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

Introduction

xvii African American urban history since World War II is an emerging field of scholarship. This research is helping to transform our understanding of numerous topics and themes—the origins and significance of the second Great Migration, the second ghetto, the contemporary urban crisis, deindustrialization, and the modern Civil Rights and Black Power movements , to name only a few. Scholars have published detailed case studies of New York, Philadelphia, Oakland, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Detroit, Greensboro, and Atlanta, but the city of Pittsburgh is largely absent from the historiography of the postwar city and the heated debates that it has generated.1 This book aims to address this gap in our knowledge and add Pittsburgh to recent discussions of post–World War II black urban history. It draws upon existing secondary sources, supplemented by primary archival accounts, newspapers, and oral histories to document the persistence of Jim Crow into the postwar years; the rise of the modern black freedom struggle; deindustrialization; and the city’s effort to create a postindustrial renaissance. By focusing on the development of Pittsburgh’s postwar African American community, this volume also seeks to pinpoint areas for future research and establish the conceptual foundation for a broader and more comprehensive study of the city’s black community during the second half of the twentieth century. As such, this book is primarily a work of synthesis rather than a detailed case study of postwar African American urban life. Equally important, this book is an interpretive account of the connection between contemporary life and historical change. It seeks to illuminate how African Americans in Pittsburgh arrived at the present moment in their history, as well as the history of the city, the region, inTRodUcTion TrotterDay text.indd 17 4/14/10 11:11 AM xviii • introduction and the nation. In 2007, the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Race and Social Problems published a report titled “Pittsburgh’s Racial Demographics : Differences and Disparities,” which documents striking gaps in employment, education, and quality of life for African Americans and whites in the Pittsburgh metropolitan region. In this book, we underscore what racial disparities mean in the day-to-day lives of black people and the diverse strategies that they deployed to address persistent inequities along the color line. As such, we hope to encourage ongoing discussions between contemporary social researchers, historians, policy makers, students, teachers, and activists. A focus on Pittsburgh is not only justified by a dearth of research on the post–World War II years, but by the unique history of the city’s black population. As the principal urban symbol of the nation’s industrial history, the Steel City offers an unusual opportunity to capture the racial and class dimensions of an era that is rapidly fading from historical memory . During the industrial era, contemporaries often called Pittsburgh capitalism’s first city. Organized around steel production, the economy of the Pittsburgh region underlay much of the nation’s urban-industrial expansion . The area attracted large numbers of European immigrants, African Americans, and American-born whites from declining agricultural areas. A variety of racial and ethnic groups perceived Pittsburgh as one of the best places for work in the industrial sector. The dynamic interplay of blacks, whites, unions, employers, the state, and a plethora of private institutions all make Pittsburgh a site with profound regional, national, and international significance for the post–World War II era. The Steel City continues to struggle with the long-term consequences of the collapse of its old industrial infrastructure. By the late 1980s, the city had undergone a first and second renaissance and was prepared for a third. In 1985 and 2007, Rand McNally selected Pittsburgh as the nation ’s “most livable city,” and helped to enhance the reputation of an urban center that had successfully made the transition from manufacturing to high technology service industries. Yet the fruits of economic revitalization movements were unevenly distributed. The city’s black population became widely dispersed across several neighborhoods, all of which experienced difficulties gaining access to jobs in the vibrant, higher-paying sectors of the service economy. Thus, Pittsburgh provides an exceedingly important example of a place in which historical scholarship bears on issues of contemporary social change, particularly those of class and race within the larger context of an evolving global economy. TrotterDay text.indd 18 4/14/10 11:11 AM introduction • xix Pittsburgh’s historic African American community...