Pittsburgh and North

2019 ◽  
pp. 6-17
Author(s):  
Terry Chester Shulman
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social Unrest ◽  
Steel Mills ◽  
Immigrant Mother ◽  
Irish Americans

A look at the impoverished working-class city of Pittsburgh that Maurice Costello was born into in 1877. Amid devastating economic and social unrest, his Irish immigrant mother struggles to support herself and her infant son after the death of his father in the steel mills. As Maurice reaches adulthood, the rise of Irish Americans in the entertainment world offers a way out. He cuts his professional teeth with the Harry Davis Company inthe heart of the city’s vibrant theatrical district, before striking out on his own as a traveling actor.

Black Chicago

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerald Horne
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Housing Projects ◽  
Steel Mills

This chapter examines Patterson's arrival in Chicago. After operating semiclandestinely in Europe and coordinating the Scottsboro campaign, being deployed to Chicago almost seemed like a demotion for Patterson. Surely, the Second City was no backwater, and given its steel mills teeming with proletarians, it was more eye-catching for a self-respecting Marxist-Leninist than a relatively less-endowed Manhattan. Still, the abjectly horrible conditions faced by the Negro working class—including many abodes bereft of water or even toilets—were suggestive of the fact that there was much work to do. Indeed, Patterson was dumbfounded by what he found in black Chicago: 60 percent of Negroes were unemployed, which was “reflected in the terribly dilapidated houses, the crowded kitchenettes, the gambling and vice.” Thus, he said, “We need scores of housing projects that exceed the Ida B. Wells project in scope and in provision” since “the Negro ghetto is an eyesore to democracy.”

Workers’ Housing and Houses: Interwar Planning from Dessau to Detroit

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 314-335
Author(s):  
Michael McCulloch
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Working Class ◽  
World War ◽  
Social Unrest ◽  
Transatlantic Comparison ◽  
Housing Shortages ◽  
American Case

Facing post–World War I housing shortages and the prospect of social unrest, policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic supported the construction of modern workers’ dwellings. Their efforts produced an extraordinary volume of new units, transforming the working-class experience. Yet, architectural and planning historians have overlooked the comparative potential in this body of work, which includes landmarks of modernism and wood-framed bungalows. This article contributes a transatlantic comparison. It explores European and US policies and projects, shedding light on the particularity of the American case, epitomized by Detroit, where in the absence of planned developments workers sought houses as independent consumers.

Opportunities Found and Lost

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Korstad
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Working Class ◽  
The South ◽  
Predominantly Black ◽  
United Auto Workers ◽  
Auto Workers ◽  
The North ◽  
Steel Mills ◽  
Tobacco Workers

This chapter explores two examples of the workplace-oriented civil rights militancy that arose in the 1940s—one in the South and one in the North. It analyzes the unionization of predominantly black tobacco workers in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and the ferment in the United Auto Workers in Detroit, Michigan, that made that city a center of black working-class activism in the North. Similar movements took root among newly organized workers in the cotton compress mills of Memphis, the tobacco factories of Richmond and Charleston, the steel mills of Pittsburgh and Birmingham, the stockyards and farm equipment factories of Chicago and Louisville, and the shipyards of Baltimore and Oakland.

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