James Weldon Johnson, poet, essayist, and author of Lift Every Voice and Sing. Johnson’s magisterial work is often referred to as the “Negro National Anthem”. (Photo courtesy of ASCAP.com)
Around 1900, the legendary African-American author and composer James Weldon Johnson penned Lift Every Voice and Sing. He didn’t mean for it to become “The Negro National Anthem” but the song was so powerful and inspirational that it was informally adopted as such. People of all races and religions – from America to Angola to Japan – have been invigorated by it ever since.
Rabbi Stephen Wise, an NAACP member during the 1920s, once wrote that it is “the noblest anthem I have ever heard. It is a great upwelling of prayer from the soul of a race-long wronged but with a faith unbroken.”
One hundred and thirteen years later, I pray that African-Americans would once again be galvanized by the words of this song. In addition to being historic and spiritual, the words of Lift Every Voice and Sing could serve as a guidepost for us as we strive to “Return to Royalty” and be all God created us to be as individuals and as a people.
Let’s look at a few of the lyrics:
“Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us…”
Johnson wrote that the intense oppression we suffered during slavery made our faith in God strong. With nothing else to latch onto, with nothing else to put our hope in, we clung to God. This is biblical, as the children of Israel did the same thing whenever they were oppressed.
Even as individuals, we have a tendency to call on God when times are tough, yet to ignore Him when He prospers us. As a people, we must fight the urge and the temptation to forget God now that we have more money, more political clout, more opportunities, and more education. We have to remember that “every good and perfect gift comes from above” (James 1:17) and that God has not given us these gifts for us to leave Him out.
Johnson also talked of singing about this faith. A song is something that’s recited repeatedly. So in other words, we should consistently remind ourselves of the journey God has brought our people through. Again, this was the case with the Israelites, who constantly taught generation after generation about how God brought them out of Egypt and showed Himself strong to them.
This appears to be something we have lost as a people as much of the younger generation seems cut off from, and oblivious to, our history. When the younger generation not only glosses over the idea that hearing the N-word upsets their elders (many of whom may have seen brutal treatment associated with that word), but actually fights adamantly to defend their usage of it, the importance of our history clearly is not being transferred from old to young.
“Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us…”
At the turn of the 20th century, when there were far fewer reasons for Black folks to be optimistic, Johnson wrote about being full of hope. Today, even though we’ve got a Black president, even though we’ve got superstar entertainers and athletes, even though we have prolific individuals in practically every field of endeavor, too many Black children are afraid they’ll die at the hands of another Black person and won’t grow to see adulthood. And more and more young Black males are killing themselves. Throughout slavery and Jim Crow segregation, Blacks had astonishingly low rates of suicide, especially considering the racism and oppression they experienced on a daily basis. But since the 1980s, the suicide rate for Black men has been rising rapidly. Too many of our youth can’t sing a song full of hope.
Hope is a sign of our connection to God, for knowing God and how awesome, powerful and miracle-working He naturally gives us hope. That significant numbers of Black kids don’t think they’ll live past 18 years of age or feel compelled to take their own lives shows that we haven’t adequately shown them how to be connected to God through Jesus Christ.
How could a people less than 40 years out of slavery, who had all the gains of Reconstruction taken away, sing of hope, and yet today, with all the progress we’ve made, many of our children are hopeless? What’s the difference?
Jesus Christ and the church was the hub of the Black community back then. Not so anymore. Johnson sums it up in his final chorus:
“Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,
Lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee…”
As a people, let’s restore the place the Lord Jesus Christ once had in our personal lives, in our families, and in our communities. He showed Himself strong to us. In much bleaker times than this, He enabled us to produce newspapers, mutual aid societies, insurance companies and more. He gave us the strength to “keep hope alive” and to endure slavery and to believe that “we shall overcome” against the most tremendous of odds.
