Hughes, Cathy

Impact on the world

After developing the “Quiet Storm” radio format at Howard University's WHUR-FM in the 1970s — a late-night R&B and ballads format later adopted by more than 450 stations nationwide — Hughes purchased her first station, WOL-AM in Washington, D.C., in 1980, at one point living inside the station with her son because she could not afford both rent and operating costs. She built Radio One into the largest Black-owned broadcast company in the country, and when it went public on NASDAQ in 1999 she became the first African American woman to head a publicly traded corporation; she went on to launch the cable network TV One in 2004 and rebrand the company as Urban One in 2017, which today spans more than 50 radio stations, cable television, and digital media reaching tens of millions of households. Howard University renamed its School of Communications in her honor in 2016.

Life & background

Born Catherine Elizabeth Woods on April 22, 1947, in Omaha, Nebraska, to William Alfred Woods, the first African American to earn an accounting degree from Creighton University, and Helen Jones Woods, Hughes began working in radio sales as a teenager at a Black-owned Omaha newspaper and radio station before moving to Washington, D.C., in 1971 to join Howard University's newly formed School of Communications. As General Sales Manager of WHUR-FM starting in 1973, she increased the station's annual revenue from $250,000 to $3 million within a year and became, in 1975, the first woman vice president and general manager of any radio station in the nation's capital. She and then-husband Dewey Hughes founded Radio One together in 1980; her son from an earlier marriage, Alfred Liggins III, now serves as Urban One's CEO while she remains chairperson, and she continues to support The Piney Woods School in Mississippi, founded by her grandfather in 1909.

Sources

1. BlackPast.org; Howard University; Black America Web