Radio

African-American radio can be divided into three general periods of historical development: blackface radio (1920–1941), black-appeal radio (1942–1969), and black-controlled radio (1970 to the present). Blackface radio was characterized by the appropriation of African-American music and humor by white entertainers, who performed their secondhand imitations for a predominantly white listening audience. During this period, black people were essentially outside of the commercial broadcasting loop; they were marginal as both radio entertainers and consumers. In the era of black-appeal radio, African Americans entered into the industry as entertainers and consumers, but the ownership and management of the stations targeting the black radio market remained mostly in the hands of white businessmen. This situation constrained the development of independent black radio operations, while the radio industry in general prospered from it. During the most recent period, African Americans have striven to own and operate their own radio stations, both commercial and public. In addition, they have established black-controlled radio networks and trade organizations. However, the percentage of African-American-owned stations still lags far behind the percentage of black listeners.

The appropriation of black song, dance, and humor by white entertainers who blackened their faces with charcoal goes back to the early days of slavery. The resulting radical stereotypes were embedded in the blackface minstrel tradition, which dominated American popular entertainment in the antebellum period, and remained resilient enough in the postbellum years to reappear in film and radio in the early decades of the twentieth century. Popular black music styles like blues and jazz were first performed on the radio by such white performers as Sophie Tucker, the first singer to popularize W. C. Handy's "Saint Louis Blues," and Paul Whiteman, the so-called king of jazz in the 1920s. A parallel trend developed with respect to black humor with the emergence of Amos 'n' Andy (starring Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll) as radio's most popular comedy series.

Indeed, Amos 'n' Andy was radio's first mass phenomenon: a supershow that attracted 53 percent of the national audience, or 40 million listeners, during its peak years on the NBC network in the early 1930s. In addition, the series provoked the black community's first national radio controversy. Robert Abbot, editor of the Chicago Defender, defended Gosden and Correll's caricatures of black urban life as inoffensive and even humane. Robert Vann, editor of the Pittsburgh Courier, countered by criticizing the series as racist in its portrayal of African Americans. He also launched a petition campaign to have the program taken off the air that amassed 740,000 signatures—but to no avail, for the Federal Radio Commission ignored it. Meanwhile, Amos 'n' Andy dominated black comedy on radio throughout its heyday as the "national pastime" in the 1930s. In addition to Gosden and Correll, the other major blackface radio entertainers of the era included George Mack and Charles Moran, known as the Two Black Crows on the CBS network, as well as Marlin Hunt, who created and portrayed the radio maid Beulah on the series of the same name.

During the period when blackface comedy performed by whites dominated the portrayal of African Americans over the airways, its audience was mostly white; fewer than one in ten black households owned a radio receiver. There were black entertainers and actors who managed to get hired by the radio industry in the pre–World War II era, and for the most part they were restricted to playing stereotyped roles. The renowned black comedian Bert Williams was the first important black performer to be linked to commercial broadcasting, in the 1920s; he was featured on a New York station doing the same routines he popularized while performing in blackface on the Broadway stage. During the Great Depression, as if to add insult to injury, a number of black actors and actresses who auditioned for radio parts were told that they needed to be coached in the art of black dialect by white coaches if they wanted the jobs. This perverse chain of events happened to at least three African-American performers: Lillian Randolph (Lulu and Leander Show ), Johnny Lee (Slick and Slim Show ), and Wonderful Smith (Red Skelton Show ). The most famous black comic to appear regularly on network radio in the 1930s was Eddie Anderson, who played the role of the butler and chauffeur Rochester on the Jack Benny Show. Anderson was often criticized in the black press for playing a stereotypical "faithful servant" role, even as he was being praised for his economic success and celebrity.

After blackface comedy, the African-American dance music called jazz was the next most popular expression of black culture broadcast over the airways in the 1920s and 1930s. As was the case with humor, the major radio jazz bands were made up of white musicians, and were directed by white bandleaders such as Paul Whiteman, B. A. Rolfe, and Ben Bernie. The first black musicians to be broadcast with some regularity on network radio were New York bandleaders Duke Ellington and Noble Sissle. A number of influential white radio producers such as Frank and Ann Hummert, the king and queen of network soap operas, began to routinely include black doctors, teachers, and soldiers in their scripts. In addition, the federal government produced its own radio series, entitled Freedom's People, to dramatize the participation of African Americans in past wars, and it recruited Paul Robeson as a national and then international radio spokesman for the U.S. war effort. But at the end of the war, the government withdrew from the domestic broadcasting sphere, allowing the logic of the marketplace to reassert itself. Then with the advent of the new television networks, and their subsequent domination of the national broadcasting market, radio was forced to turn to local markets in order to survive as a commercial enterprise. Inadvertently, this led to the discovery of a "new Negro market" in regions where African Americans' numbers could no longer be ignored by broadcasters. This was especially the case in large urban centers, where nine out of ten black families owned radios by the late 1940s. The result of this convergence of economic necessity and a mushrooming listening audience was the emergence of black-appeal radio stations and the rise of the African-American disc jockey—two interrelated developments that transformed the landscape of commercial radio in the postwar era.

