Hair, Numbers, And History
By: DAVID S. ROTENSTEIN
Dolores Slater-numbers book.tif: Dolores Slater holds her mother’s last numbers book. The final entries were made in the summer of 1960s, shortly before Louise Harris died. Photo by David S. Rotenstein.
Michelle Slater loves history. That’s a good thing because her family’s story is woven into Pittsburgh’s Hill District’s history about as tightly as possible. Slater’s grandmother wrote numbers for some of Steel City’s best-known numbers bankers. Her father cut hair and eventually ran the Crystal Barbershop, one of the Hill’s most iconic third places and Black-owned businesses. Slater, 58, learned the hair trade by watching her father and she eventually became a licensed barber herself. That’s right, not a hairstylist, a barber. One wall inside her shop is dedicated to telling her family and community’s stories. There’s a lot to unpack inside Slater’s shop and her stories.
I met Slater while researching the social history of numbers gambling in Pittsburgh. Her father, Harold Slater (1924-2014), had cut the hair of a gregarious and well-loved numbers banker and nightclub owner, George “Crip” Barron (1924-2001). On Saturdays, Barron spent time with Angela James, whom he treated like a daughter. Barron would drop Angela off at the Hurricane bar next door to the Crystal Barbershop, where she would drink Shirley Temples while he tended to business and his hair. After I interviewed Angela James for the first time in January 2021, she connected me to Michelle Slater.
Before I get into Slater’s story, it’s important to underscore the significance of the two intersecting traditions that dominate it: numbers gambling and barbering. Invented in Harlem in the first decades of the twentieth century, numbers gambling was a street lottery that formed the economic engine sustaining many twentieth-century urban, rural, and suburban Black communities. The game enabled multitudes of small bettors to wager pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters on three-digit numbers derived from financial market returns published in daily newspapers.
Deeply embedded in blues songs, African American literature, and oral tradition, numbers gambling employed thousands of African Americans and European immigrants in communities with high barriers to good jobs rooted in anti-Black racism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Catholicism. Runners, writers, and counting house employees worked for bankers who often became folk heroes: badmen who broke the rules and laws while also capitalizing Black businesses and providing economic support for people who lacked access to banking, insurance, and philanthropy.
Hair businesses — beauty salons and barbershops — were another pillar in Black social and economic networks. Inside these Black spaces, proprietors, patrons, and loafers told stories, swapped jokes, and did business — not all of it involved cutting hair and shaving. Writer Melissa Harris-Perry once described Black barbershops and beauty parlors as safe spaces where members of the Black community could speak and act freely, places “where nothing is out of bounds for conversation and where the ‘serious work of figuring it out’ goes on.”
Most hair businesses were — and are — gender-specialized: barbers cut men’s hair, and stylists cut women’s hair. The boundaries were rigid, but not impermeable. Like newsstands, bars, and other businesses with lots of foot traffic where folks tended to linger, barbershops and salons frequently fronted for profitable numbers racketeers. Folks could buy a number while also paying for tonsorial services.
William “Woogie” Harris opened his Crystal Barbershop in the 1920s. Harris and his friend and partner William “Gus” Greenlee became two of Pittsburgh’s most beloved and wealthy Black businessmen. Bootlegging and numbers gambling provided the capital for their successful enterprises. Greenlee’s nightclubs, restaurants, and Negro Leagues baseball team, the Pittsburgh Crawfords, and Harris’s barbershop provided them legitimate fronts and ways to launder racketeering money. It was a sublime Black space.
Harold Slater’s family arrived in Pittsburgh during the Great Migration. The men in his family had worked in barbering for a couple of generations back in Luray, Virginia, before moving up north. In Pittsburgh, they worked as Pullman porters and as barbers.
Michelle Slater’s grandmother, Louise Harris (no blood relation to Woogie Harris), also arrived in Pittsburgh during the Great Migration. Her family came to the city from Florida by way of Alabama and Georgia. Louise was barely 16 when she had her daughter, Dolores, Michelle’s mother. Louise’s grandparents ended up raising Dolores.
The Slater, Harris, Barron, and James families’ Pittsburgh timelines began intersecting in the 1920s. Louise Harris was working in Hill District restaurants when she struck up a relationship with Woogie Harris’s older brother, George. The pair lived together for about 12 years and they wrote numbers for Woogie. After a violent breakup in the early 1940s, Louise met another man, also in the numbers: Charles “Snotty” Lewis. They married in 1948 and split four years later. After Louise died in 1960, Charles Lewis married Eldora James, Angela James’s mother.
Yes, it’s complicated.
Harold Slater enlisted in the army during World War II. He served as an airplane mechanic with the Tuskegee Airmen. Though he didn’t fly the planes, he kept them in the air earning himself an honored position in the Western Pennsylvania Tuskegee Airmen Memorial installed inside Pittsburgh International Airport’s Concourse A.
