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This source claims that the radio can be a reason for the transformation of love to evol.
The real evil is actually "the evil of denying love."

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"But 'magic' in this sense is really part of the culture's make-believe innocence,"
The "magic" of the world of radio blocks the reality of the world from those who listen and make friends with the fictional characters. The fanciful imagination ignited by the fairy tales is in reality a "fraud, a pretended closeness," a fake feeling of love and security.

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Because of the invisibility of the fictional radio characters, the listeners are somewhat forced to make a deep connection with them. "The latter's invisibility demands an imaginative participation from the listener, and thereby enhances the intimacy of the relationships."

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"Baraka's poem defines the 'magic' of radio as a symptom of the irrational basis on which the culture perceives the achievements of technological reason." This is important because it makes it visible that Baraka believes that he is truly aware of what is happening around him.

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The contrast that Amiri uses with Mandrake the Magician is that Amiri cannot use "powers of hypnosis." He also uses the comparisons of Oral Roberts and F. J. Sheen.
This is important because it shows that Baraka realizes that he can't simply force the world to listen to reason rather than feeling.
"On both counts Mandrake therefore represents the scientific logic that made possible the technological 'magic' of radio."

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Brown, Lloyd W. "Baraka as Poet." Amiri Baraka, Twayne Publishers, 1980, pp. 104-134. Twayne's United States Authors Series 383. Twayne's Authors Series, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/CX1375900014/GLS?u=txshracd2529&sid=GLS&xid=3e998aac. Accessed 3 Jan. 2018.

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The world within the radio waves, for Baraka, is "a world free of ethical ambiguity." Baraka's poem is more of a gateway to a world in which he loved to be in. However, he is now simply looking in the past, from a future of eye-widening pain and harshness.

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In this poem, the Shadow is viewed as a hero, "a patron Saint of bohemianism (worshipped by Jack Kerouac and the poet), because he knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men."

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Smith, David L. "Amiri Baraka and the Black Arts of Black Art." Poetry Criticism, edited by Michelle Lee, vol. 113, Gale, 2011. Literature Resource Center, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/H1420103547/GLS?u=txshracd2529&sid=GLS&xid=1c0eb9a3. Accessed 3 Jan. 2018. Originally published in Boundary, vol. 2, no. 1/2, Autumn-Winter 1986, pp. 235-254.

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The various radio characters that Baraka mentions in his poem are used to show his nostalgia for the imaginative world that he once was enveloped in.
"It is with genuine anguish and consequent despair that he registers the death of a more meaningful and more painfully developed myths and the ideals they once manifested."

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When the poem says that The Shadow knows what evil lurks in the heart of men, I can agree that Blacks have "the keen insight, the 'divinity,' to detect evil unerringly like the Shadow."

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"Love spelled backwards is 'an evol word,' and no one knows that more surely than Blacks." This source says that The Shadow is a slang for Blacks, but why would it only be black people that know love is evil? I sort or agree because Blacks do go through racial segregation and other disadvantages.

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The poem starts out with mentions of Lamont Cranston and ends with The Shadow. This source claims that "it develops the poet's pre-and post-World War II assumption that radio heavily, through optimism and fantasy, purveyed the view that God's in His Heaven, All's Right with the Status Quo." This does not make much sense to me.

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"The poem is easily read as a statement that Blacks living in a white society have a special ability for the divination of evil." (divination - the attempt to gain insight into a question or situation by ritual)

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Hakac, John E. "Baraka's 'In Memory of Radio,'." Poetry for Students, edited by Ira Mark Milne, vol. 9, Gale, 2000. Literature Resource Center, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/H1420031287/GLS?u=txshracd2529&sid=GLS&xid=b4ac57da. Accessed 3 Jan. 2018. Originally published in in Concerning Poetry, vol. 10, no. 1, Spring 1977, p. 85.

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"That sometimes evil is necessary to bring about good is a claim Baraka himself makes in his more militant writings."

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Baraka's love of the radio helped in forming his "adult self," but also "helped to put him in touch with his (potentially) evil self.
This shows how the innocent word "love" turned into a knowingly "evol" one. The fictional radio character, The Shadow, can represent this evil side of Baraka. Just how The Shadow is invincible to those that listen on the radio, Baraka is somewhat invincible to those that read his work.

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Baraka utilizes rhetorical/self questions in order to "undercut his own statements."
He equates himself to Mandrake the Magician, one who can "construct make believe worlds."

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Amiri Baraka mentions Jack Kerouac as an "ally against the tacky tastes of the hoi-polloi."
This shows that Baraka does not side with the more popular tastes of the radio, and uses Kerouac as a supporter of his tastes.

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Baraka's muse in this poem is "Lamont Cranston, the alter ego of the Shadow, a crimefighting superhero of pulp novels, comic books, and radio shows from the poet's childhood."
Kate Smith is another radio performer who is known for singing "God Bless America."  She also helped by "sell[ing] war bonds and entertaining the troops during World War II." This is important because it shows how much of an influence she has had on the country.
WCBS is a radio station that helped her music spread.

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Amiri Baraka's poem addresses "the loss of self."
He feels that he lost his innocence along the end of radio.
His poem has elements of a "pastoral elegy," a poem that is usually about death and a perfect rural life.
Uses an "invoation of the muses," serves as a prologue to events that are to come.