Though the Black family had been decimated during slavery, when Christ was our center, roughly 90% of Black children were born into a home where the father was present in 1920. In 1960, that number was 80%. Today, it’s less than 30%. It seems that as our faith in Christ has gotten weaker, we as a people have gotten weaker as well. Let’s learn from the song and stay true to its closing lines:
“Shadowed beneath Thy hand,
May we forever stand,
True to our God,
True to our native land”
This is not to belittle the systemic, institutional and racist obstacles that still work against us; it’s just to say let’s take responsibility for what we can control, first and foremost by having true and sincere faith in the God Johnson wrote about all those years ago.
Violence dramatically affects the people directly involved — but it doesn’t stop there: The repercussions, especially of gun violence, ripple out across entire communities.
People become frightened, stressed and less engaged in neighborhood life. Their physical and mental health suffer. Those who are financially better off move away, and housing prices decline, setting in motion a downward community spiral — one that engenders still more violence.
“Violence is not just these little isolated instances of one individual doing a bad thing to another person,” says Michelle Kondo, a social scientist at the US Forest Service Northern Research Station in Philadelphia. “Crimes happen in a context, and environments can contribute to those acts of violence.
Kondo is one of a growing number of sociologists, epidemiologists and public health researchers who are focusing on neighborhoods as the most effective context in which to study violence and devise innovative interventions. They say that how communities are arranged — and the subtle cues people encounter as they move about in them — affects the way they live and interact with others. This makes a place either vibrant and welcoming or the opposite.
“Some places are more violent than others,” says Robert Sampson, a social scientist at Harvard University who studies crime and urban inequality. This, he adds, “suggests that the locus of intervention should be the neighborhood. That’s not to say that individuals are not important — it does say that you can get a lot more crime-reduction effect from a more population-based approach.”
Neighborhood-level interventions may not only cut down violence and crime but benefit communities in other ways, too. “These small — what we call ‘treatments,’ because of a public health perspective — have big effects on neighborhood life,” says Bernadette Hohl, an epidemiologist at Rutgers University. She says that residents are quick to realize that the interventions also improve community well-being, social interactions and civility between neighbors. They improve the health of people who live in such communities, replacing chronic fear and poor coping responses such as drug use with reduced stress and risk of mental illness.
The most promising interventions to emerge so far from this public health approach are improved housing and blight remediation. Spreading out public housing — replacing high-rises with dispersed, scattered-site buildings — has been shown to effectively reduce violent crime. Improving, or “treating,” abandoned buildings and vacant lots can also reduce rates of violence and improve public health, at relatively low cost and with little political resistance.
Building safer, healthier neighborhoods
Disintegrating buildings with boarded-up doors and smashed windows alongside plots full of weeds and trash are much more common than one might think. About 15 percent of the land in US cities is considered vacant or abandoned — a swath that adds up to roughly the size of Switzerland.
Kondo and her colleagues have focused their research on blight remediation in the abandoned buildings and vacant lots of Philadelphia, which has more than 3,000 deserted properties. In research they published in 2018, they reported that residents living near “treated” vacant lots, where trash and debris had been removed and people planted grass and trees, felt the neighborhoods had markedly improved, according to interviews with 445 randomly selected people in the area.
Police reports also showed as much as a 29 percent reduction in gun violence, which, if scaled up to the whole city, would translate to 350 fewer shootings each year. Interviewees’ perceptions of crime and safety concerns when going outside the home were reduced by 37 percent and 58 percent, respectively. A follow-up study published this year surveyed 342 Philadelphians living near such vacant lots and found that their feelings of depression and poor mental health dropped by about half.
Charles Branas, an epidemiologist at Columbia University, collaborated with Kondo on the Philadelphia research on remediating dilapidated buildings and vacant urban land. To explain their results, he invokes a kind of “broken windows theory”: Neglected and vandalized spaces start to multiply because people are fearful and are less apt to maintain the upkeep of an area if it’s surrounded by places that haven’t been kept up. And that allows serious crime to move in.
“But we find that if you go in and clean those places, if you fix the buildings even in a very basic way, and if you green abandoned land, people begin to become invested in that space and they don’t want it to return to the way it was,” Branas says.
The nature of public housing also plays a significant role. More incidences of violence tend to occur in places with concentrated public housing such as tower blocks. But when Chicago demolished 161 old high-rise public housing units in the 1990s, for example, the numbers of gunshots fired, and homicide rates, dropped by 5 percent to 8.5 percent across the city and outweighed small rises in crime in the areas where former tower-block residents moved to.
