“Our Negro Citizens” (ONC) was a weekly column in the Edmonton Journal and Edmonton Bulletin in the early 1920s. It was written by Reverend Geo. W. Slater Jr., pastor of the Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal (EAME) church in Edmonton.
Disclaimer: Please note that this piece references anti-Black violence, brutality, and white supremacy. A reference to a specific act of…
Before the early 1960s, few immigrants of African descent were allowed into Canada. Because of racist white preferred immigration rules and regulations, “admittance of ‘coloured or partly coloured persons’ was restricted to certain classes of close relatives of Canadian citizens and cases deemed as having exceptional merit.”
Newspapers frequently reported negatively on the arrivals of Black immigrants from the United States, including the Edmonton Bulletin, Edmonton Journal, and Calgary Eye Opener. The first group of Black peoples to arrive were noted rather disparagingly by one newspaper, “It was in 1908 that the first party arrived from the cotton fields of Oklahoma and settled along the Grand Trunk Pacific, the largest settlement being at Chip Lake.”
Last year, while exploring South Asian music history in Edmonton, I randomly searched “Singh + artist + 70s Edmonton” and…
The Canadian National Railway Pullman train bustled through the Rocky Mountains on the way from Vancouver headed for a stop…
Advertisements promoting the “Last Best West”—a frontier open to all pioneers—have become an ingrained part of the Canadian national mythology. Like…
Read The Last Black West: Oklahoma Freedmen Seek Refuge in Alberta, Part 1. As we noted in Part 1, early…