Smoketown Read online

  In the Hill District of the 1940s, Herron Avenue marked the boundary between the upper class “Sugartop” neighborhood and the working class “Middle Hill.”

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  CONTENTS

  Epigraph

  Preface

  Cast of Characters

  The Neighborhoods of Pittsburgh

  1

  THE BROWN BOMBER’S CORNERMEN

  2

  THE NEGRO CARNEGIES

  3

  THE CALCULATING CRUSADER

  4

  THE RISE AND FALL OF “BIG RED”

  5

  BILLY AND LENA

  6

  THE DOUBLE V WARRIORS

  7

  THE COMPLEX MR. B

  8

  “JACKIE’S BOSWELL”

  9

  THE WOMEN OF “UP SOUTH”

  10

  THE BARD OF A BROKEN WORLD

  Photographs

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Notes

  Index

  For my grandparents, Edith McColes Whitaker and Cleophaus Sylvester “C.S.” Whitaker Sr.

  Grandmother Edith McColes Whitaker (center in large hat and pearls) attending a ladies luncheon in Pittsburgh, 1941.

  Granddad C.S. Whitaker Sr. (right, in suit) presiding over the burial of a black Pittsburgh war veteran in the 1950s.

  Grandmother Edith was the only child of two “Old Pittsburghers,” as black folks who arrived before the Great Migration were called. A striking beauty in her youth, she was among the first black graduates of Schenley High, the city’s most illustrious public school, and a gifted pianist who once performed at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Hall.

  Granddad was born on a tenant farm in Texas, the eleventh child of two former slaves. He came to Pittsburgh during World War I, and worked as a chauffeur for a white undertaker who helped set him up in the funeral home business. Although he never finished high school, he prided himself on appearing a man of education and means, with his wire-rimmed glasses, suspendered suits, and patent leather shoes.

  Growing up, I knew none of this history. My father—C.S. “Syl” Whitaker Jr.—left Pittsburgh to go to college and never moved back. By the time I was old enough to remember family visits, Granddad had suffered a severe stroke. Grandmother had taken over the funeral home and moved it to a neighborhood called Beltzhoover after the city tore down the heart of the Hill District, long the center of black business and social life.

  Then I wrote a family memoir, and while doing research I came across two photos of my grandparents in the online archive of Pittsburgh Courier photographer Teenie Harris. Clicking through the archive, I discovered what a remarkable world my grandparents had inhabited. I was eager to learn more, and the result is this book. I hope that they would say I had done that world justice—and them proud.

  You have to be taught to be second class; you’re not born that way.

  —LENA HORNE

  Ever up and onward.

  —BILLY STRAYHORN

  You can only close if you opened.

  —AUGUST WILSON

  PREFACE

  TOWARD THE NORTHERN REACHES of the Appalachian Mountains, at the point where the East Coast ends and the great American Midwest begins, three rivers meet. The Allegheny flows from the north, gathering the tributaries of western New York State. The Monongahela cascades from the south, through the hills and hollers of West Virginia. Together, they form the headwaters of the Ohio, which meanders west all the way to Illinois, where it connects to the mighty Mississippi and its tentacles reach from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. Because of its strategic value, the intersection of these three rivers had generals named Braddock and Forbes and Washington fighting to control the surrounding patch of Western Pennsylvania two decades before the War for Independence. Because it allowed steamboats to reach the coal deposits in the nearby hills, the watery nexus made the city that grew up around it the nation’s largest producer of steel and created the vast wealth of businessmen and financiers named Carnegie, Frick, Westinghouse, and Mellon whose legacies live on in the renowned libraries, foundations, and art collections funded by their fortunes.

  That story of Pittsburgh is well documented. Far less chronicled, but just as extraordinary, is the confluence of forces that made the black population of the city, for a brief but glorious stretch of the twentieth century, one of the most vibrant and consequential communities of color in U.S. history. Like millions of other blacks, they came north before and during the Great Migration, many of them from the upper parts of the Old South, from states such as Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, and North Carolina. As likely as not to have been descendants of house slaves or “free men of color,” these migrants arrived with high degrees of literacy, musical fluency, and religious discipline (as well as a tendency toward light skin that betrayed their history of mixing with white masters, and with one another). Once they settled in Pittsburgh, they had educational opportunities that were rare for blacks of the era, thanks to abolitionist-sponsored university scholarships and integrated public high schools with lavish Gilded Age funding. Whether or not they succeeded in finding jobs in Pittsburgh’s steel mills (and often they did not), they inhaled a spirit of commerce that hung, quite literally, in the dark, sulfurous air.

