A trailblazer and example
Soledad O’Brien chuckled when I asked her about meeting the trailblazing reporter Sarah-Ann Shaw when O’Brien was as an entry-level writer-associate producer at WBZTV in the 1980s.
“You didn’t meet Sarah-Ann, you were presented to Sarah-Ann,” the longtime TV host and anchor said by telephone this week.
O’Brien meant that Shaw was the kind of person people pointed out to a new colleague with awe and reverence. Always busy, but also willing to make the time to help. But you didn’t just go up and say hi.
“Sarah-Ann was a full-on celebrity,”
O’Brien recalled. “People there had this tremendous reverence for people with tremendous history. And the people with that tremendous history took seriously their role as mentors.”
Shaw, who died last week at 90, was rightly remembered as a pioneer, one of Boston’s first prominent Black television journalists. She was also — and before all else — a person who combined her journalism with a legendary sense of community.
Shaw was a community activist who became a journalist almost by accident in the late 1960s. As mainstream media took stock of its nearly all-white newsrooms amid the racial turmoil of the 1960s, her deep roots in Boston’s Black neighborhoods drew attention. She started out at WGBH’s “Say Brother” before moving to WBZ-TV.
The lesson that journalists have a responsibility to the people whose stories they tell was one she was always eager to pass along. Her legacy will live on among the many journalists she encouraged to stay connected to their communities.
Latoyia Edwards of NBC10 Boston is one of those who feel indebted to Shaw. Like many others, she met her as an entry-level employee at WBZ-TV.
When Edwards — who’d grown up and attended college in Boston — was unsure about accepting her first job in upstate New York, Shaw was the one who told her she had to take it — once Edwards summoned the nerve to ask the legend for advice.
“She said, ‘You try. You go.’ And that was my beginning,” Edwards said. “I will say that she was part of a really strong team of Black people there then who really uplifted any young person who came through the door. She encouraged me to stay committed to my community.”
O’Brien never worked with Shaw directly, but absorbed lessons watching her cover Black Boston. “I liked the stories she was reporting on and I thought that the way she covered ‘the community’ — meaning Black people — was very thoughtful, at a time when a lot of other places covered people of color in kind of pandering ways.”
As a personal aside, I’ll say that SarahAnn paid close attention to how other outlets covered communities of color as well. When she thought the Globe was falling short — which wasn’t infrequently — she didn’t think twice about picking up the phone and telling me that we needed to do better.
After Shaw retired from television in 2000, she was free to devote more time to her first love, community activism. She fought for her causes — foremost among them education — and dispensed free advice to politicians.
“I wouldn’t be where I am now if Miss Shaw hadn’t made time for me,” Mayor Michelle Wu said Monday. “Conversation after conversation, she made space for me.”
Sarah-Ann’s daughter, Klare Shaw, recalled a conversation her mother had with her doctor in her later years about quality of life. What, he wondered, would she miss if she couldn’t do it anymore? Without hesitation she said, “I would really miss not being able to go to meetings.”
Her daughter laughed at the memory. “I told her, ‘You must be the only person on Earth who thinks not being able to go to meetings would be punitive.’ "
As much as her actions, Sarah-Ann
Shaw’s example is what people are mourning now. She touched even more lives than people know. “People loved her, and people respected her,” O’Brien said. “And that’s not that common. A lot of people are beloved, a few people are respected. Not that many people are beloved and respected.
Earlier this week, a group of Shaw’s friends and admirers gathered to lay a wreath in her memory at the Embrace statue on Boston Common. Shaw was already honored there, among the city’s pioneers for racial justice.
Hers is a powerful legacy that will live on.