Another team of researchers studied Denver over the same period, as the city built 38 dispersed public housing units. Residents in those neighborhoods saw no increase in crime rates, and the study authors suggest that the new structures may have led to lower crime rates in some nearby areas.
The promise of holistic, customizable interventions
Of course, widespread violence is a massive, complex problem, and multipronged solutions would likely work best. Poverty, poor nutrition, guns and environmental contamination — such as high levels of lead exposure — can all play major roles in both public health and levels of chronic violence, and they all should be addressed, these researchers say.
But grasping some of these obvious, large nettles can be very difficult. It’s hard to change the economic system, it’s controversial to enact stronger gun control laws and it’s expensive to rebuild large-scale infrastructure.
That is why proponents of altering neighborhood environments say this approach is so promising: It provides some quick wins. Early reports already have implications for city planners and policy-makers seeking simple, cost-effective interventions to reduce violence, which currently costs the US tens of billions of dollars in work loss and medical bills every year.
Social scientists continue to seek out treatments that could make a dent in crime that hits poor communities the hardest. These might include reducing alcohol availability, opening new neighborhood schools and improving public transit, although findings from studies have been mixed. The gold standard approach toward such studies are randomized controlled trials — like what’s done when testing drug treatments for an ailment, but on a citywide scale. The Philadelphia studies were structured that way (only certain neighborhoods were targeted for treatment) but many other, earlier interventions were not.
Cities may find that reshaping their built environment is a relatively easy, uncontroversial way to tackle the complex problem of violence and improve public health at the same time, Branas says.
“Political opposition to this is nil. The gun lobby’s not opposed to this at all, so this is largely an apolitical treatment for gun violence in our cities,” he says. “Impoverished neighborhoods in cities are desperately in need of inexpensive treatments like this.”
As many as 1,200 people living around the forests of coastal Kenya and Tanzania have turned to butterfly farming to make a living. Many of them were once loggers who now defend the forest.
Three butterfly-farming initiatives aim to conserve forests while generating sustainable incomes for local communities by raising and selling pupae to research institutes and butterfly houses in Europe and Turkey.
The most successful of the initiatives is helping to conserve the 420 square-kilometer (162 square-mile) Arabuko-Sokoke Forest Reserve in Kilifi county, Kenya, the last large remnant of a forest that once stretched from southern Somalia to northern Mozambique.
By contrast, the two Tanzanian projects are currently challenged by a government ban on wildlife exports.
KILIFI COUNTY, Kenya — If 51-year-old Hillary Thoya were to choose a lucky number, it would surely be 5,000. That’s the amount, in Kenyan shillings, the logger and carpenter turned butterfly farmer paid to secure his freedom a decade ago. And it was the same amount that assured him his newfound venture could actually sustain his family at a time when he was considering giving up.
One afternoon in 2008, Thoya was arrested by Kenya Forest Service (KFS) officers inside Arabuko-Sokoke Forest Reserve in Kenya’s Kilifi county, accused of illegally felling trees. Thoya wasn’t too concerned; he knew a small bribe would quickly secure his release and he could get back to the job of completing construction of a sunbed for a customer.
However, luck wasn’t on Thoya’s side. Earlier that month new forest officers had been dispatched to the region precisely to curb instances of bribery.
“As I was trying to negotiate for my freedom, the officer kept telling me ‘OK, OK, but let’s go discuss that in the office,’ and as soon as I got into their vehicle they drove me into the compound of a police station,” Thoya recalled.
He spent four days at the police station before his brother-in-law came to his rescue, coughing up a fine of 5,000 shillings ($50).
Thoya spent two more years dodging KFS officers in the forest before he finally stopped logging illegally and learned to farm butterflies instead, as part of the Kipepeo Butterfly Project. Today, Thoya is one of hundreds of butterfly farmers who are active champions for the protection of Arabuko-Sokoke forest.
With a smile on his face, he recently recounted the first big payment he received from his farming-group chair, which convinced him he’d made the right career move.
