I can remember seeing this book, Lemon Swamp and Other Places: A Carolina Memoir, on bookstore shelves while living in Atlanta in the 1980s and 1990s. For whatever reason I never bought it or read it. That all changed a few months ago after I began researching a “forgotten” Pittsburgh Negro Leagues ballpark and the people involved in its development, etc. It turns out that Louis Bellinger (1891-1946), the only licensed and practicing Black architect in Pittsburgh between 1919 and his death in 1946, designed and built the stadium in 1920. And, he built Greenlee Field a dozen years later. This book is a memoir of the extended Bellinger family and their lives in South Carolina. Louis left Charleston in the teens and ended up in Pittsburgh in 1919. His father and brothers joined him by 1926. But it’s not just a window into the architect’s life. It also offers a glimpse into the life of Walter Bellinger (1901-1965), Louis’s younger brother.
Yesterday, we said goodbye to our friend Lillian Cooper Wiggins. The memorial was held at Arlington National Cemetery and the hall was filled to capacity with family and friends. I was honored and humbled to be among the many people Lil invited into her life and to be there to help celebrate that life.
Lil’s daughter asked me to draw on my many interviews with her mom to help write the obituaries published in The Washington Post and The Washington Informer. My words were unmistakable in the beautiful program Karen compiled to celebrate her mom’s life. I was fortunate to have so many of Lil’s own words to share in my tribute to her. Words like these: “My principle was to be the best I could to write as truthful as I could.” Good advice for a historian and writer.
Lil was a force of nature and one of the best people I have had the honor to know and befriend. She had a front row seat to history as Washington transformed from a Jim Crow Southern town into an iconic Chocolate City. As she transformed herself from a midwestern transplant into a centerpiece of Washington’s social, political, and economic life, Lil moved from that front seat onto center stage. Lil went from writing history’s first draft as an influential journalist to becoming part of history because of her writing and so much more.
“From the Desk of Lil” was the column that Lillian Cooper Wiggins wrote for the Washington Afro-American newspaper.
Lillian Cooper Wiggins died October 26 at age 92. She was my friend and the inspiration for much of the work that I have done since 2011 when I began writing about gentrification and racism in Decatur, Ga. I’m a historian and I first met Lillian in the pages of a history book of sorts, Dream City, the landmark 1994 work by Washington, D.C., journalists Harry Jaffe and Tom Sherwood. It’s a deep dive into the politics and culture of late-twentieth-century Washington wrapped around the story of Mayor-for-Life Marion Barry.
Dream City is required reading for anyone working and living in Washington. I first picked it up in 2007 while working as a consultant to the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC). I had been hired to do documentary research and dozens of oral history interviews to support author Tony Proscio in writing his book documenting the history of the DC LISC office.
Lillian Cooper Wiggins aboard Air Force 2 while covering Hubert Humphrey’s trip to Africa. Photo courtesy of Lillian Cooper Wiggins.
Jaffe and Sherwood introduced readers in Washington and beyond to Lillian’s best known contribution to Washington history. In the 1970s, she began writing about what has become widely known as “The Plan.” Jaffe later wrote, “We can thank Lillian Wiggins for first articulating this particular conspiracy theory [as a] columnist for the Washington Afro-American.” Jaffe got some things wrong in that 2010 Washington Examiner article, but the gist of his observation is correct: Lillian did expose many generations of journalists, historians, and sociologists to “The Plan.”
It’s not too late to register for Tuesday evening’s program, The Invisible Syndicate: Pittsburgh’s Jewish Racketeers, 1920-1980. It’s at the New Light Congregation in Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood. The program is free but registration is required. Details at this link: https://newlightcongregation.org/events/new-light-lecture-series-the-invisible-syndicate-pittsburghs-jewish-racketeers-1920-1980/.
