The photo of the heated exchange would haunt Garagiola for the rest of his life, well into his career as a popular TV broadcaster. But Smith made no mention of the incident in the Courier, preferring not to tarnish the glow around Robinson as he headed toward the World Series. Instead, Wendell dwelled on a happier development that week: The Sporting News had named Jackie Robinson “Rookie of the Year.”
As the World Series between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Yankees commenced, Smith predicted a contest between grit and brawn, and it turned out to be just that. After falling behind two games to one, the Dodgers tied the series three-all on the improbable heroics of pinch hitters named Cookie Lavagetto and Al Gionfriddo. But in game seven, the Yankees came back to win 5–2, clinching the championship, as Robinson went hitless in four at bats.
Yet even then, Smith chose to accentuate the positive in his report for the Courier. Brooklyn would not have even won the pennant had it not been for Jackie Robinson, who ended with a batting average of .297, 29 stolen bases, and only 16 errors, Wendell concluded. And now that Robinson had done Brooklyn and black America proud, he stood to make a well-earned killing. During the off-season, Smith predicted, Jackie would rake in as much as seven times his $5,000 Dodgers salary in appearance fees, endorsements, and exhibition games.
After the 1947 season, Wendell Smith received new opportunities as well. The Chicago Herald-American offered him a job as its first black sportswriter, at a salary his bosses in Pittsburgh couldn’t match. (Out of loyalty, Smith continued to write his “Sports Beat” column in the Courier for several more years.) With the backing of the Hearst empire, Smith was finally admitted into the Baseball Writers Association of America. For the first time, Wendell was able to work in the press boxes of ballparks where he had previously had to sit alone in the bleachers, his typewriter on his lap.
Smith also helped Robinson get a contract to write My Own Story, a short autobiography about his life in baseball up to that point. Yet ironically, his collaboration with Jackie and Rachel Robinson on the book would mark the beginning of a chill in their friendship. Jackie came to view the ghostwritten book as too rose-colored, and later hired other collaborators to help him write two edgier memoirs. Meanwhile, as Robinson’s fame continued to grow, Wendell began to chafe at Jackie’s prickly complaints about the profession that had helped make his breakthrough possible.
The rift broke into the open a year and a half later, during spring training for the 1949 season. In an intramural game with a minor league club, Robinson singled off a prospect from rural Wisconsin named Chris Van Cuyk and taunted him from first base, yelling that he would remain “a Class D busher for twenty years.” In his next at bat, Van Cuyk retaliated with several brush-back pitches, and Jackie threatened to punch him out if ever did it again. When the incident drew a rare personal rebuke from Commissioner Happy Chandler, Robinson blamed reporters, saying they had blown the story out of proportion.
The excuse infuriated Smith. “This, it seems, is time for some one to remind Robinson that the press has been especially fair to him throughout his career,” Wendell wrote indignantly in the Courier. “If it had not been for the press, Mr. Robinson would have been just another athlete insofar as the public is concerned. If it had not been for the press, Mr. Robinson would not have been in the majors today. If it had not been for the press—the sympathetic press—Mr. Robinson would have probably still been taking around the country with Negro teams, living under what he called ‘intolerable conditions.’. . . Mr. Robinson’s memory, it seems, is getting shorter and shorter. That is especially true in the case of the many newspapermen who have befriended him during his career.”
Over the next two decades in Chicago—with the Herald-American and later the Sun-Times, and as a popular radio and TV broadcaster—Smith never stopped crusading. As more black players entered the major leagues, he wrote a series on the persistence of segregation in Florida training camps that shamed clubs into granting equal treatment to their black players. Along with other black sportswriters, he demanded recognition for Negro League players in baseball’s Hall of Fame. When that time came, Wendell was named to the panel that chose the first players to be recognized at Cooperstown: Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson, the Crawfords and Grays stars whom he had covered in his first years in Pittsburgh. Even when Smith fell gravely ill with pancreatic cancer in his late fifties, he devoted one of his last columns to insisting that it was high past time for a black manager in the major leagues.
