By Navani Rachumallu ’26
Princeton University’s radio station, WPRB (103.3 FM), has grown into a powerful locus of community radio since its inception in 1940. While the station is run by an undergraduate student board, many of the Disc Jockeys on-air are non-University affiliated community members from the surrounding area.
Originally known on the AM broadcasts as WPRU, the station’s primary audience was the campus community at the time of its founding. When a new FM license greatly expanded the broadcast range in 1955, questions on WPRB’s identity came to a head: What was WPRB? Was it a college station and extracurricular activity or a community radio station? Whom did they serve?
The answers to these questions were heavily debated during the late 1960s and 1970s. One largely forgotten but critical debate concerned WPRB’s engagement with its African-American staffers and audience.
A New Idea
In May 1972, three African American students (Ernest Tollerson ’75, Adrian Kelley ’75 and Russell Stokes ’75) presented a proposal to the senior board of the radio station: ten Black high school students from Princeton, Trenton, and New Brunswick could apply and be selected to learn the workings of WPRB. Keeping in mind the station’s wide radius and potential listener base, these three believed that WPRB had a responsibility to create both “programming that responds to the black people” and educational opportunities for the Black community.
According to the proposal, these high schoolers would focus on a program called “Black Montage,” featuring “news and perspectives on the black community” that Tollerson and Kelley had started the same year. The students would also be free to have their own music shows and become official members of the station if they chose. Tollerson, Kelley, and Stokes hoped this initiative would eventually become institutionalized.
“the way the station is now is the best way for it”
–senior board member, WPRB, 1972
A two-hour debate ensued during the senior board’s discussion of this proposal, showing deep divisions within WPRB staff. Responding to reluctant members of the senior board, Kelley claimed that the student board was “not innovative or willing to change.” Further proving this point, one of the white senior board members stated that “the way the station is now is the best way for it” and that he “would want a damned good reason to change the nature of the station.”
This proposal was compared to a recently established initiative called Explorers, affiliated with the Boy Scouts organization. In 1971, WPRB created an Explorers post, bringing 15-20 boys and girls from the local Princeton High School and middle school to learn the station’s operations on a weekly basis. While the Explorers were not granted official station membership, some of them were very involved with the station, to the point where they had their own music shows on the AM outlet, as well as news broadcasts on the FM outlet. Rick Leuner ‘72, an advisor to the Explorers post, commented soon after the program’s inception, “I thought, one day, that since WPRB had a training program for college students it wouldn’t be hard to blend in a program for high school kids.” It is interesting that around the same time Explorers started, so much tension and debate surrounded the program for Black students.
A few board members believed that station membership should not be granted to the Black high schoolers since the existing Explorers post didn’t include this provision. In response, Ernest Tollerson made the point that unlike the Explorers, these ten students would eventually have their own music shows on the FM broadcast band. In addition, providing station membership to community members would cement WPRB as a community organization, and would extend opportunities for involvement to a listener base that had been largely ignored.
Among all the disagreements, there was a point of contention that underlied the discussion: Is WPRB a community radio station? Disagreements on this question revealed deep rifts within the station’s community. Station manager Barry Arendt ‘72 wrote in a board report that “WPRB as an undergraduate organization is much less of a cohesive social organization than it once was.”
Eventually, the proposed program was accepted and started the following September without consensus on station membership for the Black high school trainees. Some of them assisted University student DJ’s on a soul music show as part of their training.
From the University Archives housed at Mudd Library, it is unclear what happened to this program after 1971. But looking closely at what followed, it is clear that students continued to push for Black representation at the station and resist it. This was most apparent with the birth of a new specialty show called Triad or Third Sound.
New Programming
In 1972, Triad made its first appearance on the station schedules. The show was described as “the only source of black cultural expression in the listening area.” Broadcasting soul and jazz music, poetry, and public affairs broadcasts, it aired almost every night of the week, and on Saturdays it took up a large part of the day. The starting of Triad coincided with the founding of the Third World Center at Princeton, a community space for students of marginalized backgrounds, along with growing resistance on campus to having a more integrated campus.
By 1974 Triad had grown its staff and created its own training process. The show incorporated R&B, Latin, African, and blues music, increasing its diversity of sound. Receiving an “unusually high number of requests” for songs from off-campus residents, it seemed like a success.
But even so, debates arose when WPRB failed to appear on the Arbitron or “ARB” ratings, which provides the average number of people listening to a given radio station through surveying random samples of the population. As a result, Triad in particular was targeted and faced hostility from many station members and student leadership. In a 1974 board report, then Program Director John McClave ’25 wrote, “More than one senior board member suggested to me that Triad’s hours be cut back, and that the programs be brought more in line with our regular programming” (emphasis added). McClave himself saw this suggestion as “antithetical to everything WPRB represents as a radio station,” and believed these suggestions came from a “fundamental misunderstanding and rejection of the music featured on Triad, a narrow view reinforced by Triad’s failure to show up in the ratings.”
Although McClave fought against Triad’s critics, by 1977 it was only aired late at night to make the on-air sound “more consistent and smooth” during the day.” By 1979, it was reduced to one night per week, and in 1980, the show disappeared from the WPRB’s schedules. In addition, non-student DJ’s were prohibited from having regular shows on-air with few exceptions, echoing earlier sentiments of keeping the radio station within the confines of the campus community.
Some Disc Jockeys started to express frustrations about WPRB’s sound. One Princeton student DJ commented in an interview, “It’s lost a lot of its life – no more adventurous programming.”
Change in the Face of Resistance
Less than a year after the training initiative for Black high school students started, Adrian Kelley, one of the main proponents of the program, passed away in an automobile accident on July 31, 1972. Kelley was not able to see his efforts grow into a wider effort to bring new and diverse programming to the station.
From the available sources in the University Archives, we could not definitively conclude what happened to the high school program, nor the specific reasons why Triad phased out from the schedules. The latter may have been a result of deliberate decisions by the senior board or due to decreasing interest from new DJ’s to participate, likely both. However, it is clear that although they were met with much resistance, Black students within WPRB refused to be kept on the sidelines and advocated for their community to be more widely represented both in the staffing and broadcasts of the station.
Sources:
Undergraduate Academic Files (AC198)
Undergraduate Alumni Records (AC199)
WPRB Records (AC306)
Navani Rachumallu is a history major in the Class of 2026. She is also station manager for WPRB and a student blogging assistant at Mudd Library.