A few black DJs were playing records over the airways in the 1930s; they worked through a brokerage system that charged them an hourly fee for airtime. The disc jockeys, in turn, solicited advertising aimed at the local black community and broadcast it in conjunction with recorded "race" music. Jack L. Cooper pioneered this approach in Chicago on his radio show The All Negro Hour, which first aired on WSBC in 1929. At first, he developed a live variety show with local black talent, but within two years he had switched to recorded music in order to cut costs. He played jazz discs, hosted a popular "missing persons" show, pitched ads, made community-service announcements, and also developed a series of weekend religious programs. This format was successful enough to make him into a millionaire; by the end of the 1930s, he had a stable of African-American DJs working for him on a series of black-appeal programs broadcast on two stations. In the 1940s Cooper was challenged as Chicago's premier black disc jockey by Al Benson, who also built up a small radio empire on local outlets with his own style of black-appeal programming. Cooper targeted the middle-class African-American audience; he played the popular big-band jazz recordings of the day and prided himself in speaking proper English over the air. Benson played the down-home blues of the era and spoke in the vernacular of the new ghetto populace, most of whom were working-class southern migrants. A new era of black radio was at hand.

By the end of the 1940s there was a growing number of aspiring DJs in urban black communities ready to take advantage of the new "Negro-appeal" formats springing up on stations throughout the country. In Memphis, Nat D. Williams was responsible for broadcasting the first African-American radio show there, on WDIA in 1948; he also created the station's new black-appeal format and launched the careers of numerous first-generation African-American DJs over WDIA's airways. Two of the most important were Maurice "Hot Rod" Hulbert, who moved on to become the dean of black disc jockeys in Baltimore, on WBEE; and Martha Jean "the Queen" Stienburg, who later became the most popular black DJ in Detroit, on WCHB. In 1950, WERD, in Atlanta, became the first African-American-owned radio station in the country when it was purchased by J. B. Blayton, Jr. He appointed his son as station manager and then hired Jack "the Rapper" Gibson as program director. Other black-appeal stations that came into prominence during the early 1950s included WEDR in Birmingham, Alabama; WOOK in Washington, D.C.; WCIN in Cincinnati; WABQ in Cleveland; KXLW in St. Louis; and KCKA in Kansas City, which became the second African-American-owned radio outlet in the nation in 1952. By 1956 more than four hundred radio stations in the United States were broadcasting black-appeal programming. Each of these operations showcased its own homegrown African-American disc jockeys, who were the centerpiece of the on-air sound.

The powerful presence and influence of the African-American DJs on the airways in urban America in the 1950s stemmed from two sources. On the one hand, they were the supreme arbiters of black musical tastes; they could make or break a new record release, depending on how much they played and promoted it. On the other hand, the black disc jockeys were also the new electronic griots of the black oral tradition, posturing as social rappers and cultural rebels. As such, they collectively constituted a social grapevine that was integral not just to the promotion of rhythm and blues but also to the empowerment of the growing civil rights movement in the South. Such black-appeal radio stations as WERD in Atlanta and WDIA in Memphis, as well as Al Benson's shows in Chicago, played a vital role in informing people about the early civil rights struggles. In a speech to black broadcasters late in his life, civil rights leader the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., paid special tribute to disc jockeys Tall Paul White (WEDR, Birmingham), Purvis Spann (WVON, Chicago), and Georgie Woods (WHAT, Philadelphia) for their important contributions to the civil rights efforts in their respective cities.