“I was wondering if I had made the wrong decision since I was earning approximately 500 [shillings, $5] a week. But when she sent me 5,000 on mobile money transfer I almost thought she had confused my payment with that of another farmer,” Thoya said.
Thoya’s story is common around the forests of coastal Kenya and Tanzania. Many residents, including Thoya, are members of the indigenous Mijikenda ethnic group. And like him, many have ditched illegal logging or hunting to participate in butterfly farming initiatives: Kipepeo Butterfly Project in Kenya or the Amani Butterfly Project or Zanzibar Butterfly Centre in Tanzania. As many as 1,200 farmers have participated in recent years, with Kipepeo, which is focused on Arabuko-Sokoke forest, carrying the largest number at 878.
During peak season, from March to September, Thoya doubled his luck and now earns up to 10,000 shillings each week.
Thoya said the work enabled him to set up a fish-selling business for his wife, who previously didn’t work outside the home. Together they’ve been able to educate their 10 children, some through vocational institutes.
The business of butterflies
At his family compound in Magangani village, about 8 kilometers (5 miles) from the Indian Ocean resort town of Watamu, Thoya sliced a rotting mango and sprinkled its juice on a net. He was preparing to trap his next batch of butterflies.
The current group, mostly variable diadems (Hypolimnas anthedon) in the caterpillar stage, was locked up in a netted cage outside Thoya’s house. He was waiting for them to transition into pupae so he could sell them to Kipepeo. From there they would be sent abroad to spend the rest of their lives in a butterfly house in the United Kingdom, perhaps, or Turkey.
Thoya said he wasn’t expecting much from the current batch; the brown-and-white variable diadems, rather plain by butterfly standards, sell for a mere 20 shillings (20 cents) a pupae. But he was optimistic that his next batch would include more colorful, and hence marketable, butterflies like flame-bordered charaxeses (Charaxes protoclea), stunners in black and crimson.
At the Arabuko-Sokoke Forest Reserve entrance, Thoya showed his pass to a forest officer, who signaled him to proceed into the forest.
Kipepeo is managed by the National Museums of Kenya and partners with other government agencies, including KFS and the Kenya Wildlife Service, and helps finance the farmers to start up.
“When I decided to venture into butterfly farming, I did not have any money. But after training, the project team gave me this catching net and constructed the rearing shed for me,” Thoya said as he configured his net into a funnel shape on a tree branch.
An unlucky white-and-black butterfly fell right into the net as its cohorts flitted off the branch and away. Thoya explained that the fermented mango juice attracts the butterflies, but once they feed on it the ethanol it contains makes them woozy and unable to fly.
After repeating the process on 10 trees, Thoya’s net was a scene of colorful butterflies. He was pleased by his luck: among the catch was an African swallowtail (Papilio dardanus), a.k.a. the flying handkerchief, one of the most highly priced species, at 80 shillings (80 cents) per pupae.
Thoya would bring it and the rest back home to live in a netted cage. With more luck, they would lay eggs on the orange plants inside. The eggs would hatch into caterpillars, and the caterpillars would transition to pupae he could sell to Kipepeo about three weeks after he’d trapped the parents in the forest.
“Initially I did not join because I was interested in conservation. I was just looking for an income-generating method that would not get me in trouble with the authorities,” Thoya said. “But eventually, as time went by, I realized that I can benefit from the forest and leave it intact for my children and grandchildren, who may want to benefit too.”
The farmers are divided into groups. Thoya belongs to the Magangani farming group, which is chaired by 43-year-old Mwaka Juma, the one who sent him his first lucky 5,000-shilling paycheck, a housewife turned butterfly farmer.
When Mongabay visited Juma at her house in Magangani village, she proudly showed off a sewing business she said she’d financed with butterfly money.
During the peak season, Thoya and the other farmers in the group hand over their pupae to Juma, who travels on Fridays and Mondays about 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) to Kipepeo in the town of Gede to sell her group’s produce.
Other chairpersons, like 36-year-old Dickson Mbogo of the Mkongani farmers’ group, have farther to travel. Mbogo and most of his group members live about 40 kilometers (25 miles) away from the butterfly center.
