Art & Dorrit Gilliam

WLOK: Tuned into the Community

by

Art Gilliam was a young teenager looking at the scenery as the city bus drove toward Downtown. When he turned his gaze back inside, he realized a group of white people were standing and glaring at him. He wasn’t sitting in the back. There were plenty of seats in the rear, but these passengers who boarded the bus after him were not about to sit behind a Black youngster.

That’s not how it was done. Gilliam was breaking the law. The driver radioed for the police, and an armed officer arrived and ordered him to move to the back of the bus. Gilliam was both nervous and proud. He got up, walked to the front of the bus and got off, choosing to walk the rest of the way.

In subsequent years, Gilliam would break racial barriers and become one of Memphis’ most influential leaders. In 1977 he acquired WLOK-AM 1340, becoming the first Black radio station owner in the city. He’s been there ever since, the same station in the same location serving the same community. Along the way, he’s garnered a host of honors, most recently in July when he was inducted into the Tennessee Radio Hall of Fame.

It further illustrates how Gilliam sees and thinks about the world. It isn’t static, it’s dynamic, and from the start he has been quick to reflect on events and people, from the smallest exchanges to global conflicts. This approach led him to leadership of an institution in the city as well as leadership in the community.

But he’ll tell you that when he learned he’d be honored by his industry, the first thing he thought about was riding that bus. “It’s been a long way from there to the Tennessee Radio Hall of Fame.”

For all his accomplishments, Gilliam is modest. At age 80, he continues nurturing his passion for the community, for connecting with the station’s listeners and callers. He speaks as easily with the plain and humble as with the high and mighty. In a world where trends and technologies come and go, he maintains traditions. But he also knows how to evolve while keeping things relevant.

He is a skilled businessman — he’s been a member of the Society of Entrepreneurs since 2007 — and understands that systems, risks, and consistency are all in a day’s work.

“Truthfully, I never think about accolades or things of that type,” he says. “Basically, I have to go to work every day. I don’t think that I’m building a career or headed for a hall of fame, but I’m certainly honored about it. It’s kind of like Cal Ripken Jr. with the Baltimore Orioles. He’d just go play shortstop every day. He didn’t necessarily think he was going to end up having the longest string of consecutive appearances.”

Gilliam grew up in Memphis and attended Hamilton High School. He was an accomplished student, but says that the reason he was always years ahead of his peers was his mother, a schoolteacher, who tutored him. His parents sent him to prep school in Connecticut and from there he enrolled in Yale University at age 16. He earned a degree in economics, joined the Air Force, and got an MBA from the University of Michigan. He came back to Memphis to work with his father at Universal Life Insurance, and it seemed logical that he would stay in that business.

But opportunities arose for Gilliam to become a pioneer. The Commercial Appeal sorely needed Black voices, so he became a columnist there, and soon after became the first Black anchor at WMC-TV Channel 5. With that experience and visibility, he then went to work as an administrative assistant in Washington for Memphis’ then-congressman, Rep. Harold Ford Sr.

After that, he formed Gilliam Communications, Inc. and in 1977 acquired WLOK-AM 1340, making it the first Black-owned radio station in Memphis.

The station remains his calling to this day. “I found that for me, radio was the medium of choice. You’ll find that people will say ‘That’s my radio station,’ but you won’t find them saying ‘That’s my TV station.’ They might like a particular program [on TV], but it’s the whole sense of community that people attach to their favorite radio station. Younger people today are more social-media oriented, but for the most part, radio is a unifying element for our community.”

From the very beginning after acquiring WLOK, he had to make some decisions about how to keep the station relevant. “The longest-running program in Memphis radio history is a program we have called Rainbow PUSH Coalition. It was Operation PUSH when we first bought WLOK and PUSH was considered a very militant organization.”

“A lot of people think a radio station is just people sitting in front of a microphone and talking. It’s not. We have a lot of FCC rules we have to follow. And we have three specialized computer programs that keep us on the air. I have to make sure we’re on the air, that the tower is working, and following what’s going on behind the scenes. And when you’re on 24/7, things come up at the weirdest times and you have to be there.” — Dorrit Gilliam

The station’s previous owner was Starr Broadcasting, the chairman of which was noted conservative intellectual and commentator William F. Buckley Jr. The PUSH program irked advertisers and they told Starr’s broadcast manager to get the program off the air or the advertising would disappear. Just before Gilliam took over, the show was dropped.

“So, the first thing I did when we took over the station was to go to the Rev. Billy Kyles,” he says. Kyles, a long-time activist in the Civil Rights Movement, had formed the local chapter of PUSH. “I told him, ‘You’re back on the air.’ And that defined who we were — a community station.”

It was no stretch for Gilliam, who easily understood who his listeners were, to plant that flag and let the world know what WLOK was all about. (You can hear the Rainbow PUSH show Sundays from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m.)

“A lot of it just goes back to doing your job every day,” he says, “but also knowing who you are and what you stand for.”

Gilliam meets guests in a conference room at the station, which is still at the original address — 363 South Second Street. He looks around at what’s on the walls, indicating civic citations, artwork, and community-related displays.

