Civil Disorder, and Civil Rights in a Western Pennsylvanian Industrial Town


In 1970, citizens of New Castle, Pennsylvania, a small industrial city an hour north of Pittsburgh, responded to the racially motivated murder of a local black Vietnam veteran in that city with vandalism and firebombing that forced the mayor to place the city under a state of emergency for three days. The series of exchanges preceding and following the murder reveals much about that city's history, and how several factors influenced local forms of racism. Existing scholarship has focused on racialized policies and practices in two spatial extremes—large cities and small towns—while this analysis seeks to illustrate how local, regional, and national influences shaped what forms of race-based policies and practices in spaces between these municipal extremes were permissible. Beyond place and space, this research contributes to a different set of conversations about the ways identity and community are articulated through the actions of individuals and groups, and how those understandings are shaped by individual and collective memory. This analysis begins by situating Ronald Mitchell's murder within the historical context of 1970s New Castle, broadens to place New Castle amid much larger and smaller municipalities across the country, and briefly contours some historical forces that shaped racism in policy or practice across time. I illustrate how federal, state, and local authorities responded to crises comparable to that which occurred in response to Mitchell's murder in the 1960s, and highlight how the underlying causes identified during investigations by those bodies manifested throughout the city's history and at the scene of Mitchell's murder. I also explore the role of institutions and memory in shaping knowledge and use of the past and build upon earlier scholarship in asserting their centrality to equitable futures. 



Introduction
On 1 November 1970, Ronald Mitchell a black Vietnam vet and Purple Heart recipient known by friends as "Fat Man," newlywed husband and expectant father, carpenter and activist was killed by a white shooter firing from a slowly passing vehicle shortly after midnight in New Castle, Pennsylvania, a small industrial city an hour north of Pittsburgh. Mitchell bled to death nearly one hundred feet from his home while awaiting delayed emergency services, and subsequent racist police action ignited an angry and confused crowd of black witnesses. 1 Physical violence erupted, engaging officers, residents, and city administration until sunrise. That night, firebombs targeting white and ethnic businesses within the black community kept officers and firefighters occupied until the following morning. The mayor invoked a three-day State of Emergency to mitigate the tension arising from the event. Black participants were arrested, racist police action was overlooked, Mitchell's murder was never solved, and New Castle's history of racial struggle was ignored, silenced almost entirely for posterity.
I conducted oral interviews with black and white residents who had lived most, if not all, of their lives in the city. I also conducted a public outreach on social media, in the form of a post on the community's unofficial Facebook page, where I sought more information from anyone who lived through the city's three-day state of emergency. Few of New Castle's white citizens interviewed between 2016 and 2018 can recall any detail about Mitchell's murder, the violent response by black witnesses, or the fire-bombings that induced a three-day State of Emergency. Little written evidence remains to attest to the event or its significance in the city's history a collective response to a legacy of racist policies and practices valuable for understanding relationships between people, place, and space, and the influences driving their transformation across the twentieth century. Institutions that produce or protect knowledge of different natures and purposes like historical societies and libraries or school boards and police departments archive knowledge reflective of the predominantly Anglo-American employees and staff, privilege sources honored and legitimized by a long-standing socioeconomic status quo defined by racist prescriptions, or obstructed, prevaricated around, or otherwise denied requests for information. The compounding consequence of these conditions is a silencing of the past, the forces and influences at play within it, and their lasting impact on today. 2 These events provide an important segue into a century's history of racially-inflected social, economic, and political policy and practice, as well as the history of equally dynamic community organizing, in a space between well-documented urban centers and rural sundown towns small communities that prohibited blacks and some ethnic minorities from overnight stay with threat of violence. 3 What is unique in New Castle is the evolving forms of racist policies and practices and the diverse functions they served when compared to well-documented urban metropoles like New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago, and rural sundown towns. Certain social, economic, and political conditions in major cities and rural towns allowed varying forms of public and private, overt and subtle, classed and gendered racism by actors operating within diverse systems to order social hierarchies, determine economic access, and inform political decision-making. 4 New Castle's historical past included both the rural, settler frontier and a late-nineteenth-century urban industrial boom; the city is presently a small hub in a predominantly agricultural region. The city's rapid growth and decline provide one dimension through which the history of New Castle's black communities' mitigation of and resistance to racism can be investigated.
Settled in 1798, New Castle's position on the Pittsburgh and Lake Erie Railroad fostered the growth of a population of some 300 at its beginning to nearly 30,000 by the 1870s. Between the 1890s and 1940s, "Little Pittsburgh" experienced an incredible industrial boom, as changing import tariffs, increased immigration from southeast Europe, For studies of resistance against discrimination in urban and rural extremes, see, Thomas J. Sugrue Virginia, 1995); and Loewen, Sundown Towns. Importantly, Loewen does not confine the concept of sundown town to rural spaces, despite a majority existing far outside and between urban environments. Loewen explains that most suburban communities originally predicated on racial exclusion. Varying levels and uses of violence in the North by whites contributed to maintaining the segregation of sundown spaces a conceptualization of the term I am using to analyze the existence of racialized space bound, cordoned, and policed with violence within an incorporated municipality but Aldon Morris explains that beyond context-specific experiences, little difference existed between Northern de facto segregation and Southern Jim Crow. Unique to the Northern experience, however, and especially noticeable in New Castle, is the "unspoken" nature of the rules ordering society, often demarcated by "invisible" boundaries whose physical manifestations included railroad tracks, bridges, and main thoroughfares. For more discussion of this see, Aldon Morris, Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York: The Free Press, 1984), 275-90. 4 The importance of understanding the influences shaping polities like New Castle and their relation to, relationship with, and interdependence on comparable surrounding spaces is evidenced by new scholarship on the centrality of suburbs to postwar development in the United States, see especially, The New Suburban History, Kevin M. Kruse and Thomas J. Sugrue, eds. (Chicago;London: The University of Chicago Press, 2006). and steel industry consolidation around Pittsburgh brought New Castle into the fold of the Carnegie and U.S. Steel Companies at the turn of the century. 5 The city's population peaked at nearly 50,000 in the 1950s, but the city endured precipitous decline following World War II, especially in a wave of 1970s deindustrialization, increasing workplace automation, and changes in global trade relationships. Presently, New Castle is a small commercial hub in a regionally agricultural area, where around a quarter of the approximately 22,000 residents experience poverty in the wake of history. 6 If New Castle's balance in 1970 between rural and urban space belied the achievement of economic harmony, a review of the city's history reveals a more complex evolution. Diverse groups in New Castle's history like ethnically "white" Italians and Polish and Slovak industrial workers, a small number of ethnic Syrian grocers and shopkeepers, wealthy Anglo-Americans atop outlying hills, and people of color predominantly of African American descent at the city's core experienced class and class difference, race and ethnicity, and community differently based on the coalescence of unique local histories, collective experiences, and societal positions. This historical journey provides an interesting case in which racist policies and practices respond to changing economic conditions and pervade different dimensions of existence based on forces and influences operating on multiple scales. Between major urban centers and mirroring rural counter-spaces, cities like New Castle demonstrate that varied and changing concepts of class coalesced with dynamic understandings of race and racism, and those racist policies and practices comfortably applied different dimensions of classism and racism in changing ways under evolving circumstances. This analysis will trace these themes in the stratified order of severity conveyed to investigators on President Lyndon B. Johnson's National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, formed by executive order in 1967, by interviewees in cities where civil disorders erupted across the preceding half-decade. This stratification ascended from interpersonal forms of social violence to de facto and de jure institutional discrimination, segregation, or otherwise unequal treatment that transgressed bounds of physical, psychological, and material violence.
