NGA | Bearden Memory: Pittsburgh

Memories 2 of 4

Pittsburgh

As a youth in the 1920s, Bearden lived periodically in Pittsburgh with his maternal grandparents, who had a boarding house near the steel mills. Bearden found the steel mills "fascinating." At sixteen, in the summer of 1927, he worked the night shift at U.S. Steel, and later he wrote about the condition of blacks in the steel industry. Bearden's re-creations of his memories of Pittsburgh often include the essentials of working class life that he observed:

apartment block housing
an horizon of smoke stacks, belching steam and flames
the steel worker, on his way to or from a shift
scaffolding, hooks, and pulleys from steel and bolt factories
trains, hauling steel and bringing blacks north for industrial jobs

Pittsburgh, 1938. Library of Congress, photo: Arthur Rothstein

In the summer of 1936 Bearden interviewed steel workers at Ohio and Pennsylvania plants, just as the steel industry was unionizing. His view of black steel workers—often stuck in menial jobs and at risk of discrimination regardless of union membership—was published in the December 1937 issue of the magazine Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life.

Many blacks migrated from the South for industrial jobs in northern cities such as Pittsburgh, and Bearden's grandparents rented rooms to them. This collage recalls the essence of life in their boardinghouse.

At left, a mill worker leaves for his shift, lunch bucket (made of crumpled foil) in hand.
Inside, front and center, is a warmly lit room, where Bearden remembered his grandmother "rubbing new boarders with cocoa butter. They didn't realize, when they first started, the terrific heat from those furnaces....the flames would lick out and scorch them." The life was hard, but the workers were making "a tremendous wage...."
Around the house are signs of "steel" scaffolding, a pulley, smokestacks, belching steam and fire.

Romare Bearden, Pittsburgh Memories, 1984, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; gift of Mr. and Mrs. Ronald P. Davenport and Mr. and Mrs. Milton A. Washington, 1984