Learn, Baby, Learn : For 20 years, Magnificent Montague traveled the black DJ circuit, riding the explosion of rhythm and blues. What he brought home to L.A. was the slogan ‘Burn, baby, burn’--and a passion for preaching black history.

I chase history.

I’ve been running after it for 30 years, half my life. I’ve chased it into rare-book shops, manuscript dealerships, antique stores, estate sales, rummage sales. Chased it across the ocean to Europe. Chased down more than 6,000 books, paintings, films, toys, pamphlets, letters and slave documents, all of it to tell the story of 300 years of the African-American experience. It torments me and terrifies me and leaves me trembling with joy.

It also makes me wonder: Why me? Why is a man who spent much of his life as a disc jockey, screaming his heart out during the golden age of rhythm and blues music--a man whose most famous words are “ Burn , Baby, Burn!”--why does a man like me become ordained to preach history? Why do I feel as compelled to explain the majesty of the Black Eagle (stay tuned) as to rhapsodize about Sam Cooke? Why am I chasing history when, for so long, history was chasing me?

The name is Montague. One word: MONT-a-gyew . When I was on the radio, when I was spreading the music of James Brown, Otis Redding, the Temptations, Aretha Franklin and Wilson Pickett, when I was turning an R & B music show into a sweet soul church service, commanding my listeners to put their hands on the radio and touch my heart, listeners from L.A. to Chicago to New York knew me as Magnificent Montague. Even today, a quarter-century later, it’s not uncommon for them to recognize me. They’ll hear my voice, or maybe spot my name on a piece of mail, and suddenly I’ll be hearing their reminiscences about being 16 and listening to my show on a school bus. And, inevitably, the question will be asked: Why aren’t you back on the radio , Montague? Lord knows they need you to bring some fire to the air.

And I’ll shake my head and smile. For my time on the radio was indeed a time of fire. It was a time when music and society and race and technology all exploded like a bomb, a time when black DJs made R & B erupt out of that old marketing niche of “race music” and changed the way young Americans--white as well as black--saw their world. To live in that vortex was to touch America’s soul and be touched by it.

MY YEARS WERE 1952 TO 1971, AND THE HOTTEST YEAR of all was 1965, the year Watts burned. I had arrived at KGFJ, a black-oriented AM station on Melrose Avenue, early that year, bringing with me a slogan I’d developed on the air in New York at WWRL--a harsh cry of delight I often shouted during a record I particularly enjoyed: “ Burn , baby, burn!” My fans would call in on the radio every morning before they went to high school and yell it back at me--same way Rush Limbaugh’s crowd calls up these days to say “Ditto,” only with soul. Just a way of signifying that rare, glorious, sanctified moment in which a record, or anything else, had taken its art to a new level. Out on the playground, a young man might make a twisting, Elgin Baylor, hang-in-the-air shot, and you’d hear it from the brothers on the sidelines: “ Burn , baby!” It infected the lexicon like a virus, and to my horror, when Watts went up in flames that August, when people began setting buildings and cars afire on Imperial Highway and Avalon Boulevard and Main Street, they triumphantly screamed the most evident and analogous and hip thing at hand: “ Burn , baby!”

Back then, as the city reeled, I didn’t know what to say in response. For the first two days of the riots I kept using “ Burn , Baby, Burn!” on the air, like I always did. It was my slogan, not the rioters’. And the people in power who were demanding that I stop saying it--people like the mayor, Sam Yorty, and the police chief, William Parker--had no right to take it away from me.

Only as the years went by and my hobby of collecting turned into an obsession with black history did it dawn on me that the right rhetorical response to “Burn!” would have been a tired but true cliche: “ Learn , baby.”

Learn about the forces that are controlling you. Learn to dominate them. Learn that your people in America have always struggled against oppression and always will. Learn, in ways that will astonish and inspire you, that they have often won despite odds much greater than those you face.

Learn, for example, about the Black Eagle. Come along with me on the chase for him. Feel my adrenaline pump and my goose bumps rise.

From time to time there’s a manuscript dealer I telephone. Last time must have been five years ago. “Anything for me?” I ask. She says, “No, nothing.” One morning a few months ago, I’m doing my daily exercise workout near my apartment in Mid-Wilshire--and I see her on the street with another lady.

I call out, in mock defeat, “I’m not gonna get anything from you, am I?”

And she answers, “I think I have something for you, but I’m not sure where it is.” Her files are like that.

