1 Black historians matter! In 2017, after the University of New Brunswick (UNB) hosted Dr. Charmaine Nelson, a Black art historian, she encouraged me to pursue academic recognition and credentials for the research I had been doing for years on Black history in the Maritime provinces. At the time, I assumed she was being supportive of an aspiring Black historian, notwithstanding her emphatic injunction that more Black historians need to sift through the surviving sources and assemble a more complete picture of Black history in Canada. I now appreciate the need for brown eyes studying Black history with the inherent and substantial advantage over our White colleagues in that most of us have experienced what W.E.B. Dubois calls the “double consciousness.”1 Dubois explains how Black people experience a double identity, one defined by the Black cultural experience and a second identity defined by the White power structure, which perpetuates age-old stereotypes and props up White chauvinism as reality. The struggle that Black historians face is to convince the wider society that this “double narrative” exists. Despite evidence to the contrary, those indoctrinated into and benefitting from the White colonial narrative miss the other consciousness and tend to see people of colour as recipients of White benevolence, specifically the benefits resulting from the Anglo-Saxon ascent to global primacy.
2 This narrative, of course, only makes sense when cleansed of any blemishes, no matter how historically significant these stains might be to the broader historical context. I will not belabour this point beyond a single example. Until recently, the argument that relegated the role of slavery to a tertiary cause in precipitating the American Civil War seemed to be a valid matter of opinion. Two interpretative narratives have predominated: the North invaded the South to free the slaves, or the South seceded from the Union to preserve states’ rights.2 Both of these accounts are oversimplified and thus incomplete and by turns incorrect interpretations of the nature and sources of the incompatible relationship between the Southern slave states and the Northern anti-slavery states.
3 In Canada, we feel disconnected from this story in terms of our own history. To distance ourselves from and inoculate ourselves against that American ugliness, we have expunged the racialized aspects of our history, and as a consequence we purged Black history from public discussion for the sake of avoiding conflict. That distancing and inoculation held until the international outcry over the murders of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd by police, and the attempted cover-ups by authorities. Those incidents forced Canadians to confront the imbalance of power that Black people face when dealing with White institutions of authority.3 This tragic sequence of state-sanctioned violence has resulted in two worldviews colliding and a chance for expanded horizons for those willing to take that journey.
4 An unexpected fault line in historical understanding has emerged in the recent decision by Quaker Oats to rebrand their Aunt Jemima line of pancake mix and syrup and their perverse veneration of the emancipated Kentucky slave woman named Nancy Green, who first played Aunt Jemima for a public that could not get enough of happy tales of slave life. The outcry against Quaker Oats among White New Brunswickers has been noteworthy. The idea that Aunt Jemima was an “innocent image of a kindly Black woman” allows the racist parts of New Brunswick’s past to remain hidden: a past that challenges an imagined era of happy slaves. Aunt Jemima represents a collective amnesia over nineteenth-century Black history that has been replaced by a sort of myth-making and affectation over a fictitious Black woman who personified the Jim Crow era minstrels. Aunt Jemima represents the idea that the proper role of Black women in society is to support White women in providing a wholesome home to their families; Aunt Jemima helps by providing a pancake mix but remaining safely distanced.4
5 Ironically, Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben are better known to New Brunswickers than many notable Black New Brunswickers. They remain little remembered, leaving local Black ties to the Atlantic world’s major historical events absent from the public historical narrative. What has persisted with little critical examination are vestiges of White supremacy promoted by early settler social commentary.5 This essay attempts to elevate the discussion of New Brunswick Black history above honouring fictitious iconography and instead to identify several Black New Brunswickers who were on the cusp of dramatic changes in what it meant to be Black in British North America. Images like Aunt Jemima were far from innocent, and were in fact attempts to undo years of social progress and put Black people back on the plantation.
