WERD at 77: The First Black-Owned Radio Station — and Its Houston Chapter

The Buy

Seventy-seven years ago today — October 3, 1949 — a radio station signed on the air in Atlanta and changed who got to own the microphone. WERD became the first radio station in the United States both owned and programmed by African Americans.

Twenty-six years later, my city got its own version of that story: WGPR-TV in Detroit became the first Black-owned television station in the country. Radio walked so TV could run. And WERD’s story has a Houston chapter nobody talks about — because the man who built it built one here too.

Jesse B. Blayton Sr. was not a broadcaster. He was a banker — the founding president of Mutual Federal Savings and Loan — and Georgia’s first Black CPA, back in 1928, when that was nearly unthinkable. He’d taught accounting at Atlanta University. He mentored Black students who went on to become accountants themselves. He was, by every account, the kind of man who saw a closed door and figured out how to buy the building.

In 1949, he bought a struggling white-owned country-music station on Broad Street for $50,000. Here’s the detail that tells you everything: at that station, Black people couldn’t use the restrooms. Blayton bought the place and moved the whole operation across town — to the second floor of the Prince Hall Masonic Temple at 330 Auburn Avenue, in the heart of Black Atlanta.

He kept the call letters WERD, which were already on the station when he bought it. There’s no documented meaning behind them. He didn’t need one. He had a mission.

On October 3, 1949, WERD went on the air — owned by a Black man, programmed by Black people, speaking to Black Atlanta in a voice the city had never heard on the radio before. WDIA in Memphis had Black programming a year earlier, but white owners. WERD was the first one where the deed and the dial both belonged to us.

The Voices

Blayton hired four Black announcers to start, and he hired his son Jesse Jr. to run the station — Junior would run WERD for the next twenty years.

The voices became legends. “Jockey” Jack Gibson — a Chicago friend of Blayton’s — was by 1951 the most popular DJ in Atlanta. Ken Knight was the first program director. Paul E.X. Brown brought political commentary. Joe Howard, Roosevelt Johnson, Jimmy Winnington — the station sounded like the neighborhood, because it was.

This was before Motown had a national machine. Before Black radio was a format consultants sold. WERD was inventing the thing in real time: news for Black people, music Black people actually listened to, announcers who talked like the community they served.

The Broomstick

The Prince Hall Masonic Temple turned out to be more than a studio. In 1957, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference opened its first headquarters in the same building — Ella Baker on staff, Martin Luther King Jr. downstairs.

And here’s the story I love most. According to DJ Jack Gibson, when King had an announcement to make, he’d tap the ceiling of the SCLC office with a broomstick — the studio was right above him. Gibson would lower a microphone out of the studio window down to King at the window below, and King would speak to Atlanta live on WERD.

Think about that. The most important voice of the civil rights movement, broadcasting through a broomstick signal and a microphone on a rope, from the second floor of a Masonic temple — because a Black banker bought a radio station and decided his people deserved a frequency.

What Happened to 860

Blayton retired and sold WERD in 1968. The call letters had a strange second life: Ken Knight bought them and took them to Jacksonville, Florida, where he ran gospel radio until he died in 1973. There’s still a street in Jacksonville called WERD Radio Drive.

The Atlanta 860 signal kept changing hands and formats: WXAP, then WAEC — “Atlanta’s Electric Church,” the city’s first contemporary-Christian station — then “Love 860” Christian talk, then Spanish-language salsa as “Playa 860.” In June 2024, after 76 years, the signal went dark. Beasley sold the tower site to Toll Brothers, a housing developer. Seventy-six years of airwaves, gone for townhouses.

The Houston Chapter

Here’s the part that lands on my beat twice over. In mid-1954, the Blaytons bought a second station: KREL, a 1,000-watt AM station licensed to Baytown, Texas — right in the Greater Houston market. For about four years, the family that owned the first Black-owned radio station in America owned a station in our backyard.

They sold it around 1958. The call letters changed over the decades — KWBA, KBUK, and since 1988, KWWJ: “Gospel 1360,” still on the air today from the original Baytown site. The Blaytons’ Houston chapter lasted four years, but the signal they touched is still preaching.

I think about what that meant in 1954 Texas. A Black-owned station, in the Houston market, two years before the Montgomery bus boycott. Jesse Blayton Sr. didn’t just crack open Atlanta’s airwaves — he planted a flag in Texas, too.

What Survives

Blayton Sr. died in 1977, walking home from a barbershop in Atlanta. He was inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame in 1995 — eighteen years after his death, which tells you how long it took the industry to say his name out loud.

The building survived. The Prince Hall Masonic Temple at 330 Auburn Avenue became part of the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park in 2018, underwent a thirteen-to-fourteen-million-dollar restoration, and opened to the public in the spring of 2026. There’s a Madam C.J. Walker Museum and a restored WERD studio at the original site. The National Black Radio Hall of Fame’s Atlanta chapter is restoring the original studios.

Seventy-seven years after a Black banker signed a station on the air from the second floor of a Masonic temple, the building still stands on Auburn Avenue. The broomstick is gone. The frequency is dark. But the idea — that we deserve to own the microphone, not just speak into somebody else’s — that idea never went off the air.

BH365 fact file: WERD signed on October 3, 1949, in Atlanta — the first U.S. radio station both owned and programmed by African Americans. Founder: Jesse B. Blayton Sr., banker and Georgia’s first Black CPA. In 1954 the Blaytons bought KREL (Baytown/Houston market), selling it around 1958.