If you were a news junkie in Chicago the past several decades, you knew the name Les Brownlee. He was, after all, the first black person to break into the otherwise all-white Chicago newspaper market and then became the city’s first African-American television reporter on WLS-TV.
He was a tough journalist, exposing drug dealers in poor parts of town and ferreting out crooked cops in the Chicago precincts.
….Interestingly, his journalism career really started at the University of Wisconsin, right here in Madison.