It was not a typical Friday morning at New York’s premier hip-hop radio station, Hot 97 — and not because of anything happening in the world of music.
Ebro Darden, the lead morning-show host and face of Hot 97 (WQHT-FM, 97.1), could only halfheartedly plug a Wiz Khalifa ticket giveaway before turning to more urgent matters: the killings of nine black congregants by a white gunman at the storied Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, S.C., on Wednesday.
“Don’t just try to sweep what’s happening in America under a rug and not deal with the real issues,” Mr. Darden said before breaking down in tears.
“The black church is really all we got,” he continued deliberately, pausing often to collect himself. “It’s the last place that we always know …” — here again he was overcome with emotion — “that we can bring our families and be safe.”
Across the country, many local stations with primarily black audiences — known as urban radio, playing mostly soul, rap, R&B and gospel — put the music largely aside in favor of discussing the Charleston killings. In trying to make sense of the shootings, seen by many as a hate crime, stations used their traditional medium to relay the latest news and act as a community sounding board. They took calls from listeners, channeling their shock, grief, anger and distress. And they altered their playlists to reflect the somber mood.
“We are basically the newspaper for the African-American community in the city of Atlanta,” said Reggie Rouse, the vice president of urban programming for CBS Radio and program director at V-103 (WVEE-FM, 103.3) there. “When something like this happens, whether it’s Charleston or Ferguson, we have to stop the music and open up the phone lines.”
In the days since the shooting, V-103, like other urban stations, hosted interviews with local political and religious leaders, and even carried President Obama’s news conference on the killings live. “In black radio, part of our mission is to keep our audience informed and talk about what’s important to them,” Mr. Rouse said. “I don’t even have to call my staff and tell them what to do— they know.”
Mr. Darden, who is the child of a black father and Jewish mother and attended both the Pentecostal church and Hebrew school, said in an interview that radio is the original social media. “You can turn on this free broadcast and listen to people share ideas,” he said. “For ethnic communities, it’s a place where you can hear the voices of people who look and sound like you.”
When he took the microphone on Friday at 6 a.m. for his show “Ebro in the Morning,” Mr. Darden did not have a script or even a plan, he said. It wasn’t until he clicked a link from his Twitter feed during a music break and read a timeline of recent attacks on black churches from the Mother Jones magazine’s website that he was inspired to speak on the shooting in a pointed way.
“Luckily, it’s part of my job to be vulnerable and connect with people,” Mr. Darden said. “It’s so people don’t feel alone.” He also altered the usual modern-rap playlist of his show to favor uplifting or political songs, like “Be Free,” a Ferguson tribute by the rapper J. Cole, as well as tracks from Marvin Gaye and Ben E. King.
His show even played the full five-minute monologue from Thursday night’s episode of “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,” in which Mr. Stewart addressed America’s “gaping racial wound that will not heal.” Callers to Hot 97 included listeners from Baltimore and Charleston, who were streaming Mr. Darden’s show.
He received a flood of positive responses. “You made me pull over in tears,” one listener wrote on Twitter. “I felt your emotion.”
Frank Ski, a veteran radio host whose show airs on WHUR 96.3 in Washington, said that urban stations can serve blacks as right-wing talk radio hosts like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh serve their conservative majority-white listeners. But Mr. Ski also said that while he spent much of his own show talking about the shooting in Charleston, he also appeared as a guest on Q100 (WWWQ-FM, 99.7) in Atlanta, a Top 40 station that he said had a predominately white audience.
“A lot of those folks had never really heard our position articulated,” he said.
In South Carolina, the imperative to discuss the attack was even greater. Stephen Crumbley, the program director at Charleston’s mainstream urban station, 99.3 the Box (WMXZ-HD), and its urban adult contemporary sister station, Star 99.7 (WXST-FM), opted on Thursday to cut into the nationally syndicated programs and instead focus on enhanced local coverage.
“There was a great deal of tension and we wanted to calm that tension by giving people the complete story,” Mr. Crumbley said. “We were really worried about people taking the law into their own hands and we were trying to keep a sense of calm.”
He estimated that the stations played fewer than half of the songs they normally do. “We had to go back to our roots,” he said. “Whenever something big happened in the community, radio turned off the music and became the people’s station.”
At least two people employed by his stations grew up attending Emanuel, according to Mr. Crumbley, while many more had some connection to the dead. “It’s family — we’re telling them it’s going to be O.K.,” he said. “That’s what radio is supposed to do.”
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