North of the Color Line

Migration and Black Resistance in Canada, 1870-1955

Sarah-Jane Mathieu

• Editorial: The University of North Carolina Press
• Año: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780807899397
• Categoría: Scienze sociali
• Categoría: Studi afroamericani

North of the Color Line examines life in Canada for the estimated 5, 000 blacks, both African Americans and West Indians, who immigrated to Canada after the end of Reconstruction in the United States. Through the experiences of black railway workers and their union, the Order of Sleeping Car Porters, Sarah-Jane Mathieu connects social, political, labor, immigration, and black diaspora history during the Jim Crow era. By World War I, sleeping car portering had become the exclusive province of black men. White railwaymen protested the presence of the black workers and insisted on a segregated workforce. Using the firsthand accounts of former sleeping car porters, Mathieu shows that porters often found themselves leading racial uplift organizations, galvanizing their communities, and becoming the bedrock of civil rights activism. Examining the spread of segregation laws and practices in Canada, whose citizens often imagined themselves as devoid of racism, Mathieu historicizes Canadian racial attitudes, and explores how black migrants brought their own sensibilities about race to Canada, participating in and changing political discourse there.

CHAPTER ONE

Drawing the Line
Race and Canadian Immigration Policy

On the morning of 22 March 1911, a reporter for the Manitoba Free Press paced nervously in Winnipeg's CPR station as he awaited the arrival of the Great Northern No. 7, now infamous for the cargo it carried north from the U.S. border. For the past two days, Canadian immigration officials had held up the train and its 194 black passengers as they hastily searched for cause to bar their entry.¹ For months, Canadian newspapers had warned of an impending “Black Peril” from an “Invasion of Negroes.”² Western Canadian newspapers took particular interest in these migrants from Oklahoma, “the advance guard,” they claimed, “of at least 5,000 people of mixed Cree Indian and negro blood” forced out of the South by white supremacists turned elected statesmen.³ The Manitoba Free Press reporter hoped that he would be first to witness “Negro Settlers Troop into [the] West.”⁴

Rev. Henry Sneed, a Baptist minister of “considerable executive ability, and comfortable means,” shepherded the group of “Negroes Swarm[ing] into Canada.”⁵ “Old Daddy” Sneed had culled his flock of southern migrants from his church and Masonic lodges back in Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas.⁶ He then carefully plotted their immigration to Canada over the next two years. After canvassing the Canadian Plains for future homesteads in August 1910, Sneed selected northern Alberta as their future home.⁷ In March 1911, determined migrants loaded up seven freight cars with horses, mules, cattle, and farming equipment and boarded the special train commissioned for the trek north.⁸ It was the last time most of them ever saw the South.

Aware of growing unrest over black immigration into Canada, the Sneed party anticipated harassment from Canadian immigration officials and headed for the Canadian border armed with doctors and lawyers—“the former to certify to their physical fitness, and the latter to argue the legal side of the matter.”⁹ The politically shrewd Sneed added an extra measure of precaution. His attorneys summoned the U.S. consul general stationed in Winnipeg, Dr. John Jones, “to the border to see that the negroes receive fair treatment,” declared the Ottawa Free Press.¹⁰

The Manitoba Free Press journalist meeting the Sneed party faced a savvy set of settlers, describing the migrants as “quiet and well-behaved” and “cleanly . . . especially after so long a trip.” The reporter explained that Sneed's choice of healthy, experienced farmers “fitted for the strenuous work of pioneer life” would ensure success for this group of migrants in Canada. One such would-be settler, Reddick Carruthers, born into slavery in Texas, joined the Sneed gang “at the age of 70 aspiring after a free home.” After examining the Oklahoma immigrants, the reporter drew the sobering conclusion that “apart from race, they were a very promising lot of settlers.”¹¹

The question of race colored Canadian debates over immigration throughout the first half of the twentieth century. An Englishwoman who had lived in Oklahoma before immigrating to Manitoba offered a view shared by many white Canadians in the West: “It is with regret that I have read the account of the invasion of thousands of negroes from Oklahoma to the fair land of Canada. As there is in my heart a desire for the welfare of the Dominion, . . . I feel sorry that this country should be saddled with those that the Southern States are all too glad to be rid of.” She countered the Manitoba Free Press's claim that the Sneed group's wealth and farming know-how suited them for Canadian citizenship, proclaiming that for “those who have never lived in districts inhabited by negroes, and who have only come in contact with certain well-disposed persons of that race, the disgust felt towards the tribe is perhaps unintelligible or at any rate misunderstood.” She warned that “those acquainted with the habits of them can only take the negative side as to the desirability of the negro as a resident, a colonist, a settler. As negroes flourish in a hot country and do as little work as possible, it is to be hoped that Jack Frost will accomplish what the authorities apparently cannot.”¹²

