Pioneers

Go Do Some Great Thing returns in November

I'm very happy to say that 42 years after the first edition, Douglas & McIntyre is bringing out a third edition of Go Do Some Great Thing: The Black Pioneers of British Columbia. Publication is scheduled for late November; the manuscript goes to the printer on September 16.

It's been a wonderful experience to work with D&M and its editors. The text has undergone meticulous fact-checking, revision, and copy-editing, and I've been able to add considerable new material, including photos. D&M will also issue an e-book version for the schools, where I hope it will find a lot of readers. 

100 years ago today, Canada's black battalion set sail for WWI and made history

Via CBC News: 100 years ago today, Canada's black battalion set sail for WWI and made history. Excerpt:

They faced racism and discrimination, and they had to fight a battle at home before they could represent Canada in the First World War.  

Now families of the so-called black battalion say the soldiers' struggles carry new relevance, given the state of the world today. 

Many black men were rejected from enlisting during the First World War because of the colour of their skin.  

In 1916, Canada allowed them to form the No. 2 Construction Battalion based in Pictou, N.S. It was Canada's first and only segregated military unit. Nearly half of the battalion's 600 members were from Nova Scotia.  

"When they were told 'This is not your war, this is a white man's war,' they were in effect being told 'This is not your country," said Douglas Ruck. 

'Wall built of bigotry'  

Ruck's father, the late Senator Calvin Ruck, is credited for bringing the battalion's untold story to the forefront when he wrote a book about their struggles.  

"They were in effect separated by the rest of the forces and the rest of the country by a wall," said Ruck, drawing parallels to race debates ongoing in the United States. 

"A wall built of bigotry, a wall built of prejudice, a wall built of irrational fears, a wall built of hatred."  

Saturday marks the 100th anniversary of the battalion's departure to Europe. Even getting on the ship was a struggle. They were blocked from getting on their scheduled vessel because they were told they couldn't travel with white soldiers. 

Cultural history 

Craig Smith, president of Nova Scotia's Black Cultural Society, agrees that the timing of this anniversary is significant, coming days after the International Day to Eliminate Racism. 

"If there was a time for us to need to come together, for the need for cohesion, the need to bring organizations together, now would be the time," he said.  

"It's an amazing piece of cultural history in Nova Scotia, not just here, but one that resonates across the country."

The guardian angel of swimming children

Via Hakai Magazine, an article by Tom Hawthorn: The Guardian Angel of Swimming Children. Excerpt:

At precisely 10:40 a.m. on February 7, 1922, work stopped in every classroom in every public school in Vancouver, British Columbia. The day’s lessons were interrupted so that teachers could expound on the heroic deeds of Joe Fortes, who at that moment was being buried in one of the grandest public farewell ceremonies the city had ever held. 

The children needed little reminder about Fortes, the longtime lifeguard and swimming instructor at English Bay, a sandy beach mere steps from the growing metropolis. Indeed, some of the older pupils even owed him their lives. 

Named Seraphim at birth after the highest rank of angels, Fortes left his home island of Trinidad as a teenager to work as a deckhand aboard a brigantine carrying sugar. After living in Liverpool, England, for a few years, he signed on as a crewman aboard a merchant vessel bound for Vancouver Island. On the way there, the 58-meter boat struck a rock and barely limped into Vancouver, which at the time was a rough mill town cut out of the coastal rainforest along Burrard Inlet. 

With his ship undergoing repairs, Fortes worked odd jobs before becoming a bootblack at a waterfront hotel in Vancouver. He enjoyed life in the fledgling port and never returned to sea.

On the trail of the Yukon's black pioneers

Lillian Mabel Taylor worked in Livingstone Creek and Whitehorse from 1902-1913 as a cook and laundress, and owned mining claims. Image from the Yukon Archives, Eva Stehelin collection.

Since we're halfway through Black History Month, this is a good time to revisit an article I published in The Tyee back in 2009: On the Trail of the Yukon's Black Pioneers. Excerpt:

The Atlin Pioneer Cemetery lies not far out of town on the Surprise Lake Road. Not long ago, my wife and I stopped there and walked among the gravestones and markers. One of them, a 1970s replacement for a long-vanished marker, was for "John Ellwood Simons, African, February 8, 1914 age 51 yrs; froze to death." 