Mbogo, another former logger and charcoal trader, started farming butterflies in 2006. He said the venture helped him construct a permanent house and educate his two sisters.
“Whenever I walk back into the same forest without having to play hide-and-seek with forest officers I feel very good,” he told Mongabay. “And when I meet my former associates I try to dissuade them to stop cutting down those trees because they are putting their future generations at risk.”
Once the pupae reach Kipepeo headquarters, workers sort them according to species and health before sending them on their journey abroad. Kipepeo currently exports up to a million pupae annually to Turkey, the U.K. and Germany. According to Hussein Aden, Kipepeo’s manager, most of the butterflies are displayed in butterfly houses while some are used for research at universities and butterfly centers and others are fashioned into home décor.
The group sells colorful species like the silver-striped charaxes (Charaxes lasti) for a minimum of $2.50 a pupae, including shipping. Less colorful species like the African migrant (Catopsilia florella) sell for $1 a pupae.
According to Aden, the farmers’ collecting of wild butterflies doesn’t harm the populations, whose biggest threat is habitat loss. And maintaining a continuous supply of farm-raised butterflies would not be feasible, he said, because demand for particular species is irregular.
Butterflies as forest ambassadors
Butterfly farming is relatively new to the Mijikenda of coastal Kenya; their major traditional economic activities include fishing, farming and charcoal trading. According to Aden, Kipepeo was started in 1993 to provide an alternative and sustainable income for the 100,000 or so people living near Arabuko-Sokoke forest.
At approximately 420 square kilometers (162 square miles), Arabuko-Sokoke is the largest patch left of a coastal forest that once stretched from southern Somalia to northern Mozambique. Today mostly small patches, known as Kayas and protected by local Mijikenda elders, remain.
Arabuko-Sokoke is one of the only known habitats for the golden-rumped elephant shrew (Rhynchocyon chrysopygus), which sections of the local community consider a delicacy despite its being listed as endangered. About 300 butterfly species live there, out of the 871 found in Kenya.
Only 74 butterfly species, all with IUCN status of “least concern,” have been approved for farming. Customers wanting an endangered species like the Taita blue-banded swallowtail (Papilio desmondi teita) must make a special order, and the species is only available during the rainy season.
The newfound appreciation for butterflies and the forest they inhabit has spread beyond butterfly farmers, according to Aden. Since the project launched 25 years ago, he said, local communities have stopped viewing the forest as wasted farmland.
According to Nicholas Munyao, KFS’s coast region ecosystem conservator, the project is good for butterflies because it results in the protection of their habitats. And these, of course, are home to numerous other species in a variety of taxa.
“I would not say logging is not taking place in the forest,” Munyao said. “[But] it has gradually reduced, and you find that most of [the loggers] are not from the local community.”
Overtime, Kipepeo has expanded to include other forests, such as Kakamega in western Kenya, Taita Hills in the southwest, and Shimba Hills in the southeast.
To spread the conservation message among Kenyans and Tanzanians, the butterfly farming enterprises have set up butterfly houses similar to those buying their pupae. In Kenya, there’s Kipepeo’s in Gede and the Mombasa Butterfly House in Mombasa; both Tanzanian ventures, the Amani Butterfly Project in Shebomeza village and the Zanzibar Butterfly Centre on Zanzibar Island, have exhibits at their headquarters. Species on display include the red spot diadem (Hypolimnas usambara), a black-and-white butterfly with traces of yellow on its tail;the forest queen (Euxanthe wakefieldi), a brown butterfly with patches of sky blue; and Thoya’s favorite, the blue-spotted emperor (Charaxes cithaeron).
The initiatives’ success in promoting conservation has not gone unnoticed; in 2011 the Zanzibar Butterfly Centre, which aims to conserve Jozani Chakwa Bay National Park, received a SEED Award for Entrepreneurship in Sustainable Development from the U.N. And this fall Kipepeo hosted the 20thannual conference of the International Association of Butterfly Exhibitors and Suppliers, whose mission focuses heavily on butterfly conservation — the first time the conference was held in Africa.
