Ep. 49 – Smoketown – Black Pittsburgh’s Forgotten Renaissance: A Conversation with Mark Whitaker

[0:00:07 Peniel] welcome to race and democracy, a podcast on the intersection between race, democracy, public policy, social justice, and citizenship.

[0:00:21 Peniel] Welcome to race and democracy. And on today’s podcast, we have a special guest. The author Mark Whitaker, who is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir My Long Trip Home. His latest book is The Untold Story of Smoketown. The other Great Black Renaissance. The former managing editor of CNN Worldwide, he was previously the Washington bureau chief for NBC News and a reporter and editor at Newsweek, where he rose to become the first African American leader of a National news Weekly. Uh, Mark Whitaker. Welcome to our podcast. How can L? I want to talk about this book, The Untold Story of Smoketown, the other great Black Renaissance, your recent book, which is really now in in paperback. And it’s been critically acclaimed and rightfully so. What inspired you to write this book?

[0:01:15 Mark] Well, you know, my father grew up in Pittsburgh on I used to visit a za child, and when I wrote my first book, um, which was started out as a sort of story of my long and somewhat troubled relationship with my father um, but then became sort of, ah, larger family history, um, of his family and my mother’s family. Um, I started to do reporting on the Pittsburgh that he grew up in. He was born in 1935. Um, and, um, I grew up in the Homewood district of Pittsburgh. And one day I came upon, um, Online A the archive hosted by the Carnegie Museum of Art of Of Photographs by the great, uh, black photographer Teenie Harris. He was, ah, photographer who worked for the Pittsburgh her That was his day job. But for decades, he just traveled around the city taking pictures of all aspects of black life in Pittsburgh. And I actually came upon some pictures of my grandparent’s my grandfather. Actually, both of them were undertakers. My grand father had come, uh, north during the great migration from Texas and become a mortician. And then he married my grandmother, who had grown up in the hill district on and convinced her to get an under type takers licenses. Well, um, and so there were pictures of the two of them, sort of in their prime, kind of, you know, uh, pillars of the black middle class in Pittsburgh at the time. And then I started looking at all the other photographs in this archive of, you know, great jazz musicians, like, you know, uh, Lena Horne and Billy Strayhorn, Billy Exxon, Mary Lou Williams and of athletes who came through a Pittsburgh Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson. And, um and I started, you know, to sort of you could see just visually before you that Pittsburgh had been this incredibly vibrant and influential place and so I started to do more research. And I had, um, known a little bit about the Pittsburgh Courier, the black newspaper at the time. But the more research I did, the more I realized that, um, you know, in the center of all of this, um, starting in the in the twenties and thirties and through the early sixties was the story of this newspaper, which during that time, the original big kind of national black newspaper with a national reach had been the Chicago defender. Uh, but in in this in that era, I’m starting in the mid-thirties through the late fifties and early sixties, the couriers actually overtook it. Um, and so when I sort of put all of that together. The influence of the courier, uh, the influence that Pittsburgh had had on all of these kind of iconic cultural figures. And then, of course, the fact that our greatest black playwright, August Wilson, was born and raised in Pittsburgh and then set nine of his 10 great, uh, century cycle plays in Pittsburgh. Um, I thought that there was really, you know, a book to be written which hadn’t been written, you know, aspects of the story had been written elsewhere, but nobody had really put it all together.

[0:04:54 Peniel] And when you think about this Pittsburgh Renaissance and you talk about how writers from the Pittsburgh Courier referred to this area, the black community there as Smoketown and you write that, um, it black community goes from 25,000 to 100,000 by 1960 what is fueling this renaissance? We know about the great migration, and we’ve heard about the Harlem Renaissance in the Chicago Renaissance. What are some of the people? I mean, this was the first time I heard about Cat Posey and Gus Greenlee, the Negro Carnegie’s come Posey. I’ve heard about Billy Strayhorn, but had never read as much about Strayhorn and Billy Eckstein. Eso what’s fueling this 100,000? And there’s so many famous people throughout this book, what is fueling this? 

