- [Announcer] This program was made possible by a grant from the Pennsylvania Public Television Network.

The network receives funding from the Commonwealth to provide public television to all Pennsylvanians and by viewers like you, thank you.

♪ Oh Jim Crow ♪ ♪ Where you been bae ♪ ♪ Down in Mississippi ♪ ♪ And back again ♪ ♪ Oh Jim Crow ♪ - There's a lot of amnesia especially in the North about questions of racial inequality, discrimination in past and in present.

Northerners define themselves as not the South.

We aren't you know, the hooded Klansmen and the violent racists of Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana.

♪ What's wrong with you ♪ - [Announcer] Most Americans think that the discrimination that resulted from Jim Crow was the Southern convention.

That did only affected blacks in the South and not those above the Mason-Dixon Line which forms Pennsylvania Southern border.

But that's simply not the truth.

Jim Crow thrived in our Commonwealth too.

- And this is a ranch and home in (mumbles) that we decided on and it had three bedrooms, (mumbles) had oversize garage and we liked it very much.

♪ You've been around too long ♪ - The salesman for Levitt would not show a home to a black family.

In other words, they wouldn't even let you look at it.

- [Narrator] Housing and job discrimination only part of the story.

Pennsylvania has also been visited by the very real horrors of lynching.

Lynching could and did include being burned alive.

♪ How its all over now ♪ - Mr. Walker was lynched.

And are so many marks along the way where people who were trying to clear this up knew that the man was lynched.

♪ Oh oh Jim Crow oh ♪ - [Narrator] Historians say the term Jim Crow was introduced by Daddy Rice in minstrel shows.

It eventually came to mean Negro.

Often associated with the deep South.

These mean-spirited characatures of blacks performed a huge audiences all over the world.

Many of the images that embodied Jim Crow supported the idea that blacks were inferior, buffoons, fawning servants and savage menaces to society.

♪ It's all ♪ - [Narrator] Black children were portrayed as pickaninnies, barely human and often no more than alligator bait.

Even one of Agatha Christie's most famous murder mysteries was originally titled "Ten Little Niggers".

Once blacks were reduced to cartoons it was an easy reach to codify laws reinforced by these images.

In the South these ordinances were originally known as the slave codes but eventually we just referred to as Jim Crow Laws.

They reinforced segregation and prevented blacks from enjoying most public accommodations that white Americans took for granted.

♪ It's all over now ♪ - [Narrator] But Jim Crow was not just a Southern institution.

In 1875 the United States Supreme court ruled that the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was unconstitutional.

Nationally, blacks had no rights to ride in public conveyances on land and or water.

Under the same ruling blacks also had no rights to attend theaters or other public places of amusement.

Jim Crow had reached far beyond the South and it spread will pass the Mason-Dixon Line.

♪ It's all over now ♪ - [Narrator] Dr. Thomas Sugrue is a history professor at the university of Pennsylvania and the author of "Jim Crow's Last Stand" the struggle for civil rights in the suburban North.

- The story of civil rights is a story that we tell almost exclusively through the history of the South.

Beginning with the Brown vs board of education decision in 1954 the one that's struck down separate unequal education on the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 that launched the remarkable career of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. And it's a compelling story, but it's a story that overlooks both deeply entrenched racial segregation and discrimination in the North and overlooks the remarkable struggle of African-Americans and interracial civil rights activists in the North to challenge inequality.

Jim Crow, segregation, North of the Mason-Dixon Line.

It's a story that's barely been told.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] Today at the Eastern extremity of the state of Pennsylvania, a remarkable construction project is transforming the base of the countryside.

The area below will, within the next two years be the 10th largest city in the state of Pennsylvania.

- [Narrator] The early 1950s were great time for most Americans, World War II was over and millions of GIS had returned home to rebuild their lives with their families.

Communities like Levittown Pennsylvania were helping that dream come true.

And from the outside seem to be open to all.

- [Announcer] Construction is about to begin on several 18 churches, which will serve the people of Levittown.

The city is donating the land on which these houses of worship will be built.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] That's exactly what William and Daisy Myers thought as they began looking for a larger home for their growing family.

- We had two boys and I was expecting, and we just didn't have enough room.

So we looked and looked and looked.

We visited friends in Levittown one evening and they told us about the home next door to them that was empty that was the(mumbles) The man who lived there had been transferred and they were going to put their home up for sale.

