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NY Times Sunday Book Review, Feb. 25, 2018
Harlem Wasn’t the Only Place With a Renaissance
By HERB BOYD
SMOKETOWN
The Untold Story of the Other Great Black Renaissance
By Mark Whitaker
Illustrated. 404 pp. Simon & Schuster. $30.
In the spring of 1910, not long after Robert L. Vann had passed his bar
exam and opened a law office in downtown Pittsburgh, he had a meeting
that would forever alter his fate. Vann had become a lawyer so he could
pursue his dream of arguing criminal cases, but he had mostly been
spending his time processing wills and property claims. Now five
African-American investors had come to him with a proposition: They
wanted to retain his legal services to incorporate their newspaper, The
Pittsburgh Courier.
It didn’t take long before what was considered a little “pamphlet”
evolved into a thriving publication and Vann became a business partner.
Within a year he was the editor.
The Courier that Vann created and led for the rest of his life serves as
a sort of crucible for the many events and personalities in Mark
Whitaker’s engrossing “Smoketown.” Whitaker, a distinguished journalist
and author of a memoir, “My Long Trip Home,” as well as an ill-timed
biography of Bill Cosby, profiles a number of notable black figures from
Pittsburgh and explores the intersection of their lives from the 1920s
to the 1950s. He makes no attempt to compare this era with the Harlem
Renaissance, though many of these remarkable people were part of that
glorious period that lasted a little more than a decade, from the early
1920s to the mid-30s.
Each personality, in separate chapters, provides an entree into a major
“Smoketown” social, political or cultural development, be it sports,
entertainment, the media or the arts.
Whitaker opens with a riveting scene featuring the great heavyweight
champion Joe Louis. He delivers a vivid description of Louis’s victory
over Max Schmeling in the summer of 1938, which avenged an earlier
defeat. Louis, Whitaker writes, “drilled a right into the German’s jaw
and a second into his midsection. A yelp resembling that of a stuck pig,
a sound Joe remembered from his boyhood on an Alabama farm, rose from
his opponent’s throat.”
Although Louis was not a native of Pittsburgh, by the ’30s his
ascendance was due largely to coverage from the sportswriters at The
Courier. Similarly, the reporters played a critical role in chronicling
the rise of Jackie Robinson and baseball’s integration. And no reporter
was more significant in this respect than Wendell Smith.
All during the grueling period when Robinson was breaking the color
barrier in the major leagues, Smith was his companion, helping him deal
with the daily slights and indignities. More than just a journalist on
the story, Smith was counselor, bodyguard and press agent.
Whitaker also looks at Gus Greenlee, a pioneer in the Negro National
League and the owner of the Pittsburgh Crawfords; Billy Strayhorn, the
composer and alter ego to Duke Ellington; the singer and bandleader
Billy Eckstine; and the noted playwright August Wilson, all of whom were
natives of the city and whose stories and exploits were often reported
on in The Courier.
In addition to this focus on the renowned, Whitaker brings in a number
of ordinary folks from East Liberty, Oakland, Homewood and the Hill
District to give “Smoketown” the ballast of quotidian voices and
memories. There is also mention here of the city’s black nationalist
tradition and even a discussion of the political themes in Wilson’s
plays, especially “Radio Golf” and “Jitney.”
Whitaker devotes a full chapter to the women at The Courier, including
Daisy Lampkin, a society matron and N.A.A.C.P. leader who became the
newspaper’s vice president; the secretary Edna Chappell; the gossip
columnist Julia Bumry Jones; Hazel Garland, a onetime maid who would
become the paper’s editor in chief; and the redoubtable Evelyn
Cunningham, who ventured south to cover the burgeoning civil rights
movement when she thought her Pittsburgh assignments weren’t challenging
enough.
Cunningham reported early on the courage of Rosa Parks and the
accomplishments of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. These contributions,
Whitaker writes, “foreshadowed strategies and tactics to come: the
broadening of the movement to the cause of voting rights; the search for
sympathetic, press-friendly victims who could inspire blacks and stir
the conscience of whites.”
“For Evelyn Cunningham,” Whitaker continues, “it was also the beginning
of a new life on the road, one that would make her one of the first
journalists, black or white, to arrive at the next great battlegrounds
of the movement and to introduce the country to two of its towering
figures.”
Cunningham’s tireless dedication and insightful reportage exemplified
The Courier’s social and political commitment. A decade earlier, during
World War II, the paper’s “Double V Campaign” had tied victory abroad
with a second victory at home, against racism and discrimination — a
stance that put the paper far ahead of the American government.
On this phase of The Courier’s history, Whitaker’s lucid prose is
particularly commanding, and you wish he had done more looking ahead to
our own era and its blind spots, as when he notes that in the film
“Saving Private Ryan,” the “black soldiers who operated antiaircraft
decoy balloons over Omaha Beach on D-Day were nowhere to be seen.”
“Smoketown” brilliantly offers us a chance to see this other black
renaissance and spend time with the many luminaries who sparked it as
well as the often unheralded journalists who covered it, including P. L.
Prattis, John C. Clarke, Frank Bolden, Billy Rowe and the photographer
Teenie Harris. 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.
Herb Boyd is the author of “Black Detroit: A People’s History of
Self-Determination.”
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