Skip to content

The Essex Boys: How Nine Traders Hit a Gusher With Negative Oil

Over the course of a few hours on April 20, a guy called Cuddles and eight of his pals from the freewheeling world of London’s commodities markets rode oil’s crash to a $660 million profit. 

undefined
Illustration: Sophy Hollington for Bloomberg Businessweek

Among the many previously unthinkable moments of 2020, one of the strangest occurred on April 20, when the price of crude oil fell below zero. West Texas Intermediate futures, the most popular instrument used to trade the commodity, had started the day at $18 a barrel. That was already low, but prices kept tumbling until, at 2:08 p.m. New York time, they went negative.

Amazingly, that meant anyone selling oil had to pay someone else to take it off their hands. Then the crude market collapsed completely, falling almost $40 in 20 minutes, to close at –$38. It was the lowest price for oil in the 138-year history of the New York Mercantile Exchange—and in all likelihood the lowest price in the millennia since humans first began burning the stuff for heat and light.

Watching this spectacle unfold were traders, energy executives, and freight company employees—whose livelihoods are tied to oil’s fluctuations. Regulators with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in Washington stared at their monitors, stunned. “The screen was just going nuts,” Tom Kloza, an analyst at the research firm OPIS Ltd., told Institutional Investor. The experience, he said, was like watching a film by surrealist director Federico Fellini: “You’re able to appreciate it, but no one really knows what’s going on.”

Within 24 hours the insanity was over, oil cost money again, and it was tempting to see what happened as a blip. But WTI futures, in which buyers and sellers agree on a price to trade at some upcoming date, sit at the heart of the $3 trillion-a-year oil and gas industry. WTI is one of the main components that determines the global price of oil—whether that oil is being sold by a Middle Eastern kingdom or a fracking conglomerate in Alberta. It affects what airlines pay for jet fuel and what manufacturers pay for petroleum-based chemicals.

Beyond the physical commodity itself, billions of dollars’ worth of financial products are also pegged to WTI in a specific and idiosyncratic way. Their value is determined by the WTI price at 2:30 p.m. four working days before the 25th of every month. That crucial “settlement” for the May WTI contract was on April 20.

The sudden price drop that day, which wiped out some investors who’d bet on an oil recovery, was explained as the result of a confluence of macroeconomic factors. The pandemic, and resulting economic shutdowns, had decimated demand for oil, and space to store it was rapidly running out. It seemed to be a simple case of “fundamental supply and demand,” said CFTC Chairman Heath Tarbert in an April 21 interview with CNBC. Terry Duffy, chief executive officer of CME Group Inc., which owns the New York exchange, known as Nymex, saw it in similar terms. “The market worked the way the market was supposed to work,” he told the network. “To perfection.”

Perhaps to industry veterans like Duffy, it all made sense, but to anyone who has ever paid to fill up a car or home oil tank, a negative price was difficult to comprehend. Moreover, there had been a torrent of selling starting two hours or so before the settlement, leading to questions about whether someone had deliberately set out to push prices down. Harold Hamm, chairman of oil producer Continental Resources Inc., published a letter demanding an investigation into what he described as “failed systems” and “possible market manipulation.”

After all, the May contract was back at $10 on April 21 and the outlook had barely changed. “Going into April there was chitchat about zero or even negative prices, but nobody was talking about –$40,” says Dave Ernsberger, global head of pricing and market insight at S&P Global Platts, which provides benchmarks for buyers and sellers. “So what’s the real story here?”

U.S. authorities and investigators from Nymex trawled through trading data for insights into who exactly was driving the action on April 20. According to people familiar with their thinking, they were shocked to discover that the firm that appeared to have had the biggest impact on prices that afternoon wasn’t a Wall Street bank or a big oil company, but a tiny outfit called Vega Capital London Ltd. A group of nine independent traders affiliated with Vega and operating out of their homes in Essex, the county just northeast of London, had made $660 million among them in just a few hours. Now the authorities must decide whether anyone at Vega breached market rules by joining forces to push down prices—or if they simply pulled off one of the greatest trades in history. A lawyer for a number of the Vega traders vehemently denies wrongdoing by his clients and says they each traded based on “blaring” market signals.

relates to The Essex Boys: How Nine Traders Hit a Gusher With Negative Oil
Illustration: Sophy Hollington for Bloomberg Businessweek

Paul Commins started his trading career buying and selling oil in the rowdy pits of London’s International Petroleum Exchange, where, according to a former colleague, he was affectionately known as “Cuddles.” He had the kind of broad cockney accent that wouldn’t be out of place in a Guy Ritchie movie and struggled to pronounce his r’s. As a result, his three-digit badge, which everyone wore at the IPE, contained the letters “F-W-E”—pronounced “fwee,” the sound that would come out of his mouth when he tried to say “three.”