So he asked if we would like to look at it and we did look at it and we liked it.

It was the ranch home with a garage and very nice shrubbery and everything was very nice about the home.

So we were kind of sold on it right away.

- [Thomas] In many neighborhoods that African-Americans moved into for the first time, white neighbors resisted by any means necessary.

They would pick it, they would protest and they would often commit acts of vandalism on the houses that African-Americans were moving into.

- Trouble started (mumbles) in 1957.

And that's when the show was started.

The postman came to the door and asked to speak to the owner of the home.

And I said, I am the owner of the home.

And he looked as though he had seen a ghost and he backtracked and told all the people that he had delivered mail to that blacks had moved in.

And within minutes or half hour or so people started gathering down on the sidewalk in front of the home.

Of course by night fall it had turned into a mob.

- Huge crowds gathered out in the streets in the front shouting racial epithets, clashing with the police.

All because a single African-American family attempted to move into what was an all white suburban community.

This was Levittown, Pennsylvania.

This is suburban Philadelphia in the late 1950s.

The images were images that you would associate with the deep South, but they weren't.

These were images and classic quintessential post-war American suburbia.

Levittown was the epitome of the American dream of home ownership.

Little, affordable houses that middle class Americans and working class Americans could afford.

And this neighborhood became one of the many intense battlegrounds over retaining the racial purity and racial homogeneity of a white neighborhood.

♪ Walk with me Lord ♪ ♪ Walk with me ♪ - We heard from many sources that they wanted to (mumbles) through the witness.

And we were expecting that to happen anytime.

They broke the windows in the kitchen dinette area.

And that's where I was standing before they broke the windows.

But they had promised us that, you know we would be bombed out.

It was hard.

Every night we went to bed, we would sit on the side of the bed and tell each other how much we loved each other in case we didn't wake the next morning.

And he would always tell me, you know, we can leave if you want to leave.

Anytime you feel as though you can't take it, we will leave.

And he just made me feel as though I didn't have to stay if I didn't want to stay.

It was an ordeal.

They didn't burn a cross on our yard.

That was one strange thing because we were kind of expecting it you know.

We had one day (mumbles) and said she would never give her children chocolate milk again as long as she lived.

She was afraid they would turn black.

So we knew what kind of people we were dealing with from that phone call.

And they offered like $500,000, $200,000, 250,000.

We were offered all kinds of money or large sums of money.

We asked someone where's this money coming from.

Somebody said (mumbles) 'cause we never were able to prove it.

But they offered us large sums of money.

A (mumbles) man said where those people now?

(laughing) - One thing to be said about Levittown is that and this is true in communities in the North that resisted blacks moving in.

There were whites who were supportive of the Myers of the first black family to move to Levittown.

The next door neighbors were staunch supporters.

They believed in racial integration, they were committed to it.

- Lew and Bea they're very friendly towards us and very helpful.

And their children, they had a boy and a girl.

In many instances, they were treated worse than we were in because they wrote on their building and they tried to burn crosses in their yards.

They were really treated badly.

In some cases, the people told us that they hated the Jewish people worse than they did us.

But they didn't let it bother them they struggled through it.

- [Narrator] One of the other white Levittowners who supported the Myers family was Harold Lefcourt.

Who at the time was the local township commissioner.

- God bless you young lady.

- I'm so glad to see you.

- What a pleasure to see you again.

Oh, God almighty.

You're the America we want.

- I love you.

- I cry every time I see you.

I can't help it.

God bless you young lady, come on in please.

- [Narrator] One person who was far less helpful was Jim Newell the leader of the Levittown Betterment Association.

- He's the guy Jim Newell at Southern bigoted no good Democrat.

Me a liberal of the Democrat has to share being in the party with a punk like that.

And he had that right, sir.

He's still living in America, living in my ward.

And he's telling me has his commissioner to get her the hell out.

Can he do that in my country?

What am I crazy?

- Newell came to our house before we moved and asked us to vote for him.

He ran for one of the political offices then in the township And my husband said, "You know, I'm surprised "that you would come here and ask us to vote for you."

He said, "Well I only did what they wanted me to do."

- [Narrator] We took Mrs. Myers and Mr. Lefcourt back to Levittown.

To the house filled with so many memories and a neighborhood that had definitely changed.

