“Inert and Indifferent”: When The Pittsburgh Courier Looked At Black Wheeling In 1925

In December 1925, The Pittsburgh Courier turned its eye toward Wheeling.

Not the Wheeling of booster ads, industrial pride, river commerce, or tidy civic self-description. This was Wheeling as seen from the outside by one of the most important Black newspapers in America. The article, written under George S. Schuyler’s “Aframerica Today” column, carried the blunt subtitle: “Wheeling, W. Va.: Inert and Indifferent.”

That title alone arrests the reader.

It is not soft. It is not flattering. It is not sentimental. It is a sharp outside judgment on Black Wheeling’s social, business, educational, and fraternal life in the mid-1920s. And for the Eugene and Beverly Stradwick Heritage Foundation, that is exactly why the article matters.

Our work is not to preserve only the comfortable parts of history. It is to recover the record as honestly as we can, especially when the record reveals contradiction.

This article does that. It shows a Black Wheeling that was active, educated, churchgoing, professionally accomplished, property-owning, and institutionally rooted. But it also shows a community constrained by Jim Crow, fractured by limited resources, and criticized by an outside Black journalist for not organizing with enough force.

It is both admiration and indictment.

And almost a century later, it gives us a rare snapshot of Wheeling through the eyes of the national Black press.

A Black Newspaper Sees What Local Papers Often Did Not

One of the first things that makes this clipping powerful is its source.

The Pittsburgh Courier was not a local white newspaper writing about Black life as a side note. It was a Black newspaper with a national reach, speaking to Black readers across regions. When it wrote about Wheeling, it was placing Wheeling inside a wider Black American conversation about race, power, education, business, housing, churches, leisure, and self-help.

That matters.

So much of Black Wheeling’s history has to be reconstructed from scattered fragments: school board minutes, church notices, obituary lines, city directories, census entries, annual reports, and small newspaper mentions tucked between other civic business. But here, in one column, an outside Black journalist attempted to take the measure of the whole community.

Schuyler’s tone is severe. He opens by arguing that Wheeling’s Black residents seemed unaware that serious problems required collective effort. He accused the community of being too individualistic, too divided, too hesitant to “kick” against unfair treatment.

We do not have to accept every judgment in the article to understand its value. Schuyler was writing with a particular voice: impatient, provocative, and sometimes harsh. But beneath that tone is a remarkable inventory of Black Wheeling in 1925.

The “C” In The Directory

One of the article’s most striking details is its mention of the Wheeling City Directory.

Schuyler wrote that Black residents were designated in the directory by a “C” after their names, a racial marker that separated them on paper even before one reached the street. According to the article, white officials or publishers would remove it if Black residents protested strongly enough.

Whether that claim reflected a direct promise, a rumor, or Schuyler’s own interpretation, the detail is important. It shows how segregation worked not only through schools, theaters, hotels, and restaurants, but through ordinary systems of civic recordkeeping. A name in a directory is supposed to be simple: person, address, occupation. But in Jim Crow America, even a directory could become a racial map.

For a Foundation committed to recovering names, lives, addresses, and institutions, that is no small point. The same records that help us find our ancestors also reveal the systems that marked and managed them.

Lincoln School, Still Carrying The Load

The article also gives us a valuable 1925 view of Lincoln School.

Schuyler described the school building as old and inadequate, built decades earlier for a much smaller Black population. He noted that Lincoln housed primary, grammar, and high school classes, and that the school was overcrowded enough that many children could attend only half a day.

That sentence belongs in the long arc of Wheeling’s Black educational history.

By 1925, Lincoln was not a new experiment. It was the successor to the public colored school created by the Wheeling Board of Education in 1866, the same school tradition that began with John W. West as its first teacher and grew through decades of Black educational striving. By the 1920s, that institution had produced generations of students and had become one of the central pillars of Black civic life in Wheeling.

But the Courier article reminds us that pride and inadequacy could exist at the same time.

Lincoln mattered deeply. Lincoln educated children. Lincoln employed Black professionals. Lincoln anchored the community. And Lincoln was overcrowded, underbuilt, and still operating within a statewide Jim Crow school system.

The article states that Lincoln School had about 300 pupils and employed one principal, Prof. J. H. Rainbow, and four teachers. That is a small line with large meaning. Behind it were hundreds of Black children, families, teachers, and dreams pressed into a building that could not fully hold them.

Dr. R. M. Hamlin Appears Again

For readers of our Foundation’s work, one name in this article immediately stands out: Dr. R. M. Hamlin.

We have encountered Dr. Hamlin before as a fierce voice on housing conditions, poverty, and the dignity of Black Wheeling residents. Here, in 1925, he appears in another role: not only as a professional man, but as a community-builder.

