Nat D. Williams

The station Williams joined made radio history. In 1948 and 1949 white-owned WDIA, whose owners Bert Ferguson and John R. Pepper hired Williams as the first publicly identified Black disc jockey, became the first all-Black radio station in the country. It aired Black history segments and an open forum on Black problems, grew to fifty thousand watts and became the first Memphis station to gross a million dollars in a year. Its Teen-Town singer show noticed Carla Thomas and Isaac Hayes, and its annual Goodwill Revues benefited needy Black children.

What the plaque says

Nat D. Williams In 1948, Nat D. Williams became the first black radio announcer in Memphis when he began broadcasting for WDIA. He was a cofounder of the Cotton Makers Jubilee and is credited with giving the celebration its name. A history teacher in the Memphis City schools, Williams was best known for Amateur Night on Beale Street, which he began in 1935 at the Old Palace Theater. Williams was also a columnist for the Memphis World.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Beale Street — steps away
  The street that became the center of Black Memphis after the Civil War, home to Church's Park, W. C. Handy, Ida B. Wells and the blues, now a National Historic Landmark district.
• National Civil Rights Museum — 0.5 mi
  The Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was killed on April 4, 1968, kept as a museum of the civil rights movement from the nineteenth century to today.
• 1866 Memphis Massacre Marker at Army Park — 0.6 mi
  A privately funded NAACP marker in a small downtown park, placed in 2016, that names the May 1866 attack on Black South Memphis as a massacre.
• Sun Studio — 0.7 mi
  The small Union Avenue room where Sam Phillips recorded Rocket 88, Howlin' Wolf, Elvis Presley and the Million Dollar Quartet, now a National Historic Landmark.

More markers nearby

• Rufus Thomas, Jr. — steps away
• Pee Wee's Saloon — steps away
• Ida B. Wells — steps away
• Danny Thomas — steps away