Blacks in Canada: A History [50th Anniversary Edition] 9780228007906

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Blacks in Canada

Carleton Library Series The Carleton Library Series publishes books about Canadian economics, geography, history, politics, public policy, society and culture, and related topics, in the form of leading new scholarship and reprints of classics in these fields. The series is funded by Carleton University, published by McGill-Queen’s University Press, and is under the guidance of the Carleton Library Series Editorial Board, which consists of faculty members of Carleton University. Suggestions and proposals for manuscripts and new editions of classic works are welcome and may be directed to the Carleton Library Series Editorial Board c/o the Library, Carleton University, Ottawa K1S 5B6, at [email protected], or on the web at www.carleton.ca/cls. board members: John Clarke, Ross Eaman, Jennifer Henderson, Paul Litt, Laura Macdonald, Jody Mason, Stanley Winer, Barry Wright

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238 Wildlife, Land, and People A Century of Change in Prairie Canada Donald G. Wetherell 239 Filling the Ranks Manpower in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914–1918 Richard Holt 240 Tax, Order, and Good Government A New Political History of Canada, 1867–1917 E.A. Heaman 241 Catharine Parr Traill’s The Female Emigrant’s Guide Cooking with a Canadian Classic Edited by Nathalie Cooke and Fiona Lucas 242 Tug of War Surveillance Capitalism, Military Contracting, and the Rise of the Security State Jocelyn Wills 243 The Hand of God Claude Ryan and the Fate of Canadian Liberalism, 1925–1971 Michael Gauvreau 244 Report on Social Security for Canada (New Edition) Leonard Marsh 245 Like Everyone Else but Different The Paradoxical Success of Canadian Jews, Second Edition Morton Weinfeld with Randal F. Schnoor and Michelle Shames 246 Beardmore The Viking Hoax That Rewrote History Douglas Hunter

247 Stanley’s Dream The Medical Expedition to Easter Island Jacalyn Duffin 248 Change and Continuity Canadian Political Economy in the New  Millennium Edited by Mark P. Thomas, Leah  F. Vosko, Carlo Fanelli, and  Olena Lyubchenko 249 Home Feelings Liberal Citizenship and the Canadian Reading Camp Movement Jody Mason 250 The Art of Sharing The Richer versus the Poorer Provinces since Confederation Mary Janigan 251 Recognition and Revelation Short Nonfiction Writings Margaret Laurence Edited by Nora Foster Stovel 252 Anxious Days and Tearful Nights Canadian War Wives during the  Great  War Martha Hanna 253 Take a Number How Citizens’ Encounters with Government Shape Political Engagement Elisabeth Gidengil 254 Mrs Dalgairns’s Kitchen Rediscovering “The Practice of  Cookery” Edited by Mary F. Williamson 255 Blacks in Canada A History, Fiftieth Anniversary Edition Robin W. Winks

BLACKS IN CANADA A HISTORY

Robin W. Winks

Fiftieth Anniversary Edition Foreword by George Elliott Clarke

Carleton Library Series 255 McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2021 ISBN 978-0-2280-0789-0 (paper) ISBN 978-0-2280-0790-6 (epdf) Legal deposit second quarter 2021 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec First edition published by Yale University Press, 1971 Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. Library and Archives Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Title: Blacks in Canada: a history / Robin W. Winks; foreword by George Elliott Clarke. Names: Winks, Robin W., author. | Clarke, George Elliott, writer of foreword. Series: Carleton library series; 255. Description: Fiftieth anniversary edition. | Series statement: Carleton library series; 255 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210094788 | Canadiana (ebook) 2021009480X | ISBN 9780228007890 (softcover) | ISBN 9780228007906 (PDF) Subjects: LCSH: Blacks—Canada—History. | LCSH: Blacks—Canada—Social conditions. | CSH: Black Canadians—History. | CSH: Black Canadians—Social conditions. Classification: LCC FC106.B6 W56 2021 | DDC 971/.00496—dc23 Designed by John O.C. McCrillis and set in Times Roman type.

To Honor Leigh and to Eliot, born after this book was begun, who nagged it to completion

Contents Foreword to the Fiftieth Anniversary Edition George Elliott Clarke Preface to the First Edition Preface to the Second Edition Acknowledgments A Note on Terminology List of Abbreviations Slavery in New France, 1628-1760 2. Slavery, the Loyalists, and English Canada, 1760-1801 3. "Back to Africa," 1791-1801 4. The Attack on Slavery in British North America, 1793-1833 5. The Refugee Negroes 6. The Coming of the Fugitive Slave, 1815-1861 7. The Canadian Canaan, 1842-1870 8. A Continental Abolitionism? 9. West of the Rockies 10. To the Nadir, 1865-1930 11. Source of Strength?-The Church 12. Source of Strength?-The Schools 12. Source of Strength?-The Press 14. Self-Help and a New Awakening, 1930-1970 15. The Black Tile in the Mosaic Appendix: How Many Negroes in Canada? Table: Some Indicative Census Returns Note on Sources Index I.

ix xxiii xxvii xxxiii xxxv xxxvi 1 24 61 96 114 142 178 233 272 288 337 362 390 413 470 484 486 497 521

Maps 1. 2. 3.

Canada, with particular reference to the West The Atlantic Provinces vii Ontario and Quebec

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Foreword

Blacks in Canada: The History of a Dismissal Every preposition is a proposition. Thus, historian Robin W. Winks, in titling his magisterial and authoritative tome as he does, divides his subject people from the nation-state that they help to populate. His focus is “Black” people “in”—but not, it seems, “of”—Canada. Perhaps his preposition is a subliminal blip—a slip in conscience or consciousness. Whatever the reason, its effect is to picture Black people as forever alien and separate from the Caucasian-dominant “mainstream,” a polity that celebrates itself racially as embodying the “Great White North.” Yet, Winks’s title diction signals also, maybe inadvertently, an irritating truth, namely, that Blacks have never really been accepted as Canadian, even if our progeny were born north of the 49th parallel and our ancestors slaved in the colonial quintet of Nouvelle-France (Quebec), Nova Scotia, Upper Canada (Ontario), Prince Edward Island, and New Brunswick. Arguably, then, Winks is right to employ “in” rather than “of” in his title, for the latter term would suggest an unquestioned sense of Black people belonging to Canada or even convey an amiable Caucasian Canadian welcoming of Black peoples— beyond our pseudo-official designation as cheap, mainly unskilled labour, i.e., as maids and cooks and nannies and janitors and orderlies and farmworkers, et cetera and ad nauseam. In his “Preface to the Second Edition” (1997), Winks advises that his comprehensive study of an “extraordinarily complex” history is directed at “three audiences—Canadian, American, and Black readers” (xxx), a tripartite partitioning that splits, again, “Black” from “Canadian,” but underscores the ultimate truth of this polestar in historiography: Blacks arrived in Canada as a caste overcast by a class system that numbered us as slaves, then later as Gastarbeiter—guest workers (not unlike Turks pressed down in Germany), and always as interlopers, no matter how many generations or centuries of presence our genealogies may be able to count. This fact is why African-Canadians, anytime and anywhere, may be asked—by highfalutin cop or entry-level clerk—to satisfy the apartheid-rooted and brusque interrogative, “Where are you from?” No matter how courteously posed, the question—which strikes like a condemnation—is meant to ferret out the non-Canadianness, or un-Canadianness, of the respondent. Its psychological ix

