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Posey was in a position to help recruit those workers, and to project a positive image of the Carnegie empire within Pittsburgh’s growing black community. In 1909, a writer named Helen A. Tucker visited Pittsburgh to write an article called “The Negroes of Pittsburgh” for the journal Charities and the Commons. She visited Cap Posey in Homestead and hailed his business success as a sign that “there is here [in Pittsburgh] a chance, such as perhaps few northern cities give, for the industrial Negro to succeed.” Tucker also cited three men who disputed the charge that the only reason for the rise in Negro employment in the steel mills was that blacks had been brought in as scabs. This was not true, the sources insisted; most of the blacks had been hired after the strikes were over. Tucker identified two of her sources as “an official of the Carnegie Company” and “a Negro who went to work in the Homestead Mills in 1892.” The third source was “a leading colored resident of Homestead”—very likely Cap Posey, doing a public relations favor for Carnegie and Frick in exchange for all the business they had sent his way, business that now made Posey the wealthiest black man in Pittsburgh, surpassing even the first generation of Negroes who had emerged as commercial and community leaders in the decades before the Civil War.
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FOUR YEARS AFTER THE Declaration of Independence proclaimed that all men are created equal, Pennsylvania became the first state of slave owners to pledge to work toward living up to that ideal. The “Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery,” passed by the state legislature in 1780, declared that from that point forward all children born to slaves in Pennsylvania would be free—once they turned twenty-eight. Before then, they would be classified as indentured servants, while their parents would remain slaves unless manumitted by their owners. It was a complicated and porous law that required careful tracking to ensure that Negro births were registered, that pregnant slaves weren’t shipped elsewhere to deliver their offspring, and that slave owners from other states didn’t hunt down blacks who tried to escape to Pennsylvania in hopes of seeing their children gain freedom. In short, it made a lot of work for dozens of white and black antislavery activists who lived and worked in Pittsburgh over the next eighty-five years.
Of the white abolitionists, the most prominent was Charles Avery, a rotund Methodist cotton mill owner whose travels through the South fired his anger over the plight of Negroes and persuaded him that education was the key to their salvation. In 1849, Avery took over a red-brick building in Allegheny City, north of Pittsburgh, and founded the Avery Trade School for Colored Youth. He filled it with seven hundred books, equipment to teach crafts and sciences, and an AME chapel on the third floor. In the basement he installed trapdoors leading to an underground tunnel. The tunnel opened onto a nearby canal, where rowboats ferried runaway slaves who hid in Avery’s school to and from the Ohio River. Before his death in 1858, Avery also bequeathed $300,000, more than a third of his fortune, to support missionary work in Africa and black education in America. Among the legacies of that gift was a $25,000 endowment to support twelve scholarships a year at Pittsburgh’s leading college, the Western University of Pennsylvania, for outstanding “males of the colored people in the United States of America or the British Providence of Canada.”
The most influential black abolitionist in pre–Civil War Pittsburgh was Lewis Woodson, a minister and businessman whose intense gaze, high cheekbones, and broad forehead gave him a particularly distinguished look. His parents, Thomas and Jemima Woodson, had bought their way out of slavery and moved to western Virginia, where Lewis was born, and then to Ohio. At the age of seventeen, Lewis Woodson became active in the Ohio abolitionist movement, traveling across the state to preach in black churches and teach in black schools. Moving to Pittsburgh in his mid-twenties, he married a Virginia native, Caroline Robinson, and they had fourteen children, seven of each sex. While ministering at the Bethel AME Church, Woodson began opening barbershops in downtown hotels. He enrolled his children in the Avery School but also insisted that they learn trades—barbering and tailoring for the boys, dressmaking and millinery for the girls. By the time of his death, Woodson’s sons and sons-in-law ran five thriving barbershops across the city, catering to as many white as black patrons.
