Smoketown

September 1, 2017

Jazz greats Billy Strayhorn, Billy Eckstine, Earl Hines, Mary Lou Williams, and Erroll Garner; two top Negro League baseball teams; and the most widely read black newspaper in the country--all bragging rights for 1920-50s Pittsburgh, proof that it had a thriving African American community rivaling those of Harlem and Chicago. From the former managing editor of CNN Worldwide.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 15, 2017
A "glittering saga" about the other black Renaissance.Veteran newsman and reporter Whitaker (Cosby: His Life and Times, 2014, etc.) explored his own family's black history in My Long Trip Home (2011), which included stories about his Pittsburgh grandparents' funeral business. Here, he returns to the city to reveal its incredibly rich black heritage from the late 19th century to the 1950s. As the author writes, Pittsburgh had a "glorious stretch" as "one of the most vibrant and consequential communities of color in U.S. history." Drawing on a five-page cast of characters, he tells this lively story with a linked series of family histories. In the Gilded Age, Pittsburgh had no shortage of wealthy entrepreneurs: Carnegie, Westinghouse, Heinz, Mellon, and Frick. But there was also Cumberland "Cap" Posey, a black steamboat engineer and coal tycoon who had the foresight to invest in the Pittsburgh Courier, a black newspaper that is at the heart of this story. In 1910, Posey hired a black attorney, Robert Lee Vann, the "calculating crusader," who would be its farsighted editor. Every step of the way, as Whitaker vividly chronicles Pittsburgh's key black figures in music, sports, and politics, the Courier is front and center. Its sports reporters championed the rise of the Brown Bomber, Joe Louis; as his popularity grew, the paper's circulation skyrocketed, and it became America's most influential black newspaper. Pittsburgh now had the best Negro League baseball teams, thanks to racketeer-turned-promotor Gus "Big Red" Greenlee, and the Hill District, home of the future "bard of a broken world," playwright August Wilson. Sports reporter Wendell Smith played a major role in integrating baseball with his coverage of Satchel Paige and Jackie Robinson, and the Courier also chronicled the rise of two of music's greatest pianists, the self-taught prodigy Erroll Garner and the jazz composer Billy Strayhorn.An expansive, prodigiously researched, and masterfully told history.

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December 18, 2017
Former CNN and Newsweek editor Whitaker (Cosby: His Life and Times) rebounds from his controversial Cosby biography with an informative and illuminating account of Smoketown, an African-American community in Pittsburgh. Centered in the city’s Hill District, Smoketown thrived from the 1920s to the ’50s. Though Smoketown was smaller than New York’s Harlem or Chicago’s South Side, Whitaker compares the flourishing enclave where his grandparents lived to “fifteenth-century Florence and early-twentieth-century Vienna: a miraculous flowering of social and cultural achievement.” Smoketown’s culture was made possible, Whitaker writes, by the great migration from the South and the city’s exceptional educational opportunities. Whitaker writes of such prominent Smoketown figures as Robert L. Vann, publisher of the Pittsburgh Courier, the most widely read black newspaper in America; playwright August Wilson, who celebrated the power of community “whether in the ordinary life of rooming houses and jitney stations, or in the grandest accomplishments of the Hill District in its heyday.” He also acknowledges Smoketown’s contributions to the sports world, including boxer Joe Louis and baseball stars Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige, and profiles musical icons Billy Eckstine, Duke Ellington, Lena Horne, and Billy Strayhorn, as well as photographer Charles “Teenie” Harris. Whitaker shines a well-deserved and long-overdue spotlight on this city within a city. Maps & photos. Agent: Lynn Nesbit, Janklow & Nesbit.