Black History bicentennial

My local CBC outlet has a story about First Baptist Church in Toronto, a church founded in 1826 by Black Americans escaping bondage in the United States forty long years before the ending of slavery there.  At the time the newcomers were barred from existing churches that, so the broadcast said, "only accepted free people."  Hence the new church, which has been serving an increasingly multi-ethnic congregation ever since.

There are still not that many two hundred year old institutions around Toronto.  It's another indication of how appropriate it is that a prominent Toronto gathering place be renamed Sankofa Square to acknowledge the long black contribution to this city and country. What did Lord Dundas bring to Toronto again? 

Right, nothing. Even if the Canadian Historical Review won't admit it.  As it said:

The Dundas episode illustrates a disturbing trend in historical reckonings in which everything is judged by anachronistic standards of contemporary social justice.

Sure it does. 

  

History of those lost to history

Can a dictionary of national biography include someone whose name is unknown, whose birthplace and deathplace are unknown, and of whom no actions or activities were ever recorded? There's no portrait either.

You wouldn't think so. It's certainly a bit of a stretch. But the Dictionary of Canadian Biography did it last week. It seems to break all the conventions of the biographical dictionary genre. 

But it works. Here's Harvey Amani Whitfield's biography of "Name Unrecorded."

Maybe there are some analogous cases. The DCB long ago published a biography of a ghost. That one worked too.

Historians at the Order of Canada UPDATE: Shannon Prince

I now see that in my coverage of historians honoured with the Order of Canada recently, I did not just bury the lede, I missed it altogether.

Bryan Prince, who I mentioned, was honoured alongside his wife and historical partner Shannon Prince, who I missed entirely. Husband and wife designations like these must be pretty rare.

The Sarnia Observer has a good local/national news story about the careers of the Princes, with much detail on Shannon Price's academic work in black history and her long record as curator of the Buxton National Historic Site.

Shannon, who retired last month as curator of Buxton National Historic Site and Museum after 25 years, said she was “completely shocked” and cried when she and her husband heard the latest news.

“We received an email from the secretary’s office to the Governor General,” she told The Daily News on Tuesday. “My first thought was that someone we know has been nominated and they gave us as a reference. She wanted to set up a phone call and that’s when she told us.”

... Shannon, an academic with contributions to the field of Underground Railroad research, has worked with York University, University of Toronto, Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, Millersville University, and several other historical organizations around the world

Bryan is an acclaimed author and researcher in his own right in the areas of slavery, abolition and the Underground Railroad.

On a related topic, Paul Krugman at the New York Times has a sweeping analysis comparing American slavery against  European serfdom and generally pondering the economic, class, and political underpinnings of labour exploitation across the world. (This gift link should be available to non-subscribers)  

History of Jackie Shane and the Minutes

Historica, the foundation launched by the Bronfman estate and Red Wilson's Nortel fortune, gets public funding for some of its endeavours, and this hasn't always been of the no-strings arts council sort.  During the Harper years, it seemed every single new Heritage Minute Historica launched was about either war or hockey or the Fathers of Confederation. 

That's changed. I don't know who's making the choices now, but recent Minutes are a lot more diverse. But a Heritage Minute on pioneering transgender soul singer Jackie Shane -- amazing. And it comes in at 59 seconds, too.  "Got a new way of lovin' [history], baby"  

History of Black Canadians on film

"John Ware Reclaimed," an NFB film by Cheryl Foggo about the Black Albertan pioneer, is one of the films in the "For Viola" series that Hot Docs, the Toronto-based documentary film site, is running this month.  During February, Black History month, Hot Docs is streaming all the "For Viola" films from its website at no charge. 

From an Avenue Calgary profile:

Foggo laid bare her direct connection to Black history on the prairies in her family memoir Pourin’ Down Rain: A Black Woman Claims Her Place in the Canadian West. A 30th anniversary edition of her landmark work was released last year by Edmonton-based publisher Brush Education. The book weaves a tale of a life changed and marvellously impacted by community, family and an unwavering dedication to recording Black history in Alberta.

John Ware Reclaimed continues to make the film circuit (for the time being, virtually) across the country and with a rise in attention to the perspectives and voices of young Black lives in Canada, this history that Foggo has been sharing for decades seems to be even more timely. “[I’m] searching for a way to make this history widely available to everyone and especially to the young Black people who really need it,” says Foggo.

History of Black pioneers in New Brunswick and Alberta

 

Canada Post has a handsome new series of Black Canadian pioneers up for Black History Month

Celebrate Black History Month with this booklet of 10 Permanent domestic rate stamps honouring the communities of Willow Grove, New Brunswick, and Amber Valley, Alberta. These two communities were settled in the 19th and early 20th centuries by Black Americans seeking to escape racism and build a better life.

The residents of Willow Grove and Amber Valley faced the challenges of poor farming land and harsh weather conditions. They also faced continued prejudice and discrimination, including from local and federal governments. Despite the hostility of their environments, these communities grew, and their descendants have enriched Canadian society and culture.

Black History Matters

I was struck by the bold opening of Harvey Amani Whitfield's essay in the September 2020 issue of the Canadian Historical Review: "Slavery is the most neglected aspect of pre-Confederation Canadian history." 

Whitfield's article is a powerful and field-shaping contribution, based on the questions "Is there such a thing as “Canadian” slavery? If so, what is “Canadian” about “Canadian” slavery?" and drawing on his forthcoming work, Enslaved Black People in the Maritimes: A Biographical Dictionary of African and African American Slaves in Nova Scotia, Cape Breton, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island, as well as his previous books on Atlantic Canadian black experience.

Professor Whitfield's opening declaration, "most neglected," while plausible, is unquantified, at least in the essay, and it's not hard to think of other topics that might be included with it in any shortlist. But it reminds me of an assertion I have put forth a few times: there is no subject in Canadian history that cannot be declared "neglected." Look at Tim Cook's argument that Canadian military history is sorely neglected -- military history! and of the Second World War, no less. 

Many historical fields start to escape from neglect when members of historically neglected communities take them up. The history of Ukrainian Canadians, as one example, blossomed as an academic field when Ukrainian Canadians began entering the academy some decades ago. (To the point that some aspects of Ukrainian Canadian ethic pride have become controversial.) Sikh-Canadian historians have begun to enrich the field of Sikh Canadian history, at least on the west coast. And I've never forgotten the late Louise Dechene saying that francophone history will never be very neglected in Canada because there have always been francophone historians -- though that she liked the creative tension that resulted from quite a few English-Canadians taking an interest as well.  

We need to encourage a diversity of historians to do justice to the diversity of Canadian history. We are starting to see more African-Canadian historians, Professor Whitfield notable but not alone among them, and Canadian history as well as African-Canadian history will be better for it. These days every piece of historical work by an indigenous Canadian seems transformative, because so little used to make its way to non-Indigenous audiences. No doubt these historians will continue to have grounds to advocate that their fields are neglected, even as they make the assertion less easy to prove.

Update, September 3: Alan McCullough of Ottawa comments:

The statement that a particular topic is “the most neglected subject in Canadian history” is so common that it can be treated as honest puffery. Professor Whitfield's article “White Archives, Black Fragments” doesn’t need puffery for justification; it can stand on its own. In any case, footnote 3 which identifies more than a dozen or so articles on slavery in the Maritimes from the last 30 years, undermines the contention that the field is the most neglected. What surprised me is that Professor Whitfield identifies two articles on slavery in the Maritimes from the nineteenth century.

Plaquing slaveholders

 

 

CBC News Toronto reports on handsome, unofficial plaques that have begun appearing in Toronto streets and landmarks named after 18th and 19th century Upper Canadian slaveholders. It mentions two: at Jarvis Collegiate the plaque notes the slaveholdings of the Jarvis family, and a plaque near Baby Point does the same for the Baby family.

