Gus Greenlee

Born and educated in McDowell County, “Gus” Greenlee was a son and grandson of slaves belonging to James Harvey Greenlee of McDowell County. After acquiring wealth during the Great Depression, he became a major philanthropist and promoter of Black musicians and sportsmen.

After only one year of higher education, he joined the migration of Black people from McDowell County to the north. Pittsburgh, PA., attracted Greenlee. After military service in France during the First World War, he returned to establish himself in Pittsburgh’s Black community. He made a sizable fortune in bootlegging and gambling operations during the Prohibition Era. He began a career in promoting Black culture with the purchase of the Crawford Bar & Grille, which soon became Pittsburgh’s version of Harlem’s Cotton Club, featuring touring jazz bands and celebrity performers, including Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Lena Horne, Nat King Cole, and other Black musicians who became “stars.”. The Grille became the meeting place for “Pittsburgh’s most exciting personalities, Black and White.”

Greenlee’s wealth also allowed him to purchase the Crawford Colored Giants baseball team in 1931, and shortly afterwards, he went on to re-found the National Negro League after it had floundered in the Great Depression. Under his sponsorship, the NNL would last until 1948, when segregated baseball teams gave way to integration.

Aware of the need for a sports complex in the vicinity of Pittsburgh’s Black community “on the Hill,” Greenlee began construction in 1932 of Greenlee Field that would feature a 7,500 seat stadium. Upon completion, it became the first baseball park to be owned by a Black man in the United States. Greenlee’s love of sports and his desire to expand the role of Black people in American culture led him to later acquire a stable of ten boxers, including the first black light heavyweight champion, John Henry Lewis. Continued to be driven by “an indomitable sense of racial pride,” in later years “Gus” Greenlee totally expended his wealth by providing educational scholarships and “loans” to young Black people attempting to buy homes during the years of the national depression—“especially if they came from North Carolina.”