This program was made possible by a grant from the Pennsylvania Public Television Network.

The network receives funding from the Commonwealth to provide public television to all Pennsylvanians and by viewers like you.

Thank you.

Oh, Jim Crow.

Oh, wow.

You've been very, Down in Mississippi and back again.

Oh, Jim Crow, there's a lot of amnesia, especially in the North, about questions of racial inequality.

Discrimination in past and in present.

Northerners define themselves as not the South.

We aren't, you know, the hooded Klansmen and the, violent racists of Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana.

What's wrong with you?

Most Americans think that the discrimination that resulted from Ji Crow was a Southern convention, that it only affected blacks in the South and not those above the Mason-Dixon line, which form Pennsylvania's southern border.

But that's simply not the truth.

Jim Crow thrived in our Commonwealth to.

And this is, it's ranch home and Levittown that we decided on.

And it had three bedrooms that we knew had, oversize garage.

And, we liked it very much.

You've been around too long.

The salesman for Levi woul not show a home to a black van.

In other words, they wouldn't even let you look at it.

Housing and job discrimination.

Only part of the story.

Pennsylvania has also been visited by the very real horrors of lynching.

Lynching could and did include being burned alive.

Oh.

It's all over now.

Mr.

Walker was lynched.

He was lynched.

And, so many marks along the way were.

Peopl who were trying to clear this up knew that the man was lynched.

Oh.

Oh.

Jim Crow.

Historians say the term Jim Crow was introduce by Daddy Rice in minstrel shows.

It eventually came to mean Negro, often associated with the deep South.

These mean spirited caricatures of blacks performed a huge audiences all over the world.

Many of the images that embody Jim Crow supported the idea that blacks were inferior buffoons, fawning servants and savage menace to society.

Black children were portrayed as pickaninny, barely human, and often no more than alligator bait.

Even one of Agatha Christie's most famous murder mysteries was originally titled Ten Little Niggers Got Away.

Once blacks were reduced to cartoons.

It was an easy reach to codif laws reinforced by these images.

And in the South these ordinances were originally known as the slave codes, but eventually were just referred to as Jim Crow laws.

They reinforced segregation and prevented blacks from enjoying most public accommodations that white Americans took for granted.

Now is sort of an, But Jim Crow was not just a southern institution.

In 1875, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was unconstitutional, when nationally, black had no rights to ride in public conveyances on land and or water.

Under the same ruling, blacks also had no rights to attend theaters or other public places of amusement.

So Jim Crow had reached far beyond the South, and it spread well past the Mason-Dixon line.

Doctor Thomas Sugrue is a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Jim Crows Last Stand The Struggle for Civil Rights in the Suburban North.

The story of civil rights is a story that we tell almost exclusively through the history of the South, beginning with the Brown versus Board of Education decision in 1954, the one that struck down separate unequal education, or the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 that launched the remarkable career of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.

And it's a compelling story but it's a story that overlooks, both, deeply entrenched racial segregatio and discrimination in the North.

And overlooks the remarkable struggle of African-Americans and interracial civil rights activists in the North to challenge inequality.

Jim Crow segregatio north of the Mason-Dixon line.

It's a story that's barely been told.

Today, at the eastern extremity of the state of Pennsylvania.

A remarkable construction project is transforming the faith of the countryside.

The area below will, within the next two years, be the 10th largest city in the state of Pennsylvania.

The early 1950s were great time for most Americans.

World War Two was over and millions of GIS had returned home to rebuild their lives with their families.

Communities like Levittown, Pennsylvania were helping that dream come true, and from the outside seemed to be open to all.

Construction was about to begin on several of 18 churches, which will serve the people of Levittown.

The city is donating the lan on which these houses of worship will be built.

That's exactly what Willia and Daisy Myers thought as they began looking for a larger home for their growing family.

He had two boys and I was expecting, and we just didn't have enough room.

So we looked and looked and looked.

We visited friends in Levittow and even and they told us about their home next door to them.

That was empty.

That was the Wexler's, the man who lived there had been transferred, and they were goin to put their home up for sale.

So he aske if we would like to look at it.

And we did look and we liked it.

It was the ranch ranch home.

Theres a garage and very nice shrubbery, and everything was very nice about the home, so we were kind of sold on it right away.

In many neighborhoods.

And African-Americans moved into for the first time, white neighbor resisted by any means necessary.

