Canaan, Dim and Far - by Adam Lee CILLI (Paperback)

About the Book

"Canaan Dim and Far argues for the importance of Pittsburgh as a case study in analyzing African American civil rights and political advocacy in an urban setting, asthecity was situated well between the encroachment of Jim Crow initiatives of the 1910s and the end of World War II. In that respect, it is a study of the "long" Civil Rights Movement before the flashpoint of 1954 and outside of the traditional South. In it, author Adam Cilli shines a light on neglected elements of middle-class black activism in the decades preceding the classic Civil Rights Movement. The book features a revolving cast of social workers, journalists, scholars, and activists in Pittsburgh committed to an expansive vision of citizenship that included access to decent healthcare, adequate housing, and economic opportunity along with political and social dignity. While these reformers developed community programs to salve the physical wounds of inequality and "adjust" migrants to the urban North, they appropriated mainstream discourses to change the system from within. In doing so, they challenged white America to face its contradictions and live up to its democratic ideals"--

Book Synopsis

Canaan, Dim and Far argues for the importance of Pittsburgh as a case study in analyzing African American civil rights and political advocacy in an urban setting. Focusing on the period from the Progressive Era to the end of World War II, this book spotlights neglected aspects of middle-class Black activism in the decades preceding the civil rights movement. It features a revolving cast of social workers, medical professionals, journalists, scholars, and lawyers whose social justice efforts included but extended past racial uplift ideology and respectability politics.

Adam Lee Cilli shows how these Black reformers experimented with a variety of strategies as they moved fluidly across ideologies and political alliances to find practical solutions to profound inequities. In the period under study, they developed crucial social safety supports in Black communities that buffered southern migrants against the physical, civil, and legal impositions of northern Jim Crow; they waged comprehensive campaigns against
anti-Black stereotypes; and they built inroads into the industrial labor movement that accelerated Black inclusion.

Committed to an expansive vision of economic and political citizenship, Pittsburgh's activists challenged white America to face its contradictions and to live up to its democratic ideals.

Review Quotes

This book is a must for anyone interested in the civil rights movement in the North. Cilli makes excellent use of primary sources and writes in an elegant yet accessible style. His work should serve as a model for future studies linking the activism of the Great Migration with the activism of the postwar civil rights struggle.--Stanley Arnold "The Journal of American History"

Canaan, Dim and Far presents a timely and important addition to the historical knowledge about this largely forgotten period in a city still rising from the ashes of its industrial past.--Pamela E. Walck "The Journal of African American History"

About the Author

ADAM LEE CILLI is assistant professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh, Greensburg. He specializes in the social history of the United States from the late nineteenth through the mid twentieth centuries. His articles have appeared in the Journal of Urban History and the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography.