Pioneers

Crossing boundaries: Centuries of Black migration on the Canadian Prairies

Students in front of the Amber Valley school, built in 1913. Credit: Glenbow Archives

Via CBC, and long overdue: Crossing boundaries. Excerpt:

In the morning darkness, Ron Mapp makes himself tea as he prepares for his journey home. He says goodbye to his wife, then drives straight north out of Edmonton. 

Mapp knows all the farms along his nearly 200-kilometre route to Amber Valley, Alta. As he passes them, his mind is flooded with 60-year-old memories of his first day as a 12-year old Black student in an all-white school in the neighbouring town of Athabasca. 

“It was a shock. You walked in a school and all you saw were white children. These other children stared at you,” Mapp says. 

There was a time when a trip across the Prairies could take you through all-Black communities, such as Amber Valley, Wildwood, Campsie or Breton in Alberta, or Maidstone in Saskatchewan. 

Amber Valley was once the largest and most prosperous Black settlement in Western Canada. At its height, it had more than 1,000 residents. 

Over the years, the people moved to the cities for school or to work. Mapp himself left to pursue a career outside farming. Today, Amber Valley is a ghost town.

A review in BC Studies

This review by Georgia Sitara appeared in February, but I've just become aware of it: Go Do Some Great Thing: The Black Pioneers of British Columbia. Excerpt:

The revised third edition of Crawford Kilian's ground-breaking book on BC’s Black pioneers is timely and essential reading. It is a critical corrective to omissions and erasure in both academic histories and in popular understandings, not only of the past but also of the present. 

The book’s most important contribution, as relevant now as it was when it was first published in 1978, is in its peopling of Indigenous territories, the lands now known as British Columbia, with Black settlers, alongside white and other newcomers. Composed of a melee of ethnicities and nationalities, Black pioneers came from various Caribbean Islands and eastern Canada.  They included free-born Northerners, Southern-born ex-slaves, Californians, and British subjects. Dispelling the white supremacist mythology of BC as a white settler society, the book introduces, by name, Black businessmen engaged in a wide variety of professions, skilled as well as unskilled workers, college graduates, teachers, preachers, and fortune seekers.  All of them walk off pages of the book and into our imaginations, changing how and what we remember. 

Edward Rogers just wanted a beer. He ended up battling racism in BC

In The Tyee, a wonderful article by Tom Hawthorn: Edward Rogers Just Wanted a Beer. He Ended Up Battling Racism in BC. I wish I'd known about Edward Rogers a year ago! Excerpt:

On Oct. 4, 1938, Edward Rogers and Luigi Mancuso decided to grab a glass of beer on their way home after work. 

The business partners locked their Pender Shoe Renew shop at 520 W. Pender in downtown Vancouver, next door to the Waldorf Café (later the White Rose Café). They walked west past a shoeshine stand, a tobacco shop, an auctioneer’s and the Toronto General Trust building before crossing Seymour Street to enter the Clarence Hotel. 

The lounge was under new management. A newspaper advertisement the previous month proclaimed the hotel a Vancouver landmark. “We have spared no expense nor neglected a single detail that will add to the comfort and pleasure of our patrons,” the ad stated. “Come and meet smiling Rose and Bill Low at the new place.” 

The renovated refreshment parlour, as it was billed, featured small round tables with carefully placed quartets of upholstered wingback armchairs. The long, rectangular room had a small bar in the middle. The well-appointed lounge included electric light sconces above wainscotting. Waiters in white jackets served the customers. 

As it turned out, the Clarence was not prepared to pleasure all patrons. 

A waiter refused to serve the men beer. 

Rogers, 68, who had been born in Kentucky to a father of Indigenous ancestry and a mother of mixed race, was Black. 

“I am a businessman here, a taxpayer, a voter, and a British subject,” Rogers told the waiter. 

The waiter insisted he had instructions from management not to serve Black customers. 

Negotiating the casual cruelties of discrimination in Vancouver, as in other cities, was a daily frustration faced by non-white residents. Some white-owned bars, hotels, restaurants, night clubs and barber shops imposed racist rules based on skin colour and ethnic origin in Canada’s own version of Jim Crow. 

Though he might have been a lowly bootblack for some of his working life, Rogers was a war veteran. He had met the mayor. Back in the day, he had squired American jazz musicians around Vancouver, showing off his city. He had undoubtedly faced his share of discrimination and did not care to endure such humiliation again. He decided to sue for damages.

