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Posts tagged ‘Non-commercial Radio’

Apr 4

IF THIS WERE AN ORDINARY RADIO STATION…

This is Your Life, WAFR

Advertisement for WAFR’s second annual fundraising marathon from Durham’s Carolina Times newspaper, 1973

WAFR and WVSP were no ordinary radio stations. Amid a media landscape that was overwhelmingly commercial, both stations were non-commercial.  They depended on neither advertising revenue nor funding from any established institution like a college or university.

Raising the funds needed for a non-commercial broadcasting was far from easy, however.  These stations survived for years on a mix of modest federal funding, grants, and listener donations from regular fundraising campaigns.  But WAFR and WVSP both eventually folded largely due to the overwhelming and constant challenges of raising adequate funds for maintaining station operations.

But as long as they were on the air, both stations never let their audiences forget that they were listening to non-commercial radio, as the audio clip from WAFR’s 1975 fundraising marathon demonstrates.

(Don’t see the audio player? Try Safari or Firefox. Or use the QR code below.)

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WAFR and WVSP embodied a participatory vision of media based in local communities.  At both stations, volunteers without any prior experience in media could complete the necessary FCC-mandated training that allowed them to host their own shows on the air.  Volunteers accounted for a large majority of broadcasting hours at both stations.

The excerpt below from the April 1978 issue WVSP’s Dialogue invites listeners not only to underwrite programming, but to share recordings of meetings and lectures and even submit audio interviews of people on the street to the station, all to be played over the air.


Here is What You can Do Cropped, Dialogue, April 1978

Mar 20

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AFRICA ON THE AIRWAVES

Yomi Moses, a Nigerian student at North Carolina Central University, leads children in singing their ABCs at a children's meeting of the Community Radio Workshop. Moses also taught children his native Yoruban language at the CRW.

Yomi Moses, a Nigerian student at North Carolina Central University, leads children in singing their ABCs at a meeting of the Community Radio Workshop. Moses also gave lessons in his native Yoruban language at the CRW.

When WAFR commenced broadcasting in September 1971, it didn’t take long for listeners to discern that the station’s staffers had chosen their call letters as an homage to Africa.  Indeed, with programming that celebrated African history, politics, and culture, WAFR made Pan-Africanism a main component of its programming–something that no American radio station had done before. As Obataiye Akinwole, one of the station’s founders explained in an interview for the 1995 documentary Black Radio: Telling It Like It Is, “We wanted to have our heritage in our name.”

Deejays at WAFR also assumed on-air names that emphasized the group’s collective Pan-African identity, not unlike members of black nationalist groups like the Nation of Islam or Maulana Karenga’s US Organization in Los Angeles.  Announcers’ names included Mwanafunzi Shanga Sadiki, Baba Femi, Brother Ola, Brother Hassan, and Johnny X.  The Community Radio Workshop, the non-profit organization that administered the station, also offered public seminars on African languages and culture for adults and children.  In the audio clip below, a representative of the African Reparations and Relocation Committee offers his wholehearted endorsement of WAFR’s programming

When WVSP started broadcasting several years later in Warrenton, its staff members also made international news, especially reporting on Africa, mainstays of their programming.  The station developed close ties with Durham’s Africa News Service, the U.S.’s first wire service devoted to news from the African continent (more on this in a future post), and became one of its most loyal distribution outlets.  Interestingly, the station’s tenure between 1976 and 1986 coincided neatly with the Soweto Uprising and the ultimate passage of the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of the U.S. Congress.  Consequently, WVSP frequently featured reporting on the international movement against  apartheid that gained unprecedented momentum in these years, both on the air and in its newsletter, Dialogue.

A WVSP Dialogue story on Rhodesia from 1978, provided by Africa News Service, on U.S. corporations that potentially violated a trade embargo with Rhodesia.

A WVSP Dialogue story from 1978, provided by Africa News Service, on U.S. corporations that potentially violated a trade embargo with Rhodesia and also dealt with South African firms.