Smiley's People (NPR & liberal Blacks)

THERE IS A BOX TO the left of Tavis Smiley in the broadcast studio, a box with knobs and dials and cords running in and out of it. There is a row of green lights on the box, flashing every time Smiley's voice rises above the level of normal conversation and enters the danger zone.

National Public Radio has built a reputation on smooth, professional broadcast voices, projecting authority, repose, and, let's face it, geographic anonymity—these voices come from anywhere and nowhere. They tend to be "white" timbres, usually without much of an accent or any other cultural identifier. That sensibility has kept NPR growing for three decades. But in the studio off Crenshaw Boulevard where Smiley assembles his weekday NPR show, something else is growing: the volume. Smiley's gruff voice is distinctly black and outside the beltway, it's definitely loud, and you can tell it's in the house, 'cause all the lights are on.

Thirty-seven years old, Smiley has a round face and is sensitive about his weight, which goes up and down; right now he's a little on the stocky side. In the adjoining room an engineer, a producer, and a radio consultant huddle as the show begins. There are suggestions coming over a speaker from Washington, D.C., where more staff are based. In a baseball cap and shorts, Smiley looks defiantly casual, but he feels it the same as everybody else present at the god-awful hour of 4 a.m.: There's a lot riding on his show.

Some 640 public radio stations broadcast in the country, and at the moment 27 have picked up The Tavis Smiley Show, making it a fledgling success but far from a certified triumph. "The educated population of African Americans and Hispanic Americans has grown, but that growth hasn't been reflected on the air," says Bill Davis, president of Southern California Public Radio, which oversees Pasadena station KPCC. "If The Tavis Smiley Show works, I think you'll begin to see public radio extending service out to audiences we just haven't serviced very well in the past. If it doesn't work, it's back to the drawing board."

This morning Smiley is interviewing two educators about problems black students face in the classroom, when suddenly he barks at one of them who generically invokes racist teachers. "I respectfully disagree—some of these Nee-grows are bad," says Smiley. It's hard to tell which is the biggest shock, that somebody said "Negro" on usually calm-cool public radio, that he pronounced it like he was sucking his teeth, or that the person who said it sounds a lot more like the rapper DMX than Morning Edition anchor Bob Edwards. This is a black voice talking black in a way that has unmistakable resonance for anybody tuning in.

The Tavis Smiley Show began airing in January and is heard locally on KPCC weeknights at 8 p.m. The hour-long program features a mix of debate pegged to news of the day and conversation with African American news makers and commentators. Nowhere else are you going to hear academic Cornel West, attorney Connie Rice, and conservative University of California regent Ward Connerly—all regulars—on a single show ???. Routinely radio and television drafts one spokesperson to stand in for all black people. But the Smiley show casually eviscerates the notion of a monolithic consensus and exposes differences of opinion, starting with a host who takes "Nee-grows" to task.

When public radio spotlights a race issue on its news shows or attempts a show targeted at an ethnic group, the results tend to be an eat-your-peas chore or tortured liberals torturing the culture they claim to love. Smiley's show is different: a living, breathing thing, open to everyone but focused on race. It is far from perfect. You can tell when he's reading interview questions (handed to him by staffers) that he's never before set eyes on, something that happens too often. He greets old friends with an off-putting degree of "whassup" familiarity. The chummy vibe extends to his cultural coverage, in which he lets guests shamelessly hype their book or film. At its best, though, when Smiley puts the script aside and freestyles, race talk is framed with a deftness and give-and-take it rarely gets in the mainstream media.

FOR A SHOW THAT EMANATES from L.A., it took a long time—five months—before Smiley was heard on local radio. Competitors KCRW and KPCC added the show the same week in June, though KCRW dropped it after the briefest of tryouts—less than two weeks. "The audience just rebelled," says station manager Ruth Seymour. "It was a terrible mistake." Perhaps the mistake had to do with the time KCRW handed Smiley, a 5 a.m. slot.

KPCC gave Smiley a far better slot, and his unpolished interview style and range of topics mirror those of its other talk show hosts, Larry Mantle and Kitty Felde. KPCC is also giving its audience time to grasp the show, seeing it in the long run as good for public radio as a whole. "There's an axiom within public radio that says programming causes audience," says KPCC's Bill Davis. "There's a reason why public radio listeners tend to be more white, more educated, and therefore relatively more affluent than the audience at large."