  The result was a black version of the story of fifteenth-century Florence and early-twentieth-century Vienna: a miraculous flowering of social and cultural achievement all at once, in one small city. In its heyday, from the 1920s until the late 1950s, Pittsburgh’s black population was less than a quarter the size of New York City’s, and a third the size of Chicago’s—those two much larger metropolises that have been associated with the phenomenon of a black Renaissance. Yet during those decades, it was Pittsburgh that produced the best-written, widest-selling and most influential black newspaper in America: The Pittsburgh Courier. From a four-page pamphlet of poetry and local oddities, its leader, Robert L. Vann, built the Courier into a publication with fourteen regional editions, a circulation of almost half a million at its zenith, and an avid following in black homes, barbershops, and beauty salons across the country.

  In the 1930s, Vann used the Courier as a soapbox to urge black voters to abandon the Republican Party of Lincoln and embrace the Democratic Party of FDR, beginning a great political migration that transformed the electoral landscape and that reverberates to this day. In the 1940s, the Courier led crusades to rally blacks to support World War II, to win combat roles for Negro soldiers, and to demand greater equality at home in exchange for that patriotism and sacrifice. In the 1950s, its reporters—led by several intrepid female journalists—exposed the betrayal of the promise of a “Double Victory” and chronicled the first great battles of the civil rights movement.

  In the world of sports, two Courier reporters, Chester Washington and Bill Nunn, helped make Joe Louis a hero to black America and a sympathetic heavyweight champion to white boxing fans. Two ruthless businessmen, racketeer Gus Greenlee and Cum Posey, the son of a Gilded Age shipping tycoon, turned the city’s black baseball teams, the Pittsburgh Crawfords and the Homestead Grays, into the most fearsome squads in the annals of the Negro Leagues, uniting such future Hall of Famers as Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, slugger Buck Leonard, and base-stealing demon “Cool Papa” Bell.
Another Courier sportswriter, Wendell Smith, led a campaign to integrate the big leagues, and was the first person to call the attention of Brooklyn Dodgers owner Branch Rickey to a young Negro League shortstop named Jackie Robinson. While covering Robinson’s first seasons in the white minor and major leagues, Smith served as Jackie’s roommate, chauffeur, counselor, and mouthpiece, helping to soothe the historic rookie’s private temper and fashion the public image of dignity that was as crucial to his success as power at the plate and speed around the bases.

  In the realm of the arts, Pittsburgh produced three of the most electrifying and influential jazz pianists of the era: Earl “Fatha” Hines, Mary Lou Williams, and the dazzling Erroll Garner. It was in Pittsburgh that Billy Strayhorn grew up and met Duke Ellington, beginning a partnership that would yield the finest orchestral jazz of all time. Another Pittsburgh native, Billy Eckstine, became the most popular black singer of the 1940s and early 1950s, and played a less remembered but equally groundbreaking role in uniting Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Sarah Vaughan on the swing era bandstands that helped give rise to bebop. Then, in the mid-1940s, in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, a black maid born in North Carolina who had taken up with a white German baker gave birth to a boy who grew up to become America’s greatest black playwright.

  Today, black Pittsburgh is best known as the setting of August Wilson’s sweeping Century Cycle: Fences, The Piano Lesson, and seven more of the ten plays he wrote depicting black life in each decade of the twentieth century. Wilson conjured it as a world full of tormented, struggling strivers held back by white racism and their own personal demons. It was a portrait that reflected the playwright’s affection for the black working class, as well as the harsh reality of what became of the Hill District and the city’s other black enclaves after the 1950s, when they were hit by a perfect storm of industrial decline, disastrous urban renewal policies, and black middle-class brain drain. So powerful was Wilson’s imaginary universe, and so thorough the destruction of those neighborhoods, that few in the thousands of audiences that have seen his plays or flocked to the movies that are now being made from them would know that there was once more to the actual place that the Courier writers liked to call Smoketown.

