Joe Madison, radio host and civil rights activist, dies at age 74

Joe Madison, an influential radio host with a rumbling musical baritone who interviewed President Barack Obama in the Oval Office and countless other political leaders in his Washington, D.C., studio and urged them to take action on civil rights and human rights issues, has died at his home in Washington. He was 74.

His family announced the death on Thursday, but did not indicate when it occurred. In December, Mr. Madison said in a statement that he was retiring from his daily show on SiriusXM radio after learning that his prostate cancer had returned; it had been in remission since first diagnosed in 2009.

Mr. Madison was ranked as the sixth-leading talk show host in the country in 2023 Talkers magazine on the Heavy Hundred list, where he was also the highest-ranked non-white presenter.

“Joe Madison was the voice of a generation,” President Biden said said in a social media post this week. “Whether it was a hunger strike for voting rights or his advocacy for anti-lynching legislation that I proudly signed into law in 2022, Joe fought hard against injustice.”

Mr. Madison, a former high-ranking official in the NAACP, combined social activism on radio with advocacy outside the studio. He took part in a 73-day hunger strike in 2021 to urge Congress to strengthen voting rights laws after Democrats gained control of the Senate and White House.

During the Madison show, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the new majority leader, pledged to back long-stalled anti-lynching legislation because, he said, black voters had played a crucial role in bringing back the Democrats in power and “we owe it to them.”

“No one has fought harder for his beliefs and his community than Joe Madison,” Schumer said in a statement.

Other recent guests have included Vice President Kamala Harris, Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California when she was Speaker of the House, and Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina.

As Congress signed the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act in 2021, Ms. Pelosi thanked Mr. Madison for championing it.

His broadcast — Monday through Friday from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. — was on the Urban View channel on SiriusXM, which Mr. Madison became an exclusive member of in 2013. Decades earlier, he was a fiery personality on two Washington radio stations, WWRC-AM and WOL-AM, where he was known as “the judge” for vetting callers.

“People will call you and try to give you wrong information,” he says told The Washington Post in 2013. “Most people get upset out of frustration. They don't like to be challenged, but that's how I grew up: people challenged your thought process.”

Before joining radio in 1980, he was political director of the NAACP and served on its national board for fourteen years. While there, he led a march from Los Angeles to Baltimore to promote voter registration.

Mr. Madison continued his political activism as a radio host. He was arrested in 2001 after handcuffing himself at the Sudanese embassy in Washington; he had made repeated broadcasts to raise awareness of modern slavery in that African country. He made several trips to Sudan and, working with the Swiss-based Christian Solidarity International, helped free Sudanese held as slaves.

In 1996, Mr. Madison was arrested while leading a protest outside CIA headquarters after repeatedly accusing the agency on his show of contributing to an explosion of crack cocaine use in black communities in the 1980s. The allegations were made in a series of articles in The San Jose Mercury News. A Michigan congressman, Representative John Conyers Jr., visited Mr. Madison's show to praise him for raising the issue, but critics said Mr. Madison was spreading a conspiracy theory among black listeners.

A House Intelligence Committee investigation later found no evidence linking the CIA to the epidemic.

In 2015, Mr. Madison stayed on the air for 52 straight hours to raise money for the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Joseph Edward Madison was born on June 16, 1949, in Dayton, Ohio, the son of Felix Madison, a press operator, and Nancy (Stone) Madison. The first in his family to graduate from college, he earned a BA in sociology in 1971 from Washington University in St. Louis, where he was a running back on the Bears football team, baritone soloist in the campus choir, and DJ for the campus radio station.

At the age of 24, he became director of the NAACP branch in Detroit. His radio career began at WXYZ-AM in Detroit. After moving to Washington, his popularity led to national syndication of his show and then a deal with SiriusXM, the satellite platform available to subscribers nationwide. On the air he called himself 'The Black Eagle'. He was initiated inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 2019.

In 1977, Mr. Madison married Sharon L. Moore, who survives him, along with four children, Shawna, Jason, Monesha and Michelle; five grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.

Mr. Madison often presented guests with a trademark challenge: “What are you going to do about it?”

“I have always seen myself as someone who realizes that one person can make a difference,” he explained in 2013. “Rosa Parks was a seamstress. Mabel Teel was a mother. Fannie Lou was a stock grabber. President Obama was a community organizer.”