With his deep voice and sensual delivery, Napoleon Williams sounds like he was made for radio. His interest in the medium dates back to his Saint Louis boyhood, when he would stay up late trying to tune in signals from distant cities on an AM radio. Soon he started broadcasting on CB and shortwave radios. His obsession became more than just a hobby after his experiences as a regular caller to a local news- and talk-radio station in downstate Decatur. “People would call in after I did just because I was black and say that things are not as bad as that black guy says they are. People who knew nothing about me or people like me were telling us how it was. That attitude made me realize the problem was a lack of communication,” Williams says. “In radio you can target an audience or you can leave out an audience. If there is nothing informative or entertaining as far as black people are concerned, they’re not going to listen. Decatur was a town where blacks didn’t participate.” He decided to try to change that. “The first thing was to put a radio station on the air that targeted them, that played music that would cater to them and everything, and that’s what we did.”
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When Williams and his partner, Mildred Jones, decided to start broadcasting in 1990, they didn’t bother applying for an FCC license, nor did they spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to purchase a radio station. Instead, for about $1,000, they ordered a microwatt radio kit from the back of a magazine, plopped an antenna on the roof, plugged in a microphone, and began talking.
Williams and Jones’s daughter Unique Dream Williams provides the voice for the station’s slogan: “You’re listening to 99.7 FM, Black Liberation Radio, home of the real dream team.” Unique Dream was taken away by DCFS authorities and put into Jones’s mother’s care in March 1992 because Jones was in jail on contempt charges stemming from a domestic dispute. The state claimed the child was at risk remaining at home with Williams, who had once been accused of sexually assaulting his stepdaughter. A second daughter, Atrue Dream, was born in December 1993 and also taken into DCFS custody. Jones was jailed again in 1994 for theft and for violating her parole.
“They used the pretext of eavesdropping to silence a station,” says Williams. “They thought I would fight in court to get the station back. We don’t care. We started a new one. When the judicial system is against you, they can break you just in setting court dates, and you pay for every appearance. It’s cheaper to start a new station than hire a lawyer.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Napoleon Williams photo by Stephen Warmowski.
