Even as a teenager, Carole Simpson stood out from the crowd. The former ABC news anchor excelled from an early age and later became famous as the journalist who scooped her American colleagues by securing an interview with Martin Luther King Jr. Simpson was the first woman to broadcast news in Chicago. In 1992, she became the first woman — and the first person of color — to moderate a presidential debate. Along the way, she covered some of the biggest stories of our time, from America’s civil rights movement to Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in 1990.
Simpson talked about the racism and sexism she faced throughout her career.
You’ve never been one to back down from a fight. In your autobiography, “News Lady,” you talked about becoming the first girl to run for president of Wadsworth Elementary School in the South Side of Chicago, and in high school you then turned your attention to journalism and becoming the “colored Lois Lane.” What inspired your trailblazer mentality?
I think I decided to make my parents proud of me, because I had an older sister that was a fantastic soprano. She was a mezzo soprano, discovered at 14; she began taking voice lessons because my parents were told that she would be another Marian Anderson [Anderson was an African-American contralto and one of the most celebrated singers of the 20th century] or Leontyne Price [Mary Violet Leontyne Price is a famous African-American soprano]. So all attention was focused on my sister, and so I felt if I could do what little things I could do in elementary school and high school, that they would, you know, applaud me and be proud of me. So, I didn’t have any natural talent. I didn’t have her singing voice, I’ve got a speaking voice that’s similar to the quality of her singing voice, but I just wanted to do what I could, so I got good grades, and was on the honor roll and all of those things, and I decided to run for the head of the student government.
And then when I got to high school, same thing, I was in all kinds of activities. I was in plays so they could come see me perform on a stage like my sister always did. It’s funny that you asked me that question, because I hadn’t thought about that in that way before, but that’s probably it, a desire to get the praise and adulation of my more talented sister. So, I was in high school, wanting to be Lois Lane, a colored Lois Lane, but the problem was I didn’t know any female reporters except characters from comic books. There was Brenda Starr, for example, which was a comic strip and she was a reporter, and she had the mystery man that was her secret love. And, of course, there was Lois Lane and Superman.
I mean it sounds so funny now, like they were really serious reporters. They really weren’t but it was the idea of reporting and writing your stories, which I did on the high school newspaper that made me decide I wanted to do that.
Did you ever imagine you would have such an illustrious career?
Not at all. You know, I never applied for a job. I was called: “Would you like to come work for us?”I never thought that would happen, I thought I’d be standing in. Everybody told me I’d never be able to get a job, so I thought that whole process was going to be, you know, awful for the rest of my life, but it wasn’t.
I came along in 1965, I’d gone to graduate school at the University of Iowa, and it was the height of the civil rights movement in the South, and the riots were starting in the North, and news directors and station managers and everybody was looking for black reporters, because white reporters didn’t want to go into the neighborhoods and they needed people that could go in and talk to black people and find out what people wanted. They couldn’t understand — ‘What do you want? Why are you rioting? Why are you burning down your neighborhoods?’ I was at the right place at the right time with the right credentials, and that just started me on my way.
In “News Lady” you talked about staking out a hotel room in 1966 in order to get an interview with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. How did you get him to talk to you?
By spending 12 hours on a cold marble floor waiting for him to come and see me. His lieutenants told me that he was going to have a press conference in the morning and that I could find out [then] why he was coming to Chicago, but I just wouldn’t leave. Once I had found him, and the other reporters hadn’t, I was determined. I was going to try to get a scoop and get it before everybody else did.
So I just stayed on the hotel floor by the elevators. He would have to pass by me in order to get out of the hotel, and it was important to be first. It didn’t matter if it was by a minute or whatever, you were first. So I waited, and they told him about me, so when he came down the hall he said, ‘Are you the young woman they’ve been telling me about?’ I said, ‘I don’t know, sir, but I guess so.’ And he said, ‘You waited here all night to see me?’ I said, ‘Yes, sir, I did.’ So he ended up whispering in my ear why he had come to Chicago, and then he said, ‘Don’t tell anybody.’ It was so funny, he was laughing, and I was going, ‘Don’t tell anybody?’ And then he got into the elevator.
Martin Luther King really put me on the map because I got the scoop. This was in 1966, he got into the elevator and he said, ‘I admire you, young woman, for your persistence. I expect great things from you someday.’ And when someone like Martin Luther King, who is your idol, I mean, he was it; he was a rock star; he was my rock star. To have somebody say that to you, you feel kind of an obligation that you’ve got to fulfill that. So I got the scoop and I became national news. Everybody was [saying] who is Carole Simpson? Who is this person that got this scoop? There had been reporters covering him for years as he marched through the South, and I was able to get it.