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aim—as every African-Canadian knows—is to finesse our confession of our natal alienation from, our congenital inadmissibility to, the Kingdom of Canada. If one replies that oneself, one’s parents, one’s grandparents, and even one’s great-grandparents were born in Canada—when it was “The Dominion,” or when it was “British North America,” or when it was “Nouvelle-France” and a clutch of English-dominated duchies (all anxious to suppress Indigenous nations), the interrogator is likely to voice chilly, whiplashing indignation at one’s deplorable refusal to admit one’s “honest” status as visibly, darkly, a non-citizen, I mean, not an automatically loyal subject of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant head of state, i.e., the monarch. Bluntly, the Euro-Caucasian Canuck questioning of Black citizenship echoes the tenor of that fave query of quasi–police states, “Your identity papers, please!” At once, the interrogative command may stimulate the disintegration of one’s sense of self and so purpose—metaphorically—internal bleeding and the swelling of one’s brain: a panic attack … In his second preface, Winks registers that the “Blacks in Canada” are “Negro Canadians and Black Canadians and Afro-Canadians and AfricanCanadians” (xxx), and “even, somewhat to my surprise, coloured” (xxix). He appreciates “the changing sense of self the shifts [in nomenclature] implied” (xxx). But he misses the ramification of all of these terms: to showcase African/Black Canadian opposition to de facto economic and geographical “segregation” (say, of Jane and Finch in Toronto) by striving to turn the unspoken hyphen in our nomenclature into a key—to unlock the home and treasury that Canada can and should be. Yep, we want to salute Canada as finally being a North Star Canaan (the dream of the Underground Railroad fugitives), rather than damn it as an infernally frigid Gulag (the low-paying, hyper-policed labour camp that many landed Blacks experience), one that makes a jest of freedom and a mockery of equality. Winks alerts us that “Black Canadians did not appear to have a sense of common identity,” which he ascribed “to the seven diverse waves of immigration to Canada, each with a different story” (xxviii). Winks is right, but African-Canadian identity is even more heterogeneous than he allows. Still, our “polyconsciousness” (my term) is a result of the capricious machinations of successive governing “estates” to either keep African-originated peoples out of some colony (or another) or the Dominion, or keep us down, in our “place,” as slaves or wage-slaves—or as pawns in international power struggles. I hereby elaborate this idea. 1) Africans (to use a short-hand term) got shipped to New France (present-day Quebec, Prince Edward Island, and Cape Breton Island) in the early seventeenth century. These Blacks were already

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multicultural and polyglot because they were drawn from around the  globe-straddling French Empire as well as from New England. For instance, Marie-Josèphe Angélique, Canada’s most famous slave (a deliberately ironic statement), lived in Madeira and New England before being executed in 1734 for an alleged arson that incinerated a swath of colonial Montreal.1 Not only that, but enslaved Blacks were held in bondage alongside the Panis Indigenous people, and one may presume that love or forced breeding or rape (most likely) resulted in the births of variably mixed-race children, many of them bilingual or trilingual, as well as being termed Mulatto or Métis, nouns that the French used interchangeably.2 In colonial Canada, persons classed as slaves were mainly imports, “servants” to flatter an aristocrat’s status, and not so much field hands (as in warmer climes). Therefore, their masters could purchase a slave from Port-au-Prince and another from Nouvelle-Orléans, and then ask both to adjust their different accents to the Norman accent of colonial Quebec, or even to English. Thus was African-Canadian multiculturalism—plus amalgamation with Indigenous and European peoples—realized quite early.3 2) Next, once the British deported the Annapolis Valley–based Acadians in  1755, New England Yankees and southern-fried Dixie folks landed in Nova Scotia in 1760, bringing with them—household by household— their dozens of African-American bondsmen and bondswomen.4 In other words, the Nova Scotia mainland got occupied, essentially, by pro-slavery settlers, whose attitudes pervaded—perverted—the colony. Certainly, by the time the “Black Loyalists”5 docked in the Maritimes and the two Canadas in 1783, with the lion’s share deposited in the Bluenose Realm, Nova Scotia had a ready policy of segregated 1. Afua Cooper, The Hanging of Angélique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montréal (Toronto: HarperCollins Canada, 2006). 2. George Elliott Clarke, “Métis and/or Afro-Métis: Who Do You Think You Are?,” in “Facing the Change: Canada and the International Decade for People of African Descent,” special issue, Canadian Diversity 16.4 (2019): 41–5. 3. George Elliott Clarke, “An Anatomy of the Originality of African-Canadian Thought,” The CLR James Journal 20, nos 1–2 (Fall 2014): 65–82; Cooper, Hanging of Angélique; Frank Mackey, Done with Slavery: The Black Fact in Montreal, 1760– 1840 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010). 4. Winks is silent on this “arrival,” but Harvey Amani Whitfield is not. See his “Slavery in English Nova Scotia, 1750–1810,” Journal of the Royal Nova Scotian Historical Society 13 (2010): 23–40. 5. James W. St G. Walker, The Black Loyalists: The Search for a Promised Land in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone, 1783–1870 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992).

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settlement of Black people on non-arable (swampy or stony) land. Moreover, the properties allotted were too small to allow for any kind of independent economic development. For this reason, Blacks had to truckle to suit Caucasian employers, who could pay whatever they liked (a subsistence wage). This fact entailed poverty for the Black “township,” as well as a tacit separation of families, for Black wives and mothers employed as domestics were often expected to live “in service” in their Caucasian employers’ homes in Caucasianmajority towns and villages adjacent to—but still often miles from— Black-majority hamlets and villages. (Winks tells us that “proximity and temperament” fostered “interracial sexual relations” between enslaved women and masters [11], suggesting that there was never coercion, never assault. Yet, I suspect that if the bondswomen of the past could speak, as “domestics” sometimes can today,6 both classes of women servants could report abuses and violence that would only differ in the periodicity of garments.) 3) The historical Black presence in the Eastern Townships of Lower Canada (the name assigned Nouvelle-France—Quebec—after the British conquest of 1760) and in parts of Upper Canada also stems from the influx of Black Loyalists—both enslaved and free. Notably, 10  percent of all Loyalists coming to what is now Canada were Black: Talk about being a “founding people”! (Some 30,000 Loyalists reached the Maritimes in 1783–84, and some 3,500 were  Black, sayeth The Canadian Encyclopedia.) 4) The inclement climate and actual starvation, plus relentless Caucasian enmity (resulting in cases of tacit re-enslavement), urged 1,200 Black Loyalists, in 1792, to accept transport from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick to Sierra Leone, West Africa, where the onceAfrican-Americans became Nova Scotian Creoles. On the other hand, Britain’s suppression of Maroon guerillas, the raiders and marauders of Jamaican plantations and liberators of their enslaved, saw, in 1796, some 556 of their number deported to Nova Scotia. Judging Nova Scotia intolerable, the proud warrior class secured transport “back to Africa,” to Sierra Leone, anchoring just in time, in 1800, to  put down Africa’s first rebellion—by Black people—against European-Caucasian governance. Still, the Maroons did leave some 6. Makeda Silvera, ed., Silenced: Caribbean Domestic Workers Talk with Makeda Silvera (Toronto: Sister Vision Press, 1983).