During the 1950s African-American radio DJs also had a profound effect on commercial radio in general. Some stations—such as WLAC in Nashville, a high-powered AM outlet heard at night throughout the South—devoted a hefty amount of their evening schedules to rhythm-and-blues records. In addition, the white disc jockeys at WLAC (John R., Gene Noble, Hoss Allen, and Wolfman Jack) adopted the on-air styles, and even dialect, of the black DJs. Many of their listeners, both black and white, thought that WLAC's disc jockeys were African Americans. This was also the case on WJMR in New Orleans, where the white DJs who hosted the popular Poppa Stoppa Show were actually trained to speak in black dialect by the creator of the show, an African-American college professor named Vernon Winslow. Other white DJs who became popular by emulating the broadcast styles of their black counterparts included Dewey Phillips in Memphis; Zenas "Daddy" Sears in Atlanta; Phil Mckernan in Oakland, California; George "Hound Dog" Lorenz in Buffalo, New York; and Allen Freed in Cleveland. Freed moved on to become New York City's most famous rock-and-roll disc jockey before his fall from grace as the result of payola scandals in the early 1960s.

Payola, the exchange of money for record airplay, was a common practice throughout the radio industry. It was an easy way for disc jockeys to supplement the low wages they were paid by their employers. Hence, many well-known black DJs were adversely affected by the payola exposés. Some lost their jobs when their names were linked to the ongoing investigations, and an unfortunate few were even the targets of income-tax-evasion indictments. The industry's solution to the payola problem was the creation of the "top forty" radio format, which in effect gave management complete control over the playlists of records to be aired on their stations. Formerly, the playlists had been determined by the individual DJs. This change led to the demise of both the white rock-and-roll disc jockeys and the black "personality" DJs associated with rhythm and blues, and then "soul" music. Black-appeal stations were centralized even further by the emergence of five soul radio chains in the 1960s, all of which were white-owned and -managed. By the end of the decade, these corporations controlled a total of twenty stations in key urban markets with large African-American populations, including New York, Chicago, Memphis, and Washington, D.C. The chain operations not only established standardized top-forty soul formats at their respective outlets, thus limiting the independence of the black DJs they employed, but they also eliminated most of the local African-American news and public-affairs offerings on the stations.

In spite of the trend toward top-forty soul formats, a number of black personality DJs managed to survive and even prosper in the 1960s. The most important were Sid McCoy (WGES, WCFL), Purvis Spann (WVON), and Herb Kent (WVON) in Chicago; LeBaron Taylor and Georgie Woods (both WDAS) in Philadelphia; Eddie O'Jay in Cleveland (WABQ) and Buffalo (WUFO); Skipper Lee Frazier (KCOH) in Houston; the Magnificent Montegue (KGFJ) in Los Angeles; and Sly Stone (KSOL) in San Francisco. LeBaron Taylor and Sly Stone went on to successful careers in the music industry—Taylor as a CBS record executive and Stone as a pioneering pop musician. The Magnificent Montegue's familiar invocation, "Burn, baby, burn," used to introduce the "hot" records he featured on his show, inadvertently became the unofficial battle cry of the 1967 Watts rebellion. The new mood of black militancy sweeping the nation also found its way into the ranks of the African-American DJs, especially among the younger generation just entering the radio industry. Two of the more influential members of this "new breed," as they came to be known, were Del Shields (WLIB) in New York and Roland Young (KSAN, KMPX) in San Francisco. Both men independently pioneered innovative black music formats, mixing together jazz, soul, and salsa recordings.

The 1970s ushered in the current era of black-owned and -controlled radio operations, both stations and networks. In 1970, of the more than 300 black-formatted stations, only sixteen were owned by African Americans. During the next decade, the number of black-owned stations rose to 88, while the number of formatted stations surpassed 450. Some of the more prominent African Americans who became radio station owners during this era included entertainers James Brown and Stevie Wonder, Chicago publisher John Johnson, and New York City politician Percy Sutton. In particular, Sutton's Harlem-based Inner City Broadcasting (WLIB-AM, WBLS-FM) has been the national trendsetter in a black-owned and -operated radio from the early 1970s to the present. In 1977 African-American broadcasters organized their own trade organization, the National Association of Black-Owned Broadcasters. By 1990 there were 206 black-owned radio stations—138 AM and 68 FM—in the country.

It was also during the 1970s that two successful black radio networks were launched: the Mutual Black Network, founded in 1972, which became the Sheridan Broadcasting Network in 1979; and the National Black Network, started in 1973. Both of these operations provide news, talk shows, public affairs, and cultural features to their affiliate stations throughout the nation. In the 1980s the Sheridan network had more than one hundred affiliates and 6.2 million weekly listeners; in addition to news and public affairs, it offered a wide range of sports programming, including live broadcasts of black college football and basketball games. The National network averaged close to one hundred affiliates and four million weekly listeners in the 1980s; its most popular programs, in addition to its news reports, were journalist Roy Woods's One Man's Opinion and Bob Law's Night Talk. In 1991 Sheridan Broadcasting Corporation purchased National Black Network to form the American Urban Radio Network (AURN). As of 2005 AURN is the only African-Americanowned network radio company in the United States, broadcasting three hundred weekly news, entertainment, sports, and information programs to more than 475 radio stations that reach some twenty-five million listeners nationwide.

