HBCU Radio Preservation Project: Simone Brown
Simone Brown discusses her high school talk show, multitasking at WSSU, relating to students and community, and creating a production company.
Do you hear that? It’s the sound of this week’s edition of the HBCU Radio Preservation Project! As a collaborator in the project, the Margaret Walker Center serves as a repository for the histories of HBCU stations and the community members who have been a part of them.
Simone’s childhood in Decatur, Georgia, was filled with music. Her entrepreneur parents were a major influence in her life from early on and taught her the value of traveling, punctuality, creativity, and more. Her mother worked in HR, and her father worked in transportation as well as film production. Simone’s father encouraged her interest in communications, and she actually created a blog talk radio show during high school.
“With WSSU, you were the producer, you were the engineer, you were the on-air talent, so it gives you the skills that you need to really break out into radio if you wanted to.”
Simone attended Savannah State University from 2014 to 2018, during which time she was involved with the campus radio stations WSSU and WHCJ. She became the assistant program director and then program director at WSSU. Part of her tenure there involved fostering deeper engagement with the student body and surrounding community, emphasizing the importance of a welcoming, open environment. For example, her show “Modern Movement” focused on relatable topics for college students. Simone explains how the radio industry can be competitive; another challenge in the field is the continually rising popularity of podcasts. Though she isn’t currently on-air, she has established her own multimedia production company and has worked with organizations like Disney. She also emphasizes the importance of community and the mentors who have helped her along her journey.
There’s much more to hear, so click on the video below!
About the Project
Each Wednesday, tune into our YouTube channel, @mwalkercenter, to catch a new oral history from the HBCU Radio Preservation Project!
We are proud to partner with several organizations for the HBCU Radio Preservation Project, which is dedicated to honoring and preserving the rich history and cultural resource of HBCU radio.
Here’s some more info from their website:
Much of the material created at these stations is at risk of being lost, though they document the rich history and diversity of the Black experience through the Civil Rights era and beyond. The goals are to preserve the stations’ audio collections and to foster a community of sustainability for the stations and institutional archives on campus.
The project provides preservation training and workshops for campus stations, archivists and community members, recruiting HBCU graduates as interns and fellows.
Field archivists will collaborate with stations and campus archivists on collections assessments and follow-up field services such as inventories, reformatting, rehousing, and other preservation activities.
Oral historians will interview a range of community members to document the history of the stations. Training in gathering oral histories and using historical audio in content creation will also be offered. Other goals include launching an interactive website, a podcast series, and annual symposia.
