Canaan, Dim and Far

While there is a considerable amount of literature about African American resistance to de jure segregation in the Jim Crow South, much less has been written about the struggles of their counterparts in the industrial North. Canaan, Dim and Far: Black Reformers and the Pursuit of Citizenship in Pittsburgh, 1915–1945 argues that early twentieth-century Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, should be studied as a significant site for pre–civil rights era Black activism. Although the first two decades of the century in question are often described as the “nadir of race relations” because of the loss of the civil rights granted to Blacks during Reconstruction, Canaan, Dim and Far makes it clear that Pittsburgh’s Black community did not accept their second-class status.Cilli’s work examines the multifaceted ways in which Black activists tackled the social and material problems befalling their community. Although they did not employ the direct-action protests that the civil rights movement would engage in decades later, Pittsburgh’s Black activists fought back against racist laws and instructions using a plethora of tactics. To illustrate this multifaceted attack on institutional racism, each chapter in Cilli’s book—save for the first, which provides historical context about Great Migration–era Pittsburgh—covers a specific time period, as well as a particular type of activism: training Black social workers to help Southern migrants integrate into urban living (chap. 2), securing legal aid for the victims of the racist legal system (chap. 3), supporting investigative journalism (chap. 4), fighting for equal access to education and public facilities (chap. 5), organizing Black industrial workers to join unions (chap. 6), and practicing political activism (chap. 7). Canaan, Dim and Far makes it clear that although these Black reformers desired full citizenship for their race, they often disagreed among themselves about the best strategies to accomplish this goal. However, Cilli does not suggest that these differences of opinion led to significant internal dissent that undermined the collective work of the activists.In the introduction, Cilli suggests that the work of Pittsburgh’s Black activists could be considered a logical extension of Progressive Era concerns about the deleterious effects of unchecked capitalism and industrialization. However, Black Progressives considered the pursuit of racial justice to be central to their activism, whereas their white counterparts believed that Blacks as a group were a social problem in need of a “solution.” Consequently, Black activists had to be pragmatic in how they approached their work, often leading to the prioritization of improving the material conditions of the Black community—access to employment, education, public facilities, health care, and safe neighborhoods—over the pursuit of political and civic rights. This often entailed middle-class Blacks forming temporary alliances with white capitalists to obtain improvements in working conditions and employment opportunities on behalf of their working-class brethren.Cilli’s choice of primary and secondary resources places him in the intellectual company of other scholars who focus on early twentieth-century middle-class Black activism, such as Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Priscilla A. Dowden-White, and Darlene Clark Hine. These scholars often use primary sources produced by and for the Black community in general and the activists themselves in particular. Accordingly, Cilli employs interviews from the Pittsburgh Oral History Project, archival newspaper articles from historic newspapers (especially The Pittsburgh Courier and other Black publications), records from the Pittsburgh branches of the Urban League and NAACP, and correspondence from the Howard University archives. In addition to utilizing preexisting literature about middle-class Black activists, Canaan, Dim and Far also draws upon secondary sources from a variety of fields, including labor history, the Great Migration, and World War II industrial policy, to provide context for the world Cilli describes.One minor critique of the book is that Cilli could have spent more time describing the role of Black communists and socialists in early twentieth-century Pittsburgh. Given Pittsburgh’s reputation as a hub for heavy industry and labor organizing, one would expect that Black reformers would have been in contact, whether positive or negative, with their more radical brethren. Cilli uses the figure of Ernest Rice McKinney, a Black leftist who was both a social worker and a labor organizer, to illustrate how a belief in diverse tactics often existed within the same person. However, Cilli fails to provide sufficient details about the wider network of Black radicals who operated in Pittsburgh, save for some perfunctory mention of McKinney’s brief membership in the Communist Party USA. Nonetheless, this is a minor quibble in an otherwise fine book.Although there has been an increase in scholarship about Black history outside of the Deep South, much of it remains unknown to those outside of the academy. This book helps remedy this deficiency by revealing how Black activists in Pittsburgh responded to the particular problem of being Black in a growing Rust Belt city. Canaan, Dim and Far illustrates the contributions that Pittsburgh’s Black activists made toward the expansion of civil rights, both in Pennsylvania in particular, and the United States in general. It is an ideal monograph for readers who want to learn more about the work of pre–civil rights era Black activism in the context of a northern industrial city. Canaan, Dim and Far has the detail and breadth to satisfy the needs of scholars, while also being accessible enough for educated laypeople with an interest in African American studies, Pennsylvania history, and labor history. This book would also be a welcome addition to undergraduate classes pertaining to the Great Migration and African American history. Cilli concludes his monograph by tying the work of Pittsburgh’s prewar Black activists to the more well-known endeavors of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during the mid-century civil rights movement. This is a powerful reminder that the successes of the most famous civil rights figures could only be accomplished through the foundational efforts that were realized by the activists of previous generations

Citizenship · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Gender Studies · Law · Race, History, and American Society