WERD (Atlanta)

• 1. Introduction

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  WERD was the first radio station in the United States owned and programmed by African Americans. It went on the air in Atlanta, Georgia on the 3rd of October, 1949, broadcasting on 860 AM. The man behind it was Jesse B. Blayton Sr., an accountant, bank president, and professor at Atlanta University, who paid $50,000 to acquire it. He changed the format to "black appeal" programming and brought in his son Jesse Jr. to run day-to-day operations. What grew from that purchase was more than a radio station. The building that housed WERD also held the headquarters of a civil rights movement, and the man on the microphone would sometimes take cues from a broomstick tapping on the ceiling below.

• 2. Before Blayton

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  WDIA in Memphis, Tennessee was on the air in 1948 with programming aimed at Black listeners, which its operators then called Negro programming. The distinction that sets WERD apart is ownership: WDIA's owners were not African American. WERD, by contrast, was purchased, owned, and operated by Blayton, making Atlanta the home of a genuinely different kind of broadcast enterprise. Nat D. Williams was part of WDIA's team as it became the first station programmed entirely for African Americans, but ownership remained in white hands. That gap is what Blayton closed when he signed the papers in 1949.

• 3. Jockey Jack and Ken Knight

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  "Jockey" Jack Gibson came to the station as a friend of Blayton's from Chicago. By 1951, Gibson had become the most popular DJ in Atlanta. Ken Knight arrived from Daytona Beach, Florida to serve as the station's first Program Director. Together, Gibson and Knight shaped the sound that made WERD the center of Black radio in the city. Gibson's on-air presence in particular built the station's audience during its earliest years, and his connection to Blayton gave the operation a personal as well as professional character.

• 4. Auburn Avenue and the SCLC

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  WERD was housed in the Prince Hall Masonic Temple building on Auburn Avenue, which was at the time one of the wealthiest Black neighborhoods in the United States. In that same building, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference established its headquarters after the organization formed in 1957. Martin Luther King Jr. led the SCLC, and Ella Baker was among its staff. The physical overlap between the radio studio and the civil rights organization was not incidental. According to Gibson, King would tap the ceiling of the SCLC office, directly below the studio, with a broomstick whenever he had an announcement to make. Gibson would then lower a microphone from the studio window down to King at the window below.

• 5. After Blayton

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  Blayton sold WERD in 1968. Ken Knight, the station's original Program Director, purchased the callsign and carried it to Jacksonville, Florida, where he changed a station called WRHC to WERD. Knight held on to that callsign until his death in 1973. The Jacksonville station operated as a gospel outlet for many years. The community there honored Knight's legacy by naming a street WERD Radio Drive, a name it still carries. Back in Atlanta, the original 860 AM frequency eventually passed to WAEC. The Prince Hall Masonic Temple building on Auburn Avenue, where WERD was born, still stands, and the National Black Radio Hall of Fame Atlanta Chapter announced plans to reopen WERD at that location, alongside a historical museum, once renovations of the facility are completed.