The Pittsburgh Courier was one of many that influenced American business, politics, sports, music, and social justice
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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.
Starting in the 1800s, my hometown of Cleveland had local newspapers published in German, Italian, Yiddish, Polish, Ukrainian, Slovak, Czech, Hungarian, Slovenian, and, for the numerous Irish immigrants, English.
Only occasionally would some of their stories edge into larger, mainstream media of the day, outlets like the Plain Dealer, Cleveland News, and Cleveland Press. Ultimately, their histories were largely absorbed into the master American Dream narrative. That’s the story of immigrants coming to the Land of Opportunity and overcoming obstacles to achieve a bright future for their family. (I’ve written such a narrative myself about my German and Irish ancestors, here and here.)
The Pittsburgh Courier newspaper is a key player in Mark Whitaker’s history of Pittsburgh, “Smoketown: The Untold Story of the Other Great Black Renaissance.”
And what about the unwilling “immigrants” brought from Africa and sold here as slaves? And the internal immigrants — the black people who left the harsh confines of the Jim Crow rural South and migrated to cities, mostly in the North?
That is another history told in another group of local newspapers like my hometown Cleveland Call & Post.
Their history is preserved in the archives of newspapers like the Baltimore Afro-American, the Chicago Defender, the New York Amsterdam News, the Atlanta Daily World, the Los Angeles Sentinel, and perhaps most significantly, the Pittsburgh Courier.
The Pittsburgh Courier is a key player in Mark Whitaker’s book “Smoketown: The Untold Story of the Other Great Black Renaissance.” More about that below.
These newspapers provided a platform for black voices, fostered a sense of community, and served as crucial sources of news and information in the struggle against racial discrimination and segregation. Frequently they covered stories white newspapers could not or would not touch.
Erasing Black history
The history told by those newspapers is especially valuable today given that the White House is on a campaign to remove what it calls “narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.”
As USA Today reported last week, “Trump singled out some Smithsonian Institution museums, including the National Museum of African American History and Culture. He said the Smithsonian has ‘come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology’.”
As part of his anti-DEI campaign, he fired Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress, after she testified before Congress on Wednesday.
A conservative pro-Trump group, the American Accountability Foundation, accused Hayden and other library leaders of promoting children’s books with “radical” content and literary material authored by Trump opponents, NPR reported.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. swears in Carla Hayden as librarian of Congress as House Speaker Paul D. Ryan and her mother, Colleen, look on Sept. 14, 2016. (Photo: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call)
‘Smoketown,’ the Pittsburgh story
Mark Whitaker’s book shows how the Pittsburgh Courier not only chronicled the history of the city for many decades but actually shaped that history with its role as an institutional activist and conscience of the community.
Mark Whitaker in 2012. (Photo: CNN)
Whitaker, a native of Philadelphia, is an American author, journalist and media executive. He previously was managing editor of CNN Worldwide, Washington bureau chief of NBC News, and editor of Newsweek. He was the first African-American to lead a national news magazine.
Three Rivers drove growth
He noted that Pittsburgh’s location at the confluence of the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio rivers played a key role in the city’s growth. “Because it allowed steamboats to reach the coal deposits in the nearby hills, the watery nexus made the city that grew up around it the nation’s largest producer of steel and created the vast wealth of businessmen and financiers named Carnegie, Frick, Westinghouse, and Mellon.”
Then he added, “Far less chronicled, but just as extraordinary, is the confluence of forces that made the black population of the city, for a brief but glorious stretch of the twentieth century, one of the most vibrant and consequential communities of color in U.S. history. Like millions of other blacks, they came north before and during the Great Migration, many of them from the upper parts of the Old South, from states such as Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, and North Carolina.”
The Courier’s role
At the center of it all was the Pittsburgh Courier. From the 1930s into the ‘50s, its aggressive crusades for civil rights for blacks helped it grow from a local paper into a national powerhouse, with fourteen regional editions and circulation of almost half a million.
“They had fought for unionizing Pullman car porters, for taking Amos ’n’ Andy off the radio airwaves, and for the acquittal of the Scottsboro Boys in their rape trial in Alabama,” Whitaker wrote. The Courier had “an avid following in black homes, barbershops, and beauty salons across the country.”
The Courier urged black voters in the 1930s “to abandon the Republican Party of Lincoln and embrace the Democratic Party of FDR, beginning a great political migration that transformed the electoral landscape and that reverberates to this day,” Whitaker wrote.
Crusades for Joe Louis, Jackie Robinson
The Courier went beyond politics to capture readers and build circulation. For five months in 1935, they ran a weekly profile of an up-and-coming heavyweight boxer — “The Life Story of Joe Louis.” Louis lost his first fight with Max Schmeling, the German champ, who had hurled racist taunts at him in the press.
Two years later, Courier reporters were at ringside along with a sellout crowd of 70,000 at Yankee Stadium on June 22, 1938, and watched as Louis decked Schmeling in the first round of the rematch. The Courier published its largest headline ever on the front page —“JOE KO’S MAX” along with four photos.
