Smoketown

by Mark Whitaker

  For the Poseys and the other elite Negro families, no cause was greater than the education of their children. Most of them attended the city’s white public schools, thanks to a law passed by the Pennsylvania legislature outlawing segregated education in 1883. The members of the Tuesday Evening Study Club went to Pittsburgh High. The Posey children were enrolled in the Homestead schools. When Thomas Ewell, the writer for The Colored American Magazine, visited the Poseys in 1901, he described the eldest, Beatrix, as “a charming little belle of seventeen summers,” who had achieved “a bright record in the Homestead high school.”

  Later Beatrix would graduate from California State Normal School and become a teacher like her mother. Her thirteen-year-old brother was just starting high school. His name was Stewart Hayes Posey, after the steamboat owner who had first hired Cap Posey as a chief engineer, but everyone called him “See.” They also had a ten-year-old brother named Cumberland, after his father, who was nicknamed “Cum.” But his academic record was a different story.

  A small, skinny boy with his mother’s light skin and long face, Cum Posey preferred sports to books. His first love was basketball. He played guard, and what he lacked in height—he would grow to only five-foot-nine and 140 pounds as an adult—he made up in quickness and court sense. At Homestead High, he was a mediocre student but the star of the basketball team. Admitted to Penn State, he led the freshman squad and made the starting varsity as a sophomore. But Cum’s grades were so poor that he was dropped from the team, and rather than go without basketball he quit college. (A Courier sportswriter who later profiled Cum Posey wryly described him in his college years as an “adventurous and turbulent spirit [who] brooked no faculty interference with his desires.”)

  Returning to Pittsburgh, Cum teamed up with brother See to form a semipro basketball team called the Monticello-Delany Rifles, named in honor of the abolitionist physician Martin Delany. Semipro ball was a difficult life, but Cum brought to it a crafty business sense that matched his athletic ability. He recruited a player who worked as a janitor for the city Recreation Department so the team could practice at a field house on the Hill during hours when blacks weren’t officially allowed. He arranged for an exhibition match with Howard University, considered the best team in the black college leagues, which put the Rifles on the map when they won in an upset. Capitalizing on their sudden fame, Posey cut a sponsorship deal with his father’s social club and renamed the team the Loendi Big Five in exchange for funds for uniforms and travel.

  During the summers, Cum Posey threw himself into sandlot baseball. At the age of nineteen, he joined a team of Negro steelworkers who played at Homestead Park on the weekends and called themselves the Murdock Grays. Two years later, the team renamed themselves the Homestead Grays, and Posey persuaded the manager to let him schedule their games. For most of his twenties, he tried to juggle three sports at once. Briefly returning to college, at Holy Ghost, the future Duquesne University, Cum became captain of the golf squad as well as starring for the basketball team under the name Charles Cumbert. (It would later be said that Posey used the pseudonym to pass as white, but it is just as likely that he did it to protect his amateur status, which would have been jeopardized by knowledge of his semipro career.) Then Cum dropped out again and went to work for a railway mail service. Only then, when it looked like he had no other future, did he agree to take the job of manager of the Homestead Grays. Although it seemed like a dead end at the time, it was a path that would eventually lead Cumberland Posey Jr. to outshine even his remarkable father as a historic figure in the annals of black business.

  As his son was embarking on his career as a sports entrepreneur, Cap Posey was eyeing a new area of investment. To that date, there had been only sporadic attempts to create publications for the Negroes of Pittsburgh. The first were white-run pro-abolitionist journals with names like The Christian Witness, The Temperance Banner, and The Saturday Evening Visitor. The first black-edited journal, Martin Delany’s The Mystery, had briefly gained national attention with its coverage of the Great Pittsburgh Fire of 1845. But Delany’s coverage of slave hunters and blacks whom he accused of abetting them had attracted a series of libel suits that drove him to the verge of bankruptcy and forced him to close down The Mystery after five years.

