Mearl Purvis

Walking to school with her eight siblings in Jackson, Mississippi, in the 1960s, Mearl Purvis says they learned to avoid a certain street in their neighborhood.

“We never really knew fear in the segregated South, until we came to one street — the white street.” Her older brothers would pick up the little ones and run, “because homeowners would send the dogs out. It happened almost every day.”

Today, however, sitting in the studio of WHBQ Fox 13, where she has been an anchor for 13 years, she looks back on that incident as a lesson in love, not hate. “That experience helped me understand the brilliance of my parents,” she says, “who taught me you can’t let hate eat you up from the inside out.”

An older brother always threatened to “go back” and get even with those white kids, “who would laugh as the dogs chased us down the street,” but Mearl’s parents knew better. Her mother told her, “If you try to fight someone using their weapon of hate or revenge or malice, you’ve already lost. Those are their weapons, and they can use them much better than you will ever know how.”

Purvis earned a degree in broadcast journalist from Jackson State University and began working at a local TV station that had been hit with a discrimination lawsuit. “As the stories go, they would call women ‘gals’ in interviews, or worse terms on-air,” she says, so as part of the settlement the FCC made the station acquire an integrated ownership group. The station manager also created internships, “which I suppose was to begin filling the pipeline with Black journalists,” says Purvis. “I got that first internship, and the rest, as they say, is history.”

She took reporting and anchor jobs in Charlotte, Nashville, and the New Haven, Connecticut, area before coming to Memphis in 1992. Her first job here was replacing the popular Kim Hindrew as the news anchor at WMC-TV Channel 5.

After just a few weeks on-air, she had an unsettling experience: “A white colleague said to me, ‘You know, we saw Kim as one of us, but we are really taking to you now. We have never had a dark-skinned anchor.’” And at that moment,” says Purvis, “I thought, you don’t even understand that what you said is not rooted in racism? I was flabbergasted that she wasn’t even aware of it.”

Hindrew has very light skin; many WMC viewers thought she was white, or even Asian. “Kim has lovely walnut skin, but she is definitely an African American, and she is race-proud,” says Purvis, “but people — and I mean whites and Blacks — still make a distinction about the shade of your skin.”

Purvis was recently invited to speak to a church group about the topic of light-skinned and dark-skinned African Americans. “They wanted to know, has it made a difference in your life?” The answer, she says, is yes. “And I wonder very often, are we ever, ever going to change? But we would have to change human nature, and human nature is what it is.”

As a journalist, Purvis has dealt with all manner of people, and her attitude towards race relations may be surprising. “I don’t see why there’s so much shock and surprise when you run into racism today,” she says. “Human nature dictates that humans seek a means of survival, and the fear of ‘losing your spot’ will make a person react in a way that could offend some, and hurt others.”

Purvis recognizes that African Americans were perceived as being in the way of progress of whites in the South. “They didn’t see that companies were earning millions and billions of dollars, or the people who designed our economic structure were taking many jobs away. But it was the Jim Crow way of thinking that what little crumbs I have are going to be eaten by these other people, the African Americans, so we must go after them.”

So here’s her message — the same one she learned from her parents: “Don’t be shocked by racism, but simply work your way through it. Try to be the best — always strive to be the best. Excellence is going to rise to the top. Always.”

And she is very hopeful about the future of race relations in America. She recently wrapped up a Fox 13 segment about Dr. Martin Luther King, where she talked with the Reverend Jesse Jackson at the National Civil Rights Museum. Standing on the balcony, on the very spot where King was slain, was a very moving experience, and she asked if King would think his dream had

been realized today.

Jackson replied, she says, this way “He’d be very happy to see African Americans elected to school boards, to leadership positions, serving as mayors of cities, or members of congress. And I think he’d be most proud of young people today, who are standing up and saying, ‘This has to change!’”

His words gave her inspiration, Purvis says. “As the Reverend Jackson told me, ‘Hope and healing will beat hate every time.’”