by Ann Belser, East End Print
(This story first appeared in the East End Print)
Diane I. Daniels had always wanted to work for the Pittsburgh Courier.
It was the paper that changed the civil rights conversation: an African American newspaper that was so controversial, that in the 1920s and 1930s, Pullman Porters would hide it in the train and then deliver it to specific ministers down south so that segregationists would not seize the copies and burn them.
All of the great Black intellectuals had written for the Courier in its heyday.
Daniels, who is now a freelance business writer for the New Pittsburgh Courier, spoke about her experience trying to get that job for the New Pittsburgh Courier after a screening of the 2009 documentary “Newspaper of Record: The Pittsburgh Courier 1907-1965.”
She was on a panel at the Homewood Branch of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh on Wednesday, Feb. 26, that was presented by the Friends of the Homewood Library.
The Pittsburgh Courier had more than 350,000 subscribers across the country in the decades before it filed for bankruptcy in 1965. Daniels, who had grown up in McKeesport, had always wanted a job there. “I am a civil rights baby. I was born in the ’50s, so in the ’50s and the ’60s as I was growing up I always remember reading the Courier and seeing those pictures they showed on the TV,” she said.
The paper spoke out on the biggest issues of the day. In World War II, when the American Red Cross refused to accept blood from Black donors for the troops, the Courier called them out.
When the organization changed its policy but refused to give blood from Black donors to White soldiers, the Courier called them out again, and the Red Cross backed down from its racism.
And when soldiers who were fighting for freedom overseas were battling racism at home, the Pittsburgh Courier promoted its “Double V” campaign for victory overseas and civil rights victory at home.
The newspaper, which once printed 14 editions that were distributed across the country, took on lynching, voting rights, segregation and the Ku Klux Klan. There were two strong Black newspapers at the time, the Courier and the Chicago Defender.
“That’s something in which we can take some regional pride,” said Cody McDevitt, a historian who spoke at a meeting Saturday, Feb. 29, of the Afro-American Historical & Genealogical Society of Pittsburgh.
McDevitt, who was giving a talk on his book, “Banished from Johnstown: Racist Backlash in Pennsylvania,” noted the importance of the Courier in documenting the story of two weeks in 1923 when more than 2,000 African Americans and Mexicans were forced out of Johnstown by men with guns who threatened to throw them in prison if they did not leave. Daniels was well aware of the importance of the Courier and said every Wednesday and Saturday, when she was in college at Wilberforce University in Ohio, she would go to the library to read what was happening at home.
During her college years, Daniels said, she applied for cooperative internships at the Courier, and was turned down, but wound up writing for other newspapers in Ohio.
When she graduated, she came home and applied to both the McKeesport Daily News, where she lived, and the New Pittsburgh Courier, which was her dream job.
The Daily News had never had a Black reporter. Retired Supreme Court Justice Cynthia Baldwin, who was at that time an attorney but was also Daniel’s Sunday school teacher, lobbied the paper to give her a job.
Daniels got the job at the Daily News. The same day she received an offer from the New Pittsburgh Courier.
“I had to turn down my dream job,” she said. Instead, she wrote for the Daily News as the first Black reporter there. Now she profiles Black-owned businesses for the Courier while running her own public relations firm.
The Pittsburgh Courier declared bankruptcy in 1965. In 1966 a new Black newspaper, the New Pittsburgh Courier was started.
The new newspaper maintains the same crusading spirit.
For the last 10 years it has unflinchingly documented homicides in the Black community every month. It covered the deaths at the hands of police of both Black businessman Jonny Gammage and Antwon Rose, a Black teenager. Most recently it has followed the story of Allegheny County Common Pleas Judge Mark Tranquilli who has been accused of making racist remarks.
(ABOUT THE TOP PHOTO: DIANE I. DANIELS, the Courier’s business reporter. (Photo by Ann Belser/Print)
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