2 Pitt historians were featured in an Emmy-winning documentary

When millions of Black Americans fled the Jim Crow South for industrialized cities in the North, many sought job opportunities in Pittsburgh’s growing industrial job market. Pitt faculty Alonna Carter-Donaldson and Laurence Glasco explain the movement’s impact in WQED’s digital short-form documentary, “Pittsburgh and the Great Migration,” which recently won a Mid-Atlantic Regional Emmy Award.

Associate Professor Glasco, who joined Pitt’s history department in 1969, is renowned as a chronicler of Black history, race and ethnicity in American life. He has authored four books and appeared in multiple documentaries about the history of Pittsburgh and jazz. Glasco also serves as a board member for Heinz History Center and the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation. He is a passionate advocate for documenting and preserving the history of Black neighborhoods near the University’s campus in Oakland.

Carter-Donaldson is a visiting faculty lecturer in Pitt’s Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies Program. As a public historian, her work has centered around African American women and girls in the Pittsburgh region since the 1870s, African American genealogy, the historic preservation of African American historical sites and the intersection of race and disability. In 2021, she was selected as the inaugural Burke Family Research Fellow at the Frick Pittsburgh for her work on African Americans in Pittsburgh’s Gilded Age. Carter-Donaldson has previously worked as the first project scholar for the Western Pennsylvania Disability History and Action Consortium’s Intersection of Race and Disability Project.