Chicago's WVON Radio and the Sonorous Image of Black Lives, 1963-1983 a DISSERTATION SU

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY Talking Drum: Chicago’s WVON Radio and the Sonorous Image of Black Lives, 1963-1983 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS for the degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Field of Communication Studies By Zachary William Mills EVANSTON, ILLINOIS September 2017 2 © Copyright by Zachary William Mills 2017 All Rights Reserved 3 ABSTRACT My dissertation, “Talking Drum: Chicago’s WVON Radio and the Sonorous Image of Black Lives, 1963-1983,” studies WVON radio as a mediating institution of the black public sphere in Cold War Chicago. “Talking Drum” explores how WVON celebrated, represented, and mobilized black public life in the mid-twentieth century amid a dominant public sphere that circulated racist scripts of black citizenship. Local black-oriented radio stations like WVON provided alternative forums through which African Americans could talk back to those misrepresentations, ideologies, and policies constituting the era’s national imperatives of black containment. Much like the polyrhythmic correspondence disseminated through the African drum among enslaved blacks in colonial North America, WVON’s programming demonstrated the power of black vernacular expression to construct meaningful cultural communiqués. “Talking Drum” explores how WVON’s sonorous rhetorical assault on negative public images and epistemologies of African American citizenship provided new grounds for defining, claiming, and securing freedom and interpreting black identity, interests, and needs. By analyzing the radio station’s public affairs, news, popular culture, and political programming, my dissertation contributes to discussions about the capacity of Cold War radio and contemporary innovations of the black public sphere to inspire and mobilize disenfranchised communities in shared struggles to secure greater democratic freedoms. 4 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS As I composed this dissertation I was fortunate enough to have a strong community of people supporting me every step of the way. I owe a special thanks to Angela G. Ray, who served as my advisor and the chair of my dissertation committee. Angela’s mentorship and editorial eye strengthened me as a scholar and writer. I am also thankful for the incredible generosity, affirmation, and expertise of Kate Baldwin and James Schwoch, the other two members of my dissertation committee, who added significant insights to my dissertation. I am humbled by the efforts of Sarah McFarland Taylor, who has been an unwavering advocate of mine and whose work compelled me to explore the intersections of religion and media. I am grateful and indebted to those mentors, friends, and family members who encouraged me, during the most difficult moments, to keep writing. To my parents, Janet and Hank, I am forever grateful for allowing me to litter their upstairs with my books during the year I wrote this dissertation. Their generosity in providing me a familiar and loving space to write made this dissertation possible. Finally, I am grateful to God for giving me the mysterious energy and enthusiasm that pushed me, late at night and early in the morning, to press on until this project was completed. 5 DEDICATION This dissertation is dedicated to my parents, Janet Lea Mills and Russell Henry Mills, for helping me always to hear my true self amid all the noise. 6 TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .................................................................................................. 4 DEDICATION .................................................................................................................... 5 INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................. 1 CHAPTER 1 ..................................................................................................................... 32 “FATHER, OPEN OUR EYES”: WVON’S HOTLINE, FAKE NEWS, AND PROPHETIC DISCONTENT CHAPTER 2 ..................................................................................................................... 83 “YOU’VE COME A LONG WAY, BABY!”: WVON’S BERN CLUB, FOREIGN SHORES, AND AMBASSADORS OF BLACK WOMANHOOD CHAPTER 3 ................................................................................................................... 137 “NOW RUN AND TELL THAT!”: WVON’S EDITORIALS, AURAL RELEASE, AND SOUNDSCAPES OF CITIZENSHIP CHAPTER 4 ................................................................................................................... 188 THE PANTHER WITH THE PEN: WVON’S LU’S NOTEBOOK, ALTERNATIVE SITES OF LEARNING, AND THE JOURNEY TOWARD POLITICAL LITERACY CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................... 239 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................... 249 7 INTRODUCTION Suddenly, the task before young black activists of the mid-1960s, whether in Chicago or Memphis, was to create a new conceit for modernism. It required a figure that could move an urban black public sphere to consciousness and action.1 —Houston A. Baker Jr. The drummer beat his drum, and the fellow who had been sent away came back and did what the message told him to do, without hesitation. It seemed amazingly simple. The speaker had whispered this message: “Find the pocket radio and put it in its case,” which is exactly what the demonstrator did. The amazed speaker said, “I bet you don’t even have a word for ‘radio.’ What on earth did you tell that brother?” The chief replied, “You’re right. We don’t have such a word. We told him, ‘Find that which speaks to you and you can’t speak back, and put him in his house.’” The message was transmitted with ease and brevity, with no audible consonants over vowels or visual promptings. The point was very clear: African drums were at the very least as good as Western Union.2 —Henry H. Mitchell In a March 19, 2006, article in the Chicago Tribune, Melody Spann-Cooper, chairman of Midway Broadcasting Corporation and president of Chicago’s WVON radio, described WVON as an important extension of the city’s black public sphere. In fact, since the station’s first broadcast on April 1, 1963,3 and throughout the turbulent political years leading up to the 1983 election of Harold Washington, the city’s first black mayor, WVON, Spann-Cooper insists, has mediated public discourse that has mobilized, celebrated, and improved black lives in Chicago. The station’s call letters claim its significance: once Voice of the Negro, the letters now stand for Voice of the Nation. The daughter of legendary Chicago radio personality Pervis “The Blues Man” Spann, Spann-Cooper says that black-oriented radio stations like WVON are critical institutions of contemporary black public life in the United States: 1 Houston A. Baker Jr., “Critical Memory and the Black Public Sphere,” in The Black Public Sphere: A Public Culture Book, ed. Black Public Sphere Collective (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 31. 2 Henry H. Mitchell, Black Church Beginnings: The Long-Hidden Realities of the First Years (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2004), 4. 3 “Our History,” WVON website, http://www.wvon.com/about-us/our-history/. 8 “We’ve come a long way, but there are still a lot of obstacles to overcome,” Spann-Cooper says, referring to the hard-won gains of the civil-rights movement. “We still need that talking drum.”4 Talk about “that talking drum” may be foreign to some as a trope for the black public sphere, turbulent political years, public discourse, and black public life in general. But Spann-Cooper’s trope of the talking drum finds its legitimacy in the history of communication among African peoples. Lawrence W. Levine, Henry H. Mitchell, and Albert J. Raboteau have emphasized the African drum’s significance as a communication medium on the African and North American continents.5 In particular, Mitchell describes Africans’ use of highly complex drumming codes in colonial North America to forge communal existences beyond their white captors’ semiotic and physical boundaries. The African drum’s various tonal pitches functioned as a “Morse Code” of sorts, Mitchell explains, and soon slave owners acknowledged the pagan medium’s ability to broadcast encrypted polyrhythmic correspondence: “When whites discovered that enslaved Africans often communicated the latest news to each other days before their masters knew it, they were terrified by the potential for conspiracy.”6 Slave owners dared not deny it—the drum could talk! By evoking the talking drum as a trope for WVON, Spann-Cooper reveals the political stakes of black-oriented radio in Cold War and contemporary Chicago. The implication is that through the medium of WVON radio, African Americans were able to convene, mobilize, and ultimately talk back to hostile dominant cultures, ideas, politics, and practices—much as their African ancestors did through the talking drum. In his 1964 study, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Marshall McLuhan referred to radio as a “tribal drum” that returns its listeners to a preindustrial oral 4 Don Terry, “Raising the Voice,” Chicago Tribune, March 19, 2006. 5 For more information, see Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Mitchell, Black Church Beginnings; and Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum

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