Schuyler identifies Hamlin as one of Wheeling’s Black dentists, alongside Dr. A. M. Morrison. But he also notes that Dr. Hamlin, described as an “outsider,” had attempted to provide recreational opportunities for Black youth. According to the article, Hamlin helped start the DeHart Hubbard Athletic Club, which had money in its treasury and hoped to develop a real community center for Wheeling’s Black residents.

That is a tremendous detail.

DeHart Hubbard was one of the great Black athletes of the era, the first African American Olympic gold medalist in an individual event. Naming an athletic club for him was not accidental. It placed Wheeling’s Black youth inside a larger world of Black excellence, competition, pride, and possibility.

Hamlin’s appearance here adds another layer to the man we have been uncovering. He was not simply a critic of bad conditions. He was trying to build alternatives.

That distinction matters.

No Movie House, No Real Community Center

The article’s discussion of recreation is especially revealing.

Schuyler wrote that Black residents could not enter Wheeling’s movie houses, restaurants, or hotels except in service roles, “to mop and clean,” as he put it. The Court Theater, a vaudeville house, permitted Black patrons only in segregated spaces: the gallery or the rear of the balcony when a colored show came to town.

Some Black residents, the article said, went across to Bellaire, Ohio, to see a picture.

That image is haunting: Black Wheeling residents crossing the river not for luxury, but for the basic dignity of sitting in a theater as patrons.

Schuyler’s criticism was not only that white Wheeling excluded Black residents. He also criticized Black Wheeling for not establishing its own movie house, especially given the broader Black population in what he called the Wheeling District. His complaint was that such a project would require collective action and financing, and that collective action was precisely what he found lacking.

Again, we can hear both the evidence and the editorial pressure. The evidence tells us about segregated leisure. The pressure tells us what Black journalists of the era often urged: build institutions, pool resources, create alternatives, stop waiting for permission.

The Churches: Paid For, Rooted, And Underused

The article also speaks directly to the Black churches of Wheeling.

Schuyler lists four churches: Methodist Episcopal, A.M.E. Zion, Baptist, and Holy Roller. He identifies the first three as being led by Revs. C. E. Hodges, Adams, and Davenport, respectively. He also notes that their buildings were paid for and that they had considerable treasuries.

That is an extraordinary observation.

Black churches in Wheeling were not simply worship spaces. They were centers of leadership, education, social life, mutual aid, and public identity. In an era when Black residents were shut out of many white-controlled civic spaces, the church was often one of the few institutions Black communities fully controlled.

Schuyler’s critique was that these institutions had resources but were not leveraging them boldly enough for housing and community development. He even suggested that one church had enough vacant land to support a twenty-family apartment project.

That idea leaps off the page.

In the middle of Jim Crow Wheeling, with housing shortages severe and Black families crowded into limited spaces, a Black church-owned housing development was imaginable.

It did not happen, at least not in the way Schuyler urged. But the fact that he raised it in 1925 tells us something important: Black-led community development was not a modern idea. It was already being debated a century ago.

Housing As The Central Crisis

The housing section of the article is one of its most important parts.

Schuyler described Wheeling’s Black housing situation as “very acute.” He noted that there were not enough houses for Black residents, few vacant lots available, and that many Black homes were located on steep hillsides or in narrow, dismal alleys.

This connects directly to one of the Foundation’s ongoing themes: the long history of housing inequality in Wheeling.

Decades before the housing surveys, before public housing debates, before Hil-Dar, before Grandview Manor and Lincoln Homes became part of federal redevelopment conversations, Black Wheeling was already facing a structural housing crisis. The problem was not simply poverty. It was access. It was geography. It was ownership. It was exclusion by real estate practice. Schuyler even refers to the “same realtors’ Ku Kluxism experienced everywhere,” a brutal phrase that captured how racial exclusion operated through the housing market.

His proposed solution was modern apartment development on land already occupied by Black residents. He believed Black Wheeling had enough money collectively, but not enough shared vision or trust to act.

That critique may feel harsh, but it also reveals something else: Black Wheeling had assets. Churches had treasuries. Lodges had deposits. Individuals owned valuable property. The problem was not absence of capacity. It was the difficulty of converting scattered capacity into collective power under Jim Crow pressure.

The Fraternal World

The article also points to Wheeling’s rich fraternal life.

Schuyler wrote that Wheeling had lodges of nearly every known Black fraternal organization, but that only the Pythians owned their own building. That line is especially meaningful given the Foundation’s work on the African American Knights of Pythias building in Wheeling.

Here again, the Pittsburgh Courier helps confirm what our research has shown again and again: fraternal organizations were essential to Black civic life.

They were not merely social clubs. They were systems of status, insurance, burial support, leadership training, mutual aid, and political influence. In a segregated city, owning a building was a declaration. It meant permanence. It meant autonomy. It meant a place to gather without waiting on white permission.

