Mighty Radio Live!
UPDATE: Mighty Radio is live! Click here to listen and read all about it.
When Mighty Writers launched in 2009, writers and journalists from around the city offered to help us publish the kids’ stories in newspapers and magazines.
We were thrilled and assumed that the kids would be too.
Guess what? Not so much.
Perhaps not so surprisingly, kids want to be read and heard by their peers.
“Sound and Fury,” a two-part Mighty Writers project, combines the creation of a student-run Internet radio station (Mighty Radio) with an audio documentary on the history of black radio in Philadelphia.
While discussing Black History Month a while back, one of our Mighty teens said, “I’ve been hearing about Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks since I was four. I know how great they were. But I don’t know anything about the great African-Americans that came before me right here in Philadelphia.”
Through “Sound and Fury,” they’ll learn about legends like Georgie Woods, Jocko Henderson, Jimmy Bishop, Louise Williams, Butterball and other radio icons. These radio personalities not only played the music white stations wouldn’t, but organized large-scale civil rights demonstrations and provided listeners with critical information at a time when mainstream media ignored impoverished neighborhoods.
Through our Mighty Radio station, teens will choose the topics, decide what’s news, define their own history, sound off on issues that affect them and learn how to host music shows with the kind of energy that will have listeners singing along with the tracks they play.
For more details, click: Mighty Times: Sound & Fury Edition.
Support provided by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation’s “Knight Arts Challenge,” the McEwen Fund, the Lumpkin Family Foundation, the Argus Fund, the Dolfinger-McMahon Foundation and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts (through partnership with the Pennsylvania Partners in the Arts, the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance and PECO).