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progeny in Nova Scotia (including, states rumour, a gubernatorial scion), plus a West Indian–instilled spirit of resistance.7 5) The War of 1812 delivered 2,200 souls—“Refugees,” principally— to  Nova Scotia, where they were again assigned lots—often without title—that could not sustain them economically and thus enabled their impoverishing exploitation.8 By 1816, the escaped AfricanAmerican slave Richard Preston, the “Apostle to the African Race,” had anchored himself in Halifax and quickly set about organizing the  Black masses into the African Baptist Association, established in  1853. Thus was created in Nova Scotia—which I call Africadia— a  Black cultural and socio-political infrastructure, which served to  cement a specific, Black Nova Scotian identity.9 6) From 1815 to 1861, tens of thousands of African-Americans, whether freeborn or fugitive escapees, filtered into Upper Canada (the majority) and Lower Canada. Canada was “Canaan” for them because, by 1834, Britain had abolished servitude in British North America, and that fact made its colonies a refuge for Negroes intent on escaping bondage. The passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which had the effect of endangering the liberty of even freeborn Black Americans, increased, for them, the attractiveness of British North America as a potential site of safety and settlement. Those fugitives who elected to stay in what shortly became the Dominion of Canada set up communities and founded churches in the southwestern portion of Upper Canada, near the American border, and thus evolved—as did their peers in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick—an American-inflected roots culture. (If the vast majority of Underground Railroad Blacks had remained in Upper Canada, the  colony may have gifted the nascent Dominion a “Black Belt” population in its heartland.) 7) Segregationist and pro-slavery pressures on Black Californians— prosperous and literate—led several hundred to exit the United States 7. Walker, Black Loyalists. 8. Harvey Amani Whitfield, Blacks on the Border: The Black Refugees in British North America, 1815–1860 (Burlington: University of Vermont Press, 2006). 9. George Elliott Clarke, “Introduction: Fire on the Water: A First Portrait of Africadian Literature,” in Fire on the Water: An Anthology of Black Nova Scotian Writing, volume 1, ed. George Elliott Clarke (Lawrencetown Beach: Pottersfield Press, 1991), 11–29; Walker, Black Loyalists; Peter J. Paris, The Moral, Political and Religious Significance of the Black Churches in Nova Scotia (Cherry Brook, NS: Black Cultural Centre for Nova Scotia, 1989).

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in 1848 and homestead at Victoria and on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia. These settlers were, again, culturally American.10 8) Due to the collapse of Reconstruction in the once-Union-troopoccupied South, the post–Civil War United States experienced resurgent, Negrophobic violence—or, really, domestic terrorism— that  coaxed hundreds of African-American farmers in Kansas and Oklahoma to relocate to the Dominion to try their hand at farming the Canadian Prairie in the brand-new provinces (as of 1905) of Saskatchewan and Alberta.11 9) Simultaneously, in the early 1900s, Black West Indians were enticed to industrialized Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, to labour in the steel mills. These newcomers became dedicated boosters of Pan-Africanist leader Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association.12 10) Prairie opposition to incoming African-American homesteaders led to  attempts to curtail all Black immigration to Canada. In 1955, however, the promulgation of the West Indian Domestic Scheme, a  policy triply racist sexist, and classist, saw Canada begin to admit British West Indian men as students and women as maids. (On the Francophone—or Québécois—“front,” Haitian intellectuals, escaping one Duvalier despotism or another—the Papa’s or the Baby’s— landed in Montreal in the early 1960s, promptly inaugurating African-Canadian published creative writing in French …) This elitist temporary-admittance system exacerbated class differences between working-class (or poor), “historical” African-Canadians and bourgeois Afro-Caribbean students who were pursuing professionalizing studies. Assuredly, Canada has never been about accepting Emma Lazarus’s “poor … huddled masses,” but about selecting—as potential citizens— the industrious, the inventive, the brawny, the brainy, the healthy, the  wealthy. Thus, to accept Caribbean—and, eventually, African— Black students and professionals was to introduce into “African” or  “Black Canada” the same hierarchical distinctions that constitute the Canadian monarchy generally. In terms of religion, accent, and political emphasis, including whether to pursue liberal-idealistic 10. Crawford Kilian, Go Do Some Great Thing: The Black Pioneers of British Columbia (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1980 [first published 1978]). 11. Colin A. Thomson, Blacks in Deep Snow: Black Pioneers in Canada (London: J.M. Dent, 1979). 12. Claudine Bonner, “Industrial Island—Afro-Caribbean Migration to Cape Breton, Canada, 1900–1930” (MA thesis, Canadian History, Dalhousie University, 2017).

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“integration” or revolutionary Black nationalism/Pan-Africanism, other differences between “New” and “Established” Black Canadians arose. Having been voluntarily and involuntarily segregated, “old-stock” Black Canadians deemed “integration” the dream to achieve. In contrast, immigrants from Black-majority states, so often new republics enjoying the reality of official (revolutionary) independence from “the burden of the white man” (to reverse Kipling), even though resident in a suddenly officially “multicultural” (but still Caucasianmajority) Canada, could cling to race-nationalist memories of strict, clean, and pedagogically keen Black-run schools (in Trinidad, for instance), Black-led governments of aristocratic bent and élan (in Barbados, for instance), and globally significant and celebrated cultures (see the Jamaican and Ethiopian examples). Their attitudes towards poor, less educated, and Caucasian-deferential “historical” Black Canadians could be aloof, condescending, or scornful. Or the Black Newcomers could feel galvanized to attempt mutual uplift. (Witness Jamaican-born lawyer H.A.J. “Gus” Wedderburn commit to civic action after observing, in the early 1960s, the indigence of Africville, an Africadian community on whose threshold Halifax had insultingly situated its city garbage dump.) Furthermore, the New Black Canadians were often surprised—or scandalized—to encounter Negrophobic racism that Canadian propaganda had always sworn was strictly of Yankee and/or Dixie hue. When such contretemps occurred, it was then incumbent upon the “old-stock” African-Canadians to educate the Newcomers on the tough reality of their new home.13 To sum up the previous Decalogue of immigration/migration waves to what became Canada, the structure of the African-Canadian people(s) became itself a mosaic within the Canadian mosaic. (I note that Winks dislikes the image [xxix], perhaps because he limned a “black tile in the mosaic” [xxix], when, really, that “tile” is a set of kaleidoscopic shards of various hues, from ebony to copper to gold to ivory.) Even so, in the Maritimes— particularly Nova Scotia—and in southwestern Ontario as well as centralnorthern Alberta and central-southwestern Saskatchewan, the foundation 13. Austin Clarke, introduction to Nine Men Who Laughed (Markham, ON: Penguin, 1986), 1–7; Clarke, “Anatomy”; George Elliott Clarke, “Contesting a Model Blackness: A Meditation on African-Canadian African-Americanism, or the Structures of AfricanCanadianité,” in Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002).

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cultures remain African-American. In the major cities across Canada, the largest Black communities are West Indian (in Quebec, Haitian), though East African–origin Newcomers—because they speak tongues independent of English and French—have managed to constitute their own proud, vibrant enclaves. (I use the noun with sage positivity.) While class, ethnic, religious, and language cleavages continue to segment Black Canadians, intermarriage, mutual school attendance, acceptance of African-American popular culture (as a go-to communal base), and mutual enjoyment of the range of musical beats and rhythms available across the African Diaspora, plus the collective experience of intransigent (if smiley-faced) White Supremacist racism, urge upon us a measure of unity, a point exemplified by the founding of the Federation of Black Canadians in 2017.14 Winks himself observes, late in Blacks in Canada, our cosmopolitan heterodoxy: They were so different—rural blacks from small towns in Nova Scotia, prosperous farmers from Ontario, long-time residents of Vancouver Island, sophisticated New York newcomers to Montreal, activist West Indians who were not, they insisted, Negroes at all … (335) In 1971, when the first edition of his impossibly thick and recherché volume appeared, Winks did not think to add to his catalogue of African-Canadian multiculturalism classifications such as, say, Jamaican Rastafari in Vancouver, Ghanaian civil servants in Ottawa, Red Tory Anglican Bajans in Toronto, African Baptists in Halifax, or Haitian journalists in Quebec (and one of their number, namely, Michaëlle Jean, served as the 27th  governor-general of Canada, 2005–10). Winks also fails to register the substantial history of Indigenous and African-Canadian alliances and intermarriages, the result creating a people who I dub “Afro-Métis,” and who are many thousand strong, particularly in Eastern Canada. Nor does Winks acknowledge that African Canadians are a Black North Atlantic people, perhaps the northernmost expression of African heritages on this planet.15 However—and this fault is unfortunately so common as to trouble any reading of Winks—the historian is persistently—maybe subjectively—pessimistic about the Blacks “in” Canada. One example is the passage just cited, where, after canvassing the grand multiplicity of Black identities available in Canada, the historian concludes that “the cultural matrix of each Canadian [Black] community was so changed, under the impact of immigration, war, and depression, that one could not know whether 14. Clarke, “Anatomy” and “Contesting.” 15. Clarke, “Anatomy” and “Métis.”

