The WPA History of the Negro in Pittsburgh (ebook)
"In the 1930s, the WPA's Federal Writers' Project provided work to thousands of unemployed writers, editors, and researchers of all races. The monumental American Guide Series featured books on stats, cities, rivers, and ethnic groups, opening an unprecedented view into the lives of the American people. University of Pittsburgh English professor J. Ernest Wright was selected to compile and edit "The Negro in Pittsburgh." He assembled an impressive, racially mixed team of writers and other professionals - including newspaper editors, teachers, preachers, and social workers - but when a hostile Congress abruptly terminated funding for the program in 1939, the nearly completed project languished, almost forgotten in the depths of the Pennsylvania State Library. Never before published, The WPA History of the Negro in Pittsburgh combines the original texts with an introduction and explanatory notes by historian Laurence Glasco." "The essays in this pioneering history of African Americans in Pittsburgh were written before World War II and the economic recovery that followed the Great Depression; before the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and desegregation: before the destruction of a black cultural locus in the lower Hill District. The book, therefore, not only tells the history of African Americans in Pittsburgh from colonial times to the 1930s, but also captures the perspective of the period in which it was created."