BLACK SOCIAL HISTORY : BLACK CANADIAN IN CANADIAN HISTORY - THEY HAVE PLAYED A VITAL PART IN CANADA'S HISTORY :

                                         

BLACK         SOCIAL          HISTORY

Black Canadians pose with Ontario Premier Ernest Charles Drury at Queen's Park, 1920

Early 20th century[edit]

William Peyton Hubbard was the first visible minority, and the first black citizen, to be elected to public office, at any level of government, in a Canadian city.

The flow between the United States and Canada continued in the twentieth century. A wave of immigration occurred in the 1920s, with blacks from the Caribbean coming to work in the steel mills of Cape Breton, replacing those who had come from Alabama in 1899.^[37]Some Black Canadians trace their ancestry to people who fled racism in Oklahoma, Texas, and other American Great Plains states in the early 1900s to move north to Alberta and Saskatchewan.^[38] (See for example those buried in the Shiloh Baptist Church cemetery in Saskatchewan.)^[39] Many of them encountered racism when they arrived in Canada, which they had regarded as the Promised Land.^[40]Many of Canada's railway porters came from the U.S. as well, with many coming from the South, New York City and Washington, D.C., and mainly settling in Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg and Vancouver.^[41] A noted cause célèbre in the 1920s was the case of Matthew Bullock who fled to Canada to avoid a potential lynching in North Carolina and fought extradition.^[42]

Late 20th century and early 21st century[edit]

The restrictions on immigration remained until 1962, when racial rules were eliminated from the immigration laws. This coincided with the dissolution of the British Empire in the Caribbean, and by the mid-1960s, approximately 15,000 Caribbean immigrants lived in Toronto.^[43]Over the next decades, several hundred thousand blacks came from that region, establishing themselves as the dominant black population in Canada. Since then, an increasing number of immigrants from Africa have been coming to Canada,^[13] as is also the case in the United States and Europe. This includes large numbers of refugees, but also many skilled workers pursuing better economic conditions. Today's Black Canadians are largely of Caribbean origin, with some of recent African origin, and smaller numbers from Latin American countries.

However, a sizable number of Black Canadians who descended from freed American slaves can still be found in Nova Scotia and parts ofSouthwestern Ontario. Some descendants of the freed American black slaves have mixed into the white Canadian community and have mostly lost their ethnic identity. Some of the descendants went back to the United States. Bangor, Maine, for example, received quite a few Black Canadians from the Maritime provinces.^[44]

Like other recent immigrants to Canada, Black Canadian immigrants have settled preferentially in provinces matching the language of their country of origin. Thus, in 2001, 90% of Canadians of Haitian origin lived in Quebec,^[45] while 85% of Canadians of Jamaican origin lived in Ontario.^[46]

In 1975, a museum telling the stories of African Canadians and their journeys and contributions was established in Amherstburg, Ontario, entitled the North American Black Historical Museum.^[47] In Atlantic Canada there is the Black Cultural Centre for Nova Scotia, a similar establishment located in Cherrybrook, Nova Scotia.