How Angela Davis and duch*esne Drew Became a Local Media Power Couple (2024)

Two days before my Zoom interview with Minnesota Public Radio host Angela Davis and her husband, Bush Foundation VP duch*esne Drew, I caught a lucky break. MPR sent me a press release naming Drew as the media nonprofit’s new president. He would be taking over daily operations of MPR News, Classical MPR, and The Current—and more important for my purposes, he was now officially his wife’s boss.

An exclusive with the most interesting power couple in Twin Cities media had fallen into my lap. Would they be excited about this change in status? Would they have to fake being excited? I felt like I was perfectly positioned now to achieve the impossible: paying attention through an entire Zoom call.

Davis was the first to pop up on my screen. After nearly three decades as a television news anchor, she moved 18 months ago to public radio, taking a job hosting the 11 am slot at MPR News. She has been going to MPR’s studio every day to host the show during the lockdown. “I’m at work and duch*esne has a home office in our living room,” she says. (The name is pronounced “Due-shawn.”) “So he’ll be calling from there.”

Davis has a reputation as one of the kindest people in Twin Cities media. And listening to her show that morning on frontline COVID-19 workers—an hour of calls from freaked-out nurses and paranoid plumbers—I quickly recognized that her kindness has made the move to radio. She related to a caller named Debra, a devoted home care worker collecting a low wage, in a way that felt different from the neutral, Schweddy Balls tone of public radio.

“They sound like real people, right?” Davis says of her callers. She seems delighted that I listened to the entire show. “The biggest difference between print and radio is the emotion you can hear in their voices,” Davis adds. “Even compared to video. Because with video, you’re often distracted by the image.”

Honestly, Davis sounds realer than ever herself, even on our video interface. Maybe that’s just because she’s finally free of that oppressive anchor hair. Davis still looks sharp on Zoom, though, in black horn-rimmed glasses and a burgundy sweater. As for Drew—he’s running late.

“Let me text duch*esne and see what’s going on,” she says. “We were supposed to be in Hawaii on spring break with the kids this week.”

Davis and Drew, both 52, are parents to 16-year-old Charlotte, a rising senior at DeLaSalle, and 18-year-old Kevin, who will be enrolling this fall at Morehouse College, the historically black college in Atlanta.

Just at that moment, her husband Zooms in. Drew is also wearing dark horn-rimmed glasses, and the gray in his neatly trimmed beard appears slightly more pronounced than it did in the headshot for his MPR press release. He, too, spent decades working as a journalist in the Twin Cities. He started as a summer intern at the Star Tribune in ’93; at the end of his run, in 2015, he was managing editor of operations. Now they’re both smiling at each other through their respective Zoom windows.

I ask Drew if having a wife already embedded at MPR proved to be an asset during an interview process he describes as “marathon.” He answers that, of course, she helped hone his message of leadership and community connections. “But if I were applying for a job at UnitedHealth Group I would have bounced it off her,” he says.

Davis interrupts, “It was an evil plot that we came up with in 1996 when we got married. First, I would infiltrate the building, I would observe for 18 months…”

Drew laughs. But he agrees there was a Mr. & Mrs. Smith aspect to their arrangement, and that will be ongoing. “Actually, there were parts that were clear to me that I wouldn’t be able to share with her,” he says. “We’ve always had things we couldn’t talk about pertaining to work.”

“What about me?” Davis asks. “What about the happy hours I won’t get invited to anymore? So many of my colleagues, I really enjoy their company outside of work. And I realize now it will be awkward to invite me to some things because they may not feel like they have the freedom to talk about work-related issues in the same way.”

She pauses then, as if realizing that what started as a joke just got kind of serious. “But I respect that and understand it.”

Drew agrees that there will be tradeoffs and sacrifices. He tells me he bowed out of a long-standing poker game after his promotion at the Strib. “I stopped going after a while because they clearly needed to get in a room on a Friday and talk about what stupid assholes all the managers were,” he says. They always said “Not you, duch*esne!”

Whether he won or lost at seven-card stud, he could read the room.

•••••

In addition to standing out as a media power couple, Davis and Drew seem to recognize that they represent something even rarer in Minneapolis. They’re an African American power couple. Davis was raised by her grandparents on a tobacco farm in Virginia, and Drew’s media bio says he was born in Brooklyn.

