The Shadow of the Plantation

Pittsburgh lies fifty miles north of the Mason Dixon line, the accepted dividing line between those two great districts of the nation known as the North and the South. Below this line lies Dixie, the Old South, the Deep South, the once Solid South, dominated by the plantation with its one-crop system of agriculture. Here lies the Kingdom of Jim Crow, with its Black Belt, sharecroppers, backdoor movies, Jim Crow streetcars and trains, disenfranchised citizens, and lynch law. North of this line are the chief industrial centers of the country, a dozen cities in which the Negro people have developed communities such as Harlem, the South Side of Chicago, South Philadelphia, and the Hill in Pittsburgh. To these settlements have migrated hundreds of thousands of southern Negroes. Here they vote and serve on juries, send representatives to Congress and state legislatures, participate in county and city government, publish newspapers, attend school and college with their white neighbors, ride unrestricted on train and streetcar, attend the same theaters and movies. The Negro people are one of the many national groups that make Pittsburgh dynamic. In streets, shops and foundries, in parks, churches and concert halls one sees almost every race and nation, hears almost every tongue spoken—white, yellow, black, red. Turk, West Indian, Japanese, Mexican, Chinese American, French, Finn, Magyar, Slav, Welsh and Irish inhabit their little sections and preserve their customs, traditions and languages while they become active citizens. Of every five people making their home in Pittsburgh, three are either foreign c h a p t e r 1