In the midst of the Great Depression, Communist-led coal miners waged a vicious fight against Western Pennsylvania’s coal operators. That fight turned deadly on June 22, 1931, in a hail of bullets and shotgun shells along a rural road in Hampton Township.
When the chaos ended, one miner lay dead and several were left badly wounded. The shooting — carried out near the entrance to a sprawling mine not far from North Park — would stir public outrage against the police and draw charges against dozens of miners and supporters.
Miners and their allies rally on the North Side, summer 1931. (Post-Gazette)
For a few years in the 1930s, the name Leland Knoch seemed to be everywhere in the Pittsburgh art scene. The radical North Side painter — his work described as “proletarian” even in the mainstream press — drew attention for their grim scenes of poverty and labor struggle. Politically militant, open about his poverty and his physical disability, Knoch organized artists across the city.
Then, seemingly as soon as he appeared, he was gone. Knoch died at age 41, leaving a final gallery show and a New York Times obituary notice as his legacy. Images of his work are hard to find, but the few that remain are striking. Comparing his work favorably against a colleague’s, Knoch said in 1934: “I don’t know what class of people could understand it. But I know the proletariat will understand mine.”
Scores of police stood guard on Aug. 22, 1948, as a crowd of white and Black bathers made their way to the Highland Park pool. Bottles rained down as hundreds of white opponents circled to attack. Fistfights broke out; a Black police officer was kicked in the chest and sent to a hospital. When the battle cleared, several would-be bathers lay injured or sat handcuffed. Some conspicuously wore “Henry Wallace for President” buttons.
The incident was the worst yet in the ongoing campaign to desegregate the Highland Park pool, a flashpoint in Pittsburgh’s 1940s civil rights struggle. The push to open the pool has been well covered, including by University of Montana Professor Jeff Wiltse — but it’s worth noting the key role of Communists, left-wing unionists and Progressive Party activists in the fight. While Red Scare-era reports would blame radicals for the “race riot,” Communists themselves later took credit for launching the struggle. After years in the courts and the headlines, they would finally open the pool to Black bathers.
On the night of March 16-17 1941, with well over 100 passengers aboard, the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Buckeye Limited leaped from the tracks near Baden and plunged into the frigid Ohio River.
Witnesses rushed to save the victims from cars scattered along the Beaver County riverbank. Officials later released the tally: Five people were dead, including an infant and three railroad employees, and more than 100 were injured.
Within days, investigators revealed disturbing details: Someone had removed spikes and shifted a 39-foot section of rail. Two figures were spotted watching the tracks through a blinding snowstorm. Dozens of visiting Soviet officials — the purpose of their visit unclear — had ridden the Manhattan Limited along the same spot just minutes before. And FBI investigators, it seems, considered American Trotskyists as potential suspects — suggesting they targeted the Soviet officials but destroyed the wrong train.
The Buckeye Limited lies along the Ohio River, with the light of the Jones & Laughlin Aliquippa works glowing across the water. (Wire photo, as seen in the Kane Republican)
This is the first post of Pittsburgh in Spain, an occasional series covering locals who served in the Spanish Civil War. The first item covers local activism in defense of the Spanish Republic; future posts will include brief biographies of those who served.
When Robert Raven stepped off his train at the Pennsylvania Railroad station on Nov. 26, 1937, a clutch of local Communist Party representatives greeted him with a banner. The 24-year-old’s brothers were there, too, to guide him as he hobbled atop crutches. Eight months earlier, a grenade had left Raven — a Pittsburgh native and onetime University of Pittsburgh medical student — blinded and seriously injured on a Spanish battlefield.
Raven told his story to a Pittsburgh Press reporter in a hotel room. “What am I going to do, now I’m blind, you ask? Well, I suppose I will speak with ‘Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.’ I hope the American people hear the truth. Democracy will win.”
Former Pitt student Robert Raven (center), blinded in the Spanish Civil War, at the first gathering of the war’s U.S. veterans in 1938. (Library of Congress)
Raven was one of dozens with Pittsburgh ties to volunteer in Spain. Some were killed, others returned home wounded; a few are buried here. As locals sparred over the war at rallies and in letters to the editor, Pittsburgh Communists and their allies raised funds and spread the word for the Spanish Republic.
