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Black Radio Listeners in America’s “Golden Age”

“Black Radio Listeners in America’s “Golden Age’” argues that U.S. black listenership has been all but ignored in radio scholarship regarding the 1930s-1950s, as has the context of America’s racial segregation and radio’s active role in affirming and propagating it. The essay argues for an expanded understanding of archive and archival methodology in order to gain a more complex, accurate, and varied understanding of historical black listenership, and, toward that end, performs culturally contextualized close textual analysis across media: a 1937 Lead Belly song (“Turn Yo’ Radio On”), Joe Bostic’s column for The People’s Voice in the 1940s, Frederic Wakeman’s 1946 novel The Hucksters, a 1949 feature on black listeners in Sponsor magazine, a 1934 Vitaphone Short featuring Cab Calloway, and Ann Petry’s 1946 novel The Street. Through engaging with widely-varied representations of black radio listenership, Stoever argues that black listening practices from this period not only challenge the periodization of this era as the “Golden Age” of American radio, but also upend traditional categories of active, passive, and “resistant” listening that scholars have employed to understand media reception, revealing that active listening can look and sound different for black listeners, particularly in a period when listening “actively” to segregated media in ways prescribed by the dominant culture often proved to be deleterious. The act of “turning one’s radio on” was a complicated act of agency for black listeners, not simply a passive form of ignorance, escape, and/or anesthetization as popularly represented.