The color of air

A white man goes to a black radio station looking for a job. He doesn't get hired, so he cries racism, and the station cries it right back. But could the dispute be something less sinister?

By BILL DURYEA

© St. Petersburg Times, published July 16, 2000

TAMPA -- Last September, Ty Kendrick, a 38-year-old white male job-seeker, new to town, picked up the Yellow Pages, turned to "Radio Stations and Broadcast Companies" and began dialing.

Airwatch America. "They do traffic reporting," Kendrick said. "Faxed them a resume."

Coast 107.3. "Faxed them one, too."

Two Christian stations got a resume, and so did the eight Clear Channel stations. Kendrick didn't care if he served God or Bubba the Love Sponge.

"I just wanted a job," he said.

He phoned, he faxed, he waited for a call.

One came from the "urban" station, which is radio marketing speak for the black station. Two days later Kendrick was seated in the tiny waiting room of WTMP-AM 1150, "the Boss of the Bay, your Jamz 2000 station."

The interview went well, Kendrick thought. Except for a couple of strange remarks:

"I thought you were black because of the name Ty."

And a little later:

"We don't have any white people working here."

When he didn't get the job, Kendrick was stuck for an explanation as to why. If he had the qualifications, there could be only one reason:

"It's because of the color of my skin."

Which is why, just two weeks after he started looking for a job, Ty Kendrick went looking for a lawyer.

The federal lawsuit that followed accused Dr. Glenn Cherry, his wife, Valerie, and Glenn Cherry's older brother, Charles, of racial discrimination.

To the Cherrys, the lawsuit was an affront.

A white man was invoking the Civil Rights Act of 1964, that most sacred of secular laws, to reach into the station's wallet, to call them racists. Them! The owners of a station that has been the voice of racial equality in Tampa for 45 years.

"It's just arrogance," said Charles Cherry, the station's general counsel. "Mr. Kendrick thinks that (just) because he's white he can get a job at a predominantly black radio station. That's ridiculous."

That led them to conclude Kendrick was either an opportunist out for a quick buck or an agitator with an anti-black agenda.

It's not about the color of his skin, the Cherrys said, it's about the color of our skin.

Thirty-six years after the end of legal discrimination, a job interview, one of the most common transactions in modern life, can still be fraught with distrust when the participants are of different races.

Looking at this case, America's racial landscape seems dramatically changed since the '60s -- the successful business owner is black, the job applicant white.

And yet in the past five years, 143,111 people nationwide filed racial discrimination complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. We know there's discrimination in the workplace -- a third of the EEOC cases were founded.

But what happened in the other two-thirds of the cases when discrimination was perceived but could not be proved? Maybe the discrimination was there, but if it wasn't, then what made us think it was? Have we been conditioned to believe -- no matter our skin color -- that when the interests of a black person and a white person collide in the workplace, the reason must be racism?

Timothy Dale Kendrick has a boyish face and the rail-thin build of a teenager in a growth spurt. His voice is surprisingly baritone, roughed up a little by the Marlboros he stashes in his sock.

He professes to be a Buddhist, though he doesn't practice a particular form. He's a big fan of professional wrestling and says Bubba the Love Sponge, the disc jockey who invented "No Panties Thursday," is "the only talent in this town."

"That's what it's all about," Kendrick says, "being politically incorrect."

Growing up in Springfield, Ohio, where he was known as Tim, the worst bias he experienced was kids teasing him for the hillbilly twang he inherited from his parents, who came from coal-mining country in West Virginia.

Kendrick enlisted in the Army in 1981 instead of going to college and spent most of his adult life stationed outside the United States: Somalia, Korea and Panama.

As a military police officer and later as a sergeant working on Armed Forces Radio and Television Service, Kendrick learned the Army is not always an integrationist ideal. "There were white cliques and black cliques and Hispanic cliques," he said. "But I can't say I ever saw discrimination in promotions."

"I had black supervisors. They had a stripe and what they said went. It was that simple."

He gained some notoriety in Somalia during the fighting in 1993 with a midday radio show -- his first appearance on air as Ty. Kendrick billed himself as "the Madman of Mogadishu," and he was immortalized by a Time magazine reporter who made the comparison to Adrian Cronauer in Good Morning, Vietnam.

He said in the magazine: "I need this. I need people to pay attention to Ty."

Kendrick left the Army in 1999 and moved with his new bride and her son to San Antonio, Texas.

He took a job at KTSA, a local news radio station, but quit without notice after three months, complaining in an e-mail he wasn't being promoted fast enough. He wanted badly to get "the Madman" back on the air.

"The second or third day on the job he was hitting up our sister FM station for a job. He said I wasn't paying him enough and that it was harder than he thought," said Bryan Erickson, the news director.

Two days after he quit, Kendrick was on a plane to Tampa.

Kendrick bought a bungalow catty-corner to his parents' home in a racially mixed part of the city, on the western fringe of predominantly black Belmont Heights.