They would picket, they would protest.

They would often commi acts of vandalism on the houses that African-Americans were moving into.

Joe removed in 1957, and as soon as trouble started, the postman came to the door and asked to speak to the owner of the home.

And I said, I have no one at home.

And he looke as though he had seen a ghost, and he backtracked.

And to all the peopl that he had delivered mail to, that blacks had moved in and within, within minutes or a half hour or so, people started gathering down on the sidewalk in front of the home.

And of course, by nightfall it was, it turned into a mob.

Huge crowds gathere out in the streets in the front, shouting racial epithets, clashing with the police.

All because a single African-American family attempted to move into what was, an all white suburban community.

This was Levittown, Pennsylvania.

This is suburba Philadelphia in the late 1950s.

The images, were images that you would associate with the Deep South, but they weren't these were, images and a classic, quintessential postwar American suburbia.

Levittown was the epitome of the American dream of homeownership.

Little affordable houses that middle class Americans and working class Americans could afford.

And this was this this neighborhood became one of the many intense battlegrounds over retaining the racial purity and racial homogeneity of a white neighborhood.

Walk with me, Lord.

Walk with me.

We heard from many sources that they were going to throw bombs through windows.

And, we were expecting that to happen anytime.

They broke the windows in the the, kitchen dining area, and, that's where I was standin before they broke the windows.

But they had, promised us that, you know, we would be bombed out.

It was hard.

Every night we went to bed.

We would sit on the side of the bed and tell each other how much we loved each other, in cas we didn't wake the next morning.

And, he would always tell me, you know, we can leave if you want to leave, anytime you feel as though you can't take it.

Well leave.

And he just made me feel as though I didn't have to stay if I didn't want to stay.

It wasn't over to you.

They didn't burn cross on our yard.

And that was one strange thing, because we were kind of expecting it.

You know, we had one day to call and said she would never give her children chocolat milk again as long as she lived.

She was afraid they would turn black.

So we knew what kind of people we were dealing with from that phone call.

And they offered us.

We were offered like $500,000, 200,000 250,000.

We of it all kinds of money or large sums of money.

As we asked someone where is this money coming from?

Somebody said levittown because we'd never been able to prove it but they offered us large sums of money.

And last man said, where does people need.

One thing t be said about Levittown is that, and this is true in communities in the Nort that resisted blacks moving in.

There were whites who were supportive of the Myers, of the first black family to move to Levittown.

The next door neighbors, were staunch supporters.

They believed in racial integration.

They were committed to it.

Lew And Bea, they were very, very friendly towards us and very helpful.

And in their children, they had a boy and a girl.

In many instances, they were treated worse than we were because they, wrote on their building and, they tried to burn, crosses in their yards.

They were really treated badly.

And in some cases, a the people told us that they they hated the Jewish people worse than they did us.

But, they didn't let it bother them.

They, they struggled through.

And one of the other white Levittown Jews who supported the Myers family was Hal Lefcourt, who at the time wa a local township commissioner.

God bless you, young lady.

I'm glad to see you.

What a pleasure to see you again.

Oh, God almighty.

You're the America we want.

I love you.

I cry every time I see you.

Yeah, I can't help but.

God bless you, young lady.

Come on in, please.

One person who was far less helpful was Jim Newell, the leader of the Levittown Betterment Association.

He's the gu Jim Newell at Southern bigoted, no good Democrat.

Me, a liberal Democrat has to share being in the party with a punk like that.

And he had that right, sir.

He's still living in America.

Live in my ward.

And he's telling m as his commissioner to get her the hell out.

Can he do that in my country?

What am I, crazy?

Newell came to our house before we moved and asked us to vote for him.

He ran for one of the political offices.

They in the township, and my husband said, you know, I'm surprised that you would come here and ask us to vote for you.

He said, well, I only did what they wanted me to do.

We took Mrs.

Myers and Mr.

Lefcourt back to Levittown, to the house filled with so many memories and a neighborhood that had definitely changed.

And the crowds are all around the walkway and on the street.

And all along here.

I thank the Lord for letting me live long enough to come back.

I don't hate anyone and I wish him all well.

And for some reason they must have had a reason for not wanting us to be there, just simply because we have skin color.

But I think they missed out on something by not getting to know us.

And I just pray for them.

The late doctor, Edna McKenzie, was the first African-America woman to graduate with a Ph.D.

in history from the University of Pittsburgh.

