‘Smoketown’ records an overlooked history of entrepreneurs who helped shape America
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Recently I wrote about how journalism is often described as the first draft of history. That means that for historians, newspapers often are indispensable sources of information about the time, place, and people under study.
A part of American history that is often ignored was recorded by this group of newspapers that provided a platform for black voices. They recorded the contributions of black entrepreneurs to our country’s innovation and economic development.
This post will tell of black entrepreneurs and industrialists who managed to beat the odds stacked against them:
- A deckhand who studied steamboat engines and became a shipbuilder
- A college athlete who assembled and owned a Hall of Fame baseball team
- A lawyer who built a national newspaper brand and changed history
- A racketeer whose jazz venue attracted the country’s leading artists
When we think of Pittsburgh’s industrial legacy, the familiar names we hear are Carnegie, Mellon, Frick, and Heinz. These men—white and wealthy—built steel empires, funded libraries, and etched their names in marble and American memory.
But in the same smoke-filled skies another set of industrialists — black men of vision, grit, and ambition — were building fortunes of their own. Their names rarely appear in textbooks, but they should.
That’s why I’m writing again this week about the people in Mark Whitaker’s book “Smoketown: The Untold Story of the Other Great Black Renaissance.”
Coal and steamboat titan Cumberland “Cap” Posey (left), and his wife, Anna Posey. Photos: Pennsylvania Negro Business Directory, 1910, as published by the Hathi Trust. From the Frick Museums website.
We can start with Cumberland “Cap” Posey. Born in 1858 to enslaved parents in Maryland, Posey was drawn to the rivers that fed America’s industrial heart. By the time he was 19, he was working in the engine rooms of steamboats. Over many years he learned how to maintain those engines and eventually became the first black man to gain a chief engineer’s license.
Posey and family moved to Homestead, Pa., next to Pittsburgh just as Andrew Carnegie was consolidating control of Pittsburgh’s steel mills and Henry Clay Frick was cornering the market on coke, essential for making steel.
The strike
In the violent Homestead steel strike of 1892, Carnegie and Frick crushed the union. They refused to rehire the strikers, mostly white immigrants. With Posey’s help, they found black workers to replace them.
“While blacks had largely been shut out of the mills and the unions before the strike, a decade later there would be 346 Negroes working in three Carnegie steel mills in the Pittsburgh area,” Whitaker wrote. “Posey was in a position to help recruit those workers, and to project a positive image of the Carnegie empire within Pittsburgh’s growing black community.”
Posey also supplied Carnegie with coal and the boats to transport it. His company, Posey Coal Dealers and Steamboat Builders, would eventually manufacture 21 steamboats. Posey became the wealthiest black man in Pittsburgh, Whitaker wrote.
Not steamboats but sports
Cum Posey, son of Cap and Anna, made his name in the world of sports and entertainment. Photo: National Baseball Hall of Fame Library.
Posey’s son Cumberland Jr. (Cum for short) became a prominent figure himself. He made his name in Pittsburgh’s sports and entertainment worlds. He was a player, manager, team owner, and Negro Leagues executive.
While a college student, he joined a team of Negro steelworkers who played at Homestead Park on the weekends. “Posey persuaded the manager to let him schedule their games,” Whitaker wrote. They called themselves the Homestead Grays.
Cum Posey took control of the team in 1920 and built them into “the Yankees of black baseball.” He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2006. (More on Pittsburgh and the Negro Leagues in a moment.)
A newspaper publisher
Posey Sr. didn’t stop with coal and steamboats. He also became an investor in a fledgling black newspaper—the Pittsburgh Courier. He quickly realized that the real power lay not just in owning a business, but in owning the narrative. So he helped install a new leader: a brilliant, determined lawyer named Robert L. Vann.
“In his weekly editorials, Vann began naming the friends and enemies of the Pittsburgh Negro. He praised U.S. Steel and other businesses that hired the new migrants, and denounced those that didn’t,” Whitaker wrote.
Soon Vann’s influence went far beyond Pittsburgh. According to his biography in the Pennsylvania Center for the Book, “By 1936, the Courier was publishing a twenty-page paper in fifteen editions for forty-eight states—including several Jim Crow states where a network of Pullman porters helped smuggle the paper in—as well as Canada, the Caribbean, and the Philippines.”
In barbershops and living rooms, beauty salons and train cars, the Courier gave voice to millions of black Americans. Vann pushed for anti-lynching laws, union rights, military integration, and perhaps most consequentially, a political revolution: he urged black voters to abandon the Republican Party of Lincoln and support the Democrats of FDR. That shift reshaped American politics forever, Whitaker wrote.
The Pittsburgh godfather
William Augustus “Gus” Greenlee also fits into this story. If Posey was the industrialist and Vann the strategist, Greenlee was the impresario. Born in North Carolina and raised on the streets of Pittsburgh’s Hill District, Greenlee returned from Army service in France in 1919 to run his own taxi service.
It was the same year that alcohol Prohibition began. Whitaker told how Greenlee used his taxi to make deliveries of illegal beer and whiskey manufactured by a family in Latrobe, Pa., near Pittsburgh.
Gus Greenlee, center, and star pitcher Satchel Paige, right, at the Crawford Grill. It was the place to go for sports and entertainment celebrities. At left are Courier reporter Bill Nunn and sports editor Wendell Smith. Photo by Charles “Teenie” Harris, Carnegie Museum of Art Collection. Credit: Heinz Family Fund.
Greenlee used his ill-gotten gains to buy a hotel on Crawford St. and renovate it into a nightclub—the Crawford Grill—which soon became Pittsburgh’s most famous jazz venue. The top black singers and musicians performed there.
He owned a Negro League baseball team, the Pittsburgh Crawfords, and also built Greenlee Field, the first black-owned baseball stadium in the country. When it opened in 1932, he brought future Hall of Famer Satchel Paige to pitch for the Crawfords.
Along with the Homestead Grays, Pittsburgh had two of the best Negro League baseball teams. They could compete with the best white professional teams in exhibitions.
The numbers mogul
And Greenlee’s expanding empire eventually included the city’s numbers racket. Like the legendary Sicilian godfathers, he poured his fortune into the community.
“As white-run banks stopped doing anything for Negroes except take their money, Greenlee became the top lender on the Hill, doling out loans to cover rents, prevent foreclosures, and pay doctor and funeral bills,” Whitaker wrote.
“Breadwinners laid off from factory jobs could count on temporary work in his numbers operation. Families in distress found bags of groceries and buckets of coal at their doorsteps. At the same time, Gus made sure everyone could see just how much cash he had to spread around.”
These three men—Posey, Vann, and Greenlee—did more than build businesses. They built institutions. They created cultural power, financial autonomy, and political voice at a time when every system around them worked to deny those very things.
In this Pittsburgh, culture and commerce weren’t separate—they fed each other. Journalism fueled justice. Music created stars. Business underwrote dreams. What Whitaker reveals—and what mainstream histories so often overlook—is a story of black resilience and brilliance that prospered both within the mainstream economy and in spite of the barriers it erected.
This is American history—just not the version we were taught. It’s a history that deserves not just remembrance, but recognition.
It’s time to recognize again the contribution of these local newspapers: the Baltimore Afro-American, the Chicago Defender, the New York Amsterdam News, the Atlanta Daily World, the Los Angeles Sentinel, the Pittsburgh Courier, my hometown Cleveland Call & Postand many others.
They fostered a sense of community, and provided news and information in the struggle against racial discrimination and segregation. Frequently they covered stories white newspapers could not or would not touch. Whitaker’s book, shown below, reminded us of their importance.
