ABSTRACT
Dewayne Readus grew up in the John Hay Homes public housing project, a 600-unit complex of low-rise apartments for low-income families a short distance from President Abraham Lincoln’s historic home in Springfield, Illinois. In the 1980s the project was home to approximately 3,000 people, the vast majority of whom were African-American. Started by Napoleon Williams and Mildred Jones on August 20, 1990, Black Liberation Radio broadcast from a studio in the couple’s small west-side home using a less-than-one-watt Panaxis transmitter tuned to 107.3 MHz high frequency, a vacant frequency in the Decatur-Springfield radio market. Williams’s belief that radio stations should function like public access channels, rather than as producers of pablum and profits, is also held by Tom Reveille, who in 1991 started Radio Free Venice, California’s first micropower station.
