NEW YORK CITY - GENERAL

    WLIB

 WLIB,  the New York City radio station,  for more than 32 years  (July 1971 – March 2004) catered to African-Americans living in New York. The station, broadcasting on 1190AM, covers New York City, Westchester and part of eastern New Jersey.

WLIB has provided music, news and talk mainly of interest to African-Americans including people from the English-speaking Caribbean. For special events,

it has linked with radio stations in the Caribbean (including Guyana) for special broadcasts.

The station was sold during 2004 by its owners, Inner City Broadcasting, to a group of broadcasters connected with the Democratic Party of the United States, who intend to establish a new liberal talk radio station.

 Percy Sutton, an African-American businessman who is the chairman of Inner City Broadcasting Corporation, said WLIB has lost money for 30 years and that the decision to close was partly a financial one. 

Sutton, a former Manhattan Borough president and Clarence Jones, publisher of New York's major back newspaper, the Amsterdam News headed the Inner City Broadcasting Corp. at the time of the purchase of WLIB in July 1971.

 At the time, Public Affairs, including the open discussion of racial issues, was already a significant part of the station’s schedule. Such discussion intensified  before, during and after the election of David Dinkins, the New York’s first black mayor and a close friend of Percy Sutton. Dinkins, who had stock in Inner City Broadcasting and had transferred his stock to his son, was politically attacked for this action during his mayoral campaign. The station itself was attacked for its broadcasts relating to a number of issues.
 

As an entity, the station began as WBKN on November 2, 1926 and was owned by engineer Arthur Faske and his brother Dr. Leo Faske. It changed its name many times. 

 As WCNW it became known as "The Voice Of The Negro Community." With its mixture of entertainment, religion and public-service features reflecting African-American life. Joe Bostic Sr., one of the nation's great black broadcasters, began his long career at WCNW.

 On July 1, 1942, the station became WLIB. 

Over the life of the station, it adopted a variety of formats. The classical music format was not profitable. It became an outlet for Black, Jewish (in Yiddish and English), Spanish, Polish and Greek ethnic programming.
 
On December 11, 1952, WLIB moved to what became known as the Harlem Radio Center at Hotel Theresa at 2090  Seventh Ave. in Harlem. It was there that veteran broadcaster Joe Bostic Sr., began "The Gospel Train." 

WLIB moved its studios from Hotel Theresa to the United Mutual Life Insurance building at 310 Lenox Ave. at 125th St., in 1962.

 In the late 60's and early 70's, WLIB was a widely recognized outlet for the concerns of  the  black community. The Black Panther party even broadcast its own program, "The People's Information Slot", on the station in 1969. Following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, WLIB was credited with playing a major role in keeping New York City relatively calm during a time when riots broke out in other cities.

In 1970, WLIB earned the first Peabody Award given to a black-oriented station.

CME BRINGS BACK CARIBBEAN PROGRAMMING TO WLIB

Daytime Caribbean programming returns to WLIB 1190 AM on  Sunday, January 8, 2006,   FROM 1:00 TO 3:00 P.M.

The weekly package, produced and presented by CME (Caribbean Media Enterprise), will include  news, sports, interviews, comments, and a call-in show. On-air voices will include Allan Martindale, Claud Leandro, Lloyd Braithwaite, and  Angela Massiah.  

The program will also be available on the web at http://airamericaradio.com/ . 

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK CITY

Brooklyn, New York, contains possibly the world’s largest communities of Caribbean people living outside their native countries. Many of them moved in the nineteen twenties from Harlem in Manhattan following the IRT line as it expanded into Brooklyn.

Owning property has always been important to people of the Caribbean. Therefore moving out of crowded and expensive Manhattan to Brooklyn represented progress to them. It allowed them to buy houses of good quality. In Brooklyn, they bought one- and two-family houses, formerly occupied by professionals and members of the financial community, in West Bedford and East Stuyvesant, financing purchases through credit unions and susus (box-hands).

Between 1930 and 1940 their numbers increased from just one-tenth of the population to one-third in these new areas. This transition was not easy. Whites refused to serve blacks in the restaurants and there were attempts to keep them out of the Bed-Stuy market. The Caribbean population expanded along Eastern Parkway into Crown Heights and Flatbush. They opened businesses and established “hometown” associations and soccer and cricket clubs.