Opened in 1980, the IPE was riotous—400 traders and brokers in colorful jackets screaming at one another and using hand signals to strike deals that were then sealed on scraps of paper. They mostly came from working-class backgrounds, often from Essex, known for its brash culture and ostentatious displays of wealth. (The stereotypical Essex male is a soccer-loving “geezer” with a pint in his hand and an expensive “motor.”)

The pits rewarded quick thinking and a tolerance for risk, and Commins—aka Cuddles, aka FWE—thrived there. After a few years filling orders for corporate clients at Trafalgar Commodities, he became a “local”—one of the elite traders in red jackets who wagered their own funds. A former colleague describes him as among the top three in the gas and oil pit where he operated.

The pits were collegial and freewheeling, a place of ethical and regulatory gray areas. If a local overheard news about a big trade that some oil major had in the works, he might try to jump ahead of it, a prohibited but pervasive practice known as front-running. The cavernous trading floor had cameras, but there were blind spots where people went to share information. A former executive struggles to remember a single meeting of the exchange’s compliance committee.

One trick involved an instrument called Trade at Settlement, or TAS, an agreement to buy or sell a future at wherever the price ends up at the closing bell. The contract was aimed at investment funds, whose mandate it was to track the price of oil over the long term. But some traders figured out that they could take the other side of these TAS trades, then work together at the end of the day to push the closing price as low as possible so they could pocket a profit. The practice, while officially against the rules, was so common and effective it had a nickname: “Grab a Grand.”

“It was blatant, what was going on,” according to former IPE Director Chris Cook, who says he learned of the practice after leaving the exchange. There’s no evidence Commins or his colleagues were involved in this practice.

In the IPE’s heyday, the best traders could make tens or even hundreds of thousands of pounds in a day and still hit the pub by 5:30 p.m. But the rise of electronic trading made them obsolete. The IPE pits closed in 2005, forcing Commins, then 36, and hundreds like him to either learn to trade using a computer or give up and do something else. Many struggled to make the transition and quit. Others joined banks or brokers.

Former locals who wanted to continue working for themselves banded together at so-called arcades or prop shops, trading firms where they were given a desk, some office support, and fast connections to markets in exchange for a monthly fee, a small commission on every trade, and, in some cases, a cut of any profits they made. The biggest prop firms, known as “the five families,” were based in London and had dozens of traders on their books, many of whom had come from the pits. But a half-hour’s train ride away, in the small Essex town of Loughton, Commins started a collective of his own.

His group was a mix of seasoned traders and novices in their 20s, usually the sons of Commins’s pals or his children’s peers. Among them were Dog (real name: Chris Roase), a veteran pit trader; Elliot Pickering, a skinny, awkward-looking kid who still lived with his mum and drove a Rolls-Royce convertible; and Aristos Demetriou, who went by “Ari” and was among the group’s biggest earners. Ari’s quick success had sparked a wild rumor circulated among London’s commodity traders that he’d gotten his break while working in a supermarket parking lot, pushing shopping carts, where he spotted Dog driving in and asked how he could afford such a fancy motor.

The traders were all independent, each with his own brokerage accounts and tax returns. But trading records and people who worked alongside them indicate they frequently operated in a similar fashion, buying or selling in the same direction at key moments. Away from the markets, some members of the group did everything together—play golf, watch their soccer team, West Ham United, and take their families to the beachside town of Marbella in Spain (where the catchphrase for the body-conscious was “no carbs before Marbs”). Several bought properties in the same neighborhood, an affluent village called Theydon Bois that combines the bucolic charm of the English countryside with a short tube journey into central London. After work they frequented a bar popular with the cast of The Only Way Is Essex, a kind of cockney-inflected, blingier version of Jersey Shore.