[0:05:41 Mark] Well, first of all, 100,000, which, you know, really wasn’t that much compared with that many, compared with Harlem and Chicago and a half dozen other northern black communities. Um, which is one of the things that makes you know the influence that had in that period so interesting? Um, there were a couple of things that were kind of, uh, unique about Pittsburgh in that area era for black migrants. One was. You know that the the migrants who came north, um, during the Great Migration Thio to Chicago, for example, came largely from the deep south along the Mississippi River. The migrants who came to Pittsburgh, particularly in the early phases of the great migration? Um, the great migration is considered to have begun around World War One. But even before that and then after between World War One and World War Two came, uh, Mawr from the eastern and northern parts of the Old South, um, from states like Virginia, Delaware, Maryland, North Carolina. So if they, uh their their parents or grandparents had been slaves. They were just a likely to have been house slaves, domestic slaves as field hands, the kinds of migrants who are coming from from from Thea, the, you know, the cotton fields of the Deep South. Um And so they arrived in Pittsburgh, many of them knowing how to read, knowing how to read music, playing instruments with a great deal of of sort of cultural sophistication. Um, the second element that made Pittsburgh unique was that partly because Pittsburgh had been sort of the epicenter of the Gilded Age and the late 19th century, the place where you know Andrew Carnegie made his fortune. And and Frick and the Mellon banking, family and so forth. Um, the public schools in Pittsburgh at the turn of the century and between the two first and Second World War, were among the best funded public schools in the country. There was a huge sort of centrally located high school named called Shen Li. Another one called Westinghouse, named after, um uh, George Westinghouse. So, and they were admitting black students not in huge numbers. Um, but enough that some of these migrants, you know, could could could benefit. So, you know Billy Strayhorn, for example, the great musician who became the great collaborator for Duke Ellington? I went to Westinghouse High School and as as did my father Later on, Um uh and then I think the third thing that sets Pittsburgh apart a little bit from Harlem I mean, Harlem’s Renaissance was, you know, very literary on Berry Intellectual, and the Pittsburgh had some of that. But you know, Pittsburgh again, sort of. The legacy of the Gilded Age was had a much more kind of entrepreneurial culture. It was a place where, uh, you know, there was a lot of status toe people who started businesses. So I think it both attracted and then encouraged, um, migrants, like my grandfather who you know, wanted to start businesses. So there was a very sort of commercial entrepreneurial edge to it. And you mentioned the Posey family cat posey was a came to Pittsburgh. Uh, in the late 19th century, um, he had been, uh, had sort of grown up on steamboats and had, um, become the first black steamboat engineer. And then, uh once he settled in Pittsburgh, he started building his own steamboats investing in coal mines by the turn of the century, Hey was the richest mask black black man in Pittsburgh. He had this huge mansion in in in in Homestead and, um, Hiss son, who was a bit of, ah, kind of a wayward youth. But but then later sort of got his act together and became first the manager and then the owner of the Homestead Grays, which, along with the Pittsburgh Crawfords were the two dominant Negro League teams of the 19 thirties. And and that’s a whole chapter in my book. So so? So there was really, you know, it was a place where, where business and the aspiration to be, uh, you know, to make it in business was celebrated, even even for the black Migrants.

[0:10:51 Peniel] And that’s a great segue into a discussion of the Pittsburgh Courier and Robert L. Van, because what you describe one, he’s a fascinating figure, but his relationship and the Pittsburgh Cory’s relationship to black sports figures like Joe Louis and the Negro Leagues, but also the way in which there’s there’s this entrepreneurial. But this this real pragmatism when I think about what you described with the Pittsburgh career, suggesting at one point that a Philip Randolph resigned from being head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car porters after initially being really big fans of Of of his when the messenger had a robust, uh, circulation and when black socialism wasn’t a bad thing in the 19 twenties. So describe to me, the Pittsburgh Courier, and it seemed to be an engine of so much. By the 19 forties, it had its circulation, was through the roof, and it was leading the double V campaign. But what about the What about Robert Van and the Pittsburgh Career? 

