Lukaszewicz on Whitaker, 'Smoketown: the Untold Story of the Other Great Black Renaissance'

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H-Pennsylvania Lukaszewicz on Whitaker, 'Smoketown: The Untold Story of the Other Great Black Renaissance'

Review published on Tuesday, September 4, 2018

Mark Whitaker. Smoketown: The Untold Story of the Other Great Black Renaissance. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018. Illustrations. xxi + 404 pp. $30.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-5011-2239-2.

Reviewed by Kate Lukaszewicz (Sewickely Academy) Published on H-Pennsylvania (September, 2018) Commissioned by Allen J. Dieterich-Ward (Shippensburg University)

Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=52497

In The Untold Story of Smoketown: The Other Great Black Renaissance, Mark Whitaker posits that Pittsburgh was “for a brief but glorious stretch of the twentieth century, one of the most vibrant and consequential communities of color in U.S. history” (p. xiv). He convincingly presents his evidence across ten chapters, which revolve around three aspects of black life in early to mid-twentieth- century Pittsburgh: sports, musicianship, andThe Pittsburgh Courier, the most zealous and widely subscribed newspaper of the black press. Readers should come away from the book with a sense of awe: Whitaker’s chronicle presents black Pittsburgh as a thriving, enthusiastic dynamo with energy that influenced the social and political milieus of the United States.

Smoketown advances chronologically, with understandable backtracking requisite to showing the interconnectedness of its stories. Whitaker relies on the archives ofThe Pittsburgh Courier, which includes the massive collection of photographer Charles “Teenie” Harris. This research is complemented by interviews with descendants of his characters, as well as the scholarly work of historians of black Pittsburgh.

After situating readers in the context of Gilded Age Pittsburgh and the Great Migration, Whitaker begins with a motif that grounds his book: The Pittsburgh Courier, under the leadership of publisher Robert L. Vann and his protégés, knew how to get things done. Chapter 1 heralds how Ches Washington, the Courier’s sports editor, and Bill Nunn Sr., its managing editor, wrote boxer Joe Louis into the national limelight by advocating that Louis’s skill had earned him a chance to fight for international titles, including a 1938 rematch against German Max Schmeling. Louis won not only that athletic contest but also a symbolic contest of ideologies (American democracy over Nazi fascism), as Whitaker argues that the Courier’s coverage of Louis from 1934 to 1938 led to an explosion in the paper’s national circulation. This expansion positioned the paper to assert its influence in two arenas: shaping the public opinion of its readers and targeting racist institutions. A decade later, as Whitaker describes in chapter 8, the Courier applied the same dogged persistence to integrating Major League Baseball when it identified top talent in the Negro Leagues and matched it to the most progressive minds in professional baseball management. Whitaker persuasively—if implicitly—argues that the newspaper was integral to elevating black athletes in professional sports at the national level, which can only have a positive effect on the American psyche.

As told in chapters 6 and 9, The Pittsburgh Courier applied its energies to political equality for black

Citation: H-Net Reviews. Lukaszewicz on Whitaker, 'Smoketown: The Untold Story of the Other Great Black Renaissance'. H- Pennsylvania. 09-04-2018. https://networks.h-net.org/node/8590/reviews/2330076/lukaszewicz-whitaker-smoketown-untold-story-other-great-black Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Pennsylvania

Americans. The “Double V” campaign insisted on victory not only in war but also in domestic civil rights. While this story is well known in African American history, Whitaker hones in on the leadership of publisher Vann and editor P. L. Prattis, men who routinely and personally held elected officials accountable to their black constituents. Whitaker also approaches the “Double V” story evenhandedly, acknowledging that it was short-lived and aligned with broader influences that expanded civil rights. As the civil rights movement blossomed in the late forties and early fifties, the Courier dedicated reporters to address the national stories of the Deep South, as well as discrimination in western Pennsylvania. The strength ofSmoketown lies in its thoughtful consideration of The Pittsburgh Courier; Whitaker makes it abundantly clear that this paper was a national force, with its energies justly applied.

Readers are likely to be surprised by the depth and breadth of Pittsburgh’s jazz history, presented in chapters 5 and 7. Many of these musicians were shaped by robust arts education in the city’s public schools, which produced pianists and composers Billy Strayhorn, Erroll Garner, and Ahmad Jamal; bassist Ray Brown; and singer Billy Eckstine. Other stars learned outside of school: pianists Earl Hines and Mary Lou Williams, drummer Kenny Clarke, and trumpeter Roy Eldridge. Whitaker does not simply chronicle this marquis line up, but aptly credits them with being pioneers, particularly in the development of elements of bebop and influencing the likes of Dizzy Gillespie and Dexter Gordon. A lamentable oversight in Whitaker’s work is the place of the Local 471, the black Pittsburgh chapter of the American Federation of Musicians, which protected many of the same musicians whom Whitaker lauds. For example, he discusses the role of Harlem after-hours club Minton’s Playhouse, describing it as “a nightly musical laboratory” (p. 206). The 471’s Musicians Club in Pittsburgh’s Hill District played the same role locally for these stars, in addition to welcoming national acts and giving young musicians the chance to learn from the twentieth century’s most influential jazz musicians.

Chapters 2, 3, 4, and 10 address biographies of important black Pittsburghers, many of whom founded and funded the institutions that Whitaker examines. Cumberland Posey made his fortune in shipping, invested in the Courier, and owned the Homestead Grays, one of Negro League baseball’s greatest teams. Vann’s leadership and mentorship turned theCourier into a national force for forming public opinion. Gus Greenlee owned the Pittsburgh Crawfords, another formidable team, named for Greenlee’s jazz club, the Crawford Grill, which provided a venue for musicians and audiences in an era of segregation. The last chapter on playwright August Wilson is less vital to Smoketown, as Wilson’s work postdates the bulk of Whitaker’s story and is less consequential to the book’s central tenets than the work of the Courier and the innovation of jazz by Pittsburghers.

Readers may want for the lack of an afterword, as much of the book’s content bears relevance to current issues. The end of Smoketown addresses the 1960s urban redevelopment that demolished black institutions in the Hill District, the epicenter of black Pittsburgh, in order to make room for the Civic Arena, itself demolished in 2012. Alas, the Hill District is still awaiting redevelopment from that effort. Pittsburgh again faces an affordable housing shortage due to redevelopment and gentrification, which disproportionately affects its communities of color. And in a time of “taking a knee” during the National Anthem as a means of protesting police violence against communities of color, and in a city whose NFL franchise’s owner created the Rooney Rule, Whitaker would have done well to connect the historical stories of race in sports to contemporary stories. Even so, Smoketown is a pleasant and engaging read, suitable for readers who want a popular history of mid-twentieth-

Citation: Kate Lukaszewicz. Review of Whitaker, Mark, Smoketown: The Untold Story of the Other Great Black Renaissance. H-Pennsylvania, H-Net Reviews. September, 2018.URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=52497

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.