Black community’s roots run deeper than you might think
New exhibition highlights the contributions of Toronto’s early black community
Toronto’s black presence didn’t begin with the Jamaican Canadian Association or Caribana or the incendiary Black Action Defense Committee or Black Lives Matter. The roots go much deeper, as three significant city events this past month remind us .
Take Mirvish Village around Bathurst and Bloor. That corner of the Annex is effuse with the history of Honest Ed’s, soon to be the site of another condo project. But before Mirvish’s general store and famous bargain centre bites the dust — and with it, memories of what some remember as the Black Eaton’s — efforts are afoot to retain some of that uncelebrated history.
Welcome to Blackhurst Street is an exhibition now running that commemorates the presence and contribution of black citizens in this Toronto neighbourhood — my first in Canada. I arrived in 1969. The memories are fresh: The Bathurst streetcar rumbling past my secondstorey flat at 9111/2 Bathurst to Dupont, past Hill- crest, up to Vaughan Rd. before merging onto St. Clair.
The first time seeing snowflakes, tumbling like chicken feathers from the sky, in early October, and putting on my first winter shoes, slip-sliding down Bathurst, past Wong’s Restaurant with the best beef soup this side of Montego Bay, shuffling past Mascoll Beauty Supplies, Wisdom Barber, Joyce’s and the nascent retail strip, Bathurst subway station, then the beckoning magical bargains of Honest Ed’s, the lure of Ram’s Roti, Contrast Newspaper, the dreaded varsity enemies at Central Tech, and, finally, arriving at Harbord Collegiate, obviously underdressed, and suitably frozen at the extremities.
About 127 years earlier, a black kid named William Peyton Hubbard was born at Bloor and Brunswick, one of 1,000 African Canadians in a Toronto population of 40,000. At times, one would hardly know the roots go so deep.
That’s why some citizens have set up the exhibition, Welcome to Blackhurst Street. It’s open Thursday to Sunday, 12 to 6 p.m. until Nov. 27 at Markham House, 610 Markham St.
Itah Sadu, bookstore owner of A Different Booklist (Bathurst and Lennox), is counting down the days when she must vacate to make room for the Honest Ed’s redevelopment. She’s hoping to keep the black presence and memories alive in a repurposed community space in the new project.
Last month, Sadu convened former Contrast employees to reminisce about the newspaper, founded by Al Hamilton in 1969, as the “eyes, ears and voice of Canada’s black community.”
When I worked at Contrast, starting in 1979, it was clearly more than a newspaper and more like a community gathering place and resource and drop-in centre.
Activists planned anti-racism and anti-apartheid strategy upstairs while reporters interviewed the latest complainant of Toronto police brutality.
On the wall were pictures of former editors like (late Giller-prizewinning author) Austin Clarke and City TV’s Jojo Chintoh.
Hamlin Grange and Cecil Foster and Arnold Auguste got their start here — forming part of Toronto’s literary history.
Hubbard rose to great heights as the city’s first black alderman in 1894 (122 years later city council still has just one black councillor in Michael Thompson).
He won 14 elections, served as acting mayor, invented and patented an oven, and initiated several municipal improvement.
He also pushed for a publicly owned hydro system, leading to the creation of Toronto Hydro.
City Councillor Paula Fletcher spearheaded the naming of William Hubbard Park at the restored Don Jail and the Bridgepoint health care centre at Broadview Ave. and Gerrard St., steps from Hubbard’s former home.
A few miles south this past week, George Brown College cut the ribbons on its spanking new student residence in the Pan Am Games athlete village.
They named part of it the Lucie and Thornton Blackburn Conference Centre.
The Blackburns arrived before Hubbard, escaped slaves from Kentucky, via Detroit, by way of the Underground Railroad.
Efforts to return them to slavery sparked Detroit’s first race riot in 1833 and helped establish Canada’s refugee settlement laws and defined Canada as a refuge for enslaved Americans.
The Blackburns started Toronto’s cab industry, played a key role in the abolitionist movement and are recognized as persons of national historical significance.
Buried in Toronto’s necropolis cemetery, next to the famous George Brown, their names now grace the newest residence of the college, named after Brown, founder of the Globe and Mail and a father of confederation. Blackburns. Hubbard. Blackhurst. The more we learn, the more we celebrate, the more we legitimize, and the more we affirm the black presence in the Toronto mosaic. Royson James’ column appears weekly in the Saturday Star.
The more we learn, the more we celebrate, the more we legitimize, and the more we affirm the black presence in the Toronto mosaic