By 1911, Canadian hostility to black migration gave African American would-be homesteaders ample cause for concern. Yet with the spread of Jim Crow in the South and the de facto exercise of segregation in most northern and western states, many African Americans increasingly sought political asylum from white supremacist demagogues. In a letter to the Department of Immigration, a potential black migrant, Rev. Will Hurt, captured the frustrations shared by countless African Americans, succinctly listing his reasons for coming to Canada: “I want too change government. I am tyird of this one. . . . I want too live in peace if I can for god sake.”¹³

Canada's western homesteading program enticed African Americans to head north, as did its legacy as a haven for freedom seekers prior to the Civil War. But if during the 1850s Canada had ushered in African Americans on the run from slavery, by the turn of the century most white Canadians strove for an impenetrable border. Canadian governments throughout the first half of the twentieth century averred that the Dominion of Canada should remain “for the white race only.”¹⁴ William D. Scott, the superintendent of immigration from 1903 to 1924 and Canada's most influential gatekeeper prior to the Great Depression, adamantly insisted that the “negro problem, which faces the United States, and which Abraham Lincoln said should be settled only by shipping one and all [blacks] back to a tract of land in Africa, is one in which Canadians have no desire to share.”¹⁵ Many white westerners concurred with their government's position, as evidenced by the Edmonton Evening Journal 's declaration “We Want No Dark Spots in Alberta.”¹⁶ Immigration officials and Canadian nativists rallied to ensure that this time white Canadians would not inherit Uncle Sam's “problem.”

According to the Canadian Department of Immigration and white nativists, crime, miscegenation, and lynch law accounted for much of Uncle Sam's problems. So “long as negroes are in this country . . . crime will continue and increase, in proportion as the negro population increases,” explained an editorial in the Edmonton Evening Journal. A “black cloud is looming up from the south which is dangerous enough,” warned the writer, because southern African Americans “are a menace to the welfare of the country.” He urged the Canadian government to “close out the yellow man, the red man, and the black man,” lumping together Asians, Natives, and people of African descent as undesirable citizens.¹⁷ Many white Canadians also posited that admitting African American migrants would result in moral turpitude and a decline in Canadian prosperity. For example, the Edmonton Police Department claimed that within three years of their arrival “20% of them [African Americans] were undesirables, either prostitutes or men living upon the avails of prostitution.”¹⁸

Canadian hysteria over black immigration was specifically rooted in language, stereotypes, and anxieties with powerful purchase during the nascent age of segregation. The arrival of black men in particular sparked groundless white paranoia, especially among some white women's groups. The Daughters of the Empire, an organization affiliated with the Guild of Loyal Women of South Africa, exhorted, “We do not wish that the fair fame of Western Canada should be sullied with the shadow of Lynch Law but have no guarantee that our women will be safer in their scattered homesteads than white women in other countries with a Negro population.”¹⁹ Canadians opposed to black migration persistently conjured up images of the black rapist, made popular in D. W. Griffith's internationally celebrated film The Birth of a Nation, when making the case for blocking passage of blacks into Canada. Fritz Freidrichs of Alberta alerted the minister of the interior that “these negroes have misused young girls and women and killed them. They will do the same in our country too.”²⁰ Even before any confirmed cases of crime, violence, or rape occurred, white Canadians against black migration invoked the “finger of hate pointing at lynch law” as an unimpeachable outcome of interracial coexistence. The simple solution, according to Dr. Ely Synge, was to cut off southern black migration at its source: “Now is the time to prevent,” he forewarned, “later on it will be too late.”²¹

Even when visions of black criminals floated in their head, white Canadians panicked at the sight of actual organized, affluent, and determined African American migrants—like the Sneed party—arriving in the Canadian Prairies. Destitute enslaved fugitives had stroked Canadian egos, but galvanized black migrants raised the alarm over the possibility of inheriting a caste of black insurgents stirred up by visions of independence, democracy, entrepreneurial spirit, and populist ideology. Canadians cooked up a rationale for black exclusion that danced around white supremacist convictions of the day, pointing instead to nature as the root cause of their concern over African Americans. The Edmonton Evening Journal proclaimed that the “extensive immigration of negroes is causing considerable uneasiness. That it should is not at all surprising.” Its editorial explained that nature— rather than racism—accounted for Canadian nativist anxiety. “Whether well-founded or not, we have to face the fact that a great deal of prejudice exists against the colored man and that his presence in large numbers creates problems from which we naturally shrink.”²² Prime Minister Wilfrid Lau-rier's administration reasoned that black migrants should be barred from the dominion as “the Negro race . . . is deemed unsuitable to the climate and requirements of Canada.”²³ Unable to stop determined black migrants by the spring of 1911, the minister of immigration, Frank Oliver, finally admitted that Canada's “Negro Problem is a difficult one.”²⁴

