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Celebrating August Wilson's Legacy in Smoketown 
By Mark Whitaker 

Author of Smoketown: The Untold Story of the Other Great Black Renaissance 
              

Keynote Address delivered at the 2018 August Wilson Colloquium,  
August Wilson Center, Pittsburgh PA, April 26, 2018 

 
Abstract  

 
In his opening address to attendees of the August Wilson Colloquium, Mark Whitaker—

from his perspective as author of Smoketown—discusses the research he conducted and the 
subsequent incorporation of the topic of August Wilson into his book.  Beginning with the assertion 
that that Wilson’s family story "fits the larger pattern of migrants from the northern part of the Old 
South who arrived in Pittsburgh with a respect for literacy and religious discipline," Whitaker 
contrasts the history of  black Pittsburgh as reported in the pages of The Pittsburgh Courier with the 
metaphorical representations in Wilson's American Century Cycle. 

Keywords 
August Wilson, Mark Whitaker, Smoketown, Pittsburgh Courier, Hill District 

I’m very honored to be here to address this colloquium, but I’m also a bit 
embarrassed. I’m looking out at a room full of people who have studied August Wilson and 
his plays for far longer than I have. So let me begin by making clear that I 
don’t pretend be a Wilson expert. Instead, I’m here as an author who has 
written a book about the larger cultural and political legacy of black 
Pittsburgh in the middle decades of the 20th Century. I do address in my 
book, Smoketown: The Untold Story of the Other Great Black Renaissance, 
how Wilson, who was born at the height of that community’s influence 
but wrote his groundbreaking plays in the decades after its economic and 
physical decimation, fits into that larger picture. But as far as I’m 
concerned, the best thing about being asked to speak first thing this 
morning is that I’ll get to spend the rest of the day listening to real Wilson 
scholars and intimates. 

In order to explain my perspective, it might be useful to describe how my thinking 
about August Wilson evolved as I was working on Smoketown. From the beginning, even 
before I knew exactly what shape and direction the book would take, I saw Wilson as the 
metaphorical elephant in the room. For two reasons. First, if readers had any sense of black 
Pittsburgh in the last century, it was likely because they had had seen one or more of the 
nine plays that Wilson set in the Hill District. In that sense, it was as though I was setting 
out to write a book about Danish politics at the turn of the 17th Century. An original enough 
sounding project—expect for the fact that a genius named Shakespeare wrote a play about it 
called Hamlet. 

Second, I knew that I would have to grapple with the fact that for all their 
extraordinary power and sweep, Wilson’s Century Cycle plays ignore important segments of 

Mark Whitaker 



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black Pittsburgh in the decades on which I planned to focus. Even before I began my 
research, I knew this from my father’s family, which because they were middle-class 
business people Wilson would have viewed with distrust. When asked why his plays were 
populated almost exclusively by struggling members of the working class, Wilson made no 
bones about the fact that he considered them more culturally authentic than middle-class 
blacks. “America offers blacks a contract that says, ‘If you leave all that African stuff over 
there and adopt the values of the dominant culture, you can participate’,” he once told 
literary scholar Bonnie Lyons. “The ones who accept go on to become part of the growing 
middle class and in some areas even acquire some power and participation in society, but 
when they finally settle where they arrive, they are no longer the same people. They are 
clothed in different manners and ways of life, different thoughts and ideals. They’ve 
acculturated and adopted white values.”  

Although my father’s family was middle class, I knew their story hardly fit that 
description. Like a character in one of Wilson’s plays, my grandfather, Cleophaus Sylvester 
Whitaker Sr., the eleventh child of former slaves from Texas, arrived in Pittsburgh as a 
teenager in the first wave of the Great Migration, around the time of World War I. He 
started out working in lowly jobs in the steel mills and as a chauffeur for a white undertaker, 
and may well have roomed in boarding houses like the one in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. 
But then Grandad went into the mortician business himself and became relatively 
prosperous. Never rich and rapacious like the undertaker West in Two Trains Running—in 
fact, Granddad eventually had to moonlight selling milk and shining shoes in a white 
country club—but, for a time, relatively prosperous. 

