Renee Poussaint, award-winning journalist who worked for CBS 2 in the 1970s, dies

CHICAGO (CBS) -- Renee Poussaint, an award-winning broadcast journalist who worked as a reporter and anchor for CBS 2 in the 1970s, has died.

Poussaint passed away this past Friday at her home in Washington, D.C., according to a Washington Post report. She was 77.

In the early to mid-1970s, Poussaint was part of CBS 2's news team in the early days of Bill Kurtis and Walter Jacobson's run as weekday evening anchors – also working alongside Harry Porterfield, John Drummond, Bob Wallace, Susan Anderson, John Callaway, and Chris Wallace, among others.

A Washington Post obit story notes that Poussaint – a New York City native and a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and the University of California at Los Angeles – was doing doctoral work in comparative literature at Indiana University when she decided to switch gears. She told the Chicago Tribune that her students said they got most of their information from television and were not interested in the literature she was teaching them, and she decided she needed to learn about television.

Thus, Poussaint switched to a graduate program at Columbia University, and then came to CBS 2 in 1973 as a news writer. In 1974, as documented in a Washington Post archive report, Poussaint was asked to go into the field and radio back information about a fire in the suburbs – and it turned out that a teenage boy had murdered his mother, father, sister, and brother at the scene and had committed suicide. The Jeff Fuchs murders in Park Ridge quickly became front page news in June 1974.

Poussaint was then asked to go live on television from the scene. She characterized her own performance as "terrible" in a 1982 Washington Post report, but she was offered a job as a reporter for CBS 2 soon afterward, the newspaper reported.

During her time at CBS 2, Poussaint also anchored a noontime daily newscast and hosted the community affairs program "Channel 2: The People."

Poussaint went on in 1976 to join the CBS News Midwest Bureau and then moved to the Washington Bureau, according published reports. In 1978, Poussaint joined WJLA-TV, ABC 7 in Washington, D.C. as a news anchor – a role in which she remained until 1992, according to her Washington Post obit.

Poussaint then worked as a correspondent for ABC News and sometimes filled in for Peter Jennings on "World News Tonight," the Washington Post recalled.

In 2001, Poussaint co-founded and became executive director of the National Visionary Leadership Project. The organization has recoded more than 300 interviews with Black leaders age 70 and older in a variety of roles from the arts to politics and civil rights, the Post reported.

Along with Camille Cosby, Poussaint co-edited a 2007 volume composed of the interviews, titled, "A Wealth of Wisdom: Legendary African American Elders Speak" – featuring "accounts by everyone from Maya Angelou and Ray Charles to Robert Guillaume and Coretta Scott King."