For a long time, Commins and much of his crew traded as an off-site offshoot of Tower Trading Group, one of the five families. But when two Tower managers, Adrian “Britney” Spires and Tommy Gaunt, left to start their own outfit in 2016, Commins and about 20 other Tower traders joined them. Under the umbrella of the new firm, Vega Capital London, he continued adding to his stable, offering slots to young men with ties to his social group. One was Connor Younger, the son of a building contractor pal, who a few years earlier had been posting on social media about the adolescent pleasures of rap music and chasing girls.

It’s not clear what commercial arrangement Commins had with the traders he scouted or with Vega Capital, which has dozens of individuals on its roster who have nothing to do with the Essex crew. But there were financial connections among them. Commins and Demetriou co-owned a firm called PC & AD Developments, while Commins, Demetriou, and Pickering have all been directors of an entity called PAT Developments Ltd. The companies, which don’t have websites, are listed as being involved in real estate.
 

At the start of 2020 the big industrial economies were healthy, investors were optimistic, and West Texas Intermediate was trading at about $60 a barrel. Prices began to fall in February after the first reports of the coronavirus. That accelerated as the outbreak turned into a pandemic. By the end of March, WTI futures were at $20, the lowest they’d been since after Sept. 11. Then, after tense negotiations, the big oil producers—led by Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the U.S.—agreed to reduce production by 10% to try to stabilize prices.

The cut wasn’t nearly enough. All oil futures were down, including Brent crude, which is based on oil found in Europe’s North Sea, but there was a particular problem with WTI. Unlike with Brent, which allows buyers and sellers to settle what they owe one another in cash, anyone holding an expiring WTI contract at the end of a month is obliged to take possession of 1,000 barrels of light, sweet crude in Cushing, Okla. (Despite being tiny and landlocked, Cushing is known as “the Pipeline Crossroads of the World.” It became a center for refining and distribution after wildcatters struck oil there a century ago.)

Normally, speculators can get around this by selling out before the expiration date and buying the following month’s contract, a process known as “rolling.” But low prices in March and early April had attracted a rush of amateur investors into products tracking oil, including a large Chinese fund called Crude Oil Treasure, which advertised with the tagline “Crude oil is cheaper than water.” These funds would all have to roll over contracts worth billions of dollars—and, thanks to the virus, buyers would be hard to find.

Meanwhile, storage tanks in Cushing were filling up fast. With so little space available, the cost of keeping oil threatened to exceed any potential profit from selling it. That combined with an abundance of frantic sellers to cripple an already fearful market. On April 3, Nymex issued an unprecedented warning that prices could go negative.

The crucial settlement day for the May WTI contract, April 20, was a Monday. In Essex, some of the Vega traders logged on before sunrise to take advantage of the big session. Britain was in lockdown, and the lights from their front rooms and studies dotted the still-dark village. Central to their strategy would be the TAS contracts that had once been popular in the pits, according to several people familiar with the matter.

Here’s how it works: Imagine a trader sees that WTI is at $10 and predicts it’s going to end the day at $5. To capitalize, he buys 50,000 barrels in the TAS market, agreeing to purchase oil at wherever the price ends up by 2:30 p.m. At the same time, he starts selling regular WTI futures: 10,000 barrels for $10 and then, if the market is falling as predicted, 10,000 more at $9, and again at $8. As the settlement window approaches, the trader accelerates his selling, offloading a further 10,000 contracts at $7, then another chunk at $6, helping push the price lower until, sure enough, it settles at $5. By now he is “flat,” meaning he’s sold as many barrels as he’s bought and isn’t obliged to take delivery of any actual oil.

The trader’s bet has come off. His profit is $150,000, the difference between what he sold oil for (50,000 barrels at prices ranging from $10 to $6, for a total of $400,000) and what he bought it for in TAS contracts (50,000 barrels at $5 a barrel, or $250,000). All of this is perfectly legal, providing the trader doesn’t deliberately try to push the closing price down to an artificial level to maximize his profits, which constitutes market manipulation under U.S. law. Manipulation can result in civil penalties such as fines or bans, or even criminal charges carrying a potential prison sentence of up to 10 years. It’s also illegal in the U.S. to place trades during or before the settlement with “intentional or reckless disregard” for the impact.

Commins’s traders had historically been able to make big money in a few hours on settlement days trading in the same direction, according to people who watched them work. But the strategy was risky. If an even bigger player showed up at the end of the session and made the opposite bet, it could push the market in the other direction. There were days they lost millions of dollars among them, recalls one trader who knows them. “They had balls of steel,” says another. “It was quite unbelievable to see.”