Persuaded that learning was the key to racial liberation, Woodson founded an all-black school called the Pittsburgh African Education Society. In the summer of 1831, a nineteen-year-old boy named Martin Delany walked 150 miles on foot, all the way from the middle of Pennsylvania, to study at Woodson’s school. Descended from African tribal nobility on both sides of his family, Delany had pitch-dark skin and fierce ambition. He sought out Pittsburgh doctors who taught him the art of “leeching and cupping” so that he could administer the popular bloodletting treatment to black patients. In his early thirties, Delany founded the first black-edited journal west of the Allegheny Mountains, The Mystery. He traveled to Rochester, New York, to help Frederick Douglass publish his North Star journal. Then Delany set out for Boston, where he talked his way into Harvard Medical School and became its first Negro graduate.
Returning to Pittsburgh to practice medicine, Delany continued to write articles and books and became an early proponent of the doctrine later known as “black nationalism.” Decades before the rise of Booker T. Washington, he urged blacks to study trades so that they could be economically self-sufficient. Well before Marcus Garvey, Delany traveled to Africa to scout locations where American blacks might form their own colonies. Frederick Douglass himself marveled at how strongly Delany celebrated and embraced his black identity, in contrast to Douglass’s own emphasis on equality between the races. “I thank God for making me a man simply,” Douglass wrote, “but Delany always thanks him for making him a black man.”
Along with Woodson and Delany, three more prominent black Pittsburgh businessmen of the day were also committed abolitionists. John Vashon, a mulatto born in Virginia, owned a bathhouse as well as a barbershop and was said to be the city’s wealthiest black man. At the same time, Vashon founded the Pittsburgh Anti-Slavery Society in his home and allowed his businesses to be used as hiding places on the Underground Railroad. John Peck, who owned a clothing store, was active in the Anti-Slavery Society and served on the board of Delany’s journal. Benjamin Tucker Tanner, a member of one of Pittsburgh’s oldest black families, gave up his career as a barber to devote himself full-time to preaching, teaching, and editing an abolitionist AME newsletter, The Christian Recorder.
In the 1830s and early 1840s, most of these men lived and had their businesses in an area known as Arthursville, to the east of the meeting point of Pittsburgh’s three rivers. It was named after a white wagon maker and land speculator named William Arthurs who bought one hundred parcels in 1809. Three decades later, Arthursville was still a verdant neighborhood of pleasant homes and small shops, surrounded by grassy fields and tall chestnut trees. More than a hundred black families lived there, and thirty-six of them owned property. Led by the Anti-Slavery Society, they could be counted on to harbor runaway slaves and speed their passage west to Ohio, or north to Canada.
Then in 1845, a warm, windy afternoon in April changed the future of Arthursville and the rest of Pittsburgh forever. Around noon on that day, a servant for a white colonel who lived in the downtown area left a fire she had set to heat her washing pail unattended. A spark ignited the colonel’s barn. When firemen arrived, they discovered that their hoses were dry. A rainless spring had left the city’s reservoirs low and its wells muddied with grime from the factories. As the winds picked up, the fire tore across the city, to the north, south, and west. A deafening roar filled the sky and an enormous cloud of black smoke blanketed the city. By the time it lifted that evening, after the winds died down and the fire burned out in the rivers, a third of the city had burned to the ground. Immigrant shacks and stately mansions alike were destroyed. Gone were some of the city’s best-known landmarks, including the mayor’s office and the Bank of Pittsburgh, its only remnant a charred iron vault recovered f
rom the ashes.
The Monongahela House, the finest hotel in Pittsburgh, was one of the casualties. When it was reopened two years later, with three hundred rooms and an elegant glass-domed rotunda, it was one of the few places where visitors from out of town could stay in the devastated downtown area. With so many of the old hiding places gone, it became a new depot for the Underground Railroad. After Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law allowing for the recapture of runaway slaves in 1850, Woodson and the other ministers established a Vigilance Committee to watch out for bounty hunters, and to kidnap back fugitives who were apprehended. The hotel’s black waiters, cooks, and maids became eager accomplices in the spy network. One day, Martin Delany helped them free a slave who had been taken into police custody at the hotel. Another day, a fourteen-year-old servant girl who had arrived with a rich white family from Arkansas befriended members of the hotel staff and then suddenly vanished, carrying a trunk full of soiled clothing that was later recovered as the only proof of her escape.
