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.
“Some of our people”
City workers carved the Highland Park pool from Lake Carnegie, an oblong pond, in the early 1930s. With male and female bathers both welcome at the pool, white residents swiftly established a policy of de facto segregation enforced by violence. Throughout the 1930s and ’40s, Black bathers faced beatings and threats when they visited city pools considered “whites-only,” despite formal legal protections. Police did little to protect them, as Wiltse notes.
Sporadic efforts to open the pools failed, and it wasn’t until 1948 that a concerted push by white and Black activists began to crack the segregation policy. Local Communist Party official and storied activist Steve Nelson described the campaign’s radical origin in his biography, written with James R. Barrett and Bob Ruck:
It had been a hot, sticky, typical Pittsburgh summer, but most swimming facilities were off limits to blacks. The swimming pool in Highland Park was a natural place for black people from East Liberty and Homewood to go, but it was still de facto segregated. There had been discussion about this in the Party’s District Committee, and it was decided that some of our people could raise the question in their unions. The first local to react was the UE [United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers] local at Westinghouse. They decided to bring a racially mixed group to swim there on a Sunday in early August.
Matt Cvetic, an FBI infiltrator who later named Pittsburgh Communists for the authorities, claimed to have attended a meeting to plan the pool campaign. He testified in court: “I was present. The meeting was held in a Wood Street building, the former Communist headquarters,” a likely reference to a third-floor office at 440 Wood St., a spot now occupied by the Tower at PNC Plaza.
“Going to have trouble”
The leftists first traveled to the pool on a Sunday in early August 1948, and they resolved to return every week. The second time, four people were charged after a brawl. Police claimed one young anti-segregation activist had taken a weapon: a wrench wrapped in a towel. Officials identified the newcomers as members of the Young Progressives of America, a group backing Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace (Wallace, supported by Communists and opposed to the brewing Cold War, had drawn attention for his racially integrated Southern campaign rallies).
The biggest fight took place the afternoon of Aug. 22, when some 70 progressives hopped off streetcars to march on the pool. One hundred sixty police officers stood guard, while hundreds of pro-segregation locals waited and watched nearby. Nathan Albert, a UE Local 601 activist and alleged Squirrel Hill Communist Party officer, told an officer: “I hear you are going to have trouble here today.” When skirmishes broke out, leaving several injured, police nabbed Albert as a “ringleader” and filed riot charges.
The Young Progressives
While more serious violence was averted, the fights drew widespread media attention — especially once the Wallace supporters and civil rights activists could be tied to a prominent Communist (Wallace’s campaign was red meat for local anticommunists, who eagerly published the names of those signing his nominating petitions). Anti-segregationists defended themselves, as in a letter to the Post-Gazette from Young Progressives officer Esther Bliss:
The Young Progressives of Pittsburgh know the meaning of Jim Crow. We found this meaning without going to Georgia and without disguising ourselves as Negroes. We found Jim Crow here at home, here in the city of Pittsburgh . . . It is not enough for the citizens of Pittsburgh to have a civil rights law on the books. It is not enough for the city administration to issue hollow statements on high-sounding policy. . . . We will continue in our fight to break Jim Crow practices in Pittsburgh.
Red Scare and Jim Crow
With the battle lines drawn, the authorities and white-dominated press framed the desegregation campaign as a Communist plot to stir up racial discord. A Pittsburgh Press editorial cited the cost taxpayers faced in defending those accused in the riot. “What this adds up to is that the Highland Park riot was not a spontaneous outbreak but a coolly-calculated ‘incident’ planned by the Communist Party for its un-American purposes,” the editors wrote. “In this case, the Communists simply were using both whites and Negroes to stir up the kind of trouble that helps their cause.”
Albert’s riot trial drew particular attention, especially after Cvetic, the FBI infiltrator, formally named him as a Communist. Albert’s sister, schoolteacher Dorothy Albert, also faced allegations of Communist activity. Public support from United Electrical Workers District 6 — itself embroiled in Red Scare chaos — wasn’t enough to save him. A jury found Albert guilty, and in December 1950 he was sentenced to nearly two years in the county workhouse. The judge told him, “You should be sent back to the country where you belong,” and when reminded that Albert was a U.S. citizen, added: “Well, then, he should be sent to the country which believes in those principles and which has caused so much trouble and unrest.”
Victory
Communists were driven underground and the Progressive Party fell from the national consciousness, but local Black activists carried on the pool fight. In 1951, a group of activists including Urban League official Alexander Allen said they faced threats of violence at Highland Park and sought a court injunction to close the pool. City park authorities denied the claim. But with fresh legal challenges, Mayor David L. Lawrence relented and ordered police to ensure the pool’s de facto desegregation, as Wiltse reports. Thousands of Black bathers visited Highland Park the next year, and activists turned their attention to other city pools in the years afterward.
The story of the Pittsburgh pools’ desegregation has been told before, often with the suggestion that McCarthyite hysteria was responsible for the Communist allegations. But, as in many early civil rights struggles, Communists and left-wing radicals took key roles in starting the fight — and faced jail time for it.
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