by S. L. Price
But there were, even then, glimmers of pride, agitation: In 1946, the school board received a petition asking that a “colored” janitor be hired for Jones Elementary School in Plan 11. Two years later, a black delegation presented another petition asking for an inquiry into a “pattern of alleged discrimination at Jones School.” Decorous or not, that took guts. The town’s small—4,175; 15.9 percent—black population had no political clout and plenty to fear.
Melvin Steals—future PhD, future Aliquippa junior high principal—grew up in postwar Aliquippa with a widowed mother scarred by memories of an Alabama lynching. “So my mother would beat me,” Steals said. “Whenever my brother or I did something wrong she would strip us down to our underwear and we would have to lie on the bed while she beat us, and as she beat us she would always say, ‘I would rather see you dead than in the white man’s jail.’”
Steals recalls the first time he went into a store on Franklin Avenue. He was eleven or twelve. The white merchant called him a “nigger.” Steals spoke back, and the man’s face twisted and he unleashed a spew of graphically detailed threats. “It hurt me so much that I kind of blocked out the memory,” Melvin said. “But I never blocked out the anger that I had. For some reason he just called me a ‘nigger’. . . . The feeling of rage—and it was a rage that I could not act out, because my mother conditioned my twin brother and me to a point where we would accept second- or third-class citizenship.”
Slurs, of course, provided the rawest reveal of one’s “place,” but it wasn’t hard to pick up on more subtle forms. “You could see the economics of racism as well,” said Barron Harvey, Aliquippa High class of ’65, now dean of the business school at Howard University. “People say, ‘Well, everybody was making the same money’? No. You might’ve started with the same money, but you weren’t going to move up at the same money. The white guy who, when I was in elementary school, was living on my same block? Before I got out of elementary school, he was already gone—even though his father was at the same level as the other men on that street. But he had gotten advanced. He had moved up. . . . And then he’s gone.
“There was a huge economic vitality there—but we didn’t participate in it. We couldn’t live where we wanted to live. We couldn’t go to the stores we normally wanted to go and work where we needed to work, even though we were part of the unions as well. That really clouds how you see the world. We know how they saw the world: as privileged, and had everything accessible. But for us, it was looking up. Always looking up.”
And never forgetting. Each new incident—large and small—built upon the previous. One day brought a snarled insult. The next, you fumed when a white person behind you in line was waited on first. Or you, a sixteen-year-old girl, became one of the first blacks hired at the C&L Supermarket, but were kept out of sight while the other, lighter-skinned black girl was brought up front to work the register. And all of it piled up, heavy in the collective gut. “It was brewing,” said Salt Smith. “Even when I was coming up, you didn’t have no black cheerleaders, no black majorette: You can’t even try out. They made sure of that. And you’d resent that.”
Small explosions vented some of the rage. In 1956, the existence of a black-only washroom at J&L’s 14-inch mill ended only because black steelworker Matthew Strong, a reverend at New Hope Baptist Church, attacked the black washroom wall with a sledgehammer. Tensions built, fistfights flared at the high school in 1955, ’56, ’57—evidence of a slow burn that, to the town fathers, seemed under control. “It wouldn’t be all the whites and blacks, just a couple blacks and a couple whites,” said Yannessa. “Come on. The undercurrent of racism has been in this country since they brought the slaves over from Africa. You always had something would be a bone of contention and something negative would come out of it and there’d be some volatility. It never had a long shelf life. But the undercurrent was always there.”
By 1960, the continuing influx of black workers from the South began to tip the balance; now the percentage of blacks in Aliquippa had risen to 21 percent. But on the surface, it was as if little had changed. Downtown still bustled, and Aliquippa’s population held steady at 26,369. The San Rocco Festival still went off each summer like clockwork, and on July 4th weekend, 1960, the Italians in West Aliquippa had an even more famous reason to be proud. Film composer Henry Mancini, thirty-six years old, was coming home.
