Regulars and Respectables: African American Systems of Reciprocity on the Streets of Pittsburgh

In urban neighborhoods where African Americans lived and worked the streets formed the arteries that moved goods and people in and out. The streets of urban neighborhoods are not static lines on a map or boundaries demarcating one region of urban space from another. Instead, streets can function as spaces: spaces of labor, commerce, ideas, politics, and power. African Americans faced particular problems accessing the usual avenues of formal power within American cities but they formed their own networks of information and ideas in segregated neighborhoods. These networks of informal power challenged formal notions of social hierarchy within the community and created conflicts along and within the color line. These streets were sites of struggle and cultural development. During the Modern Black Freedom Movement, African American Pittsburghers formed an alliance based on older working class-based systems of reciprocity on the streets to combat social and economic injustice surrounding their neighborhood. The streets became a theater of battle as African Americans used the visibility of streets to display the outcomes of systemic inequality in the urban north, including frequent charges of police brutality and violence.
During the early years of the northern Civil Rights movement, street capitalists used their networks of informal power to amass large and questionable fortunes but these networks all functioned through systems of reciprocity. The combination of legal and illegal enterprise often garnered a side-eye from African Americans invested in cultural respectability but for those enmeshed in systems of reciprocity, the promise that social debts would be paid kept few from openly disputing it. As the movement for equality and human rights progressed, African Americans used their informal networks to advance their cause, until some African Americans gained access to more formal networks of power and the alliance between classes collapsed amid urban redevelopment and increasing violence.