Black People in Pittsburgh: Population, Jobs, & Neighborhoods

Here's some more generalized info fromThe WPA History of the Negro in Pittsburgh. This series of articles was commissioned as a part of the American Guide Series, published by the Federal Writers’ Project, to provide work to thousands of unemployed writers, editors, and researchers in the midst of the Great Depression. An unknown number of these projects in progress were lost when the program was abruptly shut down by a hostile Congress in 1939. One of those, “The Negro in Pittsburgh,” lay dormant in the Pennsylvania State Library until it was microfilmed in 1970. The WPA History of the Negro in Pittsburgh marked the first publication of this rich body of information. This unique historical study of the city’s Black population, although never completed, features articles on civil rights, social class, lifestyle, culture, folklore, and institutions from colonial times through the 1930s. It was edited and contextualized by Laurence A. Glasco. 

Population Quick Facts

• 3 out of 5 people making their home in Pittsburgh are either foreign born or Black.

• In 1930, Black people made up almost...

  • 1/10th of all Americans

  • 1/7th of all Pennsylvanians

  • 1/12 of Pittsburghers

• Among the Northern cities, Pittsburgh ranks 9th in its number of Black people. 

Job Breakdown

In 1930, of the city’s employed people 26,121 were Black.

• 1/3 were steelworkers, glassworkers, laborers, carpenters, and workers in manufacturing and industry

• Almost ½ were domestic and personal service— servants, chauffeur, barbers, and the like

• 1/6 were trade and transportation, or were small shop owners, bus, and car repairmen

• 1/15 (all others) were white collar and professional workers.

By Neighborhood

Harlem, South Chicago, South Philadelphia are cities in themselves that grew great and small industries, businesses, and social organizations, giving them a unity. Pittsburgh is different, Black people were concentrated not in one community only, but in half a dozen island-like groups into which and around which wash other nationalities Poles, Italians, Jews (foreign-born and native), Germans, Irish, Russians, Mexicans, and Hungarians. These islands of population were the Hill District, East Liberty, Homewood, the South Side, the Strip, Manchester, Woods Run, and Beltzhoover. Instead of staying within their communities Black workers traveled to the mills and factories, or to the downtown business section.

Pittsburgh Neighborhoods and Settlements

• Hill District

  • The history of the Hill is the usual sorry tale of deterioration from a once attractive living place. 

  • When the second part of the historic Woods plan of Pittsburgh was laid out in 1784, it contained four farms and 40 outlets lying along the Monongahela River from the present Grant Street to Frasier Street in Oakland, and along the Allegheny River from 11th Street at the edge of the Golden Triangle to 33rd Street in Lawrenceville. Farm number three on this plot consisted of 274 acres, owned by A. C. Reed, which, after the Revolutionary War was subdivided for a home for General Tannehill. This is now the heart of the Hill District. 

  • What is known as “The Hill” was populated slowly...

    • 1815 - only thirteen of the town’s 5,000 persons lived on Grant’s Hill, but...

    • 1837 - a business directory listed 413 people on all that land now referred to as the Hill. These were chiefly merchants and professionals who had built in the growing suburb.

    • 1887 - The Hill was still country land, set at wide intervals with good houses, some of them wellknown for traditional hospitality. Several of the old homes survive, dilapidated reminders of former delightful prosperity.

  • As the city grew, the lower parts of the Hill, nearer the noise and dust of business and the smoke and grime of iron mills and foundries became peopled with Irish workers. These, as Jews settled among them, moved up the Hill. And then as the Black people grew in population and took up the long-used houses on the lower slopes, the Jews also pushed further out. So the successive tides of people have worked up the long slope and out towards Oakland, leaving finally the Black people, largely, in the dwellings discarded by their predecessors; and leaving them for many years in alley-houses behind the dwellings of the Jewish, Italian and other foreign populations. 

    • 1860s - the lower Hill was known as Hayti

    • 1900 - the Fifth Ward, where the Black people of Pittsburgh are more concentrated recorded 211

    • 1910 - the black population grew to 6,146

    • 1920 - it reached 10,383

  • On the Hill, 25,000 or almost half of the Black people of Pittsburgh now (1930) try to live, fighting poverty, squalor, disease, crime, vice—every human handicap. Here thrive saloons and speakeasies, gambling houses and pawn shops, pool rooms, dope dens, houses of prostitution and assignation. The Hill is the symbol of the worst that a fiercely industrial city like Pittsburgh can do to human beings.

  • (NOTE: the Black Renaissance in the Hill spanned from the 1930s - 1950s) 

• Schenley Heights, East Liberty, and Homewood

  • Connoted life lived in other ways than the social disorganization and disintegration of the Hill. Professional and middle class people own their homes-- some in the usual city row, some isolated from their neighbors by as much narrow ground as city crowding permits. In these sections, radios, automobiles, vacations with pay, pianos and bathrooms, high school and university study, theater and concert attendance are more plentiful than in the Hill and the Strip, on the South Side or Woods Run. Living is organized on a level different from that of the Hill. Bridge clubs and literary clubs meet in comfortable, well-furnished living rooms. Invitational luncheons and dinners are served at well-laid tables. Musicals, formal parties, formal calls and entertaining maintain a “genteel tradition.”

