Far and away, the Black community has led the struggle against illegal drugs and against drug violence in Pittsburgh. All told, thousands and thousands of Black people have taken part in these protests, community meetings, motorcades, peace vigils and other struggles that stretch back decades and continue today. Northview Heights, East Hills, Lincoln Larimer, and the Hill District are a few of Pittsburgh’s many battle grounds. Black civic groups, religious institutions, elected officials, and community residents have launched these hundreds and hundreds of struggles.
But all of this is ignored by the White community from left to right and back. Every time Black people rise-up against police/state violence the White media, elected officials and rank and file White people bad-mouth the Black community for not combating what they call “black-on-black violence.”
A lot of Black people, including some Black elected officials, are guilty of the same thing.
For refreshers here are a few examples of the Black community’s vanguard role in the struggle. The May 24, 1985 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article, “City war on drugs termed political” reported on a very heated exchange between Homewood residents and two Pittsburgh city council members at a May 23 public hearing on open drug trafficking.
But the article did not mention the far more important presentation by Wilbur Nelson former director of the now defunct Homewood Brushton Community Improvement Association. With fading documents in his hands, Nelson told council that some 15 years earlier HBCIA had conducted a six-months investigation of Homewood’s then embryonic open drug trafficking and gave its findings to top city officials at a community meeting at the old Homewood YMCA. The city made promises—it never kept—to disperse Homewood’s open market.
During this very same time period “around 1972,” the city pushed off the street, without wanton police violence, the massive outdoor drug market on Walnut Street in Shadyside. “For a time—respectfully 1967 to 1971” Walnut Street was by far Pittsburgh’s largest open drug market since World War II. Check out, “Metamorphosis,” the lead story in the November 21-27, 1984 issue of the old entertainment weekly In Pittsburgh.
The July 24, 1982 Post-Gazette ran a front-page story on a fiery public argument over illegal drugs in Homewood between Homewood district magistrate Dennis Schatzman, and Pittsburgh police chief Robert Coll. This led to the September 11, 1982 March Against Dope in Homewood which attracted hundreds of people. It was organized by the Pittsburgh chapter of the National Black Independent Political Party and the ad hoc September 11 Mobilization Committee which included Rev. W.C. Wentworth, James and Mildred Connors, Bill Norman and others. The march was reported in the September 18, 1982 Pittsburgh Courier article, “H-B Citizens Rally Against Dope.”
Less than two months later, several hundred Hill District residents marched down Centre Avenue on October 30, 1982 chanting, “Rise up! Dope kills! Run the pushers! Off the Hill!” The march was organized by Pittsburgh school board director Jake Milliones, House of the Crossroads director Sala Udin, along with Tamanikah Howze and many other Hill District residents.
Three years later, Reverend Alfred Pugh of Macedonia Baptists Church reported some 20 Pittsburgh-area black churches with a combined membership of over 20,000 people took part in the April 28, 1985 ”No Dope Sunday” across Allegheny County. Four years later, fourteen Homewood area churches including Holy Cross Episcopal Church, Bethesda Presbyterian Church, and Homewood AME Zion endorsed “No Dope Sunday” held on April 30, 1989.
Crack cocaine came to Pittsburgh’s Black neighborhoods in the latter half of 1988 and the first half of 1989 and, as predicted, gun violence exploded to unprecedented levels. With this, local Black resistance increased to unprecedented levels.
Here is one example from the crack cocaine era. On October 24, 2005, some 500 people crowded into Faison elementary school for a public safety forum organized by city councilwoman Twanda Carlisle.
These examples have been from the eastern end of the city because I am most familiar with this part of town. But these struggles have been fought north, south, east, and west. Northside minister the Reverend Jimmy Joe Robinson told me that in the late 60’s between enraged community residents confronted drug dealers in the streets of Manchester. In sum all of these struggles, large and small, have important strategic lessons for Black Pittsburgh.
The Pittsburgh establishment ignored the Black community’s leadership in this struggle because it ignored the overall drug crisis in the Black community. But it should have heeded the Black community’s long standing humane demands for drug prevention and rehabilitation programs. And today, the White community would be much further along combating the runaway drug plague in its midst.
But why have some Black leaders been reluctant to say out loud, crystal-clear, and often that the Black community is the vanguard of this struggle? At a November 13, 1984 public forum on “The Politics of Drug Abuse in the Black Community,” one panelist argued the open drug markets in the Black community should be a major campaign issue in the upcoming 1985 primary elections.
In reply, panelist Bill Robinson, an African American member of Pittsburgh city council said he hoped Black people would not use the issue to “embarrass my colleagues” during the primary campaign. Presumably, he was referring to incumbent city council members who were running in the primaries.
Is this puzzling diplomacy—or whatever it is—still true? In 2018, Black elected officials hold seats on the Pittsburgh school board, city council, county council, and state legislature. Are any of them reluctant to say out loud, crystal-clear, and often that the Black community has led the city struggle against illegal drugs? Are they a bit skittish because they fear it would “embarrass” the mayor Bill Peduto, the county executive Rich Fitzgerald, or the governor Tom Wolf (Trump, of course, is beyond the pale)?
“We got to blame ourselves for the dope and violence in the Black community, we can’t put it all on the White folks,” Black politicians and other Black folks say something like that, in public all the time. And legions of Black people and White people shout, “Amen!” If it is politically correct to blame the Black community in public for its short comings, it is correct to applaud, in public, Black people in Manchester, Belmar, St. Clair Village and elsewhere for leading this historic struggle in “The City of Champions.”
And when have you ever heard any of these White folks who shout “Amen,” blame the White community at large, or any European American ethnic group, for White America’s pandemic drug abuse? Never!
This raises a timely question. Should White leaders apologize publically to the Black community for mainstream White America racializing the US drug crisis, and making it “a Black thing?” This is a major reason why the US opioid crisis is now an unmitigated catastrophe. Or, should White America at large apologize?
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