Analysis of the use of violence in New Castle by police and society and in resistance to economic exclusion and social circumscription by the black community reveals an important relationship between historical narrative and public memory. The "silencing" of New Castle's freedom struggle contributes to contemporary denial by whites of the structural racial inequalities predating Mitchell's murder that prefaced individual and community responses, or their contemporary consequences. Local history is a pillar of identity, and narratives embraced by local whites deny to the enduring struggle for equitable and fair treatment any historical influence within the city's broader change over time. These silences represent disparities in the power of historical production, the occupation of positions of power in social, economic, and political systems, and access to and ownership of resources all are products of discriminatory systems maintained by whites but resisted by the city's black community, and are thus critical to understanding New Castle's history and at least some of the dynamics underlying its evolution. These silences are defended in the selection, organization, retrieval, and assignment of retrospective significance to facts of that narrative. 7 Social, economic, and political power used for the purposes of exploitation, manipulation, and control across the twentieth century serve as primary sources of conflict and contestation in the context of this analysis. Silenced narratives and perspectives incorporated throughout contribute new information to extant histories. The forces influencing and shaping racist practice and community rebuke in spaces between major urban centers and contrasting rural towns present new dynamics and relationships for consideration within broader investigations of the U.S. civil rights movement.

Spaces In-Between
Across most of the South for most of U.S. history, racism frequently took form as overt policy and practice because of historically constructed social, economic, and political systems used to exercise power over and exploit African Americans, Indigenous peoples, Mexicans, and other ethnic and national minorities. In the U.S. during and following slavery, socially enforced codes of conduct displayed in communal practices and ideologically sustained by imagery and performance buttressed ideas of white superiority with facades of submission by regulating and normalizing ritual performances of "race" a term increasingly employed to characterize, explain, and justify the maintained domination of African Americans and others. 8 Terroristic violence by whites served as the primary means of enforcement until shifting global contexts later forced the evolution of "lynch law" into subtler, more covert processes, some visible today in criminal justice and judicial systems. 9 However, communal practices and ideology underpinned perceptions of racial difference and black inferiority across many spaces in the North also, ordering social hierarchies and normalizing displays of punitive violence by the general population.
In poor and economically unstable spaces across the North, where differences in generational property ownership and accumulated wealth frequently remained too small for the privileging of class-based understandings of difference and for curated distribution of economic power, racist policies and practices often resembled those designed to maintain antebellum hierarchies of power. In areas of low economic diversity, racist social practices and political circumscription maintained white understandings of difference. In areas characterized by greater economic diversity, class-based proxies for racist policy like discriminatory loan and lending practices that segregated racial and ethnic minorities to the least valued land in most cities served to mark difference with greater salience than unbridled violence. This is not to say that unrestrained violence did not serve to communicate place and belonging, especially across the early twentieth-century North, but rather to highlight the economic nature of many acts of racist violence emerged in competition over, or fear of separation from, privileged access to economic resources. Sumptuary codes enshrined etiquette and performance standards predicated on white superiority and black deference into formal law. Unbridled violence synonymous with lynch law ensured complicity. De facto state sanctioning through the frequent oversight and participation by law enforcement often precluded questions of serious legal recourse, which the criminal justice system affirmed. Poll taxes, literacy tests, land ownership and sex requirements, and other discriminatory disenfranchisement mechanisms combined with unrestrained violence to limit the exercise of voting rights. In the absence of significant economic diversity, the roots for notions of economic class difference lacked fertile soil and no class-guised proxy existed for masking historically created and generationally maintained beliefs in racial superiority. Racist social and political practices remained methods of sustaining extant ideas of difference and systems of power for posterity.
While Northern cities may have lacked much of the infrastructure of overt institutions of slavery, racial discrimination was nonetheless perpetuated through economic policies and practices. 10 Control over employment opportunities, workplace stratification, hiring practices, and wages; oversight of the allocation and distribution of financial assets for community development, improvement, and welfare; and the power to define property values and zoning ordinances and approve building licenses, permits, credit, and loans. All reflected racial discrimination and its consequences but presented disparities in power as products of economic policies formally functioning for an array of purposes, informally grounded in racism for the maintenance of power. In major cities where economic diversity fostered recognizable differences in economic class whether defined by economic position or status, property ownership, or wealth racist economic policies and financial practices outlasted overt social practices and political machinations faced by greater judicial and international scrutiny.
In no two urban metropoles, rural towns, or spaces in-between does the balance and relationship between social, economic, and political power, or their distribution and exercise, function in the same manner or produce the same outcomes. Likewise, no experience with any raciallyinflected policy or practice falls exclusively under the label social, which I use to refer to interpersonal and group relations; economic, wherein I refer primarily to financial practices and interactions over material resources; or political, which I apply in reference to activity within the purview of government, quasi-government, juridical, or otherwise institutional systems. Unique histories of locations, economic conditions, social practices, and political relationships all influence how racism manifests in policy and practice. Nonetheless, similar conditions and trends among rural and urban spaces within geographic regions do often share similarities.
"A Young Negro Slain": Community Response to the Drive-By Shooting of Ronald Mitchell Ronald Mitchell left his home late Saturday evening for a short visit with his brother-in-law at the Rainbow Gardens bar only a few doors down the street. 11 His wife of nine months, Jennie, remembered hearing him say he would be "back in a few minutes." Six months pregnant with their only child at the time of his death, she wept to recall "he had just come home from Vietnam" the previous year. 12 He worked in the Spring Division at Rockwell Automation, producing springs for automobile axels at one of the local manufactories, and "everyone in town knew him, they liked him. He was a nice guy" and "was never in trouble." 13 Autopsy reports declared Mitchell "dead on arrival" at the St. Francis hospital, having succumbed to a puncture in the abdominal region that resulted in excessive bleeding and subsequent organ failure a succession of medical needs that might have been stopped had Mitchell received sufficient medical attention in a timely manner that morning. 14 However, emergency services did not arrive for thirteen minutes although stationed only four blocks away from the shooting. Moreover, as Mitchell bled to death within sight of his home as he waited for the ambulance to travel one mile, the police arrived within minutes. 15 In effect, black witnesses, already angered, upset, and confused by Mitchell's shooting, were faced by the aggressive provocation of arriving police officers in lieu of medical help. 16 Black residents battled police officers in the ensuing conflict, and the following evening some black residents firebombed several white businesses. 17 Police sealed Long Avenue between Mill and Moravia Streets, which outlined New Castle's predominantly black South Side community, shortly after news of Mitchell's shooting at 12:30 a.m. Both 12 Jennie Mitchell, personal interview by author, September 20, 2014, interviewee's home. 13  streets served as borders on New Castle's residential security map, produced in 1928, upon which insurance companies and lending agencies based disinvestment of black communities by denying loans and subsidy. 18 "An angry mob was breaking windows," and when vandalism and word of an attack on John Aeschbacker the white man believed by black witnesses to have shot and killed Mitchell spread, the lieutenant commanding New Castle Police Department's south side station immediately requested assistance from other officers. Shortly after, and with greater urgency, the lieutenant exclaimed that "a car had been upset" and "an apparent brawl" had ignited. "Send every available man," he begged. 19 The altercation between police and black witnesses barely lasted one minute, but a remarkable amount of human injury occurred in that time. Alongside Ronald Mitchell's blood on the streets of New Castle early that Sunday morning was that of at least nine others, including that of at least five police officers, two women, and Mitchell's alleged assailant, John Aeschbacker. In fact, the altercation occurred in defense of Aeschbacker, as police recognized a threat to his life by the crowd that enveloped him, unconcerned about the life taken less than an hour earlier. 20 Aeschbacker's "car had been overturned," and he was "pulled out, beaten and stabbed several times," in the abdomen, back, and left forearm. 21 One officer was stabbed in the left shoulder, stones injured others, and two incurred back and head injuries, one being knocked unconscious. The testimony of one of three black men arrested provides the only information about the injuries of black participants. Lennie Payne reported receiving two hits to the back while engaging with New Castle Police Chief Richard Hanna. 22 The arrival of a small detachment 18 November 2, 1970. 22 Underlying conflict between Chief Hanna and Payne emerged during testimony surrounding the murder and physical engagement with police, during which the New Castle Police Department's racially discriminatory hiring practices came to light. Matis, "Shooting Touches Off Violence," continued as, "Shooting Starts Violence," New Castle News, November 2, 1970. It must be noted that, despite aggressive and racist actions of members of the NCPD, Pennsylvania State Police Officers, who arrived near of eight state police officers and mediation by black leadership successfully mollified the crowd remaining near the scene on Long Avenue. As crowds dissipated, "an uneasy calm rested over the area," and with daybreak, "police, blacks and whites searched for answers to try and make some kind of sense from the whole thing." 23 The following morning, the New Castle News, the city's primary newspaper, reported that "broken glass was lying everywhere and practically every building had been the target of a rock throwing spree [W]indows, many of them large store windows, were broken in the several hours of vandalism." 24 The vandalized properties symbolized historical discrimination, segregation, and racism in New Castle. Neighborhood supermarkets operated by ethnically-white Italian, Polish, Slovak, and sometimes Serbian community members daily reminded black residents of their distance from the mainstream economic resources; lumber yards safeguarded the material resources untouched by black tradesmen barred from unions and not hired on job sites. 25 Police arrested three young men between early morning and afternoon, charging them with rioting, disorderly conduct, and obstructing police officers, one additionally charged with assault with intent to kill and aggravated assault and battery. The arrests failed to assuage whites angry about the vandalism and added to the outrage felt by the black community, which viewed Mitchell's murder as one more incident in a long history of racist civil rights violations, one more embodiment of the city's overarching structures of inequality.
