Ms. Poussin joined the Washington media market as a correspondent for CBS News in the mid-1970s before hiring WJLA-TV (Channel 7) as an evening and night host with David Schumacher in 1978.
He received local Emmy Awards for telling stories of human interest, including the work of Haitian migrant workers in a camp on the east coast of Maryland and the return of American hostages from Iran. He earned another for the profile of Jack Kent Cook, who is now the owner of the Washington Commanders football team.
He rose to the network level after leaving the WJLA in 1992 and won awards. For the newspapers “20/20” and “PrimeTime Live” he covered US presidential campaigns and conflict zones such as Haiti, South Africa and Uganda. Several times, he complimented host Peter Jennings on the half-hour evening show on the “World News Tonight” channel.
Renee Francine Poussaint was born on August 12, 1944 in Manhattan and grew up in the Harlem neighborhood of Spain. Her father was an engraver and union leader for The New York Times, while her mother was a social worker, deputy city welfare commissioner.
He and his younger brother were mostly raised by their mothers after their parents’ divorce and were surrounded by relatives who stressed the importance of education. His uncle, Alvin Poussin, became a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and was Bill Cosby’s consultant when he created The Cosby Show.
Ms. Poussin attended Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York on a scholarship, and received her BA in Comparative Arts in 1964. She received her Masters in African Studies from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1970, attended Yale Law School for a year and entered Indiana University for his doctorate in comparative literature.
While teaching a black American literature class, he told the Chicago Tribune that his students were less involved with the material and exhibited barely acceptable reading and writing skills.
“They said they didn’t see it as a problem as they got most of the information from the TV,” he said. “So I had a kind of identity crisis because at the same time my learning was becoming more and more esoteric – I was sitting in seminars with six people translating passages from the Bible into Swahili, and so I decided I had to study. Something about television. “
He dropped out of Indiana Columbia University to enroll in a minority journalism program, then was hired as a news writer at WBBM in Chicago. The first transmission of him happened by chance. The understaffed editor sent him to the police station to report a fire in a house in the suburbs. Authorities determined that the fire was the scene of a homicide-suicide incident that killed five people and Ms. Poussin first appeared live on camera.
“I did and it was terrible,” he told the Washington Post in 1982. “I came back, I ran, I got on and I went on, and I realized that the redeeming feature of it all was that my mom couldn’t. see me in New York. I am crazy about myself. But it was pretty bad. At least I survived. Experience.”
In 2001, he founded and served as CEO of the National Visionary Leadership Project, which recorded 300 oral history interviews with black leaders in the arts, education, government, and civil rights. Ms. Poussin compiled several of these of hers in her 2004 book The Wealth of Wisdom: Speaking of Legendary African-American Elders, written in collaboration with Cosby’s wife, Camille.
Ms. Poussin has lectured and taught local children and was an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Maryland. She was also president of her own communications company and founded Wisdom Works, a non-profit documentary company. “Tutu and Franklin: Journey to Peace” Discuss racial reconciliation with South African archbishop Desmond Tutu and American historian John Hope Franklin.
In addition to her 45-year-old husband, the survivors are a brother and two half-siblings.
When he got into television journalism in Chicago, he recalled that he was told he would never be successful for many reasons. Aside from her race, gender, and her short hair, the examiner told her she was extremely intelligent, taller than the average audience.
The speech forced him to confront prejudices and inequalities during and after his television career.
“As a young woman of color, my opportunities for activism and participation were rich and lasting,” Ms. Poussin wrote in an article she wrote in 2001. “My moral imperatives – my wishes – were strict and clear. And I believed that even if I was a woman and a black man, I should have an equal chance of being president or whatever I liked.
Source: Washington Post
Roy Brown is a renowned economist and author at The Nation View. He has a deep understanding of the global economy and its intricacies. He writes about a wide range of economic topics, including monetary policy, fiscal policy, international trade, and labor markets.
