Playing Through the Whistle

by S. L. Price

  The first serious challenge to the Pirates’ civic supremacy emerged in 1914, when former Carlisle coach Glenn “Pop” Warner took over as head football coach at the University of Pittsburgh. Warner had coached the great Jim Thorpe. He never stopped tinkering with the game—­inventing the screen pass, tackling dummies, the 3-point stance, and the single- and double-wing formations; numbering jerseys; and improving helmets. He instantly made Pitt a power—national champions in 1915 and ’16—and defeated fellow coaching legend John Heisman and his unbeaten Georgia Tech team, 32-0, before 30,000 converts at Forbes Field, to seal a third title in 1918.

  “You cannot play two kinds of football at once, dirty and good,” Warner once said.

  It took a while before Aliquippa even had the choice. What was then called Woodlawn High graduated its first class in 1913. Early forays into football resulted in four games over two years, four losses, and an abandonment of the sport by 1911. In the fall of 1914, just as Pop Warner’s Pitt machine was picking up steam, Woodlawn tried again.

  “Ha! Ha! At last!” begins the description in Condor, the school’s 1915 yearbook. “The Woodlawn High School of 1914–15 holds the distinction of producing the first high school football team. Attempts in previous years to produce a football team were cut short by the advancement of permits, to be signed, and by the insufficient number of enthusiasts. But this year all above mentioned difficulties were easily effaced and our team was soon on the road to the Hall of Fame. In the meantime, football togs were furnished by means of a bake sale.”

  In its opener Woodlawn’s enthusiasts beat Freedom, 6-5, for the program’s first win. They then went 0-4-1, including a 100-0 loss to East Palestine, Ohio. “Our boys appeared to have stage fright, while playing on visiting grounds,” the Condor continued. “As a whole, our team lacked experience. . . . Two-thirds of our boys never played football before; some of them never had a football in their hands until this year. Nevertheless, several star players have been located and will undoubtedly receive the best of attention next year.”

  But the 1915 season was little better. One site for a practice field in Plan 12 was rejected as “inconvenient.” Its replacement was an overgrown lot between two buildings littered with refuse; workers spent a day removing all manner of brick and stone. “Some of the portly candidates displayed their superior ability by removing telegraph poles by hand,” Condor reported. “Knighty showed his knowledge of farm implements by breaking a scythe or two in trying to mow the field before the stubbles were tramped down.” The team didn’t start practice until October. Only five players had experience. “The remaining six and the substitutes were new men. Now who would expect that a team so handicapped would witness anything but severe defeat?”

  Yet even with such raw talent, in one respect Aliquippa was more sophisticated than any college campus, near or far.

  Grading human despair is a fool’s game, but it’s hard to imagine a more pitiable lot than that of Gilded Age blacks in the American South. The masses crowding Ellis Island had fled lives of grinding poverty, but—pogroms aside—theirs was an escape from uncaring; they were “wretched refuse” made bold by a thousand years of neglect. The forces bearing down on the lives and families of former slaves, meanwhile, were sharp, savage, singularly directed. For many Southern whites, black freedom was a reminder of defeat; keeping the black man “in his place” was combat by another means. It made loss feel like victory.

  Jim Crow laws, first enacted in Mississippi in 1890, spread across Dixie to ensure that blacks remained politically crippled. Sharecropping and tenant farming kept them economically subservient. A system of terror, endorsed by state and local authorities, threatened retribution for crimes big, small, or wholly imagined. Generations grew up carrying the marks of that world, physical and psychic: an internal flinch that never stopped.

  “My mother was born in 1909,” said Melvin Steals, whose parents moved from Alabama to Aliquippa in the 1920s. “When my mother was seven, she experienced a lynching in Greenville, Alabama. Her best friend, name was Tutta, her brother went North and came back and he was perceived to be ‘uppity.’ He said or did something that made the local whites so angry they grabbed him and drove him to this wooded area where there was an opening and in the center of this area was a huge tree. They tied this young man to the tree and every white man and boy who could hold and fire a rifle and pistol lined up. My mother was a little girl. She could hear—she and her classmates could hear—the gunshots echoing down through the woods.”