From just after sunset until sunrise Monday morning, firebombs kept New Castle's South Side ablaze, literally and symbolically expressing the anger felt by members of the black community. 26 "When the end of the altercation, confirmed NCPD officers did not draw guns or rifles throughout the event. 23 Manna, "Quick Chain of Events Brings Confusion: 'Every Available Man' Called Out," New Castle News, November 2, 1970. 24 Matis, "Shooting Touches Off Violence," and, "Shooting Starts Violence," November 2, 1970. 25 Rombach, "Firebombs Riddle City Last Night," November 2, 1970. Montgomery's recollection of the evening of firebombings, quoted below, seems to imply that actors also targeted, if not primarily or to the same extent as other symbols, police vehicles and the mechanisms of control they represented and transported. 26 The Old Farmer's Almanac notes that in New Castle, Lawrence County, Pennsylvania, on Sunday, November 1, 1970, darkness replaced the sunset around 7 p.m. and effective moonrise did not occur until after 9:30 p.m. The fire bombings occurred between 8:39-8:58 p.m., then once more, possibly selfreigniting, at 11:00 p.m., burning into Monday's early hours. The sun rose shortly before 7 a.m. Monday morning. See, Rombach, "Firebombs Riddle City Last Fat Man got shot," Melvin Montgomery, a lifelong resident of New Castle's black community, explained, "They was right there on the South Side," and word "made it to the West Side" that "they just shot him. White dude shot him, da-da-da-da-da." 27 The following night "cops was coming in the projects and going round in a circle." "We're standing on top of this main building right on Grant Street," he continued, and "they're riding by I remember tossing" and "almost hitting the car." 28 Glass Pepsi bottles and gasoline purchased at nearby gas stations functioned as explosives for which fuel-soaked rags provided fuses. "Seven firebombings that riddled New Castle last night could have a damage bill in excess of $250,000," the News claimed hours after the last flames had been extinguished. Five firebombings scarred the South Side at and surrounding the scene of Mitchell's murder, the article continued, also noting that police reported no injuries or arrests and suspected the prior evening's killing and altercation as the bombers' impetus. News writer Rich Rombach provided a detailed timeline of the night's events for local readers: New Castle Lumber Co., also on Grant Street, was targeted shortly after and briefly reignited a second time around 11 p.m., as did the Rainbow Gardens. 30 Night," November 2, 1970. The Old Farmer's Almanac for New Castle on November 1, 1970, is accessible at, https://www.almanac.com/astronomy/rise/PA/New%20Castle%2C%20Lawrence %20County/1970-11-01. Prior to recording, Montgomery briefly reminisced upon the use of Molotov cocktails during one period of special violence, fortuitously the event he recalled was the response to Mitchell's murder. When revisited during our interview, he added that he remembered officers "stopping on the street, but they never did arrest nobody." "I remember getting the gas and the Pepsi bottles, them hard Pepsi bottles" he added, with "little rags hanging out" providing fuses. Guthery and Montgomery, interview. 27 Guthery and Montgomery, interview. 28 Ibid. 29 Rombach, "Firebombs Riddle City Last Night," November 2, 1970; "Firemen Find Night Quiet," New Castle News, November 3, 1970. 30 Rombach, "Firebombs Riddle City Last Night," November 2, 1970; "Firemen Find Night Quiet," New Castle News, November 3, 1970.
Targets of firebombing symbolized economic access unavailable to African Americans in New Castle and their locations indicate an awareness of historically established, socially understood, and legally buttressed boundaries between black and white. 31 Two of the seven firebombings targeted businesses on streets that functioned as borders between "red" and "yellow" spaces on that city's earliest known residential security map produced in 1928. Interviews with lifelong residents corroborated in explaining that the spaces delineated by the redlining map framed and influenced socially understood boundaries. 32 One participant in the firebombing on Grant Street noted its demarcation of the accepted northern boundary of black movement within the city. During separate interviews, Paul Ward, president of the BCC New Castle's most active civil rights organization at the time and Anna Mary Mooney, a white, long-term substitute teacher at the nowcondemned predominantly black Lincoln Garfield Elementary School on Long Avenue and member of several community organizations, both identified the Jefferson Street and Washington Street bridges as locations black residents through the unspoken practice and understanding of all New Castle residents were not to cross. 33 These bridges marked the southern and western boundaries of the space whose northern and eastern edges police reified and reinforced in cordoning the "riot" scene, boundaries subsequently contested by firebombing. 34 31 Rich Rombach, "Firebombs Riddle City Last Night," New Castle News, November 2, 1970. See, Appendix B. 32 Denise Guthery and Melvin Montgomery, personal interview by author, December 21, 2017. Denise Guthery, a lifelong resident of New Castle and volunteer at the Lawrence County Historical Society, indicated a similar understanding of Grant Street as a socially understood boundary past which blacks faced prejudicial scrutiny from white residents and police. Denise Guthery, personal interview by author, December 21, 2017. 33 Anna Mary Mooney, personal interview by author, September 11, 2014; Paul V. Ward, personal interview by author, September 19, 2014. 34 The same borders established in earlier generations, depicted on documents like the city's insurance redlining map, referenced by black and white interviewees, and confirmed in published statements by New Castle real-estate chairman Cecil Stubbs, are illustrated by this event. Just as the police cordon line reflected the eastern boundary of black space established on Mill Street, fire bombings on Grant Street imply an understanding by perpetrators that this street marked the formerly established, and likely commonly understood, northern boundary of that same space. Interviewees Naomi Gatewood, Anna Mary Mooney, and Paul Ward each remarked, on separate occasions and without prompting, street names that were understood to demarcate borders black and white space. The power of residential security maps to dictate the future demise or development of any given area increased exponentially with the adoption of their use by New Deal organizations like the Home Owners' Loan Corp in The energy summoned by Mitchell's murder reduced to a smolder by sunrise. Just before 9 a.m., and having already sought a conference with City Council members, Mayor Carl A. Ciallela, Jr. invoked a State of Emergency, which lasted for three days before tensions receded, permitting a return to some semblance of normalcy. 35 In addition to physical damages of more than a quarter of a million dollars, the effects on relations between black and white residents marked the city for years to come. 36 While the events following Mitchell's murder were unprecedented in New Castle fomenting tensions long accumulating within the community similar events occurring across the country in larger metropolitan spaces provide several cases for comparison, each revealing contests influenced by unique historical conditions and evolving social, economic, and political dynamics. 37 President Lyndon B. Johnson formed the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders by executive order in 1967 following a half-decade of urban civil unrest, responding to a series of assassinations of civil rights leaders rooted in a centuries-unfulfilled promise of equal citizenship and concomitant rights and freedoms. The commission's objective was to identify what incited the widespread unrest and what might be done to prevent similar disorders in the future. The commission published the Kerner Report, named after Illinois Senator Otto Kerner who served as chair, where the commission's results illustrated several tiers of grievances stratified by experienced severity. At the lowest level of perceived offense were experiences with disrespectful white attitudes, discriminatory administration of justice and consumer and credit practices, and inadequate federal and welfare programs and municipal services. On the second of three levels of intensity were inadequate education systems, poor recreation facilities and programs, and ineffective grievance mechanisms and political structures.  37 The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders provided detailed accounts of eight "riot" cities but referenced conditions in others to provide historical context. While these accounts independently provide significant data for comparison, a large body of scholarly work has since expounded on these and other cases.