Do you feel you fulfilled your obligation to Martin Luther King Jr.?
I have tried, and I’ve tried being excellent at my work and working harder than everybody else because I knew I would have to. As a black female, people’s expectations of me were very low, that I would not be able to do certain things. So I was bound and determined to prove them wrong. So when I went out, I felt I was representing women and I was representing black people, and that I had to be the best. I had to. I couldn’t let down my people, not my gender. I would have to show people that women can do this and they can do it well.
And I’ve tried to pay it back, I have scholarships for young people who want to get into broadcast journalism, who are minorities or are women. So I’ve tried to pay it back, and to mentor young people. I didn’t have anybody to tell me what to do, or [to say] this is what you do when this happens. Nobody took me under their wing and said, ‘Here’s how you handle this,’ and ‘Here’s how you handle that.’ So I had to knock my head into a brick wall before I figured out what it was you had to do.
So what I’ve tried to do is take young people under my wing, when I was working at NBC and ABC, for example, and try to guide them and try to tell them who to look out for, who is a good person that you should saddle up to. And what happens if something goes wrong and how to get your story in first. So I mentor. I’ve mentored hundreds of young people through the years. So those are ways that I’ve tried to pay back.
When you were with ABC News, you and 14 other women once voiced your dissatisfaction with ABC President Roone Arledge that women were being passed up for good stories and promotions. What do you think women in the news room today should be voicing their dissatisfaction with?
Well, it doesn’t seem like they’re going to do it. We have a situation now that I am very disturbed by, and I call it the ‘sexploitation’ of the news. When I came along, and other women came along, we didn’t dress like men, but we had on suits. They were lady suits; they were colorful and that kind of thing. But we looked professional, like the men did, with their suits and ties. Now I look up and men are still in their suits and ties, but women are now in sleeveless dresses.
It was unheard of before as you were not to see anything on a women’s arm above her elbow. The idea was to look professional. I can’t get it that dresses are tight, tight, tight, and they are low cut. The whole idea was, ‘We are professional women giving you the news. We don’t want you looking at our bodies. We don’t want you imagining things about our bodies’ — but now it’s all about that. I see women with breast implants. There was one young woman who came to ABC shortly before I left, and she was told to wear sweaters on the air.
So once again, we’ve got men making decisions. I don’t think a woman news director would tell her anchorwoman: ‘I want you in sweaters on the air.’ And then there’s all this hair, they have big hair and long hair. With us, [hair] was to be groomed nicely, not to draw attention to it. Nothing was to draw attention to anything but what we had to say about the news. And now it’s like, ‘infotainment,’ it’s not about the news. It’s about entertaining as well as informing people, and it’s just been a very distressing move for me. I don’t know how much further they can go, but I did see someone in a halter top giving the news. It’s crazy to me. So, until more women are making decisions, I don’t think we’ll see that [change].
Throughout your career you battled both sexual discrimination and racial prejudice. What were some of your worst experiences and how did you overcome them?
Well people are surprised when I say that of the two forms of discrimination [suffered], I suffered sex discrimination more than racial discrimination. I was more often told, ‘You can’t do this because you’re a woman.’ OK. ‘Well, you don’t need a salary increase because you’ve got a husband, and these men have wives, and they have to take care of their families,’ and we’re all doing the same kind of work. It was like, ridiculous. And, ‘Women are not as strong at covering the White House, so they can’t be the senior White House correspondent because they’re just not as strong. They don’t have the gravitas and so on.’ So I heard all of that kind of stuff. ‘Women don’t like to hear other women on the air.’ And so there was that kind of discrimination.
I say that was more pervasive than the racial discrimination. But when the racial discrimination did occur, it was the most crude and stupid kind of stuff. That just made me angry, that I would even have to deal with it. Like going to New York with a group of minority employees to meet with Roone Arledge, and having our national assignment editor sitting on the rim of “World News Tonight” see me and another black correspondent walk in, and we came over to say hi, and she said, ‘Oh, you’re here for the Roone lunch. What are you all going to have, chitlins and watermelon?’
