B.C.'S early black settlers' story gets a welcome revival

This revised version a well-researched look at an important time in B.C. history

B.C. history has too often been painted in monochrome versions that focus on the arrival of European-ancestry settlers and their subsequent adventures here on this stolen continent. The lives and concerns of Indigenous nations have been treated as an insignificant prequel to the important story, and the many people of colour who literally helped build the province and the nation get minimal notice.

In 1978, B.C. journalist and academic Crawford Kilian set out to correct this racist narrative with his groundbreaking study Go Do Some Great Thing: The Black Pioneers of British Columbia. Now, with issues of racial justice being powerfully raised by the Black Lives Matter movement, and the need for a more complete reckoning with racial justice more widely recognized, Harbour Publishing has issued a new and revised version of Kilian's book about B.C.'S early Black settlers. It is a welcome and timely decision.

On April 25, 1858, the steamship Commodore arrived in Victoria harbour. On board were 35 Black Americans from San Francisco. They were driven to leave California by new evidence of American racism, (including the vile pro-slavery Dred Scott Decision by the U.S. Supreme Court and the case of Archy Lee, a Black man held in San Francisco as a fugitive slave under the authority of the Dred Scott Decision) and hoped to find a better life for themselves and their families under British rule.

The Black settlers had been encouraged by colonial governor and Hudson's Bay official James Douglas (himself a man of mixed racial background) who hoped that they would form a demographic counterweight to the unruly white American gold-rush settlers who posed a real risk to British control of what became B.C. More followed.

Some of the Black settlers found work in Victoria, or established businesses, like Mifflin Gibbs, one of Kilian's protagonists. Others tried their luck in the Fraser River Gold Rush. Still others pre-empted land and developed farms, notably on Saltspring Island, where the Stark family was prominent. Others entered politics.

Some of these Black pioneers returned to the United States after the end of the Civil War, but many remained, and should not be erased, as they have been too often, from history. Kilian's well-researched volume is a good place to start. Want more? Check out the excellent Hogan's Alley society website, created in memory of a thriving Black community in east Vancouver.