The manner of his death was not unusual. Others in the graveyard had drowned, or been found dead on a trail, or accidentally shot (one gunshot victim had been mistaken for a bear). Northern B.C. and the Yukon, a century ago, were hard places to live and easy places to die. 

In researching my book on the black pioneers of British Columbia, I had never heard of Simons. I still haven't been able to learn anything about his origins or his experience in the Atlin gold-rush era. I can only speculate that he was one of a number of black Americans and Canadians who moved north in search of gold in the early 1900s. 

But at the MacBride Museum in Whitehorse a few days later, I came face to face with another black pioneer: Lucille Hunter, photographed in her blind old age before she died in 1973. Making her acquaintance led me into a remarkable community that set down roots far north of the 60th parallel. 

A Yukon matriarch 

Lucille Hunter had been the matriarch of that community. In 1897 she and her husband Charles had traveled from Michigan to the west coast and then taken the Stikine Trail to the Klondike -- considered one of the hardest routes. She was heavily pregnant. According to the 1901 census, she would have been 23, though other sources say she was just 19. 

The Hunters stopped at Teslin Lake to deliver her baby daughter, whom they named Teslin. According to Yukon historian Les McLaughlin, who knew her in her old age, the local Natives had never seen a black person before: "Not quite sure what to call the Hunters, they simply described them as 'just another kind of white person.'" 

The Hunters moved on by dog team to Dawson City, arriving in February 1898. They staked three claims at Bonanza Creek and went to work. Lucille helped Charles dig for gold while also caring for Teslin. In 1901, according to the Yukon archives, they were among 99 blacks living in Yukon, among almost 30,000 whites. 

A few years later, McLaughlin says, the family moved to Mayo and staked some silver claims. For years, Lucille would walk between Bonanza Creek, outside Dawson, to Mayo -- about 220 kilometers each way -- to work her claims. 

Evidently the Hunters did well enough to stay in the Yukon, but their daughter Teslin, after marrying a man named Jorgensen and having a baby son, died. Then Charles died in 1939, age 70. Lucille, now 65, had to care for herself. 

She and her grandson Buster continued as miners until 1942, when US construction battalions (largely composed of black enlisted men) began to build the Alaska Highway. Lucille and Buster moved to Whitehorse. According to her obituary, she started a laundry business in a tent, with Buster making deliveries around town. At some point Buster Jorgensen married and moved to the Queen Charlotte Islands. Lucille remained in Whitehorse, living on her own despite her failing eyesight. 

McLaughlin recalls going past her tiny house, where the old blind lady listened constantly to her radio. The house burned down one night, but she survived and moved into a basement suite. There she remained until she broke her hip a few years later. After that she lived in hospital until her death in 1973. Her obituary said she was 94, but if her age in the 1901 census is correct, she was probably 99.

Every Goodbye Ain't Gone: A Photo Narrative of Black Heritage on Salt Spring Island

Here we are in Black History Month again. Yesterday I heard an interview on CBC Radio's On the Coast about Evelyn C. White's Every Goodbye Ain't Gone: A Photo Narrative of Black Heritage on Salt Spring Island. It looks like a fascinating book, and I'm happy to post a link to it here.

Leon Bibb, veteran singer, Vancouver legend, dies at 93

I had the honour to meet Leon Bibb only a couple of times, but I recall him as a man of serene gravitas—and a brilliant performer. Via CBC News: Leon Bibb, veteran singer, Vancouver legend, dies at 93. Click through for a video and an audio interview. Excerpt:

Famed singer and civil rights activist Leon Bibb has died in his adopted city of Vancouver, B.C. 

Bibb grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, when racial segregation meant he had to use a separate restroom and water fountain when he was outside of the black community.   

He left Kentucky at age 19, to live and work in New York.   

As a singer and actor, he appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show no less than 10 times and performed on Broadway in the original production of Annie Get Your Gun, alongside Ethel Merman. 

Civil rights 

He also performed regularly with artists like Paul Robeson and Harry Belafonte as part of the American civil rights movement for racial equality.  

Bibb moved to Vancouver in 1969 after opening for Bill Cosby at the PNE. He immediately fell in love with the city. 

