3 factors that set the stage for the Black renaissance
The experiences of Black people in the Gilded Age (1870-1910s) set the stage for the Black Renaissance in Pittsburgh (1920-1950s). In Mark Whitaker's book Smoketown: The Untold Story of the Other Great Black Renaissance attributes the Black Renaissance to three main factors:
Where the early black migrants from the South came from, places where Black people learned how to read and play music.
The educational opportunities in Pittsburgh both at the college level and particularly at the high school level made possible by the money of the Gilded Age.
Spirit of entrepreneurship in Pittsburgh. Even though black people couldn’t always get jobs they emulated those entrepreneurs. Pittsburgh became a hub for black business.
1: The Great Migration
While large cities like New York, Chicago and Philadelphia attracted the greatest share of Black migrants, the promise of work in Pittsburgh’s steel mills also made Southwestern Pennsylvania a desirable destination. From 1910 to the 1930s, Pittsburgh’s Black population more than doubled, growing from about 25,000 to more than 55,000.
Black Pittsburghers who had been living in the city for many years before the Great Migration referred to themselves as Old Pittsburghers, or OPs. These established Black Pittsburghers had a higher class status than the migrants. Some of these OPs thought the incoming Black migrants were sparking racial animosity from the white community and were a strain on already taxed resources.
There was also community support for migrants from churches and Black-led organizations, including the Urban League of Pittsburgh, which worked to address the inadequate health care they faced.
Back then, the jobs available to Black people in steel mills were the lowest-paying and most physically demanding jobs. They experienced high rates of workplace injury and death. Black workers were also the first targets for layoffs, and that meant periodic unemployment was a way of life. It’s hard to build wealth under those circumstances. Black migrants mostly lived in the lower Hill District, where they were charged artificially high rents for poor, overcrowded housing.
NOTE: A series of events had to happen for Black Pittsburghers to even have the option to work at the Steel Mills. After the bloody strike at Carnegie and Frick's Homestead mills in 1902, they refused to rehire most of the workers who had gone out on strike, the majority of whom were white European immigrants. They were in the market for new workers who hadn’t taken part in the union movement. "Cap" Posey through his new partnership with Carnegie and Frick was able to help recruit 346 Black workers to three Carnegie steel mills in the Pittsburgh area. (More on Posey in the next section).
Here is a great source of Oral History Interviews on the Great Migration to Pittsburgh, Migrant Voices. The website is dedicated to illuminating Pittsburgh’s place in the Great Migration through the perspectives of Black migrants.
2: Educational Opportunities
A few examples from Smoketown:
1831 - Lewis Woodson founded an all-black school called the Pittsburgh African Education Society. Martin Delany, who would later become the first Black graduate of Harvard Medical School, walked 150 miles on foot at nineteen-years-olds to study at Woodson's school.
1858 - Charles Avery, abolitionist, upon his death created an 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 Province of Canada."
3: Spirit of entrepreneurship
Cumberland "Cap" Posey is referred to as one of the "Black Carnegies". After marrying his wife in Athens Ohio, they moved to Pittsburgh in 1883 (Old Pittsburgher), for entrepreneurial opportunities. He spent years studying the business of Carnegie, Frick, Mellon and Heinz before making his own investment in coal boats in 1892. Posey oversaw a payroll of one thousand employees and had nine white investors. Without specifying the exact connections, numerous accounts describe Posey as a business partner of Henry Frick and a supplier to Andrew Carnegie’s steel mills. This all positioned Posey to recruit 346 Black workers to three Carnegie steel mills in 1902 and the decade following.
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." Cap Posey was also one of the founding investors in the Pittsburgh Courier. "In its heyday, from the twenties until the late fifties, Pittsburgh’s black population was less than a quarter of the size of New York City’s and a third of 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" (link)
