About OUR COMMON GROUND
OUR COMMON GROUND
Speaking Truth to Power and Ourselves
OUR COMMON GROUND is a Black-centered space for conversation, critical thought, community, memory, and the continuing work of Black liberation.
For more than four decades, OUR COMMON GROUND has brought Black people together around a microphone—not simply to talk about what was happening to us, but to examine who we are, what we believe, what we need, where we disagree, what confronts us, what we owe one another, and what we might build together.
The OUR in OUR COMMON GROUND has always mattered.
It was never about finding some comfortable middle ground where differences disappear or difficult truths are softened. It meant our ground—a place where Black people could speak with one another, think together, challenge one another, build community, and acknowledge one another with respect, dignity, and honor.
We spoke truth to power.
And we spoke truth to ourselves.
That was the proposition at the beginning.
It remains the proposition today.
THE BEGINNING
OUR COMMON GROUND grew from a lifetime of community activism, advocacy and a conviction that informed public conversation could itself become an instrument for change.
Long before the microphone, OCG host and executive producer Janice Graham had worked in community organizing, public engagement and advocacy around the systemic and systematic inequities confronting Black people across virtually every area of American life.
After leaving West Palm Beach for college in Boston in 1966, she became deeply engaged in that city’s political and community life. Among her formative experiences was working for three years as a field specialist with civil rights attorney and activist Thomas I. Atkins, former Boston NAACP executive director, Boston’s first Black city councilman and later General Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
She was also an avid listener to talk radio and came to understand the extraordinary possibilities of the medium: people gathering around ideas in real time, questioning, disagreeing, teaching, learning and thinking aloud together.
After returning home to West Palm Beach, Graham appeared as a guest on a local talk program. When its host prepared to leave, the station approached her about taking the microphone.
She saw an opportunity—but not simply to host another radio show.
She met with community activists to think about what a Black-targeted radio station serving Palm Beach County and reaching into neighboring communities needed to do, rather than simply reproducing what radio was already doing.
From that conversation came OUR COMMON GROUND.
The microphone became a meeting place.
And the conversation became the work.
A PLACE FOR BLACK PEOPLE TO THINK TOGETHER
From its earliest broadcasts, OUR COMMON GROUND insisted upon something both simple and demanding: Black people needed independent space in which to engage one another seriously.
That meant examining racism, white supremacy and the institutions and systems that shape Black life.
But it also meant turning the examination inward.
OCG challenged its listeners and guests to consider Black leadership and institutions, class and gender, political strategy, culture, faith, economics, education, family, responsibility, accountability, memory, resistance and the exercise of our own collective power.
There were no requirements that everyone agree.
There was a requirement that the conversation matter.
Listeners were never incidental to that work. Call-in radio made the audience part of the program. People brought their experiences, questions, knowledge, disagreements, anger, humor and wisdom to the microphone.
The conversation did not belong only to the host or the guest.
It belonged to OUR COMMON GROUND.
FOUR DECADES OF BLACK THOUGHT, LEADERSHIP, CULTURE AND RESISTANCE
Across its broadcasting life, OUR COMMON GROUND welcomed an extraordinary constellation of Black voices.
Scholars and educators. Authors and journalists. Artists and culture creators. Historians and researchers. Activists and organizers. Lawyers, clergy, political thinkers, social commentators and movement builders.
Some were emerging voices. Others were among the most recognizable Black intellectuals, authors, activists and public figures of their time—people our listeners knew from books and magazines, classrooms and conferences, political movements and cultural institutions, and later from the expanding digital world.
They did not come merely to be interviewed. They came to have conversations.
OCG asked its guests—and its listeners—to go beneath the headline.
To interrogate assumptions.
To connect history with the present.
To confront power.
To disagree honestly.
To question ourselves as rigorously as we questioned America. And to consider what Black people could do for ourselves and with one another.
Those conversations now constitute something we understood only gradually as we were creating them: A RECORD of CONTEMPORARY BLACK HISTORY
FROM A MICROPHONE TO A NETWORK
The technology changed over the decades, and OCG changed with it.
The conversation moved from terrestrial radio to internet broadcasting, podcasting, online communities, social networks and live video.
OCG built community wherever the technology allowed people to gather—not simply an audience to which we could broadcast.
That work eventually expanded through TruthWorks Network — The Black Voice Collaborative, created, produced, and owned by OUR COMMON GROUND, extending the mission through additional programs, hosts, conversations, and special projects.
Across these platforms, OCG and TruthWorks explored politics and power, race and racism, Black women and gender, education, economics, criminal justice, culture, faith, history, reparations, democracy, international affairs, movement building, and the continuing struggle for Black freedom.
The platforms were tools. The mission was the constant.
COMING BACK
After more than 35 years of broadcasting, Janice Graham stepped away from the microphone.
But OUR COMMON GROUND was never only a radio program.
It was—and remains—a place.
And this moment calls for that place again.
We are not returning to recreate an old radio show.
We are not attempting to reproduce 1990, 2009 or 2022 with newer technology.
We are coming back to reclaim the space.
A place where Black people can think together.
Question together.
Remember together.
Disagree without surrendering our dignity.
Examine the forces shaping our lives.
Challenge ourselves as well as those who exercise power over us.
Listen again to those who came before us.
Hear the voices emerging among us.
Preserve what must not be forgotten.
Bear witness to what is happening now.
And continue asking the question that has always lived beneath the OCG microphone:
What can we build together?
The technology has changed.
The microphone has changed.
The world has changed.
But the need for OUR COMMON GROUND has not.
OUR COMMON GROUND
Speaking Truth to Power and Ourselves
BOLD. BRAVE. BLACK.
THE ANCESTRAL IMPERATIVE: BEAR WITNESS
The conversation was the work. It will be again.
I’ll Be Listening for YOU.
— Janice Graham
UNDERSTANDING The OCG Mission
OCG is a call to action—a statement of purpose, inheritance, responsibility, and urgency for Black people in this moment.