She was an author, educator, and devotee of Carter G. Woodson, the founder of Negro History Week, now nationally known as Black History Month.

However, she started her career as a 17 year old reporter for the Pittsburgh Courier, working with legendary photographer Teenie Harris.

And then I guess the Pittsburgh Courier was my first.

That's an exciting experience.

I was about 1 when I went in the Home Office, and I grew up in that home office doing a lot of everything, just about everything.

I did reporting.

Teenie and I worked together all the time.

During the war years.

I was working with the double V campaign.

I wrote copy, I wrote headlines, I edited, I did everything.

At the Pittsburgh Courier.

And that was, a great opportunity because there was not a day on which some great person didn't come up those steps.

And I think one of the reasons it got commonplace, you know, you knew that a Philip Randolph might come today and Thurgood Marshall to Mary McLeod Bethune the next day, or Lena Horne.

They were always there.

So you were in an atmospher of black people who were great.

And of course you had to be ambitious around people like that.

One of her earlies and most challenging assignments was confronting western Pennsylvania's Jim Crow practices head on.

Well, I went into restaurants and, I almost got literally spat on.

That is the truth.

They insulted you.

I remember one restaurant, and it was in, McDonald or Clairton, one of the little towns and I asked for a cup of coffee.

And the coffee, urn, great, the coffee.

was sitting right on the counter and cups everywhere.

And peopl sitting around drinking coffee.

They tell me we don't have any.

And then I said, but you do have some, and I just like to have a cup.

Well, if you lived around here, you'd know better.

We don't serve Negroes.

And so you're, you know, obviously, your best bet is to get out of here.

Well, of course, Jeannie had to take a picture of the establishment and all that.

He didn't go in.

All the time.

But those kinds of things I had to do.

And I had to do it for about six weeks.

And, Mr.

Paradis, who was the executive editor, then, told me, you know, you have to jump in the fire and other words, you know, you're going to get fired, but you jump in anyway.

And, now, as I think about it it was very important to do that because then we could sue them, and then they would have to open up their restaurants for black people.

People think i started down in North Carolina, the sit ins, Pittsburg had sit ins going on in the 40s.

And there were lots of blac and white young people together.

And on my particular assignment, I was allowed, but it was going on all over the city.

We broke down the, segregation.

Although Pennsylvania had a equal rights law passed in 1935.

Nobody obey the law.

They didn't even know the law and didn't want to learn it.

That's the thing that I always amazes me about America.

How Americans, we are so lawless.

I mean, the general populatio don't pay attention to the laws.

You know, they never paid an attention to the 14th amendment, or there would never have been a need for the 60s having to go out.

And, they actually hurt.

I cried myself to sleep every night after I went off.

I mean, nobody can take that kind of stuff, you know that you are.

You know, there's nothing nasty or dirty or ugly about you, but you have to let people say those things to you.

When you're going on a story, you have to stand there and listen to it, and you have to understand that you're doing it for a reason.

And no matter the fact that, you know, when you leave the office, then you go on somewhere to get insulted, you must go, because that's th only way you get the evidence.

And to say that it happened.

And then they had to be sued in order to make them obey the law.

All of this was going on during the early 1940s, when black men were helping fight fascism overseas in World War Two.

Doctor McKenzie fought the Battle of Jim Crow on the home front.

The Courier called it the double V campaign for victory overseas and here at home, our men were overseas fighting in a segregated army.

But they were being, treated equally by the French and Italians and, other Europeans, but Americans, you know, still, we're not treating our men right.

We all know the stories of the great triumphs of the 99th Percy Squadron and our men, who finally got their Medals of honor 50 years late.

However, our men were willing to do that for America, but we wer being treated equally at home.

And so our mission was to try to win some battles at home, and one was to get the respect that we deserved in our own communities.

And public accommodations were supposed to serve everybody, every citizen.

The laws protected us but the laws were not enforced.

Have you been a good little nigger?

And you said, yes, sir.

Yes, ma'am.

Of the many evils perpetrated against African Americans during the past century, lynching was the most violent and horrible.

Though the exact numbers of victims are impossible to verify.

A Tuskegee Institute report states that 4730 people were lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1951.

You've been a good little nigger.

Of these, 3437 were black, and though most occurred in the South.

46 of the 50 state in this country have witnessed these reprehensible crimes.

Children.

Each.

Others.

