In the community room of WYSO’s new Dayton Street station, radio history came back home.

On Wednesday, May 13, the HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) Radio Preservation Project held a return ceremony for Central State University’s historic radio station, WCSU 88.9, celebrating the formal return of digitized archival audio from the Wilberforce station to the institution that created it.

Gathered for the celebration were WYSO and HBCU Radio Preservation Project staff, Central State representatives, WCSU alumni and community members.

The HBCU Radio Preservation Project team collected 11 oral history interviews with folks connected to WCSU, and gathered and reformatted more than 24 hours of audio from the station’s archives, collected from reels, cassettes, CDs and other media. The digitized audio was loaded onto a hard drive, which was presented to WCSU General Manager Charles Fox.

Before the hard drive changed hands, though, Fox’s voice filled the room as part of a sound montage composed by HBCU Radio Preservation Project Assistant Audio Producer Olivia Green, who introduced the piece as “a very brief window into the soundscape, the music, the students, the community” that shaped the station.

“[WCSU] is the first federally licensed HBCU radio station in the nation,” Fox said in the montage. “I can’t imagine the joy that people must have felt hearing intellectual thought and sounds of entertainment that reflected their experience.”

Fox’s words echoed with the heft of the questions that form the nucleus of the HBCU Radio Preservation Project’s mission: Whose voices are heard? Who gets to speak for a community? What happens when those voices are saved?

These questions have their roots in another, originally asked within WYSO’s own archive by local resident Jocelyn Robinson.

Robinson, founder and project director of the HBCU Radio Preservation Project and director of WYSO’s Center for Radio Preservation and Archives, told the News last month that the first inklings of the project’s work go back “over a decade.”

Before the HBCU project existed, Robinson — a 2013 alumna of WYSO’s Community Voices program — was working with WYSO’s historic audio collection. At the time, Robinson was near the end of what would ultimately be eight years as Central State University’s Title III director, and found “a lot of Black voices, and very important Black voices” in WYSO’s archival collection from its time associated with Antioch College --- Maya Angelou, Stokely Carmichael, Alice Walker and Martin Luther King Jr., as well as well-known local artists Virginia Hamilton and Willis “Bing” Davis, among others. The recordings had been pulled by archivist Deanna Ulvestad to be digitized.

Personally “steeped in Black history and culture” and having a career background in the same since the 1980s, when she worked for the National Afro American Museum and Cultural Center in Wilberforce, when Robinson came across the recordings, it sparked what she called the “big research question.”

“If a little progressive liberal arts college in the middle of the cornfields has voices like this, what might our HBCU radio stations have?” she said.

By 2017, Robinson had begun trying to answer the question. From her years as Central State’s Title III director, she knew that about a third of the nation’s then-107 HBCUs had operated radio stations, including WCSU, though some no longer exist. Like WYSO, which was once tied to Antioch College, those stations could become vulnerable if their parent institutions faced financial pressure.

She started compiling a list of HBCUs with radio stations and developing a survey to learn more about them. A small early grant helped her begin administering the survey, traveling to stations and building relationships with people who knew the stations’ histories.

Robinson conducted a case study oral history with David Linton, now program director at WCLK at Clark Atlanta University. Linton, she said, had been trained at the “seminal” WSHA at Shaw University — formed in 1968 as the first radio station owned by a Black university, and sold in 2018 — and later helped start WRVS at Elizabeth City State University before spending years in the recording industry and returning to HBCU radio.

“There are so many stories like that that are woven together,” Robinson said.

The work also grew alongside WYSO’s own archival development. Robinson said WYSO had recordings, posters, program guides, photographs and other materials, but that “a bunch of stuff does not an archive make.” Building the Center for Radio Preservation and Archives at WYSO meant creating a model for how to identify, care for, search and preserve those materials — a model other stations and institutions could potentially use.

“It’s showing others how you do it,” Robinson said. “How you prioritize, how you get the training, how you talk about it with others, that they understand the importance of this primary source being preserved.”

The model now steers the work of the HBCU Radio Preservation Project, which got off the ground after Robinson presented the idea publicly, built connections in the radio preservation field and connected with the Northeast Document Conservation Center, or NEDCC. That partnership helped bring to fruition a $5 million Mellon Foundation grant.

Robinson said the project developed in response to what she learned from stations: that each HBCU, each radio station and each surrounding community — “from the Eastern Shore of Maryland to Langston, Oklahoma, to Tallahassee, Florida” — is different, and that preservation requires trust, institutional relationships and a shared belief that radio should be saved.

“Which is difficult, because radio is ephemeral,” Robinson said.  “You turn the knob and it comes out and goes out into the ether and travels on to infinity — so you create a mindset that is necessary to understand that [radio] is something important and worthy of preservation.”

The HBCU Radio Preservation Project identified 30 radio stations whose audio archives could be preserved — eight, including WCSU, have had their audio and oral histories compiled — and the rest are in varying stages of what Phyllis Jeffers-Coly, assistant director of administration and outreach for the project, called the project’s “life cycle.”