As China’s Crude Oil Treasure fund and others sold WTI contracts in the TAS market on April 20, the Essex traders bought them, according to people familiar with their trading, committing to buy large quantities of oil at whatever the settlement price turned out to be. Between 11 p.m. U.K. time on April 19, when the market opened, and 5 p.m. (noon in New York) the following day, the price dropped from around $18 to $10 a barrel. As it fell, Commins and his friends sold batches of regular WTI contracts, just like in the example above, as well as calendar spreads, another financial instrument that allows traders to bet on the future price of oil. All they needed was for prices to keep falling, the further the better. As the day wore on, however, they became nervous. In text messages described to Bloomberg Businessweek, they exchanged details of their individual trades and questioned whether they were taking on too much risk.

With a little more than two hours to go until the settlement, trading activity across the futures market spiked, driving the price from $10 to $5, then all the way to zero. The shift into negative prices occurred at 2:08 p.m., at which point any remaining stragglers still brave enough to be buying oil in the hope of a rebound got out of the market. Over the next 22 minutes, under the weight of ongoing selling by Vega and others, the May contract plummeted. Nymex calculates the settlement price by taking a weighted average of trades occurring from 2:28 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. The final “print,” as settlement prices are known, came in at –$37.63. In the last half-hour the nine Vega Capital traders were, as a group, by far the biggest sellers of both WTI futures and spreads, according to trading data described to Businessweek—a remarkable situation in a market normally dominated by the likes of BP, Glencore, and JPMorgan Chase.

In a mockery of the norms of commerce, the Vega crew had ended up being paid both for the futures they’d sold when oil was positive during the day and for those they bought via TAS. That, combined with the profit from the spread trades, resulted in a total take of $660 million for the nine biggest earners, according to the trading data. Demetriou, who’s 31; Pickering, 25; and Younger, 22, pocketed in excess of $100 million each, while Roase made about $90 million. Commins took home $30 million or so. Even his son, George, who’s in his early 20s with little apparent trading experience, made $8 million.

Elsewhere, investors around the world counted their losses. China’s Treasure fund informed its customers that everything they’d put in was now gone. “It didn’t occur to us” oil could go negative, A’Xiang Chen, a 26-year-old investor from Shenzhen, told Bloomberg News. Syed Shah, a day trader in the Toronto suburbs who’d started buying crude futures when the price fell to $3 a barrel, wound up owing $9 million. Interactive Brokers, America’s largest online trading service, lost $104 million because its software wasn’t equipped to handle negative prices.

Rumors of a major score by a group of Essex boys spread quickly among traders on chat groups, though the winners were coy about discussing their profits, according to someone who says he saw the messages. When asked about the size of their haul, one joked that he had to go—the mobile reception was breaking up on his yacht.
 

If the group had made $7 million that day instead of almost $700 million, they’d probably be celebrating. But the size of their winnings, coupled with their backgrounds—and political pressure to understand what happened—means that Vega has the attention of regulators. In August, Sherrod Brown, the Ohio Democrat and ranking member of the Senate banking committee, wrote to regulators saying the incident created “the impression of a market susceptible to manipulation.”

The CFTC has been investigating Vega Capital, according to people familiar with the matter. The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York has started its own probe to determine whether a felony was committed, the people say. Both authorities, as well as CME Group, declined to comment on the existence of any ongoing investigation.

Even so, no authorities have accused Vega Capital or any of the traders referenced in this article of doing anything illegal. Buying TAS and offsetting it in the futures market is a common and acceptable practice, and it was no secret that prices on April 20 might fall. Where traders have gotten into trouble in the past is when they’ve been caught trying to deliberately push the closing price rather than simply benefiting from where it ends up. In 2012, Dutch company Optiver Holding BV was fined $14 million and three of its employees were temporarily banned from trading commodities after the CFTC accused the company of manipulating settlement prices. Email and phone records showed Optiver’s traders talking about trying to “hammer” and “bully” the settlement after accumulating TAS. Such clear-cut evidence of intent is rare. Since the CFTC was founded in 1974, it has won just one manipulation case at trial.