- And the (mumbles) all along the walkway and on the street all along here.

I thank the Lord for letting me live long to come back.

I don't hate anyone and I wish him oh well.

And for some reason, they must've had a reason for not wanting us to be there just simply because of their skin color.

But I think they missed out on something by not getting to know us.

And I just pray for them.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] The late Dr. Edna McKenzie was the first African-American woman to graduate with a PhD in history from the university of Pittsburgh.

She was an author, educator and devotee of Carter G. Woodson the founder of Negro History Week now nationally known as Black History Month.

However, she started her career as a 17 year old reporter for the Pittsburgh Courier.

Working with legendary photographer, Teenie Harris.

- And then I guess the Pittsburgh courier was my first that's an exciting experience.

I was about 17 when I went in the home office and I grew up in that home office doing a lot of everything just about everything.

I did reporting, Teenie and I worked together all the time during the war years I was working with the double V campaign.

I wrote copy, I wrote headlines, I edited, I did everything at the Pittsburgh courier.

And that was a great opportunity because there was not a day on which some great person didn't come up those steps.

And I think one of the reasons it got commonplace, you know you knew that a Phillip Randolph might come today and Thurgood Marshall tomorrow, Maryville (mumbles) the next day or Lena Horne.

They were always there.

So you were in an atmosphere of black people who were great.

And of course you had to be ambitious around people like that.

- [Narrator] One of her earliest and most challenging assignments was confronting Western Pennsylvania's Jim Crow practices head on.

- Well, I went into restaurants and I almost got literally (mumbles) That is the truth.

They insulted you.

I remember one restaurant and it was in a McDonald's or Claritin, one of the little towns and I asked for a cup of coffee.

And their coffee are in great (mumbles) coffee and sitting right on the counter and cups everywhere and people sitting around drinking coffee they told me we don't have any.

And then I said, but you do have some and I just like to have a cup.

Well, if you lived around here, you'd know better.

We don't serve Negroes.

And so you're, you know obviously your best bet is to get out of here.

Well, of course Teenie had taken picture of the establishment and all that.

He didn't go in all the time.

But those kinds of things I had to do and I had to do it for about six weeks.

And Mr. Protus who was the executive editor then told me, you know you have to jump in the fire in other words, you know you're gonna get burned, but you jump in anyway.

And now, as I think about it, it was very important to do that because then we could sue them and then they would have to open up their restaurants for black people.

People think it started down in North Carolina the sit-ins, Pittsburgh had sit-ins going on in the 40's.

And there were lots of black and white young people together.

And on my particular assignment, I was alone but it was going on all over the city.

We broke down the segregation.

Although Pennsylvania had an equal rights law passed in 1935.

Nobody obeyed the law.

They didn't even know the law and didn't want to learn it.

That's the thing that always amazes me about America how Americans we're so lawless.

I mean the general population don't pay attention to laws.

You know, they never paid any attention to the 14th amendment or there would never have been a need for the 60's.

Having to go out and they actually hurt.

I cried myself to sleep every night after I went out.

I mean, nobody can take that kinda stuff.

You know that you are, there's nothing nasty or dirty or ugly about you but you have to let people say those things to you.

When you're going on a story you have to stand there and listen to it.

And you have to understand that you're doing it for a reason.

And no matter the fact that you know when you leave the office and you're going somewhere to get assaulted, you must go because that's the only way you get the evidence and to say that it happened.

And then they had to be sued in order to make them obey the law.

- [Narrator] All of this going on during the early 1940s when black men were helping fight fascism overseas in world war II.

Dr. McKenzie fought the battle of Jim Crow on the homefront.

The Courier called it the double V campaign for victory overseas and here at home.

- Our men were overseas fighting in a segregated army but they were being treated equally by the French and Italians and other Europeans.

But Americans you know, still we're not treating our men right.

We all know the stories of the great triumphs of the 99 pursuit squadron and our men who finally got their medals of honor, 50 years late.

However, our men were willing to do that for America.

But we were being treated equally at home.

And so our mission was to try to win some battles at home.

And one was to get the respect that we deserved in our own communities.

And public accommodations were supposed to serve everybody, every citizen, the laws protected us but the laws were not in force.

♪ Have you been a good little nigga ♪ ♪ Have you said yes sir yes ma'am ♪ - [Narrator] Of the mini evils perpetrated against African-Americans during the past century, lynching was the most violent and horrible.

