The run
- Network
- WMAQ Chicago
- Years active
- 1948–1951
- Surviving broadcasts
- 102
- Genre
- drama
Richard Durham's landmark series dramatising Black American lives — the most ambitious writing about race anywhere on 1940s radio. Public-domain transfers from the Internet Archive, harvested from the Old Time Radio Researchers collections and indexed episode by episode.
Source collection
Old Time Radio Researchers Group
Rights
Public domain — no renewed US copyright
Cataloguing
Air dates and notes from the Archive item record
The shape of the run
What survives, year by year
25 dated broadcasts across 79 years on the air, with 76 years where nothing is known to survive. Brightness is transfer quality; empty cells are months lost to time.
Episodes
Start here
Listen to the run in order
Restored broadcasts from 2024, in original transmission order.
- 1. Dead Air · 19 Nov 2024
- 2. The Long Silence · 26 Nov 2024
- 3. A Room Above the Street · 3 Dec 2024
The Long Silence
4 Aug 2026 · 15 min
We go back to the beginning and read everything again.
Dead Air
28 Jul 2026 · 30 min
Three interviews, one archive reel, and a question nobody wanted asked.
Sign Off
21 Jul 2026 · 45 min
Recorded on location, with the room left in.
The Case of the Missing Hour
14 Jul 2026 · 1h 0m
New tape, a reluctant witness, and a timeline that finally stops making sense.
Night Broadcast
7 Jul 2026 · 23 min
We go back to the beginning and read everything again.
The Last Train Out
30 Jun 2026 · 38 min
Three interviews, one archive reel, and a question nobody wanted asked.
Signal at Midnight
23 Jun 2026 · 53 min
The episode listeners keep sending to people who never listen to podcasts.
A Room Above the Street
16 Jun 2026 · 16 min
A quiet beginning that turns, halfway through, into something else entirely.
Same seasons
drama on the air then
Series in the same genre whose runs overlapped this one.
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