  Yet as Cap Posey could tell from the periodicals stocked in his library, publishing had become a thriving business by the 1900s. William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Pulitzer, and other press barons were growing as rich as the industrial giants of the East End. And Pittsburgh’s white-run dailies and weeklies were flourishing, particularly once a murder trial involving the son of an East End coal tycoon became the most sensational crime story of the decade.

  In the winter of 1910, Cap Posey was presented with an opportunity to invest in a fledgling publishing venture. It was the brainchild of Edward Nathaniel Harleston, a stocky, smooth-faced South Carolina native with a pompadour of loose curls who worked as a security guard and messenger at the H. J. Heinz Co. pickle factory. After working as a census gatherer in Charleston, Harleston had moved to Atlantic City and taken a job as the custodian of Heinz Pier, the boardwalk attraction where free pickles were given away. But his first love was writing poetry. While in Atlantic City, Harleston had used his savings to publish a collection of verse he called The Toiler’s Life. He dedicated the volume to his mother, and an ode to her was typical of its sentimental contents:

  In the dawning of the morning

  When rays on dewdrops shine,

  I’ll think of thee, O Mother,

  For thy love, thy boy doth pine.

  Shortly afterward, Harleston moved to Pittsburgh to work at the main Heinz factory. Still eager to share his poetry, he began printing pamphlets of new verse and selling them for 5 cents apiece on the Hill. When that proved to be a less than roaring business success, Harleston decided to turn the pamphlet into a newspaper. He recruited friends from the pickle factory to help, and they laid out the first issue in the room that Harleston rented in the home of the Tanner family. He called the paper the Courier, after a Charleston publication he had read as a boy, and mailed it to a printing company. When the first copies came back, one of the Tanner daughters borrowed $3.49 from her mother to pay the postal bill, and the first edition appeared in January 1910. Harleston quickly ran out of savings, however, at which point one of his factory friends suggested that he seek financial support from the well-to-do denizens of the Loendi Club.

  When Cap Posey met Harleston and read his little publication, he saw potential. Also intrigued were his fellow clubmen Samuel Rosamond, the Post Office official; William Nelson Page, a secretary at Carnegie Steel; and William Hance, a real estate man. But none of them had any intention of serving as a piggy bank for the enterprising but romantic pickle worker. If they were going to invest in the Courier, they wanted to own stock in a proper company. And they all agreed about who should handle the legal work: Robert L. Vann, an able and sober-minded young Negro attorney who had just passed the bar examination and set up shop in downtown Pittsburgh.

  On a cold day in March of that year, the editor and the four businessmen trudged through a thin layer of snow to Vann’s office on Fourth Avenue, in the downtown business district. By the time the meeting was over, they had signed papers declaring The Pittsburgh Courier an official corporation. The four investors had taken shares in the new venture, and Cap Posey had accepted the title of president. But it wouldn’t take long for him to conclude that the wrong man was running the newspaper. Cap Posey wanted his money on the practical lawyer, not the dreamy poet.

  Robert L. Vann at the estate he purchased in Oakmont, in the Pittsburgh suburbs, after the Courier became the bestselling black newspaper in America.

  THE PAPER

  3

  THE CALCULATING CRUSADER

  ROBERT LEE VANN HATED kitchen odors. As a boy, trying to get to sleep on sticky North Carolina nights, he smelled the grease and charcoal smoke that hung in the air from the day’s meals at John Aske
w’s plantation, where his mother worked. It filled his nostrils and reminded him of where he was, and of who he was. During the day, Vann was allowed to play with the three Askew children, to share their toys and race through the family mansion with its wide pillars. Sometimes John Askew himself would take Vann on his horse as the farmer inspected the groves of oaks and gardens of pink magnolias on the property. Mrs. Askew quizzed Vann on his ABC’s and offered him friendly lectures about Christian virtues. But at night, he was the son of the family cook, sleeping on a tiny bed alongside hers next to a hot stove in the kitchen cabin. Vann hated its odors so much that later, as an adult, he refused to eat in kitchens, and he would open a window whenever he smelled anything that reminded him of those nights.

