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While researching a recent story about Mal Goode, the son of a Homestead steelworker who became the first Black reporter for an American TV network, I started reading another book documenting the Pittsburgh of Goode’s era: Mark Whitaker’s “Smoketown: The Untold Story of The Other Great Black Renaissance.”
Goode, it turns out, doesn’t appear in Whitaker’s well-reviewed 2018 book, which surprised me a little: In their fine new biography, “Mal Goode Reporting,” authors Rob Ruck and Liann Tsoukas document that he was a prominent voice for civil rights here from the late 1940s into the early 1960s. And he worked for the Pittsburgh Courier newspaper, which figures prominently in “Smoketown.”
That’s not to criticize Whitaker, a former managing editor of CNN Worldwide, former editor of Newsweek, and a groundbreaker himself as the first Black person to head a national newsweekly. Even absent Goode, “Smoketown” teems with lively characters, incident and anecdote. It’s another of those books every Pittsburgher should read.
“Smoketown” doesn’t mine many primary sources; given that it depicts the worlds of sports, music and journalism in Black Pittsburgh from about 1910 to mid-century, few of its subjects remain around to interview.
Rather, it’s an accessible yet thoughtful synthesis drawing on what others have written, including countless articles from the Courier itself. Above all, Whitaker’s a fine storyteller with a great sense of how such disparate figures as Courier publisher Robert L. Vann, numbers king and sports impresario Gus Greenlee and jazz singer Lena Horne influenced, and were shaped, by their time and by Pittsburgh itself — and how Pittsburghers in turn reshaped the country.
For instance, if you’d like to know more about how the Courier grew from one H.J. Heinz employee’s self-published poetry publication into a newspaper of national influence, “Smoketown” is a great place to start.
The book features a compelling portrait not only of Vann, who as publisher wielded influence in Washington, D.C., but also of reporter “Ches” Washington, whose blanket coverage of boxing champ Joe Louis’ rise was calculated to grow the paper; sports columnist Wendell Smith, Jackie Robinson’s ghostwriter and mentor; and the often-overlooked women of the Courier, especially civil rights reporter (and advice columnist) Evelyn Cunningham.
Then there’s Gus Greenlee, who as a numbers runner, philanthropist, and owner of both Hill District jazz temple the Crawford Grill and the Pittsburgh Crawfords Negro Leagues baseball team was near the center of Black life here for decades. And also Cumberland Posey, the son of a wealthy Black industrialist who became a two-sport collegiate and professional star athlete before buying the Homestead Grays and emerging as Greenlee’s rival.
Perhaps most epically peopled of all is Whitaker’s depiction of Pittsburgh’s famous jazz scene. It includes portraits of not only Horne and composer, arranger and Horne confidante Billy Strayhorn, but also musicians Earl “Fatha Hines,” Art Blakey and Kenny Clarke, and the role they played in the careers of such bebop pioneers as Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. Not least, there’s Billy Eckstine, the dashing Pittsburgh-born singer whose popularity once rivaled Sinatra’s.
Finally, Whitaker devotes a full chapter to August Wilson, who was born in 1945, near the end of the era “Smoketown” covers, but whose plays evoke the rich cultural legacy of Black life in Pittsburgh over the full century.
Through the stories of figures like Vann and Posey especially, “Smoketown” is also valuable for its depiction of Pittsburgh’s Black middle and upper classes, which are often overlooked in social histories. (Whitaker also gives a nod to National Negro Opera founder Mary Cardwell Dawson.)
Whitaker himself has Pittsburgh roots: The genesis of “Smoketown” lay in research for a memoir, in the course of which he learned about his grandparents and great grandparents who had lived in Pittsburgh, where his father ran a funeral home in the Hill and, later, in Beltzhoover. It feels like another twist on that old saw about people who leave always, sooner or later, boomeranging back to Pittsburgh.
