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KPFA grew out of the conviction of Lew Hill and a small group of fellow World War II pacifists that the best hope for peace in the dawning nuclear age was open dialogue between people with different points of view. They actualized these ideals in a listener-supported radio station that would offer ideas not products. Broadcasting for the first time in April 1949, KPFA became a rare voice for cultural and ideological pluralism during McCarthyism and the conformist 1950s. Liberal thinkers such as Alan Watts, Langston Hughes, Dylan Thomas, Allen Ginsberg and Linus Pauling shared the microphone with conservatives Caspar Weinberger, the father of the H-Bomb Edward Teller and members of the John Birch Society. KPFA ON THE AIR recounts how KPFA became a voice for the radical movements of the 1960s. It surveys the station's spirited coverage of such events as the Civil Rights Movement, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, the campus Anti-War Movement and the rise of the Black Panther Party. Rather than covering up the fractious culture of the station, the documentary illustrates that communities are by nature in constant formation, change and contention. KPFA ON THE AIR traces how after the movements of the 1960s, the station painfully reconfigured itself into a multicultural coalition of various programming collectives. As KPFA ON THE AIR was being edited, the nonprofit Pacifica board that owns the station fired a number of long-time programmers and subsequently locked out the KPFA staff. Rumors spread that the board might sell KPFA's frequency, and a mobilized, militant listenership took to the streets in protest, ultimately re-establishing community control over the station's programming. Source: California Newsreel |
