TALKING DRUM: BLACK NEWS TALK RADIO (Pt. I): WOL-AM
by: Todd Steven Burroughs
WOL-AM, 1450 on the dial, is the flagship radio station of both the WOL News-Talk Network and parent company Radio One Inc.
It's also founder Cathy Hughes' dream come true: not only a radio station of her own, but the first Black news-talk radio station in the country. The Washington, D.C.-based soul music station became Black news-talk in 1980, setting a pattern for small smattering of stations around the nation to follow in that decade.
Hughes, the owner-bomb-thrower. Don't get on her bad side. When she was on 'OL air in D.C. from 1980 until the mid-1990s, she lit up both the airwaves and the phone lines. Essence magazine described her on-air persona as a +ACI-fire-breathing activist, calling out folks on the air and organizing protests that humbled the powers of Washington.
People here in D.C. still remember about how she made hundreds of thousands of people toss back their Washington Posts on the newspaper's doorsteps in 1986 when its then-newly created Sunday magazine printed and defended in print what many Blacks considered racially stereotypical images.
In the 1980s and early 1990s, WOL's headquarters on Fourth and H streets became a beacon in Northeast D.C., wrote Charisse Jones last year in Essence. Locals dropped by, and folks could watch the radio personalities at work through the station's large window. The WOL News-Talk Network--which is WOL and 1010 WOLB-AM, the latter a Baltimore sister station that runs some simultaneous programming with WOL--has since moved out of the District of Columbia. Radio One's other stations include music stations in D.C., Atlanta and Detroit.
WOL is where I first heard Bernie McCain, a legend in Black radio. And Mark Thompson and Lisa Mitchell, activists on the radio and off. Their strong Africentric and activist-based analyses made me a little less homesick for the Black news-talk radio I grew up with, New York's 1190 WLIB-AM.
And quiet as it's kept, 'OL was the place the Rev. Benjamin Chavis went to rebuild his reputation locally after being tossed out of the NAACP in 1994 because of his financial-sexual shenanigans. He hosted a Saturday morning show he called Freedom's Journal for about a year or so starting in 1995.
Hughes is clear on the purpose and the function of Black news-talk radio. I see talk radio as being the daily version of the Black newspaper, she told Emerge magazine in 1996. I see it as being an outgrowth of the Black church. Black talk radio is the daily talking drum that all people of African descent respond to. It is our history and our culture. If Black radio doesn't tell the Black community what is really going on, who will?
Certainly not White media. With the exception of token talk shows on hip-hop radio stations, they are not interested in replicating the Africentric Town Hall of WLIB or what I call the Community Pool Hall/Listening Post of WOL.
WOL and Hughes are proof that in the world of mass media, strength with few friends is better than weakness with many.
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