to raze approximately 1,300 structures within the heart of Black Pittsburgh, the section known as the Hill District, to make room for the construction of the Civic Arena sports complex. Over 1,500 families, approximately 8,000 people, were displaced, which spurred a migration to the East End section of town—the Homewood-Brushton neighborhood of Pittsburgh and Wilkinsburg. Mom’s story of how she got to Wilkinsburg is one many Black families in Pittsburgh can tell; Pittsburgher and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson captured one aspect of it in his play Two Trains Running, which offers a framework for a solution to positive change (as well as the title for my book).11
The play, which is set in 1969, the year after the Civil Rights Act was passed and Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, illustrates the economic injustice Black people still face. It presumes that Pittsburgh’s Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA), which seized land in the neighborhood of the Hill District throughout the 1960s as part of an urban renewal project, purposely undervalued Black residents’ homes and businesses to purchase the land on the cheap. The protagonist, Memphis, owns a building and restaurant, both of which are slated to be seized by the city through an eminent domain clause in his deed. A Black man, Memphis is certain the city would assess his property differently if he were White. Referring to the eminent domain language in his deed, Memphis says, “They don’t know I got a clause of my own … They can carry me out feet first … but my clause say … they got to meet my price!”
Another character in the play, Hambone, painted a fence for a grocer who promised him a ham upon completion. Hambone painted the fence, but the owner never paid Hambone the ham. “He gonna give me my ham” is a refrain throughout the play. It’s unclear if Hambone suffered from a mental illness before the incident or developed one after, but waiting for the grocer to pay what he promised drove him mad. He died demanding what he was owed.
Memphis, meanwhile, went back and forth with city officials, armed with an accurate valuation of his property and a demand that the city meet his price. The last scene of the play epitomized the kind of result Black business owners, home owners, and all residents can realize if we are collectively as committed as Memphis was in not selling himself short.
“I went down there to the courthouse ready to fight for that twenty-five thousand dollars I want for my property,” Memphis said. “I wasn’t taking no fifteen. I wasn’t taking no twenty. I want twenty-five thousand. They told me, ‘Well, Mr. Lee … we got a clause, and the city is prepared to put into motion’—that’s the part I like, ‘prepared to put into motion’—‘the securing of your property at 1621 Wylie Avenue’—they had the address right and everything—‘for the sum of thirty-five-thousand dollars.’ ” Memphis, elated to receive the compensation he demanded and deserved, starts making plans for a new restaurant. In real life, Mom, like so many other Black families, was forced to move from the Hill District to Wilkinsburg.
Knowing the worth of our homes, businesses, and communities—assets—starts with knowing that our assets are constantly being devalued. The devaluation of our assets affects us physically, psychologically, and economically in negative ways, one of which is to rob us of our sense of self-worth and dignity. Demanding our proper price helps us achieve just and equitable distributions of needed resources and reinforces the notion that there is nothing wrong with Black people that ending racism can’t solve.
Racist federal, state, and local policies created housing, education, and wealth disparities. Policy must work for Black people in the same way it has supported White people’s efforts to lift themselves up. Bootstrapping, financial literacy, and other things we wrongly attribute to White success didn’t save them from urban plight and rabid unemployment during and after the Great Depression. Federal housing, transportation, and employment policies did, and the U.S. government largely excluded Black people from those efforts.
When upliftment is too rigidly viewed as a zero-sum game, there is no incentive for an overwhelmingly White U.S. House and Senate with mostly White constituents to re-create policy history for the benefit of Black people. Therefore, change must emanate upward from the neighborhoods to the halls of Congress. To be clear, I’m not disguising a call for bootstrapping as activism. Bootstrapping won’t solve many of the problems Black people face, especially those around economic mobility. Pragmatically speaking, Black people must leverage the assets we possess to excite change. As Frederick Douglass said in his 1857 “West India Emancipation” address at Canandaigua, New York, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”12 Knowing your price is about leveraging the power we possess.
There are certainly plenty of Black people who know they have value—folks like Memphis and Hambone. However, communities need researchers to provide enough frameworks and information so leaders and families can challenge governments and markets that devalue, dehumanize, and demean us for economic gain. This book is about understanding those processes as well as how our agency and assets can dismantle those structures. We have little choice but to mobilize the resources at our disposal, but we must deploy them toward structural change if we want outcomes free of the influences of racism.
I represent Wilkinsburg. My ups and downs as a person are undoubtedly rooted in many of the struggles of my hometown. Our fates are intertwined. The childhood conflict I related earlier has shaped my entire adult life, which has been beleaguered with unpredictable outbreaks of rage, largely stemming from reminders of past feelings of vulnerability and worthlessness. Minor disagreements with lovers, friends, colleagues, and strangers often turned into blowout arguments, for reasons unknown to them. To those whom I verbally assaulted, I apologize.
In my late thirties, I “progressed.” Instead of outright verbally assaulting people, I aggressively debated with those who consciously or unconsciously reminded me of Hotsy, still taking people to the brink of hurt feelings and broken friendships. Again, I apologize. While many interpreted my anger as passion, I hurt the people in my life and myself. The stain of unresolved contempt toward Hotsy and others kept me trapped in internal conflict. I deeply wanted to belong, to matter.
This book is written using different styles to convey a state of my personal development and my varied levels of connection with certain Black-majority cities. Sometimes my internal conflicts will emerge in my writings about cities. Chapters are part memoir, part essay, and part cri de cœur, with a splash of “dispassionate” analysis, varying in degree. I hope people will turn to the associated research reports on the Brookings website.
Some chapters are emotionally distant; others are very personal. The degree to which I insert my personal narrative into each chapter reflects the level of personal and professional investment I have with each featured Black-majority city. Nonetheless, the goal at the onset of the project was to highlight assets in Black-majority cities, which in and of themselves should be viewed as assets to our democracy. I aimed to push back against the harmful narrative, rooted in White supremacy, that Black people are deficits in need of fixing. And, finally, I set out to identify potential solutions that can be used in Black-majority cities to restore some of the value lost from racism.
I start with using my hometown as a case study of sorts, illuminating the dynamics of devaluation and how it throttles economic growth in geographic areas with high concentrations of Black people. By retracing my old high school cross-country training route, I illustrate in chapter 1, “Who Runs the City,” how Pittsburgh’s tech boom was spurred by common economic development practices that overlooked and ignored Black people and institutions worthy of investment, reifying structural inequality. Consequently, cities need help in identifying assets that have been devalued. To illustrate how research methods can be used to identify assets, in chapter 2, “A Father Forged in Detroit,” I show how racism lowers the prices of owner-occupied homes in Detroit’s Black neighborhoods, lessening past and current residents’