He was still a few years away from winning his first two Academy Awards, for Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Days of Wine and Roses, but Mancini had already made a mark: he’d been nominated for an Emmy, Grammy, and Oscar, and was famous for his infectious scores for the TV shows Mr. Lucky and, especially, Peter Gunn. So a “Welcome Home” banner was stretched across Franklin Avenue for “Henry Mancini Day,” and Mancini flew in from Southern California. Thousands lined the street for his motorcade as it wound from the Wye up toward the high school. Mancini sat waving from the backseat with his wife, Ginny, and there in the front, taking the day off from the carpenter’s shop at J&L, was the grinning face of the chairman of the organizing committee, Toats DiNardo’s big brother, Phil. Way back when, he and Mancini had known each other in West Aliquippa.
It was, actually, a two-day affair, Mancini’s homecoming and a 4th of July celebration combined—and so obviously a commentary on the American Dream that no one felt the need to mention it outright. Instead there were bicycle, go-kart, and homemade-wagon races; motorcycle, archery, and parachute-jumping exhibitions; two luncheon banquets; a testimonial dinner. Mancini conducted the community band in a concert, and it all ended in fireworks and cheers. Quinto Mancini, back in Aliquippa for the first time since his boy moved him out to California, had come to the country alone and poor and twelve years old in a boat. Now the New World was calling his boy a success.
“I just can’t believe it—that it should happen to my son,” Quinto said when it was over. “I wish it could happen to all fathers, so they could have the feeling that I have. I only wish his mother were here to see it, too.”
In the fall of 1962, Robert Pipkin, a senior, sweet-shooting, 6-foot-3 leading scorer for the Quips basketball team, decided to go out for football. He’d had Aschman for history and thought him fair, and besides, Pipkin said, “Everybody wanted to play for Carl Aschman.” Bob made the team, started the first two games at defensive end . . . but found himself distracted. He kept hearing complaints from black girls about the lack of black Aliquippa cheerleaders. Word was, there might’ve been one back in the late ’50s, who would’ve been the town’s first and only. But there were certainly none now.
His antennae for racial slights were well primed: In junior high, Pipkin and two girls made a point of walking into an Aliquippa whites-only deli and ordering water—and actually got served. The 1962 football team was a softer target; the Aliquippa roster featured more than a dozen black players and slipping morale. Aschman had had disastrous seasons in ’60 and ’61, began the ’62 campaign 0-3, and for the first time found his program—long the symbol of a wholesome civic unity—racked by racial division.
Few noticed at the time. Aliquippa football that season had become the trigger for a far more public and random type of crime; cops used to dealing with bar fights and domestic tragedy found themselves fighting turf battles, juvenile delinquency, and random assaults on bystanders. The growing hostility between Aliquippa’s black and white fans actually eased during home games, because the focus would shift to the visitors. “We always had other people to fight with after the game,” said Barron Harvey. “That was Ambridge or Westinghouse.”
A clutch of Aliquippa teenagers stoned the Westinghouse buses after the home opener, and after the next game at Aliquippa Stadium, a 20-0 loss to Sharon, nine juveniles were arrested for assaulting ten people in the exiting crowd. All the suspects were identified as living in Plan 11, home to many blacks, and Sam Milanovich, now schools superintendent, may well have been referring to race when he declared, “A rowdy minority group o
f so-called wolf packs has caused considerable trouble to people en route to their homes following the contests. . . . Some of our patrons were attacked after leaving the stadium. When arrests were made the attackers were found to be carrying knives, blackjacks, and other lethal weapons.”
Milanovich decreed that the rest of the home slate would be played on Saturday afternoons. The problem wasn’t unique to Aliquippa: By then games played by North Braddock and McKeesport, as well as some schools in Pittsburgh, had been moved from Friday night to Saturday for similar reasons. Already, the arbitrary violence that would mark the 1960s—flip side to psychedelia and peace marches—had begun to bare its teeth.
