Category Archives: History

The Atlanta Bug

Posted on by
2

Introduction

Sometime in the late 1920s or even as late as 1930, numbers gambling arrived in Atlanta. Who brought the street lottery to the city or how appear to have been forgotten or erased. It could have been a Pullman porter or a baseball player or a musician or an itinerant laborer who taught Atlantans how to run a numbers racket. Or, it might have been a white gambler taking advantage of fertile new territory. However and whenever numbers made its way to Atlanta, it became an integral part of Black life and the white underworld just like it had in most every other city and town in the United States by 1940. This post shines a little light into a dark corner in Atlanta’s past to reveal the city’s bug men (and women).

Atlanta Constitution headline, October 21, 1968.

In Atlanta, the players and the men and women in the sporting life — the backers, writers, and runners — called the numbers racket “the bug.” It’s a catchy name that stuck and by 1932, when newspapers began reporting on Atlanta police officers arresting numbers runners and writers, that’s what reporters called it.[1]  Within a decade, numbers gambling employed hundreds of Atlantans and was a profitable business that historians won’t find discussed in any of the city’s boosterist literature. Continue reading →

Thomas Mellon: Segregationist and White Supremacist

Posted on by
Reply

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.

Advertisement for John Vashon’s business, Pittsburgh Weekly Gazette, June 26, 1832.

Continue reading →

Prayer chapels

Posted on by
Reply

Prayer chapels. These two rural roadside buildings competed for passersby’s souls. One belongs to a church, the other was a nightclub.

two "chapels"

The church was built in 1867 and it served farmers and coal miners. The nightclub dates to at least 1931. It served the same crowd in addition to travelers and city dwellers. New owners converted the nightclub into apartments after World War II. Some locals found that very convenient.

“I got married in the church across the street and you could do your wedding over there and honeymoon across the street,” one man told me earlier this year. The life-long resident, in his eighties, quickly added, “I did not do that, but I’ve heard different ones talk about it.”

I asked another longtime resident if the nightclub across the street, with its liquor and dancing, ever caused any friction with the church. “Oh it’s Methodist. I mean we’re Methodist. We’re Scottish. We drink. We dance. It’s not like it was, you know, Baptist,” she explained.

Most folks still alive who remember the nightclub are in their eighties and nineties. They were children with children’s memories of a place they could not go to. But, they could hear the music. One man, now 80, explained, “They wouldn’t let me over there. I mean I heard the music. I went to that church, you know, that’s the church that I went to as a kid.” His family moved away when he was about eight.

The nearest city is about six miles away. For much of the time the nightclub operated, entrepreneurs from the city and another a little farther up the highway rented the building where they hosted bands and served refreshments, liquid and solid. There was dancing and some history was made. But if you’re driving down the highway, there isn’t much there now to catch your eye and your interest. Yet, if you’re persistent enough the stories will flow and the juxtaposed buildings might just inspire you to dig just a little deeper ….

© 2021 D.S. Rotenstein

 

Counting numbers

Posted on by
Reply

As the rest of the nation focuses on election returns, I’m going to spend a few minutes on some different numbers. These numbers were published in newspapers throughout the United States and racketeers co-opted them to calculate a daily lottery number. The “numbers racket” sprung from the hope that a penny, nickel, dime, or quarter bet would yield wins that equaled or exceeded a week’s pay.

Yet, factory workers, government clerks, housewives, and even schoolchildren picked three-digit numbers six days a week losing much more over the years than they ever won. Starting in the years after the Civil War, the game was called “policy.” In the 1920s, a new nationwide numbers racket spread through cities and small towns that relied on daily reports from the New York Clearing House published in newspapers.

Cumberland Evening Times, March 21, 1930.

Folks picked their numbers using birthdates, things they heard on the radio and read in comic strips, and suggestions they got from psychics or in the many “dream books” and “hot numbers” pamphlets that circulated. Lottery dates, however, remained among the most popular ways to pick a lucky three-digit number.

Typical newspaper numbers tips published in newspapers.

For example, take Monday July 14, 1930. In Pittsburgh, that seemed like a good bet and many bettors put their change on a winning combination drawn from the actual date, 714. Panic ensued as the city’s numbers bankers failed to pay the winners.

The Pittsburgh Press July 17, 1930.

Can you spot the three-digit combination used as the winning number that hot summer day in Pittsburgh?

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, July 15, 1930.

© 2020 D.S. Rotenstein

The “Big Six”: Pittsburgh racketeer Israel Mattes

Posted on by
Reply

Welcome back to #Mobsburgh.