Bill Sample, who worked with Bibb as a music producer since the mid-1980s, said his friend was an icon who will be missed. 

Singing, charm, storytelling 

"My first thought was he leaves a big hole," Sample said. 

"He used to fill that hole with his singing and his [charm] and his storytelling, but maybe what he leaves us with is the memory of all that beautiful work that he did."

While in Vancouver Bibb produced and performed in a number of stage and television shows — including One More Stop on the Freedom Train. 

That musical — about the underground railroad journey of black slaves to Canada — was originally presented at Expo 86. 

Bibb is well-known for helping establish the success of Vancouver's Arts Club Theatre.   

He co-produced and performed in the Arts Club Theatre's seven-month-long run of Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris. 

He also created A Step Ahead, the anti-racism school program that has been presented in both elementary and secondary schools throughout B.C. and Canada for more than 20 years. 

'Gravitas' 

"One of the things that made him stand out was authority," said Marcus Mosely, who formed the band The Sorjourners and knew Bibb for more than 25 years. 

"He had the authority of being one who was in the forefront during the civil rights era, he actually marched with Dr. King, he sang with people like Joan Baez ... so he always carried within him this gravitas, this dignity and this strength."

Hidden history of African American settlers in Wellington, BC uncovered

Via CBC News: Hidden history of African American settlers in Wellington, B.C. uncovered. Click through for the full report and an audio link to a radio interview with Christine Meutzner. Excerpt:

Jimmy Claxton, the first black man to play organized baseball in the 20th century, is one of the most well-known black Canadians in history. 

But Nanaimo Community Archives manager Christine Meutzner has always believed Claxton's couldn't have been the only black family living in Wellington, B.C., where he was born in 1892. 

And when asked by the City of Nanaimo and other local community groups to explore the history of Wellington, a former mining town and now a neighbourhood of Nanaimo, Meutzner discovered she was right. 

"One black person had already been identified and I thought, well, he ... wasn't deposited there by a stork — there must have been a family," she told On The Island. 

"There must have, perhaps, been other families, and that's how I discovered them." 

Meutzner, who recently presented preliminary findings at the Nanaimo Art Gallery, found at least 70 black settlers — or six per cent of the population —  lived in Wellington in 1891. 

Remarkably, that fact wasn't well-known until now. 

Many of the settlers came from Virginia and Tennessee in the U.S. to seek their fortune in Wellington, Meutzner said. 

A lot of them ended up working for industrialist and politician Robert Dunsmuir, who Meutzner said hired African-Americans as miners because he believed them to be more docile people. 

Most of the black men that came to Wellington remained single, lived in boarding houses, were either Methodist or Baptist, and left Canada within 20 years, Meutzner said. 

Mystery of mixed-race marriage 

Since Claxton was so well-known, Meutzner said, she started by tracking down his parents, William Edgar Claxton and Emma Richards. 

Their marriage certificate indicated that the two were a mixed-race couple, but Meutzner says it's unclear how that union was received in the community at the time because there are no records. 

"I would love to know what does that actually mean," Meutzner said. "Did anybody really care? How was that received in the community? How were they treated? Were they extraordinarily brave or were did they extraordinarily not care? I have no real way of finding that out." 

Though she may not have answers to those questions — being an archivist, not a historian — Meutzner hopes her work will further highlight the fact that Canada has historically been, and will continue to be, a diverse nation.

Black artist a trailblazer in Victoria's early days

Credit: Royal British Columbia Museum/BC Archives.

Thanks to Wayde Compton for sending the link to this article in the Victoria Times-Colonist: Black artist a trailblazer in Victoria's early days. I'd never heard of Grafton Tyler Brown. Excerpt:

Grafton Tyler Brown became the first professional artist in the province when he reinvented himself in his move to British Columbia in 1882. Two years later, he headed south to Tacoma and has since become famous in the United States as the first and one of the best black professional artists in California and the Pacific Northwest. 

Practically unknown now, his paintings of the Fraser, Thompson, Okanagan and Similkameen Valleys as well as southern Vancouver Island, were celebrated in Victoria in 1883 when he opened his inaugural exhibition. But Brown, the famous American black artist, was, surprisingly, a white artist in British Columbia! 