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discrimination, when it did appear, was based on social or economic priorities” (335). Translation: Refused a job or housing or a seat in a church or school or (for that matter) a tavern, or even burial in a cemetery, or denied just prima facie courtesy, a Black Canadian could only be confused about whether he or she was a victim of racism or not. But Winks is a tad too negative here, for, no matter the blandishments of estates, or the snow-jobs of flak-catchers, African-Canadians are “a long line of fighters,”16 not a timid congregation. Indeed, there is a grand counter-narrative always shadowing what Winks theorizes as being the denigrating—blackening (I pun)—histoire of Canada noir. So, in commenting upon the failure of the Black Loyalists to thrive in Nova Scotia, Winks asserts that his subjects “knew relatively little about farming the thin soils of their new home and almost nothing about how to employ their energies, their time, or their talents to help themselves” (35). Here is a damning portrait of blatantly stereotypical Black indolence and/ or incompetence. But, hold on! Weren’t many of the ex-slaves ex–field hands in various climes in Ye Olde Republic? Why were they suddenly unable to grow potatoes in Nova Scotia, if they’d raised yams in North Carolina? Well, Winks soon reports that Nova Scotia consisted of “barren, rocky lands” (35)—not exactly a pastoral environ; too, most of the Black Loyalists “received substantially smaller allotments of land than the white settlers did,” and some received absolutely zilch (35). One learns shortly that, in the fishing town of Digby (NS), no Black Loyalist was offered a “wharf lot” (36), which thus prevented any independent entrée into pisciculture. Winks also records that “in nearly every case the black settlers were segregated,” and that their land grants were “small and inconveniently located” (36). Given his own evidence, and the truth that a third of the Black Loyalists elected to emigrate to Sierra Leone in 1792 when offered the opportunity,17 it is unlikely that any of them were “confused” about the reason for their differential treatment. Nor is it kosher to accuse them of being poor farmers when the best land—in grants of 100 to 200 acres (36)—went customarily to whites, or to castigate them for being lousy fishers when they were permitted no access to anchorage, let alone boats. Where Winks sees Black failure or Caucasian bureaucratic “inefficiency and circumstance, not design,” leading to “retarded and stunted land grants” (42), it remains the case that when Black people received land it was on an apartheid-style basis, so that they had to barter their labour for subsistence supplies. Moreover, this arrangement constituted the Africadian socioeconomic reality for two-hundred-plus years. (Shamefully, it was only in 16. Headley Tulloch, Black Canadians: A Long Line of Fighters (Toronto: NC Press, 1975). 17. Walker, Black Loyalists.

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August 2020 that the Government of Nova Scotia began to grant title to lands that Africadians had occupied, in some cases, for more than a century. Why did it take so long for this economically vital deed to be achieved? I will speculate that, if a Black landholder were unable to achieve clear title to real estate, thus hindered would be his or her opportunity to sell and move, or to provide a legal inheritance. One had to choose either immobility—including of relative class position—or abandonment of the property. Was this aggravating quandary merely due to Caucasian “inefficiency and circumstance”? Or was it malfeasance? Customarily, Winks assumes objectivity where there was likely animus, no matter how politely phrased.) Furthermore, despite the harsh weather and the bad Whites (or the bad weather and the harsh Whites), many ex-slaves or even born-free souls refused to abandon their scraggly plots and remove themselves to the superior possibilities of “the Boston States.” Instead, they developed their own lingo (African Nova Scotian English), constructed a couple dozen (mainly) African Baptist churches around the herring-choker mainland to anchor their communities, and made do with what they had—voices to sing or preach with, fists to k.o. opponents with, hands to quilt or cook or strum guitars or pluck banjos with, etc. They created a culture, ex nihilo. They did learn to put down potatoes among boulders and pebbles; they did learn to carry mayflowers to their churches; they did fish mackerel and fry cod; they spooned brown sugar onto porridge, slathered molasses on pork and beans, and gulped rum; they even expanded their communities by petitioning governments for more—non-arable—land. Not because they were stupid, but because they wanted to live with each other—around the institution of a church, a building that could double—potentially—as a school. Winks figures that the ex-slaves’ houses were flimsy, their architecture clumsy. He overlooks their grand accomplishment: to “own” land, however barren; to have a house, however misshapen; to savour a lifestyle akin to liberty; to struggle for literacy; and to exult in their own “ligion.” Winks may have turned up his nose at the outhouses in folks’ backyards, but he missed the pianos in their parlours, the Bibles in their bedrooms. Winks reinforces his theory of African-Canadian indecisiveness and confusion and a lack of a cohesive or coherent identity when he opines, on the very last page of his narrative, that “Canada had fragmented [the Negro], and set him apart from Black America” (483). It’s a dilly of a complaint, for it pretends that the diversity of African-Canadians is a congenital defect of our polity, and, worse, that we are somehow unfaithful to our African-American superiors—pointedly not peers—in Winks’s estimation. Winks confesses in the Second Preface that his guiding philosophy was “rude Jacksonian democracy” (xxxi), thus bruiting his fealty to a moreor-less White Nationalist slaveholder, anti-Indigenous oppressor, and an

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anti-British soldier whose victory at the Battle of New Orleans represented a long-distance assault on British North America. In other words, by aligning himself with—I’ll say—Jacksonian populism (not just “rude,” but genocidal in its mass dispersal of Cherokee to lands west of the Mississippi River), Winks must pit republican energy against monarchical stodginess, favour radical effrontery over decorous composure. Or plump for “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” versus “Peace, Order, and Good Government.” Given his leanings, one should expect Winks to rank AfricanAmericans above African-Canadians. Naturally, then, he decides that the history of the Blacks “in” Canada is, “perhaps, a depressing story” and “a petty one.” (479). True: It is difficult to roll-call African-Canadian triumphs, successes, and victories with the assured continuity (without chronological gaps or slightly embarrassed asterisks) that must accompany any such African-American recitation. But let us observe that African-Americans have hovered about being—for centuries—10 percent of the American whole, and are a majority in crucial districts. Because they braved omnipresent Caucasian exclusion and enmity, they were driven to develop a parallel society—a sub-civilization—of the United States, including their own colleges and universities, worship networks, entertainment venues and circuits, plus media (newspapers, magazines, television, and radio). To say “African America” is to denominate a nation—within a nation—with all the potential resources that nationhood suggests. Never have AfricanCanadians enjoyed such a 35-million-man-woman foundation, base, pivotpoint, launching pad, or infrastructure. Moreover, African-Canadians have had to attempt to prosper and flourish in a hierarchical monarchy that appoints two Caucasian and European groups—the British and the French – as its dominant ethnicities and languages. Literally, in Canada, is WASP power enthroned. Thus, all other ethnicities, religions, languages, accents, and “races” tend to diminish in status (a telltale noun in our political science) the farther they are removed from the monarch’s “race,” religion, ethnicity, language, and accent. (Indigenous Canadians also endure racism. However, because they have a nation-to-nation treaty relationship with the Crown, they possess a demi-sovereign status that Canadian courts and governments ignore only at proper peril to the faithful administration of justice.) In other words, the Canadian class system is based not only on discrimination by race (which is the case in the United States, with a Limbo category for “American Indians” and a “perpetual alien” category for Hispanics), but by religion (with Protestant and Catholic—mainly Caucasian—Christians enjoying actual taxpayer support), language, and ethnicity (which interlocks with region, so that, for instance, UkrainianCanadians may wield influence upon the governments of Manitoba and Saskatchewan, while francophones, of course, determine the Government

