Director’s Corner: Together in the Work of Preservation

Relationship. Connection. Collaboration. Partnership.

The HBCU Radio Preservation Project has been firmly rooted in these concepts, from its development to our practice today. 

None of what we are doing today would be possible without the many people and organizations who have joined together in the critical work of preserving the history and legacy of HBCU radio: the Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC), the Margaret Walker Center at Jackson State University, the American Archive of Public Broadcasting and the Radio Preservation Task Force at the Library of Congress; WYSO 91.3 FM, our project’s home; the generous funders who make our work possible; the amazing HBCU RPP team; and perhaps most important, the HBCU radio stations we serve, their institutional libraries and archives, and their communities of listeners. 

The goals of the project are to foster an ethos of preservation at HBCU radio stations, to preserve the stations’ historic audio, and to facilitate capacity-building and sustainability through connecting and supporting the stations and the institutional archives on campus.

Bryce Roe, Director of Audio Preservation at NEDCC, with WFSK General Manager Sharon Kay

As culture keepers, public historians and preservationists, we come to this work with the clear understanding that collaboration is critical to preservation work. That we need to infuse rather than extract. That we facilitate and honor people power. We have encountered this potent power time and again during our visits to HBCU radio stations. We have met folks eager to collaborate on the work of preserving the history of their stations and their communities.

That eagerness was evident during our site and preservation visits this summer to HBCU radio stations in North Carolina, Virginia, and Alabama. You could hear it in the public service announcement aired by North Carolina A&T’s WNAA about our team’s upcoming preservation visit. And feel it in the enthusiastic welcome our team received during each visit. 

The relationships we have built and the collaborations and partnerships they engendered have borne rich fruit. We have conducted more than a hundred oral histories and digitized thousands of audio assets in various formats through NEDCC. The ethos of preservation among our HBCU radio partners is strong and growing stronger as the project expands its reach, and awareness grows about the importance of preserving HBCU radio history.

We will celebrate and strengthen that ethos at our annual HBCU RPP Symposium in November. We’ll be hosted by WEAA at Morgan State University in Baltimore. We look forward to being joined this year by station managers and staff from HBCU radio stations as well as archivists, community members and others invested in celebrating and preserving the rich legacy of HBCU Radio. 

Will Tchakirides, Assistant Director of Public History and Programming, WEAA Station Manager Robert Shahid, Digital Storyteller Olivia Green, and Public Historian Vincentt Craft Sutton II.

We have been joined all along in this work by people who recognize the value and contributions of HBCUs and how sacred and important they are to Black people, and to this country. Ultimately, the work we do is about people and connection and community. It’s about coming together to fortify and sustain not only HBCU radio stations but also the fabric of civic life within a community, and in the larger world. 

We set out to develop a replicable model that can serve not only HBCUs, but other college radio stations, tribal stations, rural stations, and other public and community stations. We have done that, we are doing that, all of us, in partnership and collaboration, working together for the common good. 

Be sure to check out our website and follow us on social media for more information about the upcoming Symposium, site and preservation visits, and other HBCU RPP activities.