Joe Armstrong, the owner of a Black-owned radio station in Tennessee, is fighting off a threat from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to seize his broadcast license due to a prior felony conviction, according to NPR.

The owner of WJBE 99.7 FM/1040 AM, whose call letters pay tribute to the original WJBE’s owner, the Godfather of Soul, James Brown, is under scrutiny for a tax crime that occurred years before he took ownership of the station in 2012.

“It’s not like this is something that happened, let’s say, this year or last year — we’re talking about something that happened in 2008,” Armstrong told NPR.

According to the Institute for Justice, a civil rights organization advocating for Armstrong, at that time, he and a partner legitimately purchased cigarette tax stamps that they later profitably sold once the Tennessee legislature decided to raise the state’s cigarette tax.

Armstrong had issues with the IRS because his accountant needed to pay the taxes on this sale correctly. He was found guilty of just one count of making a false statement on his tax return in 2016, having been cleared of most of the allegations brought against him.

Armstrong’s former accountant Charles Stivers was found guilty of tax fraud in 2017 and given probation.

Radio station a pillar of the community

Following Armstrong's conviction in 2016 for filing a fake tax return, FCC says it is still determining if he, a former long-serving state legislator in the Tennessee General Assembly, can own a radio station with integrity.

However, the station has been a pillar of news and information for Knoxville’s Black community.

The radio station, which according to Armstrong, is very much a community-oriented one, is a mainstay in Knoxville and provides news for the Black community. It broadcasts local news, weather, church services, up-and-coming artists, free advertising for struggling small businesses, and, more recently, details about the COVID-19 pandemic.

“There’s a lot of people out here that have made a mistake or have been falsely accused and punished for something,” Armstrong told NPR. “But when people make restitution, when they’ve done everything that they’re supposed to do — paid their fine(s), completed the community service — they’ve shown that their character if whatever they did, it was a mistake.”

He added he informed the FCC of his conviction in 2017, but according to Armstrong, nothing happened until last year.

Armstrong and his attorney, Andrew Ward, have questioned the commission’s decision to revoke the station’s licence and enforce its 33-year-old character-qualifications guideline for radio licence holders.

“WJBE has been a beacon for more than a decade. It makes zero sense that the FCC would threaten to take that away because of Joe Armstrong’s 14-year-old, unrelated tax crime,” Ward said in a statement to NPR.

The FCC declined to comment on Armstrong’s pending case, as the case is still pending, according to NPR.