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of Québec and influence the Government of Nouveau-Brunswick). While African-Americans can protest White Supremacism in black-and-white terms, as a polar polarity, African-Canadian protests must be more diffused because the discriminations we face are more various, more multifaceted, even if their outcome is the same. Succinctly, where African-Americans seek equality, African-Canadians seek opportunity, for, as novelist Austin Clarke argued in introducing his short story collection, Nine Men Who Laughed (1986), Euro-Canadian discrimination is based on “prepossessiveness.” That is to say, as I will translate: “We Europeans got here first, stole everything worth stealing first, and all you johnny-come-latelies—immigrants (especially of black or brown or yellow hue)—had better accept your place in the pecking order, which is to grovel for the crumbs we deign to allow, and don’t dare act uppity!” To return to the opening quotation of this paragraph, Canada did not “fragment the Negro”; instead, it vaunted targeted immigration over wholesale “serf” import. Even during the colonial era, the black enslaved could bear many passport stamps (so to speak) or—in truth—brands, so that a multicultural—not a would-be totalizing— blackness took root in Canada. Then again, if the only hope for AfricanCanadian flourishing were bondage (I pun) with African America, then would not the correct action be either collective emigration to the United States (if possible), or the political and economic absorption of Canada within the United States, plus the concomitant extinction of AfricanCanadianness as a distinct form of Négritude on the planet? Problematically, both “choices” deny the possibility (and actuality) that blackness on this planet is not—imperialistically—wrapped up in the red, white, and-blue, but takes its own valid regional, national, and cultural forms in different parts of the world, including Canada. The implicit continentalism of Professor Winks may suit a “Jacksonian” (big-stick imperialist) democrat, but its acceptance would erode the distinctive, colourful (I pun again) differences that compose the African-Canadian presence amid the freezing, whitening, Canuck blizzards. Witness: The Black arrivals to Canada never did croak in the cold; they believed enough in the project of liberation that they overcame all suppressors to surge into North Star Canaan, where the water tastes of honey and the wind bears whiffs of wine; they survived all, even if they were marooned for far too long in isolation, illiteracy, and indigence. Winks sneers at our religious efforts: “Begging ministers, poverty-stricken churches, and a narrow intellectualism,” he intones, “all these hurt the Negro in his [sic] slow climb toward acceptance” (361). Yes, those worship places were never cathedrals, but, around Nova Scotia, for instance, there could be baptisms in sun-dazzled or moon-brilliant waters. Even staid Caucasians would want to be “in that number,” when the Black saints in their snow-white robes

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came marching, shouting, out the baptismal tides. Because they had accepted Christ, and because they knew themselves to be free at last, they were not waiting on White acceptance, whatever Winks thinks. In the end, Blacks in Canada: A History is an unsurpassed presentation of item after recherché item. Despite—or because of—Winks’s negative interpretation, each one of the facts that he presents morphs into a library of scholarly refutation of the overview. For example, Winks gives us one sentence on the remarkable martyr—and accused arsonist—Angélique, but doesn’t name her and insists on her status as a Caucasian woman’s possession—“a Negress belonging to Mme. François Poulin de Francheville set fire to her mistress’s house … [and] was tried and hanged” (11). But historian Afua Cooper and playwright Lorena Gale and novelist Paul Fehmiu-Brown—all African-Canadian—knew that there was more to the story than Winks allows, and present an Angélique who is a historical actor, a self-possessed heroine, a firebrand saint. They could recognize who she was—for themselves—even if Winks could not. Such is the true glory of Blacks in Canada: A History. Winks’s bleak rendition—dismissive view—of our history has provoked and goaded so many now to check the facts for themselves, reassess them anew, and rewrite them—as social scientists, as poets, as filmmakers, as dancers, as novelists, as screenwriters, as artists and artisans, as composers and librettists. A short list of those African-Canadians who delve into Winks to recover histories—proven—of creativity and courage foregrounds Wendell Adjetey, David Austin, Troy B. Bailey, Frank Stanley Boyd, Jr, Dionne Brand, Peggy Bristow, Velma Carter, Wayde Compton, Afua Cooper, Sylvia Hamilton, Daniel G. Hill, Lawrence Hill, Bridglal Pachai, Peter Paris, Donna Byard Sealey, Adrienne Shadd, Makeda Silvera, Headley Tulloch, Karina Vernon, Barrington Walker, Dorothy Williams, the authors of church histories,18 and many others. Winks’s work has also sparked the research of non-African-Canadians such as James Walker (see also his as-told-to autobiography with the unforgettable radical—and MA in history—Burnley “Rocky” Jones),19 the African-American Harvey Amani Whitfield, EuroCanadians such as Ken Donovan, Judith Fingard, Crawford Kilian, Frank Mackey, David Steeves, Colin A. Thomson, et cetera. But I honour here two trailblazing African-Canadian scribes: Peter Evander McKerrow, the first Afro-Caribbean-Canadian author (a native of Antigua), and Pearleen Oliver, the Africadian chronicler. 18. George Elliott Clarke, “Introducing a Distinct Genre of African-Canadian Literature: The Church Narrative,” in Directions Home: Approaches to African-Canadian Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 46–57. 19. Burnley “Rocky” Jones and James W. St G. Walker, Burnley “Rocky” Jones: Revolutionary, An Autobiography (Halifax, NS: Fernwood Books, 2016).

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Perhaps Winks slinks through archives and spelunks down library shelves to assemble facts that breed despair. However, read in the light of alternative thought, the facts encourage wonder and reveal unexpected capability. George Elliott Clarke E.J. Pratt Professor of Canadian Literature University of Toronto 1 novembre mmxx

Preface to the First Edition Negroes have lived in Canada for nearly as long as in the present United States. In 1628, nine years after a Dutch ship unloaded the first cargo of Africans at Jamestown, David Kirke, the so-called English Conqueror of Quebec, brought a slave boy to the French shores, and Negroes were present in New France and in British North America thereafter. Those who were slaves gained their freedom in 1834, in common with all in the British empire. The black population grew in numbers and sometimes in strength during the next two decades as a result of a substantial influx of fugitives from the United States. Yet other migrations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought other black men to Canada. The story of these men-settlers and transients-has never been told in any reasonably full way. The chief purpose of this book is to examine the history of Negro life in Canada from 1628 to the 1960s, and by so doing to reveal something of the nature of prejudice in Canada. A second purpose is to use the Negro's story as a means of examining some of the ways in which Canadian attitudes toward immigration and ethnic identity differ from the American, as a contribution to the continuing search for a Canadian identity. A third desire is to show the Negro as an actor in the context of an emerging national history, as a person who acts and reacts as well as one acted upon. Finally, since most black men in Canada came more immediately from the United States, or those British colonies that became the United States, this study also is an attempt to inquire into a neglected aspect of CanadianAmerican cultural relations. At no time in the twentieth century have Negroes comprised more than a tiny fraction of the Canadian population, and although accurate statistics are virtually impossible to find, the Negro proportion of the population probably is no more than two percent today. For this reason alone, although there are other reasons as well, this chapter of the Negro's story has been ignored by historians of both Canada and the Negro. On the other hand, those Canadians who have made it their special mission to find, to define, or to create a sense of Canadian identity often point with pride to the fact that, when the Negro slave was seeking escape from his servitude after 1850, he sought out freedom "under the lion's paw" in the British provinces. Scores of self-congratulatory newspaper articles appear each year in Toronto, London, Hamilton, and Windsor on the theme of xxiii

