Kwesi Sipho Umoja, EE’67, says that Dr. Martin Luther King’s death had a profound effect on his perception of tomorrow. Umoja, one of only 19 African-Americans on the S&T campus when he was in school, would go on to start the first black-owned and operated national radio network, National Black Network, in 1971.
“While I was in the streets I made the decision that I was going to leave my job as an electrical engineer at Colgate-Palmolive and go to work ‘finding solutions,’” says Umoja, who was known as Eugene Jackson as a student. Umoja would also go on to serve as a member of the board of directors of the National Association of Broadcasters and founder of the National Association of Black Owned Broadcasters. In 1994, he helped launch the World African Network Cable System, which distributed news by satellite to 125 African American-focused stations in the United States.
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