Bell Zonia Cutler Wilson was born in 1894 in Spear, North Carolina, to Jacob and Sarah Eller Twitty Cutler. Her mother, called Eller, was a respected midwife and healer in their small Appalachian mountain community. The family owned a substantial plot of land; in fact, Zonia’s father was the only Black landowner in the area. Today a scenic nature spot known as Cutler Falls still bears the family name.

Though by all accounts her family was a loving one, Zonia’s childhood was not easy. Scraping together a living in the isolated mountains was a constant challenge, and racial discrimination placed an additional burden on families like the Cutlers. During the years of World War I, many men in the community left for military service or work in the area’s mines, leaving women like Zonia to sustain the household. 

Her young adult life was further marred by sexual violence and wrongful imprisonment, the latter possibly part of an effort to seize her family’s land. For a time she worked as a domestic servant in the household of local politician T.D. Vance. By 1922, Zonia was a mother of three children - named Faye, Daisy, and Detroit (who went by Ray) - facing the usual challenges of parenting amidst the strains of racism and economic hardship.  

Her life would begin a new chapter in 1928, when Zonia met and married a talented musician from Tennessee named Bynam Wilson. The couple soon moved to Bramwell, West Virginia, where Bynam found work. Sadly, while living there in August 1930, the couple lost a baby boy who died shortly after birth.  A few years later in 1932, as part of the larger exodus of Black people out of the American South known as the “Great Migration,” Bynam and Zonia moved north to Pittsburgh, settling in the Hill District.

All of Zonia's children adopted the Wilson surname, and she embraced her role as a housewife in their residence on Logan Street. There she raised three more sons, named John, Franklin, and George. The family thrived in their community, with Zonia especially enjoying attending movies at the nearby Rhumba Theater, where her sons worked

It was in the Hill in 1945 that Zonia's daughter, Daisy, gave birth to a boy she named Frederick August Kittel, Jr., after his father.  By that time, Zonia had come to reside across the street from Daisy on Bedford Avenue, at the home of professional boxer Charlie Burley and his wife Julia. 

At the age of 20, young Frederick Kittel, Jr. would change his name to August Wilson - the name under which he later became one of America’s most celebrated playwrights. Though Zonia died when he was only five years old, August Wilson often recounted tales of his grandmother’s journey northward, and drew upon her memory as a link to the family’s Southern past. He paid tribute to her through the character of 11-year old Zonia Loomis in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, a play focused on themes of migration to the North and the Black struggle for freedom.

Zonia Cutler Wilson's life came to a close in March 1950 at Charlie Burley's house on Bedford Avenue.  She was buried in Greenwood Cemetery north of the city. August Wilson, along with his sisters Freda and Linda Jean, paid for a headstone remembering her as “Grandma” - a final act of honor to mark her resting place for those coming after.

It is not an overstatement to say that without Zonia’s courage, resilience, and determination to seek a better life, the world may never have known the creative works of August Wilson that have given so many an understanding of the Black experience in America. 

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Despite her quiet and unassuming demeanor, Daisy Lampkin achieved astonishing feats as a tireless crusader for women and civil rights.

Daisy Lampkin was a woman with many roles and had her voice heard throughout more organizations than one could imagine, many centered in the Hill District. Nicknamed by some as the “Dynamic Daisy Lampkin”, she has a long list of activism across social issues such as suffrage, civil rights, and even youth initiatives in the Hill District of Pittsburgh.

Ms. Lampkin was born to a working-class family in Washington D.C. in 1883. At the age of 26, she made the decision to move to Pittsburgh and settled in the Hill District, where she married restaurant owner William Lampkin three years later. Daisy and William would never have children of their own during their 50 years of marriage, but they would adopt and raise their 11-month old goddaughter Romaine Childs in 1924.

Dynamic Daisy's Activism

During this time, suffrage groups were highly segregated between White and Black women, leaving the suffrage movement to be a divided fight. Ms. Lampkin solidified her voice in the fight for gender equality in the United States and made the fight for suffrage an instance of an integrated cause for women. She became a prominent figure for women of color across many social issues that she fought for in the decades to come.

