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A few days before the beginning of Black History Month, two Black radio legends, Cathy Hughes and Tom Joyner, were having breakfast at Joyner's house in Miami. "Tom is my best friend," Hughes says. "Somebody called us recently the King and Queen of Urban Radio." It was Alfred Liggins III's 59th birthday. He is Hughes's only child and the CEO of Urban One, the largest diversified media company targeting African Americans, which she founded in 1980 with one Washington D.C. radio station.
Since taking over from his mother as CEO in 1997, Liggins has built an empire that includes 70 radio stations and two TV networks that serve a combined 85 million households. In 2004, the company made one of its most significant acquisitions when it purchased a controlling stake in Joyner's Reach Media for $56.1 million. At its height, the Tom Joyner Morning Show was one of the top-performing radio shows in the urban market, reaching eight million listeners with 115 affiliate stations. For the quarter that ended September 30, 2023, the Silver Spring, Maryland-based Urban One had net revenues of approximately $117.8 million, a decrease of 2.8 percent over the same period in 2022.
"The defining moment of my career has been my son replacing me as the CEO of the company," says Hughes, who is 76 and chairperson of Urban One. "It gave us the possibility of becoming a legacy business. Not only was my son able to work me out of my responsibilities, he out-performed me. But more importantly, he embraced my dream and my commitment to my people."
As a publicly traded company, Urban One's executive team and board of directors is beholden to its shareholders. But Hughes hasn't changed her approach to the business since she moved from her hometown of Omaha, Nebraska to Washington D.C. in 1972 to work at Howard University's WHUR. "Alfred is in the media and communications business," Hughes says. "I'm in the Black people business." It's a perfect marriage, Joyner says. "Alfred and Cathy are a perfect combination for the company," he says. "She cares about Black people, and he gets to focus on the shareholders. That's the way it should be."
When Hughes and her then-husband Dewey Hughes purchased WOL, an AM station that hit the airwaves on October 3, 1980, launching a company that was then called Radio One, she wasn't planning on becoming one of the largest Black-owned media companies in the country. "I was just planning to be there the next day to disseminate information of value to the African American community," she says.
Hughes's focus on Black people has often driven both her business decisions and her personal relationships. Retired now, the 74-year-old Joyner, who earned the nickname Fly Jock after doing a daily radio show in both Dallas and Chicago, has formed a close bond with Hughes over their shared love of Black people and urban radio.
"Tom and I are equally yoked because we have the same level of commitment to the Black community," Hughes says. "I think that's important when you talk about the merger of Black companies. The common denominator between Urban One and Reach Media is that both companies are unapologetically Black."
For most of January, these two good friends hung out together in Miami, reminiscing, gossiping, and looking ahead to the future. "Cathy is a walking history lesson," Joyner says. "Her head is full of Black history. She needs to write a book."
Listen to her long enough, Hughes will tell you of her childhood memories in Omaha, where cowboys would drive cattle through the Black area of the city on their way to the slaughterhouses. She'll tell you how she was determined not to become a statistic after she learned she was pregnant with Alfred when she was 17 years old. You'll likely find out that in 1909 her maternal grandfather, Lawrence C. Jones, started the Piney Woods School, a still-operating boarding school for African Americans in Piney Woods, Mississippi.
Hughes is humble but proud about the history she has made in her own career. Her impact on urban radio can be heard nightly across hundreds of radio stations. As general manager of Howard University's WHUR, she was responsible for the creation of the Quiet Storm, a student-led R&B radio format that became a staple of urban radio. In her first year as general manager at WHUR, she increased the station's revenue from $250,000 to $3 million. Eventually, she became at that station the first female vice president and GM at a D.C. radio station. In 1999, Hughes became the first Black female founder to take a company public.
"Cathy has opened doors for all people like us," Joyner says. "She's been the first in so many aspects."
Hughes says that when she bought her first station in 1980, there were nearly 400 Black-owned radio stations. Now, according to the latest report from the National Association of Black Owned Broadcasters, there are 220 Black-owned stations, including 117 FM and 103 AM stations.
Hughes, who sees herself still largely as a radio programmer despite her success as the founder of a diversified media company, has observed many changes in the industry since she and Joyner got their starts in the 1970s.
"When I went into business, I was competing against Clear Channel, CBS Radio, and several other Black radio station owners," she says. "Now if you're in radio, you actually compete against your listeners. They do their own playlists. They think that they are as good as Tom Joyner or Rickey Smiley. Everybody's a disc jockey and talk show host."
Hughes believes opportunities must grow for Black entrepreneurs, and not for just a chosen few. "We don't need just an Oprah or Cathy Hughes," she says. "We need multiple names in the same category." With her son, Alfred, running the company, Hughes has recently focused her attention on trying to bring a casino to Richmond, Virginia and working with Howard University to build the Chadwick Boseman School of Performing Arts inside the Cathy Hughes School of Communication, where her family foundation gave a $4 million gift in 2016.
"When they read my eulogy, I hope they can positively say that I moved the needle," Hughes says. "I might not have moved it a lot, but I did move it some. Otherwise, my life would not have been fulfilling."
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