Yet white Canadians constantly discussed that “Negro Problem” as though it were a virus carried north by black migrants themselves. In effect, from the 1890s to the 1950s, white Canadians quite effectively produced their own “negrophobia.”²⁵ They rationalized their xenophobia and white supremacist propaganda by blaming nature—what they called “climatic unsuitability”— and black settlers themselves. Both the Canadian government and white nativists dreamed up hyperbolic tales, advocated racialized federal laws, and proposed segregation and lynch law as measures for controlling Canada's own troublesome “Negro Problem.” Their actions demonstrate that white Canadians in fact shared many white Americans’ racial tenets. While white southerners fought an insurgent black citizenry, white Canadians struggled with what to do about blacks in their dominion. They would spend the first half of the century wrestling with that question as African Canadians made increasingly effective use of their voice and their vote.

Insofar as white Canadians opposed black immigration, they worried most about “Southern Negroes still coming to [the] Canadian West.”²⁶ After all, these were the same people who, within one generation, had fought for their freedom, savored their new citizenship, believed in its promise, flexed their political muscle during Reconstruction, and then were stripped of their citizenship rights during what white southerners quixotically called “Redemption.” Instead of facing the dehumanizing effects of Jim Crow, millions of African Americans cast down their buckets and hopped a train out of the South.²⁷ Those bound for Canada, like the Sneed party, plotted their immigration, braved the long journey north, outwitted Canadian immigration officials, flashed fists full of dollars, and declared upon entry, “We came to this Sunny Alberta . . . not as peons, not as a subject race. . . . We feel that our gentlemen and ladies are able to compete with the white ladies and gentlemen of this country. . . . We crossed the boundary not asking for anything but loyal citizenship.”²⁸

The Sneed case demonstrates how African American migrants came to Canada in search of meaningful citizenship and refused to let nativists dictate the quality of that citizenship. It should be remembered that for southern African Americans, white resistance was neither new nor a compelling reason to forsake their citizenship claims. These same southern African American settlers brought with them decades of experience fighting white supremacy, with some even remembering life under slavery.²⁹ White Canadians immediately encountered that defiant spirit, as evidenced by Sneed's comments to awaiting journalists. “There ain't nothin’ the matter with us mister. Sick! Ah'd like youh to show me whar we got any sick peoples. . . . We're goin’ in for farmin’ [as] all of our men have farmed all their lives.”³⁰ He added, “We are going to take up our homesteads . . . as soon as our effects arrive.” The Sneed party's self-sufficiency, resourcefulness, and assertiveness alarmed white Canadians and fueled much of the hysteria engulfing the West from the 1890s to World War I.

IMMIGRATION ISSUES DOMINATED CANADIAN politics during the first two decades of the twentieth century. On 23 June 1896, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, a Liberal, ended twenty-two years of Conservative rule and won control of the House of Commons of Canada. Only the second Liberal prime minister ever elected since Confederation in 1867, Laurier immediately implemented bold new plans for his government. Within his first decade in office, Laurier brokered the Alaska boundary negotiations with Russia, authorized the construction of two more transcontinental railway lines, added two new provinces, Saskatchewan and Alberta, to the dominion, and wooed almost two million immigrants to Canada's western provinces.³¹ Prime Minister Laurier also modernized and broadened the federal bureaucracy, thanks in large part to his cabinet, known as the “ministry of all talent.”

Laurier assembled some of the most forward-thinking politicians of his time and entrusted his newly formed Ministry of the Interior to Clifford Sifton, the former attorney general of Manitoba. Born in Ontario, Sifton moved in 1875 to Manitoba, where he and his brother Arthur Lewis Sifton, future premier of Alberta, practiced law.³² As minister of the interior, Clifford Sifton oversaw both the Department of Indian Affairs and the Department of Immigration. A migrant to the Canadian Prairies himself, Sifton seemed perfect for the task at hand. He inherited the daunting job of advertising Canada's vast Plains to the world and convincing millions of immigrants that Canada promised more to new citizens than did the United States, Australia, or South Africa.³³

Clifford Sifton's Department of Immigration adopted a twofold approach to the immigration question. As of 1896, Sifton lured immigrants west with an offer of free land: 160 acres of free farmland awaited a would-be settler from Europe or the United States willing to homestead on the Canadian Prairies. Sifton then stationed throughout Europe and the United States salaried immigration agents who enticed immigrants to the dominion with ta...