The Library of Congress Radio Preservation Task Force (RPTF) has been working to unearth, examine, and make available otherwise unheard materials from sound history, for the purpose of expanding our primary source canon to be more diverse than the current record. There are two crucial historiographical problems associated with media recognition work, and two major logistical issues. The first historiographical problem is that visibility research has correctly identified widespread discrepancies in equity of representation, but has not appropriately addressed the mechanics of what it would take to make sources available, even when materials are directly available but on obsolete formats. The RPTF has consequently built a cross-sector collaborative framework so that concepts of recognition might meet practices of circulation. The second historiographical issue at stake in this work is that researchers do not know what diverse histories have been missing from our classrooms,[1] because we do not have a functional “history of archival AV history” that might inform us about what has been lost, or what might be waiting exposition. To solve this problem, the task force has supported dozens of grant and fellowship projects to explore, locate, and digitally preserve historical materials to shed light upon numerous discourses, embodiments, experiences, and genres of performance. The RPTF has built a big data project with the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, in conjunction with the Library of Congress National Recording Preservation Board, so that collection-level descriptions are available for analysis and future preservation intervention work by scholars, archivists, and the public. Among the most crucial recognition projects that we have been working on the past few years has been exploring where African American and Civil Rights primary sources might be available.

One area of significant interest is the history at Historically Black Colleges and University (HBCU) radio stations, which don’t have an easily accessible historical database. HBCUs are more than institutions of higher learning—they are keepers of culture. Just before COVID-19, over the summer of 2019, a National Recording Preservation Foundation grant was issued so that one of the authors of this piece might conduct a national archival survey, as a first step in preserving this potentially valuable, untapped resource.

Of the 104 HBCUs, nearly one-third have radio stations that have documented the African American experience, including the Civil Rights era. Presently there are 29 active stations in 13 states and the District of Columbia, and they are as diverse as HBCUs themselves. Public, private, large, small, rural, and urban, these institutions cover a range of geography, from the Deep South to the Midwest, from the Eastern Seaboard to the Great Plains. Many have existed for decades, and their magnetic media are deteriorating; we stand to lose forever this primary source material reflecting the diversity of the Black experience over time.

When it’s completed, the project will create profiles of each station and provide data on the content, condition, and accessibility of the stations’ historical broadcast materials. The project also aims to identify stations with preservation/conservation needs, so that the grant team can look for funding to fulfill those needs. At its conclusion, a report will be available to students, faculty, scholars, researchers, and media producers who want to access these important materials.

The project’s genesis goes back to another college radio station and its historical collection that was “rediscovered.”

Project Background

Ten years ago, a treasure trove of historical radio broadcasts surfaced at WYSO, a radio station at a small liberal arts college in Southwest Ohio. As the station was moving to a different building on the Antioch College Campus in Yellow Springs, station staff discovered thousands of reel-to-reel tapes, carts, cassettes, and other media that had been stuffed into trash bags and boxes and forgotten in a musty storeroom. The contents of the tape library, some of it dating back to the station’s founding in 1958, were a mystery: Many of the tape boxes were so mildewed the labels could barely be read, and the magnetic tape itself showed signs of sticky tape syndrome, and worse. But on those tapes were interviews, lectures, concerts, and a rich primary source chronicle of the 1960s through the early 80s and the dawn of the digital age.

The forgotten and deteriorating media had languished for decades when Peabody Award-winning producer Neenah Ellis took the helm of WYSO in 2009. One of the first items to cross her desk in the early weeks of her role as station manager was a request for proposals for the American Archive of Public Broadcasting’s pilot project. That RFP set in motion an effort to preserve WYSO’s archival materials. The materials were surveyed, catalogued, stabilized, and moved to proper storage. Several hundred hours of the most significant tapes were then digitized and made accessible to the public through a partnership with the Greene County Public Library.

This locally produced media features the voices of key figures of the times, like Susan Sontag, Cesar Chavez, Phil Ochs, and Anne Braden. There were voices of noteworthy African Americans, too, like Dick Gregory, Alice Walker, Cecil Taylor, Ralph Abernathy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and many more. As the Archives Fellow at WYSO, Jocelyn Robinson worked intimately with this historical audio archives beginning in 2013, producing feature stories about the Civil Rights and Vietnam War eras from the digitized material. This award-winning series, Rediscovered Radio, often delved into the voices of African Americans locally and nationally. With a background in cultural studies and a newly minted graduate certificate in public history/archives, Robinson became curious. If a small college radio station in the Midwest held such a trove of the Black experience reflected in historical radio, what might be found in the old tape libraries and dusty closets of HBCU radio stations? HBCU radio stations have participated in and documented the African American experience, including the Civil Rights era. Many of these institutions are located in the South, in the crucible of the Civil Rights Movement; surely their materials would reflect the critical experiences of their campuses and communities during this era and beyond.

The seed for an inquiry into HBCU radio archives was planted after the first RPTF conference in Washington, DC, in 2016. In collaboration with scholars and practitioners serving on the RPTF, and with the encouragement of fellow members of the African American and Civil Rights Radio Caucus of the task force, Robinson began to design the project and the survey, with help from HBCU archivist Sheila Darrow of Central State University in Wilberforce, Ohio. Wilberforce is the home of WCSU, the first HBCU radio station to receive an FCC license. Robinson got funding to launch the survey in 2018, when the National Recording Preservation Foundation (NRPF) awarded her a grant for what became phase one of a larger preservation project.

There is some urgency in this preservation effort. Like WYSO, many of these stations have existed for decades, and just like at WYSO, their magnetic media are deteriorating, so this precious resource is at risk. Not only that, cash-strapped HBCUs have sold their broadcast licenses to raise funds to keep their institutions open. Since the genesis of this project, Shaw University in Raleigh, NC, has sold the license to its station, WSHA.

