Inner City Broadcasting

The Inner City Broadcasting Corporation ("ICBC") was an American media company based in New York City. It was one of the first broadcasting companies wholly owned by African-Americans.

Inner City was founded in 1970 by a group of prominent African-American New Yorkers active in business and civic affairs. They were led by Percy Sutton, an attorney and a former president of the New York borough of Manhattan; and Clarence Jones, a former publisher of the New York Amsterdam News. Sutton and Jones were joined by over fifty shareholders including legendary disk jockey Hal Jackson; Sutton's fellow "Gang of Four" member David Dinkins, who would later become New York's first African-American mayor; Wilbert (Bill) Tatum, who succeeded Jones as publisher of the Amsterdam News; future New York state senator and comptroller Carl McCall; Betty Shabazz, the widow of Black Muslim minister and civil rights leader Malcolm X, and musicians Billy Taylor and Roberta Flack. Dorothy Brunson, who would later become the first African-American woman to wholly own an American radio station, was an executive at the company during its early years.

WLIB, owned by brothers Harry and Morris S. Novik and programmed to New York's black community, was Inner City's first acquisition, in 1972. The sale included a right of first refusal clause to later acquire sister station WLIB-FM, which was renamed WBLS; Inner City exercised the clause two years later. While WLIB continued largely as a talk radio outlet, WBLS's format transitioned from jazz to a progressive mix of black music, under the slogan "The Total Black Experience in Sound." WBLS would experience a period of tremendous success from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s as it pioneered the urban contemporary format under program director Frankie Crocker, and the profile of Inner City rose with it.

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