were police practices, unemployment and underemployment, and inadequate housing. 38 New Castle's "Long History" Disrespectful white attitudes framed daily life in New Castle. The social consumption of racial tropes performed in minstrel shows throughout the early twentieth century provided one means of creating community and reinforcing white social superiority, and racialized messages inscribed onto the built environment decorated the industrial city's past. 39 For example, Denise Guthery, a lifelong resident of New Castle's white community, and Melvin Montgomery acknowledged the contentious implications of lawn statues popular into the 1960s that depicted a black male servant holding a lantern. Commonly used to light porch steps, Montgomery explained that the statues connoted a subordinate status symbolic of slavery. One means of resistance to the sumptuary implications imbued within the built environment the emblazoning of racial symbology onto property with ornaments indicative of ownership and status entailed the throwing of such statues through the wraparound bay-windows of their owners' homes, Montgomery recalled. 40 In addition to the inscription of racial hierarchies in community symbols, racial hierarchies evidenced how federal welfare programs routinely failed to address the needs of New Castle's black community, and members regularly attacked the disproportionate whiteness of decision-making bodies and prevarication in the face of black constituents' frustrations. Community groups held the local government responsible for the failure of several proposed developments and derided  , 1993). 40 Montgomery reminisced on throwing lawn ornament statues of black lawn-jockeys upholding a lantern while flashing a wide-grinned white smile, the tropes meant to elicit connotations of obeisant and subservient black service to white employers, through the bay windows of homes whose properties they marked. "We used to throw the statues through the windows," he explained, viewing the exchange as equalizing, "an eye for an eye." The use of coded racial symbology placed upon or ordered into the built environment as devices of disruption, violence, and destruction provided one mode or repurposing their meanings in forms of resistance. Guthery and Montgomery, interview.
representatives for misleading black community leaders. 41 In a dispute over housing development for and within the black community, numerous community members assailed a Council recommendation that recently razed single-family homes be replaced with multi-family townhouse units. The West Side community argued that replacing single-family homes with multi-family townhouse units reduced property values, confined the present population within a smaller geographic space, and limited future community growth. 42 Also, multifamily housing units served lower incomes and therefore produced a smaller tax base incapable of supporting the necessary expansion of municipal services to the area. A so-called urban blight label accompanied the inexorable dilapidation of such spaces, priming them for leveling as part of so-called urban renewal projects. Various black community organizations in New Castle sometimes disagreed over which one represented the legitimate voice of the city's black community best, but all agreed that municipal government consistently failed to recognize and address that community's needs; decisions made by municipal organizations and institutions affecting New Castle's black community ordinarily subsumed its interests to those of white businesses.
With the Home Owners' Loan Corp reliant on the city's 1928 residential security map, New Castle followed the national trend of segregating minorities into ghettos located in the least desirable areas of the city and disqualifying those areas from loans and subsidies. Disqualified areas, barred from outside investment, experienced rapid economic divestment and concomitant decline, excluded from mainstream economic networks. 43   borders and boundaries reinforced by police stops that complicated desegregation and limited black mobility, explaining that "you had unwritten restrictions and you had to know them and that was your responsibility. That was the way society was at the time." 44 Montgomery explained that though some poor whites and ethnic minorities lived in traditionally black neighborhoods, no blacks owned homes in white neighborhoods. If a socially understood color line did not exist for people of color, financial barriers further ensured that no blacks possessed the capital necessary for outmigration. 45 In one example, when the first black family, that of a doctor esteemed within the black community, attempted to move into her East Side neighborhood while attending junior high school, Denise Guthery remembered her parents discussing the implications on the neighborhood's future. Melvin Montgomery, an acquaintance of the doctor's family, explained that lending agencies attempted to discourage and stall the doctor's purchase by significantly delaying the approval of credit. 46 Mobility was a power whose exercise by the black community was heavily monitored and scrutinized. Boundaries emblazoned on the city's insurance redlining map in 1928 reflected those socially accepted by whites at that time and cemented their literal and symbolic influence over the life opportunities of black residents in the foreseeable future. 47 Black ghettos existed on "the West Side and the South Side," Ward explained, adding that "if you were black and crossed the Jefferson Street bridge you better know somebody down there or you would have to fight your way back. That was a fixture." 48 Mooney described a similar division, explaining that policy and practice segregated black citizens to the South and West sides of town while white residents lived predominantly in the North and East. Cecil Stubbs, a New Castle realestate chairman, explained that many black families were "being relocated" due to "urban renewal" projects and were "unable to buy a house anywhere else than the West Side." 49 The gentrification of innercity property and white flight coincided with what insurance and construction companies contracted by local officials classified as renewal and redevelopment projects. 50 Public housing projects filled only a few lots razed in the name of urban renewal, part of a much larger area "that insurance companies consider[ed] as being too big a risk." 51 Contentions over zoning ordinances and urban planning provided several instances of discord between the white city administration and black residents. 52 "They had us down by the railroad tracks," Ward remarked, "this was the poor section of town." 53 "Housing was segregated," Mooney added. "There was an imaginary red line around certain parts of the city A black person did not buy a house past where the hills crested All the white people lived up on hills and the black people downtown." 54 It was the base of the hills ascending in all directions from New Castle's industrial core that marked the barriers of black housing availability. 55 Similar to most urban spaces that experienced the outmigration of whites and businesses and the concomitant decline in centralized capital and investment, housing values increased with elevation and distance from that space. Mooney described a topographic 49 New Castle News, "BCC to Meet to Discuss Craft Unions," June 8, 1970. 50 Susan Linville, "1950s saw tide of downtown demolition start to roll in," New Castle News, May 27, 2017. 51 Cecil Stubbs explained the "inconvenience" experienced by blacks forced to relocate because of "urban renewal" as "necessary. spread of the city that matched with near-precision the spatial geography portrayed on New Castle's 1928 redlining map. Downtown was "a valley," a "very depressed area," she explained, that housed "two very large projects" while "all the residential areas were on top of hills." 56 Though some poor whites lived in predominantly black communities, economic and physical policing retained white-dominated hills and prohibited the integration of white, middle-class neighborhoods. Upperclass residents lived in outlying boroughs where children attended schools segregated by barriers to affordable housing that excluded the highest-earning black residents of New Castle. 57 The disproportionate burden placed upon New Castle's black community for fulfilling the mandates of desegregation compounded widespread fears within that community of the social, intellectual, and interpersonal dangers black students faced in white classrooms. New Castle's junior and senior high schools, though officially integrated, reflected the racial imbalance dictated by segregated neighborhood elementary schools. Experiences with segregation in elementary and middle-level education compounded racial ideologies exhibited by parents and older generations in Anglo-normative social spaces, manifesting in numerous conflicts between black and white students. 58 Despite the Brown decision in 1954 mandating integration with "all deliberate speed," New Castle did not confront integration until sixteen years later, when following a statewide push for integration that had requested the same of seventeen other school districts by June 1970, a committee was called to formulate a desegregation plan for the community. 59 New Castle's committee included representatives from numerous administrative, civil rights, local and municipal government bodies. After several meetings with community members and state government representatives, however, it determined to close the West Side school that served black children living in West-and South-side projects and to bus those students to the formerly whites-only school rather than to bring white students into the neighborhood. Confronting the inequitable decision, Paul Ward alleged at a subsequent board meeting that the committee was "asking one area to bear the whole burden in a community problem." He noted the disproportionate burden placed on black students being taken from a school in their community and bussed into predominantly white neighborhoods and alluded to the social and psychological challenges facing black students in those social and educational spaces. 61 Outrage and resistance to the school integration plan mirrored the extent to which it defied understood boundaries; black children were bussed to John F. Kennedy High School despite its location in a white neighborhood that criminalized the color of their skin. 62 In addition to having no black teachers, black students confronted the overwhelming changes with no support. Ward lamented, "we do feel that it is a miracle" that black students, "overwhelmed by an unsympathetic majority can function at all." 63 New Castle's desegregation plan embodied one of several community dialogues that revealed and reinforced the limitations of the black population's collective power. All expressions of dissatisfaction with the committee's decision fell on deaf ears. 64 The historical, New Castle News, July 24, 1970; and Dick Garcia, "Alternate Plan Offered Board by West Side," continued as, "Alternate Plan is Offered," New Castle News, November 24, 1970. 61 Paul V. Ward, "BCC Expresses Opinion on Integration Plan," New Castle News, November 18, 1970. 62 "Alternate Plan is Offered," New Castle News, November 24, 1970. Mooney recalled that "maybe 5-6 graduated," referring to black students, confirming many South-and West-Side residents' concerns. Mooney elaborated across several conversations the tension that existed between black and white students in New Castle's historically integrated high school. Districting unofficially and imperfectly segregated the city's middle-schools, and interviewees explained that most black students attended George Washington Middle School and white students Benjamin Franklin Middle School. Black elementary school students attended the North Street and West Side neighborhood schools, and whites attended Croton, Highland, or Lockley. When Guthery remarked that "I don't think it was on purpose," Montgomery laughingly noted that segregation never occurred on accident.