“Each of our clients regularly puts his own money at risk to try to make a profit. Sometimes it works sometimes it doesn’t,” the law firm Simkins, which represents eight of the nine traders, said in statement. “On 20 April blaring market signals—including the exchange’s repeated warnings that prices could go negative—led market participants ranging from small proprietary traders to large financial institutions to trade on the assumption that prices would drop. And while no one could have predicted just how far they’d drop, each of our clients, like many others around the world, traded on his own view of the market. They don’t intend to comment on speculation about their profits.”

Whatever happens with Vega, its wild trading day has laid bare the vulnerabilities of the TAS mechanism, which also exists in markets for gas, cattle, and other commodities. Craig Pirrong, a finance professor at the University of Houston, published a paper last year suggesting that market participants can build a large position through TAS with very little impact on prices, then offset it in the regular market in a way that moves prices—an “asymmetry,” he argued, that invites manipulation. Senior officials at the CFTC are now considering whether TAS is in need of reform. Last month the agency published what it described as an interim report on the events of April 20 that focused on macroeconomic conditions but didn’t take into account the issue of potential manipulation because of the ongoing investigation. It drew criticism from one of the agency’s own commissioners, Dan Berkovitz, a Democrat who is seen as a candidate to take over as chairman in January. He described the interim report as “incomplete and inadequate.”

“The commission must undertake and provide a meaningful analysis so that it can take whatever remedial or corrective actions may be appropriate to ensure the integrity of this critically important market,” Berkovitz says. “This was one of the most extraordinary events in any commodity market in decades.” Michael Short, a CFTC spokesman, says that the agency is limited in what it can share and that criticisms seem to “miss the point that it is an interim report.” He also says that the regulator was prepared for April 20 and that “large market swings are not new for CFTC staff.”

Back in Theydon Bois, Commins and his crew are keeping a low profile. Some have stopped trading monthly settlements, according to people familiar with their work. Several have registered new companies, and it’s not clear what has happened to their winnings. After April 20, Vega Capital parted with G.H. Financials Ltd., the clearinghouse that held its trading accounts and had a degree of responsibility for overseeing its activities. The firm has a new clearinghouse and continues to trade.

News of the win has been met with a mixture of incredulity and pride among London’s trading community—and has even led to a new nickname: “the fifth Beatle,” for Vega co-founder Gaunt, who left the firm a few months before the big day. “It’s funny how if it was BP or Goldman Sachs that made the money, no one would bat an eyelid, but when it’s a bunch of working-class lads, people say they’re cheating,” says one trader who knows them, expressing a widely held sentiment. “I say good luck to them.” —With Alex Longley
 
Read next: The Work-From-Home Trader Who Shook Global Markets

 

    undefined

    “CommUNITY, 2020” by muralist Shane Pilster, one of ten artists selected for a public art billboard project designed to promote diversity in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania.

    Photo courtesy of curator Sheila Cuellar-Shaffer and the Westmoreland Museum of American Art

    How to Diversify Trump County

    New billboard artwork across Westmoreland, Pennsylvania, is seeking to promote diversity and inclusion in an aging county that’s 95% white. 

    When driving from Pittsburgh to its deep eastern suburbs, you know you’ve arrived in Westmoreland County when you see the farms with the massive Trump campaign displays, some as elaborate as Christmas Nativity yard scenes. Indeed, there is an entire Trump House. The county is reliably Republican and overwhelmingly white — roughly 95% white compared to 2.4% Black and 2.8% “Other.” When Trump alarmed voters that Democrats and socialists were coming to doom the suburbs, this county was the kind of place he envisioned saving. He won it in November with 63.46% of the vote, which was 2 percentage points less than he won it with in 2016.

    But Westmoreland County’s roots are actually steeped in both Democratic Party politics and socialism. And while it never matched the Black demographics of nearby Pittsburgh and other Rust Belt metropolises, it was once a place where some Black businesses thrived and where Black families could find sanctuary from the city. With that in mind, today, a new set of signs is in view around the county that signals a return to those more cosmopolitan origins.