Four months after Smith wrote that column, Jackie Robinson threw out the first pitch at the 1972 World Series. Called on to address the sold out crowd and a nationwide TV audience, Robinson echoed his old friend’s last appeal. “I won’t be satisfied until I look over at the coaches box at third base and see a black manager there,” Jackie declared.
Nine days later, on October 25, 1972, Robinson suffered a fatal heart attack at his home in Connecticut. From his sickbed, Smith wrote a remembrance for the Sun-Times that was reprinted in the Courier. While other obituaries conjured up the image of Robinson that Smith had worked so hard to cultivate—of a quiet, dignified pioneer—Wendell celebrated the Jackie he had come to know, one filled with “black aggressiveness” and fearlessness in the face of controversy. “He never backed down from a fight and never quit agitating for equality,” Smith wrote. “He demanded respect, too. Those who tangled with him always admitted afterward that he was a man’s man, a person who would not compromise his convictions.”
When Smith himself died of cancer a month later, he was remembered quite differently: as a quiet advocate whose geniality stood in sharp contrast to the militant vogue of the day. “We are in a period when some blacks seem to feel that the race is being betrayed when a brother wears a smile,” columnist Louis Martin wrote in the Courier. “Wendell was a natural born smiler, if there ever was one. The menacing frown is the popular mien for many blacks now who seem so anxious to tell all whites how much they hold them in contempt. Wendell knew that whites, like blacks, come in all shapes, sizes and characters . . . . His freedom from malice and prejudice made him doubly-strong in the struggle he led to abolish the racial barriers in the world of sports. Earnest, honest and selfless, Wendell developed the kind of personality that was hard for any man to hate. Yet no angry civil rights leader nor fiery freedom fighter ever did more to open the doors of opportunity to black youth.”
It was a fitting tribute to Wendell Smith’s gentle spirit and lasting influence, but also a telling commentary on how much twenty-five years of struggle had changed black America—including black Pittsburgh—between the hopeful autumn of Jackie Robinson’s rookie season and the bitter fall of Richard Nixon’s landslide reelection.
Evelyn Cunningham (center), gossip columnist “Toki” Schalk (far left), and some of the other women who by the late 1940s were playing an increasingly prominent role at the Courier.
THE PAPER
9
THE WOMEN OF “UP SOUTH”
EDNA CHAPPELL HAD GROWN tired of covering teas, weddings, and debutante parties. Ever since joining the Courier as Julia Bumry Jones’s secretary, she had given her all to the Women’s Activities pages. When Jones suffered a stroke, she had gone to Julia’s home with a typewriter every week to help the boss dictate her “Talk O’ Town” pieces from her bed. After Jones passed away, Chappell edited the section while a stylish woman from Boston named Toki Schalk took over the gossip column and gave it a new name, “Toki Types.” But now a war was on, and Edna had had her fill.
This wasn’t the kind of journalism Chappell had dreamed of as a girl, when her father, an itinerant AME preacher, told her about Ida B. Wells and her anti-lynching crusades. It wasn’t what she imagined when she first read Carter Woodson’s “The Negro in Our History” after the family moved to West Virginia, or when she watched her older sister take over the small local paper in Uniontown, a onetime stop on the Underground Railroad sixty miles south of Pittsburgh. It wasn’t the reason that after graduating fro
m high school, Edna had skipped college and moved to California, to work for one of her heroines, Almena Lomax, the founder of the Los Angeles Tribune, and to meet another, Charlotta Bass, the pioneering publisher of the California Eagle.
So Chappell took matters into her own hands. She had expressed her frustration to Wendell Smith, who was filling in as city editor during the war years, and he had offered to give her work. One day, in a foul mood over having to cover yet another wedding party, Edna gathered up her typewriter and pens and notepad and carried them to the large round table at the other end of the newsroom.
Bill Nunn charged out of his office and confronted her. “What are you doing?” the managing editor asked.
“I’m moving my things over to the city desk,” Chappell said, tears streaming down the dark cheeks behind her thick glasses. “I’m not going to work over here anymore. I’m sick of it.”
“Who said you could move?” Nunn demanded.
“Well, Wendell said I could work for him, so I’m moving,” Edna replied.