Similar to how white schools with white teachers stigmatized black students in New Castle, regional predominantly white districts also racially stigmatized New Castle High School's black student body. Guthery and Montgomery recalled several instances of violent conflict between Ambridge High School's rural white student body and New Castle's comparatively urban blacks. Tensions erupting among and between student populations in the years preceding Mitchell's murder mirror those simultaneously escalating across the country. Guthery and Montgomery, interview. 63 Ward, "BCC Expresses Opinion on Integration Plan," November 18, 1970. 64 Ward, interview; Gatewood, interview. invariable whiteness of City Council and other local government offices demonstrated the limits of black electoral power. Though New Castle's black population mitigated constraints by forming several politicallyoriented activist groups including the Black Concerned Citizens and Political Action League and was among the first fifty cities to establish a local branch of the NAACP in 1918, city leadership commonly ignored or downplayed expressions of the black community's political interests.
Neither did the black community's voice produce change when criticizing the racial imbalance of New Castle's police force. Black residents commonly asserted that a dual justice system existed in the city, seen particularly in exchanges between the police and members of the black community. 65 One interviewee explained that police commonly targeted blacks while ignoring violent white aggressors whose actions spanned from the common use of racial slurs to physical attacks and workplace cross burnings on the occasions that police were not the latter. 66 For example, the attention given Mitchell the morning of his murder paled in comparison to the defense provided John Aeschbacker, the white man who police immediately sought to protect from blacks desirous of enacting revenge. It was with this in mind that bystanders and witnesses excoriated New Castle Police Department and pointed to Mitchell's prolonged wait for emergency services, which they accused the police of delaying.
Testimony later complained about the small number of black policemen on the New Castle police force and claimed that racial discrimination in New Castle's police department pervaded its highest ranks. Lennie Payne, for example, explained that the physical altercation with police ensued after he swung at Police Chief Richard Hanna, who had recognized his face among the crowd and, determining him suspect, proceeded to search him for a gun without reasonable suspicion. 67 ' Called Out," November 2, 1970. 68 Matis, "Shooting Touches Off Violence," continued as, "Shooting Starts Violence," November 2, 1970. Though failure of the oral examination is sufficient reason for rejecting applicants to the police force, the assessment functioned in a fashion similar to only two were black, substantiating insistent claims by members of the black community that they did not receive "equal treatment" in hiring.
Meanwhile, the city's white police force upheld a façade of justice while policing the boundaries demarcating black space and defining the acceptable uses of violence. Warren Taylor, 19, Payne, 21, and Zollie Talley, Mitchell's 24-year-old brother-in-law, were charged with rioting, disorderly conduct, and obstructing police officers; Talley was also charged with assault with intent to kill and aggravated assault and battery. 69 Though Payne accused Chief Hanna in testimony of profiling and unjustifiably searching him after wrongfully rejecting his application to the department, and though witnesses accused Lieutenant Dan Malley of instigating the event by pushing junior officers into the growing crowd of black bystanders while screaming "get them, get them," neither received any charges or departmental reprimand. 70 Indeed, state police arriving after the fact defended and praised both men for not having employed deadly force. 71 The most critical white residents lamented in submissions to the News the lack of "dead rioters" while most praised the department's courage and dedication to maintaining "law and order" in the city. 72 Divergent responses to the use of violence by members of the black community and police seen in the charges disenfranchising mechanisms like literacy tests used to control and oppress Southern black voters. 69 Mike Matis, "Shooting Touches Off Violence," "Shooting Starts Violence," New Castle News, November 2, 1970. 70 "BCC Hears Eye Witness," New Castle News, November 2, 1970; "Lot Happened in A Short Time," New Castle News, November 23, 1970; and Robbins, "Acquitted on Other Charges: Payne Found Guilty of Riot," March 2, 1971. 71 "Lot Happened in A Short Time," New Castle News, November 23, 1970. 72 Ibid. Elizabeth Kai Hinton illustrates how evolving political currents specifically a conservative shift in Democratic and Republican party platforms that drew both toward espousing the primacy of retaining "law and order" justified changes in public policy and exponential increases in local, state, and federal spending on police departments across the country. Though police almost invariably received government sanction in cases of questionable action, Hinton explains that the spending increase beginning in the 1960s climaxed during the Reagan Administration's War On Drugs. Contemporary transformations of comparable racially-targeted state-sanctioned violence include hyper-incarceration and unbridled violence by uniformed officers of the law against people of color. Public sentiment supporting almost exclusively white police forces, despite their role in acting injustice upon groups of citizens, was fostered by daily navigation through primarily segregated white spaces, daily interactions with predominantly white social circles, and daily consumption of news and media mandating unquestioned support for defenders of the color line in their honorable portrayals and ostracizing the critical, particularly in the realm of political conversation and representation. against Taylor, Payne, and Talley, and the downplay of questionable provocations by Chief Hanna and Lieutenant O'Malley communicated the acceptable use (and users) of violence and cemented what purposes it satisfied in maintaining social order and the racial status quo in New Castle. Only the latter possessed the ability to navigate between dualidentities as members of New Castle's white community and representatives of the law and state power. 73 Mirroring restrictions on housing availability and social mobility, discriminatory hiring practices restricted employment opportunity, maintaining a hierarchy resembling that enforced by the police. Strategies involved repeated circumvention, or "the runaround," as Ward described it, resulting in significant occupational segmentation that placed black workers in the lowest-paying, most dangerous jobs. They also created barriers to entry for blacks seeking union membership or access to training programs. 74 "I left for one year" to go to school "in Pittsburgh for architecture and design," Montgomery added his own experiences with discriminatory hiring practices, "and came back here and tried to get into Rockwell. They told me no, you can't get into the office but you can work in the plant." Montgomery recalled that when he "came back and got a job they burned a cross at midnight." 75 Control over hiring and terroristic uses of violence delimited what opportunities education and training might entail for black trades-workers.
