Valley’s trailblazing black broadcaster, Margaret Linton, dies

Staff report

YOUNGSTOWN

Private services will take place at a later date for Margaret Reynolds Linton-Lanier, one of the city’s first black businesswomen and a pioneer in local broadcasting. She died Monday in a Cleveland suburb.

Linton-Lanier, 95, died at Grand Pointe Healthcare Community in Richmond Heights. She had lived in the Cleveland area for several years.

“She is the reason why I’m sitting here at this desk,” said Madonna Chism Pinkard, community-relations director at 21 WFMJ-TV and host of the local show “Community Connection.” Chism Pinkard had kept in close contact with Linton-Lanier over the years.

Linton-Lanier was the former operator of Linton Funeral Home on Belmont Avenue on the North Side and was one of the first licensed female morticians.

She also was former publisher of The Buckeye Review weekly newspaper that reports on local, national and regional matters pertinent to the black community.

In 1959, she had the top leadership position for the Negro Business and Professional Women for Ohio.

She attended the White House conference on civil rights in 1965 and was appointed a member of the Youngstown Mayor’s Human Relations Committee.

She was widely known for her work in the community, serving on numerous boards, including the former Youngstown Urban League, the former Child Guidance Center and the Mahoning County Mental Health Board.

In 1975, she received an award from the Youngstown Education Association for her work in the city’s public schools.

For many years, she hosted the community broadcast program “One Woman’s World.” She was inducted into the Ohio Broadcasters Hall of Fame in 2005 in part because of her trailblazing work with the Black Broadcasters Coalition, which she and others formed in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Linton-Lanier noticed there weren’t any black reporters and anchor people on the local television stations. She and others said that was a glaring error that must be corrected.

Through the BBC, local TV stations soon began establishing programs geared toward blacks, and blacks began appearing on news broadcasts.

In 1998, Linton-Lanier was honored by the Youngstown-Warren Association of Black Journalists and Youngstown State University’s Pan- African Student Union for her efforts to promote blacks in the media.

Donald Lockett Post 6488 honored Linton-Lanier in January 2011, where she received the veterans post’s Trailblazer Award for American Pioneers in Broadcasting for leading the fight for minority programming on the city’s television stations.

She leaves a son, Gary, and several grandchildren.