North of the Color Line: Migration and Black Resistance in Canada, 1870–1955 (review)

From the advent of the transatlantic slave trade, mobility, migration, and resistance have been central features of the black experience in the Western Hemisphere. In North of the Color Line, Sarah-Jane Mathieu examines nineteenth- and twentieth-century migrations to Canada from the United States and the Caribbean, and the resultant (trans-)national mobilizations against racial segregation, discrimination, and nativism. At the centre of her analysis are the black railway workers who linked communities of resistance across Canada and combated deprecating racialisms in all aspects of Canadian life: from places of work and places of leisure, to federal legislation on immigration, to human rights issues. Mathieu contrasts mid-nineteenth-century perceptions of Canada as a haven for African-American slave fugitives with the gradual development, entrenchment, and institutionalization of a Canadian colour line that denied equality to peoples of African descent in Canada. Concluding in the mid-1950s, her study considers the legacy of black activism created by railway porters and examines how their early struggles in the workplace translated into large-scale mobilizations against Jim Crow throughout Canadian society. In so doing, she tells a story of advances and withdrawals, of victories and defeats, of unity and disjuncture, as African Americans, African Canadians, and African West Indians resisted racial subjugation and demanded equal rights and opportunities in Canada and throughout North America.

Mathieu’s study makes more than a few meaningful contributions to both Canadian and us historiographies and significantly advances the literature on black migration, identity, and resistance in North America. Engaging with studies by Eric Arnesen and Agnes Calliste, among others, Mathieu demonstrates the centrality of the railways for black men and communities north of the forty-second parallel. As they traversed the continent, black porters linked communities across physical space, and in so doing facilitated a transcontinental, and indeed transnational, exchange. Porters, she asserts, ‘were the guardians of their communities’ and ‘became crucial social and political conduits because of their access and connections to that national black Canadian network’ (163, 150). They also confronted Jim Crow in its various forms and incarnations, navigating a dynamic, complex, and often hostile racial terrain. As this book convincingly argues, porters were thus at the vanguard of the struggle against racial inequality wherever they encountered it, as they mobilized first against the discriminatory practices of their employers, unions, and fellow railwaymen and later campaigned against xenophobic government policies and institutional practices. Mathieu demonstrates that through the politicization of these railway workers, struggles against class and racial oppression were inextricably conflated, and black porters combated them simultaneously as part of the same campaign against racism in Canada.

While Mathieu creatively places the histories of Canada and the United States in dialogue with one another, sketching the transnational networks of black resistance through North America, she also endeavours to articulate a distinctly Canadian experience, moving the nation out from the shadows of us history and historiography. In so doing, she brings a critical eye to the complicity of Canadians in the formulation of colour lines and the discriminatory views and practices of Canadian politicians and employers as well as the general public. White Canadians, Mathieu argues, ‘hid behind an outward civility,’ even in their vociferous (and, as she notes, disproportionate) hysteria and opposition to the arrival of black immigrants (16). Claims of the ‘climatic unsuitability’ of peoples of African descent, as well as the assertion that blackness posed a distinctly and exclusively foreign threat, legitimized discriminatory practices at the border and helped to perpetuate a rhetorically white Canadian national identity. Black people in Canada, however, effectively invoked the country’s abolitionist tradition, as well as ideas of British fair play, to contest the racism they encountered and to legitimize their place within the nation.

One of the most provocative assertions Mathieu makes is in regard to the central role of railway porters in the formation and articulation of a black...