The Courier’s sports editor, Wendell Smith, had been campaigning for years for the integration of major league baseball. So when the Brooklyn Dodgers bought the contract of a Negro League shortstop named Jackie Robinson, the Courier assigned Smith and another reporter to cover his every move as a member of the Dodgers farm club, the Montreal Royals.
Smith also began co-writing dozens of “Jackie Robinson diary” columns with the ball player. In the year before being called up to the big leagues, Robinson relied on the reporters to help him deal with being shut out of hotels and restaurants at spring training stops in the South.
The Courier’s big scoop
Jackie Robinson at Ebbets Field, 1947. Photo from the Carnegie Museum of Art Image Collection. Taken by the Courier’s Charles “Teenie” Harris, published in “Smoketown.”
The Dodgers general manager, Branch Rickey, had given Smith a number of exclusive interviews over the years. In the last weeks of spring training before the 1947 season, Rickey invited Smith and Robinson to his hotel room in Panama City, Fla. (They couldn’t dine in the hotel restaurant because it refused to serve blacks.)
Rickey told them that he would be promoting Robinson to the big league club. The Courier scooped everyone when they broke one of the biggest stories in baseball history in their March 29 edition:
“An unimpeachable source revealed to the Pittsburgh Courier this week that Jackie Robinson . . . will be promoted to the Brooklyn Dodgers on the night of April 10 and will play for the big league club on opening day against the Boston Braves.”
The Courier’s coverage of players in the Negro Leagues also included stories about the members of the city’s two great Negro league teams, the Pittsburgh Crawfords and the Homestead Grays. Their stars included future Hall of Famers Satchel Paige, Buck Leonard, “Cool Papa” Bell, and Josh Gibson. Only Paige made it to the major leagues. (He helped my hometown Cleveland Indians win the 1948 World Series.)
Cradle of trailblazers
Finally, Whitaker chronicled the critical role Pittsburgh played in the world of music and theater:
“Pittsburgh produced three of the most electrifying and influential jazz pianists of the era: Earl ‘Fatha’ Hines, Mary Lou Williams, and the dazzling Erroll Garner. It was in Pittsburgh that Billy Strayhorn grew up and met Duke Ellington, beginning a partnership that would yield the finest orchestral jazz of all time.
“Another Pittsburgh native, Billy Eckstine, became the most popular black singer of the 1940s and early 1950s, and played a less remembered but equally groundbreaking role in uniting Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Sarah Vaughan on the swing era bandstands that helped give rise to bebop.
“Then, in the mid-1940s, in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, a Black maid born in North Carolina who had taken up with a white German baker gave birth to a boy who grew up to become America’s greatest Black playwright.” That would be August Wilson, author of “Fences,” “The Piano Lesson,” and other plays he wrote depicting Black life in America.
Billy Strayhorn, background, Duke Ellington, at the keyboard, and dancer Alfredo Gustar seated on top, at the Stanley Theater, mid 1940s. (Photo: The Courier’s Charles Teenie Harris, in The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture)
Conclusion: a train story
My favorite story in Whitaker’s book is this one. In December of 1938, Duke Ellington’s orchestra was performing in Pittsburgh at the Stanley Theater. A friend of a friend wanted Duke to hear a young local pianist and composer, the then-unknown Billy Strayhorn. The young man performed some of his own compositions and some of Ellington’s.
Ellington was dazzled. He asked Strayhorn to come back in a few days and show him some more of his compositions. These also pleased him, and he paid Strayhorn $20 for them. Then he invited him to come to New York and work for his organization.
Ellington also handed him directions for how to take the subway from Penn Station to his apartment in Harlem. The shy, diminutive Strayhorn didn’t take him up on his offer right away. He was just four years out of high school at the time and doing deliveries for a drug store. Eventually he decided to go. A friend gave him some travel money. Strayhorn wanted to impress Ellington when he arrived, so he wrote an up-tempo tune based on the note with directions to Ellington’s apartment.
The note began with the words, “Take the A-Train . . . .” Ellington loved it so much he eventually adopted it as his band’s theme song. And Strayhorn stayed on for years as the band’s composer and arranger.
(The photo above of Strayhorn and Ellington was taken by the Courier’s Charles “Teenie” Harris, and is in the African American Museum now under attack by the White House.)
Final thought
I started this post by noting that local newspapers provide a rough draft of history. And it’s often the only history available to chronicle the thoughts and deeds of people who don’t fit into the grand American Dream narrative.
“Smoketown” unlocked so much history of American life that I was ignorant of. And Whitaker showed just how important and impactful this journalistic voice was as a record of a time, place and people whose stories might otherwise be unknown to us.
We need voices of communities all across the country to make themselves heard above the shouting from the two extremes. And local media — broadcast, print, and digital — can be a vehicle for that. We can’t allow part of our national history to be erased.
Previously
I’ve written many articles on this topic: search “local news” among my posts. The following is my latest:
Local news finds some lifelines