Brandi Kellam
JournalistBrandi Kellam, an Emmy award winning journalist, has reported and produced for CBS News. She contributed to the network’s historic coverage of the 2020 Senate impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump and the death of Minneapolis resident George Floyd in police custody.
In 2022, Kellam was awarded a ProPublica Local Reporting Network grant with the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO to pursue an investigation about Christopher Newport University and its aggressive, decades-long expansion into a Black neighborhood in Newport News, Virginia.
Kellam, a native of Chesapeake, Virginia, earned a master’s degree in broadcast and digital journalism from the S.I Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. She also holds a bachelor’s degree in sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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Sixty-plus years ago, the white leaders of Newport News, Virginia, seized the core of a thriving Black community to build a college. The school has been gobbling up the remaining houses ever since. -
The groundbreaking commission, which was proposed in response to our “Uprooted” series, would consider compensation for dislodged property owners and their descendants. Whether Gov. Glenn Youngkin will sign the bill is unclear. -
Spurred by our “Uprooted” series, a task force created by the city of Newport News and Christopher Newport University will reexamine decades of city and university records shedding light on a Black neighborhood’s destruction. -
Following an investigation by the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO and ProPublica, Del. Delores McQuinn introduces bill for a commission to investigate the displacement of Black neighborhoods by Virginia’s public colleges and universities -
Black enrollment at Virginia’s Christopher Newport University fell by more than half under longtime president Paul Trible, a former Republican senator who wanted to “offer a private school experience.” By 2021, only 2.4% of full-time professors were Black. -
A provision in state law exempts college presidents’ “working papers and correspondence” from disclosure even after they step down — as we found out when we asked about one ex-president’s role in campus expansions that uprooted a Black neighborhood