[0:11:56 Mark] Well, you know Robert Robert L Van, I think partly because he died fairly young, he was just 60 years old when he died in 1940 is someone who, uh, you know, a lot of people haven’t heard of, but he was a tremendously influential, uh, figure in black leader in during this period. Hey, was born in North Carolina. His mother was ah, a cook in a sort of ah, you know, a kind of post slave plantation household. Um, he, um, sort of scraped together enough money working at various jobs and a post office and elsewhere, too. first go to a ah segregated black school in the south. And then, um, there had been an abolitionist, a white abolitionist named Charles Avery who in theory, 18 seventies, I think had established, um, uh, scholarships for black students at what ah was then called the Western University of Pennsylvania. Now the University of Pittsburgh and Van heard about the scholarships and applied and kind of made his way on his own all the way to Pittsburgh, got his undergraduate degree and then became the first black law graduate of of that university and had and set up shop after the turn of the century. He had set up shop Pond intended to be a lawyer. But there was this little, um at the time, it was essentially a pamphlet, um called the Pittsburgh Courier that had been started by this sort of dreamy poet on and eventually this the founder. I was looking for investors, and he went to There was, ah, social club for the black elite. Um called the Law Wendy Club. And he met Cat Posey and a couple of other, you know, successful local black business people the time and they in greet to invest in his business. But they wanted, you know, toc it officially incorporated. So they approach van to do that. And they quickly determined that actually, van would be a better, uh, editor, publisher and editor for the paper. Then the founder, um, And they so that they pushed him out and Van took over and then slowly but surely, starting in 19 in the 19 tens and twenties, Van through a combination of very shrewd business moves, but also kind of editorial, um, innovations, uh, expanded the paper to the point where it overtook, um, the defender. And, you know, he was you know, it’s it’s hard. You know, I think I I show in in my chapters about the growth of the courier to kind of differentiate between what was kind of a principled editorial stand on the part of the courier and what you know was the kind of coverage that would just grow circulation, you know? So he starts out covering crime stories, and then, hey, pivots to sort of taking editorial stands, you know, kind of on behalf of black rights. Then in the thirties, he jumps on the Joe Louis bandwagon very early on and and and and commits all of these. Resource is, you know, when it’s interesting because Joe Louis, who was, you know, started his boxing career in Detroit and then moved to Chicago, was right there into the defender’s backyard. And yet it was the courier that became the, uh, you know, decided it was going to become the van used the term the Joe Louis newspaper, you know, um and and in fact, it zits, the first chapter of my book and the reason you know, First of all, it’s a great story. Kind of like how they, um, how they sort of helped build up Joe Lewis as he was making his way to the, you know, rising to the to the heavyweight championship. But you can literally see before your eyes how they ride the Joe Louis story toe overtaking the defender. Um, in a in a period of three or four years.

[0:16:24 Peniel] Now, when we think about Lena Horne and Billy Strayhorn Duke Ellington, you talk about Charlie Parker. Dizzy Gillespie. Just the jazz scene. Seems like it was incredible. There s So let’s talk about that in terms of, you know, music. It seems like it was the music capital, especially by the 19 forties having somebody like Lena Horne who becomes really this global black superstar. It seemed an incredible, uh, incredible, incredibly fortuitous. But also, these, uh, these jazz players who are gonna be so innovative and so influential. So talk to us about the the music here.

