she was the Bay Area’s first African American female television news anchor and first on the West Coast. She worked at KTVU, KPIX, KRON, and KQED.  As a reporter, Davis covered many important events of the day, including issues of race, gender, and politics.

In a career spanning half a century, she has reported many of the most explosive stories of the era, including the Berkeley student protests, the birth of the Black Panthers, the Peoples Temple cult that ended in the mass suicides at Jonestown, the assassinations of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, the onset of the AIDS epidemic, and from Africa, the terrorist attacks that first put Osama bin Laden on the FBI’s Most Wanted List.

Among Belva’s many honors, in addition to the Silver Circle and seven Emmy® statuettes, has been as a recipient of the 1995 NATAS Governors’ Award and many other Bay Area, regional, statewide and national honors; including numerous accolades from AFTRA, RTNDA, PBS, and BABJA. She was the host of KQED-PBS This Week in Northern California for almost twenty years and co-author of Never in My Wildest Dreams. Belva retired from KQED in November of 2012.