Charlie taught him, you take a punch. You dont let it get you down, you get back up. Charlie is the one in fences. A garbage hauler who didnt get to play major league baseball. Charlie is fighter who could have been a National Champion but didnt get the fight, because joe lewis was enough. Charlie never got the break he should have. I grew up here every morning, bust my smooch, put up with them crackers every day because i liked you. You are the biggest fool i ever saw. It is my job. It is my responsibility. You understand that . A man got to take care of his family. You live in my house. Sleep your behind in my bed clothes. Fill your belly with my food. Because i like you . Because youre my flesh and blood. August always had this idea thats what a warrior does. That is what his mother did. So charlie was a very important part augusts development and just a neighbor across the street a few doors down from where he grew up. That is part of what we will call the warrior spirit. He didnt write any plays in pittsburgh. All his plays wellknown he wrote some plays in pittsburgh but didnt go anywhere. The plays that made him famous when he left the city in st. Paul, minnesota. Which is ironic he championed the voices and experience in pittsburgh. He said it took moving out of the city to a place very different from black pittsburgh to really hear the voices. When youre surrounded by them, youre up too close. Like your heartbeat not aware of it because it is so close to you he left pittsburgh when he was 32, 33, moved to st. Paul, got home sick and started thinking back to these voices and people he had known. He then was able to just channel those in ways he hadnt done in pittsburgh. In pittsburgh the plays and poetry he wrote were abstract, obtuse, modernistic trend, very difficult to understand, opaque and they didnt capture the language of the people. He knew that language. He just felt he needed to elevate it to bring more honor and dignity to these people. But as neighborhoods go, it is a big neighborhood, especially the old and original and includes all lower stuff now gone from urban renewal. So it was a very large neighborhood. It was the citys oldest neighborhood. You can see it is right next to downtown. So, it was the first neighborhood that developed. So it was old and it was large. But it always had blacks always lived there. That makes a difference in terms of race relations. You never had this thing, oh, somebody is coming in to our space. Okay. Blacks were there from the very beginning. So what you had was a thickening of peoples. Blacks were always here. Immigrants were always here. It sort of thickened but you never had a real push in. As you can see in the area there were, now the jews lived south of center avenue. That was the heavily jewish part. The goldbergs were here and jewish families and blacks, the italianss lived down that way and italians and greeks and syrians down there. Jews who lived down there and blacks who lived down there as well. So there was a lot of overlapping. And it was a remarkable neighborhood in terms of, you know, one of the things that people think by reading the history of cities like chicago or washington, these awful, very early race riots, before the king assassination. Well, pittsburgh didnt have those. When you look at the history of american cities, i think as you look in most places they didnt have that. So we have this sense of, you know people will never be able to forget, fighting tooth and nail this place shows, no, not necessarily. Things can be different but we focus on, it is like the dog that barks, if it is quiet and nothing happens historians dont look at it or newspapers dont look at it, or whatever. If there is riot outbreak, that gets the attention, if you only look at those, then you generalize from those. Thats another thing that the pittsburgh story will tell, this is a neighborhood where people did get along, did get along together. By getting out and really seeing life and paying attention to it, august realized life is complex and that is what make his plays so interesting. Theyre not just simplistic, prop sort of things where you know the answer, you know the good guys, you know the bad guys, theyre all runners on this side, people on that side people have really conflicting feelings and he was able to capture that because not only did he observe but he thought what he observed and he was very honest about it and when you are you get down to the Human Element and within black america there is variety. Not all just one thing or the other, there are different opinions and he captures that and shows that in his plays. There are all sorts of arguments in augusts plays where people are going back and forth in some topic because he realized, were not simple people, simple minds, complex just like everybody else. And that is really part of why he such a compelling playwrite. Were at the carrie turns turf pennsylvania one ever many places booktv will be visiting. Next we look at the impact of the Furniture Industry in pittsburgh. Ive been a steelworker all my life. I come from a steelmaking family. Both my grandparents were steel workers. My father was a steelworker. My fathers father and myself all worked for the same company, jones and laughlin steel, and pittsburgh was the Natural Capital of the steelmaking in the world and, i began to wonder why, why that was, and so, in the process with my interests i started reading books about steel making and the Steel Industry and it was always lacking the reason, i know. It was known that pittsburgh was the Steel Capital but nothing ever said why and a lot of people attribute it to coal and yes, pittsburgh had a lot of coal. One day i realized what it was, it wasnt, it wasnt the coal, although that had a big part to play in it. It was, it was people. It was engineering. It was technology. It was the development of systems. So, it was a much more complicateed system. As a matter of fact, it was also utilization of materials. Things that wouldnt be used in the past now were found to be very useful and very economical to the process. The