Anny Scoones: History of Black pioneers reads like adventure story

A review in the Victoria Times Colonist: Anny Scoones: History of Black pioneers reads like adventure story. Excerpt:

I once took a course in British Columbia ­history at the University of Victoria, and to tell you the truth, I do not remember one single thing, except for a very sad little ­sentence or two, which, oddly, floats around in my thoughts very frequently. 

It was a quote from a settler’s diary. He had been venturing deep into the ­forest of central B.C. and was reflecting on the traumatic experience of being lost and ­disoriented and preparing to meet his maker in the wilderness all alone (no doubt quite unprepared) when he came upon two elderly Indigenous trappers.

The two Native elders drew a map for the settler. The quote from his diary entry went something like: “The Native trappers could not speak a word of English, so instead gave me clear directions by scratching out a ­little map on a piece of thin bark with a sharp stick.” 

Amid the vast variety of history books and material available these days, one that stands out is Go Do Some Great Thing by Crawford Kilian (2020, Harbour Publishing), which recounts the history of B.C. from the Black pioneering perspective — a fleeting topic in most history resources. 

It begins with the gold rush era, when many Blacks began to arrive from the United States, not necessarily to seek gold, but to escape the racism and slavery in America. They first settled in Victoria and created a strong, vibrant Black community, ­raising their ­families and setting up businesses — ­hairdressing and farming were popular endeavours. 

The book reads like an adventure story, describing the characters and challenges the early Victoria immigrants and established inhabitants struggled with, and there’s a ­joyous boom-town feel to it.

Reissued classic tells story of BC’s early Black settlers

In the Vancouver Sun, Tom Sandborn writes: Book review: Reissued classic tells story of BC’s early black settlers.

B.C. history has too often been painted in monochrome versions that focus on the arrival of European-ancestry settlers and their subsequent adventures here on this stolen continent. The lives and concerns of Indigenous nations have been treated as an insignificant prequel to the important story, and the many people of colour who literally helped build the province and the nation get minimal notice. 

In 1978, B.C. journalist and academic Crawford Kilian set out to correct this racist narrative with his ground-breaking study Go Do Some Great Thing: The Black Pioneers of British Columbia. Now, with issues of racial justice being powerfully raised by the Black Lives Matter movement, and the need for a more complete reckoning with racial justice more widely recognized, Harbour Publishing has issued a new and revised version of Kilian’s book about B.C.’s early Black settlers. It is a welcome and timely decision.

On April 25, 1858, the steamship Commodore arrived in Victoria harbour. On board were 35 Black Americans from San Francisco. They were driven to leave California by new evidence of American racism, (including the vile pro-slavery Dred Scott decision by the U.S. Supreme Court and the case of Archy Lee, a Black man held in San Francisco as a fugitive slave under the authority of the Dred Scott decision) and hoped to find a better life for themselves and their families under British rule. 

The Black settlers had been encouraged by colonial governor and Hudson’s Bay official James Douglas (himself a man of mixed racial background) who hoped that they would form a demographic counterweight to the unruly white American gold-rush settlers who posed a real risk to British control of what became B.C. More followed. 

Some of the Black settlers found work in Victoria, or established businesses, like Mifflin Gibbs, one of Kilian’s protagonists. Others tried their luck in the Fraser River Gold Rush. Still others pre-empted land and developed farms, notably on Saltspring Island, where the Stark family was prominent. Others entered politics. 

Some of these Black pioneers returned to the United States after the end of the Civil War, but many remained, and should not be erased, as they have been too often, from history. Kilian’s well-researched volume is a good place to start. Want more? Check out the excellent Hogan’s Alley society website, created in memory of a thriving Black community in East Vancouver.

Uncovering BC's Black history: Who is Mifflin Gibbs?

On CBC.ca: Uncovering B.C.'s Black history: Who is Mifflin Gibbs? This is the video version of the website mentioned in the post just below. Click through to watch a 7-minute video. The blurb:

Gibbs was the first Black person elected to public office in B.C. and helped guide the colony into joining the Confederation of Canada. CBC reporter Ashley Moliere, who is part-Black, decided to learn about him for Black History Month.

Who is Mifflin Gibbs? Uncovering BC’s Black history

CBC British Columbia has posted a remarkable website to commemorate Black History Month: Who is Mifflin Gibbs? Uncovering B.C.’s Black history. I had the pleasure to take part in this project, which was done with style, imagination, and accuracy. 