"It's not the richest part of town," Kendrick said. "But it's coming up, and we like it."

If there were a map that showed WTMP's listenership, Kendrick's house would be near the center.

Without the radio towers, visitors might never find WTMP.

Since it first came on the air in 1954, WTMP's offices have been stashed between a pine grove and a palmetto thicket east of downtown Tampa.

The station's existence was hailed as a breakthrough for the black community, but WTMP was in its own way proof of the persistence of segregation. The owners and every person of authority were white; black ownership would not arrive until 1972.

In the meantime, someone burned down the building.

"We always figured it was the Klan," said Bob Gilder, a former station manager who hosted a talk show on WTMP for the better part of 20 years. "I was even shot at one night."

Along with the Florida Sentinel-Bulletin, the black-owned newspaper, WTMP was one of the best sources for information about civil rights marches and voter registration drives.

But by the late '80s, the station had begun to lose its grip on the market. Stations such as WFLZ-FM 93.3 abandoned their oldies formats to lure the free-spending young white men who were turning rap and hip-hop into a suburban phenomenon.

WTMP, losing the battle for advertisers, went into foreclosure. A consortium of former Tampa Bay Buccaneers players bought the station, but the FCC rescinded their license when one of the men pleaded guilty to cocaine charges.

By 1997 the station that was once the vanguard of black radio had become little more than a jukebox, its connection to the community's soul all but gone. If WTMP were a racehorse, someone would have put it down.

It was fitting then that its savior would be a veterinarian.

Growing up in Daytona Beach in the 1960s, Glenn Cherry learned what racism looked like -- like a white man giving bad career advice.

Cherry had always loved animals and knew early on he wanted to make healing them his life's work. He asked the family vet how to get a degree but was told to pick a career that would be easier for a black person to enter.

Heeding that advice was never an option.

His father was Charles Cherry Sr., a classmate of Martin Luther King Jr. at Morehouse College in Atlanta. Cherry Sr., a business teacher at Bethune-Cookman College in Daytona and one of the few black bail bondsmen in the state, would become the head of the Florida NAACP. When King was arrested in St. Augustine, Cherry bonded him out.

Glenn Cherry followed his father to Morehouse on an academic scholarship, earning a degree in biology in 1980. He earned his veterinary degree at the Tuskegee Institute, the college founded by Booker T. Washington.

The Air Force lured him from private practice, made him a captain and sent him to Europe to track infectious diseases from animals to humans. He returned in 1988.

That summer, Cherry's father called from Daytona Beach with information that a station there was for sale. Glenn and his older brother, Charles, had always lamented there was no black music station in their hometown.

Cherry tapped a ready-made network of financially savvy doctors and lawyers -- eight fraternity brothers with whom he had formed an investment club in 1981. Instead of putting their monthly dues into the stock market, Cherry asked them to buy into a dream.

In September 1988, Glenn and Charles Cherry took ownership of WPUL and "overnight changed the country format to urban.

"When we flipped the signal, all the advertisers walked away," Glenn Cherry said.

His fraternity buddies fretted. "They called me: "Hey, man, do you think this is still a good idea?' " Cherry said.

They turned a profit after three years.

He repeated the recipe with a news and talk station in Greenville, S.C., and in 1997 needed far less energy to persuade his investors to purchase WTMP for slightly less than $1-million.

As before, Cherry, the doctor of ailing radio stations, dispensed bitter financial medicine. He installed a computerized programming system that made a half-dozen jobs unnecessary.

But he worked hard, too, to restore the station's prominence in the community, hosting dress balls and encouraging community activism. The general partnership that represents his interest in the station is called Tama Broadcasting of Florida, named for the African talking drum.

"We're like the talking drum in the community," Cherry says.

Though WTMP's market share remains minuscule compared with those of the white-owned stations that play black music for white listeners, its value has increased to an estimated $3-million.

"We're still here," Cherry said. "We're still serving the community."

His business acumen has served his family well, too. He, Valerie and their 8-year-old son live in a spacious $200,000 home in Old Carrollwood, a neighborhood of shady cul-de-sacs that twine through lakes and orange groves.

WTMP's signal comes through clearly, but in a suburb that is less than 1 percent black, it's unlikely many radios are tuned in.

The only other radio interview Kendrick got was with a Christian station. They turned him down. "Maybe I wasn't Christian enough," he said, lighting a Marlboro. "But they didn't say that."

Kendrick said he thought he had a job at WTMP in the bag.

On the phone, Valerie Cherry had said she and her husband wanted him to come in for an interview because of his experience with the Scott system, the station's computerized programming equipment.

What happened the next morning at the station is colored by the adversarial language of the lawsuit.

Kendrick said he expected to meet with Glenn Cherry, 41, and that they shook hands when Cherry walked through the tiny waiting room. But Valerie Cherry, the head of human resources, did the interview.

