Black people leaving the city of Pittsburgh has been a huge topic of conversation. On March 23, award-winning author Deesha Philyaw, who recently signed a.
It was a time of social upheaval and racial discontent. Those in poorer areas didn’t have good access to medical care certainly less than others elsewhere who were wealthier (and typically whiter). Neither did they have the same career opportunities.
In Pittsburgh in the late 1960s and early ’70s, Freedom House Ambulance Service presented a pioneering answer to both problems, training residents of the city’s underserved areas as paramedics to deliver elite prehospital care back to neglected neighborhoods like their own. And while it lasted less than a decade, it demonstrated that with the right resources and will, pipelines could be built to craft worthy candidates in need of a chance into dedicated caregivers that returned quality help to their communities.
90.5 WESA Alexis Mighty, CEO of Pittsburgh I Can t Breathe, leads a march through the city s Hill District Tuesday.
Videos of George Floyd dying beneath Chauvin’s knee sparked global outcry and months of protests last year. Crowds moving through the streets of Pittsburgh calling for racial justice became an almost daily sight.
Two groups of young activists rose to prominence during that time: Black, Young, & Educated and Pittsburgh I Can’t Breathe. Both marched through the city Tuesday evening after the guilty verdict in the Chauvin trial was announced.
Leaders have spent the last few months diversifying their tactics when it comes to activism. Much of their work has included meeting people where they always are: their smartphones.
A historian friend once taught me the German word Zeitgenossen, explaining that it referred to one’s contemporaries, or members of one’s generation, but also more particularly connoted something like a “time-comrade.” Gabe Winant has become a great time-comrade to me, a thinker whose insights into questions of history and generationality, kinship and aging, have deeply enriched my own thinking on these subjects. His first book, The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America
, traces the transformation of Pittsburgh, the archetypal industrial steel town, into a city powered by the labor of hospital workers. It offers both a finely drawn portrait of working-class life in industrial and postindustrial Pittsburgh and a vision for how care work which has long divided workers along lines of race, gender, and generation could become the basis for a new kind of solidarity. In doing so, it also offers a profound look at how not just the workday