title of the book is city of steel how pittsburgh became the worlds steelmaking capital. They started scientific principles. One of the people that did that was man named Andrew Carnegie. A lot of the story became Andrew Carnegie. There were many steelmakers in pittsburgh. Carnegie Applied Science and hiring chemists. People questioned how carnegie could afford to have a professor, a chemist in his plant and, carnegie thought of the others, how and why couldnt they afford it . And carnegie talked about the burning sun of chemical knowledge and so he started to understand things from a scientific point of view, engineering point of have view,e other people were going on seat of the pants operations. They relied on peoples opinion and not on what it should be. The Steel Industry developed in this region because of history. Pittsburgh was a wrought iron manufacturing region. Wrought iron is, is a softer form of the material. It was made in small far hases, puddling furnaces they called them t was a small batch process. This required a lot of skill and thats where a lot of basing your analysis of what was betting on skill of people that you had working for you. Around so, in the day you might be able to make 1500 pounds of wrought iron but wrought iron was, very soft. It was malleable, but made into useful products but it was too soft. Still a lot of things being built required especially rail, required that to be harder material. That harder material turned out to be steel. So when they made rails out of wrought iron in the booming development of the United States and railroads, many rails would wear out in places and stations that had high curves, they would wear out only a matter of months and steel rails were harder. Cast iron was too hard and, from the pounding of the low comotiveses especially in the wintertime. Steel was the happy medium of carbon where this interview is being conducted is the carrie furnaces. This was the last major facility bought by carnegie before he sold out. He purchased this plant in 1898. And by 1901 he was out of the steel business. This is an ironmaking plant. You make iron from iron ore. It is not really a melting process although things do get melted. What it is are blast furnaces behind us, blast furnaces and stoves, you have to, what you do is smelt iron ore. Iron ore is per rick oxide. It has oxygen in it. You have to remove the oxygen and way you do that chemically you reduce it. You use carbon from the Carbon Monoxide from the fuel which is coke and that reduces the oxygen in the ore and youre left with iron, pure iron. So that is the process. This is really a chemical factory and not just a melting factory and that is you how you make iron from ore. So this facility was used to feed the homestead works across the river, which, many people know from homestead strike in 1892. Carnegie bought the homestead works and this carrie furnace was part of the homestead works eventually. It was also a bessemer steel plant t was built by one of his partners at one time, that they had an argument with and his name was andrew klomna. He had a vengeance for carnegie, the best semper fi Steel Company which became the homestead works was the tool of his vengance but the people that evened it owned it with kloman were afraid it would fail and asked carnegie to buy them out which he did and that became the carnegie plant. What carnegie did in homestead he went into a very special kind of open hearth steel making. And that doesnt mean fundamental steelmaking. That means chemically basic steelmaking. That means the significance of that you could remove bad materials, contaminants from the scrap and the iron that you could remove phosphorus and you could remove sulfur. All the open hearth production was made from scrap and cold pick iron. And, the bessemer plants ad thompson and homestead produced a lot of scrap which had little or no utility but if you put it in a basic open hearth furnace you could use it. So all of this material that was considered scrap in other places and useless material was now could be utilized in the open heart at homestead works and not only that, is it could be utilized to make steel that had very high prices. And so, it was a winwinwin situation with carnegie. So this is one of the synergies that i found that worked out. He took, he took material that was useless almost, and made it into the most profitable products that you could make. The only thing he had to add was labor and fuel to do it. So that is part of the genius of carnegie. He could see these things and, he utilized good ideas he had as businessman, not as a technical businessman, people used his own system and company to try to do Something Like that because it took investment, took away pro profits. He was constantly he reinvesting money from the profits back into the company, to the consternation of his partners because they wanted money. Carnegie, money wasnt important so much. Carnegie had 50 of the company or more, and so 50 of a little is much, much better and more satisfactory to him than 5 of a little to the other partners. They wanted more money. Carnegie had enough money. He wasnt extravagant liver. He didnt have, he didnt have huge homes at the time. He didnt, he lived in 1886 at least he lived in hotels with his mother and his plants were always the best. He was willing to invest the money to make his plants the best. And again, that brought more people in. That loved to work for somebody that was doing the best. Carnegie actually instituted at jones insistence, carnegie institutedhour work day in 1878. For 10 years he had to work 8hour work days at his plants, edgar thompson. As this went on, as more steel was needed and america cast taking off as a industrial nation, because carnegie had efficient mills, his profits began to take an up swing. As a matter of fact, in the late 18 90s he was starting from a little bit more than five million in profit as year to seven, to 10, to 20, to 40 million in actually last year of full, full year of operations. His profits were said to be 40 million, although that is questionable. It