I would get that kind of stuff all the time, you know. I was at the White House and was working on a radio spot, and wasn’t going to be able to run out for lunch, and so one of our technicians was going out, and I said, ‘Would you mind bringing me back a sandwich from wherever you go?’ and he said, ‘What kind of sandwich, collard green sandwich?’ And I was like ‘I have never heard of a collard green sandwich.’ Why would he say something like that to me? This showed that when they looked at me — no matter that I was a national figure at that point and known nationally on the air — they still saw me as a black woman. And asking me about fried chicken and barbecued ribs.
They always thought that I got the anchor job on weekend news because it was affirmative action. I was a black woman so they wanted to do that. I held that seat for 15 years. They would not have let me do that if I had not been good. But they never would say or acknowledge that I was good at what I did and that I had a large following among the public. I had one of my colleagues say before I was about to go on the air: ‘What do I have to do to be an anchor? Do I have to put on black face and put a kerchief on my head and wear a skirt?’ Like I wear a kerchief on my head, or ever wore a kerchief on my head. You know, it’s Aunt Jemima, and I’m not really black-faced. I’m a lighter complexion, African American.
But they saw black and the stereotypes and applied that to me. It just bothered me throughout my career. It would be like, every six months, there would be something to remind me: ‘You nobody. You’re not Carole Simpson, a national anchor for one of the major networks. You’re just a black woman.’
And it was like clockwork. It might be in a letter that I received from a fan, not a fan, but a public person. They often came from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, I might add, saying that I shouldn’t be on the air, and go back to the jungle, and go to Africa, and why do I wear these big hoop earrings, which I never did on the air. And there would be these reminders. It was like a joke. I’m like, ‘Here it comes again.’ And that continued throughout 40 years of a broadcasting career. People would make racial slurs and things like that.
How did you deal with it and overcome it?
Well, I got sick of it when I was about 40. I had been working for about 15 years at the network level, and I just got tired of it. I was sick of battling and grinning and bearing it. And so I got to the point where if somebody said something to me that I found offensive, I would say in the biggest, deepest Carole Simpson voice, ‘What did you say?’ I could get everyone’s attention. Whoever was around could hear my voice. And these men, and they were usually men, would turn red and, ‘Ah ha, I was just kidding.’ I said, ‘No. What did you say?’ And so, they were just, ‘I was kidding with you, Carole, I was,’ and everybody’s like, ‘What did they say to you?’ And I wouldn’t tell them what it was, but it was clear that they had said something offensive to me and that I wasn’t going to take it. So they were very hesitant after I embarrassed them publicly about the kinds of things they said, and they weren’t so quick to do it again.
What do you think is the biggest issue facing women today?
The state legislatures of the United States of America. I can’t believe how many legislatures have made abortion virtually impossible. And contraception, that we even should be talking about contraception, and women having transvaginal ultrasounds and things. It’s just shocking. And who’s making these decisions — white men. I am so sick of white men telling women what they should and should not do when it comes to their bodies and their reproductive lives.
So, that is galvanizing the women’s movement again. Who would have thought? But it is really getting women active again, and I think you’ll see huge fights to save the rights that we were already granted, that somebody wants to take away.
You’re now the Leader in Residence at Emerson College. According to U.S. News and World Report, 61 percent of the students at Emerson are women. What’s the biggest advice you have today for a woman entering journalism?
To be the best they can be. It’s hard to slam a door in somebody’s face who is the best and who is also going to turn up the best story. I had that problem early on, that they thought I was OK.
Then I worked really hard, just to have a little extra something that the other network didn’t have or just something, [a] special nugget, special picture, something that showed I’d gone above and beyond.
So that is my advice to women. They have to be excellent, and that’s true for minorities, too, minorities and women. Because we are held to a different standard, and to be judged with the men, with the white males, you have to be twice as good, work twice as hard, and they need to know that, if they [women] want this kind of career.
But you know, one of the things that is disturbing to me is [that] I used to do recruiting for ABC and students would tell me, ‘Well I don’t want to work weekends, and I don’t want to work nights. And I don’t want to travel, and I’m like, ‘Well then you don’t want to be a journalist. Are you crazy?’ That’s what we do. I worked weekends my entire life, because that’s where they put me. Not during the week, they said that, ‘White people didn’t like to hear news being given by black people during the week.’ Weekends were OK. What kind of craziness is that? But you watch and you see who’s on the weekends, and that’s where you’ll see minorities. You see Lester Holt from NBC, and he does a terrific job, but he’s on the weekends.