NY1 veteran anchor and author Cheryl Wills gave a lecture to students and staff to the SUNY Old Westbury community on April 27th. Ms. Wills spoke to the college about her journey in broadcast journalism including her time working at Fox 5 and eventually transitioning to working for NY1 since its launch. She told about her additional work writing books that focus on her current mission of honoring the slaves that fought and died in the Civil War. including her great great grandfather.
The Emmy Award winning journalist discussed on Zoom the start of her career as a young, bright-eyed, black female journalist at the genesis of conservative media, Fox 5 News. She explained that while attending Syracuse University, she experienced a certain level of intolerance and was shocked to see that same intolerance in the Fox newsroom in 1990. This realization brought her to her first main point of the lecture; “Don’t be afraid to stand your ground… journalism isn’t perfect.”
Wills went on to say that even though we are all raised with different myopic views of the world, young people coming into the industry should leave space to learn about the different cultures of Americans. She added, “Give it a beat, to say maybe I don’t know everything. Maybe I don’t have all the answers.”
Ms. Wills currently anchors NY1 Live at Ten on weeknights in addition to hosting her own public affairs talk show called In Focus with Cheryl Wills that airs every Sundays at 10:30 a.m.
She highlighted her most recent and meaningful venture yet. Her great great grandfather, Sandy Wills, was a slave who fought and died in the Civil War and after hearing the news, she made it her mission to honor and find all the slaves laying in unmarked graves that lost their lives fighting in the Civil War.
Through this endeavor, Cheryl was able to meet that family in Nashville, Tennessee that formerly owned Sandy Wills, as well as her great great grandmother, Emma. She considers herself very lucky to be able to have this opportunity in life, and highlights the will and courage her relatives must have had while enslaved. She points out that while other black people listed their occupation as “slave occupation,” her family member “did not allow the world to define him” and labeled his occupation as “farmer.” It is through this that Wills is able to truly connect with her long lost family members because she too did not let the world define her.
Ms. Wills explained during the lecture that slaves, particularly women, would sign their name with the letter “X” rather than a signature, because their identity did not matter. She then went on to say she is “taking back the X,” by making her presence known, and not allowing herself to be ignored.
Wills is the author of four books including Die Free: A Heroic Family Tale(2010), The Emancipation of Grandpa Sandy Wills(2015), Emancipated: My Family’s Fight For Freedom(2017), and Emma(2020). She is currently working on her fifth book titled Isn’t Her Grace Amazing: 25 Women Who Changed Gospel in which is set to be released this year.
