Race and Radio

Pioneering Black Broadcasters in New Orleans

Bala James Baptiste

• Editorial: University Press of Mississippi
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781496822086
• Categoría: Ciencias sociales
• Categoría: Estudios afroamericanos

In Race and Radio: Pioneering Black Broadcasters in New Orleans, Bala James Baptiste traces the history of the integration of radio broadcasting in New Orleans and tells the story of how African American on-air personalities transformed the medium. Analyzing a trove of primary data—including archived manuscripts, articles and display advertisements in newspapers, oral narratives of historical memories, and other accounts of African Americans and radio in New Orleans between 1945 and 1965—Baptiste constructs a formidable narrative of broadcast history, racism, and black experience in this enormously influential radio market. The historiography includes the rise and progression of black broadcasters who reshaped the Crescent City. The first, O. C. W. Taylor, hosted an unprecedented talk show, the Negro Forum, on WNOE beginning in 1946. Three years later in 1949, listeners heard Vernon "Dr. Daddy-O" Winslow's smooth and creative voice as a disk jockey on WWEZ. The book also tells of Larry McKinley who arrived in New Orleans from Chicago in 1953 and played a critical role in informing black listeners about the civil rights movement in the city. The racial integration of radio presented opportunities for African Americans to speak more clearly, in their own voices, and with a technological tool that opened a broader horizon in which to envision community. While limited by corporate pressures and demands from advertisers ranging from local funeral homes to Jax beer, these black broadcasters helped unify and organize the communities to which they spoke. Race and Radio captures the first overtures of this new voice and preserves a history of black radio's awakening.

CHAPTER ONE

Organized Action Colorized White Radio in the Crescent City

The emergence of black on-air personalities at radio stations in New Orleans changed the medium after executives diverged from white-only staffs and programming targeting Caucasians. This book, which discusses pioneering black broadcasters, is significant because African Americans need more than inclusion in broadcast historiography. In fact, broadcast historiography is inadequate without sufficient discussion of relevant black experiences.

David Nord, a former editor at the Journal of American History, said in order to understand American history you must have an appreciation for African American history. In other words, black history is mainstream American history. It is not merely adding history of black experiences to the American experience. Black history is American history.¹

Similarly, the history of American radio must include the history of African Americans. Nevertheless, broadcast historiography, and radio history in particular, either interprets the experiences of white people exclusively or lacks sufficient discussion of when and why whites finally permitted blacks to broadcast Afrocentric ideas or cultural productions. Much of the role racism played in the industry is omitted. General studies of broadcasting underrepresent how the medium affected African Americans, the roles blacks played in radio, and how they altered programming.²

To improve the historiography of blacks in radio, a considerable amount of primary data was analyzed, including archived manuscripts, correspondences, articles and display advertisements in newspapers from the period, interview transcriptions, oral narratives and historical memories of eyewitnesses, government documents including Federal Communications Commission reports, and other data concerning black radio in New Orleans between 1945 and 1965. The historical narrative includes stories of O. C. W. Taylor, a black man whom WNOE in New Orleans allowed in 1946 to produce and host the city’s first African American radio program; Vernon L. Winslow Sr., the personification of Dr. Daddy-O on WWEZ in 1949, who became the city’s first black broadcast disc jockey; and Larry McKinley, a disc jockey, announcer, and station manager, who began his career in 1953 at WMRY. Further discussion explores reasons whites discontinued prohibiting blacks from entering broadcast studios and speaking on air. The book reveals the introduction of a diversity of ideas and perspectives on air and how they contributed to feelings of pride among African Americans in the New Orleans metropolitan area.

The emergence of blacks, whether in talk or music format, transformed the character of radio and reshaped the discourse transmitted via the medium.³ Racial integration of radio broadcasting began a process of changing the medium into a more representative transmitter of black cultural structures of meaning. The rise of black announcers at radio stations provided opportunities for African Americans to have a voice to interpret their affairs and issues and use broadcast communication as a cultural resource having the potential to connect and sustain linkages among community members. Black announcers, new to the white world of radio, offered listeners a broader context within which to build community and make sense of the American experience.⁴

To build community, individuals need to create, maintain, and expand collective identities. To establish a network of camaraderie and sympathy among group members, mass communication tools must be available.⁵ Community building is a function related to an alternative public sphere or discursive space within which blacks access opportunities to crystallize their collective opinions on small and large issues. In the public sphere, people discuss important issues of the day. Since white people imagined blacks outside of systems of representative democracy, African Americans constructed a version of the public sphere to build communities and gain and maintain white approval.⁶

Black Americans had very little opportunity compared to whites to reason together via the electronic media of the era. Nevertheless, radio aimed at blacks enabled them to move in mass at a stepped-up pace in a direction toward community solidarity. The inclusion of black announcers and on-air personalities therefore changed the utility of radio. The black personality’s voice, articulation, black-centeredness, language, music choices, discussion topics, and cultural references were among characteristics embodied in their emergence.