“What is it?” I ask.

“The Black Eagle.”

Well, my heart about stopped.

I had been fascinated with the Black Eagle since I first read about him in the ‘60s. His name was Hubert Fauntleroy Julian, and you can pick your description of him: soldier of fortune, stunt pilot, diplomat, rum runner, bodyguard, foreign correspondent, mercenary. The crown prince of black aviation. He was born in Trinidad in 1897, was raised in America and ran into the wall of segregation when he tried to become a military pilot in the 1930s. Blacks did not fly for this nation until the 332nd Fighter Group--the Tuskegee Airmen--was formed in 1942, a year after Pearl Harbor. So in 1936, Julian volunteered to fly for Haile Selassie’s Ethiopian forces, which were under attack by Italy. He became a colonel.

The Black Eagle was a spectacular man. Six feet tall, 200 pounds, striding through life in a derby, cutaway coat, striped trousers and spats. I had never been able to obtain a shard of the man’s life. But now my friend, the dealer, was offering me a piece.

It was a letter that showed me yet another side of the Black Eagle. Dated Sept. 6, 1940, and written on stationery identifying Julian as a captain in the Finnish Air Force, it described how Finland, which had been attacked by Germany five months earlier, had asked Julian to broker the purchase of 10 air ambulances. Julian had arranged for a Delaware aircraft company to build the planes and for Finnish pilots to fly them back to their homeland. The Black Eagle would pocket 10% of the $529,000 cost.

I had known none of this. Now I did. I had never been able to touch the Black Eagle. Now I could. And so I slipped him into an acid-free folder and put him to sleep with the rest of the people whose glory and foibles I pursue, the people who one day will come alive inside what I will call the Montague Museum of African-American History and Culture. This is the vision that drives me, that keeps me cataloguing and indexing. I am one day going to build this museum for the ages, particularly for the youngsters, this show-me generation that needs history to live and breathe, that needs to hold men and women like the Black Eagle in its hands.

I started collecting in the 1950s, rummaging through used-book stores at first, then became obsessed in the ‘60s. Never expected to get interested in black history because I didn’t grow up thinking of myself as black. Oh, I was black, but not black-black. I didn’t feel black. I felt like Montague.

THE RADIO BUSINESS CHANGED THAT.

Growing up in New York in the ‘40s I was a radio junkie. I loved the voices I heard, the great radio voices of people like Gabriel Heatter, the newsman, and Martin Block, the pioneer disc jockey. I got the bug. I had no style, but I knew what styles to steal and meld, and at 16 I just picked up, headed north and managed to sell enough advertising time on a little low-frequency station in the Boston suburb of Brookline, to get a half-hour show. That job folded after a few months, and I hitched a ride with a music promoter down to Texas.

That’s where I found out I was black.

Houston, KCOH, 1953. Texas City, KTLW, 1954. “You got sponsors, boy? OK, you can have air time to play records, but please don’t come into the station. You do your shows from nightclubs or restaurants, got it? Stay out of the building.” It was a bitch. And what made it even harder was the fact that I started to develop a style of broadcasting aimed at women. Looking back, this was a no-brainer. You couldn’t get on the air if you didn’t find sponsors for your 15- or 30-minute show, and women held the purse strings But I pushed the envelope until it popped. I started to draw a surprising number of white female listeners. Here I am, confident as all hell, reading my poetry on the air, dedicating it to my “darlings,” telling them not to let their men treat them like dogs, vilifying the male species.

Didn’t have to be a genius to figure out who that was going to upset.

One day some men in white sheets visit the station. The manager calls me inside and introduces me to the representatives of the Ku Klux Klan.

“By God, you been makin’ love to white ladies, boy,” one klansman complains. Boy this, boy that. Uppity, uppity. Manager jumps in to save his own scalp--”Montague, didn’t I tell you to stop that?” I’m dead, I know it, when in walks J. P. Richardson, later to be known as the Big Bopper, the singer who died with Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens in the historic 1959 plane crash. He stood up to the klan and the station manager and saved my job . . . and, for all I know, my skin.

These kinds of raw encounters scraped away my naivete. Later on down the road, fans would hear me scream with glee over Ray Charles’ “Drown in My Own Tears,” Stevie Wonder’s “Uptight,” James Brown’s “Lost Someone,” the Miracles’ “Shop Around” and Otis Redding’s “Mister Pitiful” and assume I was a soul brother off the block, blown onto the air from the corner of some mythical ghetto intersection. “Back it up and gimme four more bars!” I’d yell at the end of a record I wanted to promote, and then I’d play the last 30 seconds again and moan over it lovingly.

