Robin Roberts is one of the most successful female news personalities on daytime television. The youngest of four children, Roberts would grow up in Pass, Mississippi. Her father was a Tuskegee Airmen pilot and her mother a Lucimarian would hold their children to a high standard of excellence. As a student-athlete, Roberts would finish her high school career as the salutatorian and a champion basketball player. She would go on to follow in her sister’s footsteps into journalism, earning a scholarship and degree in communications from Southeastern Louisiana University. In college, Roberts would also be a sensational basketball player, finishing her collegiate career as the university’s third-highest scorer. Upon graduation, she was drawn to broadcast television using her love of sports and her journalistic skills to join a local TV station as a sports reporter and anchor in Mississippi. As her experience and popularity grew, Roberts would get a unique opportunity to join ESPN to host the Network’s flagship program, Sportscenter, while also making appearances as a guest correspondent on ABC’s Good Morning America. She would be ESPN’s first black woman anchor in its history. 

In 2005, Roberts would get the opportunity to grace the morning news as the new co-anchor of ABC’s Good Morning America alongside Diane Sawyer, later with George Stephanopoulos which would dethrone its competitive morning show. In 2007, Roberts would endure a complicated battle of breast cancer in which she would contract a rare blood disorder and undergo treatment again in 2012. After she announced that she had been dealing with myelodysplastic syndrome, her morning show viewers would show their support of her by donating to the national bone marrow registry, Be the Match, which saw a 1,800 percent spike in donations. Roberts would not have to use the registry, for the sister whom she had idolized was her perfect match. She would make a triumphant return to Good Morning America in February 2013. She was honored with the Arthur Ashe award at the 2013 ESPYs, the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism, and was inducted into the Sports Broadcasting Hall of Fame in 2016. Roberts continues to encourage and enlighten the Good Morning America viewership.