“You’re listening to WERD Radio 860 AM” — this typical introduction greeted the inaugural broadcast of a very untypical radio station founded by Jesse B. Blayton, Sr., an African-American born in Oklahoma at the turn of the century, who had to overcome embedded racism to educate himself at the Walton School of Commerce in Chicago and earn an MBA from the University of Chicago. After completing his education, Blayton moved to Atlanta, where he became the first black Certified Public Accountant in the State of Georgia and also purchased the first radio station.

On this day, October 3, in 1949, Jesse Blayton launched the 1,000-watt Atlanta radio station WERD. The station operated out of the same house as Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and it was said that whenever MLK wanted to make a statement on the radio, he would bang the ceiling with the broom for Blayton to lower down the microphone.

Blayton’s son, Jesse Jr., in charge of the day-to-day affairs of the station, hired four black announcers — Joe Howard, Roosevelt Johnson, Jimmy Winnington, and the already well-known Jack Gibson, who was given to read the daily news from the African-American perspective, and often held live interviews with Atlanta University professors and other prominent black leaders to comment on the leading stories of the day.