  But there was more. A great deal more. Under the dusky skies of Smoketown, there was a glittering saga.

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  PEOPLE WHO WERE BORN or lived in black Pittsburgh are in boldface. Others are those with whom they interacted.

  THE PAPER

  ROBERT L. VANN, publisher of The Pittsburgh Courier

  JESSE VANN, his wife and successor

  IRA LEWIS, president and business manager

  BILL NUNN, managing editor

  P.L. PRATTIS, executive editor

  JULIA BUMRY JONES, women’s editor and columnist

  DAISY LAMPKIN, vice president and local NAACP leader

  CHARLES “TEENIE” HARRIS, photographer

  EDGAR ROUZEAU, war correspondent

  COLLINS GEORGE, war correspondent

  THEODORE STANFORD, war correspondent

  FRANK BOLDEN, war correspondent

  BILLY ROWE, war correspondent, columnist, and photographer

  CHESTER WASHINGTON, sportswriter

  WENDELL SMITH, sportswriter

  EDNA CHAPPELL, reporter

  JOHN C. CLARKE, reporter and columnist

  EVELYN CUNNINGHAM, reporter and columnist

  A. PHILIP RANDOLPH, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters

  JAMES WELDON JOHNSON, author and president of the NAACP

  W. E. B. DU BOIS, author and editor of the NAACP journal The Messenger

  ROBERT ABBOTT, founder of The Chicago Defender

  JOHN SENGSTACKE, publisher of The Chicago Defender

  MICHAEL BENEDUM, oil tycoon and Democratic donor

  JOSEPH GUFFEY, Pennsylvania senator and FDR supporter

  FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT, U.S. president

  CLAUDE BARNETT, founder of the Associated Negro Press

  BENJAMIN O. DAVIS, first black U.S. Army general

  BENJAMIN O. DAVIS JR., commander of the Tuskegee Airmen

  GEN. EDWARD “NED” ALMOND, commander of the 92nd Infantry Division

  COL. HOWARD QUEEN, commander of the 366th Infantry Regiment

  GEN. JOSEPH STILWELL, commander of the Ledo Road mission

  JAWAHARLAL NEHRU, Indian independence leader

  MUHAMMAD ALI JINNAH, Indian independence leader

  MAHATMA GANDHI, Indian independence leader

  HARRY S. TRUMAN, U.S. president

  SALLIE NIXON, widow of voting rights martyr Isaiah Nixon

  WALTER LEE IRVIN, “Groveland Four” defendant

  THURGOOD MARSHALL, head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund

  MARTIN LUTHER KING JR., minister and civil rights leader

  CORETTA SCOTT KING, his wife

  SPORTS

  GUS GREENLEE, racketeer and owner of the Pittsburgh Crawfords

  CUMBERLAND “CUM” POSEY JR., manager and part owner of the Homestead Grays

  RUFUS “SONNYMAN” JACKSON, racketeer and part owner of the Homestead Grays

  JOSH GIBSON, Negro League catcher and slugger

  SATCHEL PAIGE, Negro League pitcher

  JANET “TOADALO” HOWARD, Paige’s wife, a Pittsburgh native

  JOE LOUIS, heavyweight boxer

  MARVA LOUIS, his wife

  JOHN ROXBOROUGH, Louis’s manager

  JACK “CHAPPIE” BLACKBURN, Louis’s trainer

  JULIAN BLACK, Louis’s promoter

  MIKE JACOBS, Louis’s promoter

  J. L. WILKINSON, owner of the Kansas City Monarchs

  KENESAW MOUNTAIN LANDIS, commissioner of baseball

  ALBERT BENJAMIN “HAPPY” CHANDLER, commissioner of baseball

  JACKIE ROBINSON, player for the Montreal Royals and Brooklyn Dodgers

  RACHEL ROBINSON, his wife

  JOHNNY WRIGHT, Royals prospect

  BRANCH RICKEY, Dodgers president

  EDDIE STANKY, Dodgers second baseman

  BEN CHAPMAN, Philadelphia Phillies manager