[0:17:08 Mark] Well, again, you know, one of the interesting things about about Pittsburgh again, I mentioned that, you know, a lot of people, a lot of the migrants arrived already, Um, reading music and playing instruments. So of all of the, you know, when they were great, um, players of bass players and trumpet players and saxophone players that came out of Pittsburgh. But of all the jazz instruments, the one, um, you know, the sort of most competitive, uh, instrument in the Pittsburgh scene was the piano. I mean, they were just, you know, hundreds and hundreds of incredibly talented, uh, black pianist. So Billy Strayhorn became a composer originally. That was his instrument. Later, Errol Garner came along. Mary Lou Williams. Ahmad. Jamal who? Still performing. Um and I think it waas, you know, and it was kind of I point this out later in my my chapter about August Wilson, there’s there’s a reason that one of his plays is called The Piano Lesson. You know, because there were you if you went, you know, from house to house in in the hill district, Uh, in, um, in Pittsburgh in the 19 thirties and the 19 forties, you would see pianos. Um, you know often just, you know, kind of player pianos, upright pianos, whatever. But they were all of these, you know, young black musicians playing the piano. So and I think that that it was both because of you know, that tradition, but also frankly, because of the competitiveness within the black music scene in Pittsburgh. You know, it was interesting when I was reading some of the biographies and, um, autobiographies of, um of some of these great musicians people like Strayhorn, Merrily Williams and so forth. You know, they would talk about their childhoods in Pittsburgh, but it almost made it sound as though it was kind of a miracle that these, you know, prodigies had emerged from this kind of small little industri, you know, smoky, smelly industrial town. But in fact, it was the opposite. It was partly because, you know, they were exposed to so much great music and so much competition before they before they left Pittsburgh. It’s funny because you know all of those. So Strayhorn, Mary Lou Williams, Billy Eckstein, Errol Garner all grew up in Pittsburgh. Lena Horne did not. But the reason she ended up spending her late her early twenties in Pittsburgh. She you know, she grew up in this prominent, um, middle class family in New York. But the sort of the black sheep, as it were of her family of the previous generation, was her father, uh, Teddy Horn, who became a racketeer, uh, divorced Lena’s mother. Uh, soon after her birth. Lena until her teens was raised by her mother in New York. She was a bit of, ah, kind of a stage mother, kind of, you know, pushing her toe, you know, perform at the cotton club and so forth. Meanwhile, her father left and ended up in Pittsburgh as a numbers runner and, um, and running a hotel, Um, sort of asses front. Um, and by her late teens, leaner had gotten fed up with her mother and her, uh, stepfather. Um, and, uh, sort of, you know, parading her around, um, on trying to sort of push her into show business. So she ran away to Pittsburgh, to live with her father on. Then she she married a guy from Pittsburgh. So, um, and it’s interesting. She later became best friends with Billy Strayhorn, although they didn’t meet until after both of them had left Pittsburgh. Um, but, um so But she was, you know, at the time when just before she really took off and became nationally famous. Um uh, she spent several years in Pittsburgh, and it’s and it’s a really interesting story.

[0:21:30 Peniel] Now, you describe the decline of this renaissance, and so much of it is connected to urban renewal. Connect to the transformation of the lower Hill district and just what people called slum clearance or or just trying Thio transform these neighborhoods. And in the process, there was a lot of destruction. So what are some of the forces that lead to the decline Black Pittsburgh by the 19 fifties, 19 sixties?

