Paul White

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Paul "Tall Paul" White (born August 16, 1936 in Birmingham; died August 19, 2001 in Birmingham) was a popular African American disc jockey of the 1960s on WENN-AM. He and his broadcast colleague Shelly the Playboy Stewart were known to broadcast coded messages to civil rights demonstrators during the Birmingham campaign of the early 1960s.

White was the son of Elrod and Minnie White of Titusville, and was born at Hillman Hospital. As a child he traveled with his mother, a popular preacher in the Apostolic Overcoming Holy Church of God, often taking the pulpit himself. They settled in at the Mason City Apostolic Overcoming Holy Church of God in 1947 and he attended Spaulding Elementary School. White later came to live at the home of his older sister, Dorothy and her husband, Linwood McGinest, while attending Rosedale High School. At some point, he gained the nickname "Dudley", presumably as a reference to famed cardiologist Paul Dudley White, who served as personal physician to President Dwight Eisenhower.

In 1952 White enlisted in the U.S. Army. He served in Germany and competed as a boxer. Though he had completed most his high school classes, his academic records were incomplete and he had to re-enroll at Rosedale after his service, graduating in 1958. He worked briefly in Chicago, Illinois and took classes in broadcasting there. By 1960 he returned to Alabama and took a job at Leroy and Viola Garrett's WEUP-AM in Huntsville. There he became the first radio play-by-play voice for the Alabama A&M University Bulldogs.

Joe Lackey and Erskine Faush recruited White to broadcast Miles College Golden Bears football games on WENN and to read news stories during Shelley Stewart's morning show in 1961. When Stewart moved over to WJLD-AM a year later, White took over his morning slot as "Tall Paul", a name inspired by a 1959 Annette Funicello hit.

Tall Paul had a significant audience among white teenagers, demonstrated on one of the favorite feature of his shows -- "Roll Call." For Roll Call he would play an uptempo instrumental and then in his inimitable style announce the names of area high schools when students from those schools called in. In those still-segregated days it was not unusual to have Ramsay High School announced along with the "Parker High Thundering Herd" or the "Rosedale Sons of Kong."

White joined the staff of McClendon Broadcasting's newly-formed WENN-FM in 1969. On June 1 of that year, White was one of the featured speakers, alongside U.S. Representative John Buchanan, at a "Youth For Decency" rally at Legion Field. White's speech was on the theme of "Love of Family and Respect for Authority."

After McClendon's death, manager Joe Lackey formulated a plan for the staff— which included White, Erskine Faush, Shelley Stewart, Maurice King, Pat Williams, and Weldon Clark— to buy the station. After a few unsuccessful attempts to secure a loan, they approached A. G. Gaston, owner of Citizens Federal Bank. Gaston sent Louis J. Willie to evaluate the operation, and ended up buying the station himself and firing Lackey. In response the staff organized a walkout. The story of Black employees striking over the firing of a white manager made national news. White followed Lackey and engineer Joe Dentici to WATV-AM. Not long afterwards, White was hired at WJLD-AM, where he worked until his retirement in 1992.

In 1972 White and William Sutton operated a nightclub called Tall Paul's Funland.

White died in 2001 and was buried in an unmarked grave at Carver Memorial Gardens in Minor. In 2019–2020 Birmingham Black Radio Museum founder Bob Friedman, who briefly worked with White at WJLD-AM in 1989, raised funds to furnish a bronze marker for his gravesite.

White was inducted into the Birmingham Record Collectors Hall of Fame in 2017 and the Alabama Broadcasters Association Hall of Fame in 2022.

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