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In 1967, an African American woman from Pittsburgh’s Hill District sat before a distinguished panel of U.S. Senators in Washington, D.C., and told them bluntly that Pittsburgh’s poorest black neighborhood needs federal funds. “‘Nobody told me what to say. I wouldn’t have come down here if they didn’t let me say what I know is so. And that is, we need that money restored that you cut back. You cut it back just when we were seeing results, just when we were beginning to hope,’ she said.” The activist was Frankie Mae Pace, who for decades was an outspoken ⁸³ advocate for her Hill District community and a pioneer of neighborhood self-help that became standard in low-income areas throughout the United States.

In the two decades following World War II, Pittsburgh became the site of a vast

realignment of urban real estate in what was known as the Pittsburgh Renaissance. Dozens of buildings in the central business district were demolished to make way for shiny new towers for the city’s large companies, including the nation’s first all-aluminum skyscraper, headquarters of the Alcoa corporation. But the Renaissance also extended deep into the Lower Hill District, the historic core of Pittsburgh’s black community. Thousands of buildings were demolished, 451 businesses were displaced, and 1,551 people, mostly African American, were relocated in what Roy Lubove calls “an experiment in public paternalism.” Such massive physical and social ⁸⁴ disruption created a backlash in the black community that culminated in the late-1960s and early-1970s.

“On Poverty Program: Frankie Pace Talks Back to Senators,” New Pittsburgh Courier, March 18, 1967.

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Roy Lubove, Twentieth-Century Pittsburgh Volume I: Government, Business, and Environmental Change.

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(Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995), 131. An alternate location for the proposed Civic Arena, on the estate of millionaire Robert B. King in Highland Park, was dropped after the presentation of a petition with more than one thousand signatures, protests from several neighborhood organizations, and the emotional appeal of King himself. It was an illustration of social capital at the highest level. Michael P. Weber, Don’t Call Me Boss. David Lawrence, Pittsburgh’s Renaissance Mayor (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988), 266-268.

Around the same time as Jane Jacobs rallied historic preservationists to fight urban renewal in older American cities, Pace organized African Americans in Pittsburgh’s Hill District into the Citizens Committee for Hill District Renewal as one of the first citizen-led neighborhood revitalization efforts in the United States. Pace was the forerunner of many such activists who ⁸⁵ came after her, often poor and female, who stood their ground and fought for the improvement of Pittsburgh’s low-income black neighborhoods, a story repeated across the country.

Featured in a 1960s photo by the acclaimed African American chronicler of mid-century black life in Pittsburgh, Charles “Teenie” Harris, Frankie Mae Pace stands stylishly defiant in a matching plaid skirt and jacket in front of the Citizens Committee for Hill District Renewal office. Owner of Pace’s Music at 2209 Centre Avenue, a gospel music emporium, she is ⁸⁶ described as “the reincarnation of Sojourner Truth . . . outspoken and committed and took her message to the mayor, governor and the White House.” A native of Clinton, Louisiana, Pace ⁸⁷ came to Pittsburgh in 1936 as part of the Second Great Migration. Although she resided at 2310 Centre Avenue in the Hill, Pace was active in the Rodman Street Baptist Church in East Liberty, about three miles east. According to her obituary from 1989, she “worked to improve housing conditions and government programs for the city’s poor for more than 50 years.” Mayor David ⁸⁸ Lawrence appointed Pace to a special committee to fight poverty in 1954; she later led

Mattie Trent, “Black Female Leader,” New Pittsburgh Courier, June 15, 1974. As early as 1942, Pace had

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organized the Homeowners and Tenants Association in the Hill.

“Frankie Pace before Paces’ Citizen’s Community window,” c. 1960-1970, Teenie Harris Photograph Collection,

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1920-1970, Carnegie Museum of Art, Accession number 1996.69.326. See also Stanley Crouch, One Shot Harris:

The Photographs of Charles “Teenie” Harris (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 2002) and Cheryl Finley, Laurence Glasco, and Joe W. Trotter, Teenie Harris Photographer: Image, Memory, History (Pittsburgh:

University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011).

Louis “Hop” Kendrick, “What happened to the Black voice of outrage?: To Tell The Truth,” New Pittsburgh

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Courier, January 1, 2000.

“Frankie Pace, 84, led efforts to help poor,” Pittsburgh Press obituary, November 20, 1989.