The plaques -- here's a twist -- are provided with footnotes. Windsor, Ontario historian Irene Moore Davis of the Essex County Black Historical Research Society, who is quoted on them, knew nothing of the plaques' origins, but she's intrigued:

"Unless it was something like a Confederate general statue, which nobody needs to see in a public place ... I'm [of] the mind that we educate people better by adding to what's already there."

From her interactions, she found people share a similar mindset.

"What I'm seeing across social media, and just in conversations with people, is that they want to see more of that," Davis said.

She suggested investing in more durable and permanent plaques to outline the historical context in different parts of the city.

There have been previous projects to supplement official historical plaques around Toronto and elsewhere: the Murmur project, whose plaques provided a phone number for a local historical message, and the Missing Plaques project, which put up posters on minority and labour history. I noted them in a Beaver/Canada's History column in 2007 -- along with digital-based projects around the country -- but both Murmur and Missing Plaques seem to have been discontinued: their websites produce error messages.

The Irene Moore Davis quote:  "What we accept, what we honour, who we choose to honour, says a lot about what we value as a society."

Book Notes: Davidson on Birchtown

It was neglected here when first posted, but Acadiensis online has a long review by Bonnie Huskins of Stephen Davidson's Birchtown and the Black Loyalist Experience From 1775 to the Present.

Birchtown was the settlement on the southwest coast of Nova Scotia designated as a settlement for free African Americans accompanying the loyalist migration out of the new United States to Nova Scotia. As Davidson and Huskins make clear, not all black migrants were coming to freedom, for some were the slaves of loyalists. "Black loyalists and slaves had multiple and contested 'loyalist dreams.'” 

History of Fred Christie

In 1987 James W. St.G Walker, a historian  (a "white" or EuroCanadian historian, I might say) at the University of Waterloo, published “Race,” Rights and the Law in the Supreme Court of Canada, which proved to be a groundbreaking work both in the history of racial issues in Canada and in Canadian legal history.

Once of its case studies was Christie v. York, a 1939 decision of the Supreme Court of Canada, which held that the York Tavern at the Montreal Forum was within its rights in refusing to serve Fred Christie, a black chauffeur hockey fan, because the tavern's freedom of commerce ("Any merchant is free to deal as he may choose with any individual member of the public.") negated Christie's claim to equal treatment.

This month marks the 80th anniversary of the decision (now-overruled -- but only since the Quebec Charter of Rights came into effect in 1975).  Montreal human rights activists wanted to find out a bit more about Fred Christie, who was believed to have left Montreal soon after the decision.

Well, Fred Christie died in 1985, but they found his descendants, with some help from CBC News. It's a nice story, and it even gives credit to Jim Walker's pioneering historical research.   

History of Race and the Halifax Explosion

For the 102th anniversary of the Halifax Explosion last week, CBC Nova Scotia drew attention to a new study arguing that the Halifax Relief Commission systematically favoured white relief claimants over African-Canadian claimants

The study, "Racism and Relief Distribution in the Aftermath of the Halifax Explosion" by Mark Culligan and Katrin MacPhee (respectively a community legal worker and a lawyer, both with historical training) argues:

The HRC’s relief policies systemically discriminated African Nova Scotian claimants. The majority of African Nova Scotians in 1917 did not own real estate and were precariously employed low-waged workers concentrated in informal sectors of the economy. The HRC prioritized the compensation of lost property, not lost wages. When it did compensate wage earners, it tended to compensate regularly employed, skilled workers, and not workers in the sectors of the economy where African Nova Scotians were predominantly employed. This study therefore illustrates that disaster relief efforts that prioritize reinforcing the pre-disaster social order over meeting the needs of victims can perpetuate the inequalities suffered by oppressed groups.

and that 

while class mattered for all claimants, African Nova Scotian claimants were still undercompensated for their Explosion losses compared to white working-class claimants.

