US-MEDIA: Unlicensed Radio Station Fights to Remain on Air

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Aug 15 1997 (IPS) - The small town of Decatur, Illinois, is not the sort of place you would expect to find a radical radio station with a name like ‘Black Liberation Radio’. And that, says the station’s operator is why he faces harassment, and the threat to end the ulicensed radio’s programming.

Black Liberation Radio has been on the air since 1990, bringing a mix of soul music and lively discussions of politics and race, to the largely white, rural environs of Decatur.

Now, however, founder Napoleon Williams faces felony charges of eavesdropping, simply because he has recorded calls to his show. His companion and station co-founder, Mildred Jones, is in prison for violating conditions of probation for an earlier shoplifting charge, while their house, from which they broadcast Black Liberation Radio, has been raided twice this year.

To Illinois police, the case is a simple one: on Jan. 9, they raided the couple’s home after Illinois Governor Jim Edgar’s administration ruled that the unlicensed station had been used for eavesdropping because Williams illegally recorded phone calls. Williams also sees the dispute in clear terms: “They have tried for years to get me to shut off the radio station.”

What disturbs Illinois officials, Williams contends, is not how the station is run, but the messages he says on the air.

Because of Balck Liberation Radio’s radical stance, he says, the officials have repeatedly tried to get the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to cut off the unlicensed station, to no avail. That is why, the broadcaster argues, when police raided his home in January and May they seized a wide range of radio equipment. He contends the eavesdropping charge did not require the wholesale confiscation of the station’s transmitter and cassette players.

“This is an invented charge,” Williams says. He contends that all the show’s callers knew that they were being broadcast on the radio, and therefore could not have been prey to eavesdropping.

“The tapes I made were recorded for the purpose of broadcasting,” Williams says, noting that Illinois law allows broadcasters to make such recordings. “(The authorities’) argument is, in essence, that I don’t have a licensed broadcast radio,” and thus cannot claim to have taped the calls legally for broadcast purposes.

The official argument makes little sense to Williams. “I was talking to people who knew I was taping them for radio,” he says. “How can you eavesdrop on your own conversation?”

Williams’s lawyer, Scott Ealy, is trying to get the eavesdropping case dismissed on Constitutional grounds that Black Liberation Radio is entitled to the same broadcasting rights as licensed stations. Judge James Hendrian is currently considering the lawyer’s motion.

Illinois officials contend that eavesdropping is not the only problem they have had with Black Liberation Radio’s founders. Decatur probation officer Patrick Berter says Mildred Jones violated her probation, for a 1995 shoplifting charge, eight times during last November and December. Two of the couple’s children were put into foster care, in 1992 and 1993.

To supporters of Black Liberation Radio, however, the plethora of charges is simply evidence of an official vendetta against the couple and their home-broadcast station.

“It’s Ku Klux Klan country,” says Sue Supriano of Free Radio Berkeley, a California-based group which assists unlicensed radio programmers nationwide, of Decatur and the surrounding county of Macon, Illinois. “It’s a racist, old-boy network county.”

Supriano says that the county is also home to conglomerates like the Caterpillar tractor company and chemical giant Archer Daniels Midland, which do not share Black Liberation Radio’s populist ethos.

Despite the hassles, Black Liberation Radio has continued to broadcast, with a two-week interruption after the station’s equipment was seized in January. Williams says that the radio uses cheap equipment to send out its transmissions, and, with the loan of a transmitter from Radio Free Berkeley, was quickly back on the air. Whether it will remain that way for long is an open question. Supriano notes that, across the country, stations that do not have FCC licenses are subject to harassment and frequent closures.

In that way, they share the plight of “pirate” radio stations worldwide, from the frequently-jammed unlicensed dance stations that cropped up throughout Europe in the 1980s to more overtly political stations.

The Committee to Protect Journalists, a New York-based rights group, noted last year the harassment of the Zagreb-based ‘Radio 101’ station, which was denied a permanent license by Croatian authorities. Several independent stations in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, such as the popular, student-run ‘Boom 93′, were denied licenses or prevented from broadcasting, the CPJ adds.

Some of the people working with Black Liberation Radio are happy that their station is receiving similar concern over attempts to shut it down. Vance Bradford, one of the station’s workers, says that several national magazines have focused on the broadcasters’ plight in recent months. At the same time, he cautions, the black community in Decatur is hesitant to support the controversial station: “They don’t use their voice.”