After the Great Fire of 1845, businesses accounted for most of the rebuilding in the downtown area. Wealthy whites who had lost their homes began moving to enclaves to the east of the city. Before he decamped to New York, Andrew Carnegie built a stately house for himself and his mother in the neighborhood of Point Breeze. Henry Frick followed, erecting an eleven-room mansion that he christened “Clayton” and later expanded into a twenty-one-room European-style château. One after another, the tycoons who had made their fortunes in the railroad, steel, coal, banking, and food processing businesses settled in the part of town that came to be known as the East End. Next door to Frick, Henry J. Heinz built a home called “Greenlawn” that featured its own private museum and grounds planted with cuttings harvested at the Vatican. A half mile away, George Westinghouse occupied a ten-acre estate called “Solitude.”
Frick became an avid art collector, and he filled his mansion in Point Breeze with European masters. Every week, he also hosted a poker game at Clayton. Regulars included Andrew Mellon, George Westinghouse, and Philander Knox, a Pittsburgh attorney who would later be elected to the U.S. Senate and serve as attorney general and secretary of state. On days when Andrew Carnegie joined in the game, one historian has estimated, as much as 60 percent of America’s industrial wealth was represented around Frick’s card table.
By the end of the century, the East End was home to more millionaires than any neighborhood in America. It also boasted amenities that only those men could have made possible. Thanks to Westinghouse, its mansions were powered by an AC electric grid and enjoyed air-conditioning in the summer. Thanks to Mellon, they had phone lines that connected directly with the major banks of Pittsburgh and Wall Street. Thanks to the Pennsylvania Railroad executives who made their homes there, the East End had its own train station, on a line that stretched to New York and Washington, D.C. In the late 1890s, President William McKinley pulled into that station to visit his friend George Westinghouse. Over the next three decades, five other Republican presidents would visit the neighborhood to seek out its powerful residents and their riches.
Poor factory workers and merchants who had been displaced by the Great Fire, meanwhile, searched for new housing closer to their workplaces. In the late 1840s, Thomas Mellon met that demand by buying up large tracts of the hills that had belonged to William Arthurs and to a Revolutionary War hero named Adamson Tannehill. Mellon divided the land into small plots and sold them to speculators who carved narrow streets and threw up small homes that could be sold cheap or rented out to roomers. Jewish immigrants were among the first to move in. As the iron and steel plants proliferated, newcomers arrived from England, Ireland, and Germany. An area where coal workers settled became known as “Minertown.” The section at the bottom of the hills, where Negroes congregated, was called “Little Haiti.” The top of the hills, where river vistas stretched in all directions, was known as “Sugartop.” Like the East End, the entire neighborhood also acquired a name it would be known by from then on: the Hill District.
By the time Cap and Anna Posey arrived in the Pittsburgh area in the 1880s, the black population was nearing ten thousand. A majority of Negroes lived in the Hill District, but there were exceptions. A number of well-to-do families resided in more comfortable neighborhoods on the western fringes of the East End. The children and grandchildren of Benjamin Tucker Tanner had homes in Oakland, adjacent to the Hill. A contractor named Robert Jackson lived in a neighborhood known as Shadyside. John Writt, a caterer, made his home in Homewood. Writt was a tall, attractive man who favored waistcoats and winged collars, sported a handlebar mustache, and parted his graying hair down the middle. East End millionaires trusted Writt to bring a small army of cooks and waiters into their homes. Observing his operation, Thomas Ewell, a reporter for The Colored American Magazine, wrote: “Our caterer is not a man of ‘soft snap.’ He is a man of business, and a very delicate business at that.”
