Preserving the history of Birmingham Black Radio: a discussion of preservation, outreach and collaboration

Purpose The Birmingham Black Radio Museum (BBRM) is a community museum and archives located in Birmingham, Alabama (USA) dedicated to preserving and presenting the history of Black radio. The BBRM fulfills this mission through educational programming, providing access to physical and digital materials and supporting emerging curatorial professionals. Through a reflective analysis of the BBRM, the authors discuss the relationship between preservation, public programming and professional outreach, the partnerships that enable these functions and how conceptions of community responsibility have informed the organization’s management strategy. The BBRM provides a context for isolating the factors which inform the emergence of community memory institutions, the challenges associated with managing decentralized information environments and considers how mentorship can operate as a form of capacity building. An examination of the BBRM provides a view of one institution’s approach to engaging community partners and audiences in achieving its primary goal of documentary preservation. Design/methodology/approach This analysis is informed by historical, case study and autoethnographic methods. Emphasis is placed on examining BBRM’s historical origins, primary functions and community mandates. Specific attention is given to examining operations, resources and strategies. Commentary and discussion are grounded by the professional experiences of BBRM staff and collaborators. Findings The operations of the BBRM, and the experiences reported by BBRM staff, are similar to those documented by findings in the community archives and museums literatures. Community mandates and institutional identify have strongly informed the BBRM’s mandates, strategies for engaging the public and establishment of strategic partnerships. Originality/value This reflective analysis documents the operations of one specific community memory institution. Though the experiences documented in this paper are common to many community archives and museums, this study contributes an additional data point, further contributing to the body of evidence necessary to support a more nuanced understanding of the role and function of community memory institutions and their management.

Conclusion

Sociologist E. Franklyn Frazier published Black Bourgeoisie in 1957 noting that the African American press, particularly Ebony magazine, drastically overplayed the accomplishments of the black middle class. “The Negro Forum,” which emerged 11 years earlier in 1946, did similarly, but it could not be convincingly argued that the Forum overstated black accomplishments. Frazier suggested blacks were serving their own need for attention, while Taylor provided his listeners models of black excellence and achievement. He became somewhat Afrocentric before the theory's rise in the 1980s. Afrocentricity places African Americans at the center, as the main focus of analysis of social phenomena. Nevertheless, this thick historiography of pioneering broadcasters noted that early advertisers used innovative techniques to push beer into the black communities. Future studies should consider the effects contemporary black radio announcers might have if they organized concerted efforts to broadcast conscious messages such as those intended to stop black-on-black murder.

Hidden in Plain Sight

Chapter 2 uses autobiographical material to lay out radio/black radio and African American music history, from the 1950s to the present—across the West and East Coasts, the South, and the Midwest—particularly the 1980s generational split in black radio programming, in response to the rise of rap and hip-hop. The chapter also defines and lays out the related R&B-style Quiet Storm radio phenomenon. Tom Joyner’s career and the TJMS’s rise within that history are documented, and its evolving politics and crew members are described. The chapter summarizes the scant public-sphere attention this black radio giant has received.

Black Radio/Black Resistance

Black Radio is a window into the most famous radio show you never heard of. The Tom Joyner Morning Show is a quarter-century-old syndicated black morning radio show reaching more than eight million adult, largely working-class listeners. It offers progressive political talk, soul music, humor, advice, philanthropy, and celebrity gossip. But the TJMS is not just an adult “old-school music” radio show: it is an on-air organizer, fusing progressive politics and aesthetics. It focuses on specific political issues affecting and enraging African Americans. Black Radio analyzes the TJMS’s rise in the Clinton era, and its coverage of key events—9/11, Hurricane Katrina, President Obama’s elections and terms, the murders of unarmed black Americans and the rise of Black Lives Matter, and the shocking 2016 Donald Trump electoral triumph. It showcases the varied, contentious, and blackly humorous voices of anchors, guests, and audience members. Finally, it investigates the new synergistic set of cross-medium ties and political connections now affecting print, broadcast, and online politics in anti-racist directions. Despite the dismal present, this new multiracial progressive public sphere has extraordinary potential for shaping future American politics. Black Radio, then, is more than the project of making the invisible visible, bringing to light a major counterpublic phenomenon unjustly ignored for reasons of color, class, generation, and medium. It tunes us in to an alternative understanding of the black public sphere in the digital age. Like the show itself, Black Radio is politically progressive, music-drenched, angry, and blisteringly funny.

Remediating the Underground

The third chapter of Do You Remember House? traces the routes by which mostly straight, Black, and middle-class teenagers accessed and adapted the social and sonic templates developed by house music’s queer of color progenitors. Using close readings of radio “hot mixes” and oral history interviews with DJs, promoters, and dancers involved in the city’s all-ages “juice bar” scene, this chapter also suggests that house music radio was made by an emergent cohort of middle-class, Black, radio entrepreneurs who remediated Chicago musical repertoires for increasingly heterogeneous listening publics. The term remediation (Bolter & Grusin, 1999) helps account for the ways that the WBMX and WGCI hot mix shows incorporated and transformed the aesthetic priorities of teen juice bars, gay discotheques, and Black appeal radio programs to promote house music as a shared, if often contested, soundscape in greater Chicagoland.