Gwen Ifill broke barriers as a black female journalist and as the news anchor of PBS “NewsHour” and as the managing editor of “Washington Week.” She died from endometrial cancer on Nov.14 at a hospice center in Washington at the age of 61.

Ifill was considered one of the most prominent journalists of her generation and covered a range of stories from politics to foreign affairs. She covered 7 presidential campaigns and moderated debates between Democrat Joe Biden and Republican Sarah Palin in 2008. Ifill held numerous round-table discussions called “America After Ferguson,” a discussion on Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Mo. During the 2016 election season she co-moderated the Democratic primary debate Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

Ifill became the first African American woman to head a national political show, the “Washington Week in Review,” in 1999. Before joining PBS, Ifill was a chief congressional correspondent for NBC News, a White House correspondent for the New York Times and was a reporter for the Washington Post. When she started in the newspaper business she recalled that the men at the time did not know how to deal with an educated black woman. “never seen anything like me — a college-educated black woman and they didn’t know how to deal with me,” she said according to published reports.

In 1994 she made the leap into broadcasting and covered the Clinton White House and the impeachment proceedings. She joined Judy Woodruff in 2013 where they became the first all-women anchor team to broadcast the news on PBS “NewsHour.” She learned to not accept the limits placed upon her by society, but learned how to transcend those limits by telling the stories that needed to be told, NPR reported. “Personally, I have a flat spot right in the front of my head from trying to break down walls my entire career, forcing diversity of thought and opinion into newsrooms and onto the air. Whatever else you do with your lives, I hope you remember to fight those battles, too.”

Ifill’s impact was felt so much that before he left on his last foreign trip as president, President Obama said the reporter was an inspiration. She was a journalist with integrity and blazed a trail for women. However, Ifill was not one to pose soft questions, he recalled. “I always appreciated Gwen’s reporting, even when I was at the receiving end of one of her tough and thorough interviews–whether she reported from a convention floor or from the field, whether she sat at the debate moderator’s table or at the anchor desk.”

Woodruff described her co-anchor as a  person who loved storytelling and “loved helping people understand what was going on in the world around them. For young women of color looking for a role model, she was it.” Woodruff  also said that her colleague was able to be stern, but had a sense of warmth. This separated her from other people in the profession.