WWOR’s Brenda Blackmon celebrates milestone

BY VIRGINIA ROHAN

The Record

STAFF WRITER

Brenda Blackmon arrived in Secaucus two decades ago, fresh from television stints in Nashville and, before that, her hometown, Columbus, Ga. And so, when she first came to WWOR-TV, the station hired a voice coach to help hide her roots.

ELIZABETH LARA/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
Anchor Brenda Blackmon, a Georgia native who lives in Tenafly, marks two decades at WWOR-TV.

“I’d [originally] had a Southern drawl, but when I left Tennessee, I left with a little of a twang,” says Blackmon, the Emmy-winning co-anchor of My9 WWOR-TV’s 11 p.m. newscast. “And then when I came here, the voice coach told me, ‘It’s just that you talk flat. Take your tongue out and put it between your teeth.’ … It made all the difference in the world.”

Nonetheless, she adds with a chuckle, “When I’m very tired, the Southern accent comes back.”

Though Blackmon is now happily rooted in New Jersey — she first settled in Englewood, then moved to Tenafly nearly 10 years ago — there’s clearly no completely taking the South out of this newswoman.

On this recent day in her office at My9 News — which celebrates the anchorwoman’s 20th anniversary with an on-air salute during Wednesday night’s newscast — Blackmon displays the famed Southern hospitality, fussing over visitors, offering refreshments and fretting about the temperature of the room.

The great-great-granddaughter of a slave, she recalls what it was like to grow up in Columbus in the 1950s, when she had to sit in the back of buses and in designated “colored” sections of restaurants. Her stories are particularly dramatic as Black History Month approaches, and in light of Blackmon’s coverage of President Obama’s inauguration last year — one of the highlights of her time at My9 TV.

“I did an editorial where I kind of pointed out how it was on these [Capitol] steps built by slaves that an African-American president [would] stand and take the oath of office, and [said] if the slaves knew at the time that they were … being a

part of that history, then perhaps the back-breaking work would have somehow been more tolerable,” Blackmon says of a piece she did for “New Jersey Now” (noon Sundays), a program about state politics that she also hosts. “It was quite a day.”

It was a day even she might have found difficult to picture as a child in Columbus, where her fifth-grade teacher at the all-black George Washington Carver Elementary School had to surreptitiously teach his pupils about their heritage — including who the school’s namesake was.

“He said, ‘Don’t tell anyone, because I would lose my job. … I’m not allowed to teach you about black history,” Blackmon recalls.

She moved on to an all-black high school, which wound up getting integrated while she was still a student, and was a member of the second group of African-American students admitted to the University of Georgia, where she studied broadcasting (and the band played “Dixie,” the de facto anthem of the Confederacy, during football games).

Blackmon’s first news job was at WRBL-TV in Columbus, where she became the city’s first African-American anchor. At the time there was a statue of “a rebel soldier on the front of the building,” says Blackmon, who also remembers being called “the N word” by a woman she approached for an interview about a robbery.

Asked how she put up with all these indignities, the ever-smiling Blackmon cites a Julia Roberts line from the movie “Something to Talk About.”

“She says, ‘Southern girls are always taught to be nice. No matter what, you have to be nice,’Ø” says Blackmon. “And I can just remember growing up with that philosophy of you have to be nice.”

Surely, though, that must have been difficult.

“The more educated I became, the more I knew what to ask for and expect,” says Blackmon, who ultimately received her B.A. in communications from Fairleigh Dickinson University, where she now teaches broadcast news.

In August 1989, when Blackmon met then-WWOR-TV news director Tom Petner at a National Association of Black Journalists convention, she told him she wanted to anchor in New York. He told her he didn’t have an anchor opening, but offered her a job as a general assignment reporter on a now-defunct live interview show called “9 Broadcast Plaza” (hosted by Matt Lauer). She’d also get to do fill-in anchoring.

“I can still remember the first day coming up here in a taxicab, and it was dreary, like today, and I remember thinking, ‘So, this is Secaucus, New Jersey. I know they said it’s the New York market, but how is that possible?’Ÿ” Blackmon says.

She’s now well aware of the connection, especially after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

“The first time I think I got up from the news desk was maybe [after] 14 hours or so. The first time I went home was maybe after 24 hours,” she says. “I remember going home and getting a flag and putting it on the mailbox, and that was the first time I really had a chance to cry, to be a part of it all.”