Honoring, Accessing, and Hearing the History of HBCU Radio

Along with the return of warmer weather this spring, The HBCU RPP celebrated the return of historic audio recorded by two HBCU radio stations: Central State University’s WCSU and Fisk University’s WFSK and its forerunner WRFN.

The first celebratory stop was at Fisk University, on March 31, 2026. It was an opportunity to honor the voices and station personnel who made this preserved audio possible—a collection totaling nearly 400 hours—and to conduct a workshop around access and how to use these precious digitized sounds.

Pictured: WFSK Station Manager Sharon Kay, center, with Nashville Metropolitan Trustee Erica S. Gilmore (left), and WFSK Intern Sharice Rice at the ceremony celebrating the return of historic audio to WFSK.

Jazzy 88’s origins are steeped in HBCU radio’s rich tradition of Black student activism and cultural pride. Six hundred signatures gathered in 1969 led to the creation of WFSK’s predecessor, “Radio Free Nashville,” which the FCC licensed as a non-commercial educational station in 1973. Thereafter, a blend of jazz and R&B, funk and gospel could be heard across and beyond Fisk’s hallowed grounds, alongside daily news reporting, local talk, and live broadcasts of interviews, speaker events, and campus engagements. 

“We’ve got the history of Nashville,” WFSK’s General Manager, Sharon Kay, reminded the audience as she reflected on the station’s legacy. Her weekly program, What’s the 411 with Sharon Kay, features “interviews with just about everybody and anybody who has been a part of this university.” Now it is a part of Fisk’s documented and preserved history.

For Kay, the process of radio preservation and learning about the early days of her station has been one of human connection and material discovery. An initial site visit to WFSK in 2019 by HBCU RPP Director Jocelyn Robinson led to collaboration around preservation and later to the recording of oral history interviews with people who worked at RFN from the beginning, like former on-air news contributors Denise Sanders and Carole Carper. 

WFSK Program Director Xuam Lawson, Bryce Roe, Director of Audio Preservation at NEDCC, Field Archivist Chinyere Neal, WFSK General Manager Sharon 
Kaye, and Becca Bender, Training Coordinator, NEDCC.

The partnership also encouraged Dr. Lucius T. Outlaw, Jr., a Fisk professor at the time of the station’s founding, to provide his own reel-to-reel tape recording of RFN’s first day on air to HBCU RPP partner the Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC) for digitization.

Kay’s excitement around engaging with WFSK’s history reflects the project’s mission to inspire an ethos of preservation. Her enthusiasm was palpable in the library’s Special Collections room, where the ceremony took place. She wanted to share it with her community. “Trying to unearth the photos and the audio is going to be an amazing process for you,” Kay assured the intergenerational crowd of library personnel, students, local political leaders, and arts and culture representatives.

Safeguarding Black history on Fisk’s campus and providing access to its sonic brilliance headlined the return ceremony. As DeLisa M. Harris, Director of the John Hope and Aurelia Elizabeth Franklin Library, commented: “For these recordings to be preserved, digitized, and returned home means something deeply important… [they] hold the sound of memory, creativity, and Black expression. Their return reminds us that our stories matter, our voices matter, and preserving them in our own spaces, on our own terms, matters.”

For us as HBCU radio preservationists, this warm embrace of WFSK’s past shows why we do this vital work and who we do it for.

HBCU RPP Fellow Dana Green, CSU Vice President of Institutional Advancement Rebecca Kocher, WCSU General Manager Charles Fox, HBCU RPP Director Jocelyn Robinson, and HBCU RPP Field Archivist Chinyere Neal.

The HBCU RPP celebrated WCSU Jazzy 88.9 on May 13 during an open house at the new operational headquarters of WYSO in Yellow Springs. The centerpiece of the open house was a ceremony marking the return to WCSU of digitized audio produced by the station and preserved by NEDCC. WCSU occupies a special place in the history of HBCU radio as well as the HBCU Radio Preservation Project. WCSU was the first federally licensed HBCU radio station and a key partner, along with the National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center, in development of the archival survey of HBCU stations that led to implementation of the present day HBCU Radio Preservation Project.

The newly digitized collection includes 24 hours of original programming spanning decades of storytelling, music, culture and community since WCSU’s founding in 1962. In addition to the digitized audio our team has collected 12 oral histories from people with ties to the station. 

“We all know radio is more than sound in a community,” said Central State University Vice President of Institutional Advancement Rebecca Kocher at the ceremony. “It’s about education, it’s about advocacy, it’s about community, it’s about connection. Because of you and your effort these voices and these memories will not be lost to time… Preservation matters because history matters.Thank you for preserving a piece of Central State history.”

Click here to listen to an audio montage showcasing the preserved sounds of WCSU created by Olivia Green, former HBCU RPP Fellow and Assistant Audio Producer for the HBCU RPP.