Gil Noble is a true icon, an iconoclast if you will. He began at Ch. 7 in 1967 as the weekend nightly newscast anchor. A year later he became host and producer of Like It Is, which quickly became an important outlet for area viewers to get information on topics important to the African-American community. The show remained Noble’s only focus since 1986. And although Noble has shows and interviews on hard news topics like the civil rights movement (in all its forms), integration, education (and the lack thereof), economics, Black nationalism, African/African-American history, gentrification and so much more, he’s also done seminal interviews with celebrities like Lena Horne, Bob Marley, Danny Glover, Abbey Lincoln and with repeated newsmakers and notables like Minister Louis Farrakhan, Drs. Yosef Ben-Jochannan and John Henrik Clarke (who seemed to be two of his favorite guests), Dr. Leonard Jeffries, Kwame Toure (Stokely Carmichael) and other members/former members of the Black Panthers, Dr. Frances Cress Welsing, Regent Adelaide Sandford – the list goes on and on.
Documentaries on Black life and notables were also created by Noble under the Like It Is banner. A hard-hitting doc on how drugs affect the community first comes to mind, as well as historical ones on W.E.B Du Bois, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, Jack Johnson, Charlie Parker, Jazz music on a whole, and my favorite one – Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Most of these were made int he 1970’s and early ‘80s. As of this writing I’ve just found out that he wrote, produced and directed the first ever documentary on Paul Robeson, entitled The Tallest Tree in Our Forest.