Black Canadians

SIGNIFICANCE: Although African and Caribbean Canadians are a small minority in Canada, they have a long history that links at least three continents. Moreover, though they are a family tree with many roots and branches whose existence was long kept secret, they have played active roles defending English authority and protesting Canadian racism and continue to make significant contributions to society.

Canada’s first Black immigrant arrived in 1628, when a nameless six-year-old boy from Madagascar (later baptized Olivier LeJeune) became the property of David Kirke, an English privateer who conducted raids on the French colony of the Saint Lawrence. Institutional slavery accounted for the growth of the Black population in what was New France before the English conquest. Black individuals from the Caribbean plantations were bought and sold, and others entered the country during trade with Louisiana. Between 1628 and 1783, almost all Black people in Canada were enslaved. By 1760, the population of enslaved people totaled twelve hundred. When the British took control in 1763, slave auctions in Nova Scotia were given prominent newspaper publicity, along with notices about enslaved people who had run away and rewards for their recapture. During the American Revolution, Black Americans moved to Canada, attracted by promises of land, freedom, and equal rights in exchange for loyalty to the British cause. When some three thousand Black Loyalists arrived in 1783, most settling in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, some in Ontario and Quebec, the total Black population reached five thousand (including fifteen hundred enslaved people). Though only a small percentage of the Black Loyalists actually received land, and Black individuals were often enslaved and sold to First Nations people, Black loyalty ran high in the American Revolution. During the war, the Black Pioneers, a regiment from Shelburne, fought for the English in the belief that British North America was a safe haven.

In 1796, 600 Jamaican Maroons (formerly enslaved people who had escaped) were brought to Halifax. They helped build the Citadel, but disenchanted with their poor financial lot, 550 of them (including about sixty children) set sail for West Africa's Sierra Leone in 1800, right in the wake of the first Back to Africa movement in January 1792, when approximately 1,196 Black individuals (chiefly from New Brunswick and Nova Scotia) left Halifax in sixteen ships. Neither these events nor a third, small exodus to Trinidad in 1820 of ninety-five Black refugees affected Canada’s reputation as a haven for Black people, especially during and after the War of 1812, when from her base in Saint Catherines, formerly enslaved fugitive Harriet Tubman ran the Underground Railroad, an informal network of “safe” routes and sanctuaries for enslaved people who ran away. Between 1815 and 1860, roughly 50,000 of these fugitives remained in Canada, and after the official abolition of slavery, some became sharecroppers or tenant farmers for the English Loyalists, and others served as tradespeople or apprentices.

Caribbeans

Between the Civil War and 1900, Canada accepted Black immigrants only in emergency situations. Because the western provinces needed settlers, 1,500 experienced Black Oklahoma farmers were allowed into the prairies between 1909 and 1911. With the outbreak of World War I, the nation was more interested in nationalism and patriotism than in Black rights, prompting an exodus of 2,000 Black people after the war, chiefly to northern US cities like Harlem, New York. This loss was partially offset by the arrival of small groups of Caribbean immigrants who settled in the east, particularly Ontario, Quebec, and the Maritimes.

Up to the 1960s, Caribbean immigration was only a small percentage of total Canadian immigration because of tight restrictions based on ethnic affiliation. For example, a law prevented the entrance of Black Jamaicans but not White Jamaicans. After pressure from England (which had adopted an open-door policy in 1948) and the Caribbean, Canada, as a Commonwealth partner, had to relax its immigration policies. The West Indian Domestic Scheme (1955-1967) allowed 100 women to enter each year from Jamaica and Barbados to work as contracted domestics. By 1965, 2,700 had been admitted. In 1967, Canada fine-tuned a framework established in 1962, which became known as the points system, whereby all immigrants, regardless of country of origin, were to be assessed according to education and training, occupational skills, arranged employment, knowledge of French and English, family sponsorship in Canada, and employment opportunities in areas of destination. Subsequently, the Black population more than doubled. The peak years of Caribbean immigration were 1960 to 1990; this influx represented 3.34 percent of total Canadian immigration in the 1960s, 11.02 percent in the 1970s, and 9.49 percent in the 1980s. Most Canadian Caribbean people originated from Jamaica, Trinidad, Guyana, Haiti, and Barbados. The Caribbeans outnumbered Black expatriates from England and the United States, as well as immigrants from Africa.

Diverse Origins

The term Black Canadians encompasses Canadians of African and Caribbean heritage. Some Black Caribbean people prefer to be identified as Indo-Afro Caribbean Canadians, an unwieldy preference that has a revealing ethnological significance. In addition, some Africans do not like to see the word “African” applied to people born outside Africa.

