G20: A Tale of Two Cities in Pittsburgh
A TALE OF TWO CITIES IN PITTSBURGH
Commentary by
Larry Hales, Activist and Native of Erie, PA
As the G-20 summit prepares to descend upon Pittsburgh, the city has been
thrust into the spotlight and is being highlighted for its "commitment to
employing new and green technology to further economic recovery and
development". It has been and is being denoted as the city that got it right,
where pollution has been eroded, the rivers cleaned and the jobs in industry
have thoroughly been replaced.
But this is farce. The changes are superficial and the most oppressed workers
have not recovered from the loss of steel jobs; this fact is most clearly seen
in neighborhoods like the Hill District.
While the dignitaries that represent the G-20 countries are shown a
"revitalized" downtown they will not see the conditions of neighborhoods that
surround downtown Pittsburgh .
As far as gatherings go, the starkest contrast in Pittsburgh during the G-20
Summit week will be between the glamour and glitz of the summit; the primped
and polished downtown hotels where world leaders and finance ministers will
stay on the one hand, and on the other, the Hill--about a mile away from the
G-20 Summit convention - where those protesting unemployment will be sleeping in
a tent city.
Following a march for jobs on Sun., Sept. 20, protestors will live on the Hill
throughout the week until the end of the G-20 summit. The Hill is one of the
oldest, poorest, most renowned and besieged African-American neighborhoods in
the country.
Once known for its nightlife and jazz clubs, today the streets of the
Hill--where famed playwright August Wilson was born--have more than a few
boarded houses and failed restaurants, small businesses and neighborhood
stores. Parts of the Hill look more like the poorest neighborhoods in
Port-au-Prince or the Gaza Strip than a U.S. city.
Most young people of working age who live on the Hill are not only unemployed
most have never had a job and there are fewer and fewer low wage jobs available
to them. From as far back as the mid-1950s, real estate interests have been
working hard to push the native-poor and working-class inhabitants out of the
Hill to make way for the more well-to-do. While that process is not over the
rich, right now, are winning the war for control of the Hill.
I was not born in Pittsburgh , but in another part of western Pennsylvania -
Erie , Pa. - where the conditions are different but similar. I was born in 1976
and spent my first 15 years there. My parents worked in factories, my mother
making ceramics and my father still for GE Transportations, where he is
anticipating retiring after 40 long years making locomotives and locomotive
parts.
Both of my parents migrated to Erie from southern Mississippi . They were in
their late teens and neither had a high school education. During the period
when my parents migrated from the south there were many thousands more Black
people who did the same; fleeing the repressive and racist conditions in the
south in hopes of better paying jobs and better social relations.
By the time I became cognitively aware, conditions in Western Pennsylvania and
Eastern Ohio had already begun to change. The well-paying jobs in the factories
were beginning to dry up and working people in what has now become known as the
Rust Belt were being cast off from their jobs in the tens of thousands as
deindustrialization set in, sweeping the land like a foreboding cloud of
doom.
I can recall the looks on the faces of children I attended school with. Their
parents would lose their jobs and though as children we could not completely
comprehend the consequences of our parents' unemployment, the despair on their
faces was enough. It's like a child who falls but looks around for the reaction
of the adults before deciding whether to laugh or cry.
I was not aware then - few of the children of factories workers really were - of
what was happening in Pittsburgh, the shuttering of steel plants because of
technology or outsourcing. Pittsburgh is much larger than Erie an has a richer
history of struggle but is also a city that had long been under the sway of the
Mellons, Carnegies and other super-rich who made their fortunes off of the
exploitation of working people; even hiring armed thugs like the Pinkertons to
shoot down striking workers.
Pittsburgh , like Erie and most U.S. Midwest cities, where 20 percent of the
population is Black, is largely segregated. But at least Black people had the
Hill. Back in the day, the Hill was the place that Black steelworkers could
make a better life for their families than their parents could make for them.
The hope of those on the Hill who are trying to hold on to all they have is
that the jobs march and tent city will help them even the odds a little against
the gentry.
People from as far away as North Carolina , New York , Miami , Detroit ,
Minneapolis and even California will be meeting on the Hill in front of
Monumental Baptist Church at Wylie and Soho St. at 2 p.m., Sun., Sept. 20 for
the march for jobs. The marchers, who are expected to be in the thousands, will
march to Freedom Corner at Crawford and Centre St. where there is a monument to
civil rights activists and leaders.
After Black residents were pushed out of what was once called the lower Hill to
make way for the development of a stadium, Freedom Corner is where the Black
community rose up and proclaimed that the developers would not be able to push
beyond that point. Freedom Corner is where thousands gathered in the summer of
1963 to board buses to travel to the historic civil rights march in Washington
, D.C. It is also where angry and shocked people gathered on that terrible day
in April 1968 when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. There could not be
a more appropriate location in Pittsburgh for the jobs march to rally at
because it was Dr. King's vision of a second civil rights movement, a movement
for the right of all to decent paying jobs that the civil rights leader
dedicated the final weeks of his life to. The goal of the jobs march is to
revive that vision. After the rally, many will return to Monumental Baptist
Church , the site of the "Bail Out The Unemployed" tent city, to get ready for
their first night underneath the sky.
** For an updates schedule of events,
transportation details, and more information, see http://bailoutpeople.org/g20information.shtml.
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