(mumbles) the exact numbers of victims are impossible to verify.

The Tuskegee Institute report states that 4,730 people were lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1951.

♪ Have you been a good little nigga ♪ - [Narrator] Of these 3,437 were black.

And though most occurred in the South, 46 of the 50 States in this country have witnessed these reprehensible crime.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] Coatesville Pennsylvania is in many ways a typical American small town.

However, on a Sunday afternoon in 1911, Zachariah Walker a black steel worker was pulled from his hospital and burned alive.

♪ Have you been ♪ - [Narrator] Libra Carter Sr is a native of Coatesville and a former Negro League baseball player.

- You wanna talk about that one?

- [Narrator] He's also an artist whose work hangs in a small museum adjacent to his home and focuses on Jim Crow and it's impact on blacks.

♪ Have you been good little nigga ♪ ♪ Do you bow down to king James ♪ ♪ Have you been good little nigga ♪ ♪ Is everything all right here ♪ - [Narrator] For many of the people we interviewed the murder of Zachariah Walker is a difficult subject.

- My dad and Mr. Walker knew each other well.

And it hurts to talk about that stuff, hurts to talk about it.

Particularly someone that thought that anything like that, whatever happened in the city (mumbles) yeah.

But it did happen.

They burned him that's all.

Terrific man, terrific athlete, but (mumbles) like they did any other place in this...

I really don't like to talk about it myself but oh my... (upbeat music) - [Narrator] This is the Coatesville hospital building as it looks today.

The mob that lynched Zachariah Walker, rushed up these very stairs and despite pleas from the hospital staff drag Zach out to his gruesome fate.

To understand exactly what happened, we talked to a man who has researched the case.

Mike Geary, the director of the Coatesville Public Library.

- Zachariah Walker was a steelworker at the Bethlehem steel company here in town.

And he was identified as the murderer of a steel company policeman.

And on a weekend he fled the scene and he was pursued by a posse and eventually captured in a wounded condition.

And it was placed in the local Coatesville hospital.

A large Lynch mob of some 2000 people came and took him away from hospital, cross two township lines and then they proceeded to burn him to death.

He was burnt alive.

He died in the fire.

As far as I know, it's probably the single most terrible thing that's ever happened in this community.

(upbeat music) I read number of eyewitness accounts, many people were there many people over the course of time I've recalled those particular events.

And I certainly saw some (mumbles) of rumors of what went on but the newspaper coverage indicated that a number of individuals were identified as the primary motivators of the lynching, maybe 12 or 15 of them.

They were all put on trial and they were all exonerated at trial.

None of them were found guilty.

- [Narrator] The lynching of Zach Walker would not go unnoticed and brought an unwelcomed focus to Coatesville.

There was talk of revoking the town's charter.

- The kind of attention they got President Teddy Roosevelt heard about it and of course condemned the action outright as something that was you know, unacceptable behavior especially in the North, I guess we would say at the time, I think the country found that perhaps lynchings occurred in the South but not up here in the North.

And in fact that's not true.

(upbeat music) (train hooting) (bell ringing) - [Narrator] Before widespread automobile ownership and the emergence of commercial airlines, there was a time from the late 1800s until the 1950s, when Americans traveled almost exclusively by train.

The majority of passenger cars operating during this time like this fully restored one seen here at the railroad museum of Pennsylvania were owned by the Pullman Palace car company and its president George Pullman.

The service workers a board these trains were known as Pullman Porters almost exclusively male and African-Americans, the Porters were an integral part of the railroad business.

By the 1920s, over 20,000 African-Americans were working for the Pullman company as Porters and other train personnel.

Kurt bale is the archivist for the railroad museum of Pennsylvania.

- Pullman porters on average in 1931 that worked 8,000 hours a year with earn on average $77 and 50 cents a week.

So that was a very good paying job.

At it's height a polling company would offer accommodation so over 35 million people a year which would require the employment of over 9,000 Pullman porters.

So it was a fairly pervasive position in the black community.

It also afforded probably more working opportunities than you would get at another line of work.

Oftentimes a Pullman Porter would work in the lounge of the car.

It was his duty basically to wait on passengers, he would serve the meals, pour the drinks.