Truth be told, I didn’t know squat about R & B or the blues until I went down to Texas.

I started learning on Sundays, when I’d fill in once in a while on “The Little Green Church on the Hill,” a show for shut-ins. Bible reading and preaching. New to me, brother. My people in New York weren’t fire and brimstone; I was raised Holiness, Pentacostal, but none of it hit me, you understand? This thing about “blacks all got soul,” that’s a lie. I didn’t have no soul.

But there was a black preacher whom I shared time on the air with, and I started picking up on how black preachers operate. I started to mock him: “And the L-o-o-o-r-d said . . . .” That’s how I developed. I got my radio personality from a lot of unknown black preachers and artists of the South. Those fierce blues singers in Chicago. Those resolute Black Muslims of Harlem. Influences. I’m part and parcel of all of them. I want to be honest. Without them, there’d be no Magnificent Montague. Those preachers, they had the timing. I mean, I didn’t know how to dance, man. And some of that blues music, I didn’t understand what they were shouting about. What allowed me to develop my persona as a young man was that all kinds of black music filtered through Texas: Bobby Bland, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Louis Jordan, gospel stars like the Soul Stirrers and their new star, Sam Cooke, doo-wop. Meeting them, doing my daily show from clubs, record hops, living and breathing with the listeners, the fans, the advertisers--something inside me started to bubble up.

I fled Texas for Chicago by 1955. Had to. Southern segregation was too stifling. A prominent black DJ in Chicago on WAAF died, and I beat out 150 other jockeys for his job. I became, unknowingly, part of a huge migration of Southern blacks to northern cities, the same way I’d become, in the mid-1960s, part of another huge migration of blacks to Los Angeles. When I was on the air in Chicago, listeners who’d moved there from Texas would sometimes telephone their families and hold the receiver next to the radio, sending a nostalgic blast of Montague down South.

I understood none of the historical significance of these demographic shifts. I was too busy hustling, working the edges, trying to convert a $50-a-week radio salary into a living wage, cutting deals with sponsors and record stores and record companies and record promoters and advertisers. Example: You get 100 extra promotional copies from a record company and give them to a liquor store owner; then he gives the beer brand that sponsors your show better shelf position. Over the years, I stuck my fingers into every crevice of the music business. I became a songwriter, a publisher of more than 150 singles and albums and a record producer. I built my own studios wherever I was a DJ and used them to record new talent. Managed artists, booked weekend shows. What else was I going to do, protest my lousy radio pay? There wasn’t anybody to protest to .

Working in these racially charged environments, driving through so many cities in an era in which highways still let you see local commerce, and being the kind of person who likes to soak up a variety of influences, I spent more and more time looking for materials defining black history. There wasn’t a lot of competition for memorabilia. Negroes were still relatively invisible in America. As any collector can tell you, you develop an addictive love of pursuit. You see a fragment and it fits because of a dozen other seemingly isolated fragments that you’ve bought over the years. You imagine or crave a certain work, and then one day, out of nowhere, you behold it. Better yet, you are occasionally confronted with material that transcends your imagination.

I was in a rare-book shop in New York once, leafing through the Civil War section. Man at the counter says, “Look, I don’t have nothing.” I keep browsing, and I see the spine of a thin book, the title so old I can’t make it out. Now, I have a rule: Whenever I can’t understand the printing on the spine, I always look. I open it up. It’s in mint condition. The title is jarring: “Our Nig.” I notice the date, 1859. I notice the subtitle: “Sketches From the Life of a Free Black.” That’s enough for me. Without reading further, I buy it and put it away for 15 years. Only when I read an article saying that Harvard had a copy of the first novel ever written by a black woman, and that someone there was bragging about it, did I check my file, and I smiled: It was the same book, written by Harriet E. Wilson, whose name was buried in small type on an inside page. But see what happens when you’re consumed by collecting? Sometimes your instincts jump too quickly for your own good. I had assumed that I’d bought a white writer’s biography of a black. Only now did I recognize that I’d purchased something far more valuable.