Trouble in Tanzania
In addition to the successes, the butterfly projects have also faced challenges. In Kenya, difficulties include failing to meet the huge demand during the high season, and producing a surplus during the low seasons.
In Tanzania, though, the challenges are bigger, the biggest being the government’s banning of wildlife exports. First came a one-year ban in 2011, after alarming reports of animal smuggling the previous year. Then in 2016, the government issued a three-year ban to give it time to draft a permanent policy that would seal legal loopholes.
Amir Saidi, project manager at the Amani Butterfly Project, said the bans have slashed revenues and sent most of the 150 farmers Amani was supporting in search of alternative work.
“From 2003 to 2015 we were doing quite well,” he said. “With the ban in place we are [now] only relying on the butterfly house as a source of income, but you cannot compare the revenue generated from the butterfly house with that that was there when we were doing pupae exports.”
The Zanzibar Butterfly Centre has also ceased exporting and is now only running a butterfly house.
This March will mark the end of the three-year ban. By then Saidi said he hopes the government will have finished crafting a new export policy that will give consideration to butterfly farmers. Amani, he said, had proven beneficial in conserving forests in the East Usambara Mountains, home to a number of endemic species such as the critically endangered long-billed forest warbler (Artisornis moreaui). The ban curtailed the Amani project before staff could study how it affected the community’s use of the forest, Saidi said, but he had noticed positive changes.
Butterfly farmers speak up for the forest
Kenya’s deforestation problem is far bigger than what butterfly farming could ever address. The country lost more than 9 percent of its tree cover, equivalent to 3,100 square kilometers (almost 1,200 square miles) between 2001 and 2017, according to Global Forest Watch.
A scathing report released last April by a special task force that the environment ministry formed to investigate the country’s alarming loss of forest decried “rampant corruption and abuse of office” within KFS, resulting in widespread illegal logging.
The report led to more complaints, including allegations that a KFS officer was involved in an illegal logging racket operating in Arabuko-Sokoke. Before the release of the report, the community living near the forest had pushed for the officer’s transfer and the relocation of his office from the town of Kilifi, 33 kilometers (20 miles) from the forest, to nearby Gede, where Kipepeo is based, so the agency could keep a closer eye of the forest.
According to Abbas Shariff, chairman of the Arabuko-Sokoke Forest Dwellers Association, which promotes protection of the forest, such activism would not have been possible without the butterfly projects, which have helped the community see the importance of the forest.
“Unlike several years ago, we know that once you start messing with this forest, you are messing with our livelihood and that of our future generations,” Shariff said. “That’s why you see us dealing with anyone trying to mess us up.”
Banner image: A blue pansy (Junonia orithya), a species occasionally available through Kipepeo Butterfly Project. Image by yakovlev.alexey via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0).
Former President Barack Obama and Golden State Warriors superstar Stephen Curry told a roomful of boys of color on Tuesday that they matter and urged them to make the world a better place.
Obama was in Oakland, California, to mark the fifth anniversary of My Brother’s Keeper, an initiative he started after the 2012 shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. The death of the African-American teen sparked protests over racial profiling.
The initiative was a call to communities to close opportunity gaps for boys of color, especially African-American, Latino and Native American boys, Obama said to roughly 100 boys attending the alliance’s first national gathering. The My Brother’s Keeper Alliance is part of the Obama Foundation.
“We had to be able to say to them, ‘you matter, we care about you, we believe in you and we are going to make sure that you have the opportunities and chances to move forward just like everybody else’,” Obama said.
Obama, who left office in 2017, was joined by basketball star Curry. The men spoke for about an hour, answering questions from the audience and joking around. They talked about lacking confidence or being aimless as teens.
Obama praised single mothers, including his own. He advised the boys to look for a mentor, and to find opportunities to guide others.
Curry joined the former president in praising the value of team-work.
“What we do on the court and the joy that comes out of that is second to none,” he said, “because nothing great is done by yourself.”
The former president cracked up the audience, and Curry, when asked a question about being a man. He said that being a man is about being a good person, someone who is responsible, reliable, hard-working and compassionate. Being a man, he said, is not about life as portrayed in some rap or hip-hop music.
