Black America Joe 'The Black Eagle' Madison, Founder of Activist Radio – RadioVC Obituary

The death of Joe Maddison, known as 'The Black Eagle', was announced yesterday in the US. As a black radio personality and civil rights activist, she became an “indispensable entity” to black America. He died on January 31 at the age of 74 after suffering from prostate cancer since 2009.

Joe Madison consistently ranks in the top 10 of the 'Heavy Hundred', Talkers.com's annual list of the 100 most influential 'radio talk show hosts in America'. In 2023 list He is ranked sixth. His death was big national news in America.

Madison's radio career is a long series of passionate, often influential, acts for civil rights and social justice struggles. “What are you going to do about it?” He often challenged his listeners with almost legendary sayings. Madison could make harsh comments, but always with a sense of constructive perspective. 'The Black Eagle' is generally regarded as the founder of 'activist radio', which helped form the vanguard of the modern civil rights movement.

Born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1949, he played football for Washington University in St. Louis, graduated in 1971, and at age 24 became the youngest executive director of the Detroit NAACP chapter. The NAACP is America's largest black civil rights group. Later, Madison became national political director and a member of the NAACP's national board of directors.

Madison's radio career began in Detroit in the late 1970s when he discussed a controversial bus case on local station WXYZ. The show director asked Madison to take on a weekend show, which quickly became popular. In that program, he was the first in the media to interview a person diagnosed with HIV/AIDS.

In 1985 — midway through the Reagan era — Madison helped organize a boycott of Fairlane Town Center in suburban Dearborn after Detroit passed a law banning non-residents from its parks, which many considered racist. The Dearborn boycott was successful, resulting in a complete failure of the city's holiday shopping season. “The Dearborn boycott is where I came of age and considered myself a professional activist,” he said in 2015.

His radio career later took him to WWDB Philadelphia and Washington DC, where he was the longtime morning anchor at WWRC until the station's demise in 1998. He later joined Crosstown WOL, where Madison's afternoon show was syndicated and broadcast by Reach Media. Satellite radio service SiriusXM. Since 2007, he has worked full-time on SiriusXM's Urban View radio channel, where he hosts the morning show. In 2022, Madison signed a new multi-year deal with SiriusXM.

In 2015, Madison set the Guinness World Record for the longest broadcast (52 hours). In doing so, he raised more than $250,000 for the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. He was also instrumental in the passage of the Emmett Till Anti-lynching Act in 2020.

Madison has received numerous awards and recognition, including Talkers Magazine's Freedom of Speech Award in 2008 and the Black American Women's Hall of Fame's Man of the Year Award in 1980. In 2019, he was inducted into the 'Radio Hall of Fame'. . On December 20 last year, he announced that his rapidly deteriorating health would no longer allow him to host his radio show for four hours every morning.

---