“Everybody Had a Hustle”: Street Capitalism and Cooperation in an African American Neighborhood, 1930–45

The Great Depression transformed the streets of African American neighborhoods across the country, including within the Hill District in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  As the “last hired, first fired,” many within the working class embraced or tolerated illegal labor as an alternative to labor insecurity.  Street spaces in urban neighborhoods became spaces where men and women worked in both legal and illegal ways.  Numbers men, prostitutes, and jitney drivers faced many labor issues in their street work like competition, labor discipline, and encroachment.  These labor issues reveal how illegal laborers used street spaces as a capitalist space. 

African Americans in the working class not only tolerated illegal laborers in their midst, the often cooperated with them in significant ways.  These street capitalists were kin to many within the working class and often invested their profits toward the advancement of the community.  Street capitalists navigated class divisions within the African American community in unique ways.  Middle class African Americans expressed ambivalence and occasionally hostility about the blurring of the lines between legal and extralegal work during the period.  They struggled to deal with the most successful street capitalists, especially those who ascended into the ranks of the African American elite through combinations of illegal and legal labor.  These class-inflected responses to street capitalism also influenced other African American uses of the streets.