Hightower’s unique pictures of Black life are now part of Pitt’s archive

Early one spring evening in 1968, a group of young men walked down Centre Avenue in Pittsburgh’s Hill District. 

The neighborhood still reflected the rage that had played out a few weeks earlier, after an assassin had killed the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis. The men moved past shattered storefronts now covered in plywood. In some places, the odor of burnt wood hung in the air. The men paused at the Mainway Grocery Store, once the largest in the Hill but now a shell of charred beams and blackened metal shelving units. They stepped past the broken entrance, debris crunching under their shoes, and entered a store aisle.

One of the men wore a suit and tie and a topcoat. This was August Wilson, then in his early 20s. Already he stood out as a different type of character. Two others – poets Rob Penny and Latif Baba Ali (also known as Rocco Swain) – wore dashikis and carried sheets of paper and notebooks.

Once inside the store, Penny and Ali began reading their poetry, gracing the scorched space with a bit of lyricism.

A fourth man, Frank Hightower, raised a Minolta camera. He focused his lens on Wilson, standing in the wreckage with one foot resting on a fallen shelf. Sunlight streamed in through the broken entrance. Wilson leaned forward, took a drag on a cigarette, then exhaled, the smoke drifting off in a long cloud behind him. His forehead creased, he stared into the distance, looking serious and thoughtful.

When Hightower clicked the shutter, he knew he’d captured an extremely fine image. Photographers will tell you this is a rare experience, this feeling of certainty that you’ve married elements of light and composition and human expression in a way that reveals something at once hopeful and damning about our existence.

The picture would stand out even if Wilson had not, in the coming decades, written a series of 10 extraordinary plays chronicling the 20th-century African American experience. Two of his plays would win the Pulitzer Prize.

Hightower, now 79, hung out with Wilson and Penny and others who were a part of a unique era in Pittsburgh history, one that helped shape the city’s politics, its institutions (the University of Pittsburgh, for example) and its arts culture. This crowd spoke of Black Power and self determination, they wrote plays and poetry and founded a theater. Throughout, Hightower shot pictures.

Those images provide essential and rare glimpses into a community unfamiliar to most Pittsburghers. The city’s major newspapers largely ignored the city’s Black residents. Search the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s vast print archive for pictures reflecting the 20th-century African American experience and you’ll pull your hair out in frustration.

Folks at the Archives & Special Collections at the University of Pittsburgh Library System  realize the weight of Hightower’s work. They recently acquired his collection of images documenting Black life in the city from the 1960s through the 1990s. They’ve also acquired pictures shot by his father, Frank Russell Hightower, whose most prominent work as a photographer began in the late 1950s.

The Hightower photo collection will be celebrated Thursday at the Hillman Library Archives & Special Collections Instruction Room on the third floor of Pitt’s Hillman Library, Oakland. Materials will be on display at 4 p.m.; a scheduled program, including a conversation with Frank Hightower, begins at 4:30.

Miriam Meislik, media curator for the archives, visited Hightower’s North Side house last year to see and discuss the collection. “The moment I saw the collection in his house, I realized this was a gold mine,” Meislik said. “These are really important and valuable pieces of Pittsburgh history.

“There’s a lot of power in Frank’s work,” Meislik added. “The more I look at it, the more  I appreciate it and grasp its significance. I see it as Pittsburgh through the lens of a Black photographer documenting his life and the world of Black Pittsburgh at the time. We don’t have a lot of depictions of that, from that point of view.”

Meislik said the collection comprises tens of thousands of images in about 40 boxes of material. Those boxes include several manuscripts – poetry and plays, in draft and completed form, written by Hightower.

About 230 of Hightower’s images are displayed on the library system’s website of digital collections. His father has about 50 on the site.

A number of Hightower’s pictures depict performances by Black Horizon Theatre, founded by Wilson and Penny, on stages and in school classrooms and gymnasiums, with students gathered around. Other photographs capture Black Power meetings, Hill District street scenes, protests, class discussions at Pitt. Most of the pictures are black and white, but the collection includes several color slides, including one of writer, filmmaker and photojournalist Gordon Parks and singer Harry Belafonte.

Hightower acquired his first camera with points earned while selling newspapers on the Sixth Street Bridge. This was in 1960. Hightower had just started high school. Before sunrise, he’d first deliver a single newspaper to a man who lived on a boat on the Allegheny River, then walk up to the bridge and stand, in the dark, and hawk the day’s edition of the Post-Gazette. “It was dark and creepy,” he said. Drunks would sometimes stagger by. But the Pirates won the World Series that year, so he sold a lot of newspapers.

