Rosemary Yardley, a native of Alabama, received her bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and her master’s degree in American history from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Yardley was a part-time journalist for the Charlotte Observer for several years and then worked for the New York Times from 1962 to 1964.
She and her husband, Jonathan Yardley, moved to Greensboro in 1964, where Rosemary Yardley worked as a freelance writer for the Greensboro Daily News. After school integration became imminent in the summer of 1971, she was on a committee that authored a brochure about integration and busing. Yardley later interviewed Howard Fuller of the Malcolm X Liberation University in Durham. Divorced from in 1975, Yardley continues to write columns for the Greensboro News & Record under the name Rosemary Roberts.