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After Shaw University’s WSHA radio station went on air in 1968, several other historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) followed the North Carolina school’s lead, launching a wave of their own.

For decades, the students who worked on these channels used them to inform listeners about happenings on campus, while also playing musical selections and offering cultural programming. In doing so, the radio stations at HBCUs became pivotal resources for both the campus and the surrounding community.

But the landscape of university-based media is changing. Today, of the more than 100 HBCUs across the country, about 30 have radio stations. Some schools and students are pivoting to podcasts, for example, while others are shoring up their TikTok and short-form video bonafides. Stations have been shuttered, including WSHA in 2018, while others work to cultivate new audiences. What happens, then, to the decades’ worth of archival material made by previous generations as stations move on?

The HBCU Radio Preservation Project is working to ensure that the irreplaceable archives at these institutions are saved and accessible. As a result of the project’s efforts, WSHA’s archives are available through the American Archives of Public Broadcasting. Several other universities, including Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, have had their radio archive preserved for future generations.

How the project works

While working to preserve the archival collection of WYSO, a public radio station in Yellow Springs, Ohio, Jocelyn Robinson began wondering what collections at HBCU radio stations might include. She created a project that surveyed the radio stations to find out.

“I’ve developed profiles of all of the radio stations, so I knew when they were founded and what their format was, what their broadcast footprint was,” said Robinson, a member of the African American and civil rights radio caucus of the radio preservation taskforce at the Library of Congress. “At the end of the grant, I wrote a report and had a series of recommendations around how I thought radio stations in the campuses could be better served by support for preservation, including the institutional archives at the campuses.”

She founded the HBCU Radio Preservation Project, which provides training to the radio stations and the college’s archives on audio-visual preservation.

The project hosts the HBCU Radio Preservation archival fellowship, for which recent graduates are eligible, where fellows get early-career archival training and experience while also supporting the radio stations and institutional archives on the campuses.

The HBCU Radio Preservation Project team reformats and works with institutions to help provide people for inventorying, packing and archival digitisation. The project helps each institution care for and identify the care for its own materials. Then, American Archives of Public Broadcasting (AAPB), a service for public media, gives the institutions the options to make some of their materials accessible.

So far, the project has digitised more than 1,125 hours of archival audio and visited nearly two dozen HBCU campuses. The team has interviewed more than 90 people, recording more than 140 hours of oral histories.

Remembering the history

There is an oral history project component to the team’s efforts, which is “where the storytelling becomes even more important and more apparent in the work”, Robinson said. One of the very first oral history captures they did was with David Linton, a program director at WCOK at Clark Atlanta University, in Atlanta, Georgia, whose career started at WSHA at Shaw.

“David went from there as a student, learned his craft, and was instrumental in getting WRVS, the radio station at Elizabeth City State University in North Carolina, on the air in the mid-1980s,” Robinson said. “You’re looking at a decades-long legacy.”

“It’s really fascinating to hear narrators speak to the emergence of these stations in the 60s and 70s [and to] hear how Black radio on HBCU campuses is an outgrowth of civil rights and Black power movements,” said Will Tchakirides, assistant director of public programming and history for the HBCU Radio Preservation Project, who works with the station personnel to help develop oral histories. “That was Black college students themselves actively demanding a voice on radio, and some of the narrators we’ve spoken to were actually those students who were part of communication departments or filling other roles where they had an opportunity to speak to their fellow students, to share music, to express culture.”

The project has completed more than 90 oral histories so far, with more scheduled. Those histories are accessible to a wide audience through the project’s partnership with the Margaret Walker Center at Jackson State University, an HBCU in Jackson, Mississippi, which has its own radio station at WJSU 88.5.

Returning the history

Celebrating the stations’ histories helps different groups – from current students who might not be active listeners to family members of previous radio employees – understand the importance of the channels.

After digitising the archives, the HBCU Radio Preservation Project returns the materials to the institutions. The radio station’s hard drive is presented in a stylized black box that is decorated to look like a historic radio. The box includes the station’s call letters and its radio frequency. The institution’s library and radio station receive a plaque acknowledging and celebrating their investment in the preservation of the station’s legacy and history.

Shaw’s return included 46 digitized episodes of Traces of Faces and Places, a weekly talk show the school had.

“Not only are we preserving this radio sound, this institutional history, this cultural history, we’re also, in some ways, providing families with the sound of someone’s voice that may or may not be with us anymore,” said Phyllis Jeffers-Coly, assistant director for administration and outreach.

The late Margaret Rose Murray, for instance, who hosted Traces of Faces and Places was integral in social justice and civil rights work in the city. “This woman’s family has 46 hours to listen to of their mom being the voice and being a conduit for social justice, social change and community engagement in Raleigh, North Carolina,” Jeffers-Coly said.

When the radio stations were in their heyday, they hosted discussions about civil rights, youth activism and protests. The history that students made and preserved then is now an invaluable resource. “In this moment,” Jeffers-Coly said, “where cultural institutions, including museums, including universities, including radio stations, are losing funding, we needed to show up and show out and celebrate in a way that was public.”