Yeah. It was maybe 30 percent white. There was the declining tax base. The houses were still in decent shape during that period, but who’s going to move there, because of the school district.
Race plays an incredible role in the decline. Because Braddock was always integrated. But once the population becomes above 25 percent african american, then, the whites fled.
Its still happening. Look at Pittsburgh.
Eventually all the east end is going to be almost all african-american. The whites will have fled to the north and the south. But they’ll all come in to town for the parade after the Super Bowl.
All these neighborhoods were always white. Even the South Side was a white neighborhood.
Was it divided by ethnicity then?
Yeah. And that was the thing with Braddock, you never really had one ethnic group. There wasn’t this identity that this was an Italian neighborhood, it was really a diverse neighborhood.
The Fox cities, in Wisconsin, was almost entirely white. The largest minority group was vietnamese - laotian - hmong, who had immigrated based on clan connections. One person would come, and their entire extended family would join them later.
The next minority group that was largest was native american, and then african american. So it was a completely different ethnic or racism group dynamic that I grew up with.
When everybody’s white, it became, what’s your Christian religion, are you Catholic or Lutheran, and what was your ethnicity. So the German Lutherans were at the top of the pile, and the Polish Catholics at the bottom.
I’m Irish Italian German Catholic. Its the Irish & Italian that pushed me down.
Yeah. Like the street I grew up on, it was polish. So this Italian family moves in, and everybody was pissed off. In ’68, when my cousins moved up to Forest Hills, they were the only Italian family on that street in Forest Hills, and they had racial slurs thrown at them.
Everybody has to have a group. And no matter what group you’re in, you’re pointing the finger at another group.
I remember, when I was going to school in the 70’s, both graduate and undergraduate, and I would bring friends down, and they were just shocked at how Braddock looked. There’s always been that thing, its like twenty or thirty years ahead of the other industrial communities. If you go to Homestead now, it looks like Braddock did twenty years ago, on eighth avenue.
to be continued ...
Proto-documentary filmmaker Tony Buba makes intimate films set against the decay of the Rust Belt. He's also a total rock star who will make you laugh in three minutes or less. You can see more of Tony's work at http://www.braddockfilms.com/
Jessica Fenlon produces animation-based video - sometimes hallucinogenic trips, sometimes considerations of public cultural loss or difficulty. She designs & publishes this website. The video she made featuring photographs of Braddock can be found here.
