R.I.P.: Warren Wilson, Pioneering Black Journalist

Warren Wilson, who in 1969 became one of the first Black television journalists hired in Los Angeles, and who used the trust he accumulated in his work to help fugitives surrender safely to the police, died on Sept. 27 in Oxnard, Calif. He was 90.

The NY Times reports his son Stanley, a former news and documentary producer at CNN, confirmed the death, at an assisted living facility, but did not specify the cause.

Over more than 40 years as a reporter for wire services, a local radio station and the television stations KNBC and KTLA, Wilson covered the riots in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination, the Hillside Strangler murders and the O.J. Simpson trial.

But over more than three decades, he also became involved in the lives of 22 fugitives who decided it was safer to surrender to him than to be abused, or worse, by the authorities during an arrest. Their surrenders were often shown on Wilson’s TV reports.

(1933-2024)

“People knew that if Warren Wilson was involved, that there would not be an incident where a person could be mistreated,” Bernard Parks, a former chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, told The Los Angeles Times in 2005.

Warren Cereghino, a former editor at KTLA, wrote in a letter to Stanley Wilson after his father died that Wilson “had brought great acclaim to our news operation when he turned the news parking lot into the celebrated ‘safe surrender zone.’

“People who criticized that,” he added, “didn’t understand how easily things could have gone sideways.”

Warren Griffin Wilson was born on June 14, 1934, in Bethel, N.C., and grew up on a farm in segregated Greenville, where his parents, Lonnie and Lizzie (Edwards) Wilson, who were sharecroppers, reared nine children. When Lonnie Wilson was 19, Klansmen struck him with a pickup truck and left him to die in a ditch. He survived.