Over a decade ago, I was walking along a muddy and crowded alleyway between hundreds of shanty houses in Alexandra. Alex, as it is known, is one of post-apartheid Johannesburg’s most segregated slums and bastion of inequality. I was a young human rights activist and Fulbright Scholar living in South Africa and had just finished advising a group of residents over a water rights dispute. I exited the alleyway onto a busy street. As I weaved through a traffic jam of minivan taxis, known as kombis, a group of giggling young Black children pulled me aside and playfully threw a tennis ball at me. They knew I was not a local and were curious to interact. I smiled and crouched down. I caught a few passes, gave some hugs and continued on my way.
A decade later, I was criss-crossing the Pittsburgh region to knock doors and meet residents as a candidate for U.S. Congress, before the pandemic abruptly sidelined my travels. I met a Black single mother of three young children on her porch in a dilapidated home in the city’s segregated Hill District. We spoke of housing issues. I could hear her kids playing and giggling inside. They peeked out the window to see whom their mother was speaking with. I smiled at the kids. But, I turned solemn as I departed that pleasant exchange. Like the children in Alex, Black children in my hometown were growing up in one of the nation’s least livable and unequal cities for Black Americans, according to the landmark race and gender equity study published in 2019. At that moment, I had arrived at an uncomfortable truth. Pittsburgh was America’s apartheid city, not the nation’s most livable city.
It is a jarring comparison at first blush. The legacy of South Africa’s apartheid had forcibly, by law, separated people by racial classifications and into geographically isolated districts. The result was severe levels of occupational segregation. Schools were separated along race lines and the gap in education achievement was wide. Health outcomes for women and children were markedly different between whites and Blacks. The economic chasm across race was growing. It was indisputable that the apartheid legacy contributed to Johannesburg’s vast levels of racial inequality. How could Pittsburgh possibly compare? At best the contrast seemed historically inaccurate and at worst culturally and racially insensitive. But, as sociologists Nancy Denton and Douglas Massey once explained in their seminal work, American Apartheid, “Americans have been quick to criticize the apartheid system of South Africa, [but] they have been reluctant to acknowledge the consequences of their own institutionalized system of racial separation.”
Indeed, the apartheid comparison is apt if we dig beneath the surface. There, we find irrefutably sobering facts that contradict Pittsburgh’s romanticized moniker of “America’s most livable city.” A confluence of private and state actions has led to a long history of segregation and discrimination in Pittsburgh. Like Johannesburg, these past practices have established a comparatively “firm basis for a broader system of racial injustice” today. Although the history of Pittsburgh’s apartheid may not have been “rooted in the legal strictures” of its Johannesburg relative, the city’s policies and practices, like many localities that are comparably segregated in the United States and South Africa, have been “no less effective in perpetuating racial inequality.”
Examples abound. The razing of the lower Hill District to make way for an arena was catastrophic to Black Pittsburgh, displacing thousands to isolated grey fortress housing projects. The mass displacement of East Liberty exacerbated racial exclusion. Aggressive redlining throughout the city quietly pushed Black residents to concentrated pockets, such as Homewood, Larimer and Lincoln-Lemington. Racial steering cornered Black and Brown communities into silos. Pittsburgh created an “exclusionary zoning” code that maximized the proximity and separation between low-income renters and homeowners in specific neighborhoods to effectively establish de facto racial zoning. And the acceleration of gentrification in recent decades has made the Pittsburgh region a tale of two cities that mirrors a de facto apartheid city. There were also regional spillover effects.
Jerry Dickinson speaking with a resident of Homewood in October 2019. (Photo Courtesy of Jerry Dickinson)
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