  Vann’s mother, Lucy Peoples, was the daughter of ex-slaves who ran a general store in the town of Ahoskie, North Carolina. As a teen, Lucy went to work as a cook for wealthy white families in the region. Her first employer was Albert Vann, and it was his name that she gave her son, along with the given name Robert Lee, after her grandfather. Some thought Albert Vann might have been the boy’s father, but there is evidence that it was more likely a field hand named Joseph Hall who lived with Lucy at her second place of employment, Old Dr. Mitchell’s Farm in Ahoskie. Whatever the truth, no man followed Lucy when she went to work for the Askew family, bringing “Vann,” as she called her six-year-old son, along with her.

  Apart from the kitchen smells, Vann would remember the years on the Askew plantation as the happiest of his youth. He even had warm memories of the Springfield Colored School, the overcrowded one-room schoolhouse he attended with sixty other Negro children between the ages of six and fourteen. Although the walls were unpainted and the books were hand-me-downs, Vann mastered his three R’s well enough to be able to teach his unlettered mother how to read and write. By middle school, Vann was writing poetry. At his graduation ceremony, he used verse to announce the profession he had chosen for himself, one that would allow him to escape the fate of all the black men in the fields of Ahoskie County:

  All can marry whom they like

  I know an easier life

  A lawyer need not soil his hands

  But live by others’ strife.

  By then, Vann had a more urgent reason to seek an easier life. Lonely for a man, Lucy Peoples had married a dirt farmer named John Simon and taken her son to live with him on a property he called Red Hill. By Vann’s early teens, his stepfather had him setting traps for raccoons and rabbits and driving an ox plow under the blazing summer sun. “I learned to split rails, dig ditches, hoe cotton and corn, cure tobacco in the barns, and everything else that a plow boy of a poor Negro farmer would have to know,” he recalled. When work ran out on Red Hill, Simon loaned Vann out as a tobacco picker and once, to his humiliation, as a cook at a Virginia lumber camp. The comedown from the life on the Askew farm haunted Vann for the rest of his teens, and made him more determined than ever to escape the control of “the world’s most worthless man,” as he called Simon. “My stepfather thought I was big enough to work,” he recalled, “but he never knew how the first ten years of my life constantly rebelled against the six years of torment I encountered under his jurisdiction.”

  At sixteen, Vann began to see a way out. He managed to get a summer job working at the post office in Harrellsville, as a janitor and a clerk. The postmaster was a Negro—A. C. Boothe—the first black man Vann had ever seen in a position of high authority. Boothe took a liking to Vann, and after a while began allowing the boy to close the post office in the evening and open up in the morning.

  One day before leaving, Vann accidentally locked the stamps in the safe. He didn’t want to admit his blunder to Mr. Boothe, so he borrowed a bicycle, rode eight miles to a nearby town, and procured stamps from the post office there. By the time he returned to Harrellsville, he was bathed in sweat, but he had enough stamps to open the post office in the morning without Mr. Boothe being the wiser.

  The $16 Vann earned that summer allowed him to enroll in the best school available to Negroes in that part of North Carolina. It was the Waters Training School, a private academy founded by a Baptist preacher named Calvin Brown and run out of three small buildings in the town of Winton. Brown charged $5 a month for tuition and room and board. Vann was able to afford four months of study, saving a dollar a month by living at home during the weekends. When his money ran out, he worked another summer at the post office to earn enough to return to the Waters Training School in the fall. Winter came early that year, however, and one weekend after walking eleven miles from Red Hill in the wet snow Vann collapsed of exhaustion. Impressed by the boy’s determination, Pastor Brown arranged for him to live at the school from then on, and to earn his keep by chopping wood and doing other chores.

  When Vann was nineteen, a friend at the Waters School announced that he was going to Boston to find work for the summer. Did Vann want to come along? the friend asked. His mother opposed the idea, but Vann insisted, and a white fellow who worked on the Askew farm loaned him money for a train ticket. Vann had never experienced rail travel before, and he was too captivated to chafe at riding in a segregated car. A distant aunt who lived in Boston put him up, and he found employment bussing tables at the Copley Square Hotel, where President McKinley stayed when he was in town. Emulating the hotel waiters, Vann began to part his hair in the middle. After putting aside money to repay the train ticket, he bought a pinstripe suit, a pair of tan shoes, a raglan overcoat, and a derby hat. At the end of the summer, he brought his dandyish new sense of style back to North Carolina, and it would stay with him for the rest of his life.