He would also provide the civil war, set up the table with the silver service and the China service, other times he would lay down napkins, matchbooks make sure that the menus were displayed prominently.

If a passenger needed help he would basically ring the buzzer that was equipped on the side of the car and that would bring the Porter in.

And then of course he would serve the passengers, you know whatever it was that they needed.

It was also the Pullman Porter shop of course, to make up the sleeping bags.

He would have to basically arrange all the sheets and the blankets according to the company's very strict policies, which were in writing that he was expected to follow at all times.

Pullman Porter literally had to know the number of inches that he had to fold his sheet onto the blanket.

He also had to pour the drinks sort of the, the beverage was at a certain height for instance.

The Pullman Porter also had to be proficient at cleaning clothes, pressing suits.

He was also expected to shine shoes, on board the car, help passengers on board the train, also alight from the train.

He had to be expected to be familiar with the mechanical and refrigeration systems onboard the car.

So the Pullman Porter literally did everything.

- (mumbles) today referring to (mumbles) Harper's life.

- [Narrator] Harold Hayes is a veteran reporter for KDK TV in Pittsburgh.

His grandfather Thomas Burrell was a Pullman Porter on the Pennsylvania railroad.

- He ran on the Pennsylvania railroad and his longest run for 13 years was Pittsburgh to Detroit.

He told me that the people who had the most money for the longest time were the nicest people to him.

The people who had just made their money or were just still aspiring to make their money treated him like dirt.

- And a lot of times Pullman Porters got stuck with the passengers children especially when the wife would go ahead into the buffet car.

It was up to the Pullman Porter to have to watch over the unruly children that were left behind.

And a lot of times white passengers were very condescending on the black Pullman Porters, which there was a lot of indignity that was associated with that whole era.

- He never really got into a lot of the specifics about what happened or some of the things that he went through, but he made it clear to me that he could tell a person's upbringing by the way they treated him.

And you can imagine the issue of shining shoes or making their beds.

There were a lot of opportunities for him to be or for people to try to make him feel subservient.

- A lot of times Pullman Porters were called George because of their employee by George Pullman who was the president of the Pullman company until the turn of the century, that became a racist term that was used by white passengers whenever they would call a Pullman Porter in for service.

Oftentimes they would say, "George, I need you "to come over here and get me a towel."

"Or George, I need you to look after my children "while I go ahead and dine in the car."

- I don't think many people call my grandfather George, he was a big man.

- [Narrator] A. Phillip Randolph was a newspaper publisher who saw the need for organization amongst the porters.

The brotherhood of sleeping car porters was founded in 1925.

They were the first black labor union to ever sign a collective agreement with a large US corporation.

- I saw a movie not long ago and it inspired me to go back up into the boxes and look for his brotherhood of sleeping car porters, union beds.

I couldn't find it.

I know it's up there somewhere, but all of those things, I'm proud that he was part of that.

So when I look at documentaries like that, I know my grandfather was in there as well.

- They proved to be a very powerful network from grassroots, labor and civil rights organizing.

Why, because the train stopped in every town and they served as connectors.

They carried information, they got out and they would stay in the local black YMCA or stay in local boarding houses and hotels they'd meet people from other towns.

And they'd convey information about what was happening.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] During the great migration World War II and other events that affected the nation's black population, the Pullman porters would act as couriers.

They would smuggle African-American newspapers like the "Chicago Defender" and the "Pittsburgh Courier" into the South and other areas where blacks were forbid access to the so-called inflammatory publications.

Operation of the Pullman company sleeper cars ceased in 1968.

The brotherhood of sleeping car porters represented it's members until 1978 when it merged with the brotherhood of railway and airline clicks.

A. Phillip Randolph died a year later at the age of 90.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] Jim Crow affected nearly every facet of African-American life.

And according to Dr. McKenzie, this was no accident.

- They knew what they were doing.

And I I'm afraid it's the same thing today.

If you put blacks in inferior schools you give them teachers that are not prepared, you did not give them the latest technology, you are deliberately.

And I say, it's not a mistake or just coincidental.

They are deliberately making sure you will not be prepared to participate on equal growth.

And then of course you go into well say, other kinds of activities to make a living, then they say you're not good.

You see, they have to prove that you're worthless.

And in order to do it, they have to set it up.

- [Narrator] Nowhere was Jim Crow more evident than when blacks entered the workplace.

