Inside Pittsburgh International Airportâs Concourse A is a Black history museum. Just a few steps away from Gate A6, travelers can browse inside the tribute to Western Pennsylvaniaâs Tuskegee Airmen. Visitors can read about the Black aviatorsâ role in history and what they did after their service. Thereâs a lot to take in and you could be forgiven for overlooking the final entry in the âAfter the Warâ panel: âHarold Slater, proprietor, Crystal Barbershop.â
The Crystal Barbershop might have been Pittsburghâs best-known tonsorium. Its owner, William âWoogieâ Harris, was a legendary gambling baron and one of the cityâs wealthiest Black entrepreneurs. Harold Slater was his friend, son-in-law, and successor in the iconic Hill District establishment. Slaterâs story begins more than a century ago in rural Virginia and it continues today with his daughterâs Bloomfield barbering business. Itâs a distinctly Pittsburgh story that reveals the complexity of Black life and entrepreneurialism in the Hill District during the twentieth century.
Part of the Great Migration
Claude Slater owned a barbershop in rural Luray, Virginia. His father also was a barber. The family moved to Pittsburgh in 1920 or 1921 and they settled in a rented brick house in the Northside. Born in 1924, Harold was one of Claude and Helen Slaterâs three sons. One son drowned at age 17 in 1934 and Helen died a few months after Haroldâs birth. Claude remarried and the family moved to Centre Avenue in the Hill District where he continued barbering.
Barbershops were vibrant hubs in Black communities. They were places where stories were told, jokes were swapped, and business was done â not all of it 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 âwhere nothing is out of bounds for conversation and where the âserious work of figuring it outâ goes on.â
Harris might have been Pittsburghâs best-known barber â not for his mastery of the clippers & razor, but for his role as one of the cityâs most storied racketeers. He opened the Crystal Barbershop on Wylie Avenue in the Hill District in the 1920s. Over the years, barbers came and went from his six-chair shop. Harold Slater was one of them. He became Woogieâs close friend and, for a time, was married to Woogie and Ada Harrisâs daughter, Marion.
Harold Slater was 19 when he enlisted in the army in 1943. He became an airplane mechanic with the Tuskegee Airmen. A modest man, Slaterâs family only found out decades later.
âMy dad, the Tuskegee Airmen, he never talked about that,â Michelle Slater said in a June interview. The family only learned about his service in the unit after they were contacted by Tuskegee Airmen historian and journalist Regis Bobonis.
After the war, Slater returned to Pittsburgh where he got a job with the cityâs sanitation department. For decades, he worked an early morning shift picking up garbage in Bloomfield and other neighborhoods. Evenings and Saturdays, he cut hair in the Crystal Barbershop.
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Part of the Family
Harold Slater married Marion Harris in 1951. Marion had been married and divorced once before; it was Slaterâs first time at the altar. After the couple wed, they lived in the third-floor apartment in the Harris mansion on Apple Street in Homewood, now known as the National Negro Opera Company House.
Both Harold and his brother John had worked in the Crystal Barbershop on Wylie Avenue. John, like his father, also worked as a Pullman porter âredcap.â In the 1950s, John left the Crystal and opened his own barbershop on Frankstown Avenue with his father. Harold stayed at the Crystal with Woogie Harris.
Harold and Marion Slaterâs marriage began disintegrating after about five years. In 1957, Marion was involved in an affair with an Apple Avenue neighbor and the couple were seriously injured in a car accident after reportedly leaving a motel near Monroeville one evening. That relationship resulted in the birth of a daughter, Vicki.
The Slatersâ divorce became final in late 1958 and a few weeks later Harold married Dolores Smith. Dolores was a Pittsburgh native whose family had moved to the Steel City from Florida. Dolores also had been married and divorced once. Her mother, Louise, had been involved with Woogieâs older brother, George, for more than a decade in the 1930s and 1940s. Though the pair never wed, city directories listed them as a married couple and a Teenie Harris biography described her as Georgeâs common law wife.
Dolores Slater, now 93, doesnât think her mother and George Harris were in the numbers business together.
âShe wasnât into numbers then. After she left George, thatâs when she became independent, and I guess started to get into the numbers,â she said in an August interview. âI think George had dabbled in the numbers, too, with his brother.â
For more on Pittsburgh’s Black history, including more about the hill district, check out “Smoketown: The Untold Story of the Other Great Black Renaissance” by Mark Whitaker. [đ Amazon, Bookshop.org & local bookstores]
Louise and Snotty Make Their Mark
After splitting with George, Louise struck out on her own for a few years before teaming up with Charles Lewis. Growing up in the Hill District, Lewis had a perpetually runny nose and it earned him the lifelong nickname, âSnotty.â Lewis enlisted in the Army in World War II and he distinguished himself in battle in Europe. More than 50 later, then-Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) intervened to get Lewis the Bronze Star he had earned in the war.
Louise and Lewis were already a pair when her daughter celebrated her 18th birthday at the Crawford Grill No. 1 in December 1945. Teenie Harris captured the event in a photograph that is now archived at the Carnegie Museum of Art. The couple married in Cumberland, Maryland, in 1948. One year earlier, their arrests at the smoke shop at Wylie Avenue and Crawford Street that they ran as a front for their numbers business began making headlines.
The couple first lived at 423 Grove St. before moving to Center Avenue, where they owned a house. Louise filed for divorce in 1951. Though no decree was ever issued, Charles transferred the title to their home to Louise and he moved out.
