Gwen Ifill

One of the most respected political journalists of her generation, Gwen Ifill was born in Queens, New York. After moving several times throughout her childhood to accommodate her father's work as a minister, Ifill enrolled at Simmons College, majoring in communications. While completing an internship at the Boston Herald-American during her senior year, Ifill returned to her desk one day to find a note reading "N----r go home." The racist message however, had the opposite of its intended effect, motivating Ifill even harder to secure a full time job at the paper after graduating-which she did. She remained at the publication from 1977 to 1981 before moving on to the Baltimore Evening Sun and eventually the Washington Post. Ifill would continue with the Post for seven years, but left in 1991 when she was told that she "wasn't ready" to cover Capitol Hill. Ifill was immediately hired by The New York Times to do exactly this job, and she continued to cover the White House there until she made the move to television in 1994, when NBC took her on as its official Capitol Hill reporter in 1994. This led to Ifill becoming the official moderator for PBS's "Washington Week in Review" and a senior correspondent for "PBS NewsHour" in 1999, where she and Judy Woodruff would eventually become co-anchors and co-managing editors in 2013. In the meantime, Ifill made history as the first African American woman to moderate a vice presidential debate, officiating the 2004 debate between Republican Vice President Dick Cheney and Democratic candidate, U.S. Senator John Edwards. She would return for 2008's VP debate between Democratic U.S. Senator Joe Biden and Republican governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, shortly before publishing her 2009 book, The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama. Ifill co-moderated the Democratic presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders with Woodruff in 2016. Ifill succumbed to breast and endometrial cancer and passed away later that same year. She was 61 years old.