Manufacturing and heavy industry employed a majority of residents in New Castle throughout the twentieth century; Mooney described downtown New Castle in 1970 as "bustling" and home to "a lot of heavy industry." 76 Home of two Rockwell plants that employed 73 For detailed investigation of urban policing in the twentieth century, specifically the use of violence (in many forms) for the maintenance of social order, see, Didier Fassin,  Book, 1970. Accessed December 22, 2017 at New Castle Public Library. New Castle has boasted nicknames like "hot dog capital of the world," and the "fireworks capital of America." Though the former possessed little significance beyond the region, the city was the local headquarters for two international fireworks producers, S. Vitale Pyrotechnic Industries, Inc. (Pyrotecnico), and Zambelli over three thousand people each, a Shenango Pottery, Mesta Engineering, and several steel and tin manufacturers, most of New Castle's employment opportunities, especially for minorities and immigrants of the lower and working classes, were industrial in nature, and employers hired poor and ethnic-whites at the discrimination of black workers. 77 Despite completing trade-specific certification programs like those sponsored by Operation Dig of the Pittsburgh Construction Coalition, which sought placement for recently certified black tradesmen on federally-funded projects, or, as in Ronald Mitchell's case, receiving certification in carpentry from the Army, employers constantly evaded or deflected the attempts of black tradesmen seeking employment. 78 At a BCC picket protest against the denial of work to black tradesmen on the Riverside Housing Project in the summer preceding his murder, Mitchell explained he was told he "could not speak with anyone" regarding employment an injunction familiar to tradesmen of color. These and similar experiences conveyed to black tradesmen the uselessness of their certification and skill in the eyes of white employers. 79 Occupational segmentation was only one method for maintaining black subordination in the workforce. White leadership also excluded black workers from union membership, barring their entry into numerous "skilled" trades like bricklaying, carpentry, and painting, and monopolizing the power of collective bargaining. 80 News writer Ralph Internationale. See, "New Castle, Pennsylvania -Our History," http://www.newcastlepa.org/index.html. Mooney, interview. 77 Ward elaborated on the inequality; his father and other black residents were unable to find employment except at a blast furnace. Chemical exposure to toxins proved fatal to many and claimed Ward's father before the age of 50. "You couldn't get a job as a bricklayer" or any of what were considered skilled trades at the time, Ward recalled, "you were going to be by the blast furnaces." Ward, interview; Gatewood, interview. New Castle News, "Housing Ceremony Picketed: Black Citizen's Protest Hiring," June 2, 1970. Gatewood added that Johnson Bronze used to bring in workers from neighboring Jackson Knolls, the northern segment of Mt. Jackson about ten miles southwest, to fill the mills despite the presence of black male workers needing jobs. Clarence Ward, Paul Ward and Naomi Gatewood's late father, trained them, and the company paid for their housing, according to Gatewood's recollection. For more on defining "whiteness" social and legally, see Haney-Lopez, White by Law. 78 John K. Manna, "BCC Plans for Meeting with Building Tradesmen," New Castle News, July 24, 1970. 79 "Housing Ceremony Picketed: Black Citizen's Protest Hiring," New Castle News, June 2, 1970. 80 Ward, interview; "Housing Ceremony Picketed: Black Citizen's Protest Hiring," New Castle News, June 2, 1970; "Reasoning Together," New Castle News, June 3, 1970; "BCC Plans New Action on Unions," New Castle News, August 21, 1970; and, Deams despaired in 1970 that despite the decade being focused on training African Americans, they still experienced almost "twice the amount of unemployment as any other group." 81 The National Planning Association, responsible for evaluating and recommending improvements to pertinent policy issues, identified the "discrimination against racial groups practiced by some employers and in some cases by unions" as one of the most significant causes, to which they suggested "public education" for black tradesmen on their right to work, and charged unions to "use these workers" as a step towards resolution. 82 David Crunkleton, Vice President of the BCC in 1970, also stressed the value of education, but noted that "courses in apprenticeship training were to be offered at the Vo-Tech school but were dropped because the teachers were members of the trade unions and too many blacks had enrolled." 83 Gatewood explained that black women "didn't have nobody to back us up because they wouldn't hire blacks." To discourage black women from seeking gainful employment, Gatewood remembered teachers "told all the black people to take home economics because you're not to get no job typing, shorthand, or nothing." Gatewood recalled that white teachers expected black students, especially women and girls, to "be in somebody's kitchen, cooking or something." "That high school," she concluded laughing, "oh-ho-ho, Lord, very prejudiced." 84 Gatewood added that while applying to work at Bell Telephone alongside a white female counterpart following graduation from high school in January 1946, the woman receiving applications: "Meeting Revealed by Ward," New Castle News, August 29, 1970. Unions practiced varying levels of discrimination and exclusion, and union actions never represented the positions of all members. Continued investigation is needed to determine the relationship between specific ethnic groups and historic trade specializations in the region, the extent to which ethnic majorities within particular unions influenced discriminatory and exclusionary practice and policy, and the impact of union nondiscrimination and inclusion for varying skilled black laborers. 81 Ralph C. Deams, "Unemployment in Recessions," New Castle News, December 23, 1970. 82 Roscoe Drummond, "Unemployment and Prosperity," New Castle News, April 5, 1961. 83 "Housing Ceremony Picketed -Black Citizens Protest Hiring," New Castle News, June 2, 1970. 84 Gatewood, interview. tore it up right in front of me. She didn't care. She tore it up right in front of me didn't make no bones about it. She didn't say, you know turn back and, and I'm going to tear it up. You know, nothing like that That right there let me know The whites were here and the blacks were there. We knew we were separated. We knew that. 85 Colorism determined which, if any, black women found employment. "Betty Gunn was really light," Gatewood recounted, and "got hired as the secretary, but she had to be near white looking." At New Castle Dry Goods, "the man said they would hire us," referring to black women, "but we'd have to be almost white-looking, not black like I am, no way they would hire you." "If you were light and everything, whatnot, they'd hire you." 86 Resistance by New Castle's black community to diverse and evolving forms of racially discriminatory and segregating practices across the twentieth century demonstrates that spaces between urban metropoles and rural sundown towns experienced manifestations of, and transformations in, racially discriminatory, exclusionary, and oppressive policies and practices encountered at both historiographical extremes in response to changing social, economic, and political conditions. Despite the presence of several organizations addressing unique concerns for specific groups within the black community, a shared ideology fostered and strengthened by relation through the local branch of the NAACP, New Castle's exemplar national organization provided a platform upon which groups collaborated toward establishing a network of opportunities and resources for community members, regardless of specific group membership. That community resisted throughout evolving conditions and circumstances by blending urban organizational principles with rural operational philosophy bureaucratic and structural bodies collaborated in developing community-wide networks of opportunity and support regardless of group membership. 87 85 Ibid. 86 Ibid. 87 After elaborating briefly on the various positions comprising the Black Concerned Citizen's executive body, Gatewood explained the intentionality behind that name: "with our name being, Black Concerned Citizens, we would hold some weight" and chosen representatives "wouldn't have anything to worry about" (emphasis added by this author). In describing groundwork conducted by the BCC, Gatewood described a collaborative effort to find employment opportunities and disseminate them among blacks in need. "We had different people out in the field," she explained; some checked the post office, and others different places. She continued, "[M]aybe you're on this side Acknowledging some successes, it is difficult to overestimate the presence of overarching systems of structural inequality in framing daily life for people of color living in New Castle. 88 Multimodal social, economic, and political violence in defense of white social, economic, and political interests inhered purposes comparable to sumptuary codes that fixed social stratification in the Jim Crow South, sharecropping and tenant-leasing systems that retained economic dependence following the abolition of slavery, and disenfranchisement or deterrence that limited the electoral power of the black vote into the mid-twentieth century. 89 In of town trying to do something at this place, maybe you went to the courthouse, maybe I went to City something you can't do." In describing the working relationship between local organizations like the Black Concerned Citizens and the coexisting national bodies, namely the NAACP, whose structure the BCC mirrors, Gatewood noted humorously that " 't try to knock one another down. We tried to work together." Gatewood,interview. 88 The consequences of multigenerational racisms and discriminatory practices persist today and can be measured across multiple dimensions. Geographic space remains predominantly segregated, with residents of color comprising most project-housing constituents. Unemployment among black residents remains disproportionately higher than white residents. Residual effects of earlier discrimination in housing and employment emerge from data on the number of black residents unemployed or living below the poverty line. From data collected in 2015, 22.6% of all New Castle residents living below the poverty line are African American, despite comprising only 11.8% of the total population. The median income for historically black census tracts ranges from $11,250 to $21,136, while incomes in historically white census tracts surrounding the city core range from $38,750 to $53,691. This data was compiled by DATA USA, a project begun in 2014 under Cesar Hidalgo, professor at the MIT Media Lab and Director of Macro Connections, with the collaboration of several organizations, including Deloitte and Datawheel. See, https://datausa.io/profile/geo/new-castlepa/#housing. Though New Castle's populations identifying as " White alone" (13,786) and "Black alone" (1,558) graduate high school or higher at comparable levels (11,976 / 86.9%, and 1,373 / 88.1%, respectively), attainment of a Bachelor's degree or higher differs widely between the groups. While 16.3% of the population identifying as "White alone" (2,226) reported attaining a Bachelor's degree or higher, only 4.2% of the population identifying as "Black alone" (66) reported doing so. See, American Community Survey (2012: S1501 Educational Attainment, (Washington: U.S. Census Bureau, accessed online).
