Photo credits: YouTube screenshot via NBC News NY
Trudy Haynes, a forerunner in televised reporting and Philadelphia’s first African American television broadcaster, died on June 7, 2022, at 95 years of age.
Haynes was born Gertrude Daniels. However, she was lovingly remembered in Philadelphia as Miss Trudy, per the Philadelphia Inquirer. She was born in New York and graduated from Howard University. She previously conducted interviews with many of America’s most well-known figures, such as Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Muhammad Ali, and Tupac Shakur.
Haynes began her professional life as a Lucky Strike cigarette model. She went back to working at a radio station in Inkster, Michigan, doing audio reporting. She debuted as a secretary and worked her way up. She eventually rose to prominence and became the director of a daily women’s show. She began her broadcast career as the country’s first Black weather correspondent in Detroit. Haynes was hired by KYW-TV in Philadelphia in 1965, which would subsequently be renamed CBS 3.
As an employee of KYW-TV, Haynes was hired to be Philadelphia Pennsylvania’s first Black television reporter.
Throughout the course of Haynes’s long tenure at KYW-TV, she blossomed into a mainstay of municipal media. She was a lauded practitioner of journalism. As the face of her own television program, she marveled at the opportunity to tell robust stories, which chronicled the lives of those within the community she kept informed.
Haynes’s most delightful character traits were her warm, witty humor and the clever way she expressed herself. She won an Emmy Award and was granted tokens of high esteem, which came from many organizations. One of them was the NAACP. During the year 1999, Haynes became a Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia’s Hall of Fame inductee.
She is a true trailblazer for today’s Black American women in media and news broadcasting, such as Oprah Winfrey, Cynthia Newsome, Joy Reid, and Harris Faulkner.
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