In 1949, Jesse B. Blayton Sr. bought a small Atlanta AM station and renamed it WERD, making it the first radio station in the United States owned by a Black broadcaster. Its signal reached the Black neighborhoods that white-owned stations largely ignored, and it became a gathering place on the dial.

From the booth to the movement

WERD's best-known voice, Jack "Jack the Rapper" Gibson, worked the morning show and then organized the country's first convention for Black disc jockeys — an event that turned Atlanta into a clearinghouse for Black music programming nationwide. When the civil rights movement moved through the city in the 1960s, Black radio carried the message: announcements, warnings, church schedules and the organizing that never made the white papers.

What it is now

Atlanta's Black-formatted stations remain among the most influential in the country, breaking records and artists before national radio does, and gospel radio still functions as the neighborhood bulletin board. The format survived television, ownership consolidation and streaming by doing what WERD did: treating Black Atlanta as the audience rather than the exception.