The article also criticizes the "romanticization" of the Halifax explosion in historical scholarship. Perhaps due to the time lags of academic publication, the article does not engage with most 2017 writings on the explosion and relief, though it challenges an article drawn from David Sutherland's 2017 book We Harbor no Evil Design”: Rehabilitation Efforts after the Halifax Explosion of 1917 which, while noting the history of racial discrimination in early 20th century Halifax, concluded that after the explosion African Nova Scotians "were given unrestricted access to public health care, and, while evidence is limited, they appear not to have been discriminated against over the issuance of cash allowances or disability and widows’ pensions."

(Thx: Mark Reynolds)

Black History from the United States

I've been busy enough, but mostly I post when something seems worth posting.  A ten-day hiatus on posts to this site makes me think CanHist must be in the doldrums right now. Amirite? Not much doing in the way of major publications, to my knowledge, and not many interesting news breaks, either, 'tseems.

Recently I volunteered to receive an advance reading copy of Separate: The Story of Plessy V. Ferguson, and America’s Journey from Slavery to Segregation by the American journalist Steve Luxenburg  (pub. date February 12)  Unfortunately it's a digital copy with every page massively watermarked  "Property of WW Norton Not for Distribution," which makes it practically unreadable -- and indeed I have not read much of it. 

But it's pretty impressive: a vivid 600 page narrative around the events that provoked the landmark 1896 law suit in which the American Supreme Court declared that "separate but equal" facilities for whites and non-whites were perfectly acceptable and did not undermine the equality rights of black Americans. Plessy was launched by a committee of black New Orleanais who hoped to see the endlessly ramifying discrimination against newly freed ex-slaves stopped dead by a successful suit against the "Whites Only" cars of American railroads. The Supreme Court voted 7-1 against Plessy (and the one vote opposed was no triumph of rights-talk, either), and segregation rules for another half century and more.

Wikipedia reports that Plessy is widely regarded as one of the worst decisions in U.S. Supreme Court history. (But Brett Kavanaugh is just getting started.)

Who in Canada is even trying to write big books like these?  And who would buy 'em if they did? 

Something to read for Black History Month

Black History Month seems to be working. Cecil Foster's They Call Me George: The Untold Story of Black Railroad Porters and the Birth of Modern Canada isn't quite published yet, and already it's listed as out of stock at Biblioasis, the lively little publishing house in Windsor that has begun venturing into historical nonfiction.

The title sounds... ambitious. But the excerpt in the Globe and Mail last Saturday argues effectively that the porters were not just a remarkable community of labour. As almost the only organized black network in Canada for a long time, they launched campaigns for non-racist immigration policies and civil rights for African-Canadians.

Following the Second World War, Mr. Grizzle and his fellow porters fought to create a new Canada by embodying a citizenship that reflected the diversity and dignity of humanity itself. They battled to normalize what is now routine, and even taken for granted, in our daily living: Black workers holding a wide range of jobs, including civil-service positions, and black people from Africa and the West Indies immigrating and becoming citizens of Canada.
We should always remember this was not a fight they were sure to win. We should also not forget that Canada wasn’t originally intended to be a multicultural society. Official multiculturalism was a fluke of history, and some thought of it as democracy gone wrong. Against great odds, the sleeping car porters sacrificed themselves and all they had, figuratively speaking, to put a stick in the wheels of a Canada headed in a different direction. The train porters turned Canada black, brown and a host of other shades. Yet this important piece of Canadian history has yet to be fully told.

More on black history and Black History Month in Canada: Black History Canada
Photo: CN Collection, Museum of Science and Technology via Globe & Mail

Book Notes: two books on Can-Am history

Joe Martin and Christopher Kobrak have recently published From Wall Street to Bay Street, a comparative history of banking systems in Canada and the United States.  Starting from the observation that Canadian banks suffered nothing like the damage that hit American banks in the 2008 financial crisis, they offer a general reader's history of the banks back to the 18th century.  They like what they see in Canada

The authors trace the roots of each country’s financial systems back to Alexander Hamilton and insightfully argue that while Canada has preserved a Hamiltonian financial tradition, the United States has favoured the populist Jacksonian tradition since the 1830s. The sporadic and inconsistent fashion in which the American system have changed over time is at odds with the evolutionary path taken by the Canadian system.

