Violence Against The Station
The station's transmitter was bombed and destroyed on May 12, 1970, two months after going on the air. The new station was off the air for three weeks until repairs could be made. Five months later, on October 6, 1970, while the station was broadcasting Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant," the transmitter was bombed yet again and the damage was significantly more extensive. The second bombing took KPFT off the air for three months. No other U.S. radio station or transmitter has been bombed.
On January 21, 1971, KPFT management invited Guthrie to visit the Houston studios, where he performed "Alice's Restaurant" live as the station commenced transmitting yet again.
After months of inactivity by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and local police, Pacifica took the initiative to mount a media campaign designed to draw attention to the unsolved case and seek support for pressuring authorities to act. Federal agents ultimately arrested a member of the Ku Klux Klan, Jimmy Dale Hutto, and charged him with the KPFT bombings, as well as with plotting to blow up radio stations KPFA and KPFK. Hutto was convicted and imprisoned in 1971.
In the early morning hours on August 13, 2007, a bullet was fired into the studio, breaking a window and narrowly missing a woman's head. No one was injured. The shooting followed a week-long fundraising drive; since the shooting, one of the windows was covered with the KPFT banner and the front entrance locked.
On July 16, 2008, a man demanded access to KPFT's studios. After being rebuffed, he punched out a window pane on the back door with a knife. The man was apprehended without resistance, and promptly arrested.
On June 28, 2010, somebody cut the power lines to the station's transmitter, leaving the station only available online. Damages were reportedly approximately $10,000. Power was restored the following day and broadcasting resumed.
Raj Mankad wrote at OffCite that the KPFT bombings in 1971 were part of a larger campaign of "threats and acts of violence against progressive and radical institutions in Houston," including underground newspaper Space City!
Read more about this topic: KPFT
Famous quotes containing the words violence and/or station:
“If you complain of people being shot down in the streets, of the absence of communication or social responsibility, of the rise of everyday violence which people have become accustomed to, and the dehumanization of feelings, then the ultimate development on an organized social level is the concentration camp.... The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment.”
—Arthur Miller (b. 1915)
“When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)