Coatesville, Pennsylvania is in many way a typical American small town.

However, on a Sunday afternoon in 1911, Zachariah Walker, a black steelworker was pulled from his hospital and burned alive.

Have you been?

Leroy Carter Senior is a native of Coatesville and a former Negro league baseball player.

You want to talk about that one?

You know, he's also an artist whose wor hangs in a small museum adjacent to his home and focuses on Ji Crow and its impact on blacks.

Have you been a good little nigger?

Do you bow down to King James?

Have you been a good little nigger?

Is everything all right with the money you give?

For many of the people we interview, The murder of Zechariah Walker is a difficult subject.

My dad and Mr.

Walker, who knew each other well.

And it hurts to talk about that stuff.

Hurts to talk about it.

Particularly.

Someone that thought that anything like that would ever happen in a city like that.

Yeah, but it did happen.

The burning, that's all.

Terrific, man.

Terrific athlete.

But they stuck it to him like they did any other place in this, in this, in this.

I really I really don't like to talk about it myself, but the.

Oh, my.

This is the Coatesville Hospital building as it looks today.

The mob that lynched Zachariah Walker rushed up these very stairs and despite pleas from the hospital staff, dragged Zach out to his gruesome fate.

To understand exactly what happened.

We talked to a man who ha researched the case, Mike Geary, the director of the Coatesville Public Library.

Zachariah Walker was a steel worker at the Bethlehem Steel Company here in town.

And, he was identified as the murderer of a steel company policeman.

And, on a weekend, he fled the scene, and he was pursued by a posse and eventually captured in a wounded condition and was placed in the local Coatesville hospital.

A large lynch mob of some 2000 people came and took him away from the hospital across two township lines, and then they proceeded to burn him to death.

He was burnt alive.

He died in the fire.

As far as I know, it's probabl the single most terrible thing that's ever happened in this community.

I've read a number of eyewitness accounts.

Many people were there, many people over the course of time or have recalled those particular events.

And there's certainly some some legends and rumors of what went on.

But the newspaper coverage, indicated that a numbe of individuals were identified as the primary motivators of the lynching, maybe 12 or 15 of them.

They were all put on trial, and they were all exonerated at trial, and none of them were found guilty.

The lynching of Zach Walker would not go unnoticed and brought an unwelcome focus to Coatesville.

There was talk of revoking the town's charter.

What kinds of attention they got.

President Teddy Roosevel heard about it, and, of course, condemned the action outright as something that was, you know, unacceptable behavior, especially in the North.

I guess we would say, at the time, I think, the country felt that perhaps lynchings occurred in the South, but not up here in the North.

And in fact, that's not true.

Before widespread automobile ownership and the emergence of commercial airlines.

There was a time from the late 1800s until the 1950s when Americans traveled almost exclusively by train.

The majority of passenger cars operating during this time like this fully restored, one seen here at the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania, were owned by the Pullman Palac Car Company and its president, George Pullman.

The service workers aboard these trains were known as Pullman porters, almost exclusively male and African Americans.

The porters were an integra part of the railroad business.

By the 1920s, over 20,000 African Americans were working fo the Pullman Company as porters and other train personnel.

Kurt Bell is the archives for the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania.

Pullman porters.

On average in 1931 that worked 8000 hours a year, would earn on average $77.50 a week, so that was a very good paying job.

At its height the Pullman Company would offer accommodations for over 35 million people a year, which would require the employment of over 9000 Pullman porters.

So, it was a fairly pervasive position, in the black community.

It also afforded probably, more working opportunities than you would get at another line of work.

Oftentimes, a Pullman porter would work, in the lounge of the car.

It was his duty, basically, the weight on passengers.

He would serve the meals, poured the drinks.

He would also provid the Civil War, set up the table with the silver service in the chain of service.

All times he would lay down napkins, matchbooks make sure that the menus were displayed prominently.

If a passenger needed help, he would basically ring the buzzer that was equipped on the side of the car, and that would ring the porter in.

And then, of course he would serve the passengers, you know, whatever it was that they needed.

It was also the Pullman porters job.

Of course, the make up, the sleeping berths.

He would have to basically arrange all the sheets and the blankets according to the company's very strict policies, which were in writing that he was expected to follow at all times.

Pullman Porter literall had to know the number of inches that he had to fold if she onto the blanket.

He also had to pour the drinks or the, the drink.