[0:22:03 Mark] You know, it’s interesting, because I you know, I when I was kind of envisioning this book, I wanted it to be the story of Black Pittsburgh But I also wanted it to, in some ways stand for the story of black America in this period which, you know is a historian is relative to, um you know, the period of the Civil War and Reconstruction and the civil rights movement starting in the 19 fifties this whole era, I mean, a lot has been written about it, but but much less than other error eras of of black history. Um, so I wanted, you know, Thio without, you know, making it a story of all of black America. In that period, I wanted to kind of touch on themes that were common with other black communities. And when you see what happened to this incredibly vibrant community, which I’ve been describing for the rest of the book in the last chapter, like literally within a decade, it’s absolutely tragic. On its’s a very similar story to what happened in other, um, black neighborhoods across America At the time. It was sort of a perfect storm of three things. One waas um, the fact that a lot of these industries that had attracted blacks from the south during the migration um uh, you know, started, um, to decline eso the steel industry in Pittsburgh, the car industry in Detroit, the meatpacking industry in Chicago. Um uh, just at a time when whites were able to get loans and moved to the suburbs, whereas whereas blacks were sort of stuck in these declining inner city neighborhoods The second element waas Aziz, you mentioned urban renewal, Um, which in often began with white business interests in all of these cities thinking they were going to do something to sort of revive the downtown business district’s but in the process. And, you know, some people think this was also, you know, it was actually a deliberate part of the strategy. Um, they tor down a lot of historic black neighborhoods, uh, put up highways and other thoroughfares that cut cut black neighborhoods off from from the downtown business, uh, district’s. It was also the era of the growth of public housing, which, um, uh, you know, initially was sort of advertised thio poor and middle class black folks, as as an improvement in their lives on something good, but then ended up sort of again, sort of cutting them off, um, from from the rest of those cities. So that’s that’s something you see across America. But it’s particularly poignant in Pittsburgh, where as a result of this big, you know, uh uh, Urban renewal plan a very early one. In the 19 forties and fifties, they ended up tearing down, literally tearing down Theo entire lower hill, which had been the sort of the the heart of cultural activity where all the, you know, jazz clubs were a lot of historic churches, social clubs, Um, and to build a, you know, an indoor sports arena in a big parking lot, you know. So by the by the early sixties, the what was left of the hill was completely cut off from the downtown area, which used to be right at the bottom of the hill. Um And then when you the Siris of urban riots which never got his bad, it was Pittsburgh, as they did in a lot of other cities, but still did a lot of damage and kind of burned out a lot of the Middle Hill. Other areas. I mean, you go to Pittsburgh today, and a lot of these entire blocks and kind of sections of neighborhoods. Look, you know, frozen in time. You know, kind of boarded up and burned out. I have never been rebuilt, and then the third just quickly element that I talk about and I think it’s something that’s a little bit more sensitive. But, you know, at least in the case of Pittsburgh, I think was definitely the case is what I call kind of like the black elite or black middle class brain drain. So So this is like people like my father was born in 1935. Who before who? Once you had the civil rights movement. Affirmative action. You know the opportunity. You know, uh, non hbcu mawr colleges and universities started doing Hamlet, admit black students. You had the opportunity for all of these sort of what the boys would call, you know, the talented 10th. Um um, uh, black folks who in a previous era would have stayed in Pittsburgh or stayed in Detroit or stayed in, you know, the south side of Chicago and made their fortunes in one way or another. There they left to go to college or graduate school. Often they didn’t come back. And just at a time in the sixties and seventies, when these black neighborhoods were being destroyed and desperately needed, you know, strong leadership, this whole young generation of young people, or many of them had left. And, you know, I knew this a little bit and kind of, you know, from my father’s story. But it was very poignant because I I interviewed some of the descendants of the major figures in the book, most of whom were dead. But, you know, their Children and grandchildren are still are still alive, and some of them also had the same story they had left. They had spent most of their kind of, you know, adult lives elsewhere. But then they had come back, you know, in their in their fifties and sixties to care for their for their age and parents and to this day suffer a great deal of guilt about not having been there for Pittsburgh when when the black neighborhood there needed them.

[0:28:35 Peniel] Well, returning to the present, Um, really, your final chapters really well done beautifully written about August Wilson. And I know I heard of August Wilson for the first time really in high school when I found out about fences and I’ve read his plays. I’ve seen his plays very beautifully written, But as you point out, um, he’s really more of a poet than a historian of Pittsburgh or nine of the 10 plays or set in Pittsburgh. But certainly he was always always interested in this idea of black vernacular and sort of the black quotidian that the everyday black people. That’s the stories he wanted to tell. And he felt that that black middle class had had Thio abandon its It’s sort of authenticity or it’s culture to get access to Thio White mainstream, Um, context. What do you make of what’s happening right now when we think about 2020 and this year with the largest racial justice demonstrations in American history? Especially given what you just said about Pittsburgh, where there is guilt about black folks who escaped in quotes, not having been there when the city needed them? But what we’re seeing nationally is that all these neighborhoods, whether you’re saying Pittsburgh or New York City AUSTIN, Texas, where Minneapolis we you know there are people in need on De So what do you what? What do you think? Based on the work that you’ve done and all this journalistic and historical work where we at now with these very, very pressing issues that some of which you describe very, very well in Smoketown. But that’s still seem to persist even in the 21st century, when we’re many, many decades away from this period.

