In his weekly editorials, Vann began naming the friends and enemies of the Pittsburgh Negro. He praised U.S. Steel and other businesses that hired the new migrants, and denounced those that didn’t. Meanwhile, he admonished blacks to make the most of new opportunities. When the Westinghouse factory hired four hundred black workers and some of them proved to be unreliable, Vann delivered a stern lecture to the community. “If our boys ever expect to take part in the onward march of the country and to be respected for their skills and usefulness,” he wrote, “they must learn that the steady man, the constant man, has a better chance to become efficient, and thus gain promotion, than the man who works until payday and loafs until his wages are spent.”
As the new migrants crowded into the Hill District and other black enclaves, the Courier railed against the obstacles and indignities they encountered. It editorialized about squalid living conditions, usurious rents, mistreatment in white hospitals, and the absence of Negroes among Pittsburgh’s doctors, policemen, and schoolteachers. The newspaper launched quixotic campaigns to raise money for a Negro hospital, and to persuade blacks to found their own real estate and mortgage agencies.
The resistance that blacks faced when they tried to move into white neighborhoods was another subject of outrage—and one that Vann experienced firsthand. The year after he became editor of the Courier, he and Jesse managed to find a white man who would sell them his house in Homewood, the neighborhood east of the Hill where some of the Negro elite lived. But six years later, when Vann purchased the house next door and began renting it to another black family, his white neighbors revolted. In what became known as the “Battle of Monticello Street,” they printed handbills and held meetings to protest the influx of “undesirables.” When months of grumbling failed to dislodge Vann or his tenants, the whites began to move away, and within a decade most of the residents on the block were black.
Of all the battles Vann waged, his most passionate was to “abolish every vestige of Jim Crowism in Pittsburgh,” as he put it. Although Pennsylvania had passed a law officially prohibiting it in 1887, blacks still confronted routine discrimination in public places. Downtown theaters refused to sell them tickets or made them sit in separate balconies. Nickelodeons charged them double price. Restaurants wouldn’t serve them, or, when they did, waiters put salt into their coffee, pepper in their milk, and extra charges on their bills. Department store clerks ignored Negroes and served white customers first. When W. E. B. Du Bois, A. Philip Randolph, and other black dignitaries visited Pittsburgh, they could stay in white hotels only if they entered through the back door and used the service elevator. Instead, they frequented black-run hotels or stayed at the homes of prominent Negroes like the Vanns or Daisy Lampkin.
For a time, Vann held out hope for a new civil rights law that would spell out harsh fines and punishments for discriminatory practices. After a state legislator from Pittsburgh named A. C. Stein proposed such a measure in 1915, Vann threw the full weight of the Courier behind it. When the Stein law passed the state House and Senate, Vann wrote triumphant editorials, only to see the governor veto the legislation on the grounds that the existing 1887 statute made it unnecessary. Vann was crushed. Drained from his lobbying efforts, he fell ill and didn’t recover for several months. When he did, he wrote a bitter editorial on the fecklessness of the white political system. “The Negro need not heed the promises this year,” he concluded glumly.
Slowly but surely, Vann was becoming convinced that his editorial crusades didn’t go far enough. If their battles were ever to be taken seriously, Negroes needed to become a more organized—and more feared—political force. And if Vann was going to play a role in making that happen, he first needed to turn the Courier into a newspaper with national reach, and a national reputation.
• • •
MEETING WITH THE COURIER’S board of directors in 1919, the Little Chief argued that something bold needed to be done. The paper was selling sixteen thousand copies per issue, Ira Lewis pointed out, but it was barely scraping by. It had only $102 in the bank and had never paid more than $100 in dividends. The only hope for profitability, Lewis argued, was to double the sale price, to 10 cents. To persuade readers that the extra cost was worth it, he proposed expanding the newspaper to ten pages, adding more feature stories, and running more photographs. He suggested sponsoring a beauty contest and printing pinups of the winners. Robert Vann, Cap Posey, and the other board members approved of the ideas, but they worried that the Courier was still too small to go it alone. Its much larger rival, The Chicago Defender, also cost a nickel, and the Courier had little hope of competing with it at twice the price.
