Double Burden: the Black Experience in Pittsburgh

Double Burden: The Black Experience in Pittsburgh Laurence Glasco History Department University of Pittsburgh Scholarly studies of black Pittsburgh are numerous but uneven in their coverage. In the 1930s the Works Progress Administration (WPA) assembled a rich body of material on the social life, politics, and even folklore of the city's blacks. But the projected general history was never completed, and its unedited pages until recently lay forgotten in the state archives. The gap left by the lack of a general history, moreover, is not filled by specialized studies because these are uneven in their coverage. The nineteenth century, for example, has been especially neglected: the scholarly literature on that period consists of one article, one dissertation, and one undergraduate thesis, all of which focus on the antislavery movement of the Civil War era. The twentieth century, in contrast, has received considerable attention. The period between World War I and World War II has been especially well covered: over one hundred specialized studies--including fifty-six master's theses and dissertations--describe the adjustment problems of black migrants and the emergence of the Hill district as a predominantly black ghetto. The years following World War II also have interested scholars: more than fifty studies--primarily doctoral dissertations--examine the racial dimensions of poverty, segregation, and governmental efforts to alleviate those conditions. Finally, black Pittsburgh from approximately 1930 to 1980 has been visually well documented in the collection of Teenie Harris, a photographer for the Pittsburgh Courier whose 50,000 to 100,000 photographs rival those of New York's Vander Zee collection in portraying the texture of black urban life. At least for the twentieth century, then, the scholarly sources on black Pittsburgh are quite extensive--more than those for any of the city's other ethnic groups--and are sufficient to highlight the broad contours of black history in Pittsburgh. Taken together, the historical materials indicate that, in addition to suffering the same racial discrimination as their counterparts elsewhere, blacks here have borne two additional burdens. The first was economic. The stagnation and decline of Pittsburgh's steel industry began just after World War I--well before that of most Northern cities--and very early closed off opportunities for black economic progress. The second burden was geographic. Whereas the flat terrain of most Northern cities concentrated blacks into one or two large, homogeneous communities, Pittsburgh's hilly topography isolated them in six or seven neighborhoods, undermining their political and organizational strength. The record also shows that, despite these two extra burdens, black Pittsburghers accomplished much. They created a distinguished newspaper, owned two outstanding baseball teams, maintained a lively cultural life, and nurtured musicians and writers of national prominence. However, economically and politically, the community stagnated. It was unable to develop a stable working class, its middle class remained small, and its geographic fragmentation into several neighborhoods severely diluted its political and institutional strength. As a result, by the 1980s Pittsburgh blacks lagged behind their counterparts in most other cities in terms of economic and political development. The Black Community Before World War I _ The burdens of economic and racial discrimination can be traced to the earliest years of black settlement. Prior to the Civil War, Pittsburgh's black community was typical of those found in most Northern cities--small, impoverished, and victimized by racial discrimination. Although blacks arrived with the very earliest colonial settlers--as trappers, pioneers, soldiers, and slaves-- the population grew slowly. In 1850 they comprised only two thousand people--less than 5 percent of the city's population--and were centered in "Little Hayti," an area just off Wylie Avenue in the lower Hill district where housing was cheap and close to downtown. The black community was poor because racial discrimination excluded its men from the industrial and commercial mainstream of the city's economy. Barbering was the most prestigious occupation open to blacks, and they operated most of the downtown barbershops that catered to the city's elite. (To cut the hair of other blacks would have cost them their white customers.) Most, however, could find work only as day laborers, whitewashers, janitors, porters, coachmen, waiters, and stewards. The men's low earnings forced their wives to seek work outside the home, typically in low-paying and demeaning jobs as servants, domestics, and washerwomen. Despite their exclusion from the city's industry and commerce, some blacks prospered. As early as 1800 Ben Richards, a black butcher, had accumulated a fortune by provisioning nearby military posts. At mid-century John B. Vashon operated a barbershop and a fashionable bath house, while John Peck was a wigmaker and barber. Most members of the black elite, however, were men of modest holdings: