3,500 Settled in Canadian Province in 1780 : Cultural Center Researchers Uncovering Roots of Nova Scotia’s Blacks

Canadian schoolbooks have long ignored the story of the blacks of Nova Scotia, whose past stretches back to 1780, when 3,500 black settlers came to these bleak, rugged shores with Loyalists of the British empire fleeing the American Revolution.

Now, researchers at the small Black Cultural Center here are conducting historical studies and rummaging through attics and family trunks in search of old scrapbooks and other artifacts as they try to resurrect two centuries of black history in this Atlantic seacoast province.

Many of the early black settlers here had escaped from the slave plantations of the United States to fight for the British, who promised them equality as British subjects, including grants of land, after the war was over. Over the years, they were joined by other former slaves, many from the Chesapeake Bay region of Maryland and Virginia, and by waves of immigration from the West Indies.

Black laborers cleared the land, laid the roads and erected many of the public buildings throughout Nova Scotia, according to James Walker, a professor of history at Ontario’s Waterloo University.

But the promises of equality that drew blacks here were broken as soon as they arrived. The plots of land granted to black Loyalists were only a fraction the size of those given to whites; often they were remote, rocky tracts that were difficult to farm. The property often was transferred to blacks without full title, a condition that still bedevils their descendants two centuries later when they seek to mortgage or sell their land.

Stronghold of Abolitionists

Although there were scattered instances of slavery in Canada until the early 19th Century--some white Loyalists brought slaves with them--the institution never became entrenched.

White Canadians are proud that this country was a stronghold of abolitionists. Ontario province in central Canada had been the terminus of the Underground Railroad, which brought to safe haven runaway slaves and free blacks in the United States who were fearful of being forced into servitude after harsh fugitive slave laws were enacted in the United States.

What has not been as well known is that the vast majority of blacks who came to Ontario returned to the United States after the Emancipation Proclamation.

Canada never developed an explicit color line to segregate blacks. But custom and actual practice, especially here in Nova Scotia, enforced tacit racial barriers.

A historical monograph published last month by the Black Cultural Center documents the persistent efforts made by Canadian black men before they were permitted to fight in a black battalion in World War I. Although there were no restrictions or laws against their enlisting in regular units, white officers made it clear repeatedly that they were not welcome.

“I have been fortunate to have secured a very fine class of recruits, and I did not think it fair to these men that they should have to mingle with Negroes,” one white colonel wrote a superior in a letter preserved in public archives.

A dual school system for blacks and whites was maintained in Nova Scotia until the late 1950s, although exceptions were sometimes made. Black activist Rocky Jones recalled recently how he and other children from the black settlement near the coastal town of Truro attended classes with white pupils in the 1940s but had to use separate restrooms.

Unsung Hero

Blacks now in their 30s and 40s described the “invisible barriers” that kept them out of downtown restaurants, professional jobs and many skilled trades, and barred them from strolling through well-to-do white neighborhoods or being buried in white cemeteries.

Nova Scotia has its unsung counterpart of Rosa Parks, the defiant black Alabama woman who sparked the civil rights movement in the southern United States by refusing to sit in the back of the bus. In 1946, Viola Desmond, a black Halifax woman visiting the town of New Glasgow, breached local custom by refusing to sit in the balcony of the movie theater. When she refused to leave her seat downstairs among whites, police were called in by the management. They forcibly ejected her and jailed her overnight until she paid a $20 fine.

Desmond’s crime was that she had paid an entertainment tax of two cents on the movie ticket she was issued; the entertainment tax on the seats downstairs was three cents. The conviction was overturned when the Nova Scotia Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, modeled after the NAACP, appealed in her behalf.

Journalists and historians estimate that about 30,000 of Nova Scotia’s 857,000 people are black.

Bridge Pachai, the acting director of the cultural center, said his studies indicate that for many generations, the black population here constituted about 80% of all blacks in Canada. Since the late 1960s, when Canada opened its doors to immigrants from the Caribbean, he said, they have constituted only about 10%. When the last Canadian census was taken, in 1981, race was listed optionally.

Black Nova Scotians are scattered in an archipelago of 47 enclaves, some numbering only a few families. These insular communities are linked through the Baptist Church, which for generations has been the sustaining and often sole institution in the aggrieved settlements.

Many blacks here and elsewhere in Canada retain a firm attachment to the British monarchy. At a banquet in Toronto of blacks from across the country last December, the evening was opened with a toast to Queen Elizabeth II. Virtually all solemnly complied and welcomed the presence of the crown’s representative in Ontario, Lt. Gov. Lincoln Alexander, a black man appointed last year by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney to the ceremonial post.

sh Heavyweight Boxer

Henry Bishop, the curator of the cultural center, said he and other blacks of his generation grew up unaware of their historical past. As a child he had learned from his mother the legend of the heavyweight boxing contender from his hometown, Sam Langford, who earned modest fame in the United States at the turn of the century as the “Boston Tar Baby.”

Much later, Bishop said, he became aware of an ancestry on his mother’s side extending back to a black Loyalist family, the Cromwells, who had fought with the British during the American Revolution.

“It’s strange that I sort of delved into this area,” he remarked, “because, you see, in school we had no knowledge of it. We were not taught any aspect of black history. Anything we did read or hear about was negative. You might find some negative aspects of Africa, you know, of Pygmies in the forest. That was sort of a put-down we felt. You didn’t want to identify with anything that was black.”

Other blacks who grew up in isolated hamlets in the timber forests and coastal fishing villages of Nova Scotia in the 1940s and 1950s said they were barely aware of other blacks outside their own settlements.

Calvin Ruck, a former railroad porter and now a social worker, has written a monograph on blacks who battled the Canadian military to be able to fight in World War I. He grew up in a mining and steel town on Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton Island. As a child, he said, he did not know there were large numbers of other blacks on the mainland.

Rocky Jones, 45, said he learned of a larger world of blacks only with the advent of television. He remembers his excitement at seeing Bill Cosby in the “I Spy” series.

“I had never seen a black lawyer, a black doctor or a black professor,” Jones said. “The most distinguished black man in my community was a railroad porter. So when I saw Bill Cosby, that was my eye-opener. I never heard of the Loyalists until after I was 25 years old. Nobody questioned anything. This is just the way it was when I was growing up. All my parents told me was, ‘You’re just as good as anybody.’ ”

In the 1960s, the currents of black protest in the United States reached Nova Scotia. The young grew their hair in Afros and shouted “Power to the people.” But there was not the same stormy confrontation.

Black Panther Visit

The most calamitous civil rights event remembered here was when, in 1969, Jones invited American black activist Stokely Carmichael and a few Black Panther activists to visit. The uneventful meeting startled and alarmed whites and created deep divisions inside the black communities about the wisdom of the move.

In the aftermath, the Canadian government provided funding for the then-new Black United Front of Nova Scotia. The provincial legislature funded efforts that would culminate in the erection of the cultural center.

Programs since then at the local university have raised the numbers of blacks attending. The province has a few black lawyers and doctors, although many are recent immigrants from the West Indies.

Blacks complain about the justice system and of discrimination in the integrated schools, which have few black teachers. Most black youngsters end up in the slower learning tracks.

Although tight-knit, hard-working large families have been the tradition here, black leaders are beginning to face problems familiar in the United States: teen-age pregnancies, school dropouts and young men who turn to crime. The dreaded drug “crack” has infiltrated.