    In October, 10 billboards were installed along the major highways of Westmoreland County created by local artists around the common theme of diversity. One billboard, from artist Tina Williams Brewer, is a patch of quilts fit between the messages “Arc of Justice” and “Yoke of LOVE”— the pastiche seeming to mirror the panoply of townships, boroughs, farms and small cities scattered across the county. In artist Fran Flaherty’s billboard, four hands of different skin hues spell out “love” in sign language across a black backdrop. Shane Pilster’s billboard is a neon graffiti burner spelling out “Community,” with emphasis on the “unity” part. 

    relates to How to Diversify Trump County
    “Embracing Collective Cultures,” by artist Tina Williams Brewer. 
    Photo courtesy of curator Sheila Cuellar-Shaffer and the Westmoreland Museum of American Art

    The project is sponsored by the Westmoreland Diversity Coalition and the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in the county seat of Greensburg. Both organizations have positioned themselves as anchor institutions for the challenging mission of making Westmoreland a more racially inclusive place. For its part, the museum has been exhibiting more work from Black, African, Native American and Latinx artists in recent years, such as the current “African American Art in the 20th Century” exhibit done in collaboration with the Smithsonian. It’s a new direction for the museum, under the tutelage of director Anne Kraybill, who arrived in Westmoreland County in 2018 from the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas.

    “What really attracted me to this role is just really unpacking: What does it even mean to be American?” said Kraybill. “As you think about complicating the narrative, not only within this region, but on a national scale, I looked at this as an opportunity to help build that platform in an area that doesn't have a huge amount of diversity.” 

    “Nothing had changed”

    The billboards were curated by Sheila Cuellar-Shaffer, a Westmoreland County resident who came to the U.S. from Palmira, Colombia. Westmoreland’s foreign-born population is even more paltry than its racial minority population — just 1.6% of county residents were not born in the U.S. As a painter, her work explores social justice themes and her “own reality as an immigrant exploring identity, diversity,” according to her artist statement on her website. The sentiment around immigration in Westmoreland is mostly fraught —her thick Colombian accent has been met with anger and hostility, even when she is overheard speaking her native language of Spanish with her own family members.

    “I’ve noticed that people do not want to welcome anything different here,” said Cuellar-Shaffer. “I don’t know if it’s that they are afraid, but it’s human nature, that we’re afraid of things that we don’t know. Perhaps a bad economy helps fuel that sense of, ‘We don’t know why you’re here.’”

    This would explain the overflow of Trump signs across the county, where the economy is tanking despite a booming U.S. stock market. With its industrial and manufacturing base having eroded over the last several decades — a trend across the Rust Belt — Westmoreland County residents have mostly stuck by the party that best fortresses them from having to share what’s left of jobs and resources with those who don’t fit their mold. 

    “The union falloff; the rural divide; the narrow boundaries of belonging embraced by some within a generation that inherited a unique conjuncture of U.S. global power and labor bargaining power, and who live today in regions hammered by the loss of both,” wrote University of Pittsburgh history professor Lara Putnam for Democracy Journal. “Donald Trump created none of these trends, yet he turned out to be a perfect politician to exploit them.”

    Mike Pence Campaigns In Depressed Rust Belt Town Of Johnstown, PA
    Trump supporters gather at the "Trump House" in Youngstown, Pennsylvania.
    Photographer: Jeff Swensen/Getty Images North America

    It’s not that the mission of diversity is to turn red states blue. Rather, its urgency lies in its ability to chip away at the intensifying political polarization and racial-economic segregation that has been perilous for both Black urban and white small towns. Westmoreland is an aging, population-losing county that in many parts has been left impoverished due to the flight of industries overseas and the surge toward automation. In that regard, it is a bellwether for what direction, politically and economically, the U.S. will be moving in the years to come.

    Cuellar-Shaffer is a board director for the Westmoreland Diversity Coalition, which, originally known as the Central Westmoreland Unity Coalition, was born in response to a KKK rally held at the county courthouse in 1997. Carlotta Paige, a Black county native whose father was a police officer and also worked in some of the county’s factories, helped start the multiracial coalition, which built a following by leading annual unity rallies. The coalition chose “make our differences our strengths” as the theme for the billboards, building from the idea that diversifying is perhaps the one thing that can save the county from approaching utter demise, in the way of so many other towns across Appalachia.

    “One of the reasons that I do what I do is because I left Westmoreland County for 23 years and when I came back nothing had changed,” said Paige. “It’s just not that diverse here and that’s got to change. There are some attitudes here that need to be changed.”

