Date on Senior Honors Thesis

5-2025

Document Type

Senior Honors Thesis

Degree Name

B.A.

Department

History

Committee Chair

Christine Ehrick

Author's Keywords

radio; women's history; Black history; Memphis; Bert Ferguson; Sam Phillips

Abstract

In 1947, WDIA Memphis became the first radio station in the U.S. to switch to programming featuring only Black performers and announcers. Eight years later in 1955, WHER-AM became the first all-female radio station in the country, also originating in Memphis, Tennessee. This thesis will discuss the ways WHER and WDIA have both contributed to and reflected social change movements between 1947 and 1970, from civil rights to feminism. Substantive sources include media perceptions of both stations through local newspapers, interviews with early participants, and various secondary scholarship on the impact of both stations. Ultimately, I argue that Memphis’s racialized demography, collaboration with other music icons, and increasingly affluent Black population particularly predisposed station owners in the city to take advantage of the “narrowcasting” boom in postwar era radio. However, WDIA achieved a significantly broader reach than that of WHER due to the growing nature of Black-appeal radio, as well as the station’s commitment to genuine community uplift, rather than performative activism. While WHER was launched as an interesting experiment in female broadcasting, the women’s movement ultimately rejected female-centric radio as contradictory to its aims, creating further gendered separation in broadcasting from which feminists sought to move away. The difference in success of the two stations suggests a difference in the goals of the women’s movement and the movement for civil rights, a difference between desire for integration and actual community empowerment.

Lay Summary

Throughout the twentieth century, radio has had a drastic impact on the kinds of media Americans consume, and the ways in which events have been communicated to the public. In 1947, WDIA became the first radio station in the country to feature only Black performers and announcers, originating in Memphis, Tennessee. In 1955, Memphis similarly became home to the first all-female radio station in the country—WHER—which employed only female broadcasters. WDIA’s existence signaled a departure from earlier styles of broadcasting, where announcers had to sound “white” on the air in order to gain legitimacy. WDIA, by contrast, projected a distinctly Black sound with local Memphis announcers like Nat D. Williams and Rufus Thomas, whose expertise contributed to the station’s popularity with Black Memphis residents. This popularity eventually led other stations in other major U.S. cities to adopt similar all-Black programming, demonstrating a staying power of the WDIA sound. White audiences also became enthusiastic about WDIA’s content, suggesting the station played an instrumental role in taking down the color barrier as it existed in radio. WHER, by contrast, never achieved the broad reach of WDIA, due to their highly gimmicky nature, and, I argue, inability to move beyond the respectable, affluent sound of white Memphis. The women’s movement also disliked the premise of WHER, since feminist activists generally preferred pre-existing stations to include more women in broadcasting, rather than establishing stations for women in isolation. Overall, while the two stations originating in Memphis within a decade of each other suggest the power of Memphis in American radio history, the legacy of WDIA holds up today much more strongly than that of WHER.

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