Think on that next time you consider the whopping fees and enormous profits of whichever megabank has you in his clutches.

Public Affairs Publishing in the US wants us to know of Jared A. Brock's new biography of Josiah Henson, The Road to Dawn: Josiah Henson and the Story that Sparked the Civil War.  Their promotion emphasizes that Henson has been forgotten.

Josiah was a slave for more than 40 years, escaped with his family and trekked 600 miles to Canada, spent his life fighting for the cause and ultimately rescued 118 slaves. He founded a settlement called Dawn, which was known as the last stop on the Underground Railroad. And he was the inspiration for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s title character Uncle Tom. But he’s been lost to history.

Henson may be more a part of the historical record in Canada, where his home and his story of escape from slavery and settlement in Canada West have been part of Ontario Black history for a long time.  But Brock's book and an accompanying film documentary may change things in the States too.

Toronto Dreams Project on Simcoe and Slavery

In Toronto, the August long weekend holiday Monday is called Simcoe Day in honour of John Graves Simcoe, first lieutenant governor of Upper Canada. The Toronto Dreams Project, a lively website by Adam Bunch, contributed a look at Simcoe's complicated relationship with slavery,

He saw no place for the practice in his new province. "The principles of the British Constitution do not admit of that slavery which Christianity condemns," he wrote before he officially took his post. "The moment I assume the Government of Upper Canada, under no modification will I assent to a law that discriminates by dishonest policy between natives of Africa, America or Europe."

But the legislative council Simcoe himself had appointed was dominated by slave-holders

He was forced into a compromise — the exact thing he had promised never to do. The new law didn't abolish slavery immediately; instead, it would be gradually phased out. No new slaves could be brought into Upper Canada, but any who were already here would spend the rest of their lives in slavery. Their children would be born into captivity, too; they wouldn't be free until they turned twenty-five. Finally, anyone who wanted to free a slave was discouraged from doing so: they would be forced to provide financial security to ensure the newly freed slave wouldn't be a drain on the resources of the state.

When he returned to Britain, he was assigned to lead troops in assisting the French royalist regime in Haiti to suppress the slaves' growing independence war there -- a task he eventually dropped out of.

Image: from Toronto Dreams Project.

Histories of slavery and murder in 19th century Ontario

Karolyn Smardz Frost, archaeologist, writer, scholar, GG nonfiction winner a few years ago for I've Got a Home in Glory Land, her study of escaped slaves coming to Canada West,  has a new book on a similar theme: Steal Away Home, about Cecelia Reynolds, a youthful enslaved woman who escaped successfully to the African-Canadian community of Toronto and then spent years in correspondence with her former owner, Fanny Ballard of Kentucky, seeking to purchase the freedom of her family members.

She had the benefit of expert advice, probably from Washington Spradling, a free African-American in Louisville. Her escape plan suggests there was a communications network stretching across the Ohio River and all the way to the borders of Canada, a "grapevine telegraph" operated by African-American men and women who worked on the rivers, lakes, and canals that made up the continent's inland waterways, and as railroads progressively made their way across the continent, by those who stoked the engines and served the passengers on the trains as well.

Also on the subject of race issues, Ray Argyle's An Act of Injustice, forthcoming from Mosaic Press, is centered on the trial and execution of Cook Teets in Owen Sound, Ontario in 1884, protesting his innocence all the way.

Argyle's subject is principally the wrongful conviction issue, but the murder and its surroundings involved the African-Canadian and mixed race community of the "Queen's Bush" country south of Owen Sound.

I became aware of the tragic fates of Rosanah and Cook while researching wrongful convictions in Canada.  An astonishing story turned up in the October 12, 1908, issue of the Toronto Evening Telegraph. A single paragraph below th fold of an inside page, it bore the headline, "Hanged an Innocent Man." The story carried neither attribution nor byline, but suggested a plot far deeper than the modest space it occupied might indicate.  The actual murderer had confessed, leaving no doubt that Cook Teets was innocent of the crime for which he had been hanged

Argyle has written a novel. not a history, but he's a friend of mine and the story sounds interesting, so I'll bend the no fiction rule we mostly have here.