And at one time there was no bigger workplace in Pennsylvania than the steel mills.

- The steel industry had a lot of very difficult and dangerous jobs.

And there's almost a direct correlation between how dangerous, dirty and unpleasant the job was and how many African-Americans, you'd find in it.

The worst the job, the more likely you were to find black workers there.

Working in front of a furnace, doing foundry work, hot really unpleasant dangerous work.

You'd find black workers concentrated there.

- [Narrator] Despite the advice of his parents, Oliver Montgomery like Robert Allen and so many others followed the men in their families into the mill.

- Yeah, it's labor.

(mumbles) lowest paying job in the mill, labor gang.

- Everybody worked in the steel industry.

And so I went in there not too long after coming out of high school when parents didn't want me to go there.

They always said, there's so much discrimination, things were so horrible.

The jobs for the black people is so terrible.

Don't go near that mill, go to school get your education and keep away from the mill.

But there was nothing else to do if you wanted to make any money.

Jim Crow in the North wasn't too much different than it was in the South.

And my dad and my uncles, you know, they worked in the coal plant which is we call, human destruction job, man killing job, the fumes, the gas and everything.

- I noticed that we had to do all the hard and hot work in the open hearth, working the body of the furnaces, working at what we call the checkers, crawled down in the flus, (mumbles) about three feet high and clean those out and all the hot and nasty work we had to do that mostly.

They had a black labor gang and a white labor gang.

And black labor gang cut did most dirty, hard work.

- Bottom of the rung jobs, African-American workers were usually confined there.

And in the steel industry, they're often separate lines of seniority, which meant that if you're a white person you could keep moving up the ranks.

The more seniority you got, the more chance you had to transfer into other jobs.

Many African-American workers had dead end seniority lines.

- To paint a picture where blacks were in 1948, we had the entire industry was classified.

Your job description was classified.

You had anywhere from 30 to 32 different classifications, different levels.

Job class 31 was the lowest paid and job class 32 and later on 33 were the highest paid jobs.

Primarily the blacks was a one, two, three and four.

If you were black and you were on job class four, which at that time was where I started was what you call a labor, a bricklayer labor.

That's where you were.

And it was hard to break out of that.

- I never saw a white guy working in the body of a furnace, I never saw a white guy working the cinder pitch.

We did all that work.

- And every so often those furnaces would burn out and blacks were used to go in and clean those furnaces out.

And you can imagine just, I look at the firemen sometime at all the protection they have were black shoes which were (mumbles)leggings, as (mumbles) leggings, goggles, wooden shoes, about three inches thick.

And that's what you had to put on.

You know, like a space man to go in there to clean out that red hot furnace and dig out those red hot bricks.

That's the job you had when you can only work a few minutes.

Many people, you know, passed out.

It was a horrible job.

- You had a wooden shoe you strapped onto your you know, your steel toe shoes and you had to get up in there and maybe the furnace is down maybe two days and heat be jumping up your pants, leg knee up here with a jackhammer.

And it was really, it was hot.

And we've seen checkers, I've seen furnaces going down where the checkers were so hot we had to put an asbestos hood over our head run in and grab a few work and run out.

- See the rule was those furnaces supposed to bend down three days to a week before they would send anyone in those hot furnaces are up under the ground.

That groundhogs to clean that fluid outside.

But this eager, bigger foreman, I think it was one day and he sent a bunch of guys down there.

One guy went down up under the furniture, come up.

This is why I closed the place down.

You know, it took his goggles off and his skin came out with it, that's the kind of work we used to do.

And they said you should be glad for it.

- You could have all the seniority you wanted and that helped you.

It protected your job, but you couldn't take that seniority and use it to move into another safer, cleaner, less unpleasant job, because you were stuck in a cul-de-sac in a dead end in a job that was defined as a black job.

And so that meant that we were very significant differences in quality of work life for black and for white workers in the steel as in many other heavy industries.

- They wouldn't let you help a fitter.

Well, the only thing we could do would work in the riveting gang.

Or janitor was black, you know or maybe you could help on some machines, but man said he didn't want, he didn't wanna work with you.

You couldn't work when the boss (mumbles) It made him make you look back and say what good is education in here you know what I mean.

I mean, they're educated but there's still racism.

You asked a foreman to put you with a fitter and in order to work with a fitter you had to know how to tack well.