Schuyler contrasts the Pythians with the Odd Fellows, whom he described as having a long history and significant treasury, but still renting meeting rooms from a white lodge. His frustration is clear. To him, institutional money sitting in white banks while Black people lacked housing, recreation, and civic space was a failure of imagination.

For us, it is also a research clue.

Where were those lodge treasuries?

Who were the officers?

What projects were debated but never built?

What land was almost purchased?

What opportunities were missed, and why?

Professionals, Businesses, And Black Achievement

The article is not only criticism. It also gives us a valuable directory of Black professional and business life in Wheeling.

It names dentists Dr. R. M. Hamlin and Dr. A. M. Morrison. It names physicians Dr. G. A. Banks, Mrs. Pronty, and Dr. E. S. Kennedy. It mentions W. A. Wright, described as a mechano-therapist. It identifies Green’s Hotel, owned by Mrs. Green, and the Pan Handle Hotel, owned by Ben Taylor. It mentions barber shops, pool rooms, restaurants, a tailor shop operated by C. Gaines, the Courier agent, and a well-equipped drug store owned by Dr. J. H. Davis, with Dr. B. L. Adams as pharmacist.

These names are gold.

They show a Black Wheeling that was not passive, not invisible, and certainly not without accomplishment. There were doctors, dentists, pharmacists, hotel owners, barbers, restaurateurs, educators, clergy, business owners, fraternal leaders, and civic organizers.

The tension of the article is that Schuyler sees all of this and still asks: why has it not become more?

That question may sting. But it also helps us see the scale of Black Wheeling’s potential.

Work In The Mills, Mines, Hotels, And Streets

The article closes its survey by describing Black employment in Wheeling.

Large numbers of Black residents worked in the mills and mines of the region. Others worked as porters, waiters, cooks, domestics, bank messengers, truckers, chauffeurs, and hotel employees. This is the labor world that built much of Wheeling’s wealth while rarely receiving equal civic recognition.

That labor history matters to the Foundation because education, housing, faith, and labor were never separate stories. The child at Lincoln School may have had a father in the mill, a mother in domestic service, an uncle in the mine, a cousin in a hotel kitchen, and a church elder in a fraternal lodge. Black Wheeling’s institutions were built by people who worked hard, pooled little, and carried much.

The Courier article gives us the outline. Our work is to keep filling in the names.

What Do We Do With A Harsh Source?

This article is not easy.

Schuyler’s tone can feel dismissive, even scolding. He looks at Black Wheeling and sees too much individualism, too much jealousy, too much hesitation, too much waiting. Some of that may have been true. Some of it may have reflected the impatience of an outsider who did not fully understand the local pressures, family networks, church politics, and daily dangers of pushing too hard in a Jim Crow city.

But the article is still invaluable.

It tells us that Black Wheeling was being watched by the wider Black press. It tells us that the city’s segregated conditions were known beyond Wheeling. It tells us that Black leaders, churches, lodges, schools, and professionals were visible enough to be evaluated. It tells us that housing, recreation, schooling, and representation were urgent concerns in 1925.

Most importantly, it shows that the questions we ask today are not new.

Who controls land?

Who has access to decent housing?

Who gets to sit in the theater?

Who educates the children?

Who owns the meeting hall?

Who speaks for the neighborhood?

Who has money in the bank, and who has power in the street?

Those questions were alive in 1925.

They remain alive now.

Why This Matters To The Foundation

The Eugene and Beverly Stradwick Heritage Foundation exists to preserve, document, interpret, and share the African American history of Wheeling and the Upper Ohio Valley. That means celebrating excellence, but it also means confronting difficult evidence.

This Pittsburgh Courier article gives us both.

It gives us Dr. R. M. Hamlin trying to create recreation for young people. It gives us Lincoln School still carrying the educational hopes of Black families. It gives us Black churches with paid-off buildings and civic potential. It gives us the Pythians as one of the few fraternal bodies with its own home. It gives us doctors, dentists, pharmacists, teachers, clergy, hotel owners, barbers, and laborers. It gives us a community under pressure, but not without resources.

And it gives us an outside voice asking Wheeling to do more.

Nearly one hundred years later, we can hear that challenge differently. Not as an insult, but as an invitation to study more deeply. To recover more names. To map more institutions. To understand what was built, what was blocked, what was dreamed, and what was lost.

Black Wheeling was never inert.

But it was often constrained, watched, marked, excluded, and forced to build under pressure.

That is the story beneath Schuyler’s sharp headline. And it is why this clipping belongs in the Foundation’s archive, not as a final verdict, but as a starting point for more truth.

-T

Sources

• George S. Schuyler, “Aframerica Today: Wheeling, W. Va. — Inert and Indifferent,” The Pittsburgh Courier, December 12, 1925.

• Eugene and Beverly Stradwick Heritage Foundation research files on Dr. R. M. Hamlin, Lincoln School, Black churches, Black fraternal organizations, and African American civic life in Wheeling, West Virginia.