DECATUR, Ill – Members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People may have thought they wasted their time when they picketed a local radio station three Februarys ago.
They did so to protest a decision by WDZ 1050 AM to drop shows hosted by Michael Baisden and Tom Joyner .
But NAACP Decatur Branch President Jeffrey Perkins reminded more than 100 people attending the organization’s Heritage Breakfast on Saturday that God does things in his own time. He then announced that in the next week or two the CromwellRadio Group plans to launch Magic 98 at 98.3 FM. “We’re going to have a black station in Decatur again, and it’s going to need our support,” Perkins said, “and for those of you who think the NAACP isn’t doing anything, I’d like for you to know it’s getting done.”
Chris Bullock, general manager for Cromwell in Decatur, said an interview the new station’s format will be urban adult contemporary and will feature Tom Joyner ‘s morning show.
“From everything we’ve heard so far, it sounds like it will be received very favorably,” Bullock said. “We just want everybody to know there may be some hiccups and kinks getting the new station started.”
Marla Robinson, deputy superintendent for the Decatur School District, was the featured speaker at Main Street Church of the Living God and started out praising a presentation by Montez Hentz, 16, a junior at MacArthur High School, about the realities of being a young black male. Those realities include profiling, minimum wage jobs, dropping out of school, drug use, jail and death. “I know with every fiber of my being that young man spoke the truth,” she said. Robinson also talked about how she tracked down a student at the boys basketball game at Eisenhower High School on Friday night to ask him why he hadn’t been coming to school.
He said he’d been hanging with the wrong people and promised to come back. Robinson said she told him he had better quit playing around if he wanted to graduate and told her audience, “One of the hardest things I deal with is watching our young people throw their education away.” She added that what parents do at home is far more important than whether there are two parents there.
“Society has told us that coming from a single-parent home is the kiss of death,” Robinson said. “We know that’s not true.”
