From the onset of the modern civil rights and black power movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s through recent times, scholarship on Pennsylvania's African American experience proliferated. Unfortunately, much of it is scattered in books and journals that are not easily accessible. Under the editorship of Joe W. Trotter and Eric Ledell Smith, African Americans in Pennsylvania brings together an outstanding array of this scholarship and makes it accessible to a wider audience, including general as well as professional students of the black experience. This volume, co-published with the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, offers the most comprehensive history of the state's black history to date. Chapters emphasize the interplay of class and race from the origins of the Commonwealth during the seventeenth century, through the era of deindustrialization in the late twentieth century. We see not only poor and working-class people but also educated business and professional people. And although scholarship has traditionally focused on the experiences of black men, this volume includes significant research on black women. Most important, this volume suggests a conceptual framework for a historical synthesis of the state's African American experience. In his introduction, Trotter assesses the strengths and limitations of existing scholarship, showing how it is built on the contributions of nineteenth-century pioneers as well as those of the first generation of professional historians, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard R. Wright, and Edward Raymond Turner. Chapters are grouped into four interlocking parts that correspond to important changes in Pennsylvania's political economy. Each part includes a brief substantive introduction that ties together the themes of the ensuing chapters. This format enables readers to develop their own synthesis of key socioeconomic and political changes in the state's African American experience over more than three centuries of time. African Americans in Pennsylvania shows how ordinary people have influenced the culture, institutions, and politics of African American communities in Pennsylvania. In the process, it documents the ways that black people have influenced, and continue to influence, the state as a whole. Contributors are Elijah Anderson, John F. Bauman, R. J. M. Blackett, John E. Bodnar, Carolyn Leonard Carson, Dennis C. Dickerson, Gerald G. Eggert, V. P. Franklin, Laurence Glasco, Peter Gottlieb, Theodore Hershberg, Leroy T. Hopkins, Norman P. Hummon, Emma Jones Lapsansky, Janice Sumler Lewis, Frederic Miller, Edward K. Muller, Gary B. Nash, Merl E. Reed, Harry C. Silcox, Jean R. Soderlund, and Joe W. Trotter, Jr.

Pittsburgh is a working city, in no small part thanks to its strong African American community. As an integral stop on the Underground Railroad, many enslaved people traveled through Pittsburgh on their way further North, and many still decided to stay. During the Great Migration of the early 20th century, Pittsburgh was again a main destination for African Americans from the rural South; approximately 95% of these men became steelworkers. There was never one centralized neighborhood where a majority of the Black population lived, but Jim Crow discrimination was still rampant, even in a city such as Pittsburgh. Photographs captured by famed Pittsburgh photographer Charles "Teenie'? Harris show the candid experiences of residents, including the achievements and celebrations of people struggling in adversity and finding happiness in their families and community.

Canaan, Dim and Far argues for the importance of Pittsburgh as a case study in analyzing African American civil rights and political advocacy in an urban setting. Focusing on the period from the Progressive Era to the end of World War II, this book spotlights neglected aspects of middle-class Black activism in the decades preceding the civil rights movement. It features a revolving cast of social workers, medical professionals, journalists, scholars, and lawyers whose social justice efforts included but also extended past racial uplift ideology and respectability politics. Adam Lee Cilli shows how these Black reformers experimented with a variety of strategies as they moved fluidly across ideologies and political alliances to find practical solutions to profound inequities. In the period under study, they developed crucial social safety supports in Black communities that buffered southern migrants against the physical, civil, and legal impositions of northern Jim Crow; they waged comprehensive campaigns against anti-Black stereotypes; and they built inroads into the industrial labor movement that accelerated Black inclusion. Committed to an expansive vision of economic and political citizenship, Pittsburgh's activists challenged white America to face its contradictions and to live up to its democratic ideals.

African Americans from Pittsburgh have a long and distinctive history of contributions to the cultural, political, and social evolution of the United States. From jazz legend Earl Fatha Hines to playwright August Wilson, from labor protests in the 1950s to the Black Power movement of the late 1960s, Pittsburgh has been a force for change in American race and class relations. Race and Renaissance presents the first history of African American life in Pittsburgh after World War II. It examines the origins and significance of the second Great Migration, the persistence of Jim Crow into the postwar years, the second ghetto, the contemporary urban crisis, the civil rights and Black Power movements, and the Million Man and Million Woman marches, among other topics. In recreating this period, Trotter and Day draw not only from newspaper articles and other primary and secondary sources, but also from oral histories. These include interviews with African Americans who lived in Pittsburgh during the postwar era, uncovering firsthand accounts of what life was truly like during this transformative epoch in urban history. In these ways, Race and Renaissance illuminates how African Americans arrived at their present moment in history. It also links movements for change to larger global issues: civil rights with the Vietnam War; affirmative action with the movement against South African apartheid. As such, the study draws on both sociology and urban studies to deepen our understanding of the lives of urban blacks.

"Smoketown brilliantly offers us a chance to see this other black renaissance and spend time with the many luminaries who sparked it...It's thanks to such a gifted storyteller as Whitaker that this forgotten chapter of American history can finally be told in all its vibrancy and glory."--The New York Times Book Review The other great Renaissance of black culture, influence, and glamour burst forth joyfully in what may seem an unlikely place--Pittsburgh, PA--from the 1920s through the 1950s. Today black Pittsburgh is known as the setting for August Wilson's famed plays about noble but doomed working-class strivers. But this community once had an impact on American history that rivaled the far larger black worlds of Harlem and Chicago. It published the most widely read black newspaper in the country, urging black voters to switch from the Republican to the Democratic Party and then rallying black support for World War II. It fielded two of the greatest baseball teams of the Negro Leagues and introduced Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers. Pittsburgh was the childhood home of jazz pioneers Billy Strayhorn, Billy Eckstine, Earl Hines, Mary Lou Williams, and Erroll Garner; Hall of Fame slugger Josh Gibson--and August Wilson himself. Some of the most glittering figures of the era were changed forever by the time they spent in the city, from Joe Louis and Satchel Paige to Duke Ellington and Lena Horne. Mark Whitaker's Smoketown is a captivating portrait of this unsung community and a vital addition to the story of black America. It depicts how ambitious Southern migrants were drawn to a steel-making city on a strategic river junction; how they were shaped by its schools and a spirit of commerce with roots in the Gilded Age; and how their world was eventually destroyed by industrial decline and urban renewal. Whitaker takes readers on a rousing, revelatory journey--and offers a timely reminder that Black History is not all bleak.

The monumental American Guide Series, published by the Federal Writers' Project, provided work to thousands of unemployed writers, editors, and researchers in the midst of the Great Depression. Featuring books on states, cities, rivers, and ethnic groups, it also opened an unprecedented view into the lives of the American people during this time. Untold numbers of 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 marks the first publication of this rich body of information. This unique historical study of the city's black population features articles on civil rights, social class, lifestyle, culture, folklore, and institutions from colonial times through the 1930s.