Canadians from Africa include Black individuals from West, East, and South Africa, and Ethiopia; White South Africans and Portuguese; and Asian Indians of Muslim, Hindu, and Christian backgrounds. Black Africans are a very small group in Canada, partly because Canadian immigration policy has not favored African or Asian applicants. By 1925, when Canada’s population had nearly doubled, mainly because of an influx of White Europeans, and in the United States, Black individuals were discouraged from entering. From 1946 to 1950, Africans made up only 0.03 percent of new immigrants, with the figure rising an average of only 1 percent to 2 percent over the next twenty years. From 1968 to 1970, following the White Paper on Immigration, the average rose to approximately 2 percent of total immigration, with Nigerians and Ghanaians preferred to other Africans because of their education and skills. The highest number of Africans came between 1972 and 1980, chiefly Ugandan Asians (7,000 in 1972 and 1973) fleeing Idi Amin’s dictatorship, and Portuguese and English settlers from Angola, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe after these three countries achieved independence. Also, between 1973 and 1983, some 16,000 South Africans, mainly non-Black individuals, entered Canada, with an additional 321 arriving in 1984. The same year, Canada accepted 684 Ethiopian refugees, most sponsored by the federal government rather than private sources. The Green Paper on Immigration in 1976, which curtailed the entry of immigrants from the so-called independent classes, allowed those who were already in Canada to sponsor close relatives. Between 1950 and 1985, more than 100,000 immigrants entered Canada from Africa, including persons of European and Asian descent. Most African immigrants came from English-speaking colonies, and a smaller number came from French-speaking regions, chiefly Mali, Senegal, Zaire, the Malagasy Republic, and the Ivory Coast. About one-third of all these people spoke African languages (such as Ashanti, Hausa, Yoruba, Ibo, Kru, Sotho, Tswana, and Zulu).

Economic Life

Early in Black Canadian history, Black Loyalists, Maroons, and refugees were extremely vulnerable to exploitation and discrimination in employment and wages. Lacking high education and professional skills, they were forced to perform manual labor. Those who had been promised free land discovered that the small plots allotted to them were inadequate to support their agricultural efforts, so these settlers were also compelled to find menial jobs in neighboring White towns. Those Black immigrants who fled discrimination in California were able to settle in Victoria, British Columbia, because their savings and business skills enabled them to operate small businesses. The Black Oklahoma farmers who migrated to the prairies were viewed as a “Black problem.” Until well into the twentieth century, most Black immigrants from the West Indies, England, and the United States performed low-paying services as unskilled laborers. During and soon after World War I, many Black people found work as industrial laborers in the Maritimes, and others were hired as railway porters in Montreal and Toronto. In 1955, the West Indian Domestic Scheme allowed one hundred women per year from Jamaica and Barbados to work as servants, a frustrating experience for most who had been successful professionals (teachers, nurses, office workers) in their home countries. However, their contracts as domestics allowed them to apply for landed immigrant status after a year, which enabled them to move around the country freely and sponsor family members. The points system instituted in 1967 encouraged well-educated Black Caribbeans to flock into the country. This economic history has produced very wealthy, middle-class, and extremely low-income Black people, much the way Canadian society as a whole divides itself according to economic level.

Social and Cultural Life

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Black Canadians were caricatured as minstrels or as pleasure-seeking, irresponsible, and incapable of cultural assimilation. Paradoxically portrayed as dependent yet threatening, they were compelled to retreat into ghettos. In Toronto, for instance, in 1851, about one thousand Black individuals lived in the northwest section, eight hundred of whom were formerly enslaved fugitives. City directories specified those residences and businesses that were owned by Black people, and interracial socialization was discouraged. The existence of Black slavery and subjugation in Canada was largely denied or blamed on the Americans.

In the early days of the color bar, the chief means of support were the Christian churches that were segregated along not only sectarian but also color lines. Many fraternal organizations, mutual-assistance groups, and temperance societies were formed, and almost all were associated with the churches, whose leaders often led demonstrations and made petitions to various levels of government on issues of racial inequality and injustice. Gradually, individual provinces took decisive action, as in the cases of Saskatchewan’s first Bill of Rights (1947) and Ontario’s Racial Discrimination Act (1944) and Human Rights Code (1961). By the mid-1970s, all major Canadian cities had active Black groups such as the Congress of Black Women, the National Black Coalition, and the British Columbia Association for the Advancement of Colored People. However, despite considerable advances, Black individuals continue to view school boards and the police with suspicion. School segregation ended in 1965 when Ontario’s last such school closed, but new immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean find that their strong dialects put them at a disadvantage in English and other subjects requiring strong language skills, so much so that many of them are improperly streamed into vocational subject areas rather than academic ones. As far as the law is concerned, Black individuals respect Canada’s record of human rights while decrying many instances of police brutality, harassment, and racially motivated prosecution.

The sociocultural life of African and Caribbean Canadians is becoming increasingly entrenched through Black municipal councillors, school trustees and administrators, urban multicultural organizations and carnivals (such as Toronto’s annual Caribana Festival), and university chairs in Black studies. Cultural styles (including those of worship, music, speech, and family structure) have developed in response to conditions in Canada. Urbanization and increasing secularization have changed the roles of the church and local community. Black individuals have leaders in virtually all walks of life, from politics and the arts to pop entertainment and sports. Some famous Black Canadians include Lincoln Alexander (first Black Lieutenant Governor of Ontario and first Black Member of Parliament), Donovan Bailey (track and field athlete), Salome Bey (music), Dionne Brand (poetry), Rosemary Brown (politics), Austin Clarke (fiction), Ferguson Jenkins (baseball), Dudley Laws (radical politics), Oscar Peterson (music), and Carrie Best (human right activist and journalist).

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