Two major formats have dominated black-owned commercial radio in the 1970s and 1980s—"talk" and "urban contemporary." Talk radio formats emerged on African-American AM stations in the early 1970s; in essence they featured news, public affairs, and live listener call-in shows. By this time, the FM stations dominated the broadcasting of recorded music because of their superior reproduction of high-fidelity and stereo signals. The AM stations were left with talk by default. Inner City Broadcasting initiated the move toward talk radio formats among African-American stations when it turned WLIGAM, which it purchased in New York City in 1972, into "your total news and information station" that same year. The logic of the commercial radio market encouraged many of the other black AM operations, such as WOL-AM in Washington, D.C., to follow suit. Likewise, Inner City Broadcasting also pioneered the urban contemporary format on WBLS-FM during this same period. Much of the credit for the new format is given to Frankie Crocker, who was the station's program director at the time. To build up WBLS's ratings in the most competitive radio market in the country, Crocker scuttled the station's established jazz programming in favor of a crossover format featuring black music currently on the pop charts along with popular white artists with a black sound. The idea was to appeal to an upscale black and white audience. The formula worked to perfection; WBLS became the top station in the New York market, and scores of other stations around the country switched to the new urban contemporary format. One example was WHUR-FM, owned by Howard University in Washington, D.C. The station's original jazz and black-community-affairs format was sacked in favor of the urban contemporary approach in the mid-1970s. The new format allowed WHUR to become one of the top-rated stations in the Washington market. In the process, it gave birth to an innovative new nighttime urban contemporary style called "quiet storm," after the Smokey Robinson song of the same name. The architect of this novel format was Melvin Lindsey, a former Howard student and WHUR intern. In 1980 WOL-AM in Washington, D.C., was purchased by Catherine and Dewey Hughes. Catherine Hughes later bought out her now ex-husband's interest, and WOL-AM was the start of Radio One, Inc., the seventh-largest radio broadcasting company (as of 2003) to target African-American and urban listeners. Radio One owns and/or operates sixty-nine radio stations in twenty-two urban markets.

The 1970s and 1980s also marked the entrance of African Americans into the public broadcasting sphere. By 1990 thirty-two public FM stations were owned and operated by black colleges around the country, and another twelve were controlled by black community boards of directors. These stations are not subject to the pervasive ratings pressures of commercial radio, giving them more leeway in programming news, public affairs, talk, and unusual cultural features. Many of these stations—such as WCLK-FM, owned by Clarke College in Atlanta; WSHAFM, owned by Shaw College in Raleigh, North Carolina; and WVAS-FM, from Alabama State University in Montgomery—have adopted the jazz formats abandoned by African-American-owned commercial FM stations. Others, such as WPFW-FM in Washington, D.C. (the number one black public radio outlet in the country), have developed a more ambitious "world rhythms" format embracing the many musics of the African diaspora. In general, the growth of black public radio has expanded the variety and diversity of African-American programming found on the airways, while also increasing the numbers of African Americans working in radio.

However, since the passage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, independent black radio stations have struggled to survive. The Telecom Act has allowed conglomerates in a single market to have radio holdings that receive up to 40 percent of the market's advertising revenue and has eliminated the forty-station nationwide ownership limit; broadcasters may purchase up to eight radio stations in large markets and five in small markets. This has led to a consolidation in which conglomerates, with greater financial resources, have benefited while black-owned stations with less capital have gone up for sale. According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, from 1995 to 1996 the number of black-owned FM stations dropped from 86 to 64 and AM radio stations from 109 to 101; in 1997 there were 169 minority-owned broadcasters but by 2001 the number was 149. The largest black-controlled radio broadcaster (and seventh-largest in the country), Radio One, owns 69 radio stations; in contrast, Clear Channel, the largest U.S. radio broadcaster, owned 1,200 stations as of 2003—76 of which targeted black and urban audiences. Single-station owners are going the way of the dodo, but various entrepreneurs are acquiring their own, albeit small, clusters of stations to maintain a presence within the industry by offering grassroots community appeal and diversity of programming—and marketing that programming to more than the African-American market in order to survive and grow.

See also Jazz; Minstrels/Minstrelsy; Rhythm and Blues; Robeson, Paul; Walker, George; Williams, Bert

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william barlow (1996)

christine tomassini (2005)