So we asked, can you tack well?

No I can't tack well.

Well you can't do the art-making and he's gonna make sure that you don't learn how to tack (mumbles) - [Narrator] But blacks just didn't take that treatment lying down, they fought back.

The battle had many fronts.

- We were the wagon.

If you took (mumbles) with each other, we had to read the Riot Act to them, just like they read to us you know.

Even the civil rights movement like I say, we fought a dual or dual battled.

I should say a triple battle.

We fought for integration within the union, we fought for integration in the community and we fought for integration in the company.

It's difficult to get people to buck the status quo.

I used to put my car in a parking lot maybe a hundred cars there.

When I came out (mumbles) my car would be there by itself because the guides are telling me that we think your car gonna go up in here anytime, you know.

And they had a joke out about me.

They said, I pay anyone $100 to start my car.

So that's what we were up against.

And a lot of mafia oriented there.

And a lot of them crept in they would threaten you, you know we would threaten them back.

(mumbles) okay, fine.

You got a baby sister too.

So, you know so you threaten us, something happens to my buddy, I'm gonna get you buddy.

But that's the only thing they understood.

And once we got to organize, we had to watch out for each other because of this constant threat.

One of the threats we got is that if you go behind a furnace, you know, they make big steel ladles.

If we catch any of you behind then we gonna throw you the hot ladle of steel, you're gonna be nothing but a puff.

- It was a job you know, it was a job where you could make a decent living.

And I guess we were conditioned to accept that.

- Yes, they were conditioned.

And in fact, even today, there are people still conditioned you know, for Jim Crow, but we had to get through to them.

Well, we had to show them that progress was possible.

(mumbles) said that the message that he drilled in our head, you only gonna get what you can take and you're gonna keep what you could hold.

- The other side of the union movement was one of ethnic solidarity and exclusion.

So that many unions became, you could say, almost sort of hiring halls that relied on personal connections and personal references so that a white person would recommend a friend for a job, recommend someone they lived with, recommend someone from their extended family, recommend someone they went to school or to church with or someone they got to know, sitting on a neighborhood bar.

Well through most of the 20th century African-Americans and whites lived in separate neighborhoods.

They attended separate churches, they went to separate schools, they drank in separate bars and they certainly didn't intermarry or have family connections.

So as a result, there were large sectors of the workplace many jobs that systematically excluded African-Americans because they weren't part of the networks that unions relied on and employers relied on to hire.

- By taking in active part in the CBT your organization we were able to break it down.

We were able to fight a battle to move actually up in the local unions and move them up in the district.

And many blacks went on the staff.

We were able to make the union form a complete comprehensive civil rights department with a full-time director, staff and have representatives all over the country.

That that's what we were able to do and it changed quite a bit.

(upbeat music) - [Man] On your mark, get set, hula hoop, hula hoop, hula hoop (mumbles) (crowd murmuring) All right keep going, hula hoop, hula hoop, keep it going, keep it going we have four (mumbles) - Oh, it was wonderful to come here as a kid because we were limited to the places that we could go in the city and here it was like free.

We had a swimming pool when I was a kid here and you would bring your skates and we would go down and go skating at the barn.

- [Narrator] In a suburb not far from Pittsburgh, Fairview Park has been serving the African-American community when no one else would for over 60 years.

(upbeat music) - [Barbara] Oh, look at you with a pretty eye.

- [Narrator] Barbara Callaway is a retired teacher who has fond memories of Fairview Park.

- Hi, how are you?

Are you having a good time?

- [Narrator] Fairview Park existed because of Jim Crow.

But within it's protected environment kids never felt it's brutal effects.

- And you didn't deal with that at all.

You knew things that you could or could not do.

However, when you came out to Fairview Park you had an opportunity to interact with other churches and people from all the Mon Valley and the Pittsburgh area.

And it was just a good fellowship time.

- Amusement parks and dance halls and swimming pools were real battlegrounds over racial segregation.

White folks did not want to be in dance halls in roller rinks, in places where they were semi clad and wearing bathing suits and swimming they did not want to be near African-Americans.

They were afraid of the risk and possibility and danger of racial mixing, especially of young people of teenagers.

In the 1950s, Pittsburgh activists, challenged segregation in many of the amusement parks and the public swimming pools in the city and in the surrounding areas.