had to do with ego. It might have only been 30 million. But still thats a lot of profit. Nobody was as profitable as he was. So they had to get him out of the business. They made an asset that was so valuable they had to buy him out because he was going to destroy the all the other Steel Companies in the United States because he could undersell all of them. They got him out of the business. When he sold the Carnegie Company to farm the basis of u. S. Steel, they gave him 480 million. That is about 3 1 2 times the total profits that he made over all of the years that he was in business. After world war ii, Pittsburgh Region was beat to death by producing a lot of steel for the war effort and they tried to improve plants but they did it peace meal. So not, instead of going out and building something totally new, they would try to keep their workers working, and they would do this piecemeal. And, couldnt keep up with the industry. The plants were getting too old. They werent the new efficient plants, the continuous casters and oxygen furnaces and thinks like that. In the 70s you could see the handwriting was on the wall. Plants started closing, steel plants started closing. The story is about innovation, and story is about technology. This story is about the development of the science of steelmaking which is attributed primary to the carnegie Steel Company. It is not about the bad part of it. It is about the good part of it. It is about the science of it. It is about people thinking and excelling and doing well. Yes, the bad has to come along with the good but thats not why carnegie succeeded, nor other companies. They succeeded because they were innovators. They succeeded because they could see how to take one and one and make seven. They saw ways to make things work better, as i said, with the scrap and in the open hearth, they saw ways to make fantastic improvements over stuff that were, well, insignificant. They used insignificant things to make significant progress and to change the way things were done. Booktv in the beautiful city of pittsburgh. Up next were going to learn about the africanamerican contributions to political and social evolution in pittsburgh since world war ii. How did this old pittsburgh and this new pittsburgh play out for black people . And the book, race and renaissance is really an effort to say black people fared unevenly and they fared unequally in the process of developing the Old Industrial city and in many ways the emerging new city has not integrated africanamericans on a equal footing, you know, with their predominant white counterparts. So the first blacks who came into the Pittsburgh Region in some ways, i mean in large numbers, some ways they were migrating from areas of enslavement in the south. And they were beginning to build communities. Many of them were fugitives. Some of them were already free. But they were in some ways setting up an initial community. But the real backgrounds for our story, for this race and renaissance, is the period between the civil war and the end of world war ii. And that in real way, the long haul of that story is that black people in pittsburgh in this ohio river valley, became part of a new industrial environment that really took off in the period after the civil war. And, this moment, after the civil war, pittsburgh was beginning to pick up steam as iron and steel center. When he said blacks fared unevenly, the behavior toward africanamericans were a little mixed, but mainly hostile in many, many ways. First of all, industrialists, for the most part. There is in pittsburgh and elsewhere in the nation. They wanted to break the strike of white workers so black people were gradually introduced into the Steel Industry before the great migration took off. They came and mainly as replacements for white workers. Its interesting then that these employers could then see black people as capable of doing this Industrial Work when, in general, there was a negative attitude. You can tell there was a way in which some of these ideals of black workers. In a way, africanamericans broke stride in part because it wasnt just the owners who discriminated against them. White workers, when they organize those labor unions and made those demands, they put clauses into their union that blocked africanamerican membership. So youve got the dual impact of employer and labor discrimination. One of the strategies they employed, a very dangerous strategy in many ways because it meant that white workers were hostile and black people had to navigate that experience. The good thing for them overall, over the long haul is that they had a foothold in a major industry. For a while, companies would leave most of these workers after this drake but they did keep some that became a core of black workers that persisted until world war i and by the time the great migration hit, there was another era of recruiting black workers in the industry. Those jobs were some of the most favored jobs and they paid more than other jobs. They created a foundation for building families and communities and in the wake of the great migration, these communities really blossomed and expanded. Work in the Steel Industry helped to fuel churches, fraternal orders, civil rights and political organizations, social clubs, business infrastructure. It was really a critical piece of the economy of pittsburgh. It wasnt the only work black people did but it represented an emerging economy because before world war i and before blacks got jobs in the industrial sector, they were usually employed in Household Labor and more or less general labor jobs in all kinds of capacity on Street Construction projects and digging ditches and sanitation work, they did those kinds of jobs but this open the door for more employment. This is going to set up a scenario where black workers appreciate getting jobs in the economy but over the long haul they want to move up in that dissatisfaction that built up over the limitation that they confronted would set up fueling the rise of this movement, a black labor movement, black Civil Rights Movement and so