Nunn took Chappell into his office and “read me the riot act,” she recalled. She couldn’t simply appoint herself to a new job, he scolded. But after several minutes, his wide jaw spread into a broad smile. “Anyone with that kind of goddamn nerve will make a good reporter,” Nunn chuckled. “Go on over there and work.”
The guys on the city desk didn’t make life easy for Edna. They nicknamed her “Chappie” and “Scoop,” mocking the fact that she had yet to break a big story. Knowing that she was squeamish about dead bodies, they took her to identify murder victims at the morgue. They played practical jokes on her, such as sending her to buy a “left-handed wrench” for the press room. But Chappell took it all in stride, and eventually she earned their respect. “I did everything the same way the fellas did,” she recalled.
Like all the reporters and editors at the Courier, Chappell took great pride in her part in the Double V Campaign. She covered Double V parties and beauty contests for the Women’s pages and later helped the reporters on the city desk keep track of war bond pledges. But once the victory abroad was won, it became clear to everyone at the newspaper, and to its hundreds of thousands of readers across the country, that the second victory they had dreamed of, over racial injustice at home, was as distant as ever.
During the war, the number of lynchings in the South had dwindled to as few as one or two a year. Now lynchings were on the rise again, up to six in 1946. In Washington, D.C., Jim Crow practices remained so prevalent that a Courier campaign to expose them stretched out for a year. By the time the Washington crusade ended in 1947, the paper was able to take credit for only a few token changes: the National Theatre had started to admit Negroes for the first time, and P.L. Prattis had been credentialed as the first black journalist to be admitted to the Senate and House press galleries.
Closer to home, the Courier set out to document the persistence of Jim Crow practices in western Pennsylvania, where a state law banning any form of public discrimination had been on the books since the 1930s. Calling Chappell into his office, Prattis gave her the lead assignment. He wanted her to visit restaurants across Allegheny County and report on how she was treated. Prattis told Edna to present herself respectfully and dress as she always did at work—in conservative long wool dresses and skirts and her bookish horn-rimmed glasses.
Even after living in the region for most of her life, Chappell was shaken by what she found. When she ordered a cup of coffee at one restaurant, the waitress simply pretended not to have any. “Why, we don’t serve coffee,” the woman lied. When Edna pointed to the listing for coffee on the menu, the waitress snapped again: “We don’t have coffee!” In Clairton, a steel town down the Monongahela River, the message was even more blunt. “If you lived around here, you would know better than to come in here because we don’t serve Negroes,” the owner informed her. Every day for several weeks, Chappell returned home with similar stories. She typed up her notes, and then found herself breaking down in exhaustion and rage. “I was just so hurt I would cry myself to sleep,” she recalled.
It was no wonder that the latest wave of black migrants had a new name for Pittsburgh: “Up South.” Some twenty thousand more would arrive in the two decades after the war, bringing the city’s black population to just over 100,000 for the first time. But when they stepped off the train at Union Station or drove through the tunnel approaches on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, they no longer felt the sense of freedom and promise that Robert L. Vann and previous generations of migrants had experienced. Instead, they found conditions that didn’t seem that different from what they were used to in the South. The only homes they could hope to buy were ones listed as “Colored” in the city newspapers. Many ended up living in Pittsburgh’s new federal housing projects, which were rapidly turning into black ghettos as white residents fled. Swimming pools and other public facilities banned Negroes or limited them to restricted areas and hours. The two biggest department stores downtown, Kaufmann’s and Gimbels, wouldn’t let black customers use their dressing rooms. Nor would they hire Negroes who answered their “Help Wanted” notices—until a two-year picketing campaign brought national press attention and forced the stores to change those policies.
In 1943, black Pittsburgh had welcomed the opening of a local office of the Fair Employment Practices Committee—the job fairness agency that FDR created in a deal to stave off A. Philip Randolph’s planned March on Washington. The FEPC had helped win blacks new opportunities in the city’s steel and other manufacturing plants, and to secure previously off-limits jobs such as driving trolley cars. But once the war was over, Congress cut off funding for the FEPC and the Pittsburgh office closed down. Left behind were documents showing that 50 percent of all Allegheny County businesses still refused to hire blacks. Negroes who had found work in the war factories fell victim to the “last hired, first fired” syndrome, as plants cut back and unions invoked seniority to protect white members. Homer S. Brown, a Pittsburgh judge who had been elected to the Pennsylvania legislature, introduced a bill to create a state version of the FEPC, but it would take him almost ten years to get it passed.
