In 2020, public historians and preservationists were all atwitter after the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation announced the Monuments Project: a five-year, $250 million effort to create more honest commemorative landscapes in the United States. The foundation’s namesake, Andrew W. Mellon (1855-1937), was an early member of a Pittsburgh industrial and financial family whose ranks include bankers, lawyers, judges, and politicians. Andrew’s resume includes banking; distilling; and stints as the U.S Secretary of the Treasury and Ambassador to the U.K.

The Mellons and the institutions associated with them have long been hailed as cornerstones in American history. Yet, how well do the Mellons fare when their ties to slavery, segregation, and white supremacy are examined? In 2019, Inside Philanthropy explored this question in a blog post by Julie Travers:

For example, a recent $1 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to the College of William and Mary is one example of how a funder can approach the legacy of slavery within the humanities. It will support research and education pertaining to the college’s history with enslaved people. During my research for this article, I discovered that several Mellon family ancestors enslaved people, which raises interesting questions about how a foundation can approach this issue in its own history.

The foundation declined the blog post author’s request for comment. The philanthropy article includes some solid research, but I question why it arbitrarily limited its examination of the Mellons to slavery. What about the family’s roles in American society after the Civil War? There’s a whole lot of territory left unexplored, including mortgage lending discrimination and other structural racism reinforcing discriminatory practices that the family’s financial interests promoted.

The Mellons are American heroes. That evidence is abundantly clear in their hometown, Pittsburgh, where the commemorative landscape is filled with monuments to them: place names, a park, public art, buildings, and even a university.

In these days of truth and reconciliation, can the Andrew Mellon Foundation accomplish its goals to reshape the American commemorative landscape and “recalibrate” narratives about our shared national past without first taking ownership, telling the truth, about its namesakes? I don’t think so and one episode from the family’s history underscores why.

Andrew inherited his wealth and status from his father, Thomas Mellon (1813-1908). Thomas Mellon began his career practicing law in Pittsburgh in the 1830s. In 1859. Allegheny County residents elected Thomas Mellon as a judge in the county’s Court of Common Pleas. He served for a decade before retiring in 1869.

Shortly before Mellon left the bench, he participated in a case involving the application of an attorney who wanted to join the Allegheny County Bar to practice law in the city. George B. Vashon (1824-1878) was born in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. His father, John Vashon, had served in the War of 1812 and became a wealthy Pittsburgh entrepreneur and nationally prominent abolitionist.

The Vashon Case

George Vashon attended school in Pittsburgh and he became the first Black to graduate from Oberlin College (in 1844). He read the law under Pittsburgh attorney Walter Forward and in 1847 Vashon applied for membership in the Allegheny County Bar. The Free Soil Courier and Liberty Gazette (in Burlington, Vermont) reported on Vashon’s 1847 bar application:

This gentleman graduated at Oberlin Collegiate Institute some three years since, with much honor. He is a son of a very highly respectable colored man of Pittsburgh. He is a very good linguist—familiar with many of the ancient as well as modern languages. He has natural talents of a high order, and his moral character is unimpeachable.

Why wasn’t Vashon admitted to the Allegheny County Bar in 1847? “Not because he was not every way qualified, but for the want of a change in the color of his skin,” the newspaper wrote. “If God had painted him white he would have been admitted.”

Vashon left Pittsburgh after the experience and moved to New York. He was admitted to the bar there and used the credential to practice law in Haiti for a few years before returning to the United States. Vashon briefly moved back to Pittsburgh before moving to Syracuse, New York, where he practiced law.

Vashon followed his father’s lead and became an influential abolitionist writer and speaker. He left the law and became a teacher. In the 1850s, he was again back in Pittsburgh working as an educator. In 1863, Vashon became president of Avery College, a Black institution in Allegheny City (now Pittsburgh’s Northside).

After the Civil War, the law again beckoned. In 1867, he applied for a second time to join the Allegheny County Bar. He was rejected a second time; again, his race was the only barrier to practicing law in Pittsburgh. “The Court was unanimously of the opinion that the application should be refused,” the Pittsburgh Daily Post reported.

The decision followed months of debate and argument before the courts. The prevailing questions raised by those who opposed admitting Vashon involved the legal status of African Americans after the Civil War. Blacks in 1867 and 1868 could not vote nor could they be elected to public office because of provisions in the state’s 1838 Constitution. Opponents also questioned Vashon’s citizenship.

Judge P.C. Shannon, who represented Vashon in his bid, made an eloquent case for Vashon’s eligibility to practice law in Pittsburgh. After laying out Vashon’s credentials and describing his character, Shannon argued, “The qualifications for admission are, that the applicant shall be a citizen of the United States and of full age.” He added, “I would like to hear an argument on that point, as it has been intimated that the question is susceptible to argument. The Civil Rights Bill declares that all persons born in any State or territory are citizens.” A little more than three months later, the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution (the “Civil Rights bill” Shannon mentioned) was ratified.

Mellon’s Indictment

The Pittsburgh residents who opposed Vashon’s bar membership included prominent attorneys and judges, including Thomas Mellon. In a full-throated endorsement of white supremacy, segregation, and states’ rights, Mellon exposed his true feelings about African Americans. “I see nothing but evil likely to result to both races from their being kept and encouraged to remain promiscuously inhabiting the same territory, I would do nothing whatever to promote it,” Mellon said.