Four decades on, a book about BC's centuries-old Black history is updated for the 21st century

Via CBC Radio's Day 6: Four decades on, a book about B.C.'s centuries-old Black history is updated for the 21st century. Click or tap through to hear the interview this report is based on. Excerpt:

Crawford Kilian admits that the first edition of his book, Go Do Some Great Thing: The Black Pioneers of British Columbia, feels outdated. 

"I cringe a little bit because I was quoting some pretty crude language verbatim in that text that I didn't need to," the Vancouver-based author and former educator told Day 6 host Brent Bambury. "It was archaic and beside the point." 

In the new third edition, Kilian says "I worked very hard to make the language respectful to all concerned." 

Go Do Some Great Thing chronicles the stories of B.C.'s Black pioneers, a group of migrants who left their homes in San Francisco and nearby communities in 1858, for the promise of Vancouver Island. 

Fleeing legislated racism, the threat of slavery and dwindling prospects in California, the Black pioneers settled in what was then the colony of British Columbia.  

Forty-two years since it first hit bookshelves, the book — which is considered a foundational text on B.C.'s Black history — has been re-edited and re-released complete with a foreword by Adam Rudder, a Black activist and instructor at the University of British Columbia. The crude language written in the first edition has now been changed or removed.

In his foreword, Rudder reckons with the language used in Kilian's original version. While he understands why some may be offended by the terms used more than a century ago, they didn't come as a shock to him.  

"It was refreshing to have someone reveal this history in the form that it was actually in, and to just confront it and to challenge it," he said. 

"To expect people to be different, or to somehow come up with language that's appropriate from today, is an unreasonable expectation, I think."

A talk about the Black pioneers to the San Francisco Historical Society

On February 9 the San Francisco Historical Society posted my taped Zoom lecture about the situation that BC's Black pioneers faced in gold-rush California in the 1850s. You can see it here.

And if you have any questions about it, please post them in the comments section and I'll be happy to try to answer them.

BC's Black pioneers' story told in Crawford Kilian's Go Do Some Great Thing

An interview with Charlle Smith, editor of The Georgia Straight: B.C.'s Black pioneers' story told in Crawford Kilian's Go Do Some Great Thing. Excerpt:

Most British Columbians don’t think of Salt Spring Island as a centre for Black culture in this province. But back in the late 1850s, some Black settlers asked the first governor of colonial British Columbia, James Douglas, for permission to form a colony there, according to the memoirs of long-time Salt Spring Island resident Sylvia Stark. 

North Vancouver author Crawford Kilian mentions this in his book, Go Do Some Great Thing: The Black Pioneers of British Columbia. According to Stark, Douglas preferred that the island remain multiracial. “It’s an intriguing story,” Kilian writes, “but we have no confirmation of it.” 

Stark, who was born into slavery in Missouri, also wrote in her memoir that six other Black families were living on Salt Spring Island when her family moved there around the start of the U.S. Civil War. She lived to the age of 106, and her daughter, Emma, became the first Black teacher on Vancouver Island. 

“I kind of fell in love with Emma Stark, who was just a baby, a toddler, when they first arrived on Salt Spring around 1861,” Kilian tells the Straight by phone. “Judging from her photograph, she was a beautiful young woman, and she died at 33 of tuberculosis.” 

The Starks are one of many pioneering Black B.C. families featured in the third edition of Kilian’s 1978 book, which was published last year by Harbour Publishing. Another key figure in the book is Mifflin Gibbs, a politically active businessman who became the first Black person elected to public office in B.C. as a Victoria city councillor in 1866. 

“He was such a live wire and he always had three projects on the go at any given time,” Kilian says. 

His wife, Maria Gibbs, attended Oberlin College before they moved to B.C. Eventually, she decided to return to Oberlin, Ohio, with their five children, leaving Gibbs alone in Victoria. 

“His wife must have found she was very lonely, because there was almost no socializing between the white and black women in Victoria,” Kilian notes. “As far as I can tell, she was the only woman in the colony who had any postsecondary education at all.” 

Kilian feels that the new edition is far stronger not only in the research but also in the way he’s written about others who have been marginalized in Canadian history.  

“Since the Chinese and Indigenous people are major figures in the story of the Black pioneers, they needed to be treated with a little more respect as well,” Kilian says.