Gwen Cole Strickland and Stratton Nash grew up blocks from each other in Sewickley, where they stand at the intersection of Nevin Avenue and Hill Street, Tuesday, Dec. 17, 2024. Cole Strickland holds her mother’s book on Black history in Sewickley, which Nash’s mother helped to type up. The two are working to bring attention to the history and contributions of Black Sewickley. (Photo by Stephanie Strasburg/PublicSource)
Sewickley frequently gets defined as “rich” and “white” — but a group of past and present residents are on a mission to recast that perception by mapping the vibrant Black history of the Pittsburgh suburb.
“PublicSource is an independent nonprofit newsroom serving the Pittsburgh region. Sign up for our free newsletters.”
For Stratton Nash, 67, it was an in-flight screening of “Remember the Titans” on a business trip that cast into relief the unique contours of his Sewickley childhood. The film’s depiction of late Civil Rights-era racist exclusions clashed with Nash’s memories of his coming of age. From that same period, Nash recalls easygoing bike rides around his racially integrated street, and meals shared with a Black friend in the main booth of a neighborhood eatery.
Sewickley often gets classified with other predominantly White suburbs like Fox Chapel and Mt. Lebanon. But such a grouping obscures the comparative racial and economic diversity that characterizes Sewickley Borough. It misses as well a longstanding Black community whose contributions Nash and Cole Strickland are working to bring to local and national attention through a suite of historical preservation projects, including an original documentary film, currently in production.
Sewickley Black population stands out among comparable Pittsburgh suburbs
In Sewickley Borough, about 5.2% of residents identified as “Black/African American alone” on the 2020 U.S. Census. Roughly 13% of Allegheny County residents selected that category.
Fox Chapel Borough
1.2%
Mt. Lebanon Township
1.5%
Sewickley Borough
5.2%
Glen Osborne Borough
2.5%
Edgeworth Borough
0.8%
Sewickley Hills Borough
2.2%
Sewickley Heights Borough
1.2%
Chart: Gregory Laski/PublicSourceSource: 2020 U.S. Decennial CensusGet the dataCreated with Datawrapper
The efforts build upon a book that Cole Strickland’s mother, Bettie Cole, self-published in 2000, entitled “Their Story.” Collating more than two decades’ worth of research into the people and places of Black Sewickley, the book stands within an age-old literary tradition of self-publication that allowed Black writers to bypass industry gatekeepers and communicate a message to the world on their own terms, often at significant personal cost. To fund the 700-plus pages of “Their Story,” Cole mortgaged her home.
Who makes up Sewickley?
- Around 3,900 people live in Sewickley Borough, an area of 1 square mile distinct from neighboring Sewickley Heights and Sewickley Hills.
- Approximately 85.2% of borough residents are white, and 5.2% are Black, according to the 2020 U.S. Census. About 6.4% of residents selected “two or more races.”
- The median household income is $77,454, per 2022 Census Bureau estimates, just above the Allegheny County norm.
- The median sale price of a Sewickley Borough home was about $385,000, according to Multiple Listing Service data from the past five years. The median price countywide was $260,000.
“She was just in love with Sewickley,” said Cole Strickland, recalling her mother, who passed away in 2016 at the age of 92. Cole could locate no dedicated studies of Black Sewickley — and so had to write her own. It was a history that “urgently needs to be tapped,” Cole declared in the introduction to the book, which is back in circulation in a new impression published in 2024.
For Cole Strickland and Nash, the urgency of “Their Story” abides, especially as Sewickley’s Black population declines, and it’s central to the work they’re shepherding as committee co-chairs leading more than 30 current and former Sewickley residents who are collecting memories and raising funds for the film.
To Pittsburghers who think that Sewickley is just another “rich, white” suburb, this group says, “look again.”
Nash and Cole Strickland’s vision comes not only from studying Bettie Cole’s book. Both spent their formative years in the Sewickley of the 1960s and ’70s, decades when Black residents composed about 15% of the population, or about 900 in a town of roughly 6,000.
Those numbers accentuate the legacy of a community dating back to the early 19th century, whose ranks include famed Tuskegee Airmen, along with everyday men and women who built businesses and churches, cultivated civic organizations, bought homes and made lives for themselves even as they labored as domestic workers in wealthy white homes in nearby Sewickley Heights and Sewickley Hills — or, later, in the manufacturing industry in surrounding areas.
The Hill District-based Pittsburgh Courier recorded the world this Black community made, devoting front-page coverage to opening week services at the newly constructed St. Matthews African Methodist Episcopal [AME] Zion Church in March 1912.
“Great satisfaction is felt by Sewickley folks … of both races in the successful completion,” the Courier wrote, referring to the structure at the corner of Walnut and Thorn streets that to this day hosts a faith community.
It’s one of three Black churches whose edifices still stand in Sewickley, and it’s an example of the distinctive story of Black flourishing in a majority white area that the project aims to highlight amid what Nash calls the “dark” nature of much racial discourse today.
Beyond a single suburban story
To Rueben Brock, the film’s director, the borough’s story arrived like the light of revelation.
“When I first got the call about this project, my reaction was shock that there was even a Black community to speak of in Sewickley,” said Brock, 48, a filmmaker and Pennsylvania Western University professor of psychology who is also creator and director of the documentary “Black Pittsburgh.”