Louise didnât skip a beat and she continued her lucrative career as a gambling entrepreneur.
âMy mother was a writer.â Dolores said. As her motherâs health declined in the late 1950s, Dolores would use her lunch breaks to turn in her motherâs bets to Tony Grosso. âShe wrote numbers for Tony.â
LEARN MORE: A big numbers hit in 1930 created Pittsburgh mob legends
Dolores had gone to work as a secretary at U.S. Steel in 1952. Her story is a Pittsburgh civil rights milestone in its own right.
âI got a job with U.S. Steel, the first Black girl,â she said. Though Slater broke the companyâs clerical worker racial barrier, she still experienced racism. She vividly recalled two events. The first was when her boss ordered her to cancel a wedding shower for a white colleague at her Hill District home. The second was when she was told to not eat with a Black janitor in the company cafeteria. She resisted both times and continued working there until 1959 after she got pregnant with her first daughter.
The Crystal Barbershopâs Many Lives in the Hill District
In 1958, robbers broke into the Crystal Barbershop and the Pittsburgh Courier identified Harold as its manager. After Urban Renewal displaced the shop from Wylie Avenue to Centre Avenue, Harold moved along with his now former father-in-law, Woogie Harris, to a new Centre Avenue location.
The shopâs new location was next door to one of the cityâs most popular nightspots, known for its music and feisty owner, Anna âBirdieâ Dunlap.
âThe Hurricane was one of the jazz clubs. Everybody came to the Hurricane,â Dolores said. âA lot of men would go to the barbershop first and then theyâd slide right over to the Hurricane and spend the rest of the evening.â
Like its predecessor on Wylie Avenue, the Centre Avenue Crystal Barbershop also was a numbers drop. Though Harold Slater never got into that particular family business, he could be trusted to hold money for the shopâs gambling entrepreneurs, his widow said.
Harris died in 1967. Ada Harris inherited the lease and Woogieâs shopâs contents, but Harold continued to manage the barbershop.
âHe worked there from the time [Michelle] was born until she was in her twenties,â Dolores Slater said.
âThe Crystal Barbershop had closed down and then daddy went up with his brother,â Michelle Slater said.
And then the cityâs urban renewal machine again caught up with the Crystal: âThis used to be the ghetto but itâs not anymore. Crawford Square then moved in all up here,â said Dolores Slater.
John Slaterâs barbershop, Slaterâs, was at the corner of LaPlace and Kirkpatrick farther up in the Hill District. John died in 1988 and Harold eventually moved his business into the family homeâs garage. There, his daughter Michelle joined him in his two-chair shop.
âWe did hair in the shop down in the basement for 26 years,â Michelle said in June. âIâve just been doing it on the side. So big-scale, the last five years is when I really started out into the public.â
The Modern Crystal Barber
Michelle, 58, grew up in the Hill District. After graduating from Brashear High School, she attended the University of Pittsburgh. Slater worked in retail and real estate before landing a job in the District Attorneyâs office. Now she works for the state as a casino compliance representative and she owns the Crystal Barber, which operates out of Bloomfield’s Sola Salon. Following in her fatherâs, uncleâs, and grandfatherâs footsteps, Slater said, âIâve always had two jobs, worked two jobs. Iâm my dadâs busy beaver.â
After learning the trade from her father, Michelle Slater got the formal training she needed to get a license. She beams when speaking about the tradition sheâs continuing.
âEven though I have the skills of doing all kinds of hair, I didnât just want to do female hair,â Slater said.
Sheâs proud of her lineage and continuing in the trade her father, uncle, and grandfather practiced: âWhen people post things or see me and they always tell me, âYour dad would be so proud of you.ââ
Michelle has lots of stories about her father. One perfectly captures what it was like growing up in the barbering tradition.
âWhen you grow up in a barbering family, everybody has to look good. You canât look shabby,â Slater said. âYou have to look neat, so that was the pet peeve and that was the thing.â
Michelle and her sister Kim had to remind their dates to remove their hats before coming over to the house.
âI mean that was the one thing with my dad, like âI donât care who you date, just tell them they cannot come in this house with a hat on,ââ she said.
Steeped in history and tradition, Michelle is passionate about her familyâs story and its place in Pittsburgh history. Her shop has an âancestry wallâ where she keeps artifacts from her fatherâs shop and family photos that tell a story about a century of barbering in Pittsburghâs Hill District.
âOur family is rich â I mean weâre rich with history,â Slater said. âThis is our hustle. This is what we do. My mother never wanted to leave the Hill and Iâm glad she didnât.â
Additional Resources
- Cheryl Finley, Teenie Harris, Laurence A. Glasco, and Joe William Trotter. Teenie Harris, Photographer: Image, Memory, History. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh PressâŻ: published in cooperation with Carnegie Museum of Art, 2011. https://artblart.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/teenie-harris-book.pdf.
- Laurence A. Glasco and Federal Writersâ Project (Pa.), editors. The WPA History of the Negro in Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004. [Amazon]
- Melissa V. Harris-Perry. Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2004. [Amazon]
- Jacobs-Huey, Lanita. From the Kitchen to the Parlor: Language and Becoming in African American Womenâs Hair Care. Studies in Language and Gender. OxfordâŻ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. [Amazon]
- Mark Whitaker. Smoketown: The Untold Story of the Other Great Black Renaissance. Simon & Schuster hardcover edition. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018. [Amazon, Bookshop.org]