Pittsburgh’s Urban League moment
This book by the prominent local Carnegie Mellon University historian Joe William Trotter Jr. tracks the evolution of the Pittsburgh branch of the Urban League from its founding in 1918 to its position as a facilitator of social change today. It is profound scholarly history, its obvious target markets social services professionals and open-minded political activists. Whether it will appeal to a general audience is a question.
Subtitled “A Century of Social Service and Activism,” the book is dense with research. Footnotes and an index occupy more than 60 pages. It makes a compelling case for the effectiveness of the Urban League of Pittsburgh by tracking the push and pull among its different constituencies.
While Trotter skillfully connects the various factors involved in the struggle for social change, his book does so at a level that may be a touch too granular. Stories from the inside out — of beneficiaries of ULP in resolving a housing issue or grappling with police brutality, say — might have given this admirable, even necessary, undertakingmore personality.
Trotter is certainly steeped in his subject. The widely published author is the Giant Eagle Professor of History and Social Justice and director of the Center for Africanamerican Urban Studies and the Economy at Carnegie Mellon University.
By taking the reader through a century of major social change, from the Great Migration following World War I to the present, Trotter attests to the ULP’s ability to adapt to the times. He shows how the organization responded to the volatile Pittsburgh labor market as heavy industry, particularly steel, vanished, making way for the more diverse and demanding economyof the 21st century.
“As elsewhere in late industrial America, the collapse of the Jim Crow system in Pittsburgh coincided with the fall of its industrial economy and a sharp conservative turn against the equal opportunity regime,” Trotter writes. “During the late twentieth century, as the city transitioned from a predominantly manufacturing base to a new economy driven by high-technology medical, educational, financial and marketing institutions, African Americans suffered disproportionately higher unemployment, disease, poverty and incarceration rates than theirwhite counterparts.”
Asthis millennium neared, ULP began to focus on the needsof Black youth, working to develop educational and vocational programs that could give these young people a way into society — and the skills required to create wealth. An organization that initially focused on helping Blacks escaping the racism and limited economy of the South latch onto greater opportunities in the North now deals with far more than labor. In harmony with the NUL, ULP is deeply involved in political empowerment.
In his epilogue, Trotter acknowledges that some see the ULP as too conservative, despite its militancy in challenging segregation in the workplace, be it heavy industry or retail.He calls his book a “case study” of a Pittsburgh institutionthat forged its own path.
“In conjunction with a plethora of other well-known social justice organizations, the Urban League movement uprooted the Jim Crow order and nudged the nation closer to living up to its democratic promise,” Trotter writes. But much work remains to be done,he adds.
The aim of the book — to contextualize ULP achievements and disappointments for the record — is laudable, and Trotter helpfully begins and ends each chapter with a summary of its contents and intent, sandwiching an overwhelmingaccumulation of detailwithin the bigger picture.