page_title: Black Canadians
section_title: 1900s and 1910s
hierarchical_section_title: Black Canadians / History / 1900s and 1910s
caption_attribution_description: English: Jeremiah Jones during World War I. Jeremiah "Jerry" Alvin Jones (March 30, 1858 - November 23, 1950) was a Black Canadian soldier who served in World War I.
context_page_description: Black Canadians is a designation used for people of full or partial sub-Saharan African descent, who are citizens or permanent residents of Canada. The majority of Black Canadians are of Caribbean origin, though the population also consists of African American immigrants and their descendants, as well as many native African immigrants.
  Black Canadians often draw a distinction between those of Afro-Caribbean ancestry and those of other African roots. The term African Canadian is occasionally used by some Black Canadians who trace their heritage to the first slaves brought by British and French colonists to the North American mainland. Promised freedom by the British during the American Revolutionary War, thousands of Black Loyalists were resettled by the Crown in Canada afterward, such as Thomas Peters. In addition, an estimated 10 to 30 thousand fugitive slaves reached freedom in Canada from the Southern United States during the years before the Civil War with the Northern states, aided by people along the Underground Railroad.
context_section_description: The flow between the United States and Canada continued in the twentieth century. Some Black Canadians trace their ancestry to people who fled racism in Oklahoma, Texas, and other southern states in the early 1900s as part of the Great Migration out of the rural South, building new homesteads and communities – often block settlements – in Alberta and Saskatchewan just after they became provinces in 1905. Examples include Amber Valley, Campsie, Junkins (now Wildwood) and Keystone (now Breton) in Alberta, as well as a former community in the Rural Municipality of Eldon, north of Maidstone, Saskatchewan (see, for example, Saskatchewan Municipal Heritage Property No. 439: the original log-style Shiloh (Charlow) Baptist Church and associated cemetery, 30 km north of Maidstone.) Many of them were disappointed to encounter racism when they arrived in Canada, which they had regarded as a kind of Promised Land.
  Historically, Black Canadians, being descended from either Black Loyalists or American run-away slaves, had supported the Conservative Party as the party most inclined to maintain ties with Britain, which was seen as the nation that had given them freedom. The Liberals were historically the party of continentalism (i.e. moving Canada closer to the United States), which was not an appealing position for most Black Canadians. In the first half of the 20th century, Black Canadians usually voted solidly for the Conservatives as the party seen as the most pro-British. Until the 1930s–1940s, the majority of Black Canadians lived in rural areas, mostly in Ontario and Nova Scotia, which provided a certain degree of insulation from the effects of racism. The self-contained nature of the rural Black communities in Ontario and Nova Scotia with Black farmers clustered together in certain rural counties meant that racism was not experienced on a daily basis. The centre of social life in the rural black communities were the churches, usually Methodist or Baptist, and ministers were generally the most important community leaders. Through anti-Black racism did exist in Canada, as the Black population in Canada was extremely small, there was nothing comparable to the massive campaign directed against Asian immigration, the so-called "Yellow Peril", which was a major political issue in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, especially in British Columbia. In 1908, the Canadian Brotherhood of Railroad Employees and Other Transport Workers (CBRE) was founded under the leadership of Aaron Mosher, an avowed white supremacist who objected to white workers like himself having to work alongside black workers. In 1909 and 1913, Mosher negotiated contracts with the Inter Colonial Railroad Company, where he worked as a freight handler, that imposed segregation in workplaces while giving increased wages and benefits to white workers alone. The contracts that Mosher negotiated in 1909 and 1913 served as the basis for the contracts that other railroad companies negotiated with the CBRE. To fight against the discriminatory treatment, the all-black Order of Sleeping Car Porters union was founded in 1917 to fight to end segregation on the railroad lines and to fight for equal pay and benefits.
  During the First World War, Black volunteers to the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF) were at first refused, but in response to criticism, the Defense Minister, Sir Sam Hughes declared in October 1914 that recruiting colonels were free to accept or reject Black volunteers as they saw fit. Some recruiting colonels rejected all black volunteers while others accepted them; the ability of black men to serve in the CEF was entirely dependent upon how prejudiced and/or desperate for volunteers the local recruiting colonel was . Officially from 1916 onward black Canadians were only assigned to construction units to dig trenches on the Western Front. The Reverend William White, who commanded the all-Black Number 2 Construction Company of the CEF, founded on 5 July 1916, become one of the few Black men to receive an officer's commission in the CEF. However, the Canadian his
caption: Jeremiah Jones of Truro, Nova Scotia, was recommended for the Distinguished Conduct Medal for capturing a German machine post at Vimy Ridge in 1917.
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "240", "Image YResolution": "240", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS4 Windows", "Image DateTime": "2010:03:13 16:04:28", "Image Artist": "unknown", "Image ExifOffset": "184", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "322", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "4395", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "484", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "802"}