The show incidentally manages something NPR rarely deigns to do: break news. Cornel West disclosed his problems with Harvard University president Lawrence Summers to Smiley's listeners (he has since left for Princeton), and Bill Clinton fessed up about discussions to host a TV talk show (now on hold). When the Adam's Mark hotel chain tried to wriggle out of a Justice Department consent decree triggered by allegations of racism, Smiley put an executive on the air and heard him say the chain wasn't going to subvert the decree.

One reason Smiley can get Clinton to break news is that he owns one of the great Rolodexes in Western civilization. Smiley's not really a radio head with a passion for broadcasting; rather he is an incipient Oprah Winfrey, a media mogul whose personality and personal story dwarf any single accomplishment. He writes self-help books, holds seminars; he had a popular TV talk show on BET until he scored an interview with Symbionese Liberation Army member Sara Jane Olson and took it not to BET but to ABC. Oh yeah, he had a deal with that network, too, and that's another thing about Smiley: He has so many fish to fry it's a wonder there are any left for the market. He's in business with Bill Gates on a series of seminars and then interviews Gates on his radio show. He and Clinton have become pals, and in 1996 the ex-president introduced him to Dallas-based DJ Tom Joyner, whose nationally syndicated radio program (heard by 12 million listeners) now features commentaries from Smiley. He's not enterprising—he's an enterprise.

Part motivational speaker, part political activist, and part up-by-bootstraps proselytizer, Smiley comes across as sincere, eager, and a little bit square. He is a liberal Democrat, but more fundamentally he's an entrepreneur. Like Carter G. Woodson, Booker T. Washington, and other earlier black entrepreneurs, Smiley sees self-enrichment as race empowerment. So do many of his black listeners: In a way that it doesn't for whites, wealth signifies an advance for the race. Many of Smiley's on-air crusades are about economics: shaming corporations that don't do business with people of color.

But his business-world entanglements take on problematic connotations when applied to his show. Can he report on folks he's also doing deals with? When Wal-Mart is found guilty of discrimination, which it recently was in Kentucky, how aggressively will he discuss this, given that Wal-Mart sponsors his ABC radio spots?

"I recognize that at the end of the day all I have is my credibility," says Smiley. "I'm not an athlete, I'm not an entertainer. I'm blessed with just one gift: to try to empower people. I take that very seriously, so I do everything I can to make sure the lines are not blurred. I've got relationships in corporate America, but they would never stop me from asking tough questions. I don't get called a softball interviewer the way Larry King does."

He's a tireless vendor of opinion, in print, on radio and TV (he's a commentator on ABC and CNN). Which puts him at odds with National Public Radio, which mistrusts vivid personalities. (This is the network that turned down A Prairie Home Companion and This American Life, which originated elsewhere and became two of public radio's biggest success stories.)

The Tavis Smiley Show itself was conceived far from NPR's D.C. headquarters. In the mid '90s a group of public radio stations with a large black listenership, aligned with stations at historically black colleges, formed a consortium and began pressuring NPR for black programming. When Smiley became available after BET canned him, things moved quickly.

Laying out events this way, though, reduces his program to a black show. It's a billing no white-run program has to face, and Smiley would rather not carry that weight, either. "The truth of the matter is that everywhere I go I take my blackness with me unapologetically," he says. "The other truth is that this is the only show on NPR that has the burden every day of being authentically black but not too black. Because you don't want to offend the mainstream stations that carry your show every day. It's a delicate balancing act."

Raised in Kokomo, Indiana, Smiley grew up one of ten children, to a father who was an air force master sergeant and a mother who was a Pentecostal preacher. He attended Indiana University, where a friend was shot in the back by the police, an experience that motivated him to enter politics. In 1985 Smiley besieged Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley—whom he had yet to meet—with letters pleading for a job. Bradley was a leading black figure in national politics and was sufficiently impressed with Smiley's energy to give him an internship that eventually led to a staff position.

"I wanted to learn big-city stuff," says Smiley. From Bradley he learned how to get things done quietly and that good work gets noticed. Smiley also learned the value of a good suit. Bradley knew that a high-profile black man has all eyes on him and that every flaw is magnified, clucked over. "He said, 'Tavis, always remember this. You're a good-looking boy—always keep your good looks. Because whatever you do in life, all other things being equal, if you look good, you got a leg up.'" Smiley tells me this one morning at 6:30, chugging on a treadmill after finishing his show. "Whenever my weight goes up, I think Tom Bradley would be really disappointed in me."