“But I grew up primarily in Long Island,” he says. “My friends back home would be like, ‘Really dude? You’re from the South Shore: Own it.’”

They share a memory and impression of arriving in Minnesota: Drew in 1993, as a summer intern, before his last quarter as a grad student at Northwestern University; Davis in ’94, moving up from a television job in Lexington, Kentucky. They noticed the same thing upon landing at the airport: “I’d never seen so many white people at one time in one place,” Davis says.

“You weren’t surprised by the white people,” Drew adds. “You were surprised at the absence of people of color.”

“Yeah. It was the absence,” she agrees.

He elaborates. “It was more a matter of, we weren’t here in meaningful numbers. Especially in restaurants or other places where you would see middle-class professional people.”

The two met for the first time—within three days of Davis’s arrival—at a luncheon for the local chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists. They didn’t become romantically involved for a while. “We eased into it,” he says. They both were maintaining long-distance relationships with other people. “It was not love at first sight: Hey girl, what you doing?” he says, “because we were both spoken for.”

But they ended up hanging out after volunteering to set up a ’70s-themed fundraiser for the NABJ. At this point Drew runs off camera to grab a framed photograph of the two wearing Afro wigs and polyester styles from Ragstock. They both look incredibly young and happy.

After the party, they both agreed to form a “book club for two” (at that point, whether or not they became a couple, they clearly were fated for public radio). They met at Davis’s downtown apartment to discuss Nathan McCall’s Makes Me Wanna Holler. The book club kicked off a long, slow courtship.

“We actually got to know each other before it became romantic,” he says. “Part of the attraction of Angela was that I respected both her passion around journalism and her commitment to be excellent at it. And so I wasn’t threatened by that. So often you think of people working in broadcast and the stereotypes—how they look and how much they’re going to get paid. Is everybody recognizing and looking at them? That was not her on any level.”

She rolls her eyes. “I can cook. He liked my meals. Let’s get real for a second, okay?”

They married in Jamaica in 1996 and moved to Dallas, pursuing a bigger market with bigger gigs. They ultimately found the move professionally challenging if unfulfilling. “Dallas never felt like home,” Davis concedes.

A few years later, at another NABJ event, Drew was weighing a (dream) job offer from The New York Times. But reps from both KSTP and the Star Tribune lobbied the couple—hard—to return to the Twin Cities. Which they did, a little over two years after leaving. Ever the diligent education reporter, Drew insisted on a house in Highland Park because of the neighborhood schools.

The couple has been here now for 21 years, and they’ve worked hard to build a supportive community. They even moved Drew’s mother into their home. But it has not been without struggle. They’ve issued a parental decree: The kids will be heading out of state for college. “Not only to find students of color, but to go to school with white kids who are used to being around students of color,” Drew says.

Part of their life’s work has been to change the institutions they work for, a mission that will now shape MPR at the highest level. “I think oftentimes people have an idea in their heads of what public radio is, and it’s dated,” Drew says. “I think a lot of people think of MPR as being for college-educated white people of a certain financial status and educational background. But it isn’t just for them; it’s for all of us.”

At the Strib and the Bush Foundation, Drew advanced programs to recruit talent from a wider range of racial and economic backgrounds. That work will continue at MPR. But inclusion goes beyond recruitment, he says. “If you look above you and nobody looks like you, it’s understood that the track’s not for you,” he says.

Davis, for her part, says she’s never been more fulfilled in a media gig. And she’s looking to expand her “reporter kit” in the coming year: learning how to record and edit her own audio for radio and doing more fieldwork. “I’m hoping that our new president recognizes that regardless of your age or experience, people still want to grow and to be challenged.”

Both Davis and Drew understand that they embody a message of inclusion, although Davis has reservations about the term power couple: “It makes it sound like it’s a status that’s really hard to achieve,” she says.

“I think it’s important to recognize that we’re not unicorns,” Drew says. “We know many other successful, happy, married-for-decades black couples. But I also recognize—and this is not a small thing—it is important for young people of color to see what we have and what we’ve built is possible.”

And with that, Davis has one more important message to broadcast from the offices of MPR. “Hey, that Crock-Pot is done at 5, duch*esne.”

This article originally appeared in the June 2020 issue.

Steve Marsh

Steve Marsh is a senior writer at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine.

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