  JOE GARAGIOLA, St. Louis Cardinals catcher

  MUSIC

  EARL “FATHA” HINES, pianist and bandleader

  LOIS DEPPE, singer and bandleader

  MARY LOU WILLIAMS, pianist and composer

  BILLY STRAYHORN, composer and arranger

  LENA HORNE, singer

  EDWIN “TEDDY” HORNE, Lena’s father, a Pittsburgh racketeer

  LOUIS JONES, Lena’s husband

  GAIL HORNE JONES, their daughter

  EDWIN “LITTLE TEDDY” JONES, their son

  CHARLOTTE ENTY CATLIN, pianist and teacher

  MARY CARDWELL DAWSON, jubilee singer and opera director

  BILLY ECKSTINE, singer and bandleader

  ROY “LITTLE JAZZ” ELDRIDGE, trumpeter

  KENNY “KLOOK” CLARKE, drummer

  ERROLL GARNER, pianist

  RAY BROWN, bass player and Ella Fitzgerald’s husband

  FATE MARABLE, riverboat bandleader

  NOBLE SISSLE, bandleader

  DUKE ELLINGTON, bandleader and composer

  DIZZY GILLESPIE, trumpet player and bandleader

  CHARLIE PARKER, saxophone player

  SARAH VAUGHAN, singer

  MORRIS LEVY, founder of Roulette Records

  ELLA FITZGERALD, singer and Ray Brown’s wife

  MARTHA GLASER, Erroll Garner’s manager

  GEORGE AVAKIAN, Columbia Records producer

  THE CITY

  CUMBERLAND POSEY SR., steamboat engineer and coal tycoon

  ANGELINE “ANNA” STEVENS POSEY, his wife

  LEWIS WOODSON, minister and abolitionist

  MARTIN DELANY, doctor, journalist, and abolitionist

  VIRGINIA PROCTOR, wig store chain owner

  HOMER S. BROWN, attorney and Pennsylvania assemblyman

  BYRD BROWN, his son, and local NAACP leader

  AUGUST WILSON
(BORN FREDERICK A. “FREDDY” KITTEL JR.), playwright

  DAISY WILSON, Wilson’s mother

  FREDERICK A. “FRITZ” KITTEL, Wilson’s father

  SALA UDIN (BORN SAM HOWZE), Wilson’s childhood friend

  ROB PENNY, Wilson’s friend and fellow poet

  ROMARE BEARDEN, artist and Wilson inspiration

  ANDREW CARNEGIE, steel tycoon and philanthropist

  HENRY CLAY FRICK, coal tycoon and art collector

  GEORGE WESTINGHOUSE, inventor and electricity tycoon

  HENRY J. HEINZ, foodstuffs tycoon

  THOMAS MELLON, banker

  ANDREW MELLON, banker and U.S. treasury secretary

  RICHARD “R.K.” MELLON, banker and urban renewal advocate

  DAVID LAWRENCE, Pittsburgh mayor

  EDGAR KAUFMANN, department store owner

  ABRAHAM WOLK, city councilman and light opera buff

  LLOYD RICHARDS, stage director and drama teacher

  CHARLES DUTTON, actor

  PHYLICIA RASHAD, actress

  WYNTON MARSALIS, trumpeter and bandleader

  Never large, Pittsburgh’s black population grew from some 25,000 in 1910 to just over 100,000 by 1960. Roughly half of the population lived in the Hill District (center), which was the center of black business and culture. Blacks also resided in mixed neighborhoods to the east in Shadyside, Homewood, East Liberty, and Highland Park; across the river to the north in Manchester; and across the river to the west in Mount Washington and Beltzhoover. After the lower third of the Hill District was torn down in the late 1950s, its displaced residents moved to those other neighborhoods, causing white residents to flee and resulting in a sharp decline in the health of the economy, schools, and public services in all those previously middle-class enclaves.

  On one of his many Pittsburgh visits, Joe Louis (left) and boyhood friend Freddie Guinyard met at the Courier with Joe’s favorite sportswriter, “Ches” Washington (center).

  SPORTS

  1

  THE BROWN BOMBER’S CORNERMEN