Valerie Cherry praised his credentials, Kendrick said. "Then she stated, "I thought you were black because of the name Ty.' "

Kendrick said he tried to brush off the comment, saying, "I don't see color."

Later, he said, she mentioned that no white people work at WTMP and that the last white employee left because "she and her spouse were unhappy."

The Cherrys deny any such comments were made, pointing out that two white women work at the station, one in accounting and the other coordinating the placement of advertisements, and they have been there for years.

Kendrick expected to hear about the job within the week. The answer was delivered on his answering machine:

" "We decided to go with Chaniqua,' " Kendrick said, uncertain if that was the exact name.

In his suit, Kendrick doesn't specify what job he applied for.

"Because there was no job," Glenn Cherry said. Five people had been let go in the months before Kendrick visited the station, and another two people were let go afterward.

Kendrick says the job involved operating the Scott system and doing the midday show, although that is not specified in the suit.

"We don't need any help running the Scott system," Charles Cherry said. "It's menu-driven. It's easy to operate."

As for the midday show? Until recently there was no one in the studio during the midday show. The voice that listeners heard was prerecorded using the Scott system.

To all that, Ty Kendrick has what seems like a reasonable question:

"If there was no job, why did they call me?"

It was a mistake.

"My brother did something he should not have done, which was say, "Maybe we can use this guy sometime in the future,' " Charles Cherry said. "My brother is ex-military, he saw Kendrick is ex-military. He told his wife, "Show this guy around.' "

Is it possible that everyone knew this was a courtesy chat except the guy who was hoping for a job?

"If the guy jumped to a conclusion," Charles Cherry says, "that's his problem."

The Cherrys say it was a set-up; Kendrick says they're taking food out of his children's mouths (he supports a child from a previous marriage and a third child from another relationship). All the angry rhetoric obscures common ground the two sides don't even know they share.

Much of what Kendrick has learned about the state's continuing debate on race has come from listening to WTMP.

"They're very community-oriented," he said, admiringly. "They're always getting people fired up to take action."

Asked for an example, he mentions Jeb Bush's One Florida plan, which he does not know by name.

"When Jeb Bush was doing something to get rid of affirmative action in college, there was a big stink about that and they rallied some people . . . to go up to the capital and show people that was not right," Kendrick said.

In Kendrick's opinion, though, it is right.

"I shouldn't get a job because I'm a certain color or religion, and I shouldn't not get a job because of my color or religion," he said.

Though the station provided buses for people to travel to Tallahassee to protest One Florida, and though Glenn Cherry is a registered Democrat, he is not so much a proponent of affirmative action as he is of diversity. In a business that is predominantly black, that means hiring white people.

"I can't say I want diversity on this side," he says, "and not accept diversity on my side."

His father, the former head of the NAACP in Florida, is a Republican, and the two share a pragmatic approach to improving race relations: Improve the economic situation of the black community and equality will follow.

"It's not about race," Charles Cherry said. "It's about cash flow."

Ask Ty Kendrick if he can imagine a reason other than racism for what happened at WTMP, and he says no.

Ask the Cherrys if there's a chance Kendrick's motives were as innocent as simply wanting a job, and they say no.

Is it possible they're both wrong?

Does Kendrick, who chose to live in one of the city's most racially diverse neighborhoods, look like a racist?

Does Glenn Cherry, who was weaned on stories of racial injustice, seem like a man bent on discriminating against white people?

For various reasons cases do not always get to a jury -- some are dismissed, some settle. It may fall to us to decide if there were sinister motives on either side. We will discover, at the very least, that certainty is hard to come by when we examine the most mundane encounters between races.

Black people have long lived with the nagging suspicion that the color of their skin was the reason the cop pulled them over, or the clerk followed them through the store, or the landlord rented the apartment to someone else. Now a white person has the same kind of doubts.

But if he's wrong, if it wasn't race, then what was it?

Could it be "the Madman's" ego was wounded? Maybe a guy with an impatient streak, a need to be noticed and three kids to support couldn't accept that he didn't get a job he thought he deserved.

Could it be that professional communicators just didn't make themselves clear?

Maybe Valerie Cherry did say that Ty sounded like a black name. (Charles Cherry has asked Valerie not to comment on the case.) Maybe she should have said this was just a courtesy chat. Maybe she didn't think about the impression it would give to say one and not the other.

Ty Kendrick, crusader for equality, did land a job.

He is selling new cars.

He was salesman of the month in June.

He has given up sending out resumes to radio stations. Now the only time he hears his name broadcast is when someone pages him at the car lot.

Last month, WTMP advertised for someone to do the morning show. They hired a woman named Stacy Powers, who had worked as a disc jockey at WTMP several years back.

She is white.

- St. Petersburg Times researcher Cathy Wos and Times television critic Eric Deggans contributed to this report.

© St. Petersburg Times. All rights reserved.