Retirees Association

DDN: WSU grad hunts for historic audio at nation’s historically black schools

Jocelyn Robinson

Excerpt from the Dayton Daily News

They are the echoes of history, voices that defined the Civil Rights and Vietnam War eras.

Martin Luther King Jr. Ralph David Abernathy. Clyde Bellecourt. César Chávez. Stokely Carmichael. Susan Sontag. Even members of the radical militant Weather Underground.

For many years, the sound of these history-making voices captured in the region beginning in 1958 was at risk. The voices lived on old and dusty magnetic audio recording tapes stuffed in bags and boxes discovered in a basement storeroom at WYSO radio.

But thanks to a federal grant, the recordings have been saved – stabilized, organized, catalogued and archived in a temperature/humidity-controlled sanctuary at WYSO. And with the help of Wright State University alumna Jocelyn Robinson, this audio collection has a new life.

Robinson, an educator, producer and preservationist, marvels at the riches.

“The voices in this archives are incredible, amazing voices of the times,” she said.

Robinson’s current project is equally ambitious — a treasure hunt of audio recordings made by radio stations at the nation’s historically black colleges and universities.

It began when Robinson attended a conference of the Radio Preservation Task Force sponsored by the Library of Congress in 2016. There, she connected with a community of professionals interested in radio preservation and was asked to serve on the task force’s African American and Civil Rights Radio Caucus.