Four days after Milanovich’s announcement, Pipkin played in his final football game—the Quips’ first win of the ’62 season, 13-7 over Ellwood City before a crowd of just 1,600 at the daylit stadium. The post-victory buzz didn’t last long. During a practice in the ensuing week, “I talked to all the black football players and said, ‘Listen. We need to quit until they get some black cheerleaders,’” Pipkin said. “About seventy-five percent of the players decided to quit. We protested.”
For the white players, though, it was hardly that simple. Pipkin’s agitation did prompt some seniors to bolt—estimates range from four to eight—but it’s not clear if they quit or were forced out. “Some of us went to the coach and we said, ‘There are black players right now that are creating a lot of problems and we’ll walk out ourselves, off the football team, unless you get rid of so-and-so number,’” said Gene Yannessa, Don’s younger brother, tight end, class of ’64. “And we got rid of a whole bunch, and Pipkin was the leader.”
The relatively quaint question behind Pipkin’s strike—if a black man can serve as class president, as Howard Herring would in 1963, why can’t a black girl lead cheers?—dovetailed with the more militant stance rising among young blacks nationwide. For weeks, the national news had been led by James Meredith’s legal push to become the first black to enroll at the University of Mississippi; the night of Pipkin’s last game, after it became clear that Meredith would succeed, rioting erupted at Ole Miss—cars burned, two dead. The next morning, escorted by four hundred U.S. marshals and a thousand federal troops, Meredith integrated the outraged heart of Dixie amid clouds of tear gas.
Even without football, Pipkin had plenty to protest that school year: the lack of black teachers, the town’s segregated pools, and the unspoken rule that no more than three black basketball players could take the floor at a time for Aliquippa High. He went on to lead another demonstration protesting racial bias, as black students—Melvin Steals among them—marched out of the school building, up the path to the empty football stadium, and into the student section of the stands.
Yet despite being the locus of such tension, the school—and team—remained by far the town’s most progressive institution. Star receiver Richard Mann, after all, was one of the black players who stayed on the team after Pipkin’s departure, and he recalls the biggest racial clash of the 1962–63 school year, a seemingly inevitable fight between blacks walking down a path to town and a surrounding crowd of bristling whites with chains and bats, being defused only at the last minute.
“On both sides, man, it was lined with the white students and they were going to jump on us,” Mann said. “The only thing that stopped ’em was the white football players. I remember that.”
Such was the complex dynamic at the high school, and in the town and nation for that matter: Nothing—rivalries, racial division, friendships, fights—was ever as starkly black and white as later characterizations tended to make it. Mann agreed with Pipkin’s stand, but considers many of the whites he grew up with as true comrades. Indeed, it was a white English teacher, Caroline Theil, whom Pipkin credits with believing in him most. He read just one book in high school—Great Expectations—but Theil kept insisting that he had leadership qualities, kept writing and encouraging him after he left town, even sent him money.
“She really gave me hope,” Pipkin said. “That lady probably saved my life.”
She wasn’t alone. “Kindergarten up through twelfth grade I had only one black teacher—and he was a former football star at Aliquippa and played on the 1949 state basketball team,” said Melvin Steals. “But I had some wonderful white teachers who saw my potential and really encouraged me.” He rattles off a list, ending with Ivagean Ferry. “Mrs. Ferry taught us students about fairness,” Steals said. “She was history, very proud to be an American. In fact, Mrs. Ferry taught me how to study.”
But perhaps it was precisely the fact that Aliquippa High was less retrograde than other places that made it ripe for ferment. What with Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” the killing of Medgar Evers, and the March on Washington, the following year, 1963, is widely considered the launching pad of the modern civil rights movement. But it was also a culmination. In places like Aliquippa, the transition from isolated spats to collective action had been gaining momentum for some time.
