ELEGY FOR A FUNERAL HOME?
Longtime African-American funeral home faces challenges in changing industry
The business of dealing with the dead has been a way of life for Karen West Butler since her earliest memories of living above the family funeral home established by her grandparents 85 years ago in Pittsburgh’s Hill District.
“You respected families during visitation hours, which were typically from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m.,” said Ms. Butler, owner of West Funeral Home on Wylie Avenue. “You either did homework or you watched television.
“But you couldn’t make too much noise because you were upstairs. You couldn’t run around like you were chasing each other until after visitation was over.”
West Funeral Home, which is believed by many in Pittsburgh’s African-American community to be the oldest black-owned business in the region, at one time buried nearly everyone in the Hill District, a historically black community on the outskirts of Downtown.
In a city that was segregated, West Funeral Home provided a place of refuge for black families.
Funeral parlors run by white funeral directors did not usually welcome business from African-Americans. Black people knew they could count on the West family to preserve their burial traditions. Most importantly, they would give the deceased a type of respect in death that the person might not have always received in life.
After Ms. Butler’s grandfather, Thomas West Sr., died in 1968, her father and uncle took over the business with the help of her mother. Her uncle, Raymond West, died in 1982. Her father, Thomas West Jr., died in 1989.
Ms. Butler and her mother, Thelma West, carried on the business together until her mother had to be placed in a nursing home because of Alzheimer’s disease. She died in 2006 at age 88.
Now Ms. Butler alone carries on the legacy that has been handed down from one generation to the next since 1932.
She worries that her passing could be the end for West Funeral Home. None of her three sons are interested in following her footsteps. While each of them help her when they have time off, they have other jobs. And Ms. Butler, who declined to say how old she is, acknowledges that she is getting up in age.
“What I have always said about the funeral business is if you are fortunate enough to retire, you can retire,” Ms. Butler said. “But most likely you die in this business.”
‘Soothes the soul’
The funeral business today is different from the one she grew up in.
The way Ms. Butler sees it, the new generation puts less value on the human touch and relies on technology for communicating.
The funeral home industry overall faces more pressure to publish the prices of their goods and services online so consumers can comparison shop without calling or visiting a funeral home.
“They want to contact you by email,” she said. “Or they want to look on your webpage to see what you have to offer as far as caskets or your automobiles and things such as that. The funeral home owners also are in the technological age. They send emails. I don’t have one. Somebody is calling me about setting up a webpage. So I’m working on a webpage.
“But when you are in by yourself, it makes it kind of difficult because you don’t have anybody else to help monitor the webpage and things like that,” she said. “The funeral business — as far as I’m concerned — is more of a personal business. And once you lose the personality and the personal part
of it, I think you have lost an awful lot.”
As more African-American families have moved out of the Hill District over the years, the number of funerals Ms. Butler has been conducting has been declining.
Last year, West Funeral Home answered 38 calls for service. The prior year, it answered 50 to 60 calls, a far cry from the days when West employed a full-time staff and answered hundreds of calls in the course of a year.
These days, Ms. Butler works as the only licensed funeral director at West Funeral Home. She contracts with people to dress bodies and apply cosmetics when necessary. Finding help to pick up bodies and perform other tasks is not always easy, especially when the calls come late at night or the bodies are in buildings with no elevator.
“You try to call people to help, but that gets difficult,” she said. “You try to send two people. The people we have been using are getting old, and the work is getting harder on their backs and knees. You try to find young people, but they don’t work well after hours. They think deaths should only occur 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.”
She said it’s also more difficult to find musicians to perform at funerals. People who usually would play music on organs and piano are working full-time jobs and cannot always get off work in the middle of the day.
“I like music during the services because it soothes the soul and gives families a sense of calm,” she said. “Now we use CDs all the time.”
Too many funeral homes
Owning a funeral home has historically been a profitable business that attracted African-Americans looking for economic opportunities.
Racial segregation within the industry helped create a class of African-American millionaires, according to a 1953 Ebony magazine articled titled “Death Is Big Business.”
But black funeral homes are facing new challenges, largely because of increased competition from other funeral homes and funeral products suppliers and falling profit margins. According to the National Funeral Directors Association, the U.S. currently has 19,322 funeral homes. The organization keeps no data on the number of African-American funeral homes.
Josh Slocum, president of the Funeral Consumers Alliance in Burlington, Vt., said overall the country has too many funeral homes. Pennsylvania, which has one of the highest concentrations per capita, is a prime example.