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how the slave found freedom in Canada, and an official marker of the Canadian government notes the spot on the banks of the Detroit River where the Underground Railroad is said to have had its terminus. There, the monument proclaims, the fugitive "found in Canada friends, freedom, protection, under the British flag." Struck by the lack of literature on this aspect of Negro history, I thought it would be instructive to investigate the friends, freedom, and protection thus memorialized. But one could not know how the fugitives were received without understanding something of how British North Americans had dealt with slavery and with the Negro 'in the two centuries before the fugitives came. Nor could any real assessment be made of the meaning of the fugitive migration for Canadian history without investigating the extent of later Negro assimilation. Slowly, as its three purposes developed clarity, the study became an inquiry into Negro history, Canadian history, and Canadian-American relations. This book is the result. Some observations may also be helpful in defining what this book does not attempt to do. The writer is not a · sociologist, and a graduate degree in anthropology has served chiefly to warn him of the dangers of venturing into other professional fields without a full control of either the discipline or the literature. In deciding to bring this account down to the present decade, and in attempting to generalize about the Negro condition as it is today, one has had to borrow on occasion from that literature, but no sociological claims are made for what is said here. Nor are many side paths followed which, were one to attempt a "definitive" study, require deeper enquiries. Perhaps one should look more fully into the influence of labor unions in general and of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in particular upon the growth of self-awareness among Negro workers. Far more can be written of the West Indian immigrants. A comprehensive study of Negro religious practices in Canada remains for someone interested in church history. Such examples might be multiplied, for judgment on the necessary extent of research into peripherally related areas will differ from scholar to scholar, since one man's thoroughness is another man's pedantry. It is, in any case, intolerable to be given too much information. Two groups of historians may find this study of some use. Until now, however, the two audiences have been quite distinct. Few Canadian historians can be said to have read extensively in Negro history, and even fewer historians of the Negro can be expected to be familiar with Canadian history. As a result, figures who are daily companions to one group require identification for the other, and documentation must be somewhat heavier than one would otherwise wish. The author can see no way to avoid this, for not all Canadians have heard of Martin R. Delany,

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nor do all Negroes know of Sir Clifford Sifton. Little more than half of the material gathered has been incorporated directly into the pages of this book, lest data on the Negro swamp data on Canada; and with the thought that someone might wish to pursue various topics further, the body of notes, correspondence, and related papers has been deposited with the Schomburg Collection of Negro History in the Countee Cullen Branch of the New York Public Library. R.W.W. London September 1970

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Preface to the Second Edition The Blacks in Canada was first published in 1971 by Yale University Press in the United States and Great Britain and MeGill-Queen's University Press in Canada. The book was intended to be a sweeping history, from the introduction of slavery (and the first slave) into New France in 1628 to the near-present. Research and writing had been done between 1960 and 1969 and the story the book tells ended in the latter year. The final portions of the book verged on contemporary history, for the last segregated school had closed in Ontario in 1965 and until 1968 African-Canadians were denied burial in some Nova Scotian cemeteries. My interest in the subject had grown from a variety of influences. As a teenager I had seen my schoolteacher father dismissed from a position in rural Colorado because he supported a minority student at a time when few teachers would do so. Both my parents were quite without racial prejudice, and I was unprepared, when I went to college, to meet presumably educated people who clearly held deep racist convictions. As a graduate student in anthropology (a discipline I left after a Master's degree) I had studied Maoripakeha relations in New Zealand and wanted to pursue other inquiries, though with the methods of the historian, into the nature of race relations in high technology societies. My doctoral dissertation and second book was on Canadian-American relations during the Civil War, and my research for that book had given me some insights into White Canadian attitudes toward fugitive slaves who had fled to Canada before the war. I was also interested in how people perceive themselves: I had been struck by a historical plaque in Windsor, Ontario, which declared that fugitive slaves had found freedom "under the lion's paw" upon their arrival in British North America, when I knew that this was not the full story. Finally, the 1960s were a time of ferment in the United States, and I was interested in the civil rights movement and curious why, at the time I began my research in 1960, there seemed to be no similar movement in Canada. The study began as an inquiry into how fugitive slaves were received in British North America, what they did when they were on Canadian soil, and what the answers to these two questions might tell us about Canada. I soon realized that I could not limit my study in this way, however, for Canadian attitudes toward Black newcomers had already been shaped in some measure by earlier Black migrations; nor could I end the story so abruptly, since the real meaning of events in the mid-nineteenth century was brought to light xxvii

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only by much later developments. Thus I conceived of a full history from the entry of the first slave until as close as possible to the moment of publication. (That moment was somewhat delayed, for in 1969 I took a leave of absence from my university to serve in the U.S. Department of State, and my frequent travels extended production time to twice the publisher's expectations.) At the outset I had six distinct goals for The Blacks in Canada. I wanted to examine the history and nature of African-Canadian life in Canada, to reveal something of the nature of prejudice in Canada, to inquire into Canadian attitudes toward immigration and ethnic identity, using the Black story as a point of entry, to see how these attitudes differed from American attitudes, to show the African-Canadian as an actor in the emerging national history of Canada, and to deal with a neglected aspect of Canadian-American relations. I was by training a comparative and a diplomatic historian; I was moving away from the latter, but still entertained questions relating to diplomatic history (hence my sixth goal), as I was moving more consistently into the former. As I soon learned, the story I was to tell was extraordinarily complex. Further, few Canadians were aware of it, and what little was known was frequently wrong. I found that Black Canadians did not appear to have a sense of common identity, which I ascribed to the seven diverse waves of immigration to Canada, each with a different story, requiring the use of different and often widely dispersed sources. To the extent that any of the stories (except for slavery in French Canada, well examined by Marcel Trudel) had already been told, it had been told in isolation. There were the Black slaves brought to Nova Scotia and the Canadas by Loyalists at the close of the American Revolution. There were the Black Refugees who went to Nova Scotia following the War of 1812. There were the Jamaican Maroons. There were the fugitive slaves who fled to British North America from the end of the War of 1812 and during the Civil War, a subject already well begun by William and Jane Pease and Larry Gara. There were Black West Coast businessmen who helped settle British Columbia, particularly Victoria. There were Black farmers who moved to the Canadian plains shortly before World War I. There were the West Indians who after World War II immigrated to the urban centers of Canada. I wanted to learn all I could about each of these groups, these communities, and to relate each story to the others. In the end my research took me to Britain and France, to Jamaica and Sierra Leone, and throughout Canada, and what I had expected to be a four-year enterprise became the all-consuming effort of nine years. Two books used in some measure as models for The Blacks in Canada account for some of its strengths as well as some of its weaknesses. These were Gunnar Myrdal 's -classic 1944 work, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, on the nature of Black-White relations in the United States, and John Porter's 1965 book, The Vertical Mosaic: An

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Analysis of Social Class and Power in Canada. At the time both books were powerfully attractive and influential: I derived some of my organizing principles from them and perhaps too readily accepted the idea of Canada as a mosaic of ethnic identities. This accounts for the emphasis placed on "the black tile in the mosaic" in my concluding chapter, and while I still support many of the conclusions reached in that chapter, I no longer think the image is appropriate. A reader today-indeed, a reader of history any day-must not forget that it is the' historian's duty to report on events and attitudes as they were, not as one might wish them to have been. This is a cliche of the historian's trade, and no less true for that. But the present also influences the writing of history and attitudes toward history as a methodology. Society's concerns with what history might provide that is of relevance to today's concerns, even the language of discourse, changes. My research and my writing changed over those nine years, as they have changed even more in the quarter-century since this book was first published. A case in point is the title of the book. During much of the time I talked with African-Canadians, they preferred to be called Negroes (or even, somewhat to my surprise, coloured); both words occur repeatedly in the tapes and notes from my interviews. But by the latter 1960s terminology was changing. The publisher therefore asked whether we should try to change the language throughout the text from Negro to Black, which was becoming the preferred term. But the book was in production and in the end the publisher felt unable to alter the production schedule to make systematic changes throughout. I responded that nonetheless the title of the book should be changed to its present form. There was some to-and-fro over whether the title should be Blacks in Canada or The Blacks in Canada, and I held out for use of the definite article as a matter of dignity. As a historian I had no problem with the word Negro in most of the text, since the language reflected the period under discussion, though I was not willing to make any concession to terms that Blacks themselves had always found hurtful or derogatory. After all, I reflected, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had not changed its venerable name (though it had buried it in the invariable acronym NAACP). I suggested that we might change running titles to the chapters where appropriate, but this posed other difficulties. Then, as I was reading a short, new essay by a writer I much admired, Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man, I noted that he had used the term Negro throughout his writing. I felt that what was right for Ellison was still right for me: the title would point toward the future, the content, as a work of history, toward the past. I belabor this point before moving on to what I regard as a genuine weakness of the book simply because I have received so many questions about title and