    “There are Black people in the future”

    One of the billboards, created by Pittsburgh-based artist Alisha Wormsley, features an assembly of 1950s-era TV consoles each with a different slice of Black life captured in sepia tones on the screens. The images are of real Black people who lived in Westmoreland County in the 20th century: portraits of Black families, pilots, musicians and businessmen — one image of a Black woman holding a baby while balancing a basket on her head is a woman who had been born into slavery.

    relates to How to Diversify Trump County
    “There Are Black People In The Future: Westmoreland," by artist Alisha Wormsley
    Photo courtesy of curator Sheila Cuellar-Shaffer and the Westmoreland Museum of American Art

    Wormsley is perhaps best known today for her series of artistic work built around the declaration, “There Are Black People in the Future”— a statement that has become somewhat of a national anthem for Black artists. It’s fitting that Wormsley was chosen for the Westmoreland project given that a billboard she created in 2018, a public art installation in Pittsburgh, touched off a neighborhood maelstrom over whether Black people were even welcome in her own city. Neighbors of the building where her billboard was mantled complained about the “Black People in the Future” statement and it was eventually taken down. While many people protested against what looked like art censorship from gentrifiers, Wormsley leveraged the moment by developing a league of Black artists across the region who have been commissioned to create even more public works building upon the “There Are Black People in the Future” rubric. 

    Now the statement is prominently displayed above one of the whitest counties in the state, imposing “a spell,” as Wormsley calls it, on a place where one could legitimately question whether there are Black people in its future. 

    “I mean, we exist everywhere, and so part of the work is about this ritual, about offering this assurance,” said Wormsley. “That's what all of these people in this little rural county, that were descendants of Africans, who were brought here in the Atlantic slave trade — their descendants — they created these spaces for themselves. They created this legacy. They made sure that we existed.”

    It is just as important to Wormsley for people to understand that there are also Black people in Westmoreland County’s present, as well as its past. Black neighborhoods are sprinkled across the small cities of New Kensington, Jeannette, Monessen and Greensburg. While no Harlem, there’s historically been a network of Black businesses and churches in the area — at least enough of them that a group was able to pool resources together in the 1940s to open their own amusement park, Fairview Park, which had a roller coaster, a petting zoo and even offered hot-air balloon rides. It was not only a place for Black families in Westmoreland, but also for Black families in Pittsburgh and other cities across the region to escape to since they couldn’t attend white-run amusement parks.

    There are likely more stories like that about Black Westmoreland, but Wormsley said she had trouble finding documents and sources for these stories. According to Paige, many African Americans like her father were mostly “compliant and non-controversial” as a survival method — much of the protests and riots that defined the 1960s missed Westmoreland County.

    “They couldn’t have survived otherwise,” said Paige. “Growing up, I did not understand what my father and others had to endure to survive. It was a very small population and they didn’t have any other support other than themselves. My father was a good man, but in order to protect us, and to keep his job, and be respected by the white community he felt he had to be quiet and non-confrontational.”

    “One of the perceived dangers was racial integration”

    What you will find in the county’s archives is lots of information on its glorious past, when Westmoreland was king of the coal industry at a time when coal was king. Pittsburgh’s steel may have built the modern world, but it used Westmoreland’s coal to do it. Meanwhile, its own steel plants and glass factories helped position Westmoreland as a global hub for those industries in the mid-20th century as well. The organized labor unions created to sustain workers in those fields — and their families — became the cornerstone of the Democratic Party locally and nationally. And for most of the 20th century, Westmoreland was a solidly Democratic enclave due to the sturdy union networks embedded deep throughout the county. 

    Antique black and white photograph of historic towns of the middle States: Pittsburgh, Coal fleet
    A coal fleet in Pittsburgh.
    Photographer: ilbusca/iStockphoto

    While it’s popularly held that the unions helped laborers obtain middle-class lifestyles, this was not true for coal workers in southwest Pennsylvania in the beginning of the 20th century, when recessions and wage strikes were common. The Great Depression knocked hundreds of thousands of coal workers out of work, and the region was only able to rebound with economic assistance from the federal government in the form of the New Deal. One way that the Division of Homestead Subsistence intervened was by providing land, houses and new jobs for displaced coal workers — basically by creating new cities for them. 

