Canaan, Dim and Far: Black Reformers and the Pursuit of Citizenship in Pittsburgh, 1915-1945

By Adam Lee Cilli

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 also 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Release date: Mar 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9780820358895

Adam Lee Cilli

ADAM LEE CILLI is assistant professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh, Bradford. 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.

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

The Ugliest, Deadest Town

MIGRANTS AND REFORMERS IN THE STEEL CITY, 1915–1929

The flat, verdant fields of Ohio gave way to hills and ravines as Harrison Gant’s train crossed into western Pennsylvania in the summer of 1916. His journey had begun two years earlier, when at age fourteen he left his family’s farm near Americus, Georgia, to find work in urban communities farther north. Like thousands of southern black peasants, young Gant faced increasingly poor economic prospects in his hometown as the price of cotton declined, and this factored into his decision to relocate. He moved first to Louisville and then Cincinnati before making his way to Pittsburgh.

Had he left home a year earlier he might have crossed paths with John T. Clark in Louisville. Clark was a native of the city. After earning a bachelor’s degree at Ohio State and working at a naval yard in Portsmouth, Virginia, he returned to Louisville and taught math at a black school from 1908 to 1913.¹ Clark joined the Urban League movement in New York just as Gant arrived in Louisville. In Harlem, Clark directed a systematic study of black living conditions that convinced league officials to establish the Housing Bureau of New York.² He spent four years with the National Urban League (NUL) and eventually became its field secretary. This role led to his deployment to Pittsburgh in early 1918, where NUL director Eugene K. Jones charged him with the task of developing an Urban League affiliate.³

Gant had arrived in Pittsburgh almost two years earlier. As his train screeched to a stop at Union Station in the heart of the city, he felt a mixture of excitement and shock. Although Gant had grown accustomed to cities during his earlier travels, he never encountered industrial pollution on Pittsburgh’s scale. This was the ugliest, deadest town I ever seen in my life! he declared. Man, you couldn’t see no sun around here! I’ll tell you the truth, the first year I was here I betcha I didn’t see the sun a half a dozen times. Gant eventually found a place to stay in the lower Hill District and got a job as a common laborer in a steel plant. When Clark arrived, he moved into a house in the upper Hill and directed the local Urban League that he helped establish. Both Gant and Clark were newcomers, outsiders in an unfamiliar landscape. One was a peasant farmer from the Deep South, the other a college-educated social worker from the upper South. Like other migrants and reformers settling in Pittsburgh, their racial, regional, and class identities shaped their experiences in the city: where they lived, worshipped, played, and worked. During the interwar period these newcomers permanently altered the demographic and political landscape of the city and laid the foundations for an effective social justice movement.

The Emergence of the Black Community in Pittsburgh

Migrants and reformers arrived in a city with an established black community. Over a thousand African Americans lived in Pittsburgh in 1865. Concentrated in a lower Hill District community dubbed Little Hayti, they gradually developed black-owned institutions and businesses as well as forms of social stratification. Particularly during the late nineteenth century, when in-migration and natural growth increased Pittsburgh’s black population to twenty thousand, occupation, region of birth, and adherence to genteel customs became marks of distinction. Native Pittsburghers readily distinguished themselves from southern migrants through their commitment to respectability, membership in prestigious social clubs like Loendi and the Aurora Reading Club, and attendance at elite churches such as Ebenezer Baptist, Grace Memorial Presbyterian, and Bethel AME. They also created an impressive array of businesses (around eighty-five by 1909), including barber shops, poolrooms, taverns, pharmacies, catering operations, and wig-making enterprises.⁴

When the Great Migration began, reformers and southern migrants settling in the Hill District thus encountered a black community with an institutional framework in place and a tradition of class distinction based on origins, comportment, place of worship, and occupation. Native black Pittsburghers usually held domestic or service jobs that provided greater financial security than the unskilled factory work migrants performed. Elite black natives, who called themselves Old Pittsburghers, or OPs, prided themselves on their heritage in the community. They worshipped apart from migrants at the prestigious churches their fathers and grandfathers helped establish, and they created new social clubs to augment the ones that already existed—the Frogs, for example, surpassed the older Loendi Club in its exclusivity. Increasingly, OPs lived apart from migrants as well. As conditions deteriorated in the lower Hill, many moved to the upper Hill (called Sugartop), East Liberty, and Homewood-Brushton.⁵

Reformers served as intermediaries between natives and migrants. Like their contemporaries elsewhere, Pittsburgh’s black reformers lived and worked in multiple cities during their careers. Most arrived in the Steel City from other parts of the country and eventually left for appointments elsewhere. Clark spent time in Louisville, Portsmouth, and New York before arriving in Pittsburgh, and after eight years in the Steel City he left for St. Louis.⁶ Daisy Lampkin grew up in eastern Pennsylvania, moved to Pittsburgh, and worked for the Pittsburgh Courier and the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) before becoming an officer in the NAACP’s national branch in New York.⁷ Abram Harris came from Virginia to pursue a master’s degree at the University of Pittsburgh, and after completing his thesis he went on to teach at Howard University in Washington, DC. Although they were outsiders, reformers’ education and comportment gained them entry into the elite churches, clubs, and neighborhoods of the OPs. Courier editor Robert L. Vann, who migrated from North Carolina, lived in Homewood.⁸ Urban Leaguers Grace Lowndes and R. Maurice Moss, respectively from South Carolina and New York, lived in the upper Hill.⁹ Reformers mixed and mingled with OPs, but their opposing perceptions of the migrant community strained the relationship at times. Many native Pittsburghers believed that migrants depleted the black community’s limited financial resources and housing options, damaged their carefully cultivated image of respectability, and provoked white racial animosity.¹⁰ As one minister recalled, local African Americans feared that migrants were going to make it much worse for the resident population of blacks. Some of the so-called ‘Old Ps’ actually resented the presence of these people.¹¹

Although they generally held better-paying jobs than migrants, most native black Pittsburghers could not afford to donate money to organizations like the Urban League of Pittsburgh (ULP). But even members of the black middle class—from clergymen to morticians, druggists, grocers, and barbers—often refused to support the league. Preferring instead that migrants leave the city, some OPs saw reformers like Clark and Lowndes as interlopers whose migrant adjustment programs undermined their interests. A ULP survey in 1923 revealed that most black churches did not offer any special services or programs to help the migrants adjust to urban life, and several preachers grumbled that the migrant influx in their churches was not conducive to a high place of morality and decent standards.¹²

Reformers, in turn, often complained about the lack of support from native blacks.¹³ Responding to the poor turnout at a ULP fundraising event, one of them reminded readers that the Urban League works in the interest of us all, and it is the least that we can do to support it by buying a dollar ticket. Our disinterestedness along this line is alarming.¹⁴ Contributing to this tension were the goals of the migrants themselves, which not infrequently conflicted with the designs of both OPs and