Along with the suffrage movement, Ms. Lampkin devoted much of her life to fighting for the civil rights of African Americans throughout the early 20th century. She is most known for holding a very prominent and driving role in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).  Her efforts within the NAACP, particularly in her founding of the Pittsburgh branch, helped drive membership to roughly 2,000 by 1929. She was known to have a “oratorical flair and vigorous fundraising” spirit when advocating both on the local and national levels. She traveled to various cities across the East and Midwest cities to hold meetings for the NAACP, including Baltimore, Chicago, and Memphis.

Ms. Lampkin worked alongside some of the most notable members of the NAACP on the national level, including Mary McLeod Bethune, Mary Church Terrell, and Thurgood Marshall. In particular, she was instrumental in convincing Marshall to join the NAACP’s legal defense team, which sparked his career further into becoming one of the most prominent African Americans in the legal system. Marshall was instrumental in winning many cases that fought segregation laws, most notably Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka which found segregation in public schools unconstitutional in 1954. Marshall also went on to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court until 1991.

During the 1920s, Ms. Lampkin went further in her political activism as she served as the vice chairman of the Negro Voters League of Pennsylvania and the Colored Voters Division of the Republican Party. In the former, she was known as an alternate delegate-at-large, meaning she was ready to represent the league as a whole at the Republican national convention. Her time in politics did not go without its tough waters. During her time as president of the Negro Women’s Republican League of Allegheny County, she responded to gossip about the league and claims of greed with her usual flair at a meeting towards the council: “I had said I would resign; that I would not work for you like I have, neglecting my home and my hubands’ work and not be appreciated. But in the face of your spirit here tonight I stand here as your county chairman until you elect another, and all the devils in hell can not prevent me from doing so.”

Our male leadership is so busy with their private interests that nothing is done unless the women do it.
-Daisy Lampkin

Other Significant Roles

In 1964, she was the first to receive the Eleanor Roosevelt- Mary McLeod Bethune World Citizenship Award which was accepted by her friend Lena Horne due to her failing health after a stroke.

Ms. Lampkin remained in the Hill District on Webster Avenue until her death in March of 1965. On August 9, 1983 a historical marker was placed outside her former home in the Hill District commemorating her life and service. She was the first African American woman in Pennsylvania history to receive this honor. The Daisy E. Lampkin Award is also given annually to a woman of the community of Pittsburgh (many who have resided in the Hill District) who dedicates service to the fight for equal rights.

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In a time when banks regularly refused mortgages to Black applicants, Robert R. Lavelle invested in Black homeownership in the Hill District community.

For a large part of the twentieth century, Pittsburgh's real estate industry and homeowners blocked African American access to housing and homeownership. Racism and redlining denied these qualified applicants home loans and ownership due to the color of the applicant's skin and the close-mindedness and shortsightedness of those in power at loaning institutions. Banks simply did not lend to African Americans, and lenders avoided certain neighborhoods, creating "a self-fulfilling prophecy of neglect and deterioration." African Americans found themselves left out of lending programs. As an example, though the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) was founded in the 1930s, as of 1967, only 3% of all new homes had been sold to African Americans. Robert R. Lavelle, however, proactively worked to change these issues of ownership for Pittsburgh's African American community.

Starting in the early 1950s, Robert R. Lavelle made homeownership a reality for numerous Pittsburgh African Americans. Lavelle spent his entire life working to revitalize the Hill District. After twenty-one years at the Pittsburgh Courier, Lavelle changed careers and started his own business - Lavelle Real Estate - in 1951. A few years later, he rescued the faltering Dwelling House Savings and Loan in 1957 and used that bank to focus on supporting African American homeownership in Pittsburgh and the Hill District in particular. Lavelle's group loaned to African Americans when others would not. His efforts made a difference, as homeownership in the Hill grew from 14% in the 1960s to over 40% in the 1990s.

Lavelle argued that "Homeownership is the basis of all wealth" and that "When poor people own the land they're living on, then they have power." Homeownership gave residents standing to demand more from their schools through the payment of property tax. Additionally, homeownership drove neighborhood and community improvements through the simple concept of pride of ownership.

