Black history a focus at Donora event
Brian Charlton, archivist at Donora Historical Society, discusses the Ku Klux Klan leading a New Year’s Day parade in Monongahela during a black history program Monday at Mon Valley YMCA.
Members of a black Boy Scout troop are shown with their leader circa 1940 outside First Baptist Church at Fourth Street and Allen Avenue in Donora.
Black and white students were integrated in Donora’s public schools from the start of the borough’s incorporation in 1901.
They are shown seated together in old class photos as well as those of athletic teams at Donora schools, according to a Black History Month program presented Monday by Brian Charlton, archivist at Donora Historical Society.
“They played together until they graduated and then they had to join separate groups,” Charlton said during his program, “The African-American Community in Donora,” held at Mon Valley YMCA in Carroll Township.
Black men who worked at the U.S. Steel plants in Donora had to play on “colored (sports) teams,” even through old photos taken at their workplace show them beside their white co-workers, Charlton said. Yet in 1921, a company publication showed a photo of a black man named Steve Simms listing his weaknesses as gin and chicken, he said.
He said it was an anomaly at the time for Donora’s schools to be integrated because, like today, racism against “targeted groups” was a problem throughout the Mon Valley in the early days of the borough.
“We keep repeating the same mistakes of history,” he said, referring to current attempts by the White House to exclude certain would-be immigrants.
“We never learn the lessons of history.”
Charlton said there was a strong Ku Klux Klan presence in the area. He displayed a photo of a large number of men wearing white robes and hoods leading the New Year’s Day parade in nearby Mononogahela in 1908. He said the Klan in the early 20th century was against anyone who wasn’t white and Presbyterian.
Minstrel shows were incredibly popular, too, in Donora. They included on the stage Southern belles and white men wearing blackface. Charlton said once such performance included in the cast Michael Duda, a white man who went on to serve as a president at California University of Pennsylvania.
Charlton also pointed out a number of successful black people from Donora, such as Lt. Martin Law, who was a member of the Tuskegee Airmen during World War II, and Ulice Payne, who was president and chief executive officer of the Milwaukee Brewers.