The beverage was at a certain height.

For instance, the Pullman porter also had to be, proficient at cleaning clothes, pressing suits.

He was also, expected to shine shoes on board the car.

Help passengers on board the train also alight from the train.

He had to be expected to be familiar with the mechanical and refrigeration systems on board the car.

So the Pullman porter literally did everything musical today.

Referring to Walt Harper's life.

Harold Hayes is a veteran reporter for KDKA TV in Pittsburgh.

His grandfather, Thomas Burrell, was a Pullman porter on the Pennsylvania Railroad.

He ran on the Pennsylvania Railroad, and his longest run for 13 years was Pittsburgh to Detroit.

He told me that the people who had the most money for the longest time with the nicest people to him, the people who had just made their money or were just still aspirin to make their money, treated him like dirt.

And a lot of times Pullman porters got stuck with the passengers children especially when the wife would go ahead into the buffet car.

It was up to the Pullman porter to have to watch over the unruly children that were left behind.

And a lot of times white passengers were very condescending on the black Pullman porters, which, there was a lot of indignity that was associated with that whole era.

He never really got into a lot of the specifics about what happened or some o the things that he went through, but he made it clear to me that he he could tell a person's upbringing by the way they treated him.

And you can imagine, the issue of shining shoes or making their beds.

There were a lo of opportunities for him to be or for people to try to make him feel subservient.

A lot of times Pullman porters were called George, because of their employee by George Pullman, who was the president of the Pullman Company until the turn of the century.

That became a, a racist term that was used by white passengers whenever they would cal a Pullman porter in for service.

Oftentimes they would say, George, I need you to come over her and get me a towel or, George, I need you to look after my children while I go ahead in the dining car.

I don't think many people call my grandfather George.

He was a big man.

A. Philip Randolph was a newspaper publisher who saw the need for organization amongst the porters.

The Brotherhood of Sleepin Car Porters was founded in 1925.

They were the first black labo union to ever sign a collective bargaining agreement with a large U.S.

corporation.

I saw a movie not long ago, and it inspired me to go back up into the boxes and look for his Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters union badge.

I couldn't find it.

I know it's up there somewhere, but all of those things, I'm proud that he was part of that.

So when I look at documentaries like that, I, I know my grandfather was in there as well.

They proved to be a very powerful network for grassroots labor and civil rights organizing.

Why?

Because the train stopped in every tow and they served as connectors.

They carried information, they got out and they would stay in the local black YMCA or stay in local, boarding houses, motels.

I'd meet people from other towns and they'd convey information about what was happening.

During the Great Migration World War Two and other events that affected the nation's black population, the Pullman porters would act as couriers.

They would smuggle African-American newspapers like the Chicago Defender and the Pittsburgh Courie into the South and other areas where blacks were forbidden access to the so-called inflammatory publications.

Operation of the Pullman Company.

Sleeper cars ceased in 1968.

The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters represented its members until 1978, when it merged with the Brotherhood of Railway and Airline Clerks.

A. Philip Randolph died a year later at the age of 90.

Jim Crow affected nearl every facet of African American life, and according to docto McKenzie, this was no accident.

They knew what they were doing, and I'm afraid it's the same thing today.

If you put blacks in inferior schools, you give them teachers that are not prepared.

You do not give them the latest technology.

You are deliberately and I say it's not a mistake or are just coincidental.

They are deliberately making sure you will not be prepared to participate.

Unequal class.

And then of course you go into you will say other kind of activities to make a living.

Then they say you're no good.

You say they have to prove that you're worthless.

And in order to do it, they have to set it up.

Nowhere was Jim Crow mor evident than when blacks entered the workplace, and at one time, there was no bigger workplace in Pennsylvania than the steel mills.

The steel industry had a lot of very difficult and dangerous jobs, and there was almost a direct correlation between how dangerous dirty and unpleasant the job was and how many African-Americans you'd find in it.

The worse the job, the more likely you were to find black workers there, working in front of the furnace, doing foundry work.

Hot.

Really unpleasant.

Dangerous work.

You'd find black workers concentrated there, despite the advice of his parents, Oliver Montgomery, like Robert Allen and so many others, followed the me in their families into the mill.

Yes.

Labor laws, laws paying job in the mill, labor gang.

Everybody worked in the steel industry.

And so I went in there, not too long after coming out of high school.

My parents didn't want me to go.

