Kaufman, Monica 1948(?)–

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Monica Kaufman 1948(?)–

Journalist

Veteran television journalist and broadcaster Monica Kaufman made history as the first African American to anchor one of the local newscasts in Atlanta, Georgia. When she began anchoring the news for the city's ABC affiliate in 1975, Atlanta was just beginning to emerge as the South's most important black metropolis. Three decades later, Kaufman is a much-loved local celebrity known as much for her reporting skills and multiple local Emmy awards as she is for her commitment to many civic and charitable organizations. She is also proud to serve as a role model for future journalists. “When you turn on TV now, you can see someone like you no matter which channel you watch, whether its a Latino or an Asian or black or gay,” she told Phil Kloer in an interview for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “Kids look at us and say, ‘I can do that.’ When I was growing up, I couldn't say that 'cause there was no one that looked like me or talked like me.”

Born Monica Rosie Lee Jones in the late 1940s, Kaufman grew up as an only child in the African-American neighborhood called Smoketown in Louisville, Kentucky. Her parents divorced when she was four years old, her mother remarried several years later, and Kaufman had no contact with her biological father until she graduated from Presentation Academy, an all-girls' Roman Catholic high school.

Kaufman went on to the University of Louisville but dropped out at the age of nineteen to marry. She took a job with a bank but soon tired of it and walked into the newspaper offices of the Louisville Times, which was located across the street from the bank, and applied for a position as a clerk. She was hired and soon moved to up to a reporter's desk while returning to school to finish her degree. Eager to move into television news, she managed to get an interview at Louisville's NBC affiliate, WAVE-TV, but its news director told her, “‘Honey, you need to stay in newspapers because you really don't have the skills,’” she recalled the interview with Kloer for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “I got the idea: I need to take a charm course and learn to put on makeup and how to dress for TV.”

One of her assignments in the charm-school course involved modeling in a restaurant, where she caught the attention of the news director for a rival television station in Louisville; the director thought that Kaufman possessed a winning combination of poise and verve. She was hired as a reporter and news anchor at WHAS, the city's CBS affiliate, in 1973, and was lured to Atlanta, Georgia, two years later to serve as the new nightly news anchor at WSB-TV, an ABC affiliate. The Atlanta station had the top-rated television news outlet for much of that decade, and when Kaufman made her debut in August of 1975, she became the first African-American anchorperson in the city's broadcast history. She was also the first woman to coanchor a flagship broadcast on an Atlanta station, but she was unaware of both of these distinctions, she told Atlanta Business Chronicle's Elizabeth Vaeth. “They didn't tell me until after I went on air that I had made history,” she noted.

Kaufman's personality came through on the air, and she became a local celebrity for her off-camera commitments to the community. A move to a much larger market, perhaps even a national news team, seemed to be in her future, but in 1980 Kaufman—whose first marriage had ended and who was now married to Clinton Deveaux, an Atlanta judge—became a mother, and the focus of her time and energies shifted from work to home. “I don't have the drive I had before Claire to be on network TV,” she admitted in a 1986 Atlanta Journal-Constitution interview with Maureen Downey when her daughter was six years old. “Now, I want to have roots. I don't believe in shifting kids around.”

Kaufman began conducting interviews with local movers and shakers in the mid-1980s, called “Monica Kaufman's Close-Ups,” which netted her a few of the record twenty-eight local Emmy awards she would collect over a long career. By the time her twenty-fifth anniversary at WSB neared in August of 2000, she had been on the air longer than any other local journalist in Atlanta and was one of the longest-serving news anchors in any U.S. market. The station feted her with a career retrospective broadcast “Monica Kaufman 25th Anniversary Special,” and for her thirtieth-year anniversary in 2005, the station's Web site featured an image gallery of her ever-changing roster of hairstyles, for which the newscaster had become somewhat infamous over the years. After surviving a bout with breast cancer in 1998, however, Kaufman kept her hair close-cropped and dyed platinum, explaining to her fans that she had grown weary of the demands of maintaining longer locks and wanted to have a style that complemented her new commitment to exercise and keeping fit.

Kaufman has long been an in-demand public speaker and fixture on the charity circuit, though she had often tried—and failed—to limit her commitments to just fifty-two speeches per year. She donated freely of both her time and money, and she explained why in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution interview with Downey: “With the money my mother made, she couldn't have paid the fees for Girl Scouts and the Y,” she said. “So I buy 10 memberships each year out of my own pocket for 10 children at the Butler Street YMCA, because somebody did it for me.”

After thirty-two years on the air, Kaufman still anchored three nightly WSB newscasts in 2007. A year earlier, after her 2005 marriage to DeKalb County police captain John Pearson, she began using her new husband's name. As with nearly everything in Kaufman's life, the announcement triggered local newspaper articles and good-natured debate, but as she noted in an article about the name change that appeared in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “for me, it was a personal statement about my commitment to my marriage,” the new Pearson told reporter Helena Oliviero. “People say ‘Monica Kaufman is your brand,’ but I am a human being first.”

At a Glance …

Born Monica Rosie Lee Jones, c. 1948; daughter of Maurice and Hattie Jones; married Jerry Kaufman, 1967 (divorced, 1975); married Clinton Deveaux, 1978 (divorced, 1983); married Clarence Lott, 1988 (divorced, 2000); married John E. Pearson Sr., 2005; children: Claire Deveaux; stepson John E. Pearson Jr. Education: Earned degree from the University of Louisville, 1975.

Career: Worked in a bank, 1967-68; Louisville Times, reporter, 1968-72; Brown-Forman Distilleries, public relations associate; WHAS-TV, Louisville, KY, reporter and news anchor, 1973-75; WSB-TV, Atlanta, GA, news anchor, 1975—.

Memberships: Atlanta Association of Black Journalists; National Association of Black Journalists; Society of Professional Journalists.

Awards: Women's Sports Foundation and Miller Lite, Women's Sports Journalism Award, 1992; Georgia Broadcasters Association, Citizen-Broadcaster of the Year, 1993; University of Georgia, Broadcaster of the Year, 2001; inducted into the University of Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame, 2001; National American Women in Radio and TV, Commendation Award; winner of twenty-eight Southern Regional Emmy awards for broadcasting excellence.

Addresses: Office—WSB-TV, 1601 W. Peachtree St. NE, Atlanta, GA 30309.

Sources

Periodicals

Atlanta Business Chronicle, September 11, 1998.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution, September 2, 1986; August 23, 2000; August 24, 2000; March 5, 2005; September 15, 2005; March 12, 2006; October 19, 2006; June 25, 2007.

Essence, June 1998, p. 92.