Gwen Ifill, a pioneering Black journalist with an unshakable reserve of integrity and grit, died Monday, Nov. 14, at a hospice center in Washington, D.C. She was 61.
According to her brother, Roberto Ifill, the cause of death was endometrial cancer. She was noted for her fight against this form of cancer that attacks the lining of the uterus, a cancer prevalent among Black women.
Whether on the medical battleground or in the newsrooms of America, Ifill was indomitable, unwilling to go quietly against the forces that would deny her will to live or to express her clear thinking about public affairs.
“She didn’t mind telling anyone when she thought they were wrong, on camera,” said Judy Woodruff, Ifill’s co-anchor on PBS’s “NewsHour.” “She kept it respectful. She was one of the most graceful interrupters I have ever seen.”
Woodruff added that Ifill possessed that rare combination of authority and warmth. “She came through the screen as a friend of people who watched her, but she also displayed the authority for people to believe you, to have credibility,” said Woodruff.
Forging these traits began in Queens, where Gwendolyn Ifill was born Sept. 29, 1955. She was fifth of six siblings of a father, O. Urcille Ifill, a native of Panama and an AME pastor, and a mother, Eleanor Husbands, a homemaker from Barbados. Ifill attended high school in Springfield, Mass. and graduated from Simmons College in Boston in 1977 with a bachelor’s degree in communications studies.
Ifill cut her eyeteeth as a reporter with the Boston Herald American, particularly at a time when Boston was caught in the throes of a divisive forced-busing turmoil. Right away her feisty resolve was apparent to her colleagues as they grappled with a Black woman who would not suffer fools kindly.
In 1981, she was hired by the Baltimore Evening Sun and three years later, after acquiring experience covering city hall, she joined The Washington Post. Her first assignment was covering suburban politics as the bureau chief in Prince George’s County.
When the Rev. Jesse Jackson mounted his presidential campaign a second time in 1988, Ifill followed him from stump to stump, giving him the coverage that few other journalists in the mainstream media provided. The New York Times hired her as a congressional correspondent in 1992 and she was again on the campaign trail, this time with Bill Clinton. With Clinton’s victory, she was the paper’s White House correspondent. In this capacity, she was in the catbird seat as the president endured impeachment hearings stemming from his affair with Monica Lewinsky.
During this period, Ifill was also a regular guest on WETA, Washington’s public broadcasting station. When the show’s moderator was released, Ifill was offered the job and her transition from print to television was seamless.
For all her bravado and consummate professionalism on the beat and in the studios, it wasn’t until she arrived behind the desks at PBS that she became a household name and broadcaster. And that presence was given added cachet when she and Woodruff took over as co-anchors of the “NewsHour,” the first major media outlet with women as co-anchors.
By 2004, her prominence was given a broader platform when she moderated the vice-presidential debate between Richard Cheney, the incumbent, and Sen. John Edwards. Her questions about the AIDS crisis was widely commended and she drew similar praise four years later when she moderated the debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden.
Despite a busy schedule on television as a co-anchor and as a panelist on sundry news shows, Ifill found time to write “Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama,” a perceptive analysis of the president and the general status of many other Black elected officials.
During her moderations of town hall events that centered on police abuse, she never wavered from asking the hard questions and making sure the audience was given ample opportunity to express their concerns. Three years ago, speaking to a number of journalism students, she told them, “I was taught that the search for truth and the search for justice are not incompatible and are, in fact, essential. Diversity is essential to the success of the news industry, and journalists must include diverse voices in their coverage in order to reach a broader audience. We have stories to tell, but many in our audience have stopped listening because they can tell that we’re not talking about them.”
Ifill never stopped talking about those without a voice, and she was relentless in her pursuit of the truth and maintaining those precious journalistic ideals so important to her and her craft.
Besides her brother, Roberto Ifill, of Silver Spring, Md., survivors include another brother, the Rev. Earle Ifill of Atlanta, and a sister, Maria Philip of Silver Spring.