It begins with reaching out to station managers, librarians, archivists or other campus contacts. Then comes a site visit, when the team begins to build relationships and assess what materials exist and where they are housed.

“We ask, ‘What do you got, and who has it?’” Jeffers-Coly said.

Sometimes an institution has a trained archivist on staff; sometimes it doesn’t. At Central State, Jeffers-Coly said, the team worked with Keith Perkins, director of alumni relations, to connect with alumni who carried institutional memory. That was important, she said, because current WCSU leadership was newer to the station.

After an initial visit, the team returns for a preservation visit. Public historians conduct oral history interviews while preservation staff inventory materials and prepare them for digitization.

The technical side of the project’s work is led by the NEDCC, where Bryce Rowe serves as director of audio preservation. Roe said WYSO leads the project, while NEDCC focuses on preserving historical recordings found at stations. Chinyere Neal, a field archivist with NEDCC, described their work as “on the ground, hands on.”

“Sometimes it’s literally digging through boxes that are presented to us, digging through closets, looking at desks,” Neal said. “The thing I like to do at every site is find the filing cabinets and look in the backs of those.”

Roe added that stations are not typically set up to archive their own material, since their job is to produce programming and get it on the air, so NEDCC asks questions aimed at getting to know the folks who work there — questions that build trust and, more often than not, lead to finding recordings.

“We’re not coming in and saying, ‘Where is your archive?’” Roe said. “We’re saying, ‘Hey, what was your favorite time at the station?’”

Once materials are identified, they’re packed, shipped to NEDCC, digitized and inventoried. After that, the project works with institutions on next steps: how to preserve the digital files, how to integrate them into campus collections and how to make them discoverable or accessible through repositories such as the American Archive of Public Broadcasting or the HBCU Digital Library Trust.

Oral history, too, is a central part of the project’s work; as Will Tchaikirides, assistant director of public history and programming said, the project team looks for former station managers, volunteers, alumni, community listeners, students — folks who can explain what a radio station’s audio recordings meant in context.

“We believe that memory is as important as sounds when it comes to archiving history and communicating historical narratives,” he said. “It gives context, it gives color, it fleshes out the historical record.”

Malik Perkins, a former WCSU staffer, was one of several who contributed his voice to the historical record. A student at Central State from 2010 to 2014, he told the News he went to school intending to pursue television, but found his way into radio after doing well in a production class taught by Edwin Clay, who was then general manager of the station. His first assignment at WCSU was digitizing music, which helped him learn the station’s library, and soon opened him up to what would become his first media training ground.

“I didn’t know I was going to be on the air,” Perkins said with a laugh.

Perkins hosted “Jazz at Sundown” from 6 to 8 p.m. on Fridays during his junior and senior years, playing contemporary jazz. Around the same time, Perkins started working part-time behind the scenes at WHIO Radio. After signing off at WCSU, he would nap, then work overnight at WHIO. Shortly before graduation, he moved into multimedia news reporting with WHIO, where he worked for nearly five years.

Working at WCSU, Perkins said, helped him learn to adapt to a quickly shifting environment — critical for a news reporter — not only when things were going well, but when they weren’t.

“You know, in a textbook, things don’t go wrong, but when you’re out in the field, whether it’s newspaper or TV or radio, something can go wrong,” Perkins said. “You have to learn how to rebound and think on the fly.”

That preparation stayed with him as he moved through broadcast journalism and into his current work as a communications specialist at Ohio State University, and he aims to continue independent journalism and storytelling work in the near future, building on a career that began at WCSU.

“I think it’s incredible to have [WCSU’s] history archived for other people to learn about, to preserve the legacy and the innovation of these universities,” Perkins said.

Perkins’s voice joined Charles Fox’s as part of the montage that was played at the May 13 return ceremony for WCSU; Jeffers-Coly said the return ceremony is a relatively new addition to the HBCU Radio Preservation Project’s life cycle — a celebration meant to send a message.

“In response to a condition where our histories are being erased, we have to make decisions about showing up and showing out and making sure that we’re not erased,” she said. “So I suggested last fall that we do official returns, versus just returning the material in a more technical way — adding the celebratory, ceremonial, sacred part to it.”

“My contention is that HBCUs are hallowed ground,” Robinson said, echoing Jeffers-Coly. “HBCU radio gives voice to community that may not otherwise have a voice that is directed by Black folks.”

At the May 13 ceremony, Robinson called the return of WCSU’s digitized archive a full-circle moment: Yellow Springs and Wilberforce, she said, have long been connected by community, education and shared movement work.

“It’s not just about radio, it’s about people,” Robinson said.

And in a moment when Black history is being challenged, rewritten or erased, Robinson said the work of preservation is also a form of resistance.

“We will not be silenced, we will not be erased, we will not be deterred,” she said.

For more on the HBCU Radio Preservation Project, go to http://www.hbcuradiopreservation.org