Some of what I own, I have never seen another copy of. An example is my thick 1895 book recording all written and spoken tributes after the sudden death of Frederick Douglass, America’s leading Abolitionist--and that scares me more than it delights. If I hadn’t found that book, it might well be consigned to oblivion. Imagine: What happens if “Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil & Wicked Traffic of the Slavery & Commerce of the Human Species,” written in 1787 by Attobah Cugoano, an African taken to England, is never read? What happens if a tiny, elegant pincushion with an engraving of a black man in chains, called “A Colored Man in the City of New York,” made in 1835 by Patrick Henry Reason, a black artist who worked for Abolitionists, is never seen? What happens if Frank Sapp’s magnificent 1944 painting of Haitian Gen. Toussaint L’Ouverture astride a horse, symbolizing the ability of black men and women to throw off colonial chains, is never viewed?

Conversely, what happens if you allow people to experience these works, and hundreds like them, in the course of a day? I’ll tell you. You throw your so-called contemporary role models in the trash can. You proclaim that these are our role models.

The more I collected, and the longer I remained a DJ, the more my professional life bled into my fascination with the black experience. I was working at KSAN in San Francisco in 1957 when the station decided to jump into the violent struggle to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Ark. A delegation of us, including the station’s white owner, the Rev. Norwood Patterson, flew to Providence, R.I., where Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus was attending a weekend governors conference, along with President Eisenhower. The week before, Faubus had barred nine black children from entering Central High. I squeezed into a Saturday press conference the governor was holding and burst out on behalf of one of the black children, Elizabeth Eckford, whom we planned to fly out to San Francisco Sunday for a rally.

“Governor!” I yelled. “That little girl says she’s scared but she wants to go back to school. Why don’t you give the kids a chance to learn, let them go back to school Monday, and if there’s any trouble, then call out the National Guard to protect them?”

“Why do you try to crucify me?” Faubus replied. “I’m the most liberal governor in the South.”

“Do you call pointing guns at children ‘liberal?’ ” I shouted back.

Now, what the hell was I doing? I didn’t have the political sophistication to be carrying on a debate with a minor-league politician, let alone Faubus. But at a time when blacks had no power base beyond their churches, this was the role that black DJs had begun to play in the ‘50s. Whites owned the stations and the unions. We DJs labored in electronic sweat shops, sweltering studios with noisy electric fans, one microphone and two turntables and heavy headphones. Your on-air nickname might be Jockey Jack, but if you messed up they’d fire you and put another Jockey Jack on the air tomorrow, and it would be as though you never existed. Barely up from slavery.

Yet despite these hardships--in fact, because of them--successful black DJs enjoyed astonishingly strong, direct communication with a mass audience, a feeling of solidarity that was unprecedented in commercial broadcasting. We were de facto mayors and weekday preachers, masters of a private universe. We were the equivalent of movie stars, the sole link between listeners and the music. No way that happens today. You’ve got stations being routinely sold for tens of millions of dollars, programming their music on the basis of demographic and “psychographic” studies. The DJs are along for the ride. In my day, radio was a seat-of-the-pants business. You worked by your gut.

Tell you a story from 1961. I’ve left San Francisco for a brief stop in L.A. and then a year in St. Louis, and now I’ve hit New York, home at last, on WWRL. I’m so popular that in addition to my 1 to 3 p.m. show, the station adds another three-hour shift, midnight to 3 a.m. (Thousands of parents eventually wrote the station to complain that their kids’ schoolwork was suffering because they were staying up too late.) Atlantic Records, the giant of R & B, has purchased a song called “If You Need Me,” intending to have it recorded by one of its popular artists, the great Solomon Burke. But somebody has slipped me a copy of an unreleased “demo” of the song, recorded by a then-unknown artist named Wilson Pickett. I love it and begin playing it, and the request phone line starts jumping off the hook with calls from listeners who feel the same way. I call up Jerry Wexler, Atlantic’s guru, to let him know. He’s speechless. You’re playing the wrong record, he complains. Didn’t matter to me. I didn’t need any market research to know a hit.