Israel Mattes was born in Russia and he arrived in Pittsburgh in 1906, along with his mother and four brothers. Abraham Mattes, Esther’s husband and Israel’s father, had come to the city three years earlier. Within 20 years, Israel and his younger brother Nathan became two of the city’s best known Jewish racketeers. Two other brothers, Ben and Sam, also had brushes with the law. This post explores Israel Mattes’s short life and tragic death in a dark Squirrel Hill parking garage. Continue reading →

Pittsburgh’s Kid Angel

Posted on by
1

Stories circulated for years in Pittsburgh about the exploits of a Jewish gangster known as “Kid” Angel.  During the 1920s and 1930s, Angel  and his gambling exploits were legendary. “Over town there’s a lad who has been active around the bookie shops where the race track fans pick the horses,” wrote Post-Gazette investigative reporter Ray Sprigle in 1936. ” [Harry] Angel is his name, but everyone knows him as Kid Angel.”

1701 Centre.jpeg

The corner of Centre Avenue and Arthur Street in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, April 2020. In the 1920s, Harry “Kid” Angel had a billiards hall and gambling den at this location.

This visit to #MobsBurgh re-introduces Kid Angel to Pittsburgh readers. Continue reading →

Fenced Out: Enclosure and Racism in Montgomery County, Maryland

Posted on by
2

This is a dispatch from deep within the enforced social distancing imposed by the 2020 coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

In 2006, a Montgomery County, Maryland, homeowner placed a chain across an unnamed and unsurfaced road to restrict access to her subdivision. Known locally as “Farm Road,” the narrow corridor provided access to a small African American community settled during Reconstruction. The Farm Road case became the latest example in the suburban Washington, D.C., county of more than a million people where whites have closed off roads leading to Black homes.

Maryland-National Capital Planning Commission “Address Book.” Addresses crossed out in the right portion of the map are along the “Farm Road.”

Farm Road, 2016.

Though Farm Road has received a lot of attention since 2006, the other cases of exclusionary enclosure in Montgomery County are less well known. This post explores a few other examples that antedate Farm Road.

The Hyson homestead in the Burnt Mills part of Silver Spring and the Jackson family driveway fence are two known precedents that likely represent a much larger sample of episodes where white folks erected barriers to Black spaces. I learned about these two examples during interviews about African American hamlets that I conducted between 2016 and 2018. This post is derived from those interviews and from the limited documentary evidence that survives. Continue reading →

The Jim Crow pet cemetery

Posted on by
2

In Jim Crow Montgomery County, Maryland, it was easier for white folks’ pets to get a respectful burial than it was for the county’s African Americans. The indignity is compounded when you factor in the conditions of many Black cemeteries in Montgomery County versus the Aspin Hill pet cemetery. Many Black cemeteries have been abandoned and overgrown. Others, like Bethesda’s River Road Moses Cemetery, have been paved over.

Montgomery Preservation, Inc., a historic preservation advocacy group recently announced that it was giving its prestigious Wayne Goldstein advocacy award to someone for “documentation of, advocacy for preservation of historic Aspin Hill Pet Cemetery.”

Continue reading →

Ephemera: Barbershop

Posted on by
Reply

The editor of a monthly Pittsburgh neighborhood newspaper recently asked me to cover a benefit being held at a local cafe. The benefit was to raise money for a customer battling stage 4 brain cancer.

Naturally, I had to ask about the building’s history. The owners proudly told me that the building they lovingly rehabilitated in 2017 was used for more than a century as a barbershop. One of them even described the meticulous research he had done to confirm what nearby residents had told him.

Advertisement, Pittsburgh Daily Post, November 2, 1912.

Continue reading →

A son of Moses in Pittsburgh’s North Side

Posted on by
Reply

Introduction

Moses Order logo, c. 1887.

I first “met” Henry White in 2017 while researching a suburban Washington, D.C., cemetery. White was a founder and the namesake of White’s Tabernacle No. 39 of the Ancient United Order of Sons and Daughters, Brothers and Sisters of Moses. Henry (sometimes called “Harry” in historical records) was born c. 1847 in North Carolina. By the late 1870s, he was married and living in an African American hamlet in the District of Columbia established by free Blacks in the 1830s.

Henry White and his wife, Clara, had several children during their marriage. After Henry died, one of their children moved to Allegheny City, Pennsylvania. Henry White left no diaries or photographs and he died intestate. His traces in the historical record are slim, but compelling. While searching for information that would help me to understand Henry White and his time in Washington, I found a 1930s legal case in which his kin were named as defendants in litigation brought to clear the title to properties in the former hamlet where Henry and Clara raised their children. Among the briefs and depositions were papers filed by William Miles White, a resident of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. He was the same “Miles White” who was just a few months old in June of 1870 when a census enumerator visited Henry and Clara White’s rented Tenallytown (Tenleytown) home.

I finished the cemetery research and its results were presented in a report submitted to the descendants of the people associated with the White’s Tabernacle cemetery and agencies in Montgomery County, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. William Miles White and his life in Pennsylvania became an open question to follow up on later. Later arrived in 2019 when we moved back to Pittsburgh.

Like his parents, Miles White left few traces in the historical record. But also like his father, what evidence he did leave raises some intriguing questions about where he lived and how he fit into complicated racialized urban and suburban landscapes. This post is a step towards answering those questions. Continue reading →