My grandmother, Edith McColes Whitaker, was the only child of “OP’s,” or “Old 
Pittsburghers,” as the black folks who arrived before the Great Migration were called. Her 
father, John McColes, worked as a steel company messenger, and her mother Emma—whom 
I would know as “Gram”—was a homemaker. They were hardly rich, either, but they were 
comfortable enough to live in Sugartop, then the most expensive neighborhood on the Hill. 
Grandmother Edith was a member of the first generation of black students to attend 
Schenley High School in the 1920’s, played piano at the Carnegie Library Recital Hall and 
had her engagement party at the Loendi Club, the gathering place of the black elite. When 
the first Whitaker Funeral Home in Rankin became profitable enough, she encouraged 
Granddad to move it to Homewood so my father and his sisters could attend its highly 
regarded integrated high school, Westinghouse.  

Yet my father’s family was as proudly black as any other in the Pittsburgh of the day. 
The Grandmother I knew in my childhood cooked chitlins, played the numbers every day, 
went to Bethany Baptist Church on Sundays, and greeted me with down-home commands 
like: “Give me some sugar, child, or I’ll jump down your throat and dance on your gizzard!” 
She also worked her arthritic knees to the bone keeping the funeral home going after 
Granddad suffered a stroke, and often resorted to selling Avon products door to door to pay 
the grocery and utility bills.  

As I began to work on my book, I discovered further evidence of a black Pittsburgh 
not found in August Wilson’s plays in the photographs of Teenie Harris. In fact, the day I 
decided to write the book that became Smoketown, I was browsing the internet and 
stumbled upon two photographs of my grandparents in the Teenie Harris Archive of the 
Carnegie Museum of Art. Granddad, dressed in a suit and tie and polished patent leather 
shoes, was presiding over the burial of a black military veteran at a graveyard outside 
Pittsburgh. Grandmother, wearing pearls and one of her big church hats, was attending a 
ladies’ luncheon in Homewood.  

Then, as I clicked through the rest of the archive, there was Joe Louis hanging out in 
the newsroom of the Pittsburgh Courier. There was Louis Armstrong grinning at a corner 
booth at the Crawford Grill. There was Lena Horne singing at the Loendi Club. There were 
Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn, and “Honi” Coles gathered around an upright piano at the 



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Stanley Theater. There was Satchel Paige shooting the breeze with Gus Greenlee in Gus’s lair 
atop the Crawford Grill. There was Josh Gibson squatting in a catcher’s crouch in his 
Homestead Grays uniform. There was Jackie Robinson leaning on a bat at Forbes Field, 
looking right at home, during his rookie year as a Brooklyn Dodger. And on and on and on. 

In other words, there on my computer screen was visual evidence of a black 
Pittsburgh so vibrant and influential that it was once known as “Little Harlem” and “the 
Crossroads of the World.”  Yet as I investigated further, I discovered that the full extent of 
that influence had been captured only in fragments, in Teenie’s photographs and in 
individual biographies, sports and jazz books and academic studies. No one had pieced 
together the full story of how this relatively small black community—less than a quarter the 
size of Harlem’s, and a third the size of Chicago’s—had left such a profound imprint on 
Black history, and American history, in the brief but glorious period of its heyday from the 
1920’s through the 1950’s.  

So that’s the story I set out to write in Smoketown. But because I still didn’t know 
what I was going to say about August Wilson, I put him in a box. Quite literally. You see, 
when I write my books I keep research materials for my chapters in separate Bankers Boxes, 
those cardboard storage containers you can buy at Staples or on Amazon. So I bought 
anthologies of Wilson’s plays and collections of his interviews and put them in a box. Every 
time I did an interview or came across an article that touched on Wilson, I put the notepad 
or the clipping in the box. And I left the box untouched until I had written the rest of the 
book—nine chapters in all—and was finally ready to wrestle with the elephant in the room 
in my last chapter. 