- [Narrator] One of those who challenged the status quo was the Reverend J Harold Hayes, the pastor of Bethlehem Baptist church.

His son recalled the fight.

- The prevailing practice apparently was that African-American churches could come to Kennywood and have their picnics there, but they could not use the pool nor could they use the dance hall.

And it says here in this article that once the heads of Kennywood were asked about it they were told that the prevailing practices would apply that they could use any of the facilities other than the swimming pool and the dance hall.

And the article mentions that my father and others said that a stand needed to be taken and so the ministers of the McKeesport Ministerial Association which was interracial, it was the Catholics the Protestants, the white churches, the black churches.

He was part of this organization, but he and some of the other African-American ministers said to the ministerial association we should take a stand here and say that this isn't right and they did.

Now I'm not certain being the age I was growing up how this eventually was resolved.

We know in this generation, that's not an issue but the common thought was that eventually there was no longer a pool at Kennywood.

And maybe that's how it was resolved I'm not certain.

But it's something that I've always shared with young people that perceive that Jim Crow was just an issue in the South when indeed it was an issue here as well.

- [Narrator] Ernest Jackson is the president of the Fairview Park Association.

- So in 1945, they bought the piece of property out here and sell them talents in Delmont 100 acres at first.

And it was a full fledged amusement with Merry- go-round, rollercoaster, swimming pool and all the activities one will find in any other park.

So that's what was the beginning more or less from the fact that the Jim Crow Laws at the time was not lying flat to go into parks where whites were owned by whites.

- [Man] On your mark, get set, go!

- Today, we don't have the amusement rides over the years with the elimination of the Jim Crow Laws the blacks were going to the more modern parts like the Kennywood and Westview park and the support for this park kind of dwindle to the point where they could not sustain the equipment for safety reasons.

So over the time all the equipment eventually eliminated from the park.

- There you go - Great (mumbles) - Today, the park is used mainly for picnics, reunions, different churches use it for different events they have here at the park, and it's still a full, it's a functional park but not as amusement park.

- [Narrator] Lawrence Mason of Delmont Pennsylvania describes himself originally as a city boy from Pittsburgh but he had his reasons for moving to the suburbs.

- I've been involved totally since about 1948 the young lady that I was courting at that particular time her father was on the board of trustees for the park and that's how I became familiar with Fairview Park was living in Pittsburgh at the time in Homewood and we used to come out with him to cut the grass and do odds and ends, you know, get on a good side of the father-in-law, you know.

And that relationship sort of developed to the point that we eventually got married, at that time the park had a restaurant building on the park and which had an apartment upstairs, above that.

We lived in the apartment then, you know sort of took care of the grounds.

The vision they were really far sighted, few individuals, I think with no funds with no resources was able to acquire this land at close to almost 200 acres.

I think we all (mumbles) them.

- [Narrator] But the Barbara Callaway and many others Fairview Park is still very important.

- I think this is important because we own this land.

Now we own it, we didn't always own it, but we own it now.

And land is an important thing to own.

It gives you a sense of who you are.

We all should own a piece of ground.

If you don't have anything, but a flower pot with some dirt in there, everyone needs to own some land.

And I tried to impress upon the young people this belongs to you.

So therefore, when we're not here any longer you will have to be the storage of this property.

Are you enjoying your hot dog?

Is it good?

Good.

(upbeat music) - Americans, especially white Americans tend to look toward the future.

Let's forget about the past.

What's past is past that's gone.

Let's look forward instead to change and to progress.

But we have to confront the troubled and unresolved past.

If we wanna move forward and progress.

Can't just pretend that history didn't happen.

You can't pretend that it doesn't have ongoing consequences.

It's there, it matters, it continues to shape and constrain people's lives and people's opportunities and choices right up to the here and now.

- It's knowledge, we don't care where it comes from, but more important we don't need to put anybody down.

And I honestly believe that if this information gets out everybody will be happy.

It must be burdensome to carry a load of hatred or a segregationist attitude or the need to discriminate against people or to treat them unfairly and unequally.

That must be a burden.

- [Thomas] The Mason-Dixon Line was the traditional boundary between North and South.

It's a reminder that Pennsylvania is a lot closer to the South than we think it is.

Pennsylvania's history has much more in common with the history of Virginia and North Carolina, Mississippi than most of us Pennsylvanians care to admit.

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