The Contestation over National Identity: Nineteenth-Century Black Americans in Canada

© Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canadienne d’études américaines 30, no. 2, 2000 The Contestation over National Identity: Nineteenth-Century Black Americans in Canada Jane Rhodes This paper examines black Americans and their search for safety, liberty, and what Floyd Miller called “a black nationality,” on the eve of the Civil War. It is concerned with those nineteenth-century African Americans whose spatial movements , and their relationships to the state, can be defined and understood through their crossing of the forty-ninth parallel into Canada at some point during their lives. In Canadian towns and cities like Toronto, Windsor, Chatham, and Amherstburg, black American expatriates grappled with questions of political and national allegiance. They used Canada West as an outpost where they could devise strategies to confront the racial oppression that gripped their lives and enslaved their families. Through their newspapers, conventions, and churches, black subjects on both sides of the border engaged in a wide-ranging debate about where they belonge, and where to invest their hopes for the future (Miller). Indeed, the particularities of black American nationalist movements and black American national identities can be traced directly to nineteenth-century migrants such as Martin Delany, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Henry Bibb, and Samuel Ringgold Ward. These individuals displayed the kinds of contested identities that W.E.B. Du Bois would later define as “double consciousness,” an often tortured selfawareness of their racial and national selves, of their Africanness and Americanness . Paul Gilroy describes this search for a black nationality through the metaphor of an ocean that is “continually crisscrossed by the movements of black people—not only as commodities but engaged in various struggles towards emancipation , autonomy, and citizenship” (16). The idea of the Black Atlantic “provides a means to re-examine the problems of nationality, location, identity, and historical memory” (16). By the same token, examining black migrations in North America —the formation of a continental diaspora—is crucial for understanding the dynamics of black American and black Canadian identities (16). Canadian Review of American Studies 30 (2000) 176 Contemporary black scholars in Britain and Canada have eloquently located the problem of blackness in relation to national ideologies of citizenship . Simon Gikandi argues that the clear demarcation between Englishness and blackness is an historical formation that “has presented an intellectual and political challenge to the crown’s black subjects as they seek their place in the postimperial nation” (51). To be part of the nineteenth -century British empire, including Canada, was to be white; the nation simply disavowed or discounted the presence of blacks. This has produced a painful sense of invisibility for black Canadians, who are not only few in number but continually reminded of their outsider status. Notes Rinaldo Walcott, Canadian blacks “are an absented presence always under erasure … Canadian blackness is a bubbling brew of desires for elsewhere, disappointments in the nation and the pleasures of exile” (xiii). While Walcott was referring to the state of blacks in latetwentieth -century Canada, he could easily have been describing the sentiments of nineteenth-century black migrants. The period between the Emancipation Act of 1833, which outlawed slavery in the British Empire, and the outbreak of the United States Civil War was an era in which black Americans looked increasingly toward Canada and Britain as safe havens from American racism. The institutions of slavery in the South, and legally sanctioned segregation and discrimination in the North, were constant reminders of blacks’ exclusion from all symbols of national identity and from all possibilities of the privileges of citizenship . Yet we know little about how free black and fugitive slave émigrés defined themselves as national subjects. Understanding the exigencies of their daily lives, of the struggle to preserve self and family, is essential in sorting this out. Rarely taken into consideration in the discussion of the black diaspora are factors such as the distinctions between slave and freeborn status, skin colour, and gender.1 If Africa was the ancestral birthplace for most black Americans, the United States became—over the course of 300 years—their actual and literal home. That most were held in bondage did not lessen the fact that they felt a deep claim...