When I finally opened the August Wilson box two years later, I discovered that 
much of the story I had written in the rest of the book was indeed absent from his plays. As 
reviewers of Smoketown have noted, the heart of the book is the story of the Pittsburgh 
Courier, which was the best-selling black newspaper in America from the mid-thirties until 
the early sixties, with 14 regional editions and a circulation that peaked at more than 
400,000 copies at the end of World War II. And at the heart of that story stand two Southern 
migrants who were extraordinary entrepreneurs. Cumberland Posey Sr., known as “Cap,” was 
a riverboat deckhand who became the first black man to engineer a steamboat. Posey then 
founded a shipbuilding company and invested in coal mines and was the richest Negro in 
Pittsburgh when he bought stock in the Courier and became its first president in 1910. 
Robert Lee Vann was the son of a plantation cook from North Carolina who traveled alone to 
claim a scholarship for colored students at what is now the University of Pittsburgh. After 
becoming its first black law school graduate, Vann accepted the editorship of the Courier, 
and from 1910 until his death in 1940 he transformed the paper from an eight-page pamphlet 
of local news to the powerful national weekly it became. 

Yet nowhere in Wilson’s plays set in those decades do you get a sense of just how 
powerful the Courier was, or how much pride and swagger that gave the black folks of 
Pittsburgh. Seven Guitars refers to the Joe Louis’s epic battle with “The Pittsburgh Kid” Billy 
Conn. But there is no sense of the role the Courier played in making Louis a hero to black 
America and a sympathetic champion to whites in the 1930’s. Fences deals with Troy 
Maxson’s bitterness at the racism that cost him a shot at pro baseball when he was playing in 
the Negro Leagues. But there’s no hint of the part that Courier sportswriter Wendell Smith 
played in crusading for baseball integration, and then introducing Branch Rickey to Jackie 
Robinson and serving as Robinson’s travel companion, confidant, and spokesman in his 
tense first years in the Dodgers’ organization. The politics of the Depression and World War 
II provide a backdrop to several Wilson plays, but they don’t capture how the Courier turned 
Pittsburgh into ground zero for the migration of black voters from the Republican to the 
Democratic Party under FDR, or its “Double Victory Campaign” that mobilized black 
support for the war after Pearl Harbor. 



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While Wilson’s plays are full of music and musicians—Seven Guitars and the 
Chicago-based Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, in particular—you wouldn’t know from them that 
Pittsburgh produced a dozen of the greatest jazz musicians of the 20th Century. They 
included not just stellar performers but trailblazers in their musical disciplines: Kenny 
Clarke and Art Blakey on the drums, Roy Eldridge on the trumpet, Ray Brown on the bass, 
George Benson on the guitar, Billy Strayhorn as a composer and arranger, and Billy Eckstine 
not just as crossover crooner but as a big band leader who mentored future bebop pioneers 
such as Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Sarah Vaughan, Dexter Gordon, Fats Navarro and 
Gene Ammons.  

Because my Grandmother Edith played the piano, I was particularly taken in my 
research with the profound impact of Pittsburgh musicians on that instrument. They 
include Earl “Fatha” Hines, who set a new standard for the jazz piano in his early recordings 
with Louis Armstrong; Mary Lou Williams, the “little piano girl of East Liberty” who grew 
up to become one of the greatest female instrumentalists of both the swing and the bebop 
eras; and Ahmad Jamal, who is performing and recording award-winning albums to this day. 
And, of course, Erroll Garner, who in the fifties and sixties was one of the most sought-after 
concert performers and late-night TV guests in the world of jazz. During his many 
appearances on The Tonight Show, Johnny Carson liked to kid Garner about the fact that he 
couldn’t read music, as though he was some kind of inexplicable natural genius. But as I 
point out in Smoketown, Garner was simply a genius who grew up in the unique musical 
culture of Pittsburgh, and learned to play by ear imitating his sisters’ piano teacher and his 
many talented classmates at Westinghouse High.  

By the way, I also tell the story in the book of how we have that piano heritage to 
thank for one of the greatest bass players of all time. Like so many black Pittsburgh kids in 
his day, Ray Brown, who was born in 1926, grew up taking piano lessons. But when he 
arrived at Schenley High in his mid-teens, he was one of twenty-eight pianists who 
auditioned for the school orchestra. Ray had to wait all week just to get fifteen minutes of 
rehearsal time. So one day, he was waiting his turn when he spied a big string instrument in 
the corner of the room.  