Between 2012 and 2013, 124,596 deaths occurred in Pennsylvania and the state had 1,585 funeral homes.
“By our formula, the state of Pennsylvania only needs 498 funeral homes, but it has three times that many,” Mr. Slocum said. “There are 200 funeral homes in the city of Pittsburgh, which is an enormous overstock that was caused by so much segmentation by ethnicity and race.”
Mr. Slocum said many funeral homes are languishing in part because an increasing number of families are choosing cremation, which costs less than traditional burials.
Many black funeral home owners also face another challenge. As more chains and corporations swallow up much of the business, owners of white family-run funeral businesses are able to sell and retire. But one industry expert said he has found that black funeral parlors are less likely to be purchased by large funeral home conglomerates.
There’s a reason that the roll-up trend hasn’t had the same impact in the black funeral home industry, said Robert Pierce, president of Pierce CFO, a Gainesville, Ga.-based company that brokers deals for funeral homes.
It can be difficult to transfer the clientele and the business, he said.
Mr. Pierce said in more than two decades in business his company handled about 2,000 sales of funeral homes. Only about five of those sales involved AfricanAmerican funeral homes.
Mr. Pierce said there has always been a strong relationship between black funeral homes and churches, which creates a barrier to entry for nonblacks. He said that is different from other types of funeral homes.
“You can buy a funeral home that caters to Jews, Catholics or Protestants, and things will be fine even if you are not a Jew, Catholic or Protestant. But you cannot buy an African-American funeral home if you are not African-American.”
He said his assessment is based on an experiment his company tried 25 years ago. The company hired an African-American sales representative to work with black funeral homes, but it became apparent black ministers would not support the effort. Because of the loyalty the black community has to its funeral homes, the business is one industry in which black families have been able to create generational wealth, he said.
African-American funeral director Odell Robinson, owner of Odell Robinson Jr. Funeral Home on the North Side, agreed that white funeral directors are likely to fail at trying to run a black funeral home because the cultural gap would be harder to overcome and many families tend to be loyal to the family undertaker.
But that type of business arrangement has succeeded in other places, he said.
“I do know of big-volume African-American funeral homes in California that are doing 1,000 or more calls that are owned by corporations, and it’s working,” Mr. Robinson said. “But they have black funeral directors who are running it. When white people are involved with black funeral homes, they have to have a black frontman to try to make that shift.”
A giant Canadian company, Loewen Group Inc., attempted a controversial sales agreement in the mid1990s with the National Baptist Convention USA, the nation’s largest organization of black churches with 33,000 churches at that time, according to news reports.
The deal called for two members of each congregation to sell graves, vaults, tombstones and other Loewen products to church members. The counselors and church pastor would get a commission, and the convention itself received a cut from each sale.
The fierce backlash caused a split between the convention and its ally, the National Funeral Directors & Morticians Association. The arrangement was revised to make it clear that Baptist convention counselors would pitch only cemetery products, not funeral arrangements, to black churches.
‘A troubling situation’
The options for independent African-American funeral home owners who want to retire often come down to selling to another African-American funeral home in town or selling to an individual African-American who wants to get into the business.
Mr. Pierce said it is difficult to sell a funeral parlor that is doing fewer than 50 calls a year. “A person with a 50-call funeral home can make a living but not much else,” he said. “That’s more of a job than a business. And most people who would want to buy that job don’t have the money to buy in.”
Several interested buyers have approached Ms. Butler in recent years, but the people who have come forward seem to be interested in purchasing only the building, not the business.
“One thing I don’t want is for the building to be turned into an office building,” she said. “I would prefer it still be a funeral home. I would also want it to be an independent funeral home, not a conglomerate. If not, I can see closing the doors. I don’t know.”
The two-story building and the 10,000-square-foot lot it sits on with a view of Downtown is valued at $475,000 for property tax purposes, according to Allegheny County records.
Another scenario Ms. Butler is open to would be for an intern at the Pittsburgh Institute of Mortuary Science to train with her with the idea of getting a license and taking over. She recently had an intern who did just that but ended up moving to California instead.
“I’d like for them to stay, rather than get experience from me and move somewhere else,” Ms. Butler said, adding that she began internships only two years ago because, until then, she still had hopes of her own children taking over.
“Let’s face it,” she said. “A lot of funeral home directors are mature like me. It’s a troubling situation because it’s a business as well as an emotional decision.”