Smoketown: The Untold Story of the Other Great Black Renaissance

Duke Ellington with a group posed in Loendi Club for Synchronettes Club party, by Charles “Teenie” Harris, 1938. Copyright: © 2006 Carnegie Museum of Art.

Toward the northern reaches of the Appalachian Mountains, at the point where the East Coast ends and the great American Midwest begins, three rivers meet. The Allegheny flows from the north, gathering the tributaries of western New York State. The Monongahela cascades from the south, through the hills and hollers of West Virginia. Together, they form the headwaters of the Ohio, which meanders west all the way to Illinois, where it connects to the mighty Mississippi and its tentacles reach from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. Because of its strategic value, the intersection of these three rivers had generals named