For P.L. Prattis and the other Courier editors who had worked so hard advocating on behalf of Negro soldiers, it was particularly distressing to witness the struggles of black servicemen returning from World War II. Two weeks after the Japanese surrender, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette was already heralding the new world of opportunities for returning white vets. “Fraternity Pins Replace Medals: GI Joe Going Back to College,” proclaimed a feature story on the hundreds of veterans who were enrolling at the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Tech, and Duquesne University under the year-old GI Bill of Rights. The paper gushed about how much more mature the vets seemed compared with the average “Joe College,” with his “casual slouch, the sloppy socks, the carelessly knotted ties.” The vets dressed sharply, stood erect, and were never late to class. “They’re all business, these boys we’re getting in here from the army,” marveled a Pitt staff member. “Some of them even forget themselves enough to salute.”
For poor whites from immigrant backgrounds, a service record could serve as the ticket to a new life. Joseph L. Murphy was an Irish kid from Avalon, a small town upriver from Pittsburgh. Murphy had dropped out of high school and worked as a stock clerk before enrolling in the Civilian Conservation Corps. When America entered the war, he was assigned to the Sixth Armored Division, where he was promoted to lieutenant. Upon returning to Pittsburgh, he walked into a veterans center and took an aptitude test that got him into a “retail merchandising” course at Pitt alongside college grads studying for business degrees. Married with a two-year-old son, Murphy had his sights set on becoming a store executive. “I may find myself in pretty fast company,” he told the Post-Gazette, “but I’ll take a chance because if I can make good this course will give me a five-year jump on anyone just starting in at retail merchandising.”
When white vets like Murphy needed money, it was there for them
. On Grant Street, in the heart of downtown, nine of the city’s largest banks opened the Pittsburgh Clearing House Association, to help cut through red tape involved in applying for the new government-subsidized loans and mortgages. “Under the GI Bill of Rights,” the Post-Gazette explained to its readers, “a veteran may borrow to buy or build a new home or repair one he already owns; buy a farm or equip one; buy a business or start one.” Around Pittsburgh and across America, those loans would transform the social landscape. Veterans would use them to learn new skills and launch new careers, to buy new homes in the suburbs, and to open and invest in new businesses that fueled an economic boom that lasted for the next quarter century, the longest in U.S. history.
For black veterans, however, it was a different story. In the last year of the war, a War Department survey found that of the Negro soldiers still in the field, more than thirty thousand had plans to return to full-time study. Some 200,000 more hoped to go to school part-time. But when they returned home, they encountered hurdles in every corner of the country and at every tier of education. Many black GIs from the South had been illiterate or semiliterate when they enlisted, but had acquired valuable reading and math skills in the service and now wanted to finish high school. Yet Jim Crow restrictions on the number of black students who could study within a given geographical area—called “pupil stations”—meant that thousands had to wait years for a classroom spot, or never got one at all. (As the deadline for applying for GI Bill educational benefits neared in the early 1950s, the Courier estimated that more than 300,000 eligible black vets in seventeen Southern states would lose those opportunities due to “limited Jim Crow facilities.”)
In the North, better-educated blacks encountered a more genteel form of Jim Crow. Most of the five thousand Negroes who served as officers in World War II hailed from the North, and many came home with visions of completing college or pursuing graduate or professional degrees. But many of the schools to which they aspired continued to place unspoken limits on the number of nonwhite Christian students they admitted, to their student bodies as a whole or to specific departments, programs, and internships. In 1947, almost two years after the war had ended, a study funded by the Jewish War Veterans and the American Jewish Congress found that quotas for blacks, Jews, Catholics, and “persons of Italian descent” remained rampant. Outraged by the findings, Arthur Klein, a Democratic congressman from New York, introduced an amendment to the GI Bill that would have compelled the Veterans Administration to hold hearings on any school charged with discrimination. It would also have empowered the VA to “stop all further payment” of government subsidies “if the school refuses to end the practice.”
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