“If you are very confident about your sexuality, you don’t have to have eight women around you twerking,” he said to applause. “‘Cause I’ve got one woman who I’m very happy with. And she’s a strong woman.”
The first meeting of what would later become the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) took place in 1905 in Fort Erie near Niagara Falls, Canada. Legendary thinkers such as W.E.B. Du Bois attended.
Although the social justice movement for the advancement of Black Americans was initially named the Niagara Movement, based on that first meeting in Canada, there was no mention of Black Canadians at this historic meeting.
The story of this meeting helps to demonstrate the ongoing invisibility of Black Canadians both within Canada, across North America and internationally.
Given the strong geographical connection between Canada and the U.S., it is reasonable to question why Black Canadians are missing from the Niagara Movement’s historical narrative.
Their absence in this history highlights the erasure of the contributions of Indigenous, Black people and other racialized peoples in Canada. This Canadian historical narrative, as Canadian sociologist Rinaldo Walcott suggests, has effectively “invisibilized” the Black presence in Canada.
In his book, Black Like Who?, Walcott speculates that the NAACP disallowed Black Canadians from attending this first meeting, despite their attempts to engage in dialogue with the organizers. Walcott writes that there were Black people in Canada who had both heard of and wanted to participate in the movement. However, he believes they were not welcomed.
Many know that Black Americans faced racist laws meant to segregate and oppress their existence, but many do not realize that Black Canadians also faced the hardship of anti-Black racism or the extent to which they suffered.
Cooper’s example helps to demonstrate the Canadian settler social conditions where Black people are assumed to be guilty.
The urgent need for a social justice movement
Black people in both Canada and the United States have encountered, and continue to face, a white settler terrain that loathes Blackness. After the Civil War, the United States Congress passed laws to support newly freed African-Americans but in the decades that followed, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a series of decisions that set back those efforts.
By 1905, the need for a social movement for African-Americans was urgent.
The NAACP would become the vehicle to increase the social citizenship of Black people in America, especially during the early 1900s, when the race divide cut deep and afflicted the social, political and economic conditions of Black folk.
U.S. segregation laws in the 1900s made holding meetings in hotels impossible. Efforts to hold the original meeting in Buffalo, New York were thwarted by a social climate that was simmering with racial hostility toward Black Americans. In historical notes, Buffalo’s NAACP chapter president, Rev. Mark Blue, mentioned that Black American thinkers were accepted by the management of the Erie Hotel, near Niagara Falls, Ont.
Why were Black Americans but not Black Canadians allowed at this historic meeting? Who disallowed them to enter? Was it the hotel managers? Was it the organizers? Were they there but perhaps not mentioned?
Invisible in Canada
Canada often characterizes itself as a haven for Black slaves of the American South, but it does so without acknowledging its own participation in the Black slave industry.
A seldom mentioned historical fact is that Canada has its own Black slave history. Prior to abolition, Black enslavement existed in Canada until it was abolished throughout British North America.
Before the Niagara Movement, the Canadian region was the site of safer passage of Blacks fleeing slavery in the United States. Heroic figures like Harriet Tubman travelled through Niagara, Canada to bring slaves to a better life in northern North America. Yet, as Walcott points out, there is little or no reference to these facts in the historical commentaries on the Niagara Movement.
The lack of information about these histories is another form of anti-Black racism that exists in Canada. Canada has adopted a policy of erasure when it comes to acknowledging the history and contributions of its Indigenous and Black peoples.
Many scholars have asserted the importance of continued Black Canadian cultural studies. The power politics of whose work gets published, and where, and the absence of Black, Indigenous and racialized histories have reinforced Black invisibility.
It is necessary to critically engage on historical notions of Blackness and the “cross border political identification” of Black Canadians and Americans. By recognizing that both Black Canadian and American historical episodes of anti-Black racism are similar, we question how the white settler terrain has convinced mainstream society to believe one is worse than the other.
This is an updated version of a story originally published on Feb. 14, 2019. It clarifies the location of the Niagara Movement’s first meeting.