Some of the most complete records of Black American life in the last half century were never written down. They were broadcast: commencement addresses and church services, city council fights and high school football games, jazz sets and call-in shows, recorded by student-run stations at Black colleges and stored, if they were stored at all, on tape that is now quietly falling apart.
The Ford Foundation has decided that record is worth money. Over the past year, the foundation’s $750,000 grant to the HBCU Radio Preservation Project has flowed out to 14 stations as unrestricted support, distributed by formula rather than competition. In Atlanta, the beneficiary is familiar: WCLK, the jazz station at Clark Atlanta University that has been on the air since 1974.
Money with no strings, aimed at a specific hole
Unrestricted is the operative word. Stations have spent the grants on the unglamorous line items that keep a signal alive: essential staffing, programming, broadcast and digital infrastructure, carrier fees. Several used the money to backfill the loss of Corporation for Public Broadcasting funding, a federal cut that landed hardest on small stations with small margins.
The project itself, housed at the Center for Radio Preservation and Archives at WYSO in Ohio and run in partnership with the Northeast Document Conservation Center, does the archival half of the work: free preservation services for the stations and their institutional archives. The grant also funds travel stipends so station personnel can gather at the project’s 2026 symposium, hosted by Morgan State University in Baltimore on November 12, home of another grantee, WEAA.
The full grantee list reads like a dial tour of Black college radio: KTSU at Texas Southern, WNCU at North Carolina Central, WJSU at Jackson State, WVAS at Alabama State, WJAB at Alabama A&M, WNSB at Norfolk State, WPRL at Alcorn State, WRVS at Elizabeth City State, WSSB at South Carolina State, KJLU at Lincoln, WESM at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, and WURC at Rust College, alongside WCLK and WEAA.
“While the funds have been used to meet present-day needs, they are also helping secure longevity,” said Jocelyn Robinson, the project’s director, in the announcement.
Why tape matters
Almost a third of the nation’s 101 HBCUs have radio stations, and many have been broadcasting for more than 50 years. The project’s case for urgency is physical. Reel-to-reel tapes, cassettes, and early digital formats deteriorate on their own schedule, not on a funder’s, and what sits on them is primary source material: first-person documentation of the communities these stations served when few other microphones were pointed their way.
Preservation work rarely gets the gala treatment. It has no naming opportunity and no ribbon to cut, and its payoff arrives decades late, in a researcher’s headphones. Which is what makes this grant notable beyond its size. Ford treated memory as infrastructure: unglamorous, load-bearing, and worth paying to maintain before it fails rather than after.
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