by 1860 Richards's fortune had been dissipated and the manuscript census listed only twelve blacks--three barbers, three stewards, a musician, a porter, a waiter, a pattern finisher, a grocer, and a "banker"--with property worth $2,000 or more. Despite its small size and poverty, Pittsburgh's pre-Civil War black community supported a remarkable number of institutions. These included an AME (African Methodist Episcopal) church, an AME Zion church, four benevolent societies, a private school, a cemetery, a militia company, a newspaper, and a temperance society. The community also contained an impressive set of leaders, such as Vashon, Peck, and Lewis Woodson, all barbers and all active in civic affairs. The best-known leader was Martin R. Delany who, after publishing The Mystery newspaper in Pittsburgh, co-edited Frederick Douglass' North Star paper, and authored an important nationalist tract, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States. The race pride of Delany is indicated in a comment by Frederick Douglass that he thanked God for simply making him a man, "but Delany always thanks him for making him a black man." The community and its leaders placed great emphasis on education. They maintained their own school--the existence of which had originally attracted Delany to Pittsburgh--and avidly pursued higher education. Delany went on to become one of the first blacks to study medicine at Harvard University, Vashon's son became the first black to graduate from Oberlin College, Peck's son became one of the nation's first blacks to obtain a medical degree, and Lewis Woodson, in addition to his duties as barber and minister, taught in the community's own school. The community stressed both cultural attainments and gentility. The accomplishments of two of its children reflect those emphases. Henry O. Tanner became an award-winning painter based in Paris, and Hallie Q. Brown became a leading elocutionist who performed throughout the United States and Europe. Culture and gentility also became social stratifiers, often in combination with pride in place of origin. A. B. Hall, a nineteenth-century resident, recalled that the pre-Civil War community was dominated by an aristocracy of genteel families and cliques: "The Virginians, District of Columbia and Maryland folk, consorted together; the North Carolina people, thought themselves made in a special mould; those from Kentucky, just knew they were what the doctor ordered; while the free Negroes, who drifted in from Ohio and New York, didn't take a back seat for anybody." Despite their stress on culture, gentility, and education, black Pittsburghers faced daily indignities and threats to their personal and civil rights. They were excluded from, or confined to separate sections of, the city's theaters, restaurants, and hotels. Occasionally they were attacked by white mobs, although they were spared the major riots that convulsed black communities in New York, Philadelphia, and Cincinnati. They also faced continual efforts to deny them an education. Protests by Harvard students forced Delany to leave that institution before getting his M.D. degree. Fear of student protests at the University of Pittsburgh (then the Western University of Pennsylvania) prompted professors to ask John C. Gilmer, the school's first black student, to sit in the hallway outside the lecture room. And in 1834 Pittsburgh excluded black children entirely from the city's new public school system, to which blacks responded by establishing their own school and vigorously protesting their exclusion from the public system. Three years later the city provided blacks with a segregated school on Miller Street, but its wretched condition disappointed and angered black residents. In addition to being deprived of an equal education, blacks were denied even basic rights of citizenship. In 1837 Pennsylvania disfranchised its black residents, causing enraged black communities throughout the state to hold numerous protest meetings and rallies. Even more trauma was in store when, in 1850, the federal government passed the Fugitive Slave Act. This act, which was designed to help slave catchers apprehend runaway slaves, was the most terrifying law passed during the pre-Civil War era. It made lawbreakers of Pittsburghers--black and white--who had been working to help runaway slaves, and facilitated the recapture of Pittsburgh blacks who themselves were runaway slaves. The act terrified so many that during the l850s the city's black population dropped from l,974 to l,l49. Those who did not flee were galvanized into action, establishing an elaborate network of spies, harassing slave catchers, and even kidnapping slaves passing through the city with their owners. The pessimism of that decade caused Martin Delany to give up hope in America and urge blacks to emigrate. Delany himself traveled to Nigeria and negotiated with Yoruba chiefs for a settlement near Abeokuta, whence his later reputation as the "Father of Black Nationalism." In resisting slavery and racial discrimination, Pittsburgh's blacks were not without white supporters.

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