Until recently, I had forgotten a lot about those days. I’m a stubborn kind of fellow, short and wiry and steel on the inside. I hate losing, and I pride myself on not looking back. After Watts burned, I reluctantly let “Burn, Baby, Burn!” slip out of my repertoire. It was stained. The Los Angeles Times had a front-page story the fourth day of the riots explaining that the “hep” slogan had been “borrowed” from the radio, but that wasn’t enough to salvage it. “Magnificent Montague will ‘burn’ no more,” the black-owned L.A. Sentinel proclaimed. I told the kids, if you want to call KGJF and scream a dedication, scream, “Have Mercy!” And they did, and I did, too, and my show on KGFJ continued through 1966, the greatest year R & B music ever saw, an endless sweaty parade of Otis Redding and Sam and Dave, Stevie Wonder and Eddie Floyd, Johnnie Taylor and Wilson Pickett--music so simultaneously hard-edged and tender, rhythmic and melodic, lurid and sacred, gospel and gutbucket that an hour of my show could leave you slumping over your car’s steering wheel, gasping for breath. Soul music, we called it, a brief but glorious marriage of R & B at midnight and church on Sunday morning.

But my fascination ebbed. Radio was getting too profitable to be left to the DJs. Programming gurus were already institutionalizing the Top 40 format, playlists were replacing the instincts of the jocks, FM was replacing AM. I left KGFJ in 1967, broadcast for a couple of years on L.A.’s legendary XERB with Wolfman Jack, then set my sights on producing records and developing new radio stations. Meanwhile, “Burn, Baby, Burn!” was adopted by protesters of all races. In New York, black demonstrators, angered by a murder acquittal, yelled it as a threat. In Berkeley, flag-burners screamed it on the eve of a Supreme Court decision. In South Carolina, capital punishment advocates chanted it outside execution sites. I didn’t care.

Then, nine years ago, on the 20th anniversary of Watts, I got a call from a white guy at The Times named Bob Baker, pitching a what-happened-to-you? story. I wouldn’t talk to him. He wrote me a letter, told me that 20 years ago he’d been a fan, that in some weird way soul music had rescued him. I gave in. He drove down to Palm Springs, where my wife and I owned and ran an easy-listening FM station. After a couple of hours of talking, I started to think about what had happened to me, where my life fit.

All those crazy times. Spinning Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me” for six straight hours from midnight till dawn while broadcasting out of a furniture store in L.A. in 1958. Refusing to sit in a blacks-only section at a Bobby Darin concert in St. Louis in 1960 and instead--at Bobby’s demand, once he heard about the nonsense--introducing him onstage. Watching Johnny Ace shoot himself to death playing Russian roulette backstage in Houston in 1954. Having Malcolm X come to my apartment in New York in 1962 and use my black history collection to research those riveting street-corner speeches he gave on 125th Street. Making public introductions during the L.A. mayoral campaigns of a man I’d first met when he was a cop, Tom Bradley.

I began to recognize that the black experience wasn’t merely something that I’d collected. It was something that I’d lived, something that I’d helped shape. If history was chasing me, maybe I’d let it catch up.

See, I want stories like mine, bigger than mine, in the black history museum I’m going to develop. I want hundreds, thousands of them. I want to take my collection out of storage in a warehouse and lay it out in a place where history can leap out at you. Where you can walk the path of my people. Where you not only listen and read about the pain and the glory but you feel it. Where the video screens roll the images and the speakers burst forth, and the greats, the Booker T. Washingtons and the Frederick Douglasses, share the podium with the anonymous strugglers.

I want you to hold in your hand the 12 1/2-cent pamphlet written in 1850 by fugitive slave Henry Watson. I want you to watch the silent movies of 1916 by the black-owned Lincoln Motion Picture Co. of Los Angeles. I want you to sing along to “It Pays to Serve Jesus” by the Pace Jubilee Singers. I want to overwhelm you with the power of contralto Marian Anderson’s Negro spirituals and classics. I want to bombard you with computerized special effects to make you well up with tears at the sheer brilliance of Dr. George Washington Carver.

We have the technological power now to show the course of a man’s life in the span of five minutes: a sickly Alabama slave child, stolen from his mother, repurchased by his owner for the price of a horse, miraculously rising to earn a master’s degree in agriculture, inventing the economic miracle of crop rotation by alternating cotton with peanuts, then developing more than 100 peanut byproducts. Behold a replica of his laboratory, his letters, an original painting he did with peanut oils. Behold this inspiration--inspiration for all Americans. Step inside my museum and touch my heart. That is my dream.

I want to tell these stories to reach the youngsters who have the energy and the intensity to succeed but don’t know their history. I don’t want to tell it to them. I want to show it to them. These gang members, these rappers--once they understand their history, there’ll be no holding them back. I will give them something more powerful than their AK-47s. I will give them their BHDs, their black history degrees. I will show them how to soar, like the Black Eagle.