Brock expected a tale of racial and economic subjugation. But research for the film has revealed a “uniquely tight-knit community, even across racial and ethnic lines,” he said.
“It wasn’t total harmony,” Brock added, attributing Sewickley’s history of interracial cooperation at least in part to the necessity for Black labor on white estates. Nash and Cole Strickland likewise acknowledged that not all Black Sewickleyans across generations would paint the same picture of their hometown.
Still, the dozen Sewickleyans interviewed for this story agreed that the town flouts the traditional scripts on U.S. suburbs, which elevate mid-20th-century racist housing policies and practices — from which Sewickley was not immune — while ignoring the ways Black suburbanites were making places of their own across the nation decades before.
Even designating Sewickley as mostly white, with a Black population of 10% by 1900, “obscures a whole complex history,” according to Linn Posey-Maddox, a Temple University professor who studies suburbs and urban/suburban relationships.
“It’s important to honor the lived experiences of people of color who are in suburbs, and the ways they built community for themselves and their families despite being in a numerical minority and despite the broader context of systemic racism.”
Sewickley’s two Ys
Perhaps no landmark brings that context into sharper focus than the Sewickley Valley YMCA.
Like many Black Sewickleyans before, neither Cole Strickland nor her mother walked through the Y’s doors because the institution did not admit Black members at the time.
When Sewickley Valley YMCA CEO Trish Hooper examined the organization’s available records, she didn’t find any policy mandating racial discrimination, which she believes persisted through the mid-1960s. But she is intimately familiar with the sense of exclusion that current Black members and their ancestors once felt.
“It’s really important for us as a Y to acknowledge what our history is, and every day to work to build trust,” said Hooper, the organization’s leader since 2011.
Contemplating that historical exclusion induces in Cole Strickland not anger but pride about the way her forebears responded to injustice. “When Blacks were rejected from an establishment, they built their own,” she said. They “pushed through with strength and ambition.”
In 1913, Black Sewickleyans opened their own YMCA, known as the “Colored YMCA.” Later, the Sewickley Community Center filled the gap and became a hub for Black recreation and cultural life. The center remains active, led by Board President Bob Patterson, 57, whose family’s roots in the area stretch back at least six generations.
For nearly half a century, the Community Center hosted “Come on Home” weekend, an event that called upward of 400 Black Sewickleyans strewn across the U.S. back to their hometown for an annual community reunion.
Black Sewickley past, Black Sewickley present
Sewickley last celebrated “Come on Home” in 2015, the result of a loss of organizing continuity between older and younger generations, many of whom have made their place in the world that beckons beyond the borough’s boundaries. It’s a sign, too, of the town’s changing racial and economic profile, which many residents described as “sad.”
Sewickley’s Black population has been decreasing since the 1960s, and as elders pass on, Black-owned homes have fallen out of family lines. “There’s no wrongdoing, but it’s a good school district, and housing prices are high,” explained Nash, who serves on the Quaker Valley School Board.
Black residents a constant presence in Sewickley across 120 years
Sewickley’s Black population hit a high in 1960, as did the borough’s overall population, according to U.S. Census data from 1900 through 2020. Since that time, the Black population has declined at more than double the rate of the borough’s overall population, though the number of Sewickleyans who identify as belonging to “two or more races” has increased steadily since the option appeared on the 2000 Census. (Note: This chart uses “Black” as a consistent category, but census racial designations have changed across time, as this infographic explains. Data from 2000 forward refers to the “Black/African American alone” population.)
The thriving Triumph Baptist Church, where both Cole Strickland and Nash worship, recently outgrew its borough home and moved to a new location. The former church structure is now a private residence, which sold for $990,000 in 2021, according to real estate records.
But even as Cole Strickland and Nash turn their faces toward a retreating past, the story of Black Sewickley is scarcely over.
When Bettie Cole was conducting research for “Their Story,” she paid a visit to Carlos Norman, then a 21-year-old aspiring Black barber from Ambridge. Norman recently had taken ownership of the business of Aaron White, a Black Sewickley barber approaching retirement.
Thirty years later, Norman’s business is still running. Norman credits his start in part to White. He also notes the role of the late Laurence O’Loughlin, a local dentist (who was white) who leased Norman his first shop, never raising the rent more than $10.
Norman’s Cut N Edge was “the Black barber shop” when it opened in 1993, but now it’s simply “a barber shop” — a trajectory that sits just fine with Norman.
“We’re still Black, we’re proud of being a Black establishment,” he said. But Norman considers his business a “melting pot,” which serves clientele of all races and walks of life, and offers opportunities for them to meet and connect.
That networking now happens in the building Norman moved into 10 years ago, right next to St. Matthews AME Church on Walnut Street. It’s the same structure that once housed the “Colored YMCA.”
Gregory Laski writes about culture and civic life. He can be reached at gmlaski@gmail.com or on Twitter/X at @ProfL12.
Collection and analysis of historical census data for this story was aided by staff at the U.S. Census Bureau Library, the University of Minnesota IPUMS project, and the University of Pittsburgh Center for Social and Urban Research.
This story was fact-checked by Rich Lord.
This article first appeared on PublicSource and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
About Post Author