They they always said there's so much discrimination.

Things are so horrible.

The jobs for the black people is so terrible.

Don't go near that mill.

Go to school, get your education and keep away from the mill.

But there was nothing else to do if you wanted to make any money.

Jim Crow in the North wasn't too much different than it was in the South.

And my dad and my uncles, you know, they worked in a coal plant, which as we call, you know, human destruction job, ma killing job, the fumes of gas, everything, noticed we had to do all the hard and hard work and the open hearth work in the body of the furnaces.

Working in the check what they call the checkers, crawl down in the flues, up in about three feet high and clean those out and all the hot and nasty work we had to do, though we had to do that mostly they had a black labor gang and a white labor gang and black labor gang.

God did most of the dirty hard work.

Bottom of the rung jobs, African-American workers were usually confined there.

And in the steel industry, there were often separate lines of seniority, which meant that if you're a white person, you could keep moving up the ranks.

The more seniority you got, the more chance you had to transfer into other jobs.

Many African American workers had dead end seniority lines to paint a picture where blacks were in 1948, we had the th entire industry was classified.

You get a job description classified.

You had anywhere from 3 to 32 different classifications, differing levels.

Job clas one was the lowest paid in job class 32, and later on 33 were the highest paid jobs, primarily the blacks was one, two, three, and four.

If you were blac and you were on job class four, which at that time was where I started, was what you'd call a laborer, a bricklayer, labor, that's where you were.

And it was hard to break out of that.

I never saw a white guy work in the body of a furnace.

And there was a white guy working a cinder pit.

We did all that work, and every so often those furnaces would burn out and blacks were used to go in and clean those furnaces out there.

You can imagine just, I look at firemen sometimes with all the protection they had.

Well, blacks used to wear, braided leggings aspects leggings, goggles, woode shoes, about three inches thick.

And that's what you had to put on the, you know, like a spaceman to go in and to clean out that red hot front and dig out those red hot bricks.

That's the job you had.

But you can only work a few minutes.

Many people, you know, passed out.

You know, it was a horrible it was a horrible job.

You had, a wooden shoe you strapped on to your, you know, you steel toed shoes and you had to get up in there and maybe the furnace is down maybe two days and heat was jumpin up your pants, leg up or what?

A jackhammer.

And it was really.

It was hot.

And we seen checkers.

I've seen furnaces go dow where the checkers were so hot we had to run, put an asbestos hood over.

He'd run in and grab a few brick and run out.

So the rule was those furnace supposed to have been down three anywhere, three days to a week before they would set anyone in those hot furnaces or u under the ground like groundhogs to clean.

That flew us out.

But this eager beaver foreman had to think, I think it was one day.

And he sent a bunch of guys down there.

One guy went down in front of the furnace.

Come up.

This is why I close the place down, you know?

He took his goggles off and his skin came up with it.

That's that's the kind of work we should do, you know.

And you should.

You should be glad for it.

Yeah.

You could have all the seniority you wanted and that helped you.

It protected your job, bu you couldn't take that seniority and use it to move into another, safer, cleaner, less unpleasant, job because you were stuck in in a cul de sac and a dead end, and a jo that was defined as a black job.

And so, that, meant that there was were very significant, you know, differences in quality of work life for black and for white workers in and but in steel, as in many other heavy industries, they wouldn't let you help a fitter.

When the only thing we could do would work in a related work in a riveting gang.

Or janitor was black, you know.

Or maybe you could help on some machines, but, man said, you know, why don't you?

He don't want to work with you.

You could he you couldn't wor when the boss one in particular.

It made no make you look bac and say, what good is education?

And, you know, I mean, they are educated, but it's still racism.

You asked, Foreman to put you with, with a fitter and in order to work wit a fitter, you had to know how to tack well, so we ask you, can you tack well?

Well, no, I can't tack well.

Well, you can't do the, making the heat We will make sure that you don't learn how to tack well, but blacks just didn' take that treatment lying down.

They fought back.

The battle had many fronts.

We really worked.

And if you took blood else with each other, we.

We had to read the riot act to them just like they read to us.

You know, even the civil rights movement, like I say, we we fought a duel or duel, battled, I should say a triple battle.

We fought for integration within the Union.

We fought for integration in the in the community, and we fought for integration in the company.

It's difficult to get people to buck the status quo.

