Tube City Almanac

January 07, 2008

Race Against Time

Category: General Nonsense, Mon Valley Miscellany || By



A friend and Alert Reader from the Turtle Creek area emailed me last week in disbelief.

He was doing some research on "the Valley" when he ran across the above map of what used to be "Patton Township" --- present-day Monroeville.

It seems to be company-owned housing for African-American employees of Wilmerding's Westinghouse Air Brake Company.

The area illustrated is across from the entrance of Good Shepherd Cemetery, which is quite a walk from the WABCO plant, in what was then a very rural area. (Talk about segregation!)

The map is from 1928 --- four generations ago.

"The word they actually used had worse connotations," said my friend. "I didn't think that s--- happened here. Not so overtly, anyway."

. . .

Well, I can remember my grandfather telling me that in McKeesport before the Great Depression, African-Americans weren't allowed to use the sidewalks Downtown. If they did, the cops would hassle them.

In the 1920s --- or so I was told --- when black diners were served at one of the city's main restaurants, the busboy would bring a garbage can to their table when they finished eating and smash their plates into it, to demonstrate that they weren't welcome to return.

On an updated version of that Patton Township map from 1948, the "Negro" section still exists, but the word "Reservation" has been scratched out. That means African-American WABCO employees were still being segregated from the rest of Wilmerding in the 1940s.

That's three generations ago.

. . .

Speaking of McKeesport restaurants, if you were a kid in the '40s and '50s, you probably remember the swank second-floor dining-room at G.C. Murphy Co.'s "Store No. 1" on Fifth Avenue.

If you were a white kid, that is. Because black kids weren't allowed upstairs. They had to eat at the lunch counter downstairs. That persisted until the mid 1950s.

The mid-1950s, you'll recall, is also when Kennywood closed its swimming pool for fear that they would have to "integrate." Park management mumbled excuses about the filtration system leaking.

Sure. Yet it couldn't have been leaking too badly, because Kennywood temporarily used the pool for a "boat ride" feature. It eventually reopened to black and white swimmers.

That was just about two generations ago.

. . .

In their 1996 documentary "Struggles in Steel," Tony Buba and Ray Henderson show how many African-Americans were lured North in the 1920s by promises of better-paying jobs and freedom from subsistence farming.

But they were also imported by steel mills and other factories (like the "Air Brake") to help break labor unions run by white, European immigrants. No one told the African-American workers that, of course. They found out the hard way.

The resentments lasted a long time. Black steelworkers were confined to low-paying laborer positions and didn't get better-paying skilled-trades jobs until the 1970s.

That was about one generation ago.

. . .

Over the holidays, I attended several parties with family and friends.

More than once I heard someone uncork a ripe opinion or nasty joke about one ethnic group or another, and how they're ruining their neighborhood or their country, and blah blah blah.

That's my generation.

What did I do? I gritted my teeth and said nothing.

And that's called "cowardice."

. . .

My mother taught me better. She always speaks up whenever someone tosses out an ignorant racial or ethnic opinion.

Today's her birthday. It's also a new year. In honor of both, I'm going to start speaking up whenever someone starts in about "those people" --- whether they be white, black, Asian, Hispanic.

It's a small start. But maybe you want to make it your resolution, too.

Oh, and try not to feel too superior to "hicks" and "hillbillies" down South. The Mon Valley's record on race relations is pretty poor.

Sure, we don't have "Negro reservations" in Monroeville any more. But it wasn't that long ago. And we still have a hell of a long way to go.






Your Comments are Welcome!

There was an African-American neighborhood in my hometown of Youngstown that was called “The Monkey’s Nest.”
And there’s a theory that Idora Park’s pool closed for the same reason as Kennywood’s, so it wouldn’t have to integrate (of course, real honest to God evidence suggests that it just cost too much, especially when you couuld swim in city pools for a nickel).
Vince - January 07, 2008



Interesting post Jason.
Scott Beveridge (URL) - January 07, 2008



A check of Google Earth indicates that the “colored church” on the 1928 map is no longer there, but there is a large structure with a parking lot just to the East.

The phone book lists “Bethel AME Church” at 2538 Woodlawn Drive in Monroeville.

I’d be willing to bet every Winky’s in Wilmerding that it’s the descendant of the old church.
Webmaster - January 07, 2008



Jason,

Fantastic post. We should be past all of these issues but are not.

I was fortunate. My father taught me never to judge a person by their skin color but rather by their actions and their character. I guess there are no aethiests or racists in fox holes…..

Their is no room for racism or any -isms in todays world. I am fearful that some self proclaimed “Christian” Evangelical from the South would rather throw a bullet than a vote Senator Obama’s direction. Seriously.

Tolerance is a virtue that we all could use more of.

Paul
Paul Shelly (URL) - January 07, 2008



It’s so weird that I just drove through there a few months ago. I found an old map that area and apparently there was an airport there at one time. I was hoping to find a weeded-in abandoned runway. To my dismay I found a landfill :( Anyone know if garbage is still being dumped there?
The Dude from West Mifflin - January 07, 2008



My mom grew up just over the border in Ohio — East Liverpool, Ohio to be precise. She remembers very vividly being scolded for drinking at a “negro water fountain” when she was a kid (probably in the 1940’s).

From 1979 to 1984, I went to East Hills Elementary school, one of the first members of the newly minted magnet program (a program that was attempting to integrate schools better). When I started there, blacks were still 75% of the children attending the school, when I ended it was at around 60%.