Brown was African-American by birth. His parents, Thomas and Wilhelmina, were two free blacks who had left the slave state of Maryland for the free state of Pennsylvania in 1837. Grafton Tyler Brown born February 22, 1841, was the first of three sons and a daughter, all of whom appear as black in the censuses of the period. 

At age 17 he headed west for Sacramento, California, on his own, and worked over the next two years as a hotel steward and porter, where the local census and directory makers described him as “Black” and “Colored.” There, his painting caught the attention of the local paper, which reported on Nov. 15, 1859: “We noticed last evening some very excellent painting done by Grafton T. Brown, a servant boy in the St. George Hotel…. The lad has never taken lessons but his execution will compare favorably with that of acknowledged artists.” 

In a move that changed his life, and, it would seem, his colour, in 1861, age 20, Brown left Sacramento for San Francisco, where he was hired as an artist by a German printer, Charles Conrad Kuchel. Brown was sent around the west to draw panoramic views of towns which Kuchel lithographed and sold to the townspeople, many of whom had also paid extra to have their homes and businesses prominently represented. 

Kuchel died in debt in 1864, and his widow turned over the business to Brown. At age 24, the former black porter owned an established print shop in San Francisco, and was one of only 55 lithographers in the entire United States. But he was no longer entirely black. 

Whether by chance or more likely by craft, when Grafton Tyler Brown, who had inherited his father’s lighter colouring, was enumerated by the San Francisco directory makers for the 1861, he was listed without the designation “coloured” applied to blacks. The 1870 census taker called him a “Mulatto” suggesting he was thought to have only one African American parent while that same year the Dun and Bradstreet credit agency called him a “quadroon,” meaning that he was thought to have a single African-American grandparent. In the census of 1889 he was listed as “White.” Race, the idea that people can be rigidly separated by their looks, proved itself to be quite arbitrary and open to interpretation. 

Grafton T. Brown and Co. took the lead in colour printing on the Pacific Coast. When in 1870, the first salmon canner in British Columbia, John Sullivan Deas, himself a black entrepreneur, needed colourful labels, he turned to Brown, whom he likely knew from when both lived near each other in San Francisco. 

In 1882 Brown moved again and reinvented himself one more time. Now generally accepted as “White,” he decided to make a living as a painter, selling original landscape paintings, and he chose to do this reinvention in Victoria. 

To see the little known parts of the province, he joined a geological survey party in 1882 as they travelled from Kamloops, through the Okanagan valley, up the Similkameen, and back to the Fraser by late October in order. By November he had established himself in a studio in Victoria in the Occidental Hotel at the corner of Wharf and Johnson streets and the British Colonist newspaper directed clients to him, describing him as “an artist of more than local celebrity in California and elsewhere.”

Abraham Lincoln Legacy: BC's digital commemoration of Lincoln's life

Thanks to @govTogetherBC for tweeting the link to this new BC government website: Abraham Lincoln Legacy | BC's digital commemoration of Lincoln's Life. Excerpt:

Welcome to the British Columbia government’s engagement site inviting citizens to collaborate on the preparation of a letter to mark the 150th Anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s death. 

Premier Clark has received a request from the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, asking her to prepare a letter that would reflect on the meaning of Abraham Lincoln and his legacy to British Columbians. The letter will be paired with a previous letter of condolences sent by the Governor and Legislature of the Colony of Vancouver Island to the United States in 1865 following President Lincoln’s assassination. 

The Premier has asked Sam Sullivan, MLA for Vancouver-False Creek, to collaborate with British Columbians, on her behalf. During the month of February, and coinciding with Black History Month, Sam will be collecting comments and stories from British Columbians, especially those whose heritage is connected to Lincoln and the legacy he created. Submissions will be accepted until end of day February 28, 2015. All comments and submissions will be reviewed prior and some may accompany the final letter that will be sent to the museum in April, 2015. 

We thank you for sharing a piece of your history with us today. One way to share your story is to leave a reply on the blog post below:

Click through to see the blog post, a welcome from Sam Sullivan—and if you have something to contribute, please do!

Welcome to Black Strathcona!

I'm very happy to link to Black Strathcona, a new website about the history of Vancouver's black community. The interactive map on the home page includes links to ten stories about that community, and it includes a page that will become a blog.