I used to put my car in a parking lot, maybe 100 cars, and when I came out to eat i my car, I'd be there by itself because the guys would tell me that we think your car going to go up in here anytime, you know, and they had a joke that about me.

They said, I pay it, I'll pay anyone $100 to start my car.

So that's what we were up against.

And a lot of mafi oriented there, and a lot of it crept into it and they would threaten you, you know, we would threaten them back.

So, you know, okay, fine.

You got a baby sister too.

So, you know, so you threaten us, you know, something happens in my buddy but I'm going to get your buddy.

But that's the only thing they understood.

And once we got organized, we had to watch out for each other.

Yeah, because it was a constant threat.

You know, one of the threats we got is that if you go behind a furnace, you know, they make these big steel ladles, you know, if we catch any of you behind, we're going to throw you that hot ladle a steel.

You won't be nothing but a puff.

You that it was a job, you know was a job.

Well, you get a. Make a make a decent living.

You know.

And I guess we were conditioned to accept that.

And yes, they were condition, and in fact, even today there are people still conditioned, you know, for Jim Crow.

But we had to get through to them.

Well, we had to show them that progress was possible.

Okay.

Philip Randolph said one message that he drilled in our head, you're only going to get what you can take and you're goin to keep what you're going home.

The other side of the union movement was one of, ethnic solidarity and exclusion, so that many unions became, you could say, almost to have hiring halls, tha relied on personal connections and personal references so that a white person, would recommend a friend for a job, recommend someone they lived with, recommend someone, from their extended family, recommend someone they went to school or to church with, or someone they got to know.

Sitting around in a neighborhood bar.

Well, through Through most of the 20th century, African-Americans and white lived in separate neighborhoods.

They attended separate churches.

They went to separate schools.

They drank in separate bars.

And they certainly didn't intermarry, or have, family connections.

So as a result, there were large sectors of the workplace, many jobs that, systematically excluded African-Americans because they weren't part of the networks, that, unions relied on, and employers relied on to hire advice, take an active part in the CBTU organization.

We were able to break it down.

We were able to fight a battle to move blacks up in the local unions, move them up in the district.

Many blacks went on.

Staff were able to make the union for a complete comprehensive civil rights departmen with a full time directors staff and have representatives all over the country that that's what we were able to do.

And, it changed quite a bit.

On your mark Get set.

Hello.

Ho ho ho ho ho ho All right.

Oh ho ho ho ho!

And here we go.

If you want to get more up or down.

Oh, it was wonderful to come here as a kid, because we were limited to the places that we could go in the city.

And here it was, like, free.

We had a swimming pool when I was a kid here.

And you would bring your skates and we would go down and go skating at the, barn in a suburb not far from Pittsburgh.

Fairview Park has been servin the African-American community when no one else would for over 60 years.

Oh, look at you with the those pretty eyes.

Barbara Callaway is a retired teacher who has fon memories of Fairview Park.

Hi.

How are you?

Are you having a good time?

Fairview Park existed because of Jim Crow, but within its protected environment.

Kids never felt its brutal effects.

And you didn't deal with that at all.

You knew things that you could or could not do.

However, when you came out to Fairview Park, you had an opportunity to interact with other churches and people from all.

The mine Valley and the Pittsburgh area.

And it was just a good fellowship time.

Amusement parks, dancehalls and swimming pools were real battlegrounds over racial segregation.

White folks did not want to be in dancehalls and roller rinks.

In places where they were semi clad and wearing bathing suits, and swimming.

They did not want to be near African-Americans.

They were afraid of the risk and possibility and danger of racial mixing, especially of young people, of teenagers.

In the 1950s, Pittsburgh activists challenged segregatio in many of the amusement parks, and the public swimming pools in the city and in the surrounding areas.

One of those who challenge the status quo was the Reverend Gerald Hayes, the pastor of Bethlehem Baptist Church.

His son recalled the fight.

The prevailing practice, apparently, was that African-American churches could come to Kennywood and have their picnics there, but they could not use the pool, nor could they use the dance hall.

And it says here in this article that, once the heads of Kennywood were asked about it, they were told that the prevailing practices would apply, that they could use any of the facilities other than the swimming pool and the dance hall.

And the article mention that my father and others said that a stand needed to be taken and so the ministers of the McKeesport Ministerial Association, which was interracial, it was the Catholics, the Protestants, the white churches, the black churches.

