Black Radio: The Success That Was, and the Uncertainty That Is
Back on January 10, New York radio station WLIB (1190 AM) switched from urban gospel music to “La Exitosa,” a hybrid Spanish-language format blending Latin pop and English-language adult contemporary.
If you didn’t notice, you’ve got company. With no disrespect for gospel fans, almost no one else did, either. Small AM stations like WLIB have been kicked to the radio fringes these days, and WLIB programs La Exitosa mostly because it’s a cheap simulcast with its bigger sister station WEPN (98.7 FM) — both of which parent company Emmis wants to sell.
Still, in the spirit of Black History Month, it’s worth remembering that just 30 or 40 years ago, WLIB wasn’t an afterthought. It mattered, because it was an epicenter of black radio and black radio helped shape American culture over the rather eventful last half of the 20th century.
Not that “black radio” was a monolithic entity. It was as diverse as the black community. It often had to get creative because money was a challenge, and it could be ragged around the edges. But collectively, black radio accomplished a singular vital mission: It gave a microphone to voices that since 1619 had far too often been dismissed or ignored.
The first station with all-black programming was WDIA in Memphis, which made that switch in 1947. The first black-owned station was WERD in Atlanta, 1949. In New York, brothers Harry and Morris Novik bought WLIB from the New York Post in 1952 and after initially targeting several ethnic groups, they shifted their focus primarily to the black community.
Pioneer black stations began by featuring music, including the hot tickets of the postwar years: electric blues, combos, rhythm and blues. It was fresh, energetic stuff that younger listeners embraced as their own.
Many older listeners, and traditional radio stations, were less enchanted. They heard “jungle music,” from which tender ears and children needed protection.
Thus was born the Good Music Crusade of the 1950s — which, like every such effort in the history of music, failed. Far from disappearing, rhythm and blues partnered up with country, jazz, Latin, gospel and pop to create rock ’n’ roll. We didn’t lose Perry Como, we just gained Little Richard and Fats Domino.
While some mainstream radio stations took the hint and started playing rock ’n’ roll, they left out enough of the good stuff so there was still room for black radio to create its own sound.
In the process of securing this musical foothold, black stations were also paying attention to other concerns of the community, from new theater productions and spring fashion trends to weightier matters like how developers and government were reshaping neighborhoods.
As the civil rights movement grew, black radio became both a reporter and a player. When leaders like The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. came to any large town, they often stopped first at the black radio station, getting the airtime unavailable elsewhere. When people took to the streets in Harlem in 1965, black radio was there to report on how the community was seeing it, not just how it looked from outside.
A Malcolm X, identified by most white folks only from his most controversial statements, could go on black radio and explain his views — like them or not — in fuller context.
As socio-political talk radio blossomed into a major force in the 1970s and 1980s, black radio and hosts like Mark Riley, Clayton Riley and Imhotep Gary Byrd on WLIB provided a counterpoint to the generally conservative tenor of popular talkers like Rush Limbaugh and Bob Grant.
WLIB had a news department, which at times included Gil Noble, Bill McCreary, Eric Williams, J.R.R. Ramey and sports reporter Larry Hardesty. While covering the major stories, they explored aspects that were noted incidentally in most mainstream coverage.
Theoretically this should have added up to a comfortable, smooth-running radio niche.
Behind the scenes, it was more problematic. As in every other business in the history of business, management drove some of the hosts nuts and some of the hosts drove management nuts. WLIB and its hosts routinely came under fire from both conservatives who said they were too radical and progressives who said they weren’t radical enough.
And then there was the money, or the shortage of it. Commercial radio runs on advertising revenue, and while some of black radio’s music-formatted FM stations eventually became decently profitable, most black stations were perceived to have only a modest number of listeners, too many of whom were perceived to have only a modest amount of disposable income to spend.
Hosts and owners of black stations long argued that Arbitron and other rating services were not measuring the full scope of black listenership. Byrd once mused that when he walked down Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn during the West Indian Day parade, he heard more radios tuned to WLIB than Arbitron seemed to think were listening to WLIB in the whole city.
Bob Law of WWRL, another prominent black New York radio station, recalled that few mainstream media outlets paid much attention in 1995 to plans for a Million Man March of black men in Washington. Black radio and other black media promoted it aggressively, and if the marchers didn’t number a million, they came close. Apparently, Law noted drily, some people did listen to black radio.
Byrd, among others, described black radio as the drum of the community, harking back to African tribes where the drumbeat was the call to listen.
One notable modern drumbeat came after the sensational 1989 case in which five black and Hispanic teenagers were convicted of assaulting a jogger in New York’s Central Park. The news team at black radio station WRKS, led by the late Bob Slade, stayed on the case for 13 years, arguing that the defendants were railroaded by flawed evidence and public outrage. In 2002, the system admitted WRKS was right. The real perp confessed, the five convictions were overturned and the city signed off on a $41 million settlement.
Communities listen and march to a different drum in 2025 than they did in 1995. Messages now travel on the Internet, which in some ways broadens the audience, but also fragments it. Donald Trump notwithstanding, it’s harder for all communities to find the center, the voices around which to rally.
By the time the Internet became near-universal, black radio had already been slammed by the Telecom Act of 1996, which permitted corporations to own larger clusters of media. Because most black stations were independents, without deep corporate pockets, many were soon squeezed out. Black-owned Inner City Broadcasting, which bought WLIB and its sister station WBLS in 1972, filed for bankruptcy in 2012, and since then several owners have tried to figure out whether any kind of programming could make WLIB financially viable.
That’s a tough question for all AM stations these days, and it’s not at all clear there’s an answer. Even beyond the fact that all traditional radio stations are losing listeners to streaming services, the AM band long ago lost its music audience to the FM band, and AM today is largely irrelevant to anyone under 60. A number of new car radios don’t even have an AM band.
Black radio was once a full-service community enterprise in New York, so pervasive that from 1952 to 1959, Evelyn Robinson hosted a show after midnight from the window of the Palm Café on West 125th Street, chronicling the night life of Harlem. Today WLIB is just hanging on, hoping for a light not many people in the business can see.
What won’t go out, though, is the light from black radio’s history. Radio itself played a critical and often underappreciated role in shaping the 20th century, and it’s not entirely coincidental that some of the most fundamental shaping happened after black radio showed up around the century’s midpoint.
Anyone who doubts the influence of black radio only has to turn on a music radio station today and remember this: Back in the early 1980s, hip-hop music was as scorned as early rock ’n’ roll. Unmusical, it was called. Uncivilized. Morally corrosive. Downright dangerous. A few black radio stations like New York’s Hot-97 finally started playing it full-time anyway, and today it’s the foundation beat of pretty much everything in mainstream popular music.
Black radio, like all media, is figuring out its future on the fly these days. There’s no playbook. There never was. What’s clear is this: When black radio became a community drum, the voices in that community became harder to disregard.
