Chester, Pennsylvania sits along the Delaware River, and is the birthplace and home of Queue Points co-host Jay Ray. The city’s history in the Black freedom struggle runs deep. Long before Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. became a global symbol of nonviolent resistance, he was a young seminarian at Crozer Theological Seminary walking Chester’s streets, studying, and sharpening the voice that would one day move nations. This Queue Points episode, released in time for Dr. King’s holiday, returns to that ground through the living work of Jean-Pierre “JP” Brice and CMP Radio, a Chester-based non-profit whose mission is “to fight the injustice our community experiences by giving power to our people and their voices.”
JP is Brooklyn-born but Chester-raised, and his story holds the same tension King wrestled with: how to stay rooted in love while standing in the gap the amid violence, loss, and systemic neglect. He talks about losing his father at twelve, carrying the weight of “taking care” of his family, and, later, drifting into the street life. Today, it is therapy, a hard look at his own choices, and the simple question, “What did you want to be at sixteen?” that drives him toward radio and community work. The result is CMP Radio, an internet station built from Chester for Chester, explicitly committed to “cultivating mature positivity” and making people feel seen, heard, and accountable to one another.
“We’re gonna do it in Chester. We are gonna cultivate mature positivity by constantly making progress and understanding that we are Chester made products, man, all CMP.”
- Jean-Pierre “JP” Brice
That commitment echoes King’s insistence that love is not just sentiment, but discipline. Where King drew from the Black church’s spirituals to fuel his courage, JP draws from R&B music to stay grounded enough to keep doing the everyday, local work.
In the episode, he describes how R&B became both refuge and teacher: listening to WDAS and Tony Brown’s Quiet Storm with his mother, making mixtapes, learning that the music carried instructions on how to love, apologize, listen, and be vulnerable as a Black man in a world that often punishes softness. When he was jumped at a club and nearly lost his eye, he spent his recovery writing about the radio station he wanted to build, R&B in his ears and a journal in his hands. He says plainly that if you write your vision down long enough, you run out of excuses not to live it.
“I believe that if you get a journal and you write down what you want, it’ll come true. I had no other choice but to start the radio station, ’cause I had wrote so much about it.”
- Jean-Pierre “JP” Brice
Today, CMP Radio produces media programs, supports intergenerational storytelling cohorts, and organizes its Fusion Fridays events that bring resources, music, and a sense of safety directly into Chester’s neighborhoods. JP doesn’t frame himself as a movement leader; he frames himself as a man who decided he didn’t want to just exist, he wanted to live and to help his city live, too.
On this Dr. Martin Luther King Day, this episode invites listeners to see Chester not only as the place where a young King once studied, but as a city where that legacy is still being argued with, expanded, and lived out through microphones, block parties, and hard conversations between fathers and sons.
“I’ve been pushing unity since I first started… Our community is so divided right now… That’s not stuff you were born with. You were born with this, right? [Grabs his skin] This skin right here. So, you know, we should stand together.”
- Jean-Pierre “JP” Brice
In a world that frequently flattens Dr. King into a single line about “a dream,” this conversation brings us back to the everyday work of love as community power and commitment. One broadcast, one song, one story at a time.
The only way we can do it is together. Love is the message. We learned that from Dr. King, MSFB, and today, through the work of JP Brice and CMP Radio.