He was part of this organization, but he and some of the other African-American ministers said to the ministerial association, we should take a stand her and say that this isn't right.

And they did.

Now, I'm not certain.

Being the age I was, growing up, how this eventually was resolved, we know in this generation that's not an issue.

But the common thought was that eventually, there was no longer a pool at Kennywood.

And maybe that's how it was resolved.

I'm not certain, but it was.

It's something that I've always shared with young people that perceive that Jim Crow was just an issue in the South, when indeed it was an issue here as well.

Ernest Jackson is the president of the Fairview Park Association.

So in 1945, they bought this piece of property out here in Salem, Townsend Dam on 100 acres at first.

And it was a full fledged amusement park with Merry-Go-Round roller coaster, swimming pool and all the activitie one will find in any other park.

So that's what was the beginnings, more or less from the fact that, the Jim Crow Crow laws at the time was not allowing blacks to, go into parks where whites were owned by whites.

On your mark, get set.

Go, go.

And they're off today.

We don't have the amusement rides.

Over the years with the elimination of the Jim Crow laws.

The blacks were going to the more modern parks, like the, Kennywood and Westview Park.

And the support for this park kind of dwindle to the point where they could not sustain the, the equipment, for safety reasons.

So over the time, all the equipment eventually eliminated from the park, you go free.

Yeah.

Today the park is used mainly for picnics, reunions, different churches used for different events.

They have, here at the park and it's still a full dysfunctional park, but not as an amusement park.

Oh, no.

Yeah, it's supposed to be.

Lawrence Mason of Belmont Pennsylvania, describes himself originall as a city boy from Pittsburgh, but he had his reasons for moving to the suburbs.

I've been involved totally since about 1948.

The young lady that I was courting at that particular time, her father was on the board of trustees for the park.

And that's how I became familiar with, Fairview Park was living in Pittsburgh at the time, in Homewood.

And, we used to come out with him to, cut the grass and do odds and ends, you know, get on a good sid of the father in law, you know, and, you know, that relationshi sort of developed to the point that, we eventually, got married.

At that time, the park had a, restaurant built, building on the park, which had an apartment upstairs above that.

We lived in the apartment and, you know, sort of took care of the grounds.

The vision, they were really far sighted.

Few individuals, I think with no fans, with no resources, was able to, you know acquire this land and close to, almost 200 acres.

I think we owe a lot to them.

But to Barbara Callaway and many others.

Fairview Park is still very important.

I think this is important because we own this land now.

We, we didn't always own it, but, we own it now.

And land is an important thing to own.

It gives you a sense of, who you are.

We all should own a piece of ground.

If you don't have anything but a flower pot with some dirt in there everyone needs to own some land.

And I tried to impress upon the young people this belongs to you.

So therefore when we're not here any longer, you will have to be the steward of this property.

Are you enjoying your hot dog?

Is it good?

Good.

Americans, especially white Americans, tend to look toward the future.

Let's forget about the past.

What's past is past.

That's gone.

Let's look forward instead to change and to progress.

But we have to confron the troubled and unresolved past if we want to move forward.

And progress can't just pretend in history didn't happen.

You can't pretend.

And it doesn't have ongoing consequences.

It's there.

It matters.

It continues to shape and constrain, people's lives and people' opportunities and choices right up to the here and now.

To its knowledge, w don't care where it comes from.

But more important, w don't need to put anybody down.

And I honestly believe that if this information gets out, everybody will be happy.

It must be burdensome to carry a load of hatred or, a segregationist attitude, or the need to discriminate against people or to treat them unfairly and unequally.

That must be a burden.

The Mason-Dixon line was the traditional boundary between north and South.

It's a reminder that Pennsylvania is a lot closer to the south than we think it is.

Pennsylvania' history has much more in common with the history of Virgini and North Carolina, Mississippi than most of US Pennsylvanians care to admit.

Welcome to the colored section.

Welcome to the Negro League.

Sign your name on the black list and know this.

It's American historian.

See what it is to be blackmailed.

See a real life conspiracy.

Sign your name on the black list and know this It's American history.

First black this and first black Yeah, yeah.

Give me the truth and not the facts the facts we are the original people.

The alpha and omega of it all We get the short end of the sick all of the time welcome to the colored secion.

This program was made possibl by a grant from the Pennsylvania Public Television Network.

The network receives funding from the Commonwealth to provide public television to all Pennsylvanians.

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Thank you.