“Three years I went up there, and at the end of the school year there was always a riot in the school,” said future Aliquippa mayor Anthony Battalini, class of ’64. “They would come down marching, on what we call ‘The Paths’; you come out of the high school and there’s a set of steps to go down to Plan 12. They’d come out singing that ‘We Shall Overcome,’ and then all hell would break loose. Teachers were out there and everything. I can remember when I was a kid in school, I was in shop class, carpenter’s shop. And we knew: the blacks would be in carpenter’s shop making these clubs and they’d have ’em in their locker. At lunchtime I went in all their lockers and cleaned ’em all out. . . .”
The black players that Pipkin led off the field in 1962 didn’t return. Aschman never once spoke to him about the issue, or vice versa, but Pipkin never considered the coach himself racist. In fact, he points out, Aschman had no qualms about starting a black quarterback, Jethro McCoy, on his great team in ’59. “He was a good man,” Pipkin said, but “he was not going to beg you.”
And he was not going to soften. Gene Yannessa separated his right shoulder during the Ellwood City game, “but you were fearful of saying anything to him,” he said. “On Monday morning we had meetings; the whole football team would go an hour earlier before school would start and Aschman would go over and scream at us and bitch about what we didn’t do right. I waited and waited—I hated to do this, but I had to go up to him: my shoulder was all fucked up.”
After the meeting, Yannessa approached Aschman. “Coach, can I see you for a minute?” he said.
“What’s your problem?” Aschman said.
“My shoulder, I hurt it in the game and I can barely pick up my arm. . . . ”
Aschman grabbed Yannessa’s arm, twisted it one way and then the other.
“There ain’t nothing wrong with that goddam arm,” he said. “Get the hell out of here and go to class!”
“And like an asshole, I didn’t go to the doctor’s or anything and eventually it healed on itself,” Yannessa recalled. “But the pain was always there and there was a lump up there. Basketball season came and I went out, and the first time I had practice I went to take a shot from the foul line and I couldn’t reach the basket.”
After sitting out three weeks, Yannessa played the last three football games in pain. Though the Quips suffered humiliating losses to Beaver Falls and Ambridge, and finished the ’62 season 2-6-1, Aschman never thought to use his clout to broker peace with the blacks. “He wasn’t going to budge,” said Aschman’s son, Carl Jr. “He said, ‘If they wanted to play, they could play. If they didn’t, they could stay home’; he would use what he had.”
Just days after the walkout, Aschman’s outmanned boys, led by quarterback Frank Lalama’s three touchdown passes, stunned the county by “beating” undefeated New Castle with a 19-19 tie. The upset was enough to knock New Castle’s Red Hurricanes out of the running for a WPIAL title; their fa
ns would be vowing revenge for years to come. Aschman eventually finished with 189 wins in all, and this wasn’t one of them. But it was one of his great coaching jobs.
“We really jelled,” Yannessa said. “Because we lost some of the people that were like a cancer, like Pipkin, and when that happened we came together more as a team, the blacks and the whites. I’m not sure we even knew how good New Castle was.”
Surprisingly, news of Pipkin’s walkout never became public knowledge. But the idea that a black player—and a wild card with poor grades, at that—would challenge the town’s “king” and its crown jewel rankled elders even in the black community. One of them, the father of future Nebraska star tackle and Kansas City Chiefs draftee Bob Liggett, visited Pipkin at home one night to tell him he’d made a mistake, to ask him to apologize and lead the players back. Did he understand what he was taking on? Pipkin replied that he knew and, secretly, he was sure the school would give in. He would apologize for nothing.
“I rocked the boat,” Pipkin said. “I went against the system that was the life of that community. Who is this guy, sixteen, seventeen, to tell other black kids? I just saw injustice: How come black girls couldn’t be cheerleaders? And nobody else saw it.”
But the school didn’t give in. Pipkin was hardly a unifying figure, even among fellow black athletes; it was lost on no one—including Zmijanac—that the hoop star’s seemingly principled stand was carried out in the context of an athletic lark. Pipkin wasn’t seeking a future in football. “He played basketball,” said Larry Stokes, a black sophomore who didn’t strike that season. “I didn’t walk out, because I just played football.”
