Pittsburgh's steel and coal industries had reached the peak of their productivity around the same time that European immigration had been cut off by the war, and Northern mills and factories hired and even recruited black laborers for the first time. Between 1910 and 1930, Pittsburgh and its surrounding communities absorbed roughly 50,000 black migrants. These new arrivals frequently experienced more of a struggle than they had expected in finding both work and decent housing.
Pittsburgh's black community was at an especial disadvantage to integrate newcomers. Its electoral and business power was undercut by the fact that, because of the city's hills, the residents lived primarily in nine tracts instead of one large neighborhood. Seven of these tracts were in the Hill district, the ghetto where Wilson was later born and raised. There, the cellar apartments and tenement houses that accommodated many families were often in appalling condition. Unfortunately, home ownership remained a financial impossibility for all but one percent of the residents of the lower Hill in 1930, only a generation before Troy Maxson acquires his home in Fences. Troy Maxson's pride in the home he owns is tinged with bitterness: he recognizes that, despite years of hard work, he never could have afforded a house without the help of his brother's disability benefits.
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