After the war, Harold went to work in the Crystal Barbershop. In 1951, he married Woogie and Ada Harris’s daughter, Marion. The couple lived in the Harris’s spacious Victorian home known throughout Black Pittsburgh as the “Mystery Manor”; historic preservationists later dubbed it the National Negro Opera Company house for its brief time in the 1940s as the pioneering arts company’s headquarters.
Married and divorced once before, Marion was a free spirit and the marriage to Slater ended in divorce in 1958. By then, both had begun relationships with other people. Less than a month after an Allegheny County court issued the divorce decree, Harold married Dolores; their first daughter was born soon after that. Michelle came along five years later, in 1963.
Despite his divorce from Woogie’s daughter, Harold Slater remained close to Woogie and he continued working at the Crystal Barbershop. After Woogie died in 1967, Slater became the shop’s proprietor. He ran it until the 1980s when the city’s urban renewal machine caught up to the block.
At 93, Dolores Slater lives in a home that is less than 500 feet from the Crystal Barbershop’s final location, the block where it moved in the 1950s after urban renewal displaced it. “All my life,” is how long she says she has lived in the Hill. “I was born here and in fact I only moved one time. I moved to Homewood for one month and then I moved back. I love the Hill.”
The city used eminent domain to take her family’s home in 1980. “We lived across the street from the Crystal Barbershop,” she recalled. “So they wanted me to move out and I wouldn’t move out until — I told them till they found something on the Hill for me.”
Dolores worked for U.S. Steel and for Pittsburgh Public Schools. After her mother died, Dolores wrapped up her mother’s numbers business. A few years later, while pregnant with Michelle, she briefly worked at a Hill District “numbers station.” Her life story weaves in and out of the narrative that made Pitsburgh’s Hill District one of the nation’s most recognizable Black neighborhoods.
All of this history converges in Michelle Slater’s one-chair Pittsburgh shop. “I’m a barber-stylist,” Slater explained in July 2021. “I love it and when people post things or see me and they always tell me, ‘Your dad would be so proud of you.’”
Slater worked in several jobs after attending the University of Pittsburgh. She still works as a casino regulatory officer when not in her shop. Barbering, however, is in her soul and it’s the work she loves, along with talking about her family’s history. When she opened her own barbershop, Slater called it The Crystal Barber to honor her father.
“I’m big historian. In my house, I have another gallery … I just believe in old pictures and family and our family is rich — I mean we’re rich with history,” she explained standing in front of family photos and artifacts from her father’s barbershop, including his shaving cup, electric clippers, and his Associated Master Barbers of America membership plaque (member number 33213). She calls the space her “ancestry wall.” It includes one photo that she calls “Generations.” Shot in the Hill District outside the family home, it shows her great-great-grandmother, great-grandmother, grandmother Louise Harris, mother Dolores Slater, and older sister, Kim.
Many of Slater’s pictures aren’t ordinary family snapshots. The family’s close ties to the Harrises meant that their lives were documented by Charles “Teenie” Harris, George and Woogie’s youngest brother, who was best known as a renowned Pittsburgh Courier photographer. His photographs chronicled Black life in Pittsburgh for more than half a century.
“This is our hustle,” says Michelle Slater. “This is what we do. My mother never wanted to leave the Hill.” Her whole family’s history is bound up with the Hill District’s history: the barbershops, numbers, and displacement. Yet, because of the stigma attached to urban renewal and the poverty induced by segregation, the Hill’s history is a lot like Black History Month: a tokenized and separate narrative. “The Hill District may have a bad name and nobody wants to reach back and see what the beauty of it all was in the beginning,” Michelle explains. “And so they put it to the back burner until someone wants to come and build something and it’s more commercial and industrial, but nobody’s reaching back for the history of it.”
I asked Michelle how she learns Pittsburgh’s Black history and her family’s role in it. “I wouldn’t know where to go,” she replied. “Like the only things we have are the Teenie Harris pictures.” A 2011 book documenting Teenie Harris’s career simply mentioned her grandmother in an endnote as George Harris’s “common-law wife.” Harold Slater’s name and time in the Harris family is absent from the 2007 City of Pittsburgh historic landmark nomination for the home he shared with Marion Harris Slater and her married name was misspelled. Like Black history throughout the United States, much of the Slaters’ story has been erased and forgotten. Though there are Black historians documenting Pittsburgh’s past, their work is built on a foundation laid by decades of Black history produced by whites. Big names and big men like Woogie Harris and Gus Greenlee have become tokens of a rich Black past once defined by people like Louise Harris and Harold Slater and Dolores Slater.