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Semansky, Chris. "Overview of 'In Memory of Radio'." Poetry for Students, edited by Ira Mark Milne, vol. 9, Gale, 2000. Literature Resource Center, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/H1420031285/GLS?u=txshracd2529&sid=GLS&xid=36969732. Accessed 3 Jan. 2018.

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"The radio, the adult poet realizes, always lay under the shadow of politics, class and racial divisions, state power, and sexuality, even as it nourished the child's imagination and allowed the poet within him to develop."

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The "'innocence lost'" with the radio was an "authentic and undivided state of imaginative power," it let Amiri Baraka escape from the shadows of harsh reality.
This is bad because it kept him from "grasp[ing] the real world's truth."

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Although the radio age came to an end, it helped Baraka in the fact that it released him from the world of fairy tales and magical radio waves.
It helped "in the child's maturing beyond the state of unthinking belief on which his imaginative pay with the radio deepened."

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The poem symbolizes a piece "of his childhood's most intense imaginative experience, the long hours a boy spent seated before the radio."
Amiri Baraka's childhood was majorly effected by the collective hours he spent next to the radio, momentarily living in a world of complete imagination.

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The era of radio is thought of as a magical experience "lost from the world of everyday reality and only to be revisited through a special act of imagination."
The radio is a sort of secret that only those who experienced it firsthand will understand. Amiri Baraka is one of those people, and feels bad for those who do not understand.

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The title 'In Memory of Radio' and the work from which it came (a book, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note) can suggest a theme of death, a "powerful preoccupation with death."
The title can symbolize "a sort of elegy--a memorial for the dead

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"In Memory of Radio" can symbolize a sort of letter of remembrance written by ghosts from the lost world of radio.
"evokes disembodied voices coming over the airwaves," shadows of the past, a "part of the child's lost world conjured back momentarily by poetic memory."

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The era of the radio lured in the listeners with "spellbinding dramas."
Fictional characters on the radio once "radiated" godliness

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Amiri Baraka wrote this poem truly in memory of the radio era. I am assuming that he grew up listening to the radio, everyday. And once he saw the television taking over, he realized that it was leaving the magical importance of the radio behind. He wrote this poem with the idea that the radio can never be replaced. However, he does mention that while growing up with the radio, he was somewhat blinded or hypnotized by the voices of the radio.
He claims that he can't hypnotize or persuade like the famous people on tv, but he knows that love is evil. He even goes to the extent to flip the word around to spell "evol"
He says that he would not want to experience love in order to try to find the real meaning of such a word. I think that maybe he's had some bad experience with love.
He goes back to his days of youth, listening to fanciful stories and realizes how entranced he once was. Maybe he is reasoning with himself, maybe it is good that the era of the radio is fading. So that he can keep his eyes open to reality.
The claim is made that the evil that lies deep within the hearts of men is love.

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Lines 22- 26 - He talks of how The Shadow becomes invisible to those that don't believe
He quotes the radio comic, claiming that The Shadow knows the evil that is within the hearts of men

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Line 19 - Let's Pretend is a US radio series
each week there was a new tale that was acted out by a cast of young children
these tales consisted of make-believe worlds and fanciful characters

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Line 18 - The Red Lantern Corps is a part of the DC universe, sort of an opposite to the well-known Green Lantern
On the radio, the Red Lantern is a part of the "Land of the Lost" - a radio fantasy adventure aired from 1943 to 1948, about adventures of two children who traveled underwater with a fatherly fish Red Lantern

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Lines 13-17 - he is claiming that love is evil, even turning the word around to make an almost exact spelling of "evil"
He is questioning, who truly understands what love is or what it is like to love, he implies that no one really knows
He wouldn't want to be the person willing to find out

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Line 12 - Adolf Hitler was a German politician who had major dictatorship over Germany and Poland
Goddy Knight was an American politician

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Line 11 - Fulton John Sheen was an American bishop of the Catholic Church, known for preaching and work on television and radio, referred to as a televangelist

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Line 10 - Granville Oral Roberts was an American Christian televangelist, one of the most recognized preachers worldwide, a controversial American religious leader of the 20th century

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Line 9 - Mandrake the Magician is a newspaper comic strip

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Line 6 - He believes that it was better to have experienced the joys of the era of the radio than television

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Line 4 - he thinks of the television as repulsive, not as genuine or magical as the era of the radio

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Line 3 - WCBS is a television Network
Kate Smith is an American singer also known as "The First Lady of Radio"

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Line 2 - Jack Kerouac is a beat poet, a "literary iconoclast"

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"The Shadow' is a collection of serialized dramas in the 1930s that were mentioned on the radio

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Miller, Tyrus. "Overview of 'In Memory of Radio'." Poetry for Students, edited by Ira Mark Milne, vol. 9, Gale, 2000. Literature Resource Center, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/H1420031286/GLS?u=txshracd2529&sid=GLS&xid=927e8292. Accessed 2 Jan. 2018.

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Line 1- Lamont Cranston is the everyday person of a fictional character called "The Shadow"

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“Amiri Baraka: Online Poems .” Amiri Baraka: Online Poems, www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/baraka/onlinepoems.htm.