Before more HBCU radio station licenses are sold and before these archival materials deteriorate further, there needs to be a systematic archival survey of HBCU stations. This is the only way to create a database and other comprehensive records of the valuable material they’re holding.

Broadcast Archival Materials Are at Risk

In addition to being at risk of deteriorating, these materials are at risk of being discarded to make room for newer materials because the older are obsolete or too bulky to store. One unexpected and valuable outcome of the phase one grant was the opportunity to alert HBCU radio stations and their campuses to the significance of their archival materials. It encouraged them to consider creating a preservation plan and to include their broadcast materials in their institution’s overall preservation efforts. Historical media is at risk, but in the absence of a preservation plan, so is the digital material that stations are creating today. An added benefit of the project is connecting HBCU radio stations to the resources available for the continued safekeeping of their historical and current materials.

Collection appraisal and planning are important elements of the archival process. The first step is the execution of a survey or inventory of the material to be collected or preserved. What is significant about the content of the material? Are there unique voices or events represented? How much material is there? What formats is the material in? Where is it located? What is its condition? Are there urgent preservation or conservation needs? Is the material accessible? And who owns it, physically and intellectually? There is no overarching preservation organization that ties together all radio stations located at HBCUs to answer these questions.

Robinson designed the HBCU Radio Station Archival Survey Project to create such a resource. The project kicked off in spring 2019 with t an online questionnaire that gathered profile information for the stations and asked for data on the content, condition, and accessibility of the stations’ historical broadcast materials.

By spring 2020, 21 of 29 stations had voluntarily participated in the online survey.

Preliminary findings show how important it was to conduct this survey: Of the respondents, five indicated that they have no archival materials related to their campus radio station. Most of those that do have material are storing it in locations that are not suitable for long-term preservation.

The project also provided information, counsel, and resources to stations that needed to preserve or conserve their materials, connecting them with appropriate expertise, services, organizations, and agencies. Site visits to select stations based on survey results took place in fall 2019 and winter 2020, and small mini-grants were made available to participating stations that encouraged preservation planning and implementation.

After the NRPF grant money was spent and the COVID-19 pandemic started, the project stalled—although Robinson did write a preliminary report for phase one in 2020. This report called for a larger HBCU radio preservation project, which in June 2021 was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This phase two pilot project—in partnership with the Northeast Document Conservation Center and WYSO, as the administrative hub—includes completion of the initial survey, site visits, and a series of preservation workshops that will take place through December 2022. These activities will lay the groundwork for the team to apply to Mellon for a full implementation grant to assist all HBCU radio stations in preserving their materials.

When the current project is complete, the full survey report will be available on the RPTF website, as well as through the collections database being compiled by the RPTF in conjunction with ARSC. This final report will then be accessible to the radio stations, the various campus communities involved, and to all students, faculty, scholars, researchers, and media producers who want to access these important resources.

The survey results and subsequent preservation activities that are planned at least through 2022 will provide a wealth of resources in addition to preserving the important HBCU radio legacy. Exploration of Black college radio, its history and impact on campus and in the community, is fertile ground for teaching and learning. This preservation work will provide:

• Access to oral histories at campus radio stations by former students and staff
• Audio for digital storytelling projects using historical audio
• Primary sources for research
• A source of locally produced materials in underrepresented areas
• The capacity to examine the impact of local programming on local communities
• Opportunities to examine local responses to national trends

HBCU Radio Stations

Radio stations housed at Historically Black Colleges and Universities have long given voice to the communities in which they are located. Many of these institutions are in the southern United States and have been important locations during the Civil Rights Movement in major cities like Atlanta, GA, Tallahassee, FL, and Jackson, MS. Others are in midsize or smaller cities like Petersburg, VA, Orangeburg, SC, and Prairie View, TX. They are important chroniclers of the histories of their institutions, their communities, and of the United States of America. The radio stations identified through the project are:

Jocelyn Robinson, Producer for Emerging Initiatives, Education, & Archives, WYSO

Jocelyn Robinson is a Yellow Springs, OH-based educator, media producer, and radio preservationist.

She holds a BA in Art History from Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio and a Master’s in Cultural Studies with a concentration in Race, Gender, and Identity from Antioch University. In 2015 she earned a graduate certificate in Public History with a focus on Archives Administration, also from Wright State. Since 2007, she has taught transdisciplinary literature courses for Antioch University which incorporate critical cultural theory and her research interests in exploring self-definition and identity through narrative.

Trained through WYSO’s Community Voices program in 2013, Jocelyn served as the station’s first Archives Fellow, producing Rediscovered Radio, short documentaries using WYSO’s civil rights era audio as source material, and she was recognized with a 2014 New Voices Scholar Award from the Boston-based Association of Independents in Radio (AIR). Her current series, West Dayton Stories, is a community-based story-telling project centered on the people and places of Dayton’s vibrant African American neighborhoods.

Jocelyn Robinson serves on the African American and Civil Rights Radio Caucus of the Radio Preservation Task Force, a project of the Recorded Sound Preservation Board at the Library of Congress. In 2019, she was awarded a National Recording Preservation Foundation grant to survey the archival holdings of HBCU radio stations. Based on survey findings, funding from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation is supporting an HBCU radio preservation pilot project through 2022. Link here for more information on the project.

Josh Shepperd is an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, and serves as sound fellow of the Library of Congress NRPB, chair of the Radio Preservation Task Force, and director of the Library of Congress Sound Submissions Program. Josh is additionally an associate editor of Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture.

1. Casswell, Michelle. “Critical Archival Studies: An Introduction,” Journal of Critical Library and Information Sciences, 1, no 2 (2017). ↑