Before there was a Black Radio United For The Vote, there was WERD. Atlanta is where Black-owned radio in America began, and the stations behind this site grew out of that history.
WERD: the first Black-owned station
On October 3, 1949, Jesse B. Blayton Sr. took over WERD, a small 1,000 watt AM station, after buying it for $50,000. It became the first radio station in the United States owned and programmed by African Americans.
Blayton was already a pioneer. He was Georgia's first Black certified public accountant, a bank president and a professor at Atlanta University, the school that is now Clark Atlanta University.
He switched WERD to programming for Black listeners and put his son, Jesse Blayton Jr., in charge of running it. The on air staff included Joe Howard, Roosevelt Johnson, Jimmy Winnington and "Jockey" Jack Gibson, who by the early 1950s was one of the most popular radio personalities in Atlanta.
The station started with rhythm and blues and grew into church services, educational shows, radio plays and community news. In 1954 there were roughly 200 stations aimed at Black audiences across the country, but fewer than a dozen were Black-owned. WERD was one of them, and it was first.
A microphone out the window
WERD broadcast from the Prince Hall Masonic Temple on Auburn Avenue, then one of the most prosperous Black business districts in the country. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference had its offices in the same building, one floor below the studio.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. often walked upstairs to make statements on the air. Gibson later described a quicker route: King would tap on his ceiling with a broomstick, and Gibson would lower a microphone out of the studio window so King could speak from the office below.
The station also carried King's Sunday sermons. At a time when Black voices were routinely shut out of mainstream media, WERD gave Black Atlanta a direct line to its own news and its own leaders.
Blayton sold the station in 1968. He was inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame in 1995, and the 860 AM frequency WERD once used is still on the air today under different call letters.
WAOK and the sound of the movement
WAOK, News & Talk 1380 and one of the partners in Black Radio United For The Vote, has its own place in this story. In 1956 disc jockey Zenas "Daddy" Sears and a group of investors bought the station at 1380 on the AM dial.
Sears was a white DJ who had come to love Black music through Armed Forces Radio. Under him, WAOK became one of the first stations in the nation to make blues, R&B and soul its main format, with local hosts like Willie Lee Perryman and Zilla Mays on the air.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s Sears got involved in the civil rights movement under King's leadership, and it showed in the programming. One show, Two Worlds, was built to get Black and white Atlantans talking to each other. Another paired Sears with James "Alley Pat" Patrick, a popular Black disc jockey.
WAOK moved to soul in 1968, to gospel in 1980 and to talk aimed at Atlanta's Black community in 2001, under the name The Voice of the Community.
From the movement to the ballot box
That history is the reason the partnership exists. In 2020, Atlanta's Black radio stations came together for the first time to push one message to their listeners: make sure your voice is heard at the polls.
The stations on the logo wall today include KISS 104.1, V103, 1380 News & Talk WAOK, Majic 107.5/97.5, Hot 107.9, Praise 102.5, Classix 102.9, Streetz 94.5, Smooth Jazz 101.1, 104.5 FM and Jazz 91.9 WCLK, the station of Clark Atlanta University, the same school where Jesse Blayton once taught.
The tools have changed since a microphone hung out of a window on Auburn Avenue. The job has not. Registration checks, early voting and the ID rules for November 3 are all in the Georgia voter information for 2026.