American Radicals by Holly Jackson

Author:Holly Jackson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2019-10-07T16:00:00+00:00

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THE BLACK REFUGEES who fled Ohio for Canada in 1829 to found the Wilberforce colony with the initial support of the National Conventions of the Free People of Colour had been joined in the intervening years by other emigrants. By the 1840s, Ontario was dotted with settlements like the intentional communities of Dawn and Elgin, as well as regular towns with concentrations of expatriate black families. These communities north of the border became even more attractive in the following decade as the fugitive slave law continued to endanger every free person of color in the North, but especially the many who had once been enslaved. Then came the 1857 Supreme Court decision in the Dred Scott case, which declared that no person of African descent could ever be an American citizen, indeed that black Americans had no rights at all that white men were bound to respect. Thousands of African Americans crossed the border, streaming into Canada West from every city in the North.25

One particularly popular destination was Chatham, Ontario, which sits across Lake Erie from Cleveland, a quick ride from Detroit by train or steamboat. Around a third of the residents of Chatham were black exiles from the United States, and the town soon became large enough to support a newspaper, two churches, a school, and a firefighting company. Black settlers could also claim the same legal rights and protections as white Canadians, including the vote. This city was called “a mecca” and “the colored man’s Paris” of the mid-nineteenth century for the robust black community that sprang up there. Ontario was not utopia, of course, and the settlers still encountered racial prejudice despite their improved legal status. Some white Canadians took legislative action in an attempt to limit any further influx of black immigrants. But many African Americans found this kind of racism far preferable to the situation in the United States, fleeing a supposedly free democracy for the protections of a monarchy.26

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