The period from the mid 1960s to the mid 1970s was one of the most exciting, and in many ways the most fruitful, in the history of Canadian race relations, and its epicentre was Halifax. For almost 200 years the African Nova Scotian population had lived in segregated, impoverished settlements across the province. Among them was Africville, a community of about 80 families perched on the northern edge of Halifax itself. Throughout those 200 years black Nova Scotians sought to improve their conditions, insisting on their rights as British subjects. They did produce many significant victories, but the pace was excruciatingly slow.
The threatened expropriation of Africville by the City of Halifax was arguably the chief catalyst in provoking a confrontation between black and white communities and between African Canadian citizens and their governments. Although this energetic movement did not save Africville, it did generate revolutionary changes in the legal and social...
James W. St.G. Walker is a professor of history at the University of Waterloo, where he specializes in the history of race relations and human rights. His publications include The Black Loyalists: The Search for a Promised Land in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone, 1783–1870 (University of Toronto Press, 1992, 2nd ed.) and “Race,” Rights and the Law in the Supreme Court of Canada (Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History and Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1997).
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