Recovering, preserving, and reimagining the lost tradition of African American radio drama.
Research & Production Initiative — 2026
WBZV · RadioFreeBronzeville.com
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Executive Summary
Between the 1930s and the 1960s, African Americans built one of the most inventive and least remembered traditions in American broadcasting. Writers including Richard Durham, George S. Schuyler (writing as Samuel I. Brooks), Robert F. Williams, Frank D. Griffin, and Kirk Lord used radio to imagine Black futures, dramatize Black history, build community across distance, and challenge segregation at the height of its power.
Almost none of it survives in public memory. Scripts sit scattered across research archives. Recordings decay, undigitized, in storage. Some material may already be gone. Black Radio Reborn is a research, preservation, and production initiative dedicated to finding, restoring, licensing, and reviving this body of work — through podcasts, live performance, museum collaboration, and digital media — before the window closes for good.
Statement of Need
American broadcasting history enshrines The Shadow, The Lone Ranger, Suspense, and Orson Welles's War of the Worlds. Largely absent is a parallel tradition of comparable ambition: Richard Durham's Here Comes Tomorrow and Destination Freedom, Native Sons, Freedom's People, Democracy—USA, and Robert F. Williams's Radio Free Dixie.
This is one of the earliest sustained traditions of Black speculative fiction and documentary drama in any medium — and it remains almost entirely invisible.
Black-authored programs were often produced locally, sustained by community institutions rather than networks, and preserved haphazardly if at all. Lacquer discs and magnetic tape continue to degrade. The historians and family members who remember these broadcasts are aging. The window for recovery will not stay open.
Goals & Objectives
The project pursues four interlocking goals — each a discipline in itself, each dependent on the others.
Find surviving scripts and recordings, investigate copyright status, document production histories, and interview historians, archivists, and family members.
Digitize at-risk materials where rights permit, build a searchable bibliography, record oral histories, and develop classroom-ready resources.
Produce a limited podcast series, short-form digital adaptations, staged live radio performances, and immersive, historically informed sound design.
Museum events, university partnerships, Substack, podcast and YouTube distribution, workshops, and a touring live performance program.
Project Design
Three phases, broadcast in sequence — from archive to stage.
A systematic investigation of the archives most likely to hold surviving scripts, recordings, and production records — establishing the scholarly foundation for everything that follows.
Pilot episodes inspired by historical works, each combining historical commentary, newly performed excerpts, interviews, period music, and modern sound design.
The culminating work: the first modern dramatic adaptation of George S. Schuyler's serialized novel The Black Internationale and Black Empire — originally run in the Pittsburgh Courier, 1936–1938 — as podcast, live theatrical radio, museum presentation, and educational performance. Pending confirmation of rights.
Significance & Timeliness
Podcasting has restored mass appetite for serialized audio storytelling — the exact form this tradition pioneered. Museums are actively seeking immersive, performance-based programming. Advances in sound technology now permit historically informed reconstruction at a quality once unimaginable.
Young audiences already consume serialized narrative daily, through podcasts and short-form video. What's missing is not an audience. What's missing is the material itself, returned to circulation. Black Radio Reborn reconnects a suppressed tradition to a public now equipped to receive it.
Precedent
Bronzeville's policy era — the underground lottery that anticipated today's numbers games — has already reached mainstream audiences and A-list talent once. These two existing works are proof of the appetite Black Radio Reborn is built to meet.
Audio Drama · Spotify Original
BronzevilleA serialized fiction podcast dramatizing the policy game and the residents who built a self-sustaining Black economy around it. Starring Laurence Fishburne, Larenz Tate, and Tika Sumpter; written by Academy Award– and BAFTA-nominated screenwriter Josh Olson (A History of Violence).
Listen on Spotify ↗Documentary Feature
King of Kings: Chasing Edward JonesFilmmaker Harriet Marin Jones traces the life of her grandfather, Edward Jones — the most powerful of Chicago's Policy Kings during the Depression era — in a documentary executive produced by Quincy Jones and Debbie Allen.
View on IMDb ↗Institutional Partners
Prospective research, preservation, and production partners — formalized during Phase One.
Deliverables
Funding Alignment
Black Radio Reborn is designed to be funded through mission-aligned foundations rather than federal humanities programs.
Knight's commitment to journalism, media innovation, and informed, engaged communities maps directly onto a project that recovers a suppressed broadcasting tradition and redeploys it through contemporary platforms. This relationship is not speculative: the project director is a previous Knight Fellow for work using radio to counter hate speech in Rwanda — a project that, like this one, treated radio as an instrument of community repair and civic imagination.
Conclusion
Their work deserves more than a footnote. Black Radio Reborn gives it what it has never had — a full recovery, a permanent record, and a second life before the audiences it was always meant to reach.