“What’s that?” he asked the music teacher.  
“A bass,” the teacher replied.  
“If I played that instrument, would I be in the orchestra all the time?” Ray asked. 
“Yes, we’re looking for a bass player,” the teacher responded. 
And that’s how the great Ray Brown took up the bass! 

Again, you won’t find the names of Ray Brown or those legendary Pittsburgh pianists in 
Wilson’s plays. However, I do like to think that there’s at least an acknowledgement of that 
rich keyboard tradition embedded in The Piano Lesson. After all, Wilson said that he got the 
inspiration for the play from a painting by Romare Bearden, who also grew up in Pittsburgh 
in the era when the piano was a prized possession in so many black homes.  

Despite these historical omissions, however, as I immersed myself in research about 
August Wilson, I came to see how firmly he stands in the broader cultural tradition I trace in 
Smoketown. In the introduction to the book, I talk about the three social forces that—like 
Pittsburgh’s three great rivers—converged to make its black community so unique. The first 
was where the Southern migrants came from, and the kind of knowledge and values they 
brought with them. Second were the unique educational opportunities available to black 
folks in Pittsburgh in the late 19th Century and first half of the 20th Century, thanks to those 
Pitt scholarships and the Gilded Age philanthropy that helped make the city’s integrated 
public high schools like Westinghouse and Schenley among the best-funded in America. 
The third was the spirit of entrepreneurship that, along with the stench from the steel 
plants, hung in the air in Pittsburgh, setting it apart from the more literary and less 
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All three of those formative strains run deep in the August Wilson story. The rest of 
Smoketown is filled with characters who hailed from the northern and eastern parts of the 
Old South, where blacks were most likely to have learned to read books and music and to 
acquire other habits of cultural sophistication. As it turns out, a remarkable number came 
specifically from North Carolina. They include Robert L. Vann, the Courier editor; Gus 
Greenlee, the racketeer who owned the Crawford Grill and the Pittsburgh Crawfords; Billy 
Strayhorn and Mary Cardwell Dawson, the founder of America’s first black opera company; 
and Evelyn Cunningham, the charismatic Courier reporter who covered the early battles of 
the Civil Rights Movement. And, sure enough, August Wilson also had North Carolina 
roots. His mother, Daisy, was born there and migrated to Pittsburgh in her teens with 
Wilson’s grandmother, Zonia. In fact, it’s been said that Zonia was so determined to get to 
Pittsburgh that she made the journey on foot—a story that, alas, my friend historian Larry 
Glasco assures me is apocryphal.   

Daisy Wilson learned to read but Zonia never did, and the daughter watched her 
mother’s living as a North Carolina farmer suffer as a result. So when Daisy arrived on the 
Hill and took up with a white German immigrant named Frederick Kittel, known as Fritz, 
she was determined that the children she had by him learn to read as early as possible. 
When her first son was born, named after his father but called “Freddy,” Daisy took him to 
the Carnegie Library on the Hill to get a library card when he was just five years old. Soon 
Freddie had devoured all the Hardy Boy novels and his older sisters’ Nancy Drews. With the 
same determination that Billy Strayhorn’s mother, Lillian, showed in moving her family to 
Homewood so Billy could attend Westinghouse High, Daisy sent Freddie to Catholic Schools 
on the Hill to be taught by nuns. As a moody teen, Freddy kept getting expelled from public 
schools, but he had so thoroughly internalized his mother’s reverence for learning that he 
resolved to educate himself by hiking to the Carnegie Library in Oakland every day and 
reading hundreds of books on its shelves. 

So Wilson’s story fits the larger pattern of migrants from the northern part of the 
Old South who arrived in Pittsburgh with a respect for literacy and religious discipline. In 
his own way, he was also the beneficiary of the unique opportunities for schooling—and for 
self-education—that were available to Pittsburgh Negroes. And if you think about it, Wilson 
was a shrewd businessman, too, no matter his views on capitalism. Who else but a born 
marketer would, after deciding to become a writer at the age of 21, type out every variation of 
his name to come up with a better literary moniker than Frederick Kittel Jr.? And then settle 
on a pen name, derived from his middle name and his mother’s maiden name, that conjured 
both cultural distinction—Au-gust!—and Everyman ancestry—Wil-son! Who else but a 
natural entrepreneur would, no sooner than he had scored his first successes as a 
playwright, after years of struggling as a poet, decide that he wasn’t going to stop until he 
produced a play for every decade of the 20th Century? 

