Above and Beyond

Dr. Rodney Wead has penned his story in a book, Above and Beyond: How a Tall, Lanky Kid from the Omaha Housing projects spent a lifetime helping others top their dreams. He shares insight into how he used his high school and college athletic abilities and lessons to balance how he achieved countless civil rights victories while achieving economic improvements and describes his eclectic experiences that range from rising from childhood poverty with his best friend, the late Major League Baseball Hall of Famer, St. Louis Cardinal Ace Pitcher Bob Gibson, to founding a credit union, the nation’s first black-owned and operated AM/FM radio station and a community bank.

Dr. Wead takes you on a journey that tells of his greatest friendships - with two line brothers and several notables who have transitioned to the Golden Shores - hometown mentee and NFL Hall of Famer, Chicago Bears’ great Gayle Sayers, and Historian and Journalist Dr. Lerone Bennett. He proudly details initiation into Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity, Inc., Alpha Eta Chapter at Dana College.

Dr. Wead has received numerous accolades. A street has been named for him in Omaha, nearby the former location of the Community Bank of Nebraska, a Nebraska chartered institution that he led the organization of to benefit the economic uplifting of the Black community. As Dr. Wead describes in his book how financial investor Warren Buffett encouraged him to pursue the bank founding because “he was fully supportive of the Black community raising its own capital and therefore, creating financial empowerment.”

The founding of KOWH AM/FM radio station earned the Omaha community the first in the nation to have a black-owned and operated AM and FM bands. Radio One and TV One Founder Cathy Hughes, referred as his little sister, helped Dr. Wead in establishing the station by recruiting and training its first disc jockeys. Hughes' lived nearby in the same housing projects. That project, Logan Fontenelle, was the site of triumphant and tragedies. The senseless death of a young teenage girl, shot in the back of the head by an Omaha police officer, is among the most horrific experiences impacting his life including the irrational and near life-ending beatings by then U.S. Presidential candidate and Alabama Gov. George Wallace’s private security team. Dr. Wead had many more encounters with the police as a routine demonstrator for human rights that included passage of the National Voting Rights Act of 1965.