William H. Dilday Jr., the first Black TV station general manager in the U.S., died July 27 at the age of 85. He had sustained complications following a fall and died in Newton, Massachusetts.
Dilday was also part of a group that acquired a station in the U.S. Virgin Islands, the first U.S. station with Black owners.
Dilday was 34 when he got a call from a non-profit in Jackson, Mississippi, asking if he would take over WLBT Jackson, which the NY Times called the state’s largest TV station.
There had been litigation against the station on behalf of a group of Black citizens and the United Church of Christ. The station had mostly ignored the civil rights movement and the lives of local Black residents.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled in favor of the church and Black citizens coalition, and the judge, future Supreme Court chief justice Warren E. Burger, ordered the license transferred to a non-profit organization whose leaders were members of the church. It was that organization that contacted Dilday about running the station.
Dilday was born in Boston in 1937, his father a Pullman porter and his mother a homemaker. He graduated from Boston University, spent two years in the army and worked at I.B.M. before shifting to television.
Dilday became director of personnel at WHDH Boston in 1969.
He accepted the WLBT Jackson job in 1972. He increased Black employment at WLBT and launched an integrated children’s show, Our Playmates. He created an investigative series, Probe, that won a Peabody, and sent a reporter to cover a white supremacist rally that others ignored. In 1980 he refused to air a network miniseries, Beulah Land, the NY Times reported, that showed happily enslaved Black people.
“He came in at a time when healing was needed and to build morale at the station and develop a kind of family relationship between all cultures,” said Goldia Revies, WLBT’s former public affairs director, on the station website. “And it worked. And it was good. And we all felt that togetherness that we were all in this together.”
WLBT also turned a handsome profit with Dilday running the station.
Dilday was part of a group to acquire TV station WSVI in St. Croix, part of the U.S. Virgin Islands, the first Black-owned station in the U.S. That happened in 1973. He was also a founding member of the National Association of Black Journalists.
Dilday moved to Jackson’s CBS affiliate, WJTV, in 1985, where he was general manager. He retired from television in 2000.
He later worked as an adviser to politicians in the Jackson region.
Dilday married Maxine Wiggins in 1966. She survives him.
Former WLBT anchor Maggie Wade said of Dilday on WLBT.com, “Our first conversation was a welcome to the company and he shared his hopes and plans for my growth at WLBT. He was direct, a consummate professional, so proud of the work of WLBT, [and] made sure I knew the history of the station and his expectation for excellence.”