New Castle only recently (2002) began developing formerly cleared properties near the city-center into parks and other cultural attractions; those in Mitchell's former neighborhood remain abandoned and falling into disrepair or are replaced by housing projects or industrial manufactures. 89 Most popular in the early twentieth century, the declining acceptability of cross burning as a form of racial intimidation the combined outcome of a plethora of national and global factors primed an environ welcoming to increased racial violence by police forces already historically rooted in the restriction and suppression of blacks. Gatewood, interview. response to an inquiry regarding the prevalence of cross-burnings in New Castle as means of racial intimidation, Gatewood explained that whites used "the cross more than anything," though extensive reports of racist abuses of power by police challenge the former practice's predominance. Montgomery added the inequitable outcomes of such violence against people of color. "It was happening every day You'd see two people fighting and the only one who is going to jail is the black person." Actors introduced race-based policies and practices in New Castle influenced and shaped by the city's unique history. Denise Guthery and Melvin Montgomery both collaborated in explaining how financiers stalled the approval of credit to a wealthy black dentist to defend the racial homogeneity of neighborhoods outside the city's core and ascending the surrounding hills. By 1970 a declining steel town but with a history dating to the U.S. frontier in 1798, forms of racism reflected the shaping of a fluctuating and changing economy and population under the influence of national and international circumstances and developments. The mistreatment of black residents by whites, especially the police, reified that city's racial hierarchy, long entrenched in cultural fixtures like minstrel shows and later lawn ornaments ordering social space. 90 In seeking to reconcile the racism her father displayed in some contexts and settings, Guthery explained "I think everybody needs to be a bully in some way. You know, when you're growing up you need to have someone that you can bully that you can feel like you're better than, and sadly, that goes with the color of skin." 91 Prevarication, occupational segmentation, prohibition from unions, and canceled training programs obstructed any potential for upward mobility sought through industrial employment. Zoning ordinances, urban development schemes, and 90 Beyond the minstrel shows popular in the early twentieth century and racist lawn ornaments into the following decades, interviewee accounts include narratives of police mishandling of individuals with mental illnesses, abusive behavior and language toward black children, overuse of clubs in suppressing conflict, and racial "onesidedness," as one interviewee described what others called a "dual system of justice." When asked if the New Castle Police Department remained disproportionately white, Montgomery responded, " 're the same way. They haven't changed. They're all white. There are no blacks," adding "they'd call you a 'nigger' too." "They never put me in the paper but they never said a thing" about white perpetrator. "They always, always, went for the black guy." Montgomery lamented how little has changed, as "police didn't arrest no damn body" in response to his daughter's murder in 2000. "They just brushed it under the rug," he lamented, "they've been brushing shit under the rug for years." Guthery and Montgomery, interview. 91 Guthery and Montgomery, interview. racially discriminatory housing policy limited the domicile available to black residents.
"Where Do We Go From Here?": Historical Narrative and Public Memory 92 Martin Luther King, Jr. recognized independently that which the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders recognized after over six months of research conducted by hundreds of individuals across the country. Where the Kerner Commission feared the further devolution of the United States into "two societies" both "separate and unequal," King recognized the historical impossibility and unsustainability of this outcome and concluded in his title that extant options included "chaos or community." The use of King's question in the heading of this analysis's conclusion seeks to revisit that question, "Where do we go from here?" The conversation surrounding historically discriminated and segregated communities of color necessarily requires a consideration of how much change has occurred since his assassination fifty years ago. A speech given by the president of the University of Cincinnati's Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, James Lacy, at an event commemorating King's life and legacy on the 50th anniversary of his assassination at the city's National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, reckoned with the problematic dichotomy and questioned if "chaos" and "community" were mutually exclusive, and if restoring and emphasizing community cannot function as one means of disrupting the systems maintaining and perpetuating structures and systems of inequality. Perhaps the single greatest act of violence is erasure from memory. 93 Based on the oral interviews conducted between 2016 and 2018 for this research, it was found that many of New Castle's residents cannot recall any detail about Mitchell's murder or the violent community responses that induced a three-day State-of-Emergency. The informative power of this historical moment is silenced; past generations' racially discriminatory and racist practices, and their residual consequences and contemporary forms, are disclaimed 92 See Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Do From Here: Chaos or Community? (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968). 93 Trouillot illustrates how silences created at fact identification, creation, archiving, and recall silenced the memorialization of Colonel Jean-Baptiste Sans Souci by his assassin Haiti's first King, Henry Christophe I by constructing a narrative in which Christophe's decision to name the building erected at the site of Sans Souci's assassination after the Colonel is construed as an emulation of the earlier-named palace of Prussia's Frederick the Great, denying the possibility of Christophe memorializing or silencing Sans Souci's existence, replacing the man with the building and place. in their absence. These silences are "less visible than gunfire, class property, or political crusades," or an evening of vandalism and firebombing, but "are no less powerful." 94 Community memory gauged by public outreach revealed incomplete, if existent, awareness of the incident or vague recollection framed by themes of conflict and violence. 95 Some interpretations reduced the importance of the perspectives sought by this author and offered alternatives that marginalized discrimination extant during the period of investigation or equated types of violence by actors occupying vastly different social, economic, and political positions. 96 These responses often emphasized "good times growing up in New Castle," described by Otie Carmody as "a great place in the 1950s" compared to today, or maintained the "good and bad on both sides" raised by Florence Bruno Richardson. Specifically, Carmody reduces the importance of the subject of inquiry 94 Trouillot, Silencing the Past, xviii. 95 Alex Tabor, "Fine People of New Castle, I need YOUR Help," Facebook, January 31, 2018, https://www.facebook.com/groups/newcastlepa/permalink/10155566066776051/. Carol Hamed regretted, "I wish I co the time and have no memory of this. I asked my husband who lived just a few blocks " Robin Masi, who explained she "was only in 2 nd grade" and lived "on the upper east side," had no recollection. Kara Melissa Stevenson Stinnett was "4 or 5 at the time" and remembered only her "father being upset and not allowing my mom to take us to that area to shop." Though remembering with notable detail the violence between black and white students while first transitioning from a Catholic school to New Castle Area High School her sophomore year, Marilou Tomski Zaverl did not recall Mitchell's shooting or subsequent responses; both Zaverl and Cindy Crognale describe violent interaction between black and white students as "riots." The inquiry stirred incensed responses from others. Susan Delores rebuked some of the outreach's wording, writing "I don't know where you['re] getting antagonistic police force unless you were there." She noted fear of when her father "had to go out in riot gear," and that caused by anonymous callers' threats to harm her family. Given that all experiences are unique and valid to those experiencing or receiving them, Susan Delores's response provides one gauge for the sensitivity of some members of the white community to precarious relationships between New Castle whites and people of color (emphasis added by author, full Post text appended). 96 Dissonance to contentions within local history, imbued within a seemingly innocuous comment disconnected from the framed inquiry, is one means of deflecting, obscuring, and redirecting efforts to incorporate that suppressed history into broader, general civic discourse. As surely as intentions and motivations varied widely between individual actors in the plethora of tumultuous conflicts in mid-century New Castle, Carmody and Richardson illustrate additional means of coping with complex, complicated, and contentious aspects of local history that run counter to the extant positive narratives responsible for binding New Castle's white community. Alex Tabor, "Fine People of New Castle." by shifting the topic and ignoring that which is posited, and Richardson acknowledges contention, but damns individuals on both sides, conceptualizing the source of conflict as individual action, behavior, and consequence, rather than a product of structural, systemic inequalities.
