1973 was the year Fisk University students launched WRFN—Radio Free Nashville. Later it became WFSK and today is still broadcasting at 88.1 on the FM dial. In spring of 2026 the HBCU Radio Preservation Project brought the digitized sounds of student-run radio back to the historic Fisk campus in a ceremonial presentation to the radio station and the campus archives. The hard drive small enough to fit in your palm was filled with decades of voices--student DJs introducing records, community leaders discussing local politics, jazz musicians, gospel programs, call-ins, conversations, all pieces of Nashville history. In this episode of Broadcasting History: The HBCU Radio Legacy we’ll hear about the significance of that audio as told through oral history.
Historic Radio on an Historic Campus
The HBCU RPP team first visited the historic campus of Fisk University in 2025, where they walked the same paths as luminaries like Langston Hughes and WEB DuBois. Historical placards around campus tell how Fisk students were at the center of the Nashville Sit-In Movement, trained in nonviolent direct action by civil rights leader James Lawson and helping to launch what would become the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC. They learned that in 1969, Fisk students, inspired by the Black Liberation Movement of the era, demanded a voice and organized over 600 signatures to get a radio station on campus. By 1973 an FCC license was obtained for WRFN—Radio Free Nashville.
History Keeping Today
The call letters were changed to WFSK in 1983, and now Sharon Kay is the general manager of the station, a role she took on in 2006. Sharon has been a steward of station history going back to the WRFN days, and in her office every photograph and tape tells a story about students and broadcasters who contributed to Black Nashville's identity on the airwaves. In Sharon’s oral history interview with project assistant director Will Tchakirides she noted that WRFN was the first Black FM station in Nashville, “Those students that started this radio station were absolute geniuses, 'cause it was at a time when FM was relatively new.”
Dr. Lucius T. Outlaw, another oral history narrator, was one of those students on air for Radio Free Nashville in the 1970s. He explained how the station reflected student-led political action on campus. “I mean, so here you've got a radio station on a campus where you've already got, in terms of programming and curricula, et cetera, the exploration of all kinds of interesting, challenging, radical, even revolutionary ideas.” Uninhibited by the restrictions of commercial stations, students were free to explore. Alongside journalism, the station became a stage for jazz music, including experimental free jazz, cementing Fisk's radio identity within the ecosystem of Black radio in Nashville.
Current Leadership Preserves Legacy
Sharon Kay came to WFSK a prolific talk radio host and DJ, and has been steadfast in bolstering WFSK's footprint in Nashville, honoring the history from which it came, all while hosting her signature show, What’s the 411 with Sharon Kay. It’s a public affairs call-in aimed at engaging and informing the Nashville community. And she’s maintained the station's identity as a place for jazz music and support for jazz musicians.
Few stations are able to care for years of accumulated history, and tapes, reels, and even digital files don't last forever. Neither do the people that remember what's recorded on them. Without preservation, decades of community memory can disappear through deterioration or simply a lack of time and resources. Preserving WFSK’s legacy is preserving Black Nashville’s legacy.
The Importance of Celebrating Preservation
HBCU Radio Preservation Project's field archivists worked side by side with campus archivists and station staff to identify materials, then digitized those recordings at the Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC) so community listeners can engage with the station’s historic voices. And the project sits down with former students, broadcasters, people who were there when these voices first went on air to record the oral histories that fill in the gaps and bring context to the sound.
The goal isn't simply to save old audio. It’s to build a living archive that the station itself can continue to use and that students, scholars, broadcasters, and the surrounding community can learn from. Former WRFN student Denise Sanders identified what’s at stake, “Anything that we have done and created as, you know, HBCUs or Black people, I think needs to be preserved because so much of our history is lost, and it's beginning to be lost again because of the banning of books and so forth. So, we've got to be proactive in preserving this history.”
At the return ceremony, the room was filled with HBCU Radio Preservation Project team members, public historians, and archivists, along with WFSK staff, Fisk librarians, and community members with connections to the stations. Project staff delivered the hard drive with all of the digitized files that have been preserved--416 audio artifacts. WFSK is not simply gaining access to those files or to the oral history interviews with people across the station's history. Folks are reconnecting with classmates, with mentors, neighbors, versions of themselves that still exist on tape. The digitized files returned to the institution that created them, but they also returned to the community that gave them life.