    For Westmoreland County, that meant the creation of Norvelt, a 1,326-acre patch town built in 1934 with roughly 250 single-family housing units, each complete with its own chicken coop, running water and electricity — all amenities that the former coal workers were unaccustomed to. The new city also had a farm, dairy barn and clothing factory where Norvelt residents were expected to work. It was a completely federally funded progressive enterprise based on wealth redistribution policies to help the poor. In other words, it was socialism

    And yet racial exclusion was a feature of even this liberal project. Of the families who moved in, only one was African American. In their book Hope in Hard Times, authors Timothy Kelly and Margaret Power — both native Westmoreland residents — write that, “In Norvelt, one of the perceived dangers was racial integration.” Perhaps not coincidentally, the Ku Klux Klan, thought to be a Southern racial terrorist group, had already taken root in the area.

    The Norvelt of today hardly resembles its genesis. At first staunchly devoted to the Democratic Party (“Norvelt” combines the last syllables of the name Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the New Deal president who made this all possible), it is today almost an entirely Republican jurisdiction.

    “To explain the generational shifts in party affiliation, I can point to the economic transformation of the county, the closing of industry and the mines, the demise of the unions and their replacement with new affective communities such as the megachurches, to partially explain this political transformation,” wrote Power about the county she grew up in. “But when it comes right down to it, I believe the most significant factors are White supremacy and conservative social values, which many in the area equate with being American and what they will fight to preserve or reinstate.”

    “A different truth than mine”

     To that end, the Westmoreland billboard project seeks to promote messages of diversity and inclusivity not just around race but also gender, disability and age. In Alejandro Fiez’s billboard, “A cat reminded me You are Me,” an older woman puts her weight on her end of a seesaw to lift a younger girl on the other end so she can reach a cat stuck in a tree. 

    relates to How to Diversify Trump County
    “A cat reminded me You are Me,” by artist Alejandro Fiez
    Photo courtesy of curator Sheila Cuellar-Shaffer and the Westmoreland Museum of American Art

    Westmoreland County is perhaps finally coming to terms with that reality. Besides it being a white county, it’s also a gray one, with 23.5% of its population over the age of 65, compared with 18.7% for the state, and 16.5% for the U.S. Its median age of 47 is 20% higher than that of neighboring Allegheny County and also Pennsylvania, which share a median age of 40. It is also bleeding off population: Census estimates from earlier this year found that the county has lost roughly 14,500 people since 2010, with each of its largest municipalities losing significant numbers as well.  

    “We need to make people feel comfortable to come here because otherwise it’s going to affect the economic development of the county,” said Paige. “There are going to be jobs they’re going to need to fill if we can ever get over this pandemic, and for the economy to grow again you’re going to need more workers. We need to bring more minorities here to fill those jobs, but they don’t feel welcome, so they don’t come really.”

    The Westmoreland Diversity Coalition commissioned a survey study in 2015 that unearthed some of the thoughts and attitudes behind the county’s diversity problem. On the question of whether Westmoreland is welcoming to racial minorities, 16.6% of white respondents agreed compared with only 2.7% of non-white; meanwhile, 16% of minorities strongly disagreed compared with just 4.1% of white respondents. 

    relates to How to Diversify Trump County
    Fran Flaherty’s “LOVE” billboard is seen on Route 119, which runs through Westmoreland County.
    Photo courtesy of curator Sheila Cuellar-Shaffer and the Westmoreland Museum of American Art

    Since then, county leadership has begun to acknowledge these disparities and a need for new policy. Its Reimagining Our Westmoreland comprehensive plan was enacted in 2018, setting a goal of promoting “the entrepreneurial spirit of diverse populations by creating a welcoming place for them,” and it recently unveiled the “Welcome Everyone Westmoreland” initiative aimed at convincing county residents that diversity is in their best interest.

    The billboard project is laying the groundwork for that. The signs have been up since October, but last month they were shuffled around to new locations throughout the city to ensure more visibility. Source materials and 3-D renderings of the billboards were on display at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art through November. For next year, museum director Anne Kraybill has scheduled an even heavier load of race-focused artwork and programming. 

    “I saw an opportunity to bring something to the community that maybe they hadn't had before, and yes, it's majority white, and yes, it's majority aging, but unless we create a space to do this work, it's just going to continue on that trajectory,” said Kraybill. “[The county] has been stereotyped under a partisan lens, but there are really committed people here who are trying to do work beyond what the election means — that are trying to make this place a really great place to live, where you can feel safe and welcome.”

     

        This is an archived version of the webpage, saved via our browser extension on 12 December 2020.

        Visit the live version