• North Side: Allegheny, Manchester, Woods Run

  • Once a green and open village, with lawns reaching to the river, and elm trees sheltering porticoed houses. In Manchester, Black life is almost as old as the city itself. In Allegheny, too, was the Avery Mission settlement where one of the first Black schools in the country was established. Here also Avery College taught the sciences and the humanities. In old Allegheny several of the earliest churches were founded. Part of the Avery Church settlement had grown up in streets easily reached by the spring flood of the Allegheny River. Year after year streets and houses were submerged and, when the waters subsided, left under layers of slime and mud. There came also to this settlement an influx of that human wreckage that found quarters most easily accessible near rivers and railroads. Old residents moved out, discouraged, and crowded into the Carrington Street and Manchester districts. Housing became an acute problem here, and with it grew problems of health, infant mortality, delinquency and other evils.

  • Carrington Street, Boyle Street and the Brighton Road district are not so decrepit as the lower Hill District and the South Side, not so substantial as Homewood and Schenley Heights. They are, nevertheless, among the less desirable parts of the city for living. Manchester and Woods Runs, with the South Side, are scarred by social decay. These are the steel-mill settlements—black, congested, sorry with mill grime, industrial disease, and misery.

  • In Manchester and Woods Run now (1930) the six thousand odd Blacks are chiefly families whose fathers do hard labor in the nearby mills. Today (1930) many of them live on relief. A few run small businesses for their own people—barber shops and restaurants, chiefly. Here, too, came many people from the South during and after the migration of the First World War. 

  • These North Side communities have developed their own social unity expressed in the North Side and Suburban Civic League of about 400 members, in women’s clubs, in the Olympian Dramatic Club and in young people’s social clubs. The pastors of sixteen churches form the Ministerial Association. Four or five doctors and three dentists practice.

• The Strip

  • “The Strip,” once notorious as the “Stormy Ninth” Ward, is a narrow stretch of industrial slums between the Allegheny River and the Pennsylvania Railroad running from the Union Station almost to the old United States Arsenal. It became one of the level sections of city land, conveniently lying along the river banks, preempted by the early iron industry, and for years was inhabited by German, then Irish foundry and mill workers. As the Black Diamond Steel Mill was the first in the city to employ Black workers, numbers of Blacks moved in with Poles and Slovaks, and the German and Irish drifted eastward. It is now a grimy backyard of the city, a kind of ghost city, a deserted mill area, discarded by industry, partly demolished; churches and schools for the most part have moved to neighboring sections.

• South Side, Beltzhoover

  • On the industrial South Side lives another island community of Black, five percent of the Germans, Poles, Hungarians, and Russians squeezed into the smoke and dust-corroded flats along the Monongahela River, or climbing the bleak hills just beyond the flats. Here again are the tawdry and barren homes of unskilled millworkers, washed and scorched to uniform dreary gray by rain and sun and falling cinders from mill stacks in whose hot shadow they stand. Dilapidated, dark from crowding together and from the smoke-filled air that settles around them, roofs leaking, steps broken, porches hanging—kitchens frequently used for sleeping, these houses are human habitations. Rooms of semi-darkness, where the plaster has fallen and rain seeps in, two beds, a table, a stove, and soap boxes or orange crates for chairs, sometimes house a family.

  • Beltzhoover, a conservative community lying on the outer hills of the city, has a Black population of approximately 2,000. This settlement grew rapidly when the Liberty Tubes were begun in 1924. Italian and southern black laborers employed on the construction of the tubes lived in shanties overhanging the tube area and, after completion of the tubes, many of them did not leave but moved into better houses. Residents from the degenerating parts of the Hill moved into the greener, more open district of Beltzhoover. Here they built or rented more modern types of homes than had been theirs on the Hill, sometimes graced with amenities like flower gardens. Beltzhoover has a less mobile population of millworkers, postal service employees, two physicians, a dentist, social workers, nurses, clerks and people in other occupations, about one third of whom are homeowners. The families of several school teachers, who because of the prejudice in our Pittsburgh school system must seek employment elsewhere, live there. The relief situation is less acute here than in the Hill, Manchester, or the Strip. It is a neighborly community. Frequently Blacks and whites visit back and forth. Occasionally in time of illness a white family takes home a Black family’s wash and vice versa. At Christmas, pudding and pastries are exchanged.

Economic Stability

The economic basis upon which rests the social, political, and cultural life in Pittsburgh is weaker and more shifting than that of any other group. Because of such variability, as well as the existence of several communities rather than one concentrated settlement such as Harlem or South Chicago, the group mood and outlook has not established or coalesced; group unity has remained weak.

• 3/4ths of Pittsburgh Blacks lived in poverty

• 1/6th of them have the necessities of decent living

• 1/10th maintain comfortable middle-class circumstances. 

• Several had accumulated small fortunes

• a few have incomes above $10,000 a year

• 15% of the community owned their own homes, as compared with about 1/3 of native whites and 1/2 of foreign borns.