Martha Jean the Queen—Patron Saint of Blue Collar Detroit

Martha Jean the Queen painted by DeVon Cunningham (1976)

 

A couple of radio executives from WCHB-AM in Detroit were driving through Memphis on business in 1963 when they heard the voice of Martha Jean the Queen (MJQ) on their radio. They liked the Queen’s Southern accent and her facile deejay patter. These Northern radio men were in the South shopping for an African American disc jockey that could help WCHB-AM (Inkster, Michigan) capture the vast Detroit Black radio market. Most Black Detroiters had Southern roots, so it seemed like a sensible marketing strategy.

MJQ was number one in her Memphis time slot which was a notable achievement in the Jim Crow South for a Black woman disc jockey—a testament to her ability to draw an audience. These Northern radio execs called Martha Jean at WDIA–AM and offered her a raise of $30 a week if she would take her radio program to Detroit. MJQ was a recently divorced, single mother of three daughters who didn’t want to move, but Martha Jean had custody and needed the extra income, so she took the job.

Martha Jean Jones was born on September 9, 1930 in Memphis and graduated from a Catholic school. She began nursing school but the harsh realities of life and death pushed her into business school. As fate would have it, Martha fell in love with jazz trumpeter Luther Steinberg, married him, and had three daughters in quick succession. She saw her life as the manifest destiny of a young Southern Black woman, a child of poverty, followed by a volatile marriage, bondage to babies, and a lifespan of degradation by Whites.

Luther Steinberg was struggling in the music business when he became abusive to Martha Jean, so she divorced him. “There are two things I can’t stand,” she said commenting on her failed marriage in a Detroit Free Press feature article on January 10, 1982, “a man who is cheap and a man who runs around on his woman.”       

Martha Jean used the power of positive thinking to pick herself up and provide for her children. “We should all try to see the beautiful side, the positive side (of life),” she said, “but the ugly side has been with us as a people for a long time and with me personally as a divorced woman with children.”

Martha Jean Steinberg became a receptionist for Memphis radio station WDIA-AM. Because she had a pleasing manner dealing with everyone who walked through the door, the station manager gave her a try on the radio in 1954 as a substitute for an ill disc jockey and she stayed there for nine years learning the radio business and earning the title The Queen. Her patented tagline "You betcha!" after she read advertising copy was like money in the bank for advertisers.

In a May 21, 1967 Detroit Free Press Sunday interview, MJQ was asked what her radio name “The Queen” meant to her. In figurative deejay fashion she answered, “I was written in the sands of time 5,000 years ago, endorsed and smiled upon by the gods. I have a purpose, and I’m on my way to fulfill my purpose…. I am the Queen of the people, they are my purpose.”

When MJQ came to Detroit, WCHB wanted her to play easy listening rhythm and blues and read advertising copy. MJQ’s Homemakers Delight program ran from 10:00 AM until 12:00 PM for three years. One of her early challenges was the perception that she sounded too White to project the Black image over the airwaves. “I had to get down with it to prove I was Black enough and find my place in Detroit’s Negro community, so in many ways, I had to act and sound more colored than colored. Detroit had long been a haven for jazz musicians, so I introduced jazz to my musical lineup and my audience grew.”

MJQ became known for supporting women’s rights throughout the 1960s reminding blue collar wives when it was payday at the Ford plant or Great Lakes Steel—the two largest employers of Black men in the Detroit area. “Get that check from your man before it disappears, ladies.” Martha Jean was proud of herself for making it without "the crutch of a man.” She never forgot the desolation of being left alone with three daughters and no money. The Queen was an inspiration to her soul sisters in the audience.

Unsatisfied with her limited role at WCHB, MJQ jumped stations again when WJLB-FM offered her more money, air time, and freedom to co-produce her own programming. In addition to playing music, she added a fifteen minute call-in segment named Tasting Time where she gave her daily salute to blue collar people around the Detroit area.

In a Detroit Free Press feature article on October 23, 1966, MJQ explained her move, “WJLB-FM will give me a better opportunity to serve my people and do things for them. The secret of my success in Detroit are the people—the forgotten blue collar workers. I like and enjoy people. I feel a disc jockey has command of so many hearts and minds…. I give my listeners a positive reality and that surge of hope necessary to exist. I feel my day is in vain if I can’t touch someone or lift their spirits.

