New & Noted

Mark Whitaker

BUY TICKETS

“An expansive, prodigiously researched, and masterfully told history.”

KIRKUS REVIEWS

Mark Whitaker’s Smoketown is a captivating portrait of Pittsburgh’s renaissance of black culture, influence, and glamour from the 1920s through the 1950s.

Today black Pittsburgh is known as the setting for August Wilson’s famed plays about working-class strivers. But this community once had an impact on American history that rivaled the far larger black worlds of Harlem and Chicago. It published the most widely read black newspaper in the country, urging black voters to switch from the Republican to the Democratic Party and then rallying black support for World War II. It fielded two of the greatest baseball teams of the Negro Leagues and introduced Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers. Pittsburgh was the childhood home of jazz pioneers Billy Strayhorn, Billy Eckstine, Earl Hines, Mary Lou Williams, and Erroll Garner; Hall of Fame slugger Josh Gibson—and August Wilson himself. Some of the most glittering figures of the era were changed forever by the time they spent in the city, from Joe Louis and Satchel Paige to Duke Ellington and Lena Horne.

Smoketown depicts how ambitious Southern migrants were drawn to a steel-making city on a strategic river junction; how they were shaped by its schools and a spirit of commerce with roots in the Gilded Age; and how their world was eventually destroyed by industrial decline and urban renewal. Whitaker takes readers on a rousing, revelatory journey—and offers a timely reminder that Black History is not all bleak.

Book Signing

A book signing will follow the lecture. Smoketown will be available for sale from Classic Lines.

Partner

TICKETS

$10
BUY TICKETS
Tickets may also be purchased via phone (412.622.8866) or at the door from 6 p.m. on the day of the event.

WHERE

Carnegie Library Lecture Hall
4400 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, 15213

SHARE THIS EVENT

Upcoming Lectures

Hernan Diaz

APR 8

Ed Yong

APR 29

Jesmyn Ward

MAY 13

Anna Monardo

MAY 23