So Vann set out to persuade the Defender to lift its price to a dime as well. After the board meeting, he began writing persistent letters to the Defender’s publisher, Robert Abbott. The son of former Georgia slaves and stepson of a mulatto missionary raised in Germany, Abbott had founded the Defender in 1905, five years before the Courier. Almost overnight, it became the top Negro newspaper in the country by focusing coverage on the Great Migration. It specialized in graphic horror stories about Jim Crow, glowing tales of success in the North, and pictures and classified ads touting the jobs and housing that awaited blacks in Chicago. Fourteen years later, the Defender was on its way to a readership of 200,000. But it barely turned a profit, either, due to the high cost of printing and labor. Finally, after Ira Lewis made a special trip to Chicago, Abbott agreed to the price-fixing scheme—a decision that he would later come to regret as the Defender slowly began to lose ground to the Courier.
The price hike didn’t pay off immediately. At first, the Courier’s circulation plummeted. Two years later, it still had less than $300 in its account with the Potter Title and Trust Company. (When the bank refused to issue a loan, Lewis indignantly withdrew the tiny sum.) By the mid-1920s, however, things began to turn around. Vann hired the Ziff Corporation to sell advertising space to national brand names such as Pillsbury, Colgate-Palmolive, Lever Brothers, and Vaseline. He had to pay an onerous commission—a third to a half of the cost of the ads—but the accounts increased revenue by a quarter and gave the paper a new air of sophistication. Circulation rebounded, too, as readers responded to the pinup girls and other changes that Lewis had suggested. For the first time, Vann officially agreed to emulate The Chicago Defender and add more “yellow” to the paper’s mix. Addressing the board in 1922, he conceded that while he was still “opposed in principle to sensationalism,” he had come to see that “the weekly sales of the Courier could be greatly increased by the publication of more sensational and morbid stories.”
Yet what attracted new readers more than anything else was the Courier’s growing roster of memorable writers. Vann was proving to have an eye for distinctive talents, and a flair for showcasing them. By the early 1920s, a writer named John L. Clark was filling a column called “Wylie Avenue” with Runyonesque accounts of the nightlife and lowlife on the Hill’s main thoroughfare. A trio of talented sports writers—Bill Nunn, Chester Washington, and W. Rollo Wilson—was turning out four pages of lively coverage and commentary every week, and creating wildly popular traditions such as the Courier’s All-America football team and its coverage of the annual game between Howard University in Washington, D.C., and Lincoln University outside Philadelphia, otherwise known as “the Negro Harvard-Yale.”
A decade earlier, shortly after assuming the reins of the newspaper, Vann had hired a young woman to take dictation. But he quickly realized that Julia Bumry was destined to be more than a stenographer. A native of Parkersburg, West Virginia, Bumry had attended Wilberforce University, where with her round, expressive face and lively personality she became a star actress and leader in the Delta Sigma Theta sorority. When Bumry quit to take a teaching job down south, Vann lured her back by offering to make her a writer. She settled down in Pittsburgh and married a local waiter, Henry Jones. In 1920, Vann promoted Julia Bumry Jones to a new position—women’s editor—in charge of covering black Pitt
sburgh’s social calendar of teas, dances, and weddings. Under the breezy byline of “Jules,” Jones began writing a column entitled “Talk O’ Town,” mixing chatty gossip with sly political observations and appeals to the Courier’s female readers to exercise their economic and voting power.
Vann added other columns aimed at attracting a national readership. “Sylvester Russell’s Review” covered the theaters and dance halls of black Chicago. In New York, Floyd J. Calvin opened a bureau in Harlem and hosted The Courier Hour, a short-lived talk radio program that was the first of its kind for a Negro audience. Walter White, the young writer and NAACP official, wrote a column on the latest news from the Harlem Renaissance crowd. In 1925, at Ira Lewis’s suggestion, Vann made his most important addition to the paper since the Little Chief himself. He hired George Schuyler, an acerbic Harlem-based columnist whose arch reports on “Aframerica” helped increase the Courier’s circulation by 10 percent in six months.