Today, people from the Caribbean live in larger areas of Brooklyn. A significant number of new immigrants to the United States go to Brooklyn directly and settle  there.

MANHATTAN, NEW YORK CITY

Blacks lived in what is now New York City long before modern times. Some of the evidence of this fact lay in what is now called the African Burial Ground, dating back to the 17th and 18th centuries. 

The early immigrants from the Caribbean were relatively wealthy and paid their own fares to travel to the United States on regular passenger steamships. Most of them were professionals. The ships docked at ports in New York, Massachusetts and Florida, and communities developed in Harlem and Brooklyn in New York and also in Boston and Miami.

Manhattan’s Harlem was once the center of New York City’s black community and included the early immigrants from the Caribbean who began arriving in New York in significant numbers early in nineteenth century. Overcrowding in Harlem caused the old residents to look elsewhere for housing and people from the Caribbean started  moving to other locations in the city. Harlem still represents the core of people of the Caribbean living in Manhattan. 

Harlem was once a luxurious suburb, but after the period of depression at the end of the 19th Century, African Americans and people from the Caribbean started moving in to the area. Many of the Caribbean blacks and mulattos  were skilled professionals but, being people of color, they did not enjoy the prestige and monetary rewards their professions would normally afford them. However, Harlem's large black community provided employment  for them in normal times. But when times got hard, many of them became impoverished.  Since it was difficult to take care of the houses in a depressed economy, properties in Harlem began to decay.

Immigrants from the Caribbean have made significant contributions to life in Harlem. Many of them became entrepreneurs and by 1901 controlled controlled 20% of the businesses in Harlem.

They also played significant roles in what was called the Harlem Renaissance, an outpouring of creative literary, musical, artistic and other cultural activity in Harlem among blacks during the period 1920 to 1930 approximately. Claude McKay and Marcus Garvey of Jamaica were notable among them.

Some notes on Harlem

Harlem Week
Harlem Week began in 1975 as Harlem Day, which was a one-day tribute to Harlem’s history, and to a community of people who live, work, play, learn and worship together. It was intended to revitalize Harlem and give it the status it enjoyed in the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s.

During the late 1960’s and mid-1970’s, many of Harlem’s noted institutions began to fade. Among the former showcase institutions were the Apollo Theater, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Renaissance Ballroom, the Rockland Palace, Small’s Paradise, the Theresa Hotel, its famous streets (125^th, 135^th, 116^th, and145^th Street), historical churches, splendid houses and beautiful parks.

The small group of residents who combined forces to restore Harlem were successful and eventually Harlem Week came out of Harlem Day. During Harlem Week, activities highlighting relevant aspects of the African-American, Latino, Caribbean-American, and European-American cultures of Harlem are featured. Harlem Week now covers most of the month of August. The ideas that drive Harlem Week are now abroad in the tri-state region and beyond - in Miami, Atlanta, Detroit, Cleveland, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Newark, Boston, Los Angeles, Denver, Charlotte and Toronto among others.

RICHMOND HILL, QUEENS, NEW YORK CITY

Richmond Hill in the borough of Queens, New York, was populated previously by mainly Germans and Irishmen, later by Latin Americans, and yet later by Guyanese, mainly of Indian descent. By the late 1980s forty per cent of the residents of  Richmond Hill were Guyanese.

Today, Liberty Avenue with its many Guyanese and other Caribbean businesses resembles the Caribbean more than it resembles America. Some people call the area Little Guyana, even though there are immigrants from China, Latin America,   India and other parts of the Caribbean living there. Others call the area Little India, partly because of the many immigrants from South East India and Indians from Guyana and Trinidad live in the area.

SCHENECTADY COUNTY, NEW YORK

A new community of Guyanese is being created at Schenectady County. Hundreds of Guyanese families have been leaving New York City to settle in Schenectady. Most of the families are from the borough of Queens, more particularly Richmond Hill.

Guyanese have been actively and openly wooed by the mayor of  Schenectady, and a special website, www.guyaneseopportunities.com , has been established to further encourage settlement there.

Schenectady County, part of New York's Capital District Region, is located in the Mohawk River Valley, 150 miles from New York City, 190 miles from Boston and 220 miles from Montreal.