  The fathers of James Frank, college president and first black head of the NCAA, and Eugene “Salt” Smith, a longtime leader of Aliquippa’s Democratic machine, both emigrated to town from Blakely, Georgia, where, in 1916, six black men were lynched. In 1919, the year that seventy-six blacks were killed by mob violence in the Deep South, Private William Little returned to Blakely from the battlefields of France and made the mistake of wearing his Army uniform in public. The first time he was caught, Little was beaten and forced to remove it. The second time, he was beaten to death.

  Almost any alternative, then, would’ve been an improvement in the lives of Southern blacks. American industry dangled one. The coming of World War I slashed European immigration by two-thirds, and the resulting labor shortage amid high demand sent labor scouts scurrying below the Mason-Dixon Line, jobs and train tickets in hand. Some 500,000 blacks left Georgia, Mississippi, Texas, Alabama, and North and South Carolina between 1910 and 1920, the first wave of the “Great Migration” that remade a nation.

  During the last few years of World War I, 12,000 new black workers appeared on the industrial rolls in Western Pennsylvania. In Aliquippa, the main influx began after 1920, settling in the earliest days at the mill itself. Four wooden bunkhouses, Western style, had been erected on the J&L site, sleeping four to a room—actually, eight: When one man rose to start his twelve-hour shift, another ending his dove onto the still-warm pillow. Bedding was changed once a week. Workers made 33 cents an hour, paid $15 a month for room and board.

  Enough white ethnics passed through the bunkhouses to make the arrangement seem less than segregated, and when black workers saved enough to buy a home they were first sent to the enclave—in their case, Plan 11 extension—reserved for them by the J&L-controlled land company, same as any Serb, Pole, or cake-eater. In truth, few first-generation arrivals—of any stripe—garnered much respect. Management looked down on Italians as a matter of policy during World War I, demoting and firing them for the least cause and threatening, as one investigative report stated, “to send them to Germany and have them shot.” When J&L built its first community pool near the end of the war, a black man named James Downing Jr. recalled, his people weren’t the only ones shut out.

  “Italians, Polacks, Serbians, Lebanese, they couldn’t attend that pool because when they went up there, they would tell them, ‘Say, you’re too hairy, you make the water dirty,’ all this kind of stuff,” Downing said. “So they told them: ‘You have to go down and swim in the Ohio River.’”

  But it was also fact that blacks arrived with two indelible marks against them. Racial prejudice, of course, was just as pervasive in the North as in the South. And the practice of using Southern blacks as strikebreakers in Pittsburgh, dating back to 1875 and recently reinforced by the tens of thousands employed during a national steel strike in 1919, left them even more isolated among the white rank-and-file. Thus blacks found themselves relegated to the worst jobs at J&L, the most filthy and dangerous; if they weren’t working punishing twenty-four-hour shifts in the open hearth, where so many collapsed unconscious, they were the ones shoveling sizzling coke-oven muck and chomping wads of tobacco to flush their mouths of soot and fumes.

  Such stratification served J&L well. A workforce divided, be it by resentment, competition, or prejudice, made for cheaper labor costs. Blacks sat at the bottom of the wage scale—the region’s skilled and semiskilled steelworkers making an average of
60 cents an hour, compared with the 70 to 90 cents earned by their white and foreign-born counterparts—and the industry had no interest in making the workplace more equitable. When the superintendent of J&L’s seamless tube insisted that not one of his 2,800 workers could be black (“I don’t want no niggers working here”), upper management saw no need to challenge him.

  Promotion—the hope of working one’s way up and out—was not an option. Too quickly, newly arrived blacks had to stomach the realization that, though their families had been in America far longer, they seemed fated to be passed over in favor of even the newest arrivals. “Betrayed by Reconstruction and upstaged by steerage immigrants,” as cultural critic Albert Murray put it, his generation, “the grandchildren of slaves freed by the Civil War,” tamped down a cancerous resentment. Upon his arrival in Aliquippa from Georgia in 1927, James Frank’s father, Willie Frank Sr., began a thirty-year stint as a blast furnace keeper, standing in unmeltable wooden shoes for hours in the breathless heat and opening a chute whenever the molten ore flowed. James himself worked two summers on a labor gang and in the blast furnace; in his family’s time, he says, “I don’t remember a black ever receiving a managerial job.”

