July 6, 1986
Last Tuesday at 10 A.M., Vincent Thomas sat atop the highest hill on Manhattan Island and addressed Harlem.
"WHCR signs on the air," he announced from the small studios of Harlem Community Radio, 90.3 on the FM dial, a new 10-watt station with its headquarters at City College. '"If you've stumbled onto us and you're listening," he added, call a friend and spread the word. Harlem has its own radio station."
That morning at the college, Prof. Tony Batten of the communications department was correcting the galley proofs of the second issue of New Harlem, a student magazine that began publishing last December. Its purpose, as defined in its preface, is "to engage, reflect, challenge and bring together the community of Harlem and City College."
The station and magazine are part of what many people describe as a growing spirit of collaboration between the college and Harlem.
WHCR, which at first is broadcasting at least 35 hours a week, plans to focus on those who are not served by other stations, specifically school-age children and the elderly.
Public-affairs programs, story-reading hours, and programs broadcast in Spanish and French for the growing groups of Hispanic and Haitian people are being considered.
"A lot of different kinds of music and art forms are frozen out of larger stations," Mr. Thomas, the station manager, said. "We plan to throw a variety of things at people and to look for our niche."
Mr. Thomas said the station's signal could be clearly heard in upper Manhattan from the East River to the Hudson, with some listeners picking it up as far south as 59th Street.
Harlem residents and community groups have responded enthusiastically. When WHCR applied to the Federal Communications Commission for permission to go on the air, many leading Harlem institutions sent letters of support, including the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Harlem School of the Arts, North General Hospital, and Community Boards 9 and 10. To Preserve Oral Tradition
The resources for the radio station and the magazine are limited. At the WHCR studio, a crowded room on the first floor of the North Academic Center, turntables and tape players sit on college-issue desks. There is no record and tape library. During the first weeks, Mr. Thomas expects to rely on his own collection to help fill the air time.
The station will have a community advisory board. Mr. Thomas said he hoped that, in time, local residents would become more directly involved with the programming, helping to preserve an important part of Harlem history, its oral tradition.
"I hope this can be a throwback to the Harlem of old - an opportunity for exchange," he said. "I hope we're going to find a lot of people coming out of the woodwork with things."
Mr. Batten and Mr. Thomas said they had told their students to be ready to compete for an audience by maintaining high standards and by what Mr. Thomas called "making people feel a part of the station and building a constituency brick by brick."
"City College was always the place for immigrants to become melded into American society as scholars, scientists, artists, and good citizens," Mr. Batten said, "and Harlem is the cultural capital of the black diaspora."
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