In 1979, the Crispus Attucks Community Center was in dire straits.
Since the late 1960s, it had been losing money and the economic stagnation of the ’70s – the “malaise,” as former President Jimmy Carter put it – strained its finances. Membership was down. The United Way of York County – the center’s largest source of money – was pressuring the organization to shut down and let the City of York take over its building for a rec center.
At 48 years old, the center was facing a mid-life crisis, one that could have skipped the golden years and gone straight to hospice care.
The center’s board sought new leadership. They found someone, a guy who worked at Caterpillar named Bobby Simpson. Simpson agreed to take a year’s leave of absence from work to try to turn the organization around.
President and CEO Bobby Simpson at the Crispus Attucks York History & Culture Center in York talks about the history of the organization he has been part of since 1979.
At almost every step of the way – through its housing rehabilitation projects to its charter school and pre-school programs to the development of a campus on the south end of the city that encompasses more than four square blocks – Simpson said, “We were told we couldn’t do it.”
Forty-seven years later, Simpson is still there.
And the center is still there, having grown to occupy a four-square-block campus on York’s south end. It is among the largest nonprofits in the county, if not in the state.
As Simpson was looking back at what the center has accomplished, he envisioned a center that would tell the organization’s story – and through that, the story of the Black community in York – so that its contributions would live on and inspire further progress.
When he began talking about creating such a center, he said, “We were told we couldn’t do it.”
Well, he did.
Preserving history
The center, off Boundary Avenue between South George and Duke streets, is now part of a campus that includes the center on South Duke Street, the Loretta Claiborne Building on Boundary Avenue and the center’s early learning center.
It is a striking building, designed by the York-based architectural firm Murphy & Diffenhafer. It’s modern looking, with curvilinear features, a timber-frame structure with a straight-line staircase that connects all four floors, three inside floors and a rooftop space.
The $13 million project began five years ago when Simpson began thinking about the center’s history, its part in the city’s culture and its legacy.
“We had all of this history,” Simpson said. “We had boxes of documents and books. I wanted to find a way to preserve this history.”
The Crispus Attucks York History & Culture Center in York April 20, 2026.
The collection, spread over three floors, is just part of the center’s mission. It also includes conference rooms; one on the first floor, capable of housing large meetings, has one wall papered with newspaper clippings about CA and York’s Black community over the years.
The center traces CA’s legacy from its namesake, the first casualty of the Revolutionary War, a free black man killed during the Boston Massacre, to the center’s expansion into housing rehabilitation and education.
“If CA didn’t exist,” said Scott Deisley, the center’s interim director, “everything you see in this campus wouldn’t be here.”
‘No support’
When they said it couldn’t be done, the “they” included a professional consultant, specializing in raising the funds for such projects.
Simpson said the center hired the consultant to conduct a feasibility study for the history center. “They said there was no support,” Simpson said. “’You can’t raise that kind of money.’ We told them where to put it. We know the community better than they do.”
It helped, Simpson said, that CA had been successful in building the showcase buildings of its south-end campus. It also helped that Simpson had built a reputation among those in the philanthropic community for delivering what he promised and being accountable. Among those he counts as supporters include the family of the late Louis Appell Jr., former Gov. Tom Wolf and former president of York Federal Savings and Loan Bob Pullo.
Pullo is one of the longest-tenured supporters of CA. In the 1980s, Pullo was the only banker in York who would loan CA money to buy up vacant houses and renovate them to provide decent, low-cost housing in the neighborhood around CA. “This was one of the worst slums of York,” Simpson said. “We started buying them up and renovating them. We would not have been able to do it without Bob Pullo.”
Pullo loaned the center $800,000, which resulted in CA buying 232 dilapidated houses and renovating the ones worth saving. Today, CA owns some 180 properties in the blocks around the center.
It’s that kind of history that Simpson believes the community should know, that there is a way for this city to attack its most daunting problems and have some success.
A long staircase runs past all three floors ending in a skylight of the timber frame constructed building at the Crispus Attucks York History & Culture Center in York April 20, 2026.
‘Never played the blame game’
The first floor of the center is dedicated to the history of Crispus Attucks, from its founding in 1931.
York’s Black community had been growing in the previous three decades, a result of the migration of former slaves and sharecroppers from the South to flee oppression and seek economic freedom in the industrial North.
Black civic leaders and clergy, including Dr. George Bowles, the Rev. Thomas Montouth and the Rev. David Orr, had organized institutions to fill the void by “segregated and exclusionary city organizations,” according to the exhibit. Crispus Attucks soon became “the heart of activity” for the Black community.
In one photo, educator Helen Thackston is depicted reading a book to her class. Among the children seated at the desks is Simpson, eyes wide, as is transfixed on her teacher’s words.
In the late 1960s, CA was among the organizations that participated in the York Charette, formed after the riots in 1969 to address the issues that led to civic unrest that claimed the lives of rookie Police Officer Henry Schaad and a preacher’s daughter named Lillie Belle Allen. The center included memorials to both Schaad and Allen.
But in the 1970s, internal conflicts and funding issues led to disarray, and perhaps the center’s death.
New leadership – including Simpson, former York City Councilman Ray Crenshaw and Dan Elby, who worked with juvenile offenders in York County – brought the center back from the edge of extinction.
“We were successful because we never played the blame game,” Simpson said. “We’d tell people, ‘You don’t owe me nothing. Open up the door and I’ll get it myself.’ We had to be accountable. A lot of people didn’t like Bobby Simpson for that, but I don’t give a rat’s ass. And make sure you put ‘rat’s ass’ in there.”
The rooftop deck at the Crispus Attiucks York History & Culture Center in York April 20, 2026.
Connecting history to the present
The second and third floors of the building include exhibits that tell the history of the migration of Blacks from the South to York, the riots and what CA has been able to accomplish in the past four decades – expanding its mission to include education, job training, housing and services for seniors.
“Why we need to connect the history of CA to the history of York is to tell the impact that CA has had on the city,” Deisley said, describing the transformation, over the years, of the neighborhood in the city’s south end. “Without CA, none of this would have happened.”
Columnist/reporter Mike Argento has been a York Daily Record staffer since 1982. Reach him at mike@ydr.com.
This article originally appeared on York Daily Record: Museum tells history of York PA’s Black community & Crispus Attucks