The same year, Vann and the Courier lost Cap Posey. He died in midsummer after a brief illness, following his beloved Anna to the grave by seven years. Posey was eulogized at the Loendi Club, buried with elaborate Masonic honors at the Homestead Cemetery, and remembered as a “pioneer of industry” in a front-page tribute in the Courier. Yet rather than slow Vann down, Posey’s passing ignited even more ambition, as though he was determined not only to succeed his mentor as the most influential Negro in Pittsburgh, but to surpass him.
The following year, Vann took the daring step of issuing $25,000 worth of new Courier stock, at a time when the paper was only beginning to become profitable. His stated purpose was to fund a new printing plant. But Vann may have sensed that there would be limited demand for the offering, because when that proved to be the case, he dug deep into his own savings to buy up most of the new shares. Now Vann was not only the paper’s editor but also its majority owner.
To celebrate, Vann treated himself to a coveted status symbol among successful Negroes. Although he had never been a good driver—he had crashed his first car, a Lincoln, soon after buying it—he decided to splurge on a Cadillac. But the first dealer Vann visited in Pittsburgh refused to sell him the roadster he wanted, worried that his white customers would start to view the Caddy as “a nigger car.” Vann had to go all the way to Altoona to find a willing seller—and even then the dealer insisted that he pay the list price, $3,570, entirely in cash.
In 1926, Vann also waded into two very public fights that drew more national attention to the Courier and elevated his own national reputation. The first battle was with James Weldon Johnson, the renowned author and executive secretary of the NAACP, and W. E. B. Du Bois, the legendary editor of that association’s journal, The Crisis. Until then, the Courier had shown deference to the venerable civil rights group and its leaders. But in October 1926, it printed a bombshell headline on the front page. “NAACP ‘SLUSH FUND’ AIRED,” it read.
The story below was just as dramatic. It charged that James Weldon Johnson had abused his position as the sole black board member of the Garland Fund, an endowment for the support of liberal causes that had been established by the rebellious son of a Wall Street millionaire. Of the $35,000 that the fund had donated to Negro causes, the story alleged, “the lion’s share” had gone into the coffers of the NAACP, paying for executive salaries and “expensive and palatial offices on Fifth Avenue.” Most of the money had been meant for the defense of Ossian Sweet, a black physician from Detroit who had been charged with murder when a white mob tried to prevent him from moving into a white neighborhood. Yet only $5,000 had made its way to Clarence Darrow and Sweet’s other attorneys, the Courier alleged. Meanwhile, another $5,000 had gone to W. E. B. Du Bois “for study of Negro education in South Carolina”—an outrageous sum, the paper suggested, for such a narrow project.
Johnson wasted no time in firing back. Less than a week later, he issued an angry press release insisting that the donations to the Sweet case had been fully audited, and that the stipend to Du Bois was for study of black education across the entire South. Then Johnson unleashed a vicious personal attack on Vann. “He has written a more poisonous attack than has emanated from any white Southerner in the entire history of the NAACP,” Johnson seethed. “I think the colored people of American have a little account to settle with Mr. Robert L. Vann, Editor of the Pittsburgh Courier.” Arriving in Pittsburgh several days later, Johnson gave a hot-tempered address denouncing Vann as a “liar” and “scoundrel.” The paper responded with a mocking account of the speech. “He came, he ‘cussed,’ and he went,” the paper reported, under the headline: “JAMES WELDON JOHNSON AIRLY SLUSHES OVER SLUSH FUND.”
The feud grew even nastier as Du Bois joined the attack on the Courier. In the year-end issue of The Crisis, the editor published a list of “Assets and Liabilities” for Negroes in 1926. The liabilities included “31 Lynchings” and “Vann.” The Courier lashed back at “The Pope of Fifth Avenue,” as it described Du Bois. “The army of readers of the Pittsburgh Courier will merely smile when they hear the characterization of Mr. Vann as a Race ‘Liability,’ ” the paper jeered. “About 20 times more of them read the Pittsburgh Courier than read Dr. Du Bois . . . . If Du Bois is a sample of the Highly Educated Negro, there is little wonder that his following of twenty years ago can now be numbered on the fingers of the one hand. The old boy is dead on his feet and doesn’t know it.”
