Great jazz and baseball.That’s what Pittsburgh’s largest black neighborhood, the Hill District, was famous for around the country in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s.Unless you’re a serious jazz fan, a student of Negro league baseball or you have read my 2017 Jim Crow/civil rights history book "30 Days a Black Man,30 Days a Black Man: The Forgotten Story That Exposed the Jim Crow South" you probably never heard of Pittsburgh's Hill District or its rich culture and national importance.It’s not your fault.During the glory decades of “The Hill’s” remarkable, unsung and long-forgotten black renaissance, black and white America were two separate and unequal social and economic worlds that rarely touched or overlapped.The mainstream Big Media of the day – the white daily newspapers, news magazines and radio – paid virtually no attention to the culture or problems of black Americans in either the North or the Jim Crow South.To appropriate a phrase, in 1948 the lives of America’s 14 million blacks did not matter to white editors, white advertisers and white readers from Manhattan to Atlanta to Hollywood.In “Smoketown” Mark Whitaker shows what a big story the White Press missed.A New Yorker and former Newsweek editor with deep family roots in black Pittsburgh, Whitaker is like a cultural archeologist with good journalism skills.He carefully digs up the proof that “for a brief and glorious stretch of the twentieth century” the then-Steel City’s Hill District was “one of the most vibrant and consequential communities of color in U.S. history.”Whitaker’s history of the Hill District’s cultural renaissance and the talented men and women who created it is thick with the stories of the great musicians, star ballplayers, wealthy racketeers and newspaper geniuses who made it a bustling, exciting and loosely policed 24/7 Mecca of commerce, nightlife and vice for the Pittsburgh’s area’s 100,000 blacks and adventurous white jazz fans. But there was nothing romantic about the Hill District, which looked down a steep but walkable slope to downtown Pittsburgh’s stumpy and sooted skyline. Often lawless, it was blighted in every serious socioeconomic way and malignly neglected by the all-white, all-Democrat City Hall.Until the late 1950s, when a hundred acres were flattened to the sidewalks by the atomic wrecking ball of urban renewal, “the Hill” was home to about 40,000 mostly poor and working-class blacks and 10,000 scuffling immigrants from places like Italy, Syria and Russia. Its black population in the ‘30s and ‘40s was much smaller than Harlem’s or Chicago’s.But as Whitaker shows, the enterprise of a handful of the Hill’s movers and shakers -- legitimate businessmen and rich racketeers – had a remarkable, lasting and heretofore unsung influence on the culture and politics of black America. Some of the Hill’s kingpins operated nightclubs and huge dance palaces on the Hill's main streets that regularly booked Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong and the Count Basie Orchestra. The fertile jazz scene nurtured future superstars like Sarah Vaughan and sprouted homegrown heroes like pioneering bop band leader and singer Billy Eckstine and Duke Ellington composer Billy Strayhorn. The Hill’s numbers baron and richest man, Gus Greenlee, and his rival Cum Posey Jr., the son of a wealthy barge company tycoon, signed up future hall of famers like Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige and built the Pittsburgh Crawfords and Homestead Grays into the powerhouse teams of the Negro baseball leagues. Meanwhile, through brilliant marketing and a tabloid-like style of advocacy journalism that crusaded for the equality and civil rights of blacks in the North and the Jim Crow South, publisher Robert L. Vann grew his weekly Pittsburgh Courier into the country’s largest and most politically important black newspaper. Though he does little original or new reporting, Whitaker does a thorough, convincing and footnote-free job of making his case for the Hill’s District’s many talents and national political reach. He’s a good story-teller, or, more accurately, a good “re-teller” of stories told in older books about jazz stars and August Wilson. That’s true whether he’s doing the play-by-play of the 1892 Homestead Steel Strike or describing how the Pittsburgh Courier worked behind the scenes to make Joe Louis a celebrity black hero and a decade later helped Jackie Robinson get into the majors and stay there. Whitaker devotes whole chapters to the platonic love affair of Lena Horne and Billy Strayhorn and to the tough life and late-blooming career of acclaimed playwright August Wilson. Wilson, who grew up on the Hill during the 1950s and 1960s, carried its cultural renaissance into the 21st century by setting nine of his acclaimed ten plays there, including “Fences” and “Jitney.” “Smoketown” is mostly about individuals – dozens of shrewd, driven and gifted individuals – and it's packed with their mini-bios and stories of struggle, success and failure in an isolated society within a society where blacks were on their own in every way.The lineup of pioneering jazz giants incubated by Pittsburgh’s vibrant subculture of black