Like New York City, Cleveland, and Detroit, Pittsburgh has a significant Jewish organized crime history. Eastern European Jews living in the Hill District collaborated with other immigrants — Southern Blacks and Italians — to create informal economies in a city where racism, antisemitism, and generalized xenophobia erected barriers to good jobs, housing, and financial institutions. A small group of Hill District Jews went into bootlegging during Prohibition and then gambling. By 1930, a loosely organized Jewish syndicate occupied a top tier of Pittsburgh’s vice underworld. This presentation explores the social history of Pittsburgh’s less violent counterpart to Cleveland’s “silent syndicate” and Detroit’s “Purple Gang.” These Jewish vice entrepreneurs helped to create some of Pittsburgh’s most enduring brands, including the Pittsburgh Steelers, and were integral to the city’s early entertainment sector as theater and nightclub owners. The program’s arc begins in the Hill District and ends in Squirrel Hill where the invisible syndicate’s leaders had their homes and gambling clubs.
Come for the stories and the history. Who knows, you might even find out how Meyer Sigal got his nickname!
Earlier this week I got a Facebook message from a friend who lives in Decatur, Ga.: “More construction in Decatur Oakview Rd.”
I am used to messages like this. They have arrived via email, Twitter, Facebook, and text for the past decade. Many of them come from people like my 60-something Decatur friend: the senders are Black, elderly, and many have been lifelong Decatur residents. They include photos of buildings being demolished and the McMansions that replace them. They also include comments about displacement and racism. For years these folks have tried to get relief from city officials and to get their stories told by the press.
Unlike local bloggers, overworked newspaper reporters, and disinterested broadcast journalists, I listened and I wrote. A lot. I earned the trust of a lot Decatur residents while also angering many others invested in the myth of a liberal and progressive city that only exists in their minds and the city’s flashy advertising campaigns.
The site shown in the message I received is located on Oakview Road, between Second and Third avenues, just inside the Decatur city limits. Until last year, it was one of the Oakhurst neighborhood’s few surviving twentieth century commercial nodes. The one-story buildings occupied by a beauty parlor and grocery store had been community fixtures for decades.
Oakhurst Grocery (1529 Oakview Road) and “Purple Building” (1531 Oakview Road), May 2012.
In the spring of 2021, a group of Decatur, Ga., residents approached local institutions with a request for information about the history of Juneteenth in the city. They wrote to the DeKalb History Center and to city officials, including assistant city manager Linda Harris.
Harris replied to an initial query by directing the group to the City’s “Historic Decatur” web page and to a page dedicated to the history of Decatur’s erased Beacon community. It’s curious that Harris would direct someone asking about Black history in Decatur to the “Historic Decatur” page because the information there only discusses white history and Black history is completely absent. In fact, the page is such a clearcut example of whitewashed history that I use in in my lectures, one as recently as August 6, 2022.
Slide used in Black history presentation delivered at Berry College, Rome, Ga., Aug. 6, 2022.
By many accounts, Pittsburgh-raised gambling entrepreneur Jakie Lerner was a very generous man — when the odds were in his favor. Like many of his peers who relied on betting in one form or another to make a living, Lerner had his ups and his downs.
Jakie Lerner
When he was up, he liked to give friends and relatives gifts. He gave them dogs, cashmere sweaters, and jewelry. Lots of jewelry.
Last month I interviewed the daughter of another Pittsburgh gambling entrepreneur, a smalltime numbers operator who plied his trade in the city’s Strip District. He was friends with Lerner and Lerner’s daughter was friends with the woman, then about 10 years old. Lerner was a frequent visitor to their Millvale home during the summers he spent in Pittsburgh visiting from Tucson. Lerner caught up with friends and relatives, gambled, and checked in on the Hill District numbers rackets he oversaw remotely from Arizona.
In the interview with the Strip District numbers man’s daughter, she told me about one memorable 1950s visit by Lerner to their home. Lerner had bought a gold watch for his own daughter and he showed it to the friend’s daughter, asking if she liked it.