[0:30:32 Mark] Well, you know, I think that it is a national shame that many of these communities the Hill District, um, in Pittsburgh, some of the other historically black neighborhoods. But then, you know, all the other neighborhoods were talking about, um, in in, uh, not only in the industrial north, but also parts of the South. There are parts of those cities that are actually worse off today than they were in the age of segregation, which is, you know, um ah, it’s kind of difficult to believe, but I think that’s true that I mean, I think that there waas you know, in the great migration period, at least in these neighborhoods, um, you know the opportunity for black folks Thio, you know, to start businesses, um, to get, you know, reasonably decent educations to find jobs in factories and so forth. You go to the some of those neighborhoods now. I mean, I went to Westinghouse high School, which, you know, still has a kind of, ah, hall of Fame in that you go in the lobby and their pictures of all of these prominent black folks you know who graduated from Westinghouse High School. Um, and it’s a city, you know. Now they you know, they struggle to send kids to college. They just want to sort of keep them indoors and off the streets. Um, every day. Um uh, it za various kind of sad, um, spectacle. Um and so, you know, I think that and and, you know, these are the areas I mean, look there problems between black folks and police everywhere you go in America. And, you know, we’ve We’ve seen that so vividly in the last couple of months, but but it’s particularly bad in those neighborhoods where you have, like, you know, you have the decline of these neighborhoods, which then, you know, kind of was accompanied by this trend of, you know, military militarization of the police. You know, much less sort of community policing. Much more kind of, you know, kind of going quickly to very hostile and violent confrontations. A supposed to mediation. Ah, lack of understanding of the police of a lot of the sort of, you know, problems and issues that that that folks in those communities and also the fact that you know, uh, the black folks because of, you know, drug laws and sentencing laws and so forth and so on have become so vulnerable to the criminal justice system that, you know, everybody in those communities just lives in mortal fear of, of, of getting arrested For the first time, we’re getting rearrested of being branded a felon for life, you know, which which, which just adds Thio the dynamic. So, you know, I kind of look, ah, lot of issues were being discussed now and and kind of inequities in, you know, every every industry and every walk of life. And and it’s all true, and I think it all needs to be addressed. But I do hope that we don’t lose, Um, in this moment of awakening and reckoning, a particular focus on what? On what has happened in the last 50 years in those specific communities? Because that’s really where you know, it’s the worst for black folks in America. And, um, it would really be a shame if you know in all of the talk about, you know, more diversity and industry and more diversity in Hollywood and in academia and so forth. All of which are very important. You know, we lose this opportunity to seriously look at let’s look, look, you know, and and address, you know, the, you know, just just just all of the of the destructive forces that, um, you know, that have been a play in in those particular communities in the last 50 years. 

[0:34:42 Peniel] Alright, we’ll leave it there. We’ve been discussing The Untold Story of Smoketown, the other great black Renaissance with Mark Whitaker. Uh, this is available in paperback, and he’s also the author of the critically acclaimed memoir My Long Trip Home. He is the former

[0:34:57 Mark] deal. You forgot you forgot one thing. Oh, yes, I reviewed your latest book for The Washington Post, and I gave it a much deserved res e recommended, and I’m happy to now recommend it yet again

[0:35:11 Peniel] Thank you. 

[0:35:12 Mark] Scored in the shield. That’s a fabulous. 

[0:35:15 Peniel] I appreciate that. Mark Whitaker is the former managing editor of CNN Worldwide. He was previously the Washington bureau chief for NBC News and a reporter and editor at Newsweek, where he rose to become the first African American leader of the National News Weekly, and his latest book is The Untold Story of Smoketown. The Other Great Black Renaissance. It is out in paperback. It is a brilliant book, a page turner. Terrific, well done. Then we’ve been honored to have him as a guest on our podcast. So thank you. Thank you, Peniel. 

Thanks for listening to this episode and you can check out related content on Twitter at Peniel. Joseph, that’s P E N I E L J O S E P H and our website csrd.lbj.utexas.edu and the Center for Study of Racing Democracies on Facebook as well. This podcast was recorded at the liberal Arts Development Studio at the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. Thank you.