  Coming North, meanwhile, didn’t even provide refuge from Reconstruction’s most harrowing symbol. In 1925, 25,000 members of the Ku Klux Klan marched, in full regalia, with flags waving, down Pennsylvania Avenue in the nation’s capital. Perhaps it was inevitable that the arrival of so many dark, non-English-speaking immigrants, the societal shift from farm to city, and the preoccupation of Woodrow Wilson’s administration with “100% Americanism” would spark a nativist backlash. But if the resurgent KKK’s expanded brief against “mongrelization,” alcohol, immorality, Jews, and especially Catholic foreigners gained deep traction in Northern states in the 1920s, its mission of white supremacy remained central. And Pennsylvania proved fertile territory.

  Between 1920 and 1926, the KKK added anywhere from 250,000 to 300,000 new members in the state, a quarter of whom dwelled within the fifty-mile radius of Pittsburgh that included Aliquippa and surrounding Beaver County. Next-door Allegheny County and the four counties contiguous accounted for ninety-nine local chapters, or “klaverns”; Beaver County, with nine klaverns and a relatively small black population, appeared less invested. But the KKK made its presence felt. In July 1923, nine members kidnapped a black man in the town of Beaver and—accounts differ—either placed a rope around his neck as a warning before letting him go, or lynched him outright.

  Aliquippa, just five miles away and soon to be Beaver County’s commercial hub, had its own klavern, “The Ku Klux Klan of Woodlawn.” It was announced in the spring of 1922 with a late-night launch of skyrockets, a burning cross above Plan 11, and a front-page letter in the Woodlawn News. Girdler, the mill superintendent, wrote about numerous local cross-burnings in the early 1920s, the KKK’s attempts to organize, its circulated promise “to drive the colored people back to the South,” and its demand that he fire a member of the J&L police force for anti-Klan actions. In typical fashion, Girdler painted himself as the tough who booted the KKK out of his office. Crosses continued to burn on area hills, he said, “but almost as quickly as those flames died the Ku-Klux Klan had burned itself out in Woodlawn.”

  But Girdler’s concern seemed to center more on control than employee welfare. Many a night the town’s young black men clambered up to the high, scrubby emptiness of Griffith Heights, the hill behind Plan 11, only to see a KKK flame ignite on another ridge. Between such displays and the mill’s racist employment practices, they were primed for the black nationalist message espoused in a pair of Pittsburgh speeches by Jamaican expatriate Marcus Garvey. Attendance at the town’s black churches dwindled. One black pastor, panicked by the way Aliquippa’s 1,500 blacks had taken to Garvey’s “Race First” rhetoric, warned the FBI of a coming race riot.

  In 1923 Aliquippa grocer Matthew Dempsey tried to open a chapter of Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association; fifty black millworkers met secretly, and regularly, behind a curtain in Dempsey’s store. Every J&L employee involved was fired, and soon all talk of black empowerment dissolved. In 1924, the year Girdler moved to J&L’s head office in Pittsburgh, the Klan—far from being eradicated—was welcomed in “the regalia of their order” by town pastors, marched to the altar of one Presbyterian church while a choir sang “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” and was celebrated with a “special sermon” at an evening Methodist service at Woodlawn High.

  Within four years, courthouse revelations of corruption and infighting within the Pennsylvania Klan would decimate membership and mark its end as a political force statewide. But deep into the next decade, it still cast shadows in Aliquippa.

  “Sometimes in the summer we would see crosses burning on the top of the hills late at night, two or three of them a night,” said composer Henry Mancini, who came of age in the late 1930s. “We knew it was of course the Ku Klux Klan. Though there was a substantial black population in Aliquippa, there were very few black students in that high school of three thousand. I used to think about it and wonder why they weren’t coming to school. And if the burning of crosses on the hills in the night gave me a chill, I couldn’t begin to imagine what it did to them.”

  Some, like Emory Clark—father of jazz great Sonny Clark, up from Georgia to work the coke yards in Aliquippa Works—let the KKK drive him away to the coalfields east of Pittsburgh. But most blacks stayed, burying their bitterness beneath smiles or sighs. The game was rigged, South and North; they knew that now. Theirs was not a nation of healing and high theory, of “all men are created equal.” It was a far harder reality, one annealed by the same simmering rage that fueled the Boston Tea Party, Bloody Kansas, the Haymarket affair. They, too, in other words, had cause to fight.

