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The Voice of Dunbar will live again.That’s the plan, anyway.A group of Dunbar residents is trying to start a new community-radio station to broadcast music, talk shows, news and other things relevant to the community’s largely black audience.“The community needs a voice,” said the project’s assistant director, Lodovic Kimble, a psychology professor at Keiser University. “And a radio station seems to be the best method to get the word out to the African-American community.”The project comes in the wake of a pirate radio station that the Federal Communications Commission shut down in 2011. The Dunbar station’s creator, Al Knighten, was arrested on a felony charge of unauthorized radio transmission and sentenced to perform community service in lieu of jail time. The feds seized his radio equipment.Despite being illegal, that station performed a valuable service for Dunbar residents, said Joe Battle, director of the new radio project and a supporter of the pirate radio station. The station served as cheap broncos jerseys a social hub and helped fight the public perception of Dunbar often reinforced in other news media.“Our community is underrepresented,” Battle said. “And we don’t want the narrative of our community and the people living in it to be decided by other sources Chiefs jerseys cheap and the media.“Most of the things they have are sensationalized, like high crime. But our community is multicultural, and we have a lot cheap Saints jerseys of good groups that are doing a lot of good things,” he saidDunbar Community Voice Radio will be named in honor of the weekly Dunbar newspaper the Community Voice, Battle said. Charles Weaver published the paper for 20 years until his death in 2007.Organizers are applying for a broadcast license under the 2010 Local Community Radio Act, which opened the airwaves to new, low-power FM radio stations across the country.This new station potentially could get federal approval sometime in March, and the radio could go live within three months after that, Battle said.“It would be a real station,” said the Rev. Jessie Denson of the nonprofit Dunbar Gospel Association, which is involved in the project.(Page 2 of 2)<br>The project’s first fundraiser will be a gospel concert Sunday featuring Grammy Award-winning singer Everett Drake, national recording artist Gayla James and two other acts.“So far we’ve been getting a lot of moral support from the community, and moral support is good,” he said. “But we also need cheap Chiefs jerseys financial support.”The Dunbar Community Voice Radio project is a broncos jerseys cheap longtime dream for some Dunbar residents, including Battle, who was part of a group trying to start a local station in the ’80s. That project fell apart. The Dunbar Gospel Association has also tried to start a radio station for more than a decade.The station would feature gospel, R&B, blues, jazz and other music “of an African origin,” Kimble said. Plus there would be political talk shows, local news, event announcements and more.Organizers plan to submit their application between Oct. 15-29, the open window for the FCC application process. If the project doesn’t get approved, they’ll likely apply again or perhaps look into taking over an existing, for-profit station instead, Kimble said.The 250-watt community radio station would have a range of 5-10 miles, Kimble said, but they eventually want to expand its reach to other largely black Lee County communities such as Charleston Park and Harlem Heights. That would require Saints jerseys cheap an upgrade to a bigger antenna.“We’re looking for it to bring the black community together, wherever they come from,” Kimble said. “We’re dreaming big.” Page