He statement continued:

I would have colored men practice as attorneys, sit on juries, hold courts and exercise the right of suffrage—not here, however, but among themselves—in some part or section of the Union where white men would be under the same disabilities among them which they are liable to among whites. So far am I from doing anything to encourage the races to remain together, that I would do everything short of violence or harshness to facilitate and promote their separation. If the colored race is ever to be placed on the way to social progress—if it is ever to attain the rights and privileges of manhood—it must be placed in a position where it can enjoy true self respect. This never can be done as long as that race remains dispersed among the white race …

… To expect by law to place a sparse colored population, scattered among a numerous white population, on a footing of social equality with the whites, seems to me impossible, and it is only surprising that it should be sought to retain the two races together by shaping our laws and institutions to that end.

Mellon’s opposition to Vashon’s bar membership went well beyond the question of whether one individual met all of the legal criteria to practice law. And, it exceeded any policy position he might have had regarding admitting African Americans to the bar. His statement laid bare his deeply held beliefs that there was no place in the United States for racial equality.

Fast forward about 150 years to 21st century Pittsburgh. It’s a place where Mellon and his kin are widely and uncritically celebrated. And, it’s also a place where African Americans struggle to achieve equity in education, healthcare, and housing. It is a place where Black bodies and Black history have been erased. In recent years, though Pittsburgh frequently gets kudos as being America’s most “livable city,” Black residents add an important caveat: “except for African Americans.”

Pittsburgh didn’t get this way overnight. It took decades of racism beginning with seemingly small acts like granting a well-educated Black man admission to the bar to practice law here. Workplace discrimination, redlining, inadequate schools, an inequitable criminal justice system, and environmental racism all built on the foundation laid by Mellon and his contemporaries. Yet, Pittsburgh celebrates them and it has all but erased Vashon and many others from histories and the commemorative landscape.

Where can we find the George Vashon Monument or Vashon Park or the Vashon scholarships in law and education? What about the Vashon House Museum?

We can’t find them because they don’t exist. And that, along with the uncritical celebration of folks like Thomas Mellon, contributes to Pittsburgh’s challenges in becoming a livable and equitable city for all of its people. Over the past year, during the pandemic and in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, Pittsburgh has sought to find a path towards healing and racial reconciliation. For there to be reconciliation, though, there must be truth. Last October NPR’s Rachel Martin interviewed Rev. Mark Sills in a story about truth and reconciliation movements. “It’s difficult to heal trauma without truth-telling. You have to uncover and acknowledge what has been done wrong before you can fully move forward,” Sills said.

It’s time to discuss the roles that the Mellons and others played in creating the through-line from George Vashon to Hill District ghettoization and urban renewal to Jonny Gammage to East Liberty gentrification to Antwon Rose. And, it’s time for George Vashon’s monument.

Postscript(s)

Shortly after Pittsburgh rejected George Vashon, he left the city for good. He moved to Washington, D.C., and began practicing law there. “He was admitted [to the DC Bar] on the same credentials as he was excluded a few days ago from the bar of this county,” the Pittsburgh Weekly Gazette reported.

Vashon went on to work for the Freedman’s Bureau and he represented the agency in the District courts. The agency’s leader, a white military officer named Oliver O. Howard, quickly appointed Vashon as the first professor in a new institution: Howard University.

After experiencing some of Washington’s homegrown brand of anti-Black racism, Vashon left the District for Mississippi where he became a professor of Ancient and Modern Languages at Alcorn State University. He died in 1878. More than a 100 years later, Vashon’s great-grandson, Philadelphia attorney Nolan Atkinson, in 2010 lobbied successfully for the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to grant Vashon posthumous membership in the bar.

On July 27, 2010, Pennsylvania Representative Patrick J. Murphy celebrated Vashon in Congress: “I rise today to honor George B. Vashon, a 19th century Pennsylvanian who distinguished himself as an African-American educator, abolitionist, poet, and activist, and who earlier this year was posthumously admitted to the bar 163 years after he first tried to break this barrier.” Murphy added, “I am pleased to share this notable achievement of an outstanding, if lesser- known American—George B. Vashon. It is also a privilege to recognize the important efforts that resulted in his becoming the first African American to gain admission to legal practice in Pennsylvania.”

I didn’t discover Vashon’s story while researching Black history in Pittsburgh. Though I have worked in and around Pittsburgh history since 1992, I didn’t learn much about Vashon until recently. I had seen summaries of the family’s significant story in various histories like The WPA History of The Negro In Pittsburgh (2004), but I hadn’t read any detailed biographical accounts until this year.

While searching for newspaper coverage of nuisance complaints stemming from slaughterhouses and meat byproducts processors in the former Allegheny City, I came across an article published in 1868. The article was about George Vashon and it was published in the Pittsburgh Commercial Appeal just days after an Allegheny County Court decided a case involving a glue maker accused of fouling the air in proximity to his rendering plant.

John R. Large (c. 1817-1902) was one of the Pittsburgh attorneys who opposed Vashon’s second bar membership application. Large explained his opposition:

I don’t want to associate with the black man, much less practice law with him. Sometimes I get on the wrong side of a case, and I don’t want to be placed in such a position that people on the street may say “Well, Large, you are a great lawyer to be beating by a negro.” It is great absurdity to think of admitting a negro to the bar. Such a thing would be a nuisance.

And then Large siad, “It had all the odors of a nuisance, equal to that out at Butcher’s Run, which your Honors recently ordered to be abated” [emphasis added].

Large’s statement made me want to know more about Vashon and here we are. Something does smell about George Vashon’s experiences, but I don’t think it was the nuisance that lawyer Large had in mind back in 1868.

© 2021 D.S. Rotenstein

 

 

 

Shortlink for this post: https://wp.me/p1bnGQ-3Iv