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content. The issue of language led some commentators to condemn The Blacks in Canada, on occasion I suspect unread, two decades later. But the book was, and is, about Negro Canadians and Black Canadians and Afro-Canadians and African-Canadians. These shifts are significant, and in speech and subsequent writing I have followed them, both as a matter of courtesy and because I accepted the changing sense of self the shifts implied. A book is written in a time, and published at a moment, and were it a political tract perhaps it should shift as the politics shift. But this book is not a political tract. At the time The Blacks in Canada was published, however, some reviewers implied that it was. One reviewer derided my use of "the fashionable epithet 'blacks' in the title"; another imagined that the book was written from a commitment to New Deal Liberalism; another wanted far more "relevant" sociology and anthropology; yet another, apparently unmindful of the fact that I was writing for three audiences-Canadian, American, and Black readers-complained that I explained events and references that no Canadian needed explained. Despite these observations, the reviews were overwhelmingly favorable. Several reviewers declared that the book would create a new field in Canadian studies; some praised the interpretation, some the research; all remarked upon the extent of primary sources drawn upon. There was general agreement that the book was a good start to a neglected subject and that more books would follow. More books did follow. Many filled in gaps and corrected errors. Were I to revise The Blacks in Canada now, extending its story from 1969 toward the end of the century, there would be much more to say, new perceptions of past events, many significant books and articles to draw upon and to argue with. (I have chosen not to revise the book, for I feel that a new volume of nearly equal length would be required to tell the rich story of the last twentyfive years.) More has been done, and more remains to be done, on the period after World War I. Further research is needed on Black women, on trade unionism, on immigration from Latin America and Africa. Far more must be written on Black writers in Canadian literature; more is needed on the West Indian presence. Despite the detailed account here and elsewhere, there is more to be said about Black settlements in Ontario before the Civil War, about the Ku Klux Klan in Canada, about Africville and Halifax. Yet if these subjects, and others, remain insufficiently explored, the student of African-Canadian history can rejoice in the outpouring of work that has informed a broadening readership during this quarter-century. Peggy Bristow, Dionne Brand, Velma Carter, Linda Carty, Afua P. Cooper, Agnes Calliste, Daniel Gay, Sylvia Hamilton, Judith S. Hill, Hilary Lawson, Saje Mathieu, Howard and Tamara Palmer, Adrienne Shadd, Bruce Shepard, A.W. Spray, Jonathan Walton, and Dorothy Williams do not appear here. Daniel G. Hill

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is cited, but his best work was yet to come in 1969. I do not agree with all these authors, and they most certainly do not all agree with me, but there is a clear intellectual interaction between all nonetheless. What do I think of The Blacks in Canada today? No one is the same person after writing a book as before: the struggle to write should change the author. I have written several books since this one, and each has changed me in many ways. I still feel affection toward this book or I would not consent to seeing it reissued; I still feel it contains much research, most of it sound, much of it interesting, a good bit of it significant, and to the best of my abilities all of it true. But of course I recognize the ways in which it speaks from 1969 rather than from the 1990s. At the time of publication my most formidable critic was James W. St. G. Walker, now one of the leading scholars of African-Canadian history, and then very shortly to publish his own superb work on the Refugee Blacks. He faulted me for not telling "the history of Negro life in Canada" adequately, and he was right. I had, he argued, written a "history of the Black man as an issue in white Canadian life." Because I began with the perspective that racial barriers are wrong-Walker did not suggest that he felt otherwise-! overemphasized the building and the destruction of barriers between Black and other Canadians. (Indeed, I had written most of one chapter in the passive voice, thinking this a stylistically subtle way to show how Black Canadians were acted upon rather than acting, with respect to the subject of the chapter. No reviewer noted my stylistic preciousness, which was just as well, since it lent support to a view that was inherently wrong anyway.) I was particularly taken to task by Walker, but by others as well, for what was felt to be an unsympathetic depiction of Black churches as reinforcers of racial separation. Since these reviewers saw me as that New Deal Liberal whose goal was racial integration rather than the celebration of a separate and prideful identity, they concluded that I was without regard for legitimate Black aspirations distinct from an American melting pot or a Canadian mosaic. Walker concluded that I was "dangerously" suggesting that Blacks themselves, not White racism, were responsible for their unequal position in society. I did not, and do not, think this, but Walker was correct to point out the ambiguities of my language and analysis. Other commentators since have singled out the chapter on self-help and voluntarism as marked by a critical approach insufficiently understanding of Black culture or of economic and class realities. I believe these criticisms to be just, and were I to approach the subject again, I would do so armored with all the literature that has appeared since 1969, with a wider grasp of the literature of Black identity that was shaping public debate in the 1960s, and with less of the rude Jacksonian democracy that informs and shapes some of the conclusions here.

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Of course, if one has influenced the scholarship of others, negatively as well as positively, one may take some pleasure from knowing that what one has done has not proven to be irrelevant to matters of great importance to all of us. The research accomplishment remains real, if the perspective is now dated. One cannot please all critics (some found the story well written, "sharp," "pungent," filled with "dry wit," even "dramatically told," while others found it "dense," "a catalog," "far too academic," and even "flabby"). No book of this scope has displaced it. Dozens of articles have appeared which have drawn upon its documentation (not always with acknowledgment). Were I teaching a course in African-Canadian history today, this is not the book with which I would begin, but I continue to believe that one would arrive at it nonetheless, if only to argue with its perspective and conclusions. One of those previous reviewers twice called The Blacks in Canada "a definitive history." It is not that-no history ever is. But it was a start, a prod, a goad, a reminder to others of a story to be told, enriched, corrected, and extended. It was a beginning, for me and for many readers. My views and the views of those readers have changed, sometimes congruently and no doubt sometimes putting greater distance between us. Yet there is one element in the book I would not change were I to begin again. The reviewer who flatteringly if mistakenly thought the book definitive remarked on the historian's inclination to place too much emphasis on the significance of leadership. I continue to believe that individuals make a difference, and while I fully recognize that class, gender, sexual orientation, environment, and much else narrows the channels in which we all live and make our decisions, I will accept no determinism and will not back away from my conviction that leadership remains basic to all human endeavor. I wish to thank the many people who, over the years, have corresponded with me about this or that aspect of The Blacks in Canada, who have corrected me, provided new sources, and kept me informed as the field has developed. I wish in particular to thank my friend Austin Clarke, son of Barbados, distinguished Canadian novelist, who has acted as a one-man clipping service over the years, and Saje Mathieu, my student, who mixes her criticisms with wit and grace and has drawn my attention to several writers and their articles I might well have not otherwise known about. I also thank the Yale University Press for releasing copyright so that this new edition could become a reality.

