On a cold winter night in 1933, a group of rogue Beaver County police officers raided a home in Industry, an Ohio River community about 6 miles west of Beaver. Inside the home, the white cops found about 60 Black men and women dancing and drinking. What happened afterward became a civil rights flashpoint: 46 of the revelers were piled into trucks, driven to the state line, and told to not return to Pennsylvania.The case had been forgotten until recently. Yet, it happened at a time when mass expulsions of Black people were being carried out in communities across the country, including in Southwestern Pennsylvania. Because of the people involved and the circumstances behind why hundreds of Black laborers were working in Beaver County that year, the episode resonates with current events.Outside of the biographies of some of the civil rights leaders involved in the case, including Pittsburgh Courier publisher Robert Vann, local NAACP chapter President Homer Brown, and national NAACP President Walter White, the incident had disappeared from local memories and history books.Beaver County history enthusiast Roger Applegate was the first person to write about the deportation in nearly a century. He learned about it while surfing through newspaper databases looking for story ideas for a local historical society newsletter.“My first thought was, holy shit, who would do that to somebody,” Applegate says. “How could you treat somebody like that?”Virginia Heath was a Black woman who had grown up in McDowell County, West Virginia. It was a coal mining community where many Black people settled after the Civil War. Heath’s father worked in the mines there. She rented a two-story wood frame house in Industry near the site where Pittsburgh-based Booth & Flinn was building the Montgomery Island Lock and Dam for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.Montgomery Island Lock and Dam. Photo by David S. Rotenstein.More than 400 laborers worked on the dam project. Many were Southern Black men who came north for the work. Newspaper coverage of the dam construction reported that many of the Black workers “lived in shanties near the dam.” Conditions were rough and there were few permanent Black residents in Industry: three out of 996 people in 1930, according to the U.S. Census.Jan. 20, 1933, was a Friday. That night, Heath hosted a party in her rented rooming house. At about 11 p.m., Beaver County and state police officers entered the house and set up a makeshift courtroom in the kitchen. There, they informed each of the Black men and women that they were being charged with being drunk and with disorderly conduct. Each was given a choice: Pay a $2.50 fine ($60.89 in 2024) on the spot and leave or be taken to jail.Forty-six people couldn’t pay and were taken to the Beaver County jail. The next day, they were driven about 70 miles south in county-owned trucks and dumped in the rain at the West Virginia state line in Washington County. Along the way, the officers transporting them terrorized the captives by firing their guns.The NAACP collected clippings from newspapers around the country, such as this one from the New York Herald-Tribune, documenting the Beaver Deportation. Source: Library of Congress.Some of the people hiked into West Virginia, toward Morgantown. Others headed for Waynesburg. There, Washington County Sheriff Frank Krepps housed them before providing transportation back to Beaver County.Within one week, the episode was making headlines around the country. Though journalists called it a case of “shanghaiing,” the NAACP dubbed it the “Beaver Deportation.” The civil rights organization’s New York headquarters fully backed the Pittsburgh chapter, providing legal expertise and funding. They demanded that the rogue police officers be brought to justice.Finding no relief from the Beaver County district attorney, they lobbied Pennsylvania Gov. Gifford Pinchot to intervene. Pinchot’s attorney general appointed a special deputy, John D. Meyer, to investigate. Eight months after the episode, in September 1933, Attorney General William Schnader issued a report recommending that the officers involved be prosecuted for kidnapping and conspiracy.Beaver County officials declined to put the matter before a grand jury, and none of the participating officers were charged. Only three people faced criminal charges stemming from the January episode. Heath was indicted on a liquor charge — Prohibition had not yet ended. She pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 60 days in jail and a $100 fine. Besides Heath, a Black man and woman were charged with “fornication.” Two weeks after Heath’s guilty plea, the court reduced her sentence. She was ordered to pay court costs and to “leave and remain out of the state in the future.”Johnstown forced 2,000 Black residents to leave the city in 1923. The Dallas Morning News published this cartoon, which was reprinted in Literary Digest magazine later that year.Pattern of racial violenceThe Beaver Deportation was not an isolated incident. Historians have documented hundreds of mass expulsions of Black people from communities throughout the United States. Some of them were associated with massacres, such as the one that took place in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921 that killed about 300 people. Others, like the expulsion of all the Black residents of Forsyth County, Georgia, in 1912, created sundown towns where Black people never returned. A decade before the Beaver Deportation, the mayor of Johnstown ordered more than 2,000 Black residents to leave the city. Journalist Cody McDevitt documented the episode in a 2020 book, “Banished from Johnstown: Racist Backlash in Pennsylvania.”A few months after the Johnstown expulsion, officials in Stowe ordered all of the Black residents to leave within 24 hours. “The order, which bears all the earmarks of the Ku Klux Klan followed the murder of Thomas Rowland, white … and the wounding of his granddaughter,” wrote the Pittsburgh Courier.“Pennsylvania wasn’t a state that banned African Americans from living [here], but there certainly were lots of places that basically restricted or tried to keep them out,” says historian John Hinshaw. “The 1920s, you know, would have been a very strong period, where the Ku Klux Klan had this kind of dramatic rise.”The Beaver Deportation was spectacular headline material for much of 1933. Though the national NAACP did advocate for justice, the civil rights organization had bigger things on its plate. As the Beaver County case played out, the NAACP was engaged in a national campaign to free Alabama’s “Scottsboro Boys” (men wrongly accused of raping a white woman who were facing death penalties) and lobbying Congress to pass an anti-lynching bill.In October 1923, Stowe officials ordered all of the community’s Black residents to leave within 24 hours. The Pittsburgh Press published this photo on Oct. 10, 1923. Public domain photo courtesy of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.History repeats itselfHinshaw teaches history at Lebanon Valley College in Annville, Pennsylvania. He has a Carnegie Mellon University Ph.D. and has studied race relations in the Mon Valley.But he hadn’t encountered the Beaver Deportation in his research — few historians have. Nonetheless, he knows about many other similar cases.“I think a lot of that stuff would be sort of under the radar,” he said. “The only reason something like this comes up is because the NAACP picks up on it and becomes a little bit of a cause célèbre … is it recorded if the police just tell you to get your ass on down the road and move? You know, you basically can’t stay here?”The historian sees parallels from the Jim Crow era emerging in contemporary political rhetoric. “If we’re thinking about the possibility of mass relocations or mass deportations of people from the United States, you know, which is one of the things that could be coming in the next year,” Hinshaw said. “It’s useful to look at sort of past occurrences of when people are basically forced to move.”The post Surprising details about the Beaver deportation that forced 46 Black people to leave the state appeared first on NEXTpittsburgh.