Before long, virtually every black newspaper in the country had weighed in on the slush fund dispute. The Chicago Whip, The Cleveland Gazette, The Detroit Owl, and the Tucson Times echoed the Courier’s calls for an investigation. The Baltimore Afro-American, The Philadelphia Tribune, The Chicago Bee, and The Richmond Planet backed the NAACP. Others argued that blacks couldn’t afford such intramural squabbles and called on both sides to back off. Finally, after three years, they did. In a carefully orchestrated reconciliation, the Courier and The Crisis published public letters in which Vann expressed regret for his attack, and Johnson and Du Bois accepted the apology. “NAACP-Courier ‘BURY THE HATCHET,’ ” read the headline in the Courier.
Yet even then, the hard feelings lingered. Vann was particularly incensed that Johnson had tried unsuccessfully to get him booted from the prestigious black fraternity Sigma Pi Phi, otherwise known as “the Boulé.” When Johnson died a decade later, Vann informed Walter White, the new NAACP chief, that he would not attend the service. “I say about his funeral,” Vann wrote, “the same thing I said about Huey Long’s funeral—‘I shall not be present, but I am glad it happened.’ ”
The second battle allied Vann with black America’s most prominent labor leader and against the Courier’s rival, The Chicago Defender. In the summer of 1925, A. Philip Randolph, the editor of the radical New York–based journal The Messenger, took up the cause of black railway porters. In a series of articles, he lamented their outrageously low pay, grueling hours, and humiliating need to beg for tips and to pay for their own uniforms. At a meeting in Harlem, Randolph called for organizing the workers and agreed to lead a new union, which he named the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. But most of the Negro press was cool to the effort, particularly the newspapers in Chicago, where many of the porters lived and where their chief employer, the Pullman Company, was based.
Vann sided with Randolph. He began publishing weekly stories tallying the union’s recruits and touting Randolph’s speeches. When Randolph came to Pittsburgh, Vann met him at the train station, put him put up on Monticello Street, and gave banner coverage to his address at the Loendi Club. At the same time, Vann made no bones about what he expected in return. “There are 10,000 Pullman porters and I am perfectly willing to fight their battle . . . but I think they ought to be willing to give me a little financial support,” Vann wrote to an associate. “I want the Courier to go into the home of every porter.” In addition to new subscribers, Vann gained access to The Messenger’s national sales agents, and to hundreds of porters whom he recruited to hand-carry the Courier to remote parts of the co
untry where he couldn’t ship the newspaper.
For two years, the Brotherhood’s membership grew, and so did the Courier’s circulation. Then in 1928, Vann abruptly turned on Randolph. The Pullman Company had refused to come to the bargaining table, and Randolph was threatening a strike. In series of editorials, the Courier argued that the union was still too weak to stage a successful walkout, and that Pullman executives would never deal with Randolph because of his socialist past. In an open letter to Pullman porters and maids, Vann called for Randolph’s resignation. “The Pullman Porters ought not to suffer because Mr. Randolph years ago decided to be a socialist,” he wrote. “He is now at the place where he can go not farther and it is time the porters realized it and worked out some other way to get some of the things they want.”
Randolph was irate. In an impassioned reply in The Messenger, he disputed the notion that he could no longer lead the union and implied that Vann was conspiring with the Pullman Company to get rid of him. “There is a certain colored gentleman in the woodpile somewhere and the Brotherhood will smoke him out before this fight is over,” Randolph wrote darkly. In fact, Vann may have well believed he had the interests of the porters at heart, but he had commercial motives as well. The Defender had finally come around to supporting the Brotherhood, so the Courier now had a competitive incentive to take a different position. The Messenger had also lost circulation, so access to its sales network was no longer of great value. According to one Randolph biographer, many in the Brotherhood also suspected that it was no coincidence that just as Vann began to show sympathy for the Pullman Company’s point of view, the Courier suddenly had enough money to start building a new printing plant.
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