W. V. Banks Dies; Black-Owned TV Station President
William Venoid Banks, president of the first black-owned television station in the United States, has died at his home here. He was 82.
Banks, a lawyer and minister who died Saturday, was president and general manager of Detroit’s WGPR-TV, which went on the air in 1975, and WGPR-FM, which became Detroit’s first black radio station in 1964.
“The fact that blacks can launch a television station is proof that America is the land of opportunity for all people,” Banks, the son of a Kentucky tenant farmer, once said.
Banks was born in Geneva, Ky., and graduated from Lincoln Institute of Kentucky. He came to Detroit and worked in the Dodge auto plant while attending what is now Wayne State University. He graduated in 1926 and entered Detroit College of Law, earning a degree there in 1929.
He also attended Detroit Baptist Seminary and was ordained a minister in 1949.
He was supreme president of the International Free & Accepted Modern Masons, known as the Black Masons, and it was that fraternal group that subsidized the television station.
The station originated nearly all its programming because of what Banks described as a dearth of black-oriented shows.
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