As I reported and wrote Wilson’s story, I couldn’t help but compare his visionary 
ambition to that of Cap Posey, the deckhand who dreamed of becoming a steamboat 
engineer. Or Robert L. Vann, the editor who willed a local pamphlet into a national 
newspaper. Or Gus Greenlee, the racketeer who brought Satchel Paige to Pittsburgh, raided 
Josh Gibson from the crosstown Grays, and launched the “East-West Classic,” the all-star 
baseball game that became the biggest sports event in black America. Or Billy Strayhorn, 
who composed a professional musical in his first year out of high school, before he ever met 
Duke Ellington. Or Evelyn Cunningham, who talked her way off the Women’s Desk at the 
Courier by pitching a “widow angle” that convinced her editors to send her to cover the 
aftermath of a brutal racial murder in 1948 Georgia and launched Cunningham’s career as a 
civil rights reporter. 

As for the strains of working-class anger and frustration in so many of Wilson’s 
plays, they also made sense when I considered the period in black Pittsburgh’s history that 
shaped his worldview. For the flipside of the happy convergence that created “the 



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Crossroads of the World” was the perfect storm that destroyed it almost overnight. In the 
late fifties, the city of Pittsburgh tore down the Lower Hill, the heart of black social and 
business life, in the name of urban renewal. In the late sixties, the riots that followed Martin 
Luther King Jr.’s assassination destroyed much of the Middle Hill and other black enclaves. 
The decline of the steel industry disproportionately devastated black folks, who couldn’t get 
cheap loans to move to the suburbs like their white ethnic neighbors. Black flight took a toll, 
too, as ambitious, well-educated blacks who in the past would have stayed to become 
community leaders left and never came back—people like my father, Cleophaus Sylvester 
Whitaker, Jr., Westinghouse Class of 1952. 

This connection between the historical destruction of the Hill and the artistic point 
of view of Wilson’s plays was so evident that I entitled my last chapter “The Bard of a Broken 
World.” Here’s some of what I say about it. After describing the 1969 death of Jesse Vann, 
Robert L. Vann’s widow and successor as publisher of the Courier, and the fact that Jesse had 
once appeared as a guest on the TV show This is Your Life, I write the following:  

No one August Wilson came into contact with on the Hill in the late 1960’s would 
ever have qualified for that distinction. They were the folks that the city’s declining 
manufacturing economy and the downtown “Renaissance” had left behind: the steel 
and coal workers who had lost their jobs; the cooks and waiters who worked for 
minimum wage and tips; the garbage men and janitors who clung to lowly rungs on 
the city payroll; the hustlers and pushers who turned to selling pyramid scheme 
products and street drugs to get by. But the blues made Wilson yearn to hear their 
stories, and he went about finding places where he could eavesdrop on them. 
Wilson sat for hours in a booth at Eddie’s Restaurant, nursing cups of coffee and 
scribbling down overheard conversations on napkins. He hung out at Pat’s Place, a 
cigar store with a billiard table in the back where pensioners passed their days and 
where August came to be known as “Youngblood.” Day after day, he ate lunch at a 
diner called Pan Fried Fish so that he could listen in on the conversations of gypsy 
cab drivers who worked out of a storefront “jitney station” next door—a collection of 
young hustlers and loquacious retirees who spent as much time telling tall tales and 
ribbing one another over games of checkers as they did answering the phone on the 
station wall that rang with calls for cheap rides around town. 

It was these notes and memories, once Wilson moved to Minnesota in the late 1970’s and 
began writing for the theater full-time, that became grist for his first Century Cycle play—a 
one-act version of Jitney—and the eight others that followed. Because Wilson littered those 
plays with so many references to actual addresses, businesses and figures in the Hill District, 
much as been written about how historically accurate he was, or wasn’t, in those details. The 
family of the real Undertaker West, for example, complained about Wilson’s heartless 
fictional character in Two Trains Running. Friends of the man who inspired the white 
butcher in the same play, the owner of Lutz Meat Market on Centre Avenue on the Hill, 
pointed out that in real life Lutz was a supporter of black rights who never would have 
welched on the debt of a ham. 

