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Get the most interesting and important stories from the University of Pittsburgh.A Pitt-Greensburg professor is uplifting a little-known chapter of Pittsburgh’s history — its role in the Great Migration.
Starting over 100 years ago, a mass movement of approximately 6 million Black southerners relocated north in pursuit of better jobs and to escape Jim Crow racial segregation and discrimination. While large cities like New York, Chicago and Philadelphia attracted the greatest share of Black migrants, the promise of work in Pittsburgh’s steel mills also made Southwestern Pennsylvania a desirable destination. From 1910 to the 1930s, Pittsburgh’s Black population more than doubled, growing from about 25,000 to more than 55,000.
The Black working-class migrants who moved to Pittsburgh didn’t leave behind written records, but you can hear some of them tell their stories via Migrant Voices, a website created by Adam Cilli, assistant professor of history.
“The Great Migration is an indispensable part of Pittsburgh’s rich racial and ethnic history,” he said.
When researching his latest book, Cilli discovered a trove of 50 oral histories of Black men who settled in Pittsburgh as part of the Great Migration. Those recordings, along with primary sources, make up the Migrant Voices website.
“The oral histories I uncovered were held at different archives and recorded on janky cassette tapes. I knew that few people outside of a handful of scholars were aware that these collections existed, and I wanted these recordings to be accessible to everyone,” he said.
“The Migrant Voices website is a powerful entry point for learning about [migrants’] lived experiences — their lives in the South, their journey north and their time working in Pittsburgh,” Cilli added.
This Black History Month, Pittwire asked Cilli to share insights into the challenges Black migrants faced in Pittsburgh and the lasting impact they have had on the city. Plus, he took us on a tour of significant sites around the Steel City.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How did Black migrants learn about opportunities in Pittsburgh?
Company agents from the major northern steel mills would fan out across the South to recruit workers. There are oral histories available on the Migrant Voices website that describe agents coming around with pockets full of money, saying, “I can buy train tickets for anybody willing to go to Aliquippa or Pittsburgh.”
While part of the draw for migrants was to make more money than they could as sharecroppers, they were also reaching for greater freedom than they could in the Jim Crow South.
The Pittsburgh Courier, an African American weekly newspaper with national circulation, also provided vital information to would-be Black migrants. At its peak, The Pittsburgh Courier was the largest black-owned and operated newspaper in the country, with a circulation of more than 200,000, which meant readership was around 600,000. Sometimes northern Black newspapers were shipped in secret to the South through Pullman porters, African American men who worked in railroad sleeping cars.
Another way migrants gathered information was through letters from friends who had already moved north.
What kind of reception did Black migrants receive once arriving in Pittsburgh?
Black Pittsburghers who had been living in the city for many years before the Great Migration referred to themselves as Old Pittsburghers, or OPs. These established Black Pittsburghers had a higher class status than the migrants. Some of these OPs thought the incoming Black migrants were sparking racial animosity from the white community and were a strain on already taxed resources.
There was also community support for migrants from churches and Black-led organizations, including the Urban League of Pittsburgh, which worked to address the inadequate health care they faced.
Back then, the jobs available to Black people in steel mills were the lowest-paying and most physically demanding jobs. They experienced high rates of workplace injury and death. Black workers were also the first targets for layoffs, and that meant periodic unemployment was a way of life. It’s hard to build wealth under those circumstances. Black migrants mostly lived in the lower Hill District, where they were charged artificially high rents for poor, overcrowded housing.
Why was working in Pittsburgh still appealing despite the conditions Black migrants faced?
Sharecropping was difficult for many reasons, the first of which was the steady decline in the global price of cotton during the early 20th century. Secondly, being a sharecropper means splitting profits with the landowner. Thirdly, blights such as boll weevil infestations could devastate an entire crop.
Many of the oral histories featured on the Migrant Voices site mention that their cotton crop was destroyed, so they switched to corn and then watermelon, and then moved north in search of steady work.
Many sharecroppers were caught in a cycle of chronic indebtedness. They would borrow money at the beginning of the agricultural season from a landowner, hoping to sell their crops at market and pay off their debt by harvest time, but they wouldn’t break even.
What would you say has been the lasting impact of the Great Migration on Pittsburgh?
The Great Migration fundamentally reshaped the racial and social character of the city in the sense that before, there was a very small, Black community and few Black businesses. The influx of Black migrants made new things possible, such as the development of powerful racial advancement organizations like the Pittsburgh chapter of the NAACP, which pushed for equality. The Civil Rights Movement of the ’50s and ’60s didn’t happen out of nowhere — a precursor to that activism stemmed from the community organizing partnerships made between Black migrants and middle-class Black people.
Top photo by Alex Mowrey; Adam Lee Cilli stands in front of Union Station in downtown Pittsburgh. His book, “Canaan, Dim and Far: Black Reformers and the Pursuit of Citizenship in Pittsburgh, 1915-1945” (Univ. of Georgia Press), examines how Black reformers navigated the fraught racial landscape of the urban North to advance civil rights and provide social welfare support services for migrants.