Early black announcers provided status and publicity opportunities to African Americans who owned a business or worked in a profession. Black announcers, particularly in the talk-show format, provided occasions during which black decision makers in social and religious organizations could solicit donations, new members, and the attention of a widely dispersed community. The announcers provided black parents, and their family members and friends, opportunities to experience pride when their children played a musical instrument, sang, read their essays, or otherwise displayed their talents on the air.

Black pioneers in music radio disseminated a variety of incarnations of the blues, jazz, boogie woogie, gospel, and rhythm and blues. The trailblazers shared knowledge of black music traditions with their audiences and were conduits through which musicians talked to the public about their art.

The new presence of blacks on the air ushered in the process of change in the nature of programming, marketing, advertising, Euro-centeredness, and broadcast media’s perpetuation of an ideology of black inferiority and white superiority. Blacks introduced a divergence in talk-show topics, music programming, strategy to attract consumer markets, and ideologies of Afrocenteredness and racial equality.

To construct a thick narrative of broadcast history, a micro-level approach is warranted. The information must meticulously address blacks and their experiences in radio as well as whites who exhibit a propensity toward racism. New Orleans is the setting for several reasons. The city possesses a significant black music legacy. Blacks laid the foundation for the late 1800s development of jazz music that defined a major stream of American culture. African Americans fused together the musical, dance, and rhythmic traditions of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century slave celebrations in Congo Square. They developed the jazz funeral and Mardi Gras Indians and added major components to the rise of gospel, funk, and rhythm and blues. As well, during the Civil Rights Movement, New Orleans was one of the racial battlegrounds of the South wherein the descendants of African slaves marched past ramparts of white supremacy and pushed toward equal, legal protection. During the movement, leaders in the city refined what would become the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and elected the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as its president. Finally, the city in the bend of the Mississippi River had a sizable population of African Americans.

Blacks in New Orleans employed music to sustain themselves as they struggled with slavery and the slave trade, unjust state and local laws, separatist social structures, obstacles to educational opportunities and gainful employment, and opposition to interaction between blacks and whites. When black announcers arrived, they began a reconfiguration of radio into a utilitarian resource gradually enlarging opportunities for African Americans to pursue the American dream.⁷ The racial integration of radio presented opportunities for blacks to speak more clearly, in their own voices, and with a cultural tool that laid the foundation for a broader plateau on which to build community.⁸

Broadcast historians have also focused insufficient attention on black Americans and their interest in community building. White power brokers opened the public sphere to whites but closed it to blacks. The public sphere is the space between the state and the individual where ideas and issues are debated. The implications rendered blacks virtually powerless in the South before 1965. Whites held political and economic power in the North and the South and succeeded in stopping or at least drastically slowing processes in which blacks attempted to build community. Public institutions, such as newspapers, were among principal community building tools before the rise of racial integration in radio. As staunch, overt white supremacy subsided and black empowerment surfaced, African American dissent, conflict, ideological passion, and “intermitted agitation” morphed into a strategy of nonviolent resistance.⁹

To fully understand the history of blacks in broadcasting, one has to consider factors associated with segregation and integration in mass media in the United States. Why did whites decide to hire blacks to play records or musical instruments, to sing, or talk on the air? The reasons included multilayered factors that converged in a gradual movement over time, including black cultural production,¹⁰ the assertiveness of individual blacks,¹¹ the profit motive, saturated white markets, and competition.¹²

Radio stations integrated racially as social, economic, and political events unfolded, each affecting the other and influencing broadcast decision makers. Whites in some northern cities racially integrated public accommodations before their counterparts in the South. States such as Indiana, Michigan, and New York passed legislation outlawing racial discrimination in public places. For example, New York enacted a Human Rights Law in 1945. In radio an impetus for integration was the acceptance of black cultural production, such as the music genres of gospel, jazz, blues, boogie, and rhythm and blues. Whites developed a fascination for African American music and dance. Advertising and broadcast executives hired blacks to play instruments, sing, and later talk via radio in part because young adult and teenage whites in northern cities, beginning in the Jazz Age of the 1920s and 1930s, were listening. Radio audiences in Chicago heard the music of the dance band Clarence Jones and his Wonder Orchestra as early as 1922 on the city’s Westinghouse station, KYW.¹³

Nevertheless, broadcasters programmed a limited amount of black music in the early days of commercial radio in the 1920s. The rise of network broadcasting did not necessarily increase black employment opportunities, but it began the surfacing of wide distribution of the African American presence on radio. National dissemination of content emerged in 1933 and advanced a slow, steady climb toward racial inclusiveness and multiculturalism in the medium. Networks began to dominate American broadcasting beginning in the mid-1930s as advertising agencies took over the production and distribution of radio programs.