  When Vann was selected valedictorian of his graduating class from Waters Training School, he hailed Abe Lincoln as his hero. “Never would Abraham Lincoln have risen from his humble cot to the presidency had he not first chosen the position and, after choosing this lofty height, he strove with earnest and persistent efforts, ever keeping in view that executive mansion which marked his course from boyhood to the day of his greatest attainment,” Vann proclaimed in an impassioned graduation speech. “Once having found what he is best suited for, the individual should pursue aggressively his goal. Opportunity would then almost inevitably come his way. To every individual there comes as much as once in a life an opportunity which, seized at its flow, leads on to fortune; omitted, all his life is a spectacle of failure and disgrace, and he together with his once glittering talent soon sinks into oblivion and despair.”

  That impatience to make the most of his talent was evident the next fall when, at the recommendation of Pastor Brown, Vann enrolled at Virginia Union University, a Baptist school in Richmond. He studied Greek, wrote for the college journal, and spent long evenings debating the wisdom of Booker T. Washington’s appeals to Negroes to see to their own advancement. A classmate whose parents taught at the university invited Vann to dinners and dances at their home, where he mixed with the sons and daughters of Richmond’s black elite.

  Yet in his time in Richmond, Vann also came to see that opportunity for Negroes in the South was shrinking fast. In state after state, legislatures were rebelling against the legal rights granted Negroes under Reconstruction and passing Jim Crow laws segregating public facilities. The town’s newspaper, The Richmond Planet, ran editorials calling for repeal of the Fifteenth Amendment granting blacks the right to vote. When Vann returned home to North Carolina, he found Democrats shoving aside a Fusionist alliance of Republicans, Populists, and blacks with angry appeals for a return to “a white man’s state, and a white man’s government.” In Wilmington, a riot broke out after gun-toting white thugs chased blacks away from the polls. Afterward, local Negroes began packing up their possessions and heading north.

  It was the precursor to what would become known as the Great Migration, and Vann decided he had no choice but to join the exodus. He set his sights on the Western University of Pennsylvania, in Pittsburgh, and the scholarships for twelve promising Negro students a year that had been established by the abol
itionist cotton mill owner, Charles Avery. Vann applied for one of those places, and when he was accepted he returned to Ahoskie County to deliver the news.

  While at the Waters School, Vann had proposed to a girl named Mattie Davis and bought her a small diamond ring. Now he told Mattie that she could keep the ring but that the engagement was off. “I’m going North,” Vann said curtly. “There will be no wedding plans.” Then, on a hot August day, Vann went to Red Hill to bid goodbye to his mother and good riddance to his stepfather before heading to the nearest rail station and boarding a train for his new home in Pennsylvania.

  Even after Boston and Richmond, nothing could have prepared Vann for Pittsburgh, for how different it was from the farmlands of his youth. The first thing he must have noticed was the smell. Miles before his train pulled into Union Station, a stench akin to rotten eggs would have reached him, stronger than any of the kitchen odors he detested as a child. It came from the sulfur that was emitted by iron ore and coke in the 4,000 degree heat of the city’s steel furnaces and excreted in piles of gray slag that littered the landscape. As Vann emerged from the train station, his eyes would have felt the sting of air suffused with smoke from the mills along the banks of the three rivers. By day, viewed from the top of its many hills, Pittsburgh could be every bit as ugly as Birmingham and the other British industrial cities to which Charles Dickens himself, after a visit to America, had once compared it. Miles of smokestacks striped the horizon, blackening the sky over the grim factories. Yet by night, the city could also be a thing of eerie beauty, as the still burning lights from the factories haloed the city’s bridges and caused their reflections to shimmer in the dark mirror of the rivers below.