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Pittsburgh’s efforts in the War on Poverty in the 1960s and helped develop the Model Cities Program in 1965. But in 1969, Pace and two other African American leaders in the Hill, Jim ⁸⁹ McCoy and Byrd Brown, erected a large billboard at the corner of Crawford and Wylie that read,

“No Redevelopment Beyond this Point! We Demand Low Income Housing for the Lower Hill,”

a symbolic rebellion of popular support against further redevelopment plans by the City in the Middle Hill. Their act of resistance was part of a nationwide grassroots movement to reclaim ⁹⁰ neighborhoods for residents, rather than outsiders’ visions of a community driven by elites.

In the 1950s through the 1970s, Pittsburgh was a center of citizen resistance to some of the nation’s first post-war physical and economic disruptions, such as urban renewal and deindustrialization. Low-income residents successfully challenged their respective growth coalitions and rejected mid-century conceptions of modernism that failed to adequately take into account the needs of poor people. They protested against elite-driven urban renewal plans, negotiated with political leaders, and developed alternative responses, such as community development corporations, that were bottom-up solutions to urban ills. In the decades after the 1970s, Pittsburgh’s neighborhood leaders continued to create innovative programs for the revitalization of inner city communities, but this time in cooperation with growth coalitions. As

Pace testified before Congress in March 1967, telling the Senate Education and Labor Committee as spending on

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the Vietnam War was accelerating, “‘Two-thirds of the people in my neighborhood have incomes under $3,000 a year. The housing is frequently sub-standard; the schools are not first class. If this country can spend billions destroying life, it can spend millions building it.’” When asked if she had been “rehearsed,” Pace told Vermont Senator Winston L. Prouty, “‘Nobody told me what to say. I wouldn’t have come down here if they didn’t let me say what I know is so. And that is, we need that money restored that you cut back.” She continued, “‘We could do a lot more good in Pittsburgh, even with the money we have, if the local people were allowed to allot the money where it is most needed, instead of you people down here earmarking it.’” “On Poverty Program: Frankie Pace Talks Back to Senators,” New Pittsburgh Courier, March 18, 1967.

McCoy formed the United Negro Protest Committee in 1963 and Brown was president of the Pittsburgh branch of

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the NAACP. “Billboard inscribed ‘Attention: City Hall and U.R.A. No Redevelopment Beyond This Point! We Demand Low Income Housing for the Lower Hill, C.C.H.D.R., N.A.A.C.P., Poor People's Campaign, Model Cities,’

at Crawford Street near intersection of Centre Avenue, Hill District,” 1969, Charles “Teenie” Harris Archive, Carnegie Museum of Art, Heinz Family Fund, Accession Number 2001.35.9463. This intersection would later be called “Freedom Corner,” a symbolic rallying point for many civil rights demonstrations.

Tracy Neumann argues, as government and foundation funding became available in the

late-1970s and early 1980s, organizations “needed to ensure that their development development plans were compatible with the growth coalition’s vision for the city.” ⁹¹

During the 1960s and early-1970s some grassroots citizens movements utilized protest strategies developed by Chicago organizer Saul Alinksy. For instance, the Manchester Citizens Corporation (MCC) adopted the Saul Alinsky-style of organizing and packed public hearings at City Hall, jammed the phone lines of local elected officials, and protested in great numbers to change conditions in the neighborhood. In one protest against the Urban Redevelopment ⁹² Authority and City of Pittsburgh Housing Authority in 1974, MCC board member Betty Jane Ralph told the New Pittsburgh Courier, “We’ve always been fighters, and this is no exception. In all our many battles with the city administration, we’ve been committed to not letting the city come over here, do just what they want, and not consider the needs of the people living here in Manchester.” Though, as Roy Lubove argues, the Ford Foundation’s funding of urban ⁹³ extension programs in the Pittsburgh neighborhoods of Homewood-Brushton, Hazelwood-Glenwood, and Perry Hilltop in the early-1960s “marked the emergence of a new kind of

community organization strategy, one that placed less emphasis than the Alinsky Industrial Areas Foundation upon conflict, but more emphasis on citizen participation than the Ford Foundation

Tracy Neumann, Remaking the Rustbelt: The Postindustrial Transformation of North America (Philadelphia:

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University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 62.

Gale Cincotta helped write the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977. She was a close ally of Saul Alinsky and

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his Industrial Areas Foundation in Chicago. Dan Holland, “Forging A Consistent Vision: The People, Place, and Race That Shaped Manchester’s Renewal, 1964-2014” (M.A. Thesis, University of Pittsburgh 2015), 23-24.

