In downtown Atlanta, there sits a small brick building that was the home to the first black-owned radio station – WERD – in the United States in the 1950s. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders used the broadcast to spread their messages, encourage black citizens to vote and announce civil rights marches in between the performances of black jazz and blues performers during the Jim Crow era.
One would hope that by the year 2021 the legacy that WERD left in American history would only help to grow and expand the number of black-owned radio stations. Unfortunately, the data tells a much different story.