Pitt event celebrates trailblazing Black broadcast journalist and Homestead native Mal Goode

Homestead native Mal Goode broke the color barrier on network television in the 1960s. But his story and journalistic legacy, which many people do not know about, is more than that.

His biographers want Pittsburgh residents and beyond to know about his successes and his American story, too, of coming from nothing and succeeding and making a difference through his work and advocacy. Goode, who died in 1995 in Pittsburgh, led the way not only for the Black journalists who followed him but also for how the media began covering the Black experience in this country.

A program that celebrates his life and work Thursday at the University of Pittsburgh aims to focus on all of this, according to Pitt history professors Rob Ruck and Liann Tsoukas. Their book, “Mal Goode Reporting: The Life and Work of a Black Broadcast Trailblazer,” published last year, traces his life up to and beyond becoming the first Black ABC News correspondent and in all of broadcast television in 1962.

Morgan State University multimedia journalism professor Wayne Dawkins and Carnegie Mellon University professor Joe Trotter will speak at the event, which runs from 4-6 p.m. Two of Goode’s grandchildren, Randy Wilburn and Christee Goode Laster, will add their reflections, and so will the co-authors.

Goode is a symbol of the Black American experience and struggle, the co-authors believe. How he persevered from growing up in Homestead — working in a steel mill during high school to finance his Pitt education and taking on a wide variety of jobs when he couldn’t afford law school to reaching his ABC position at 54 — has all the touchpoints of the 20th-century narrative. That includes racism, turmoil and television’s development as the dominant media.

As they learned more about Goode during the 10 years they researched and wrote his biography, Ruck and Tsoukas said they realized that Pittsburgh doesn’t recognize his contributions enough and neither did the University of Pittsburgh. Because of that, it is important to them that Thursday’s program not be centered on their book.

“We wanted it to be about Mal Goode,” Tsoukas said. “… We feel like we’re the ambassadors for his story.” 

After graduating from Pitt and a second stint working at a steel mill during the Depression, Goode worked as the Centre Avenue YMCA boys director and managed the city’s Terrace Village and Bedford Dwellings Hill District housing projects. His next position, in circulation at the Pittsburgh Courier, led him to local radio in 1948. With his basso profundo voice resonating over first the KQV and then WHOD (later WAMO) airwaves, Goode challenged the police, politicians and segregation while providing Black listeners with a voice that captured their experience, according to a news release about the event.

“He becomes a pundit before there were pundits. He’s a voice and he’s powerful,” Tsoukas said. “He’s capturing experiences, and he’s relaying important material through the radio as Black media always has been. Black DJs [back then] were called the mayor of the town.”

He couldn’t break into local television, though, which frustrated him, she said. “He was a proven professional — very quick on his feet, always prepared, a beautiful voice,” Tsoukas continued. “He was implacable.  He couldn’t break in, and it was completely a racial issue.”

What he and his wife, Mary Lavelle, also did led him to ABC, based at the United Nations in New York City.  They welcomed many Black visitors into their homes for a meal and to just relax, as Ruck explained, something they couldn’t easily do in the 1950s. Those visitors included notable Black baseball players such as Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays, Roberto Clemente and Hank Aaron.

Robinson pushed ABC to hire Goode, according to many reports and a 2024 Pitt article last year detailing the biography. His first appearance on ABC occurred when the network broke into regular programming with his Cuban missile crisis update in 1962. His later assignments during his 11-year career there gave him special access to Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, among other Black leaders.

Goode’s son Ronald connected Ruck to his father when the history professor spoke about the Negro Baseball League and sandlot teams during a Heinz History Center forum in the 1980s. What followed was an amazing interview, Ruck said, and his regret is that he didn’t know then what he knows now about Goode and his path to ABC.

At this time broadcast television was in startup mode, Tsoukas said, rapidly expanding to become the dominant news medium. “It had to catch up and set the pace at the same time,” she said.

Where some major award-winning print journalists bombed on national television, Goode didn’t. And he was never a traditional journalist and had not written news copy, she noted.

From his own life experience and radio work, what Goode had in addition to his voice was presence. He was a people person, too, who could relate to many.

“He was really warm and gregarious and demanding, all those things at once. He was opinionated, [and] he was strong,” Tsoukas said.

One of her favorite comments about him came from a young civil rights activist that he was fierce but “unvicious,” a word she coined to describe Goode. “When he walked into the room, he would be so informed that people would quake,” she told Tsoukas.

