BLACKNESS AND BRITISH ‘FAIR PLAY’: BURGEONING BLACK SOCIAL ACTIVISM IN ONTARIO AND ITS GRASSROOTS RESPONSES TO THE CANADIAN COLOUR LINE, 1919-1939

“Blackness and British ‘Fair Play’: Burgeoning Black Social Activism in Ontario and its Grassroots Responses to the Canadian Colour Line, 1919-1939” centres community-building as an effective method to reject the notion of Blackness as racial alterity and second-class citizenship in Canada. This project highlights the understudied and informal everyday acts of resistance that Black Canadian women crafted to fight anti-Black racism during the interwar period. After identifying how white Canadians expressed the colour line during the 1920s and 1930s, I consider how Black people pragmatically responded in Ontario. In this study, I argue that Black women worked as community leaders to engender a shared intra-racial collective among Black Canadians of varying backgrounds. Their dynamic leadership changed over time, developing through church fundraising social activities, starting church youth clubs, to launching much-needed leisure, recreation, and learning activities premised on a Black international scope and a Pan-Africanist ideology. A close examination of oral history interviews, church records, activist organization records, and newspapers offers a thoughtful consideration of historical contingencies. These factors informed the everyday, local ways that Black people in Ontario challenged their racialized alterity and ostracization in Canadian society.

Department dc:contributor.department

History

Author dc:creator

• Shaw, Melissa

Advisor dc:contributor.supervisor

• Errington, E.J.

• Black Canadians
• Ontario
• social activism
• Black women
• interwar period
• anti-Black racism

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1974/28878

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:queensu.scholaris.ca:1974/28878