The racism I saw during those years was just appalling, and it is the reason I’m so very anti-racism now. I lost one of my first best friends because she was told she needed to choose between her neighborhood black friends and her white friends (me), she couldn’t have both.

But worse, in the classroom the white kids could get away with disrupting the entire class with taunts of superiority; yet even something small like bringing in candy to share with the class had the black children sent to the principal’s office.

And even the parents who sent their white kids to the black school showed their racism when they pulled their kids from the classroom of a very able black math teacher who had dyslexia (they proclaimed her stupid because she couldn’t spell, never mind that this wasn’t what she was teaching) and sent them to the not very able white math teacher.

Occasionally I hear people try to tell me that “racism is dead”, and my stomach just turns. The children who were taught the lessons of white superiority in those classrooms were my peers, and I’m sure they’ve taken those lessons with them into adulthood.
gwen - January 07, 2008



In answer to the dude from West Mifflin… yup, that landfill is still active. When I was a kid many a neighbor’s roof was buried there when my father put a new roof on their house; I remember entering the landfill from Shaw Ave in his pickup truck.

Now, there’s a new road directly from 130 that’s not through a neighborhood. A real conspiracy would be if the old route were through the reservation, but it wasn’t; I’m not sure what the demographic of the Mellon plan (site of the old entrance) is, but one could guess they were not the most influential people given how long the old entrance persisted.
Derrick - January 07, 2008



Excellent post, Jason.

And Gwen’s comment moved me to add my 2 cents.

Racism is not confined to any geographic locale, The South, where I am from, does not have a monopoly on this shallow way of thinking. But my life was deeply affected by such shallow thinking, particularly in the building of a all white high school to bus us kids to when the other high school we were attending suddenly had, oh my God, five little 8th graders who were not white.

Let’s do the math….2,000 white kids, 5 young brown skinned kids. Were our lives at stake? I think not. (This kind of segregation was rampant in the ’60’s in the South. Just build another school further away.)

I got transferred to the “superior” white high school, and it changed my life for the worse. The teachers there were lousy, they were basically social status conscious, and were far inferior to the teachers and counselors I had at the “mixed race” high school. At the “mixed race” school, my counselor was trying to prepare me for winning a scholarship at a decent college, as he was for all the other students.

At the all white high school, I was told by my counselor that I should just get married and have children.

I guess maybe they wanted me, as well as my white classmates, simply to perpetuate the white race. After all these years, I have to wonder if that was the message. It sounds crazy on one level, yet maybe these racists do have an agenda. Is it possible? I think — Yes. They certainly were in a position to brainwash us kids at that time.

Oh, BTW, I never had children. Just not into perpetuating, I guess.
Lane in McK - January 07, 2008



My family is from the South, and my cousin insists that the charge of racism leveled at the South is overblown. She says that the segregation or separation of races in the South is by block, not by neighborhood (ghetto). She lives in Chapel Hill, a pretty progressive little town, though, so her view may not cover the whole South (consider Atlanta or New Orleans).
I knew people who went to East Hills in the late nineties. I think it was better integrated then, and they pride themselves on not being racist and having African American friends. Still, one of them complains about illegal aliens, for example, how they are stealing American jobs and stealing government services and not paying taxes. When I explain that in fact they are having taxes with-held under a phony social security number, and that in fact the illegal will lose the value of the Social Security and Medicare taxes because of that phony number, she is not convinced, and thinks the sneaky illegal’s are still trying to game the system. It’s hard not to brand people from different cultures as “other”, someone to be feared and pushed away.
Ed Heath (URL) - January 08, 2008



Nothing like muddying the issue, but the question about illegal immigration has nothing to do with people of different cultures. It is totally, 100% about people who are living in this country illegally. Most of the immigrants I know are very adamatantly opposed to illegal immigration because they understand that others shouldn’t illegally & freely obtain the same benefits of citizenship that they themselves worked so long and hard to obtain legally. The company I currently work for was founded by Chinese immigrants, and we have immigrants from Bulgaria, Belgium, Belarus, The Czhech Republic, Italy, and Ireland just to name a few. About a third of our small company have immigrated from elsewhere, legally and became citizens. They all believe that folks should follow the immigration law and the government should actually enforce the law. They are not in favor of the “reform” that was proposed last year either. I don’t think any of them are afraid of a different culture.
Bulldog - January 08, 2008



Great post. I also distinctly recall my grandparents and parents telling me that many of the coal patch towns around here were segregated in a similar fashion. Most of the time blacks and even to a certain extent, Italians, were forced to live in smaller company houses usually only one story or a story and a half, with maybe three rooms, while the whites/older immigrants were allowed to live in the larger, two story duplex houses. I know this is true of at least a handful of the Yough River patch towns- Industry, Smithdale, Victory, Twilight, etc. In many instances these families were unfairly targeted for violence by the C & I police. It’s something that should be talked about more instead of being swept under the rug all of the time.
mon valley girl - January 09, 2008



Boy, did this article bring back memories. I grew up downtown and could go up on the roof of my bldg. and look across the river and actually see a burning cross of the KKK! Knowing what I do now, it would effect me a lot differently! I was quite young and my folks didn’t really explain the whole thing to me! Sheltered…...you betcha!
exporter - January 18, 2008



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