That translated into the way he evolved his television role, not only as a journalist “but also an activist at the same time. [It] was super sophisticated, I think. [It’s] just glorious to watch how that evolved. He was so prepared.”

Goode pushed back at network leaders during his tenure, which ended in 1973, to include more Black correspondents and cover more of Black life than the civil rights movements and riots. He also chafed at “being used and being the conduit of getting a story of racial turmoil out into the public,” Ruck said. “And then he told his superiors, ‘I won’t cover another riot.’ And he doesn’t. He’s just sitting at the intersection of all these fast evolving, distressing and powerful currents.”

After he left ABC, he continued reporting on the United Nations and politics for the National Black Network, something Goode did until he was 83, according to a podcast Ruck and Tsoukas recorded with his grandson Wilburn and BlackCast. He also gave many presentations, leaving behind a treasure trove of material archived at the University of Missouri. 

Two of his children reached out to Ruck to write his biography, which he agreed to do if Tsoukas could assist. In 2015 the co-authors combed through that archive with the help of professionals there. Then they traveled to Virginia, where Goode’s parents were born regions apart, collecting family history and reviewing historical society and other records.

Family members produced calendars, more family history, cards exchanged and more to aid them. “In doing the biographical work we were able to produce a well-rounded look at his life, and that’s largely because of the family,” Tsoukas said. The Goodes had six children, four who are still living. Three reside in Pittsburgh.

Ruck said one of the bonuses of their collaboration comes from Tsoukas’ work as a graduate student in African American history and teaching courses on it for decades. “She had a far more complex and nuanced understanding to how the Black experience evolved [than I],” he said. 

Goode is the grandson of enslaved people, and his father came to Pittsburgh. Although illiterate, he secured a steel mill job and sent home money so his family could buy land. His mother, who was educated and a teacher, met and married him in Homestead.

The parents wanted their children to be educated and immersed in faith, family bonds and the struggle for freedom, Ruck said. That is reflected in Goode’s background, working night shifts in the mill during high school and college, then securing positions benefiting his degree and blossoming in the 1950s as a radio voice.

He became “a fierce protector of Black people who is trying to get at what their issues are, get their voices out. That to me was a story in and of itself, worthy of writing about him,” Ruck said.

Part of that was mentoring Robinson and others. Goode took Hank Aaron to his first NAACP meeting while he visited Pittsburgh, and he became a lifelong member of it, something he learned when he interviewed him for one of his books. Ruck has written nine books and a documentary on Pittsburgh sports, Black sports and their intersection and more, according to the 2024 Pitt article.

Goode continued that mentoring after he moved to Teaneck, N.J., for the ABC position, counseling young Black journalists. Ruck and Tsoukas spent a great deal of time talking to them. They learned from them that Goode could be “really warm and gregarious and demanding, all those things at once.”

His ease at dealing with people and reporting can be traced back to his upbringing in Homestead, Ruck said. He lived in Hilltop, an integrated neighborhood that included Black and white steelworkers and close to where prominent Black leaders lived. Goode worked in the mills with people who didn’t have high school diplomas while he pursued his degree and belonged to Alpha Phi Alpha, a fraternity for Black students at Pitt.

Ruck said, “He moves back and forth throughout his entire career. He can relate to the Black elite, the Black working class, the Black hustler. And he does it without condescension.

“I think you see that when he gets to ABC, and his mission is to help force the networks to redefine how they cover Black America. He’s not just reaching out to just his Alpha Phi Alpha brothers. He wants to talk to the people in the streets. He wants to bring that full range of voices. He’s not condescending or pretentious in how he does that.”

The co-authors watched hours and hours of his television footage among other sources and saw that he pursued his sources aggressively. “We came up with the idea that no one was too big or too small to escape his interest or his wrath,” Tsoukas said.

What they both hope Thursday’s event attendees come away with is that Goode is a symbol of the Black American experience and struggle. His life is “like ripping a page out of the center from the enslavement to the migration history, [all] touchpoints as a narrative to the 20th century,” Tsoukas said.

Right now, learning this is important. “Mal fought his entire life to get the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act passed,” Ruck said. “And then he starts to see in the ’80s a racial reaction against a lot of that take hold and chisel away, erode these rights. [That is] What is going on right now. We need a voice like Mal’s. We needed them then. We need a voice like Mal’s today. We need many voices.”

Registration for the event is available here. The event will be livestreamed, and a link will be sent to those interested in that the day prior. It will be held at the O’Hara Student Center in Oakland.