Race and Renaissance: African Americans in Pittsburgh since World War II

Chapter 2 New Migrations, Renaissance I, and the Challenge to Jim Crow

44 52 new migrations, Renaissance i, and the challenge to Jim crow Pittsburgh entered a prolonged period of economic and population decline during the years after World War II. The city lost increasing numbers of jobs and people to the suburbs, the South, the Southwest, and to overseas expansion of manufacturing production. During this time, Pittsburgh’s black population increased and gained a larger share of the city’s total, but African Americans confronted the persistence of racially biased employment policies; structural limits on their economic mobility; and enduring barriers to where they could live and educate their children. The city’s black residents responded to these constraints by intensifying their demands for equal access to jobs, housing, education , and a variety of human services and public accommodations. Their postwar movement for social change gained increasing focus in the rise of the modern Civil Rights and Black Power movements.1 Migration, Industrial Decline, and Economic Inequality Global competition, technological change, and shifting federal investment policies transformed Pittsburgh’s socioeconomic, class, ethnic, and TrotterDay text.indd 44 4/14/10 11:11 AM new migrations, Renaissance i, and the challenge to Jim crow • 45 race relations during the 1950s and 1960s. The U.S. share of the world’s steel market, dominated by the Pittsburgh region, plunged from 54 percent at the end of World War II to 20 percent in 1970. The city’s value added from manufacturing employment dropped from 47 to 38 percent during the same period.2 Pittsburgh’s total population decreased from nearly 700,000 in 1950 to just over 500,000 in 1970. This represented a loss of about 11 percent during the 1950s and 14 percent during the 1960s. Young people between the ages of twenty and thirty-nine left the city and region in growing numbers, while the city’s immigrant population continued to drop—from 85,000 during the 1940s to just over 45,000 during the 1960s (see table 1). In June 1963, a local housing study concluded that Pittsburgh needed more than forty thousand new jobs annually in order to arrest economic decline and maintain its current population level.3 The city’s largest employers confronted increasing foreign competition for their products. European producers already created competition for steel made in the United States, but during the postwar years, Taiwan, Korea, and Brazil became major steel-producing countries as well. At the same time, the Basic Oxygen Furnace (BOF) and electrical steel-producing processes displaced older, labor-intensive “open-hearth” furnaces. The BOF produced a batch of steel in less than one hour and dramatically reduced the demand for industrial labor. Conversely, the open-hearth process required six to twelve hours to perform the same job. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, open-hearth methods had accounted for over 90 percent of U.S. steel production. By 1970, the United States produced some forty-eight million tons of steel using the openhearth methods, while steel produced by BOF and electrical processes together increased from only a few million tons in 1958 to 83.5 million tons by the late 1960s.4 Government investment policies also weakened the steel industry and the manufacturing sector of the Pittsburgh region. Whereas the federal government favored steel producers during the interwar years, it now increasingly favored aerospace, electronic, computer, and similar firms relying on synthetic rather than metal products. The West Coast and South emerged as major centers of these new industries. During the 1950s alone, California increased its share of defense spending by 21 percent, while the southern region showed an increase of 13 percent. Meanwhile, the Pittsburgh-based U.S. Steel Corporation diminished its own vitality by opening up expensive new sources of iron ore in northern Canada at a time of steady decline in market demand for steel and metal products. TrotterDay text.indd 45 4/14/10 11:11 AM 46 • new migrations, Renaissance i, and the challenge to Jim crow The city’s other major employers (most notably H. J. Heinz Company, Alcoa, Gulf, and Westinghouse) responded to escalating global competition and technological change by internationalizing large portions of their operations. By the 1960s, the international units of these corporations accounted for about 35 percent of their profits.5 In order to arrest economic and demographic decline, the city initiated an ambitious urban redevelopment program known as Renaissance I. Beginning in 1943 and running through the...