Alice D

The Flint Courier News reported this week that longtime radio host Alice Delaine Evans, known on air as Alice D., has retired from gospel radio station WFLT-AM (Flint) after 37 years.

She started her career in radio, interning at WFLB, the radio station that was in the basement of Flint Central High School. In college she wrote and produced a 16-week series entitled “Soul Spotlight” where she did interviews, played music and gave job openings for the week, among other things. She did campus radio at Michigan State University, but her first professional job was at the former WTLZ-FM in Flint.  Evans went on to be one of the original announcers at WDZZ-FM, later moving the WFLT.

“It was a hard road to hoe because everyone said one-I wouldn’t get in the business, that I wouldn’t stay in the business and that I wouldn’t be accepted,” she said. “Number one: I was Black. Number two: I was blind. Number three: I was a female. They already said I had three strikes and I would not succeed. I used to tell them: ‘How can I succeed if you don’t give me a chance?”’

Evans told the paper that her colleagues always remind her of how long she has been around and that she has “set the bar very high.” Evans was the first totally blind Black graduate from the Flint Public Schools. She graduated from Northwestern, where “all the special ed material for the blind was at that time.”  Evans said that she "lived radio" from the time she was 9 and still does.

Evans told the paper that she has been called a living legend “many, many times by many people, ” but considers herself “just an everyday person.”