‘Go forth and tell our stories:’ From harmful narratives to healing stories, words could turn the page for Pittsburgh’s Hill District

In 1994, I moved into the historic Hill District, a neighborhood often considered to be the cultural soul of Black Pittsburgh.

I lived a short walk from Freedom Corner, an inspiring monument at Centre Avenue and Crawford Street. Dedicated in 2001, it recognizes the rallying point that launched many of the city’s social justice marches and honors a pantheon of activists who helped to halt the avalanche of development that demolished much of the Lower Hill.

My house, with its bright red door, was cradled just a few blocks from the Lower Hill, a neighborhood heralded for its abolitionist history. I was proud to live there. In this neighborhood lay the roots of the community once known as Little Hayti, so named to acknowledge the people’s alignment with the liberation and self-determination that fueled the 1804 Haitian Revolution.

In the 1950s, according to University of Pittsburgh historian Larry Glasco, the Lower Hill had 400 businesses (mostly white-owned) and some 8,000 residents (mostly Black). During an interview for a recent oral history project, one former Lower Hill resident remembered a vibrant, busy place that “glowed like Las Vegas.”

Some 27 years ago, to get to my job as a journalist at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in Downtown, I walked through the Lower Hill. As I walked, I often thought of the people — past and present — who shaped this neighborhood’s grand history. They were the muses who fed many of the stories I wrote about the Black community for the newspaper.

But as I walked, I also wondered why what I saw in the Lower Hill didn’t reflect a better narrative about the rich Hill history that I knew.

What I saw on my way to work — the acres of asphalt parking lots, an uninspired high-rise apartment building, and the faded arts and sports center known first as the Civic Arena and later Mellon Arena — were images often disconnected from the legacy of the community I was writing about. The community suffered from such a blighted vision of what it was that, whenever I got off at 10 p.m. or later, no cab would take me to the community I called home.

Harmful narratives permit harmful policies

Over the years, I’ve pondered this disconnection. I began to believe that it has much to do with the Hill District becoming a “Black space” — a place transformed by politics and culture into identifying as Black — and the emerging 1950s racialized policies and language that did harm — narrative and actual  — to these spaces across the country.

Let’s consider this: Five years before Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson was born in the Hill District, the 1940 Census listed people from 25 nationalities living in the neighborhood.

The Great Migration, the outpouring of Black people fleeing Southern racial oppression, pushed a wave of African Americans into the Hill. By 1930, there were 50,000 Blacks living in the Hill, more than double  its Black population in 1910.

As Black people moved in, other people moved out. Black businesses, churches and families began to dominate the social and cultural life of the Hill. The community moved from being an ethnically diverse space to being largely an African American or a Black space.

Soon, America’s racialized housing and public policy structures intruded into the Black space. In 1949, Title 1 of the federal Housing Act, which established urban renewal, used language that characterizes many Black spaces as “slums” and “blighted land.”

Pittsburgh media, academic institutions and others adopt this language, which constructs a perception of Black spaces as being diseased. A “Black” Lower Hill District faced scrutiny for its “urban blight” — a term coined by U.S. urban planners in the 1950s to refer to the process by which city spaces fall into disuse and disrepair.

In the racialized language of urban renewal, broken houses meant broken culture. Urban renewal fomented a “narrative blight” that controlled how the larger society perceived “Black” spaces. This narrative blight devalues a people and a community’s history, creativity and culture. It silences and erodes their humanity and to be in a Black space is to be in a space that is lesser than.

In contrast, I fondly recall an oral history I collected from an elderly artist who grew up in his grandmother’s house in the Lower Hill. “It’s the place,” he says, “where I first felt human.”

Yet, the narrative blight doesn’t render the Lower Hill as being a human space. By first calling the space a ghetto, it justified the razing of hundreds of homes where thousands of young Black children were first made to feel human.

Once the homes were gone, under the urban renewal mandate, the arena took their place, ensuring that the primary association of this site for generations would be of a failed entertainment venue later renamed Mellon Arena for a bank built by a wealthy white family. That it had first been a space where Black grandmoms loved their children was largely erased.

Community stories reclaim pride and connection

I left the Hill District about 27 years ago and moved to the North Side. But a new role has me re-engaged with my former neighborhood. I now serve as president of the board of directors of the recently opened August Wilson House. Today, the renowned playwright’s rehabilitated birth home is a community arts center.

With August Wilson House, I organize “Your Story Matters,” an oral history project to collect the voices of Hill residents. It has shown me that oral history is one way to fight back against narrative blight. It is effective because the people’s stories “unsilence” the miseducation of who they are and what they’ve contributed.

Sharing a story becomes a first step in acknowledging the humanity of our mothers and fathers and all those who came before us. These survivors had triumphs and losses that are woven into the larger American fabric: They went to war, faced racism, held jobs, found joy, and they wanted to be recognized and loved. We can’t let their stories just disappear; we can’t let their voices go silent.

In recent years, community voices and activism have led to projects that are restoring the memory and history of what was present in the Lower Hill. As a reader of Pittsburgh history and of August Wilson, I’ve wandered across many references to the vibrancy of Fullerton Street. When I moved into the Hill, this much-heralded passageway had been bulldozed. It no longer existed. About a year ago, on my way to August Wilson House, I was riding up Centre Avenue, and there, above me, in bright blue and white, is the revived street sign for Fullerton. Its reintroduction fills me with pride and recognition, satisfyingly reconnecting me to all of the stories I’ve heard about the street.

Other Lower Hill redevelopments stand to unsilence the past, too. Among other projects, the Historic Hill Institute has worked to create Frankie Pace Park, a green space dedicated to the trailblazing community leader. Also, the historic Black church, Bethel African Methodist Episcopal, once considered the heart of the Lower Hill, is reclaiming its former space . Seventy years ago, it was bulldozed to rid the community of blight.

These developments stand to reconnect the present to the past, giving a new generation of Pittsburghers a memory and a living story of what came before.

Following Wilson’s way

Finally, we can look to the work of playwright Wilson on the importance and impact of telling and sharing our stories.

Wilson’s 10-play cycle, though fictionalized, was inspired by real lives and historical events, which he used to unsilence Black voices across a span of 100 years.

“What I want to do,” he said, “is place the culture of Black America on stage, to demonstrate that it has the ability to offer sustenance so that when you leave your parents’ house you are not in the world alone. You have something that is yours, you have a ground to stand on, and you have a viewpoint, and you have a way of proceeding in the world that has been developed by your ancestors.”

Wilson died in 2005. But what he left us with was a way to “unblight” our narratives. And that is, to go forth and tell our stories.

Ervin Dyer is a writer who focuses his storytelling on Africana life and culture. He can be reached at ervin@augustwilsonhouse.org .

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