Black Power Radio Waves

• In Event: Sounds of Dissent and Solidarity in Africa and the Americas

Abstract

This paper brings insights from Black Power studies to bear on radio and broadcast studies, and vice-versa, through a preliminary discussion of Black Power radio history. In influential monographs, media scholars William Barlow and Brian Ward have invaluably amplified radio’s contributions to the civil rights movement, showing how African-American deejays, broadcasters, musical artists, and station owners mobilized and interpellated citizens across color lines and regions. However, their work rehearses narratives of declension and demonization that assume that militant and separatist Black Power groups destroyed the gains of the civil rights movement after the mid-1960s. These narratives are productively challenged by the “long civil rights” and new Black Power studies (e.g., Jacquelyn Down Hall, Peniel Joseph, Nikhil Pal Singh, James Smethurst) that examine historical and geographical connections as well as discontinuities among liberation movements across the twentieth century. Meanwhile, Black Atlantic and hemispheric studies of sonic solidarities (John Kun, Tsitsi Jaji, Shana Redmond) expand the U.S.-centric focus of African-American radio studies. This paper will argue that the insights afforded by “long civil rights” and transnational sound studies are integral to investigating the histories, cartographies, arts, and legacies of Black Power radio.

Specifically, I will argue that Robert and Mabel Williams’s program Radio Free Dixie, broadcasted from Havana from 1962-1966, illuminates the hemispheric routes of Black Power radio, as well as its influence into the late twentieth century and the present. First, I will discuss Radio Free Dixie’s dissemination of African-American culture and revolutionary politics in Cuba, and the show’s reception by Cuba’s Radio Progreso and Granma newspaper. I will then examine Radio Free Dixie in relation to later developments in Black radio in the U.S. such as Mbanna Kantako’s Black Liberation Radio (established in 1988 in Springfield, Illinois), which is cited as the beginning of the micro-broadcasting movement; and an important example of Black public radio, Third World News Review, established in the 1980s at U.C. Santa Barbara by Cedric Robinson and Corey Dubin. Through this preliminary outline of Black Power radio history, I will consider its implications for understanding what Rayvon Fouché calls “Black vernacular technological creativity” – the ways in which the African-descended rearticulate and politicize technological artifacts, practices, and knowledge.

Author

• Cheryl Higashida, University of Colorado-Boulder