In the 19th century, what is now the University of Pittsburgh was called the Western University of Pennsylvania. Before his death in 1858, Charles Avery, a white Pittsburgh cotton trader whose travels through the South had awoken him to the horrors of slavery, endowed a fund for 12 scholarships a year at Western University for “males of the colored people”.

Forty years later, Robert Lee Vann, the son of a former slave cook from North Carolina, traveled to Pittsburgh to claim one of those scholarships. In 1910, after earning undergraduate and law degrees from Western University, Vann accepted a job as the editor of the Pittsburgh Courier, a four-page chronicle of local events. Eventually becoming publisher and owner as well, Vann transformed the Courier into America’s best-selling black newspaper, with 14 regional editions.

Ever since the Civil War, blacks had voted overwhelmingly Republican out of loyalty to the Great Emancipator. But in 1932, Vann used the Courier as a soapbox to urge blacks to vote for FDR, beginning a migration to the Democratic Party that transformed American politics.

Vann took pride in hiring young college grads, and his recruits played a major part in some of the biggest cultural stories of the age. Chester Washington, a Pittsburgh native whom Vann helped send to Virginia Union University, used his behind-the-scenes access to boxer Joe Louis to turn the “Brown Bomber” into a hero to blacks and a sympathetic champ to whites.

Read the full article on Pittsburgh's black renaissance by Mark Whitaker at CityLab