Civil Rights Era
In 1951, Leon promoted his son-in-law, Bob Klein, to general manager. Klein saw an opportunity in the marketplace and quickly adopted programming geared toward the local African-American community. The music consisted of jazz and rhythm & blues. WDAS added a number of young personalities, including Georgie Woods, Jimmy Bishop, Carl Helm, Butterball Tamburro, Jocko Henderson and Hy Lit. The station also added black-oriented public affairs and news programs, and provided in-depth coverage of the unfolding civil rights movement, featuring award-winning and groundbreaking journalists Joe Rainey and Jim Klash,along with Walt Sanders, Carl Stubbs, Bill Adams, Dave Colman, Jimmy Carter and later, reporter Ed Bradley (later of TV's 60 Minutes). The station employed many blacks, in on-air, office and management positions. The station also took on an activist role in the movement. WDAS was commended by many in the industry and in the civil rights movement. Leon and Klein signed on a sister FM station, WDAS-FM, in 1959. By the early 1970s, the station would launch a groundbreaking and influential urban contemporary format still used today.
The station retained the R&B format throughout the 1960s, while adding gospel music with Louise Williams. Many people involved in the civil rights movement, including Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, visited and were heard on the station. Following his return from Mecca, Malcolm X visited the station on December 29, 1964 where he was interviewed by Rainey under heavy armed police guard due to assassination threats.
Klein filed a class action lawsuit against the Arbitron rating service in 1972, on behalf of all black radio stations, protesting that black radio listenership was undercounted. Arbitron settled the suit after four days of testimony and amended its methodologies and policies.
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Famous quotes containing the words civil rights, civil, rights and/or era:
“Civil Rights: What black folks are given in the U.S. on the installment plan, as in civil-rights bills. Not to be confused with human rights, which are the dignity, stature, humanity, respect, and freedom belonging to all people by right of their birth.”
—Dick Gregory (b. 1932)
“If I thought that I could speak with discrimination and impartiality of the nations of Christendom, I should praise them, but it tasks me too much. They seem to be the most civil and humane, but I may be mistaken.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“When we lose love, we lose also our identification with the universe and with eternal values—an identification which alone makes it possible for us to lay our lives on the altar for what we believe.”
—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 3, ch. 2 (1962)
“The era of the political was one of anomie: crisis, violence, madness and revolution. The era of the transpolitical is that of anomaly: an aberration of no consequence, contemporaneous with the event of no consequence.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)