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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.
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