To borrow from a 1972 Earth, Wind & Fire cover song, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?,” where have all the Black voices on national sports radio gone? Yussef Khan’s First and Pen brought this up in his March 31 piece on former ESPN host and reporter Clinton Yates after he was let go four days earlier.
“What’s happening to the Black national sports radio host?” asked Khan. “At one time, prominent Black sports voices could be heard on airwaves across the country. Listening to mainstream sports talk radio and podcasts, you hear similar voices, practices and styles.
“And when it comes to discussions around coaching, these same voices frustratingly circulate the same names.”
In other words, the same old White voices speaking mainly on White coaches. And some of these same old voices, and young ones for that matter, seem unbashful to bash Black athletes and coaches when given the chance.
This subject isn’t news-breaking. We wrote back in 2017: “Sports radio, whether locally or nationally, remains the last holdout in media diversity … programmed by Whites, seemingly only for White listeners. If by chance a Black host is heard, typically that person was a former pro athlete as opposed to someone who’s Black and trained as a broadcaster.”
Of course, there were exceptions such as 2 Live Stews, the brothers Stewart, and Fred Hickman, among others, who had a national platform as Black sports talkers, as Khan briefly mentioned.
After reading his piece, we immediately reached out to Mark Gray, another Black trailblazer in sports radio.
Gray was the first Black host on ESPN Radio during its early days and the network’s first late-night weekend host. He later hosted the first originally produced weeknight sports show on then-XM Satellite Radio, and was its first weekend host on the MLB channel, MLB Live.
Gray has more than 25 years of experience in multimedia communications across print, broadcast radio and TV as a play-by-play announcer for HBCU sports, on the web, and as an adjunct journalism college professor.
“I’m still doing my thing,” said Gray, who hosts a nighttime show on Sports Rap Radio, a reconstituted all-Black sports channel in Detroit.
Sports Rap Radio first came on the air on a White-owned AM sports station in 2024 but went off the air less than 90 days later. It is now heard on Detroit’s WGPR-FM HD2, a longtime Black-owned radio station, and online.
His current time slot once again gives him a national platform, Gray said. “That’s why I took the 9-11 slot at Sports Rap,” he said, “so I could get back to my West Coast audience because I realized that I connect with people on the west side of the Mississippi better than the average East Coast person.
“It blows people’s minds when I tell them that I was at ESPN before Stephen A. (Smith),” Gray said proudly. “I’m glad I got in when I did.”
Also reached for comment was another longtime Black sports radio voice, Kevin Stanfield, based in Washington, D.C. Some things haven’t changed, he noted.
“I was working at a Contemporary Christian station, I did the overnights and a buddy of mine did the evenings,” he recalled. “They called him in the office and said, ‘We’ve got a complaint that you were sounding too Black.’ That’s a legitimate fear of White programmers and station owners. They don’t want to lose their audience.”
Today’s divisive climate makes it even harder to find diversity on sports radio, Stanfield continued. “As we see through society, people have hidden prejudices, and some of the prejudices aren’t hidden anymore. They feel emboldened now.”
Khan, Gray, Stanfield and this reporter all agree that Black voices in sports radio, both nationally and locally, are still needed today more than ever.
“We do have a voice,” Stanfield said. “We can have our own voice if it takes a little work, and we just got to stick with it and do what it takes to get established in that line.”
“We’re just doing it on different platforms. I’m kind of waiting to see what the next iteration with AI and all that kind of stuff brings. I think there are new opportunities waiting for Black people with so much access to become their own channel,” Gray said. “I think we gotta take advantage of it.”
FINALLY …
Legendary Black radio personality Bob Law joined the ancestors on March 30 at age 86. Law hosted the first national Black talk show, “Night Talk,” in 1981 on the now-defunct National Black Network, which launched in 1972 and closed in 1995. He also produced a 2010 documentary on the rise and fall of Black radio, “Saying It Loud,” which can be viewed on YouTube.
Charles Hallman welcomes reader responses at challman@spokesman-recorder.com.