  Pitt and Penn State did not integrate their football rosters until the mid-1940s. But just two years after the Aliquippa team’s inception, a Condor photo of the 1916 squad includes, for the first time, one unnamed black player. And it was no anomaly. Starting in 1919, every Woodlawn team for the next six years featured, without newspaper mention or yearbook comment, an unnamed black player.

  The town—or borough, as it was called—was hardly color-blind. Black families had begun to move beyond Plan 11 extension, into mixed immigrant areas like Plan 11 and Logstown, but were still relegated to segregated sections in the downtown movie theaters and barred from entering shops and bars there. Blacks played on all-black mill teams and their own semipro baseball team—first named the Aliquippa Tarzans, then the Aliquippa Grays—though they did compete each season against the all-white Aliquippa Reds. The semipro football Aliquippa Indians, which began play on Crow Island in 1925, never allowed black players.

  Still, the public high school—renamed Harding High for five years before finally settling on Aliquippa High in 1930—and its sports teams were allowed a social leeway granted almost nowhere else. It wasn’t the only town in Western Pennsylvania to do so. While Aliquippa’s anonymous black players were making a quiet mark at Woodlawn High, thirty miles south, in Washington, Pennsylvania, a black athlete named Charlie “Pruner” West was making history.

  By his senior year at Washington High, the teen, who had reputedly outraced a horse and wrestled the family bull to the ground, had been named all-WPIAL in football, track, and baseball and led the Presidents—the “Little Prexies”—to a championship. In 1920 West enrolled at his hometown college, Washington & Jefferson, a football force then on par with Notre Dame and Michigan. In his first varsity game, he ran a kickoff back 65 yards for a touchdown and threw in another 46-yard romp. In the off-seasons he dominated in the pentathlon, proving talented enough to make the 1924 U.S. Olympic team.

  Surrounding Washington County would, in the next six years, spawn seventeen KKK chapters, but West’s presence on the roster caused no stir; “at least 95 percent of the local people,” West felt, pulled for him because his integration was so seamless at W
ashington High. In 1921, a 98-yard run spurred the Presidents past Syracuse and made West a national star known for “ripping through would-be tacklers with high knee action”; Pop Warner called him the most formidable open-field runner in the country. Then West stepped in as starting quarterback and led the team to Morgantown for a showdown with West Virginia. When the Presidents’ train pulled into the station, a waiting crowd chanted, “Kill the nigger!”

  West, light-skinned and unknown enough that no one recognized him, debarked last and said, calmly, “We didn’t bring him with us this time.”

  W&J won 13-0. At the end of the season, West traveled with only ten other players to take part in the 1922 Rose Bowl against the undefeated “wonder team” from the University of California. It would be the last time a small college would take part in the prestigious game, the only time the contest would end in a 0-0 tie—and the first time a black man would quarterback a team in Pasadena. Later, after graduating from Howard Medical School, West established a thriving practice in Virgina. Black kids all over Western Pennsylvania took note.

  “He was an idol of mine since my earliest days,” said Ray Kemp, who, with the Pittsburgh Pirates, an early iteration of the Steelers, was one of two blacks to play in the NFL during its first stab at integration, in 1933. “I wanted to be an athlete in football and track because of him. Back then, blacks had so few role models to follow that Dr. West stood out as the sort of man I wanted to become.”

  No councilman, mayor, school principal, or mill superintendent in Western Pennsylvania then explicitly made racial tolerance on public school teams a matter of policy. The numbers early on were tiny, just one or two black players every few years, with slots opened only to those too talented to ignore. But that crack in segregation became custom. In the late ’20s, the black population at Aliquippa High produced football-playing brothers Norman and Albert Wilkens, and their Serb and Croat and Italian teammates made room. The rivalry between Aliquippa and nearby Ambridge had become overheated by then, and the fact that both head coaches, Nate Lippe and Moe Rubenstein, were Jewish paled next to the teams’ ongoing feud. Winning mattered most.