Ontario's African-Canadian Heritage: Collected Writings by Fred Landon, 1918–1967 (review)

This collection is commemorative in two respects. First, it commemorates the foundational scholarship of turn-of-the-century historian Fred Landon, a prolific author of the African-Canadian experience in the era of the Underground Railroad. Second, this collection, commissioned in 2007 by the Government of Ontario, commemorates the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire.

This book, according to its editors, is a homage to the pioneering work of one of the most important scholars of black Canadian history - one who wrote for both popular and scholarly audiences - a recognition of Landon's 'personal support for Black activism' (21), and an opportunity to reflect upon Landon's work on the Underground Railroad, 'the first great freedom movement in the Americas' (15). The collection includes Landon's most significant work on the Abolitionist movement, the social history of black settlers in the mid-nineteenth century, and the role that these settlers played in geopolitical struggles of empires where the legal status of these former slaves lay at the heart of these contests.

The strength of the collection is its excavation of an important body of work. Though Landon's writings are fairly well known to specialists of black Canada and pre-Confederation history, this collection introduces them to a wider audience, and that is important because Landon's work framed many of the questions that shaped the field over the next century. The editors have also thoughtfully appended an extensive - but not exhaustive - bibliography of nineteenth-century black Ontario history.

Nonetheless, the collection's unreflective emphasis on the celebratory and the commemorative is its weakness. While it is true that edited collections routinely pay tribute to the work of singularly important scholars, only a rather one-sided view of Landon's work can necessarily emerge from a state-sponsored initiative seeking to celebrate the history of blacks as Canadian nation builders and, by extension, Canada as a haven where blacks' contribution to this nation-building project could germinate and flourish.

This book includes no fewer than three introductions, none of which lays out the critical questions and issues that would interest conscientious professional and community-based historians wishing to gauge the strength and weaknesses of Landon's work and wanting a nuanced appraisal of his professional life. Instead, we are presented with biographical sketches of Landon's life through anecdotes. A more balanced appraisal of Landon's work and his limitations would have been useful. His contemporaries Arthur Lower and Harold Innis, for example, were both better writers and more accomplished thinkers. In addition to the obvious factor of the racism - institutional and overt - that characterized Canadian academe at that time, what role might Landon's limitations have played in black Canadian history's subsequent trajectory as a marginalized sub-field? The passivity of black Canadians in much (not all) of Landon's work is not addressed by the editors, nor is his tendency to emphasize white male beneficence as the driving force behind much (again not all) of the history of black Canadians. More troubling, we are not told how Landon, a professed 'freedom fighter' (15), might have been influenced by his years of tutelage under his graduate supervisor and mentor, U.B. Phillips, the influential historian of the antebellum south who is well known for his less than flattering views of peoples of African descent. Nor are we given any sense of how or why Landon came to have an association with H.A. Tanser, an obscure but paradoxically influential educational psychologist and proponent of eugenicist thought who wrote extensively on the mental inferiority of the descendants of the very populations Landon studied. Tanser's research was supported by his extensive use of Landon's private library. Landon never rebuked Tanser's work in print and even favourably reviewed it in this journal.

This is not an attempt...