African Sounds in the American South: Community Radio, Historically Black Colleges, and Musical Pan-Africanism

Abstract

One night in the early 1970s, Donald Baker received a call for help from a listener. Baker was hosting his regular show on WAFR-FM in Durham, NC, a town of 100,000 residents with a declining tobacco and textile economy. The sole Black-owned radio station in Durham, WAFR occupied the second story of a former Masonic temple on Pettigrew Street in the heart of Hayti, the city’s historic Black business district. The caller was throwing a house party that night but didn’t have a record player. Baker—known on the air by his adopted Kiswahili name Mwanfunzi Shanga Sadiki—usually played a mix of jazz, Latin, and soul, but this night he tried something different.