WDIA: The Goodwill Station

WDIA signed on June 7, 1947, owned by two white men, John Pepper and Bert Ferguson, with country and pop programs. Ferguson turned to targeted programming once he saw that no Memphis station served the city's Black listeners. Nat D. Williams launched Tan Town Jubilee on October 25, 1948, and B.B. King joined in 1949. In 1954 the Goodwill Fund began paying for school transportation for disabled Black children, scholarships and Little League teams, and the station went to 50,000 watts. Chuck Scruggs became its first Black general manager in 1972.

What the plaque says

WDIA: The Goodwill Station WDIA, the Goodwill Station, was the first radio station in the nation to have an all-black format. This format made WDIA the top-rated Memphis Station in the early 1950's. In 1948, Nat D. Williams became its first black "D-J". Among those who appeared on WDIA were B. B. King, Dwight More, Rufus Thomas, A. C. Williams, Willa Monroe, Martha Jean Steinberg and Maurice Hulbert. Early programs included Teen-Town Singers, Payday Today, Brown America Speaks and Hallelujah Jubilee.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Beale Street — 0.2 mi
  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 — 0.6 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 — 0.7 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 — 0.9 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

• Gayoso House — steps away
• Marion Scudder Griffin 1879-1957 — steps away
• Washburn's Quarters August 21, 1864 — steps away
• First Tennessee Bank — 0.2 mi