Judith Cummings, who was the first black woman to head a national news bureau for The New York Times, serving as chief correspondent in Los Angeles from 1985 to 1988, was found dead on May 6 at her home in Detroit. She was 68.
According to an obituary in the Times, neighbors who had noticed newspapers collecting outside her home summoned the police, who found Ms. Cummings’s body in bed, said Charlene Wagner Coleman, a cousin. The cause was not immediately known, she said. There were no signs of foul play.
In 1971, Ms. Cummings was a speechwriter for the chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in Washington when she was recruited by The Times to participate in the newspaper’s first program to train minority journalists.
The Times promoted her about a year later to general assignment reporter on the metropolitan desk, where from 1972 to 1979 she covered crime, transit, schools, strikes and parades in New York City and in particular wrote articles about its marginalized citizens.
In one, Ms. Cummings wrote about two Chinese-American teenage sisters who jumped to their deaths from a rooftop because their father had forbidden them to see their non-Chinese boyfriends.
In 1988, Ms. Cummings left The Times to care for her ailing parents, Dorothy Daniel Cummings and James E. Cummings Sr., in Detroit, and to help manage the family’s real estate investment business, Ms. Coleman said.
Ms. Cummings was born in Detroit on Dec. 27, 1945, attended public schools and received her bachelor of arts degree from Howard University in Washington in 1967.