“When we first came in to the station,” he says, “all you had on the walls were albums. Record companies would give you gold records if you played their music and it got hot. And radio stations were perceived to be an arm of the recording industry. I couldn’t have that. So we removed them.” One listener was a postal worker who had some pictures of cabins for enslaved people. He said to Gilliam, “I want to have them preserved. I want to give it to you if you’ll put it somewhere that would be recognized.” Gilliam agreed, and the images have been there for years.

Of course, the commitment to community is not just on the walls, but is reflected in programming. There’s always been plenty of conversation with listeners about current events, with local DJs covering topics light and heavy. And the music format has changed as well, with gospel replacing R&B in the mid-1980s. “In a certain sense, the community defines who you are,” he says. “We made the switch to gospel in a way that put us even closer to the community, because it put us closer to the church part of the community.”

A crucial member of the radio station’s staff is also a crucial member of Gilliam’s life. His wife, Dorrit Gilliam, carries the title of COO of Gilliam Foundation, Inc., and she’s responsible for, among other things, the WLOK Stone Soul Picnic and the WLOK Black Film Festival.

She got that job by taking the long way around. Dorrit and Art’s contemporary love story began in 2004 on an online dating site. He was in Memphis, she in Copenhagen, Denmark. They had mutual friends and the correspondence seemed to be working, so she came to Memphis to meet him and see if they wanted to continue the relationship.

As it happened, the connection blossomed and they soon got married. She planned to continue her work, which was tutoring. “My heart is really with tutoring,” she says. “If you teach the kids the basics, it doesn’t matter how bad they are when they start, they can continue life and succeed in school.”

And that’s what she did. Dorrit got a job tutoring at Booker T. Washington High School. The couple thought that would be her career, but the school system discontinued the tutoring program and, by chance, WLOK had an opening for a traffic manager. “Why don’t you come and fill in for a while until you get back into tutoring?” Gilliam asked her.

As it often is with the best-laid plans, the return to tutoring was not going to happen. But that work had provided Dorrit with the tools she would need to go beyond handling the nuts and bolts of radio station traffic management. “Whenever I have a job, I might not know anything about it at the beginning, but I want to know,” she says. “I keep digging into things until I understand why it is like it is. I never see a problem and say, oh, let’s move on. I want to find out why it happened and how do we prevent it from happening again.”

Gilliam realized that his wife had this powerful ability to understand how things worked and to grasp the intricacies of technical issues. “She now knows more about the technical aspects of the radio station in many ways than anyone else here,” he brags.

Dorrit elaborates: “A lot of people think a radio station is just people sitting in front of a microphone and talking. It’s not. We have a lot of FCC rules we have to follow. And we have three specialized computer programs that keep us on the air. I have to make sure we’re on the air, that the tower is working, and following what’s going on behind the scenes. And when you’re on 24/7, things come up at the weirdest times and you have to be there.”

As happens when you have a talented person who can run a business office and deal with the complexities of IT, it soon became apparent that Dorrit’s plate was going to get even fuller. With her attention to detail, she was the right person to oversee the Stone Soul Picnic and Black Film Festival, which are run through the Gilliam Foundation.

She explains, “I make sure that we have the artists, the venues, the vendors. It’s about coordinating and of course, I have different people helping with different parts of it, of both the picnic and the film festival. But it is my responsibility to put it all together and make sure that everything runs as it should.”

Gilliam wrote a book in 2014 titled One America: Moving Beyond the Issue of Race. It’s not a memoir, he says, but it necessarily brings up his life experiences in the context of the South and America during the Civil Rights Era.

It’s a thoughtful work and still relevant even though the nation has gone through extraordinary times since its publication. His life story is fascinating and his observations insightful. And he shares the lessons he’s learned — from childhood, to sitting on a bus, to experiencing racism in school, to connecting to the community, to devoting his life to improving the city, the nation, and the world.

One of the moments he witnessed was when he and Dorrit were traveling through Mississippi and stopped at a rural convenience store where it was soon clear that interracial couples were frowned upon. Gilliam wrote: “A couple of women at the counter really glared at her in a very condescending way. She just looked at them and smiled her very lovely and friendly smile. ‘And how are you ladies today?’ she said as she made her purchase and walked out of the store. That kind of exceptional ability to avoid getting caught up in the negativity of the moment helped me with my own introspection.”

It further illustrates how Gilliam sees and thinks about the world. It isn’t static, it’s dynamic, and from the start he has been quick to reflect on events and people, from the smallest exchanges to global conflicts. This approach led him to leadership of an institution in the city as well as leadership in the community.

“Ultimately, you evolve, and I think you’ll be fine when you do that,” he says. “We went through a period when we were considering if AM radio would survive at all. Keeping it connected to the community is how the film festival came about. Plus keeping up with technology — now we’re streaming all over the world and we rely on social media. That was our adjustment from being strictly a relatively low-power AM radio station to where we are today. For almost 50 years, we have seen about every change you can see and we’ve managed to find a way. We still have people who listen to WLOK all day long — they’ll never touch that dial.”