Community has unique past
‘Whitney Pier seems to know multiculturalism in ways that other communities didn’t seem to’
The community welcome mat may not have been out but African Nova Scotians who lived in Whitney Pier in the 1920s took matters into their hands, building their own support system and tonight, Dr. Claudine Bonner will tell members of the Old Sydney Society just how they did it almost 100 years ago.
Bonner will speak on “Bridging Religion and Black Nationalism: the founding of St. Philip’s African Orthodox Church and the Universal Negro Improvement Association Hall in Whitney Pier During the 1920s.”
“The talk itself is suppose to be centred around the relationship between the black community in Cape Breton and the Marcus Garvey movement and the African Orthodox Church which came out of the Garvey Movement,” explains Bonner, a women and gender studies and sociology associate professor at Acadia University in Wolfville.
According to Bonner, the newcomers came to work at the steel plant which was thriving at the time. Initially they went to local churches but found the reception less than inviting.
“There was a desire to have their own church,” said Bonner, adding research has been done indicating the newcomers experienced racism within those churches.
“I have interviewed community elders who have told the same story that people felt pushed out of the churches …
they felt the need to start their own church. There were incidents where people couldn’t be buried or married in the churches they were in.”
In 1921, members of the community reached out to the African Orthodox Church in New York City to send someone to Whitney Pier to start a church. At that time, the African Orthodox Church was associated with the Marcus Garvey Movement and the fact that many of the new immigrants came from the West Indies where both the movement and the church started, led to both making significant inroads in this area.
“It’s the only African Orthodox Church in Canada so that makes it special,” said Bonner. “It has served as the heart of the community in lots of ways.”
Marcus Garvey is best known as the founder of the Back To Africa movement and the UNIA.
Bonner says his idea was to help blacks find self-empowerment, resilience from working together and supporting each other wherever society was oppressive.
“The idea of coming together and being able to form a community and support each other was important at the time. Coming back from the war and not being able to find jobs, fighting for their country and being part of something bigger and then coming back and not being part of the community, they had to find ways to fight the enemy.”
Locally, blacks weren’t allowed to join the steelworkers union in the 1920s so the Garvey movement worked on behalf of the local community getting them better wages.
“The Garvey movement in addition to being about selfempowerment and economic co-operation and all those
things, it was also a labour movement,” said Bonner. “So one of the thing that it sought to do was to get better wages for black workers, to provide support for families — they had their own nurses, they had their own teachers and all those things.”
While the local black community started their own church, which exists until this very day, they emerged into a
tight-knit community that supported each other, a factor that seemed to be a part of the immigrant experience.
“It’s part of a much larger story that really talks about the ways in which this community was connected to the broader Whitney Pier community,” said Bonner. “The different immigrant communities kind of had the same experiences of poor living conditions, of having subsistence gardens, everybody’s lives were the same in lots of ways so it’s the story of Whitney Pier, it’s just one piece of it.
“Whitney Pier seems to know multiculturalism in ways that other communities didn’t seem to.”
Bonner’s talk will take place at 7:30 p.m. today at the Old Bank Building, 173 Charlotte St., Sydney.