Greg Mims, “Northside Citizens File Charges Against URA, Housing Authority,” New Pittsburgh Courier,

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February 2, 1974.

community action programs of the early 1960’s.” Still, such approaches were driven by ⁹⁴ funders, not the people themselves. Organizations like MCC and individuals profiled below—

who Alinsky calls “native or indigenous leadership”—continued to agitate for change. ⁹⁵ Several women illustrate the fight against political and business elites in Pittsburgh at a time when charismatic male leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X commanded the national civil rights agenda. Behind the scenes, women were often the foot soldiers of the movement. At the neighborhood level, strong-willed, determined women achieved small but significant victories by influencing the moral agenda. In Pittsburgh in the 1960s, Frankie Mae ⁹⁶ Pace led the opposition against further demolition of the Middle Hill District. Dorothy

Richardson and Ethel Hagler, humble, virtuous church-going ladies of the city’s North Side, led protests for affordable housing and ultimately conceived of Neighborhood Housing Services, which became a national model. Another Northsider, Betty Jane Ralph was a potent voice for Manchester as it beat back a massive road project and forged its own identity as an attractive black neighborhood. These women, along with a number of men who operated out of the ⁹⁷ spotlight at the local level, illustrate citizen resistance and control over an ethical, principled

Roy Lubove, Twentieth-century Pittsburgh Volume I: Government, Business, and Environmental Change

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(Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995), 174.

Saul Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 64.

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For more on this topic, see Lisa Levenstein, A Movement Without Marches: African American Women and the

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Politics of Poverty in Postwar Philadelphia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). In her book, Levenstein writes that “women’s attempts to claim resources from public institutions left indelible marks on the postwar urban landscape, bringing a range of government benefits and services into poor black communities” (6).

See also, Keisha N. Blain, Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).

Profiled in Dan Holland, “Forging A Consistent Vision: The People, Place, and Race That Shaped Manchester’s

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Renewal, 1964-2014” (MA Thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 2015).

agenda which ultimately prevailed in community development. They also show the humble beginnings of movements and programs that became national models.

From the outset of urban renewal in the 1950s, Pittsburgh became a center for the implementation of innovative approaches to community development, in large part because African Americans like Pace, Richardson, Hagler, and Ralph tried to gain control over neighborhood initiatives of Pittsburgh’s elite-driven Renaissance. African Americans’ use of social capital in the form of political power, control over information, and organizing prowess enabled them to effectively voice their concerns and shape the city’s community development agenda, particularly as it pertained to the supply of affordable housing. This cycle of protest and negotiation between everyday residents and elites played out repeatedly from the 1950s through the 1970s. As a result, African Americans forged a sense of identity, asserted their right to civil society, and took greater control over the destiny of communities through property ownership. ⁹⁸ The results were uneven, as not all African American communities in Pittsburgh had the ability to respond to rapid changes. But in those communities which had the capacity, or had

accumulated enough social capital to leverage political and financial capital, citizen-led development projects blunted the negative effects of renewal. ⁹⁹

The path was not always easy and came with immense losses through the displacement of thousands of residents under the federal urban renewal program, discriminatory bank lending practices, suburbanization, and deindustrialization. But these negative effects led directly to

Roy Lubove writes that “Low-cost housing, clearly, was an insignificant element in the renewal process.” Roy

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Lubove, Twentieth-Century Pittsburgh Volume I: Government, Business, and Environmental Change (Pittsburgh:

University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995), 130.

Trotter and Day describe the creation, in 1954, of the Homewood Community Improvement Association, led by

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African Americans. “The organization formed ninety local block community clubs by the early 1960s.” Joe W.

Trotter and Jared N. Day, Race and Renaissance: African Americans in Pittsburgh since World War II (Pittsburgh:

University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), 74.

what researcher Fidel Campet calls a “grassroots insurgency.” “From the mid 1960s into the early 1970s, African Americans and sympathetic white allies developed differing strategies to improve housing conditions in the city by engaging state institutions and emerging federal housing programs. Residents formed community based organizations (CBO) and grassroots protest organizations (GPO). . . . In all, these organizations became new sites of black self- determination and community development forcing the introduction of capital, civic institutions, and federal housing programs into the community.” This pushback from African Americans ¹⁰⁰ against further elite-driven renewal projects in the 1950s and 1960s laid the groundwork for community-driven planning and development initiatives in the 1970s and beyond.