Joe Madison, a prominent talk radio host with a musical baritone, who interviewed President Barack Obama in the Oval Office and many other political leaders in his studio in Washington, DC, urging them to take action on political and humanitarian issues rights. at his home in Washington. It was 74.
His family announced the death Thursday, but did not say when it happened. In December, Mr. Madison said in a statement that he was taking a leave of absence from his daily show, on SiriusXM satellite radio, after learning that his prostate cancer had returned. he has been in remission since he was first diagnosed in 2009.
Mr. Madison was ranked the #6 most important talk show host in the country in 2023 by Talkers magazine on the Heavy Hundred list. He was also the highest-ranking non-white host.
“Joe Madison was the voice of a generation,” said President Biden he said in a post on social media. “Whether it was a hunger strike for voting rights or defending the anti-lynching legislation I proudly signed in 2022, Joe fought hard against injustice.”
Mr. Madison, a former senior NAACP official, combined social activism on air with advocacy outside the studio. She went on a 73-day hunger strike in 2021 to urge Congress to strengthen voting rights laws after Democrats gained control of the Senate and the White House.
On Mr. Madison’s show, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the new majority leader, pledged to pursue long-overdue anti-lynching legislation because, he said, black voters had played a critical role in bringing back Democrats in power and “we owe it to them.”
“No one fought harder for his beliefs and his community than Joe Madison,” Mr. Schumer said in a statement.
Other recent guests have included Vice President Kamala Harris, Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California when she was speaker of the House, and Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina.
At the signing into Congress of the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act in 2021, Ms. Pelosi thanked Mr. Madison for standing up for him.
His show — aired from 6 A.M. to 10 a.m., Monday through Friday — was on the Urban View channel on SiriusXM, which Mr. Madison joined exclusively in 2013. For decades before that he was a fiery personality on two Washington AM talk stations, WWRC and WOL, where he was known as “The Judge” to fact-checking viewers.
“People will call and try to give you misinformation,” he 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 entering radio in 1980, Mr. Madison was the political director of the NAACP and served on its national board for 14 years. While there, he led a march from Los Angeles to Baltimore to promote voter registration.
He continued his political activism as a radio host. He was arrested in 2001 after being handcuffed at the Sudanese embassy in Washington. had made repeated broadcasts to raise awareness of modern slavery in Sudan. He made several trips there and, working with the Swiss organization Christian Solidarity International, helped free the Sudanese who were being held as slaves.
In 1996, Mr. Madison was arrested while leading a protest outside CIA headquarters after he repeatedly accused the agency on his talk show of contributing to the boom in 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 lawmaker, 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 to black listeners.
A House Intelligence Committee investigation later found no evidence linking the CIA to the outbreak.
In 2015, Mr. Madison stayed on the air for 52 straight hours to raise money for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Joseph Edward Madison was born on June 16, 1949, in Dayton, Ohio, to Felix Madison, a press executive, and Nancy (Stone) Madison. He was the first in his family to graduate from college, earning a bachelor’s degree in sociology in 1971 from Washington University in St. Louis, where he was a running back on the football team, a baritone soloist in the campus choir and a DJ on the campus radio station.
At 24, he became the director of the Detroit branch of the NAACP. His radio career began at WXYZ-AM in Detroit.
After moving to Washington, D.C., his popularity led to a national syndicate of his show and then a deal with SiriusXM, the satellite platform available to subscribers nationwide. He called himself “The Black Eagle” on air. He was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 2019.
In 1977, Mr. Madison married Sharon L. Moore, who survives, along with four children, Shawna, Jason, Monesha and Michelle. five grandchildren; and a great-grandchild.
Ms. Madison often posed a trademark challenge to guests: “What are you going to do about it?”
“I’ve always seen myself as a person who recognizes that one person can make a difference,” she explained in 2013. “Rosa Parks was a seamstress. Mabel Teel was a mother. Fannie Lou was a shareholder. President Obama was a community organizer.”