His father taught him the basics of photography – we’ll get to that in a second – then Hightower attended a photography school in Philadelphia.

Afterward, back in Pittsburgh, Hightower found inspiration in the poetry of writers such as Penny and Wilson and Chawley Williams as well as in the leadership and activism of, among others, Curtiss Porter, Sala Udin, Jake Milliones, Margret Dobbins, Nicole Miller and Gail Austin.

“Where they’d go, I’d go,” he said. “I started photographing everything related to Black people. I was 22, 23 years old, and it was a turning point for me. I just stuck with it.”

The collection of his father, Frank Russell Hightower, covers some of that same era. In 1968, he photographed Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to the U.S. Congress, and Democratic presidential nominee Hubert Humphey during a campaign stop in Downtown Pittsburgh. But a number of his most interesting pictures were made in the late 1950s. They include photos of the Indianapolis Clowns baseball team performing at Forbes Field in 1958 – the crowd pictures are fascinating – and group pictures at the YMCA on Centre Avenue.

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Any conversation with Hightower will eventually lead to a discussion about his family and his roots. Like his images, Hightower’s family story reveals much about Pittsburgh.

Frank Hightower’s paternal grandfather, also Frank Hightower, was born in 1886 to a farming family in Madison County, Georgia, about 60 miles east of Atlanta. He’s listed in the 1900 census as a 13-year-old farm laborer. By 1917, he’d moved to Edna, Louisiana, and was working in a lumber mill. Three years later, in 1920, he was living with his wife, Ardella, on Decatur Street on Pittsburgh’s North Side and working at a grocery store.

Hightower remembers his grandfather as a tall, slender man whose fair skin, straight hair and blue-gray eyes allowed him to pass as white. This helped the grandfather in his business. In the 1940s and 50s, Black residents had trouble getting credit – lending institutions didn’t want to loan money to African Americans. Grandfather Hightower had an arrangement with several wholesale distributors in the city’s SoHo neighborhood that made it possible for African American residents to purchase furniture and other household goods without standard credit. People could go to one of the distributors, pick out what they wanted, and Frank Hightower would later collect payments from the customers. 

“He did that six days a week,” Hightower said. On Saturday evenings, Frank and his son Frank Russell Hightower gathered all the invoices on a dining room table in their Franklin Street home and conducted the week’s accounting. The following afternoon, grandfather Hightower would travel to SoHo and settle things up with the business owners.

As a young man in the early 1960s, Hightower traveled with his grandfather as he made his rounds. Hightower remembers driving to a number of different neighborhoods, from the Hill District to the West End to Manchester, to knock on the doors of those who’d made purchases and collect the week’s payments. “It was a well-oiled system,” Hightower said. “Sometimes he collected only a few dollars at a time.”

While Frank Hightower’s light skin certainly opened some doors for him, the advantage had its limits.

“My grandfather once bought a house on Marshall Street,” Hightower said. “The deal was just about complete and he made one mistake. He said, ‘I’d like my wife to see the house.’ And as soon as they saw his wife, they sold the house to someone else. They saw that she was Black.”

Hightower remembers his father Frank Russell Hightower as a man who could do anything – repair an automobile, fix plumbing issues, remodel homes. In addition to keeping the books for his father’s  business, he cleaned office buildings at Gateway Center and worked as a photographer for Allegheny County. He also shot weddings and portraits.

“People used to call him ‘The Wedding Photographer,’” Hightower said. “It seemed like he did one every Saturday. At a certain point he stopped doing them. I asked him, ‘Why did you stop doing weddings?’ He said, ‘Every week I’d get sick and throw up before the wedding. I had so much anxiety. I got tired of going through that ritual.’ ”

Frank Russell Hightower built a photo studio on the first floor of the family’s Adam’s Street home; film developing and printing took place in a second-floor darkroom. Hightower often helped his father – that’s how he learned the basics of photography.

Despite Frank Russell Hightower’s work schedule, he still made time for his family. There were fishing trips to Lake Erie, Pymatuning, Sugar Lake. Hightower remembers rising before dawn to pick out a fishing spot with his father and maternal grandfather James Rucker, a construction and railroad worker and long-time fisherman. They cooked eggs and bacon on outdoor stoves and watched the sunrise over a lake.

To this day, Hightower enjoys watching sunrises. It’s an echo of his past and, like his photography, a reflection of his family’s story. The photographs created by him and his father now play a significant role in revealing Pittsburgh’s story.