An AM radio signal once home to the first African American owned radio station is no more: 860 WAEC-AM has gone dark after 76 years on the air.
Beasley Media has sold its 17.2-acre tower site in Atlanta to a housing developer Toll Brothers to construct townhomes. As a result, the 860 signal has gone dark after 76 years.
860′s most recent format, which began in late 2023, was Spanish language salsa music called Playa 860. Before that, it was Love 860, a longtime Christian talk format.
Richard Warner, who used to work at 11Alive, WSB radio and Georgia Radio News Service, said the signal going silent is yet another sign of how few people actually listen to AM radio, the dominant radio option in the 1920s through the 1960s until FM took over. AM survived more as a talk format in the 1990s and 2000s.
In Atlanta, when popular news/talk station WSB in 2010 added an FM simulcast at 95.5, that gave listeners very little reason to flip over to AM. Today, WSB doesn’t even promote its AM signal anymore calling itself 95.5 WSB.
AM is now dominated by religious and niche formats. And many new electric vehicles don’t even offer AM as an option.
Streaming music, podcasts and YouTube now represent 45% of all audio listening with AM/FM at 36% in 2024, down from 52% in 2014, according to Edison Research earlier this year.
The 860 signal began in 1948 and was purchased in 1949 by Jesse B. Blayton Sr., a Black bank president and Atlanta University professor, for $50,000. He called it WERD-AM.
Ryan Cameron, who hosted a recent podcast series on the history of Black radio called “Amplify Color,” noted that Blayton’s studios were upstairs from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference on Auburn Avenue. Civil rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. would tap on the ceiling when he needed to send a message to the Black community and WERD would lower a mic out the window and let him speak.
“WERD was a major player in the civil rights movement and being in that particular building in Sweet Auburn made a difference,” Cameron said.
The station’s power, he said, may have been the source of the phrase “word up,” as in “we need to get the word up to the radio station.”
Cameron said he hopes the tower will be relocated and the signal survives.
Learn more
Read about WERD from the New Georgia Encyclopedia and Jesse B. Blayton Sr. from the Radio Hall of Fame.
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