Whether Ms. Niles, her management team and the station’s board of trustees were paying adequate respect to WBGO’s legacy was at the heart of the conflict. “People who have a conception of what WBGO was in the ’70s and ’80s may need to rethink some of that in the 2020s,” said Tom Thomas, co-chief executive of the Station Resource Group, a national alliance of public radio stations.

WBGO, which has an annual budget of about $5 million, recently focused on expanding the station’s editorial content. Nate Chinen, a former jazz critic for The New York Times, was hired by Ms. Niles in 2017 to be the head writer.

“One thing I give Amy a lot of credit for is really insisting on an ideal that, in the 21st century, BGO needs to be considered and to consider itself a media organization rather than strictly a radio station,” Mr. Chinen said.

The criticisms from the community, though, were less about the product and more about workplace culture and the role of the station in Newark.

In the op-ed from November, the community activist Ronald Glover raised concerns that the station’s board and management were elitist and disproportionately white.

He wrote that as a contributing member to the station, he was surprised not to be invited to WBGO’s 40th anniversary gala, which was held in New York City and not in Newark last year. “Is it because I am not a ‘high-end donor’?” he wrote, adding that he knew of several black WBGO staffers who either had not been invited or had been excluded because of the $1,200 ticket.

“The intentional exclusion of these employees is emblematic of deeper issues,” he wrote.

WBGO was founded in 1979, a dozen years after the Newark riots, when the black writer and activist Amiri Baraka, a resident and the father of Newark’s current mayor, Ras Baraka, had inspired a new freedom of self-expression and activism.