The proliferation of black music continued to move station managers and advertising agencies to hire blacks at the local level, in stepped-up fashion beginning in 1948, when disc jockeys began to multiply and white teenagers hugged tighter onto risqué music.¹⁴ Disc jockeys began in the 1930s the transition in radio from focusing on recorded music to highlighting the person who introduced the recording artists.¹⁵ Northern broadcasters in the 1940s and early 1950s hired blacks earlier and at greater frequency than their southern counterparts. But as late as 1947, Ebony magazine reported radio stations employed only sixteen blacks, less than 1 percent of the three thousand disc jockeys nationally.¹⁶

Independent stations in big cities did not have access to programming distributed by the networks: NBC, ABC, CBS, and MBN. Non-affiliates had to produce their own content. The lack of access to network programming contributed to station managers being less resistant to hiring black talent. Independent broadcasters with stations in cities aired the music, talk, and comedy of black entertainers more than network affiliates or radio serving small markets. Approximately eight hundred local radio programs included at least one black singer, instrumentalist, comedian, or actor between 1920 and 1933.¹⁷

White broadcasters in the North hired blacks in part because moderate and liberal attitudes broadened their views of opportunity sooner and wider than the frame through which southern conservatives gazed. Ethnic-oriented whites established in northern cities radio stations targeting immigrants and were among the first to hire blacks. Southern whites enforced racial segregation longer than their northern counterparts and created a sociopolitical environment that discouraged the establishment of ethnic-oriented radio in the South.¹⁸

The continued reliance on directing the advertisement of products and services to white people interfered with decisions to hire black actors and writers. The rise of commercials as a major source of revenue in the mid-1930s contributed to the continuation of white exclusiveness. Corporate executives refused to hire advertising agents to produce programs that featured blacks in serious or leading roles. Dramas, game shows, comedies, and variety shows were among prominent radio content during the period. Broadcast managers did not want commercials or programming that overtly attracted black consumers. White consumers, they rationalized, would avoid purchasing products or services associated with blacks. White supremacy saturated the American mindset. An advertising agent rationalized: “Pillsbury flour is one of our biggest accounts. If it gets out that we were pushing Negro talent on a Pillsbury program, the next thing you know, it would be branded a ‘nigger flour’ and it would never move.”¹⁹

The first radio station to air a black announcer in New Orleans in 1946 did so in part because blacks organized their efforts to obtain airtime on WNOE, an affiliate of the Mutual Broadcasting Network. It was not for an immediate profit motive, in the sense of selling black listeners to advertisers for the highest price. The owner of WNOE, James A. Noe, was a politician who envisioned running for political office. He also had his eye on petitioning the Federal Communications Commission to increase the power at which his station transmitted. Having black programming would help his causes.

Nationally, in 1941 officials at the Urban League organized blacks and convinced executives at the Columbia Broadcasting System to allow the League to produce and broadcast an African American radio program. The Urban League, founded by blacks and liberal whites in 1911, is a black-rights organization interested in urging blacks to learn skills qualifying them for high-paying jobs and in motivating public and private-sector employers to open up employment opportunities. CBS agreed to let the Urban League use its production studio and equipment to produce a black show, but limited its content to music. On March 30, 1941, CBS broadcast “The Negro and National Defense,” which featured entertainers including Louis Armstrong’s band and a segment from Detroit where Ethel Waters sang “Georgia on My Mind.”

Urban League officials also organized at the local level in the 1940s. They urged their affiliates to approach owners of radio stations and ask them to give the group free airtime to produce public affairs shows. The national organization granted a charter to organizers in Louisiana, and they established the Urban League of Greater New Orleans in 1938. O. C. W. Taylor, who integrated radio in New Orleans, was one of the founders of the local Urban League and its first director. An article in the Pittsburgh Courier indicated blacks in New Orleans, led by Taylor, accepted the challenge. The group organized as the Negro Citizens Committee and later approached WNOE management and convinced station officials to provide free airtime.²⁰ A solid link existed between the New Orleans Urban League and the first black program, the “Religious Forum of the Air”; however, neither Taylor or the black press publicized details of negotiations between WNOE and the committee. Middle-class blacks in New Orleans in the 1940s were subdued about publicizing their efforts or victories at obtaining racial concessions.

Albert Dent, another founder of the local Urban League, epitomized the cautious approach. Dent, the president of Dillard University, engaged in quiet diplomacy typical of old-guard black leaders: “My role in New Orleans, in getting things done, is to work quietly with the power structure.” Dent silenced publicity about integration of the public library in New Orleans in 1955. He called the presidents of the area’s black institutions of higher learning (Southern University at New Orleans and Xavier University) as well as the principals of the African American high schools and said a small branch of the library was opened to blacks. Direct your students there discreetly, he said. Nothing concerning the integration of the library system was published in the newspapers or broadcast on radio or television.²¹

Before World War II, radio stations, and network affiliates in particular, transmitted programs to attract the attention and imagination of whites: Women during mornings and afternoons and both genders and all age groups during evenings.²² In 1933 CBS introduced block programming, an approach to scheduling that targeted housewives. CBS began scheduling daytime serials, or soap operas, contiguously in fifteen-minute time slots. WWL was the CBS affiliate in New Orleans. Before CBS’s innovation, soap operas were scattered throughout the program day. Block-scheduled daytime serials encouraged women who worked as housewives to listen and continue listening to a network or independent station’s offerings. Officials at other networks and program directors at stations throughout the country also adopted some form of block progra...