'WGIV' was an African American formatted radio station tuned to 1600 kHz on the AM radio dial, licensed in the city of Pineville, North Carolina. Founded by Francis Marion Fitzgerald in December 1947 at Charlotte, North Carolina, the call letters unofficially stood for ‘We are GI Veterans’, in reference to the then recently concluded World War II, and the station has been identified as being amongst the first franchise in the broadcasting industry to take on racial issues. The people of Charlotte viewed WGIV as an icon of White-Black] integration, as represented in one of their brand symbols – a white hand shaking a black hand. WGIV believed in co-operation and integration over uprising, and sought to dissolve lines between Whites and Blacks rather than isolate the two as different identities.