Smoketown: The Untold Story Of The Other Great Black Renaissance, Whitaker - B -

                                                      This is the story of the flourishing of Pittsburgh's  black community from the 1920's through the late 1950's. It saw the finest black paper in the country, the Pittsburgh Courier, the two best Negro League baseball teams, the Pittsburgh Crawfords and the Homestead Grays, a flourishing of the performance arts, and the birth of August Wilson. Most of Smoketown's story is centered in the Hill District, just east of downtown. The lead in this story is the Courier, which rose to become the nation's most successful  black newspaper by endorsing and promoting the career of the Brown Bomber, Joe Louis, in the 1930's. The paper had been started by a dreamer, but acquired in 1910 by Pittsburgh's most successful black entrepreneur, Cap Posey. As a river town on the underground railroad, in a state that had led the way in the emancipation and education of blacks, Pittsburgh had a small, well-educated, and cohesive black community. Robert Vann built the paper into an economic success and overtook the Chicago Defender as the leading voice of black America. He also led the charge that started blacks voting Democratic when the paper endorsed FDR in 1932. That same year, the  Black Yankees and the Pittsburgh Crawfords opened Greenlee Stadium, the first ever built by a black man. Red Greenlee was a bootlegger, the owner of the numbers racket in town and the bank for the city's negroes. He was also an entrepreneur extraordinaire who brought 5 future Hall of Famers to the Crawfords. Cool Papa Bell and Josh Gibson though, were the sidemen for Satchel Paige, the most famous of them all. The late 30's and the war years saw Lena Horne, Earl Hines and Billy Eckstine all achieve national prominence. During the war,  the Courier fostered the promotion of blacks in the military, and one of its reporters, Wendell Smith, was Jackie Robinson's travel companion and spokesman starting in 1947, when Robinson became the most famous black in America. The paper pioneered women in roles other than the society pages and  heaped praise on the nascent civil rights movement. When mainstream white papers began to follow the civil rights movement and hire the best black reporters, the end came quickly for the Courier as it went bankrupt in 1966, and the memory of Pittsburgh as the crossroads of black America faded away. A son of the Hill District, August Wilson, has immortalized the era in his works.