Radio visionary’s legacy is secure
At the turn of the millennium it was impossible to meet one Fitzroy Gordon without being serenaded with tales of his mighty, all-consuming quest to acquire a Black-owned and Black community-focused radio station in Toronto.
Former Star reporter Ashante Infantry, in a 2010 profile, reported how Gordon cornered a federal cabinet minister with, “My people, the Black and Caribbean population, need to have this radio station and I’m not going to stop knocking on your door. I’m committed. I will give my life for this.”
Now, Gordon’s Toronto station, G98.7 on the FM dial, is “the way we groove” for many in the African, Caribbean and Black community. The radio station’s mark, imperfect and imprecise, yet indelible, is a reflection of the man who died last Tuesday (at age 65).
Gordon had suffered as stroke in 2017 and never returned to the station where he was founder and CEO.
It would take almost a decade of lobbying and grind before the station
began its live broadcast on Nov. 28, 2011 ,with Jimmy Cliff’s, “I Can See Clearly Now.”
The station’s staple was and is reggae, R&B, soca, jazz, African vibes, gospel, some dancehall, oldies — the kind of eclectic mix of urban music not widely available, except on playlists of people from the African diaspora. And, pointedly, a sprinkling of talk radio, daily Caribbean and international news and sports not available elsewhere on the dial.
I didn’t sign Gordon’s petition for the radio station when he solicited my support. I had written several times, in this space, about the need for a place where people of colour in the GTA could converge to voice concern, comfort each other, confront stereotypes, challenge and empower each other, marshal support for common causes — and do so without seeking approval or favour from corporate overlords. So, while I backed his intent and said so, I was just too disappointed by the previous attempt to deliver on the same goal. The next promoter would have to “show me.”
Today’s listeners of Flow 93.5 may not even know that this was the landmark spot for Black-owned radio, until it was no longer. Denham Jolly, a proud Black community warrior, beat Gordon to the punch when he got Flow 93.5 to the airways in 2001 as the first Black-owned commercial radio station in Canada. But Gordon was the first to sustain the vision, frayed and blurred and difficult as it is, of the Toronto radio station as a vital Black community resource and voice.
The attraction for community leaders and thinkers and guardians, the elite some derisively say, is never the music — often decried as too much booty-shaking, illicit-sex-encouraging, raunchy-lyrics-producing pap that, nevertheless, is the soundtrack of the majority of listeners. The cry centres on this: the largest Black community in the country — along with its musical and cultural cousins in the African/Asian/Latino diaspora — needs its own voice. Unfettered. Unfiltered. Without editorial comment from the Star, the Globe, CFRB and talk radio jocks.
The vision is for a radio station where there is intelligent counterpoint to mindless, stereotypical, uneducated pontification that no one can stop in a free society. Besides, there should be a media incubator for African-Canadian scholars and educators who are rarely asked to show that they, too, know about the pharmaceutical industry, and marketing trends, and space travel, and Brexit and housing affordability and carbon tax and whether a three-stop subway to Scarborough would help or hurt the masses stuck on buses.
Any radio station can change music format. What made us enthralled with Jolly’s promise was the talk and current affairs, the voice. Hundreds of letters supported the birth of Flow. But within a year it was losing money and Jolly dropped much of the essential content; and then sold the station.
Gordon’s legacy is he persisted, challenges notwithstanding. He’d said:
“This is a moral imperative for me. It’s required for the growth of the Black and Caribbean community. I’m not operating a jukebox; that’s not radio. People have a lot of ways to get music. A community cannot grow on just music. Our young people will be lost. We must provide information, be a forum for discussion.”
And, so, the man who was on the late night CHIN radio airways dispensing wisdom and old wives’ tales and psychobabble and entertainment disguised as non-advice love talk under the moniker Dr. Love, brought us cricket news in the morning on CBC radio when no one else carried it. He produced an international sports show on the FAN, wrote about cricket in the Toronto Sun, produced an annual Maja Awards show — and all the while dreaming of the radio station.
Of course G98.7 is not nearly perfect. Grapevine, the Sunday afternoon talk show, has enormous potential but too often fails to reach the standards that serious listeners demand. But that can be fixed.
Gordon, who arrived here in 1979, left us with more tools and in a better position than what he found. At times, the broadcaster mixed his metaphors, mangled the language and fell short of the Queen’s English.
But how many of us can say we fought the good fight, we pursued a dream and achieved more than our colleagues and friends dared imagine.
Thank you, Mr. G. Your legacy is secure. As always, with human endeavours, it’s left to your successors to perfect the vision.