“In my own Southern way of talking, a lot of people started listening to me. My positive message gives people self-confidence to accomplish whatever is challenging them. I’d play blues, and between each bar of a song, I’d talk without interfering with the lyrics and say things like ‘Hey! You cats at Kelsey Hayes’ or ‘You guys in the hole on Ecorse Road’ when the Wayne County Road Commission was working on the roadway. These blue collar workers were listening on transistor radios at work, and it made them feel like somebody when I mentioned them or their place of work on the air. Soon, places all over town began asking me to give them a call out over the airwaves. My slogan was ‘You’re somebody, act like it’.”

 

During the 1967 Detroit Riots/Rebellion, MJQ broadcast for 48 hours straight urging Black demonstrators to get off the streets and stay home. She helped police negotiate with armed Black Panthers barricaded in a house into surrending peacefully to avoid bloodshed because innocent women and children were inside. That terrible conflagration was transformative for Detroiters. From that moment onward, Martha Jean felt a responsibility to be a bellwether for her people. In the 1970s, MJQ moderated a show called Buzz the Fuzz with Detroit Police Commissioner John F. Nichols credited with improving police/community relations. Every Thursday from 7:00 PM until 7:30 PM, callers could ask Commissioner Nichols questions.

On January 11, 1971, MJQ gave a short scream into the microphone at noon, and then there was three hours of radio silence. Nine Black WJLB staff members—including MJQ—staged a sit-in by locking the studio door and barricading the plate glass front window of the station’s offices on the 31st floor of the David Broderick Tower. The on-air staff was all Black but management was all White. The staff charged that the outgoing station manager failed to live up to an earlier agreement to appoint a Black station manager to replace him. After all, WJLB’s listening audience was primarily Black. The sit-in strike ended at about 3:00 PM after attorneys for both sides met to settle the matter with Norman L. Miller being named as WJLB’s first Black station manager.

Three weeks later on February 2, 1972, Martha Jean had an on-air, religious epiphany. While doing her Inspiration Time program, she announced, “I was just touched by the Holy Spirit.” Then there was a brief pause. Pensively she continued, “It was as if something, a different entity, came through my soul and told me my mission is to help bring Jesus Christ to the people,” she explained. From that moment, MJQ shifted from Soul Mistress of Detroit to Radio Evangelist and began featuring gospel music.

In 1972, Martha Jean became an ordained minister and established her own nondenominational church in 1974. She purchased a two-story house on Grand River Avenue with a $70,000 Kresge Foundation Grant and named her church The Home of Love. She set about fulfilling her mission to serve the downtrodden and forgotten people of Detroit. Her organization raised money and bought the house next door for a church community nursery and preschool for daycare to help young Black women earn a living and get a leg up on life. The $12,500 mortgage for the Joy Building was paid off in cash.

MJQ left WJLB-FM on May 30, 1982 over a scheduling dispute. Their new station manager told Martha Jean he was switching her popular midafternoon time slot to their spiritual hour at 5:00 AM. The time change was unacceptable, and she wasn’t having any of it.

Two weeks later, MJQ signed with station WQBH-AM that specialized in Black-oriented religious and inspirational programming. She took over her familiar 11:00 AM to 2:00 PM afternoon time slot.  The new job also came with a pay raise in line with her new status as station vice president and program director. Fifteen years later, MJQ formed The Queen’s Broadcasting Corporation and purchased WQBH for $4.1 million dollars becoming the first woman-owned radio station in the country. She financed the purchase on the strength of her radio personality, her lucrative radio contract income, and her advertising agreements.You betcha!

Martha Jean the Queen passed away at the age of sixty-nine from an undisclosed illness at 10:45 AM on January 29, 2000 in Detroit’s Harper Hospital. Upon learning of Martha Jean the Queen Steinberg’s passing, The Detroit News reported, “She was hailed as an inspirational force that motivated people and served as a conscience for those needing guidance. Her listeners were the common, everyday folks from Detroit who lived from paycheck to paycheck.” MJQ had a private funeral service and was buried in Detroit’s Elmwood Cemetery.

In her lifetime, Martha Jean the Queen was honored as one of rock music’s pioneering disc jockeys—the only woman so honored. She is also a member of the Black Radio Hall of Fame, Michigan’s Black Women’s Hall of Fame, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and what she was most proud of, the founder and spiritual leader of the Queen’s Community Workers of America, that did charitable works around the city for Detroit's forgotten people.

In 1976, Detroit docu-artist DeVon Cunningham painted MJQ’s portrait where she is wearing a blue caftan and surveys the heavens. It commemorates her trip to the Holy Land with seventy members of her Order of the Fishermen ministry. The painting is listed in the registry of the National Portrait Gallery of American Biography at the Smithsonian Institute.

Docu-artist DeVon Cunningham