COMMENTARY

COMMENTARY Connect past with present in Black History Month

by Handel Kashope Wright

Growing up in my native Sierra Leone, I had not paid much attention to being Black, since just about everyone else was. It wasn’t until I arrived in Canada in the late 1980s for graduate studies in the seemingly ubiquitous whiteness of Windsor, Ontario, that I was made to focus on race, acknowledge my own Blackness, take on Black identity, and realize that, in the eyes of others, I was seen first and sometimes only as Black.

Since then, I’ve lived as a Black man in race-focused Canada and USA, including British Columbia, where I’ve spent the past 15 years. What I’ve come to realize is this: it’s hard being Black in Canada; it’s even harder being Black in B.C.

One of the myths that makes it hard to be Black in B.C. is the widespread impression that there’s little to no Blackness: no Black people, no Black history. Unlike elsewhere in Canada, B.C. has no Black neighbourhoods. While Halifax has Mulgrave Park, Toronto has Jane and Finch, and Montreal has Little Burgundy, in Vancouver there is nowhere to go where one can find a high concentration of Black people or where one can be among Black people— a curious fact about a major Canadian city.

The lack of present-day Black neighbourhoods in Vancouver is, in fact, linked to the racist erasure of Blackness in the past. Hogan’s Alley in Vancouver’s Strathcona area was once home to a large community of Black residents, including Nora Hendrix, grandmother to rock legend Jimi Hendrix. However, most of the neighbourhood was bulldozed in 1967 to erect the Georgia Viaduct—an act that saw not just the demolition of buildings but the erasure of Black community in Vancouver.

According to Statistics Canada, Blacks constitute some 1.2 percent of the province’s population. With B.C.’s Black community being relatively small and geographically scattered, it is altogether too easy to ignore or forget B.C.’s Black population.

All of this makes for what I call the Catch-22 of Blackness in B.C. Because there are relatively few Black people here, there is, apparently, little reason for interventions to help foster a more welcoming, supportive environment for us. But because there is not a more welcoming, supportive environment for Blacks in B.C., we fail to attract Black people or keep them if they do come here. In education, for example, there are supposedly too few Blacks to justify Black studies in the curriculum. But because of the lack of Black studies, we end up knowing little of Black B.C. history and thinking there are no Black people here.

We clearly and urgently need to intervene in this vicious cycle, to escape our Black Catch-22. My recommendation is a Black Field of Dreams: “Build it and they will come.” In other words, establish Black studies to overtly attract Black faculty, staff, and students to our institutions of higher learning; teach all British Columbian students, in K-12 and beyond, about historical and contemporary Blackness; and foster an environment that is welcoming to Black workers and families.

Community groups such as the B.C. Black History Awareness Society and the Hogan’s Alley Society are playing a significant role in filling in the blanks, both in terms of raising awareness of Black history and addressing erasure of historical Blackness. And Black Lives Matter Vancouver is at the forefront of addressing urgent contemporary anti-Black racism. Works like Gillian Creese’s book The New African Diaspora in Vancouver: Migration, Exclusion, and Belonging, are helpful for learning about Metro Vancouver’s recent immigrant Black Africans. And since we lack Black place, social media groups like “Meanwhile, Black in Vancouver” are creating Black community in cyberspace.

But more needs to be done. This Black History Month, if we want to meaningfully honour and celebrate historical and contemporary Black British Columbians, we must take the time to learn more about our province’s history—its entire history, including its Black history.

Historical wrongs cannot be unearthed, let alone understood—and present-day discrimination cannot be understood, let alone addressed—until the past is connected with the present. This is a project not just for Black History Month. After all, those of us who are Black do not have the luxury of a month of identity. We are Black all year round. g

UBC education professor Handel Kashope Wright is senior adviser to the president on antiracism and inclusive excellence and coeditor of the forthcoming book, Black British Columbia: Past and Present.

Colonial governor invited Black pioneers to B.C.

by Charlie Smith

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.

Approximately 800 free Blacks from California moved to this province between 1858 and 1860. In Go Do Some Great Thing, Kilian makes a persuasive case that the colonial governor, Douglas, invited them because he wanted to bolster the population with non-Americans to prevent British Columbia from falling under U.S. control. Douglas was clever enough to recognize that the 1857 Dred Scott decision in the U.S. Supreme Court was sufficient to encourage them to come. That’s because this pre–Civil War ruling denied Blacks U.S. citizenship, whereas in B.C. they would be allowed to vote.

“This was a huge inducement, especially to people like Mifflin Gibbs and the others who had been very politically active all their lives and were so disappointed when [the] Dred Scott [decision] said, in effect, ‘You’ll never be citizens.’ No matter if you were the third generation of born-free black Americans, you will never be citizens.” g