The contemporary silences surrounding Mitchell's murder and its context within New Castle's freedom struggle whether neglected, overlooked, or suppressed by local institutions and organizations and the minimal account of black history in the city's records, render current narratives of the city's history, a pillar of local and regional identity, incomplete. Members of the New Castle Police Department and New Castle Area School District School Board employed what interviewees called "the run-around" upon the author's request of certain documents and information, and several white residents contested and denied the realities of black contributors and interviewees. When discussing the extent to which this research involved several public institutions in New Castle, Gatewood laughed, explaining: "They're not going to tell you nothing." Describing most as "very prejudiced," she added that "the people that would know about that murder here in New Castle, those are the ones you're not going to get no information from." 97 The dynamics inherent to contests over social, economic, and political resources in the economically fluctuating, semi-urban, regionally agricultural city are critical to understanding its history and at least some of the forces shaping its evolution, and that of similar spaces in-between.
Indeed, Mitchell's murder did not independently incite the evening of vandalism, physical conflict with police, or subsequent firebombing. A matrix of racisms and discriminatory practices occurring and compounding across generations framed black interpretations of Mitchell's murder, many of which manifested at the scene in the delay of emergency services, racist police actions, and ignorance of the plights of New Castle's black citizens. 98 The denial and elision of this narrative 97 Gatewood,interview. 98 Guthery and Montgomery corroborate brief references to fights between black and white students in the News in 1968-1969 while Mitchell served as a carpenter in the Army in Vietnam, providing a modicum of evidence that tension between members of New Castle's black and white communities increasingly took violent form throughout the 1960s. Ignorance to the needs and interests of black citizens repeatedly demonstrated throughout the decade, compounded especially by events occurring nationally, namely the assassination of numerous black and white civil rights leaders, spurred a militant ideological outgrowth within the black community. Montgomery explained that The assassinations of Kennedy and MLK, Jr., "kind of made me a rebel " "It kind of made me more militant. I don't remember being militant as a little kid." " from New Castle's public memory and civic discourse, whether neglected, overlooked, or suppressed, renders many narratives of the city's history a core dimension of civic identity incomplete and thus denies to the enduring struggle for equitable and fair treatment historical influence.
As systematic control of housing availability, employment opportunity, and educational access circumscribed life opportunities for people of color across every dimension, similar control over public memory the narratives used in formulating individual and community identities maintains similar limits upon civic awareness and obligation. 99 In the same fashion that isolation from federal loan and subsidy decimated opportunities for black families to accrue a modicum of the generational wealth amassed by white families throughout the mid-twentieth century, the silencing of New Castle's freedom struggle from the city's historical narrative, and from that city's civic discourse, similarly obstructs the addressing of inequitable systems and redressing of past violations responsible for the disproportionate disadvantages experienced by members of the city's communities of color. The consequences of racially discriminatory policy dictating the use and purpose of residential space and workplace organization, and of racially segregating practices framing relations between black and white citizens, remain discernable in their influence on the present and future.
Despite obstructions and barriers to access in fair and equitable housing, education, and employment, the black community organized to collect and share resources like employment opportunities, protest and then Marti -up. I ain't going to tell no lie. That's all I wanted to do, was fight." Guthery and Montgomery, interview. 99 In his analysis of social movements, Aldon Morris applies Resource Mobilization Theory to hypothesize various reasons for the successes or failures of social movements within the Modern Civil Rights Movement that he periodizes between 1954 and 1963. Beyond lacking sufficient resources as diverse as population size/human capital, consumer power/financial capital, social network connection or economic access/social capital, political affiliation, or control over narratives used in identity-formulation or community maintenance the momentum unachieved also precluded the support from external groups necessary for sustained campaigns against inequitable systems, the notable exception being the black-led Pittsburgh Construction Coalition, which collaborated in educating black male laborers on their legal rights to employment on various jobs. Morris's application of Resource Mobilization Theory is applicable to intangible, sociocultural generational wealth expressed in ancestral or familial history in relation to mainstream society, sense of individual or group pride or sense of belonging derived from connection to and investment in reciprocating social order, and also individual and collective public memory. See Morris, Origins of the Civil Rights Movement, 275-90. discriminatory businesses and projects like the Riverside housing development, where black tradesmen were denied work despite the project's federal underwriting, and respond with violent resistance to violent racism. However, contemporary manifestations of social, economic, and political policies and practices experienced throughout the mid-twentieth century persist in legal precedent, sociocultural perceptions, and consumed imagery. 100 Beyond disparities in accrued generational wealth, the scars of residential security maps and discriminatory housing policy mark urban spaces almost ubiquitously, including New Castle. 101 Consequences of discriminatory hiring of disproportionate criminal punishment, social and political discrimination, and the influence of changing social, economic, and political conditions mark communities of color. 103 Classism and racism continue to intersect locally, regionally, and nationally to perpetuate inequality much alike caste systems. 104 New Castle's expansion from a rural, frontier village to booming industrial steel town, and since into more uncertain economic territory, and the changing composition and size of its population, framed a context in which diverse groups competed for limited resources. The pale disposition of the city's historic officeholders was not produced by majoritarian politics alone, though the African American population historically comprised between ten and fifteen percent of the city's total population. Local social, economic, and political behavior, and respective means of acting on racist belief, never escaped the influences, limits, obligations, and obstructions of national and international scale sometimes embraced and mirrored, others spurned and resisted. 105 A body of literature illustrates how changing social environments, fluctuating economic conditions, and volatile political balances interact within major urban cities to affect the lives of people of color. Corresponding dynamics in rural spaces receive increasing attention as investigations of the urban-suburban relationship incorporate broader regions. New Castle's local and regional history, social disposition, economic transformation, and political history defined the spectrum of permissible racist policies and practices throughout the twentieth century. Uniquely, New Castle and similar mid-sized cities, especially those experiencing significant change or transformation across the twentieth century, provide cases in which transforming policies and practices can be analyzed. 106 New Castle's economic fluctuation provides an interesting case in which racist policies and practices evolve in response to changing economic conditions and weave through different fields of existence in response to diverse pressures. In places between major urban centers and rural counter-extremes like New Castle, varied and changing concepts of class coalesced with dynamic understandings of race and racism to inform policies and practices able to comfortably apply different dimensions of classism and racism under evolving circumstances. A greater understanding of relationships between external influences and local dynamics in places between population extremes supports ongoing research on contemporary manifestations of racism in policy and practice in the U. S. improvement in the state falls short of national averages and stagnant local economies lacking jobs are spurring outmigration. Madonna explained that urban areas and "third class cities" leaned heavily democratic, and described rural, small towns, like "old mining and mill counties," as "republican havens." Washington Journal, "Terry Madonna on the Political Dynamics of Pennsylvania," C-Span, November 1, 2018, Pedro Echevarria. 106 Pennsylvania owns eight of the United States' 769 cities with populations greater than 50,000 (1.04%), in which reside 2,403,365 citizens. New Castle, however, falls among that state's additional 1,005 incorporated places with populations ranging from ten to over 44,000 home to 5,608,476 of the states approximately 12.8 million. U.S. Census Bureau, Population Division, Annual Estimates of the Resident Population for Incorporated Places of 50,000 or More, Ranked by July 1, 2017 Population: April 1, 2010 to July 1, 2017, May, 2018, and, Annual Estimates of the Resident Population: April 1, 2010 to July 1, 2017, May, 2018. Pennsylvania or its relation to national events are all enthusiastically encouraged and welcome.
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