But in Smoketown, I avoid such nit-picking because I think it misses the point. If 
you read Wilson’s interviews and commentaries on his plays, it’s clear that he never saw 
himself as a historical realist. He freely admits that he didn’t do much factual research, or 
even attend much theater. Instead, he talks repeatedly about Aristotle’s Poetics, which deals 
with the use of language to define character and dramatic structure to distill the tragedy and 
comedy of human existence. Wilson’s essential genius, it seems to me, is in the way he took 
the everyday banter and street life of black Pittsburgh and elevated it to the level of 
universal poetry. He may have had his own controversial personal views about who was and 
wasn’t authentically black, but he was enough of an artist to produce dramatic experiences 
that could be shared by people of all economic and racial backgrounds. In this sense, August 
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Lou Williams, Romare Bearden and so many other figures in my book, artists who took the 
specific cultural influences of Pittsburgh and used them to create work that transcends 
place and time and speaks to the entire world. 

One final theme in Wilson’s plays links him to the legacy I celebrate in Smoketown, 
and that’s community. Wilson liked to say—provocatively, as usual—that relationship to 
community was what set the races apart. “The basic difference in worldview between blacks 
and whites can be expressed as follows,” he once said. “Western culture sees man as being 
apart from the world, and African culture see him as a part of the world.” It was why Wilson 
always said that his most famous play, Fences, with its solo “tragic hero,” was his least 
favorite, while his favorite was Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, that symphony of characters in a 
World War I era boarding house. At the end of my book, I repeat Wilson’s observations 
because they echo the larger point I wanted to make about black Pittsburgh as a whole in its 
glory days. While I tell the story through individuals, I hope readers come away with a sense 
that the “Other Great Black Renaissance,” as I call it, was made possible above all else by the 
dynamics of community—by the inspiration, fellowship and competitive motivation that its 
heroes and heroines received from each other. 

Let me finish with more confession about my book-writing process. Until the very 
end, I didn’t have a citation page—you know, that page at the front of books with a quote 
that is supposed to capture the essence of what you are about to read. I personally think 
citations have become somewhat of a cliché, so I didn’t bother to include them. But just 
before the book was about to go to press, my editor informed me that the pagination had 
gotten screwed up, and the easiest way to solve the problem would be to add a citation page. 
So at the eleventh hour, I started scrambling for a suitable quote. 

In the end, I found three. The first was from Lena Horne, who I write about in the 
book because she spent her early twenties in Pittsburgh. “You have to be taught to be 
second-class; you’re not born that way,” Lena said. The second, from Billy Strayhorn, was the 
plucky motto with which he bid friends goodbye. “Ever up and onward!” Strayhorn liked to 
say. And the third, thanks to theater critic Christopher Rawson, was from August Wilson. 
When King Hedley II, the eighth play in the Century Cycle, closed on Broadway in 2001, after 
mixed reviews and a two-month run that fell short of his earlier triumphs, Rawson 
interviewed his friend August for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “You can only close if you 
opened,” Wilson said philosophically. “We were there . . . you’re not going to stay open 
forever.” 

“You can only close if you opened.” What a terrific line! I thought. What a perfect 
way to sum up the spirit of ambition and creativity that I tried to capture in Smoketown! 
And what a fitting way for me to end this talk today. You can only close if you opened, and 
it’s been my privilege and pleasure to help open this colloquium on the immortal legacy of 
August Wilson.  

Works Cited 

Whitaker, Mark.  Smoketown: The Untold Story of Other Great Black Renaissance.  Simon 
and Schuster. 2018. Print. 

Author Bio 

Mr. Mark Whitaker is an American author, journalist, and media executive.  He was the 
editor of Newsweek magazine from 1998 until 2006, the first African-American to lead a 
national news magazine. From 2004 to 2006, Whitaker served as President of the American 
Society of Magazine Editors. He was Senior Vice President and Washington Bureau Chief 



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for NBC News. From 2011 to 2013, he was Executive Vice President and Managing Editor 
of CNN Worldwide. 

 

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	Celebrating August Wilson's Legacy in Smoketown
	Abstract
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	Works Cited
	Author Bio