6 It seems fitting we contrast the fictitious Jemima with a real heroine, Nancy Morton. Morton was the plaintiff in the 1800 trial often referred to as the “Nancy trial” that challenged the validity of slavery in New Brunswick.6 Though ultimately unsuccessful, the history of Nancy’s bid for freedom provides an opportunity to challenge the victim narrative. Nancy’s case was not unique in the Atlantic world, but one in a long tradition of Black petitions for freedom and for an acknowledgement that natural rights applied to all people, including those of African descent. This practice of petitioning led back into Nova Scotia, the Thirteen Colonies, the Caribbean, and ultimately to Black fugitive James Somerset who challenged the validity of his enslavement in the 1772 Somerset case in Great Britain.7
7 The Somerset v Stewart case launched Granville Sharp’s career as the leading abolitionist in Britain, and would see his proteges credited with the establishment of the Black settlement in Sierra Leone.8 What remains little recognized is the earliest work organizing the Black émigrés and the tireless petitioning of the British government by Black Loyalist Thomas Peters, who travelled between New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and England.9 Equally neglected are the New Brunswick religious leaders like Methodist Henry Beverhout and sometime New Brunswick resident David George. George is virtually unknown outside of the Black community, but was a founding father of the Baptist Church in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, established the first African Baptist Church in the United States, and founded the Baptist Church in Sierra Leone.10
8 Recently, UNB decided to change the name of Ludlow Hall, named for the province’s first chief justice and the presiding judge in the Nancy case who ruled to continue treating slavery as an issue of property rights. The reflexive reaction by opponents of removing Ludlow’s name from the law school alleges that the name change is “erasing history.” They contend that Ludlow was a man of his times, representative of most early nineteenth-century attitudes (Aladejebi et al. 17–33). In 1800, when the court’s ruling on the Nancy case came down, Ludlow was a man out of step with the direction of British and the American societies.11 By the end of the American Revolution, most northern colonies had enacted some degree of emancipation.12 British evangelical abolitionist politician William Wilberforce had unsuccessfully introduced legislation in the House of Commons in 1791 and 1792 to abolish slavery. By 1807, legislators would agree to cooperate with the United States to ban the trans-Atlantic trade (Coffey 112,115). In neighbouring Nova Scotia, between 1785 and 1808, a steady stream of court challenges and failed pro-slavery legislation had driven a group of Digby Loyalists to petition the legislature as a last gasp to legalize slavery in the province, but that entreaty languished (Hamilton 32; Troxler; Whitfield, North to Bondage 63). Notable holdouts included Prince Edward Island—the only province with the notorious claim of formally legislating slavery—Upper Canada, the American South, New Jersey, and Ludlow’s native New York.13
9 The quest for freedom would continue in the early nineteenth century through to the War of 1812 and the arrival of another wave of Blacks from the United States. During this time, Blacks faced inordinate challenges due to colonial racist ideas and racial bias. Similar to the Blacks who settled in the 1780s, new Black arrivals inhabited the poorest land and smaller portions of land than White settlers did. Often officials did not give Blacks ownership of the land but instead issued certificates of occupancy. This situation ensured that Blacks were in a position where reliance on their own farms would not provide self-sufficiency, and ensured a Black labour force for nearby White communities (Spray 68–9). The social unrest in Britain resulting from decades of war manifested itself in anti-Black resentment and the developing ideals of racial inferiority of Blacks, not only among the colonial elites, but also with the working class (Hanley). These racist attitudes left little chance for Black economic advancement; thus by the 1840s Blacks had joined the out-migration to the United States.
10 At this time, a young Black man by the name of Edward Bannister departed St. Andrews to become a seaman. In the early 1850s, we find him living in the Boston area and practicing as a hairdresser. He then developed his artistic skills (notably, sketching and painting) that he displayed even as a young man in St. Andrews, earning some renown as one of the pre-eminent African American artists of his time. That is not the end of the story for Bannister, however. He along with his wife Christina (Babcock) Bannister were conductors on the Underground Railroad and a supporter of the United States Colored Troops, making the Bannisters contemporaries of abolitionist titans like Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison (Bannister; Emilio et al. 24). Though Bannister has a gallery named after him in Rhode Island, you will not find a permanent acknowledgement of his accomplishments in his province of birth (Gates and Higginbotham 46–7).
11 Edward Bannister’s involvement with the Underground Railroad is not the only tie New Brunswick had to this secret institution. There were at least two terminals in the province, one in Bannister’s community of Slab Town in the south of the province, where there is evidence that at least one Black fugitive transited through.14 However, this southern path was under more scrutiny by Confederate sympathizers, so an even more secretive route ran through the north of the province via Fort Fairfield, Maine, and then along concealed tracks to Tomlinson Lake.15 From there, Black runaways would make their way down the valley to either settle in existing Black communities or travel further afield.
12 St. Andrews had another famous Black personality emerge by the name of George Braxton. During the nineteenth century, Braxton migrated from Virginia to the Boston area, where he cooked at Wellesley College before receiving chef training in Paris (Yentsch 115). By 1896, Braxton had attained the position of head chef at the prestigious Algonquin Resort, likely the first Black head chef in Canada (“Canada’s 1st African American Executive Chef”). Braxton also published a cookbook making him one of the first Blacks to do so in Canada.16
13 When we confront Braxton’s real achievements with the Jemima trope, we must confront the fact that Aunt Jemima was an image created in the minstrel tradition. The goal of this image was not to celebrate the accomplishments of men like George Braxton; the intent was to undermine them. Aunt Jemima was a caricature intended to portray Black plantation life as beneficial. This historical distortion perpetuated the myth that naive Blacks preferred simpler lives as that was all that Blacks were intellectually capable of managing.
14 Looking at a few of these accomplished New Brunswick Blacks forces us to confront the Black reality. We still live in a society that will at once decry the removal of a fictional Black cook from a syrup bottle, but remain ignorant or unenthusiastic about accomplished Black chefs. We must do better at teaching these stories in secondary and post-secondary institutions in New Brunswick not only because they deserve to be known, but also because cultural ignorance is not harmless. If we take anything away from the current unrest, it is that ignorance and misinformation are powerful and they are dangerous. Recasting the Western narrative to include all aspects of slavery, emancipation, and Jim Crow will create a societal awareness that can better interpret the context surrounding New Brunswick’s historic and current Black communities. The Black community is integral to the ebb and flow of Canadian and Atlantic world history. Black history matters!