New Haven, Connecticut October, 1996

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Acknowledgments Literally hundreds of academicians, archivists, librarians, local historians, and private individuals have helped me to gather materials, and each cannot be singled out for thanks. Some I have mentioned in the appropriate places in the notes; of many others I must ask that they take this book itself as testimony to my gratitude and as witness to the fact that their aid was not entirely wasted. Foremost among those I must thank are the many Canadian Negroes themselves who, collectively in meetings or alone across cups of tea in their homes, nearly always were responsive, responsible, and interested. What is said here will anger some of those who helped me most, for one must mention some who are still active in their work; but even those with whom I most disagree will, I trust, grant me my conclusions as I grant them the sincerity of their actions. The Social Science Research Council, through a grant-in-aid of research in 1959-60, enabled me to begin this study; and Yale University, through the award of a Morse Fellowship and supplementary travel funds for research in Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Jamaica, and West Africa, helped me to complete it. The Yale University Library sought out several hundred titles through interlibrary loans and purchased at least as many more titles from its William Inglis Morse fund for Canadiana. I am grateful to these institutions-and to the men who have made them what they are-for their help. Brief portions of this book have appeared elsewhere. I wish to thank the Princeton University Press and Martin B. Duberman for permission to reprint paragraphs from an essay of mine in his Anti-Slavery Vanguard: New Essays on the Abolitionists (1965). The Canadian Historical Review, in which, in 1969, an extended version of chapter 12 appeared, and the Canadian Historical Association, to which in 1964 I read a paper derived in part from chapters 3 and 14, also receive my appreciation. This paper has subsequently appeared in the Dalhousie Review ( 1969). Portions of the concluding chapter have been published in The Journal of Negro History, vols. 53 (1968) and 54 (1969). Friends and colleagues have given me much exacting and practical help by reading portions of this study as it progressed. Particular gratitude goes to C. Vann Woodward, Sterling Professor of History at Yale University, who read the entire manuscript in its penultimate version, and to Benjamin Quarles, Professor of History at Morgan State College, who read it in its xxxiii

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final form. Professor John Hope Franklin of the University of Chicago, Professor William H. Pease of the University of Maine, Professor Harold H. Potter of Sir George Williams University, and Professor W. L. Morton of Trent University read intermediate drafts of major portions and rooted out numerous infelicities of style and misleading nuances of meaning. Mr. Christopher H. Fyfe of the University of Edinburgh criticized chapters 3 and 5 in an early draft and directed me to most of the manuscript sources used in Sierra Leone, while Professor Edwin Redkey of the University of Tennessee helped by evaluating chapter 11. Dr. C. Bruce Fergusson, Archivist for the Province of Nova Scotia, sought out errors in chapters 2, 3, and 5, and Professor Marcel Trudel of l'Universite d'Ottawa read chapters 1 and 2. Dr. Daniel G. Hill of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, and Professor Alexander L. Murray of York University gave me access to their unpublished dissertations, while the late Fred Landon, Professor Emeritus of the University of Western Ontario, showed unfailing interest and gave me unlimited use of his own files. Professor George A. Rawlyk of Queen's University was a most helpful commentator on an early paper, and he provided entree to private records in Halifax, while the Reverends William Oliver and Charles Coleman of that city also aided me in many ways. Mrs. Miriam Swanson and Mrs. Anne Granger typed the final manuscript and cheerfully eliminated a host of split infinitives, dangling participles, and inconsistent spellings. Barbara Folsom of Yale University Press prepared the manuscript for publication. The maps for this volume were made possible by a grant for this purpose from the Provost's Fund. To all, I owe much. That this study will nonetheless retain errors of fact, judgment, and interpretation remains solely my responsibility. On the occasion of a second printing, I have corrected a small number of typographical and other errors-R. W. W. (March 1972).

Foreword

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A Note on Terminology Throughout the text Canada is normally used to designate the area encompassed by the Dominion of Canada. This term technically is incorrect for many portions of the present Dominion prior to 1867 (and for Newfoundland before 1949). When technical accuracy is required, as in dealing with legal matters, more precise terms are used. New France refers to the French colony prior to 1763. The Maritime Provinces are Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island; if reference is made to the Atlantic Provinces, these three provinces are joined by Newfoundland. Initially, Prince Edward Island was called Isle St. Jean; New Brunswick was part of Nova Scotia until 1784. Toronto was York until 1837. Until 1841, present-day Ontario was Upper Canada and present-day Quebec was Lower Canada; from 1841 to 1867, they were Canada West and Canada East respectively. During both periods they were referred to collectively as the Canadas, a term that excluded the Maritime Provinces. The whole of these British possessions were the British North American Provinces and they were, despite the term provinces, colonies. The Crown Colony of Vancouver Island was proclaimed in 1849, and it did not unite with British Columbia until 1866; references to British Columbia prior to the latter date are not meant to include the island. Some Canadians regard Americans as inappropriate when applied exclusively to inhabitants of the United States, but the word is so used here. Finally, Negroes as used in this study means any people who considered themselves to be Negro, or who were so considered by the law. West Indians are included within the term except where stated otherwise. There is a substantial body of literature which traces the evolution of this word and which suggests that colored is a more satisfactory term, while many Negroes today prefer Afro-Americans or blacks. Since few white Canadians were aware of these controversies, and since many Negroes quite rightly reject colored for the value judgment it implies, Negro is given its broader, or popular, meaning here, although all of the terms are used, in context.

xxxvi

Blacks in Canada

List of Abbreviations AHR BCA BM BPL CHA CHR CMS

co FO G

HO JNH LC MHS MVHR NA NBM OH OHS OPA PAC PANS PRO PSHS RSC SPG TPL WO

American Historical Review Provincial Archives of British Columbia, Victoria The British Museum, London Boston Public Library Canadian Historical Association Canadian Historical Review Church Missionary Society, London Colonial Office Records, Public Record Office, London Foreign Office Records, Public Record Office, London Governor General's Records, Public Archives of Canada, Ottawa Home Office Records, Public Record Office, London I ournal of Negro His tory Library of Congress, Washington Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston Mississippi Valley Historical Review National Archives, Washington New Brunswick Museum, Saint John Ontario History Ontario Historical Society Ontario Public Archives, Toronto Public Archives of Canada, Ottawa Public Archives of Nova Scotia, Halifax Public Record Office, London Pennsylvania State Historical Society, Philadelphia Royal Society of Canada Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, London Toronto Public Library War Office Records, PRO

List of Abbreviations

xxxvii

Abbreviations or short titles for less frequently employed depositories, publications, and organizations are established on the occasion of the first usage within each chapter. With most manuscript citations, a date or a folio number is provided-whichever may be most helpful to the reader.

CANADA, with particular reference to the West

Cities and Towns - Conodo 1. 2. 3. 4.

St. John's

56. Brooks 57. Tilley 58. Cords1on 59. "-:41 R'60. Tete Joune Cache 61 • Barkerville

29. Killarney 30. Emerson

Sydney

Truro Holifox 5. Guysborough 6. Digby

31. Regina

7 . Shelburne

8. Saint John 9. Fredericton I 0. Charlottetown II. Quebec 12. Montreal 13. 911owo 14. Kingston 15. Toronto 16. Homilton 17. St. Cotharines 18. Orillia 19.Mottowa 20. London 21. Chatham 22. Windsor 2 3. North Boy 24. Sault Ste. Marie 25. Ft. William 26. WIMipeg 27. PortQ9e La Prairie 28.Brondon

32. Moose Jaw 3 3. Saskatoon 34. Melfort 3 5. Prince Albert 36. Kinistlno 3 7. North .Bottleford 38. Eldon 39. Moidslone 40. Wilkie 4 I. Lloydrninster 42. wawota 43. Kitscoty 44. Edmonton 45. Fort Saskatchewan 46. Athaboska 4 7. Donat ville 48. Amber \/alley 49. Clyde 50. Wildwood 5 I. Chip Lake 52. DrCJY.IOn \/alley 53. Breton 54. Orurnhellet 55. CoiQGrY

N 0 R T H

62 . Komloops

63. Yale

64.Hope 65. Penticton 66. New WHtrninlter 67. Burnaby 68. Vancouver 69. Victoria 70. Prince Rupert 7 I . Eaquimdlt 72. Nonoima 73. lllsuvius 74.Sidney 75. Saanich 76. Duncan 77. Ganges Harbour 78.Sooke 79. Shawnigan Lake BO. Dawson Creek · 81 • Whitehorn

82.0owson 83.Leduc

WEST

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