The young girl swooned. Seeing her reaction, Lerner gave her the watch and said he’d buy another for his daughter. Still living in Tucson, Lerner’s daughter told me in interviews in 2019 and 2020 that her father had given her jewelry. After speaking with the woman raised in the Strip District and Millvale, I texted Lerner’s daughter and asked if she recalled getting a watch from him in the 1950s.
“He did buy me several watches through the years but this one might’ve been a Hamilton that had diamonds around it. I still have the watch I don’t wear it,” she replied.
It’s difficult to explain how many accounts of harassment, intimidation, & retaliation that I collected over a decade of research on Decatur, Ga. Here’s one account that I didn’t have to elicit — a resident volunteered it in a public meeting.
August 6, 2022: “Heirs, History, and Land: Recovering and Conserving Black Spaces and Stories.” Featured presentation, Shelton Family Settlement at Possum Trot Family Reunion and Historical Marker Unveiling, Berry College, Rome, Georgia. (Delivered remotely.)
July 2022: Agnes Scott College is awarded a $750,000 Mellon Foundation grant to conduct research, community engagement, and develop curriculum on race and racism in Decatur, Ga. The grant application relied on my research; the institution wrote that if the grant is awarded that the college would seek to hire me as a researcher and adjunct professor. It would have been nice if Agnes Scott College had consulted with me prior to using my name and my credentials in the application. Needless to say, I did not collaborate with Agnes Scott College on its project.
Obsessed is probably too strong of a word to describe my interest in the October 1934 turf war among two Washington, D.C. gambling entrepreneurs. But, I have had a very keen interest in the case ever since 2019 when I first read about it while working on the Talbot Avenue Bridge Historic American Engineering Records (HAER) report. It had been nearly four years since my first interviews with an aging Washington, D.C., former journalist had turned me onto the historical significance of numbers gambling. By the time that my research took me to the Takoma Park, Md., driveway where a notorious mob hitman gunned down newspaper employee Allen Wilson, I was hooked.
The free virtual program covers the history of racketeering and numbers gambling in the D.C. burbs, from the Black gambling entrepreneurs who ran the numbers in rural African American communities throughout the mostly rural suburban county to the white D.C. kingpins who made their homes there to complicate law enforcement efforts to rein them in. The so-called “Mistaken Identity Murder” caps the program as I connect the dots on one of the D.C. area’s most sensational gangland killings.
The alleged hitman, Tony “The Stinger” Cugino, was one of the East Coast’s most feared killers. In my “Squirrel Hill by the Numbers” walking tours, participants visit the site where Cugino allegedly dumped the body of one of the loose ends he cleaned up earlier in 1934 before killing Wilson. With Cugino, it’s always “allegedly” because he never made it to trial, for the Wilson murder or any of the others attributed to him. The official reports were that he hanged himself in 1935 in a New York City jail cell after the police finally caught up with him. By that time he had been suspected in hits all throughout the mid-Atlantic and upper South, including another infamous Montgomery County murder case (the “Chevy Chase Car Barn Murders“) just a few months after Wilson’s “Mistaken Identity Murder.”
Come for the numbers history and stay for the murder!
Baltimore Sun, Oct. 23, 1934.
Beyond the Zoom room
The Silver Spring program is the second of three lectures on racketeering history I’m giving this month. Pittsburghers can drop in on “Cold Storage and Real Luck” at the Lawrenceville Historical Society July 20. There were mobsters on 1500 block of Penn Ave. in Pittsburgh and the story of the city’s giant refrigerator building and Pittsburgh’s most aptly named bar has several good rackets chapters.
On August 1, just a few days before Pittsburgh’s infamous 805 episode‘s 92nd anniversary, I’m speaking to the Moon Township Historical Society. Tony “The Stinger” and his 1934 visit to Pittsburgh may or may not be on the program but lots of Steel City vice will be.
Wanted Poster for Tony “The Stinger” Cugino. United States Postal Inspection Service Bulletin, Oct. 2003.