After his time with Bradley, Smiley got the bug, running in 1991 for a city council seat; he came in fourth. He had plenty of entrepreneurial moxie, but now he was in need of a gig. He landed a daily slot on AM radio and began to market himself as an entrepreneur of empowerment. As a job description that's pretty vague but also usefully flexible, and Smiley's timing was impeccable: He emerged in the post-riot era, a time when the media were searching for the monolithic voice of black Los Angeles. He was never going to be that, but he leveraged his skill as a speaker and his connections, and he rarely turned down the offer of a microphone. BET gave him a show in 1996, and his aggressive stands on issues and high-profile guests made him a national figure.

ULTIMATELY, THE MOST INCONGRUOUS THING about Smiley's NPR show isn't that it speaks with a black voice on a network where there aren't many, but that it comes from Los Angeles. In its 32 years, NPR has never before had a show that originated here. The network has looked at Los Angeles the way characters do in Woody Allen movies—we're the wacky outpost where trends come from and where Hollywood rules all. We make the folks in D.C. feel that much better about themselves.

That might just be changing, though, when the network opens NPR West, its new facility in Culver City, in October. This is its first major production center outside Washington, D.C. The $12 million center, funded half by NPR and the rest by California-based foundations, will have room for about 90 employees when it's fully on line. Smiley's production staff will move there (though he'll continue to broadcast from the building he owns near Leimert Park), and the network is planning a new daytime news and culture show that will, it says, have a West Coast flavor. NPR West will also house the West Coast bureau and function as backup to the D.C. headquarters should D.C. ever go off the power grid.

"We all know that Southern California as a whole is an influence maker in terms of culture for the country, whether for better or worse I'll leave to greater minds than me to work on," says Ken Stern, NPR's executive vice president. "I think we will fail in our mission if we take NPR East and dump it without change on the West. I think there's going to be a new, different NPR culture out there."

Nothing so far divulged about the new daytime show (scheduled to begin sometime next year) makes it sound like a break from the parade of news and talk NPR already offers in abundance. According to Stern, the show will feature amped-up coverage of pop culture and trends; he does not mention immigration or secession. It doesn't seem like NPR brass have spent a whole lot of time picking the brains of the best local radio minds, among them Ruth Seymour.

"When has that ever stopped an organization before?" asks Seymour. "[I'm] somebody who loves the network and raises tons of money for it, [but] they have never had a West Coast sensibility. They are very East Coastoriented in their way of thinking. It's hoped they understand that there is another sensibility out here."

THE GREEN LIGHTS ARE DIM, the treadmill shut off. It's afternoon now, and Smiley has finished his show, tracked down Al Sharpton in a Philadelphia restaurant for an interview, and visited his barber. Now he is driving over to City Hall to interview Mayor James Hahn.

Immediately the difference between NPR culture and the ways of Smiley are clear. As the radio pros who keep him on the air mill about nervously in a City Hall pressroom, and as a mayor's aide stands there looking at her watch, Smiley is nowhere to be found. When he arrives 20 minutes late, apologizing for the traffic, let's just say Smiley doesn't seem surprised that the mayor makes time in his schedule to still do the interview.

There is an odd coolness to their conversation, Smiley reading questions from a sheet a producer hands him, Hahn attacking secession—the issue that will define his legacy—with all the passion of a pot holder. Then when the interview is finished, both stand and come to life. They waltz off for a private chat; Hahn gossips about Bernie Parks, Smiley pledges to do what he can to fight secession. They move in close, Hahn handicapping his anti-secession campaign and warming up. This is what politicians do best, stroke and schmooze, and make no bones, two pols are working each other here.

Smiley has a one-year contract with NPR. Given his drive, many have wondered about his commitment to public radio. The topic came up at a recent NPR station managers meeting, and Smiley felt it necessary to tell the brass he wasn't going anywhere yet.

"I consider this opportunity historic," he says. "One does not run away from a historic opportunity one year into it. There's a whole culture at NPR that needs to be challenged and changed. You don't do that in a year. And I owe it to all those persons of color who have never had a show like ours to not, in the words of James Brown, 'hit it and quit it.'"

Still, nothing suggests that Smiley is settling in for a long haul. The visit with Hahn over, the tape recorder stashed away, Smiley gets a tour of the mayor's office, reminiscing with Hahn's staff about the Tom Bradley era. Does he ever think about running for office again, he is asked as he strides to the elevator. "Um, not right now," he says with a smile. "Besides, I've got people telling me I'd have to take a pay cut if I worked here."

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