Bernadette Carey Smith, Black Reporter in Mostly White Newsrooms, Dies at 83

At The Post, Ms. Smith was given more substantial assignments, covering a speech by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the National Cathedral, the funeral of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and other high-profile events.

“Her talent and perseverance produced extraordinary stories that humanized national news at a time when all too many stellar women of all colors and backgrounds were shunted off to the Pink ghetto of society pages,” Myra MacPherson, who started working at The Post just as Ms. Smith was leaving, said by email.

Ms. Smith’s Post career also lasted about two years before it was announced that she would become editor in chief of a new Black women’s magazine called Sapphire.

But the name Sapphire didn’t stick, and neither did Ms. Smith: By the time the magazine, renamed Essence, published its first issue in May 1970, she had been replaced. Edward Lewis, one of the magazine’s founders, in his book “The Man From Essence: Creating a Magazine for Black Women” (2014), said her request for a 5 percent share in the company was one sticking point.

Ms. Smith began working at Vogue instead, and by the end of 1969 she made news herself in dating the television personality David Frost. “Duo at Asti’s: David Frost and Vogue writer Bernadette Carey,” The Daily News of New York wrote that December in a gossip item.

She and Mr. Frost had met at a party in 1968 and were an item for a year or two, attending dinners with boldface names like Aristotle and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

“David had a network show in America by then and was the toast of New York,” Ms. Smith recalled in an interview with The Mail of Britain in 2013, when Mr. Frost died. “He’d taken a house in the Hamptons. I didn’t look too bad, and I had a fairly decent wardrobe, which David liked.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/03/business/media/bernadette-carey-smith-dead.html