musicians, mainly pianists, in the first half of the 20th century was impressive – Earl “Fatha” Hines, Mary Lou Williams, Strayhorn, Eckstine, Errol Garner, Ahmad Jamal, bassist Ray Brown and drummers Art Blakey and Kenny Clarke. Later came the more popular tenor saxophonist Stanley Turrentine and guitarist George Benson.But the book's recurring star and most important character is an institution, the Pittsburgh Courier. With more than 400,000 subscribers, probably at least 2 million readers around the country and editions in 13 cities at its peak in the late 1940s, the weekly was hugely popular and influential. Often using quotes from the paper’s articles, writers and editors, Whitaker revisits several of its many national crusades, including its long fight for the desegregation of the military. Its controversial “Double V Campaign” during the early days of World War II called for blacks to achieve victory for democracy overseas and victory for themselves at home in the form of full and equal citizenship.Whitaker explains why the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover and President Franklin Roosevelt threatened the Courier and other papers with censorship or worse because of the “unpatriotic” “Double V for Victory” campaign, and he devotes a chapter to the intrepid women reporters who went South to cover the early days of the Civil Rights Movement.“Smoketown” is a long-overdue and rewarding trip to a forgotten special place and time, but it isn’t perfect. Whitaker, who doesn’t seem to have a sharp ideological ax to grind with anyone or anything, including the city’s Democrat and Republican power brokers whose idea it was to clear-cut a hundred acres of the Hill and tear out its commercial heart and cultural soul.Whitaker could have been more clear about the Pittsburgh Courier’s house politics. Like almost all black papers of the era, it was reliably Republican, pro-business, moderately conservative and an enthusiastic supporter of Republican presidential candidates Wendell Willkie in 1940 and Thomas Dewey in 1944 and 1948.The exception, which Whitaker stresses because it shocked so many black Americans in 1932, was the Courier’s surprising abandonment of the beloved Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln.Embracing the hated Democrat Party of Jim Crow, the paper endorsed FDR instead of Herbert Hoover on its front page. Using a powerful metaphor from a speech by publisher Vann, the Courier recommended that black voters turn their Lincoln portraits to the wall and vote for the Democratic candidate for president.A reverse echo of the relationship between blacks and the Democrat Party today, Vann had decided the Republican Party was taking the black vote for granted and not doing enough to fight in Congress for full black equality and civil rights.Vann’s political 180, partly made because he was seeking a position in FDR’s administration, was short-lived. His fling with Roosevelt and the New Deal ended when he saw FDR was never going to seriously confront the bigoted Southern Democrats in the Senate who blocked Republican civil rights bills with their filibusters and other maneuverings. It’s also too bad – and strange -- that during his worthy paean to the Courier Whitaker didn’t give greater respect to the Courier’s incredibly prolific associate editor, columnist and renowned satirist, the controversial and now forgotten conservative/libertarian/radical George Schuyler.Schuyler, aka “The Black Mencken,” was a super journalist who wrote virtually every in-house editorial for the Courier from 1926 to the early 1960s, plus his two signed weekly columns. Based in Harlem, he often traveled to report on the economic and political condition of blacks in the American South, South America and Africa.He offended and made fun of everyone, including black leaders like NAACP boss Walter White and later Martin Luther King Jr., whom he said did not deserve the Noble Prize.A fierce individualist who hated all –isms, especially communism, he considered the whole concept of race a fraud dreamed up by socialists and politicians.In 1943 he was calling for government reparations for interned Japanese-Americans -- as well as reparations for the killing, stealing and civil rights abuses committed by the U.S. government on black Americans and Native Americans.“Smoketown” probably goes a little too deep into the life and career of August Wilson. And he gets lost now and then in the high weeds of jazz and baseball. Despite its flaws and omissions, though, Whitaker takes readers on an enjoyable trip back in time and gives Pittsburgh’s Hill District and its talented ghosts the national props they’ve always deserved.Tag:Ex-newspaperman Steigerwald is the author of 30 Days a Black Man: The Forgotten Story That Exposed the Jim Crow South, which retells the story of Pittsburgh Post-Gazette star reporter Ray Sprigle's undercover mission through the Jim Crow South in 1948. He also wrote Dogging Steinbeck,Dogging Steinbeck: Discovering America and Exposing the Truth about 'Travels With Charley'  which exposed the truth about Travels With Charley and celebrated Flyover America and its people six years before they elected Donald Trump.