  

The Black History of Thomas Jefferson

"Perfect"

Annette Gordon-Reed's The Hemings of Monticello, her exploration of the enslaved and freed Hemings family members and of Sally Hemings' long relationship with Thomas Jefferson, struck me as a masterful and almost unanswerable work of history, though indeed one requiring a good deal of judgment and interpretation of sources that were intentionally ambiguous from the start.

Not everyone is not yet ready to concede Gordon-Reed's case. History News Network, the American aggregator of history-related items (often politically related, too) publishes William G. Hyland Jr. defence of Jefferson. But Gordon-Reed has not much to worry about. The money 'graf of the defence:

Thomas Jefferson was raised as the perfect Virginia gentleman. The personality of the man who figures in the Hemings soap opera would be preposterously out of character for him.

Because it's understood no Virginia gentleman would never have laid a finger on a slave.

In other Black History month news, the Star reports on Measha Brueggergosman's encounter with the Book of Negroes, the 1783 register of black Americans, slave and free, embarking for Nova Scotia, including her ancestors. She's making an album on the subject.

Black History Month: Joe Fortes

Today's Dictionary of Canadian Biography feature is Sherry Edmunds-Flett's biography of Joe Fortes (b 9 February 1863), the man who once taught most of Vancouver to swim -- and who today is remembered by a waterfront fountain and a Vancouver steak and seafood restaurant

Known to be clean, sober, and an expert mixer of cocktails, he was most famous, however, for his volunteer work as a swimming instructor and lifeguard. He was a common sight at English Bay beach, where he taught thousands of children to swim. It was not until around 1897 that the city, in recognition of his services, put him on its payroll as a lifeguard; at some point he was also made a special police constable. He reputedly saved more than 100 people from drowning, including many children and several adults, among them John Hugo Ross, who would die in the sinking of the Titanic.

Black History Month: Tales from the 2.9

Apparently 2.9 is the percentage of Black people in the Canadian population-- whether their origins and identity are Caribbean, African-American, Afro-Canadian, Nigerian, Somali, South African, the whole diasporic range.

Last year Casey Palmer launched a website called Tales from the 2.9 to post daily during February, which is Black History Month here  Tales is not really focussed on history, more on Black Canadian achievement and experience in general.  But it's a lively site, based on a lot of interviewing, and looks to be active throughout .

Here's one response from last year's daily tales,when a standard question to his interviewees was about Black History Month:

Black history to me when I was younger was all about the culture. I grew up in the 80’s RnB and soul, 90’s hip-hop era. Hip-hop was conscious. Artists like Public Enemy, KRS 1 and the Boogie Down Bronx, X Clan, Brand Nubian; and great female artists like MC Lyte and Queen Latifah were the teachers of black history.

And another:

Anytime I think about Black History Month, I tend to think about why schools don’t teach about Canadian Black History. I can’t believe that all this time, everyone was having tea meetings or skipping rope. Why isn’t Canadian Black History taught here or mentioned? We only learn about the major stories, from Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, Mandela or slaves escaping to the North.

Take a look or 2 (.9) during February.

Macleans on Cooper's Black History

Macleans' takes note this week of Dalhousie University's new interdisciplinary  program in black and African diaspora studies led by program creator -- and Governor General's Award-winning historian -- Afua Cooper, who hold the James Robinson Johnston chair in black Canadian studies.

The presence of blacks in Canada dates back to 1604 and the Port Royal settlement. It’s this 400-year legacy, along with arts, culture and other topics, that Cooper wants to focus on. “Students will learn about the long-lasting black communities all over this country and the struggles and triumphs of black Canadians,” she says. “They faced a lot of discrimination throughout these centuries: social exclusion, segregation, segregated schools.”

James Johnston, for whom Cooper's chair is named, ain't the moneybags donor university chairs usually honour.  A native Haligonian, he was the only black lawyer to practice in Nova Scotia before the First World War (DCB biography here)