Beyond the South
A view of a civil rights march down North Main Street in Washington led by Lou Waller in April 1964
Forrest “Bud” Harris took this photo of Teenie Harris during the 1968 Pittsburgh riots.
In this photo taken in June 1939 by Teenie Harris, men and women gather in and around a bus with a banner reading, “On to Richmond, Detroit NAACP, Youth Councils and Senior Branch, Largest Branch in the USA.”
This photo of a “Black Monday” demonstration shows Mike Desmond, the Rev. Jimmy Joe Robinson, Nate Smith, Byrd Brown and others at Freedom Corner in the Lower Hill in Pittsburgh.
This photo by Teenie Harris shows Rosamond Barnum handing Mrs. Reeble Marshall a bag of produce from a produce truck outside Freedom House in Pittsburgh in February 1967.
Blacks who shopped in area department stores once faced a bewildering dilemma.
If they wanted to try on an article of clothing, they would have to buy it, whether or not they liked it, or whether or not it fit. The same stipulation was not applied to whites, who were free to try on anything and purchase what they liked.
If skilled African-American steelworkers migrated from Alabama to work in the region’s mills, they often found themselves assigned to menial tasks or janitorial work, even if their abilities trumped those of their white coworkers.
If they bought a ticket at a moviehouse, they were frequently ushered to the balcony. If they wanted to see the Pittsburgh Pirates at Forbes Field, they were directed to sit in sections apart from most of the white spectators.
Then there were the public swimming pools that residents flocked to during the summer. For a 2010 oral history assembled by Washington & Jefferson College students and staff for the Washington County History and Landmarks Foundation, the late Washington-area resident James Harley recalled making a trip to a Burgettstown swimming pool with a Boy Scout troop in which only he and his brother were black.
All the other Scouts were allowed to swim, while Harley and his brother were told they needed to produce a “health certificate” before they could dive in.
“So we went and sat in the car until everyone else was finished swimming,” Harley recalled. “There were times when me and my brother went to restaurants and were asked to leave. White churches, we were asked to leave white churches. That’s when I turned against organized religion, because I don’t see that as a Christian thing to do.”
These were “very humiliating barriers,” said Samuel Black, the director of African-American programs at the Senator John Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh.
At a half-century’s remove, when we think of the civil rights movement around Martin Luther King Jr. Day or Black History Month, what often comes to mind are images of protesters in the Deep South being set upon by dogs and fire hoses, lunch counter sit-ins, schoolhouse doors being blocked and poll workers administering unreasonable literacy tests. Memories of those days have been revived by the release of the film “Selma,” which depicts voting rights marches in Alabama 50 years ago and has figured prominently in this year’s movie-awards season.
But the civil rights movement was not strictly confined to the slice of America below the Mason-Dixon Line. The effort by African-Americans to overcome decades of discrimination, subtle and otherwise, also extended into the North, where African-Americans demanded better treatment in the places where they worked, shopped and learned. It reached into Cleveland, Philadelphia, Boston, Detroit and, yes, Pittsburgh and the communities that surrounded it.
While blacks in the Pittsburgh region endured indignities both large and small, much of the struggle in this part of the country centered on economic issues – eliminating roadblocks to jobs on construction sites, putting more blacks at the front of classrooms, allowing them to serve in fire departments and having improved access to health care. “All of these add up to economic issues,” Black said. “That’s what a lot of the civil rights movement focused on.”
Many of the institutions and tactics used in the South were also deployed here – ministers mobilized parishioners from the pulpit, and organizations like the NAACP and the Urban League provided support and foot soldiers. The Pittsburgh Courier, one of the leading African-American newspapers in the country, reported extensively on the local drive for civil rights while also weighing in on national and international struggles.
Ralph Proctor, a professor of history and ethnic studies at the Community College of Allegheny County and the author of the book, “Voices from the Firing Line: A Personal Account of the Pittsburgh Civil Rights Movement,” disagrees somewhat that the civil rights movement in this region was just about dollars and cents. “Every aspect of Pittsburgh life was segregated,” said Proctor, 76, and an activist in those days. “This was a completely segregated society … Pittsburgh was 20 years behind most other northern cities. It always has been a kind of parochial town.”
Along with campaigning for justice and equal treatment, the drive for civil rights in the Pittsburgh area included shaking loose the expectations and roles that had been thrust on blacks, according to Proctor, who was the president of the University of Pittsburgh branch of the NAACP when he was a student there. Traditionally, girls were steered toward secretarial or stenographic careers, and boys were put on a vocational or technical path. College was recommended for very, very few blacks – “We were not guided in that direction by guidance counselors,” Proctor recalled – and they sought to upend expectations and push more young blacks into colleges, universities and professional life.
One African-American woman who did make that leap into collegiate ranks was Shirley Waller, a Buffalo, N.Y., native who later relocated to Washington. She attended Virginia Union College and studied to be a missionary for a couple of years before returning to Washington and marrying Louis Waller, one of the early leaders of the NAACP branch in Washington.
Now 82, Waller remembers giving birth to her first child, Phyllis, at Washington Hospital in 1956 and being forced to recuperate in a hallway rather than being given a room with a white person. She was eventually shown to a room, but the other occupant – a white woman – balked at her presence. By the time her second child, Lorraine, was born in 1960, she was able to have her own room.
When told about what her mother went through when she was born, Phyllis Waller said that “it made me feel disappointed and upset about what my parents and other people went through at that time. But it gives me some positive feeling that that isn’t the case anymore.”
Phyllis Waller is now the president of the Washington NAACP and still has a store of memorabilia from one of the highest-profile events in Washington’s civil rights history – a march by her father and fellow members of the NAACP on May 10, 1964, from the Basle Theater (now the Life Church) on the corner of Main and Chestnut streets, to the post office that was then located on Maiden Street. They were sending letters to Pennsylvania’s U.S. senators, Hugh Scott and Joseph Clark, urging them to support the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
The NAACP branch of Washington was one of the most energetic within Pennsylvania, with “Freedom Swimmers” demanding to be allowed to swim in the city’s pool (the city drained the pool once the swimmers were finally admitted) and it lobbied hard for increased employment opportunities for African-Americans. One of the group’s leaders was James McDonald, whose involvement was spurred after he was refused a meal in Texas while serving in the U.S. Army in the 1950s.
Compared to those days “things are greatly improved,” he said. “Fifty years ago, I never thought we’d have a black president. I can’t say that we’ve gone backward. We’ve gone forward.”