Bea Hines, documenting Miami’s pride and pain for more than 50 years, earns top award
More than 50 years later, Bea Loretta Hines still remembers her first day on the job as a cub reporter for the Miami Herald.
It was June 16, 1970. Tuesday morning. She was 32.
“I was wearing my yellow church dress and my high heel white shoes — 3-inches high. I was Miss Brenda Starr. I was going to work as a reporter for the Miami Herald. I was too happy.”
As she walked through the newsroom’s metal doors, the Herald’s managing editor, Larry Jinks, met her. He told her a riot had broken out the night before in Miami’s Liberty City, where Bea had moved to from Overtown when she was 13.
“Would I be afraid to cover it?” Jinks asked her, the first Black female reporter in the Herald’s history.
“No!” she told him. (Despite her declaration, Bea was petrified and hadn’t known about the riot as she didn’t own a television.)
She hopped into her used 1967 blue-and-white Biscayne Chevrolet — “a boat” — and drove to Liberty City. As she was walking along Northwest 62nd Street, she passed a pool hall where two guys were stationed in the doorway.
“And I heard one of them saying this riot was hurting my business, that he had women on the street. I walked up and said, ‘Excuse me, sir.’ I told him I was a reporter for the Miami Herald and asked him, ‘What is your business?’
“He looked up at me and said, ‘I’m a hustler.’”
And that led to Bea’s first story as a Miami Herald reporter, a front-page piece on the man who called himself “Iceberg Slim.” (Jinks would later tell her the story, which earned an honorable mention in a journalism contest, was what the newspaper needed to counterbalance the riot stories.)
On Friday, Bea, now 85, received the Royal Palm Award at the 36th Annual Ev Clay/PRSA Miami Chapter Endowment Fund Luncheon, honoring her 53 years as a journalist including her current post as Miami Herald Neighbors columnist. Past award winners have included Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava, the late historian Arva Moore Parks and Zoo Miami’s Ron Magill.
“Her powerful writing on intense issues has made her one of the most important voices among women and women of color,” said Connie Crowther, who presented Bea with the accolade, the two having met in those early days at the Herald. (Crowther would go onto run her own PR firm.) “She covered community unrest in the 1980s, and her columns, which ran on the front page of the local section from 1981-85, were nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.”
Looking back, Bea wonders how she made it through the early years as the paper’s first Black woman reporter. She got her start as a library file clerk for the newsroom in 1966.
“I went through so much. I didn’t even know if I would last,” she recalled. “I just literally prayed through all those years, prayed and prayed. All the things that were thrown my way — the racism, the dirty remarks, the lying. Thank God, I had people in my corner.”
She remembers conversations with young Black reporters hired at the Herald after her. Some of them were not accustomed to what Bea says was Miami’s “blatant racism, where people would call you the N-word to your face.”
She would counsel them, often in the fifth-floor ladies room of the old Herald building off Biscayne Bay or at Sunday family dinners at her home.
“Listen,’’ she would tell them, “you’re going to find some sort of racism wherever you go because you’re Black. But you’ve got to deal with it, and deal with it with dignity.”
More than 50 years later, Bea Loretta Hines is still writing her stories, chronicling the community’s pride and pain, with grace and dignity.
This story was originally published October 7, 2023 at 1:46 PM.
