Academic literature on the topic 'Pittsburgh Courier'

ABSTRACT:Visual representations of the Lower Hill District created by Pittsburgh's redevelopment coalition and by neighbourhood insiders reveal the conflicting ways redevelopers and residents understood older neighbourhoods and their redevelopment. Redevelopers’ maps and photographs of the Lower Hill documented the neighbourhood's densely built-up blocks and intermixture of land uses as definitive examples of blight that threatened downtown's economic health. Models and architectural sketches of the Civic Arena – the jewel of the Lower Hill's redevelopment plan – promised to wipe away blight and renew the city. Redevelopers distributed their imagery through brochures and the city's daily press. Framed by captions labelling the Lower Hill a ‘blight’ and the Civic Arena a ‘wonder of the modern world’, these images helped sell the public on redevelopment. Lower Hill insiders, most notably the city's African American newspaper, the Pittsburgh Courier, and the Courier’s lead photographer, Charles ‘Teenie’ Harris, envisioned the Lower Hill and its redevelopment differently. Harris and the Courier criticized the neighbourhood's dilapidated housing but celebrated its thriving social life. They also supported redevelopment but saw it primarily as a route to new jobs and improved housing for Hill residents. After the Civic Arena opened in 1961, redevelopment failed to deliver more jobs or better housing because redevelopers’ worldview prioritized the built over the social environment. Hill District residents, led by the Courier, reacted to these shortcomings with visual protests pairing redevelopers’ favourite symbol of progress – the brand new Civic Arena – with symbols of racial injustice. By spotlighting the inequalities that undergirded redevelopers’ vision for the city, these protests stopped redevelopment from spreading further into the Hill in 1968.

In October 1926 a leading African-American newspaper, the Pittsburgh Courier, featured adjacent photographs of two young women with a provocative caption: “White Actresses Who Open with Robeson and Bledsoe on Broadway during Week.” The actresses featured were Lottice Howell, starring with Jules Bledsoe in the musical play Deep River, and Edith Warren, starring with Paul Robeson in the drama Black Boy. In reporting this latest bit of integrated casting, however, the Courier was wrong on two counts. First, they misidentified the photographs, identifying Howell as Warren and Warren as Howell; and second, they misidentified Warren, whose real name was Fredi Washington, as “white.” Washington (who dropped the stage name during previews) was, by self-identification, Negro, or, in the language of the Savannah official who recorded her birth in 1903, “colored.”

This special edition of Central European History is concerned with how America viewed Germany, and my contribution focuses on how, beginning with Hitler's rise to power, Germany became a point of reference for the emerging American civil-rights movement. By looking at Crisis, published by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and Opportunity, published by the National Urban League, as well as African-American newspapers, such as the Pittsburgh Courier, Chicago Defender, Amsterdam News, Afro-American, Negro Digest, Ebony, and Jet, I will show how the black community discussed developments in Germany, America's struggle against Nazi racism, and the black soldiers' experience in postwar Germany.

Golden Age cartoonist Jackie Ormes created dramatic narratives in her comic strip Torchy in Heartbeats (Pittsburgh Courier, 1950–54) that were unique, in that they were created by a Black woman cartoonist for Black women readers. Ormes skillfully manipulated the typical strip's narrative structure to creatively depict a single Black woman freely traveling the world in the era of Jim Crow. This essay examines two specific Torchy in Heartbeats strips from 1951–52 to reveal how Ormes worked within the then-dominant framework of respectability politics—not to challenge it, but to present a Black woman navigating racialized gender discrimination and pursuing her desires despite her “respectable status,” with sometimes terrifying results. In the process, it works to redress the paucity of scholarship on Black women's contributions to comic books and strips.

W. E. B. Du Bois, the editor of the Crisis, a journal of the ‘darker races’ that was the organ of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was among the earliest African American intellectuals to take a strong interest in Gandhi. However, the African American press, represented by newspapers such as the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender, was as a whole prolific in its representation of the Indian Independence movement. This article, after a detailed consideration of Du Bois’s advocacy of Gandhi’s ideas, analyses the worldview of the African American press and its outlook towards the movement in India. It is argued that a more ecumenical conception of the ‘Global South’ ought to be sensitive to African American history, and I suggest that African American newspapers played a critical role in shaping notions of the solidarity of coloured peoples, pivoting their arguments around the Indian Independence movement and particularly the satyagraha campaigns of Gandhi.