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 There was a time when black voices on radio could organize local charity drives, lead protests against whites-only restaurants, and force stores to open their doors to black customers, all while periodically spinning hit records.
The movie Talk to Me, about late 1960s and ’70s DJ and talk show host Petey Greene, demonstrates the way black DJs once focused on extremely local issues in the black community, and sheds light on their broader context in the national political landscape.
Such was the case with WTPS 1080-AM in Miami.
Morning talk show hosts Joy-Ann Reid and Andre Eggelletion, the brother of Broward County Mayor Josephus Eggelletion, discussed issues ranging from cancer-causing agents in the soil of a black neighborhood in Fort Lauderdale, to the horrific gang rape of a mother and son in West Palm Beach, to the racially imbalanced treatment of the Jena Six defendants in Louisiana.
As they talked, Reid and Eggelletion also listened. They encouraged callers to share their views, and were quick to rein in those who strayed off topic or spouted inaccurate or misleading information.
On weekends, WTPS, which billed itself as “The People’s Station,’’ featured Caribbean music and other programs.
Not anymore.
The only all-black talk radio station in South Florida went away last week, replaced by a Christian talk outlet.
“I think that 1080 clearly made a significant impact on the black community in South Florida, creating needed dialogue both between the various parts of the Diaspora, and between the black community overall, and the larger community,’’ Reid said to me in an email. “It's a forum that I believe will be sorely missed.’’
California-based Salem Comm-unications has bought WTPS from Washington, D.C.-based Radio One, for somewhere around $12 million.
The sale is hardly a flash in the pan. It is a symbol of a changing media landscape nationwide that – because of the Internet, satellite communications and the rise of black ownership of radio stations – finds itself focusing more on stockholders than stakeholders in local black communities.
The result is that black radio no longer has that direct and intimate connection with the black community that it once did.
Certainly, syndicated radio hosts such as Tom Joyner and Steve Harvey have won large audiences, and they do talk about issues that are important to people from the African Diaspora.
Yet these national shows do not have that intensely local feel that the old radio DJs of decades past – who often put on shows that could be seen as well as heard in local storefronts with big windows – could muster.
“In the 1970s, black radio was the drumbeat of the community,” Joe Madison, a former NAACP official, told Marc Fisher of The Washington Post. “As an NAACP official touring the country, if I wanted to get information out about an issue or event, my first stop was always the local black radio station.’’
Madison started out as a talk host in Detroit in the ’70s and now runs a morning show that airs simultaneously on WOL (1450 AM), a Washington, D.C.-area radio station owned by Radio One, and on XM Satellite Radio’s black talk channel, according to The Washington Post.
“Syndication doesn’t really allow for that,’’ he told the newspaper. “The issues have to be national. If I’m pushing a get-out-the-vote rally in Dayton, Ohio, that’s not going to be on ‘The Tom Joyner Show.’ ”
No one personifies the changing corporate landscape of black radio more than Cathy Hughes.
In 1979, Hughes and her then-husband, Dewey Hughes, purchased a small Washington radio station, WOL, creating Radio One. Her marriage eventually ended, and she bought her husband's share in the station, according to the website of TV One, Hughes’ other national empire.
(I will digress here to say that I love Hughes’ TV One. At last, we have a black-owned TV outlet that is a counterpoint to the no-longer-black-owned BET. TV One frequently displays positive images of black men and women doing positive things in society.)
Now back to Radio One. Years ago, Hughes was forced to give up her apartment and live at the station for a time in order to make ends meet.
Over time, she made the station profitable, and her own talk show became a major hit in D.C. By purchasing stations in other cities, the company eventually became the nation's largest black-owned radio chain.
Hughes is the first African-American woman to head a firm publicly traded on a stock exchange in the United States.
But times do not appear to be as good for Radio One in 2007 as in the past.
The company has been selling stations across the country – including WTPS – attempting to recoup its losses, according to The Miami Herald.
Broward Times columnist Barbara Howard, who co-hosted a show on WTPS, lamented the loss of the station in a recent email to me, which I will use to close my own column this week.
“While I am saddened that 1080 was sold, I understand that the station is a business and one goes into business to make money,’’ Howard wrote. “I’m just hoping to find a station where my voice will continue to be heard. Black folk deserve more than music – regardless of whether it is Hip Hop or gospel.’’
She continued: “We want to know and be able to voice our opinions on local, national and world affairs just like any other ethnic group. I hope someone black will heed the call and buy another station here in Miami.’’
Photo: Brad Bennett, executive editor of the Broward Times.
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