Small groups of Negroes also settled among white immigrants in neighborhoods across the rivers from the Hill. On the North Side, Caroline Wiley and her husband, Thomas, lived on a plot of land first purchased by her grandfather, a fugitive mulatto slave, for the sum of $100 in 1832. On the West Side, a handful of families had homes on the steep streets of Beltzhoover and Mount Washington, otherwise known as “Coal Hill.” One resident of Mount Washington, Samuel Rosamond, taught himself stenography and became proficient enough to be hired as the private secretary to George Westinghouse’s chief electrician, O. B. Shallenberger, the inventor of the meters essential to the monitoring of AC power systems. Eventually Rosamond’s prowess as a clerk led him to high-ranking jobs at the Post Office and the Civil Service, where he once took dictation for Theodore Roosevelt when the future president was the service’s commissioner.
When the Poseys first moved to Homestead, they lived in an area called Munhall that was populated largely by factory workers. But once Cap Posey became an industrial mogul, he decided that he, too, like the East End barons, required a residence that reflected his stature. He moved his family into a home in Homestead that was the most ornate ever owned by a Pittsburgh Negro. Towering above all the houses around it, the Posey mansion had two floors with fifteen-foot ceilings and seven enormous windows looking out on the street. Six columns flanked a wide porch, and a two-tiered staircase led down to the curb. The first tier went from the front door to the bottom of the house; the second continued down another ten feet through a manicured hedge rimmed with stone. In the library, the Poseys filled the bookshelves with literary classics and covered a center table with periodicals. In the dining room, they displayed china that Anna Posey decorated by hand. A talented artist, Anna painted oils and watercolors that hung throughout the mansion as well as in the homes of other members of the Negro elite.
Along with families of new wealth like the Poseys, the Writts, and the Rosamonds, their circle included heirs of the Arthursville abolitionists who continued to number among Pittsburgh’s leading black businessmen. Lewis Woodson’s daughter Virginia married a barber named Jacob Proctor who counted members of the Carnegie and Westinghouse families among his clients. One afternoon, an East End matron whose husband was getting a shave decided to pay Virginia Proctor a visit. The woman was wearing a wig, and Virginia asked if she could inspect it to see how it was made. Shortly afterward, she opened a wig store on the second floor above the barbershop, and “Mrs. Virginia Proctor’s Hair Shop” became one of the most successful Negro enterprises in the city, with branches downtown as well as on the Hill.
For the men of the black elite, social life revolved around a handful of fraternal orders—the Knights of Pythias, the Knights Templar, the Reformers, the Odd Fellows—and the city’s most prestigious black social establishment, the Loendi Club. Located off Wylie Avenue in the bottom part of the Hill District, it was modeled after the Duquesne Club, the Romanesque refuge of the city’s white lords of rail, steel, electricity, and finance. Like its counterpart, the Loendi Club was known for its elegant dining r
oom, where members discussed business over lunch; for its card and billiard rooms, where they relaxed after work; and for its library, where wide leather chairs were suitable for reading and napping. The floors were draped with expensive carpets, and the walls adorned with the paintings of Henry Ossawa Tanner, the son of the Arthursville barber, who had moved to Paris and become a notable figure in the Impressionist movement.
Wives and daughters had their own societies. In the summer of 1897, a group of Negro women met in the home of Rachel Lovett Jones, the spouse of a businessman, to form what would become the longest surviving book club in black America. They called it the Aurora Reading Club, and they adopted as their motto “Lifting as We Climb,” a slogan borrowed from the Washington, D.C., matrons who had formed the National Association of Colored Women the year before. Every week, the reading club’s twenty-five members met to discuss books and to organize support for local charities. One was the Aged Women’s Home, a refuge for indigent widows. Another was the Working Girls Home, a boardinghouse on the Hill that welcomed penniless young migrants from the South who might otherwise have become working girls of another sort.
In 1890, Andrew Carnegie gave Pittsburgh a gift of $1 million to build one of the first of the more than sixteen thousand libraries that he would finance during his lifetime. A decade later, it opened a branch on the Hill, a stately red-brick building with a huge Beaux Arts arched entrance. The librarian, a Mrs. Wilson, founded another book club there, for colored girls of high school and college age. On the second night of every week, the thirteen members of the “Tuesday Evening Study Club” met at the Carnegie library on Wylie Avenue to hear lectures from guest speakers and to study the history and literature of foreign countries that they dreamed of visiting one day.