You can have integrity no matter what your situation.
-Robert Lavelle, 1988

Throughout his life, Robert R. Lavelle fought to correct wrongs and injustice when he encountered them. As a young serviceman returning from World War II, Lavelle encountered racism in the Jim Crow South. When Lavelle refused to sit in the back of a streetcar in Virginia, a white man threatened him with a crowbar. Lavelle would later recount: "I stood up to him. I've always fought for self-respect, and I was willing to lose my life for it right then and there." In 1967, after being denied membership and access to Pittsburgh's real estate association and multilist service, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund represented Lavelle in his suit against 35 Pittsburgh realtors in a case centered on his exclusion from professional services. The suit was settled out of court, with Lavelle Real Estate being granted membership in the real estate association and full access to the listing service.

While Lavelle championed the Hill District, he also lamented the effect crime had in reducing the quality of life for its residents. In the wake of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination and the Eight-Day Riots, Pittsburgh found itself in a tumultuous time where crime levels escalated. In a 1969 letter to the editor of the Pittsburgh Courier, Lavelle noted that in that year, his Hill District real estate office had been burglarized three times, suffered several other attempts, fell victim to thievery, and that he personally was held up at gunpoint. Lavelle argued that citizens must work with police to protect and develop their neighborhoods and best interests and make their communities "peaceful and economically progressive."

Sadly, a different kind of crime forced Lavelle's lending institution, Dwelling House Savings and Loan, to close its doors in 2009 - the institution was the victim of online crime and deposit fraud. Robert R. Lavelle's real estate business, Lavelle Real Estate, is still operating and an important part of the Hill District.

Lavelle was born in Tennessee on October 4, 1915, and passed away in Pittsburgh at the age of ninety-four on July 4, 2010. In between, he worked to correct injustice where he encountered it and helped improve the lives of the people who call the Hill District home. His legacy is the thousands of families he helped acquire a home when other institutions turned their backs on them, as well as the Lavelle family he left behind. The Hill District is a better place today because of his efforts in the past.

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Franklin Wilhamina “Frankie Mae” Pace was born in 1905 in Clinton, Louisiana, near Baton Rouge, to Henreatta and Louis Scott. She grew up in Chicago, Illinois, with her nine older siblings and moved to Pittsburgh in 1936 with her husband, Charles H. Pace.

The couple owned a gospel music store, the Old Ship of Zion Music Company (later changed to the Charles H. Pace Music Publishers) on Centre Avenue.  Charles and Frankie quickly made themselves fixtures in the Hill District community.

As a young woman, Frankie wanted to become a social worker, but had limited means to attend college.  Instead, she served the Hill community through volunteer work and community organizing. Pace especially devoted herself to improving education and housing in the Hill District. She quickly emerged as an icon, described by Henry Freeman of the United Way Family and Children’s Services as a “‘real honest-to-goodness community leader" for disenfranchised communities.

Mrs. Pace was an original member of the Homeowners and Tenants Association—the first group to protest City Hall during Pittsburgh Mayor David L. Lawrence’s tenure; that group eventually became the Citizens Committee for Hill District Renewal (CCHDR), which Pace founded with realtor Robert Lavelle and civil rights activist Jim McCoy. The CCHDR was instrumental in organizing community leadership to ensure urban redevelopment in the Hill District be done only with community input.

I knew that ...if you wanted something done in your neighborhood you had to find out who to see to get it done, then go there and speak up.
-Frankie Pace

In 1967, Pace testified before a U.S. Senate Sub-Committee on Manpower and Poverty in support of President Johnson’s "War on Poverty." Amidst the escalating Vietnam War, she spoke directly and with conviction, telling the Senators that “if we can spend billions of dollars to destroy life, we ought to spend millions of dollars to save life.”

Her community service also included a membership on the Board of Directors for the Urban League of Pittsburgh and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) of Pittsburgh, and a number of other community organizations. She was a lifelong active member of the Rodman Street Baptist Church

Frankie Pace's devotion to the Hill District came from a deep religious faith, a desire to serve others, and an understanding of her responsibilities in the community. In an interview before her death in 1989, Pace stated, “‘I already knew even by the time I came here if you wanted something done in your neighborhood you had to find out who to see to get it done, then go there and speak up.’”  The Hill benefited because Frankie Pace spent her life doing just that.

In 2021, the City of Pittsburgh honored Mrs. Pace with the newly-opened Frankie Pace Park located between the Lower Hill and downtown.

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