Warren Wilson, a pioneering Los Angeles broadcaster and former KTLA reporter, has died at age 90.
Wilson died on Friday, September 27, in Oxnard, California, his son Stanley said in a statement.
The son of North Carolina sharecroppers, Wilson was a broadcast journalist for more than 40 years and ranked as one of Los Angeles’ first Black broadcasters when his career got going in 1969, according to the Los Angeles Times. He spent 21 of those years at KTLA.
Wilson covered the 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy at Los Angeles’ Ambassador Hotel, the 1992 Rodney King riots, and the O.J. Simpson trial, amid other major events in the city. And for his coverage of the 1992 riots — which were sparked by the acquittal of the police officers charged with excessive force in the videotaped beating of Rodney King — Wilson earned a Peabody Award.
“He was brave,” KTLA reporter Eric Spillman said. “During the riots, Warren went down to the South L.A. area and interviewed a shop owner who was trying to put out flames while standing on the roof of a burning building. I will never forget that.”
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Spillman also remembered his former colleague as “a trusted reporter,” saying that “members of minority communities who were afraid to turn themselves in to police would often contact Warren and arrange to meet with him, and he would safely help them turn themselves in.”
In fact, Wilson assisted in the surrender of 22 fugitives wanted by law enforcement, the Times reports. “I guess I can identify with the underdog because of what I’ve had to go through as a Black man working in a white world,” Wilson told the newspaper in 1993. “I take some pride in thinking that maybe someone — a suspect or a police officer — stayed alive because of all this.”
In his statement announcing his father’s death, Stanley said that Wilson’s “demeanor on the air as an iconic television journalist was just as authentic as he was a father, unsensational, sincere, a voice calming and eloquent.”
Wilson is survived by six children: Pamela Wilson, Melissa Jones, Elizabeth Wilson, Ronald Wilson, Stanley Wilson and stepdaughter Debra Hansen. Kim T. Wilson, his second eldest daughter, died in 2003.
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