WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. (WGHP)—
Karen Parker is the first African-American woman to get an undergraduate degree from UNC Chapel Hill.Her roots started here in the Piedmont, but she has worked as a copy desk editor at the LA Times and recently retired from working with the Winston-Salem Journal.
"I have to keep up with news every day," Parker said. "I'm a news junkie."
Parker has lived, read through and even played a role in some unique moments in history while working as a lifelong newspaper copy editor.
"A lot of crazy things happened while I was at the Times," Parker said. "One of the coolest things I did was work on the Olympics desk in '84 in LA."
But she says chance are she wouldn't have been part of any of it if she hadn't worked with one of the Winston-Salem Journal's only black reporters at the time, Luix Overby, as a college student in 1962.
"He did something on Sunday called the 'Negro Page,' which sounds awful to people right now but at that time no other major paper in N.C. was doing anything about black people other than crime news," Parker said.
Parker filled in for Overby, and her work led to an internship.
She graduated from Chapel Hill as the first black female undergraduate and went on to hold jobs at newspapers in Michigan, New York, Utah, and Los Angeles.
