Africville apology an historic moment
Wednesday’s historic agreement between the City of Halifax and the former residents of Africville, which was intended to turn the page on their bitter 40-year dispute, did not please everyone. How could it? The old wounds run too deep; the new hurts remain too raw.
Make no mistake. There are legitimate questions to ask about what is—and isn’t—in this deal.
Should the former residents have received individual compensation, for example, for what the city now acknowledges was a mistake that “disrupted” their lives and whose “repercussions [continue to] haunt us in the form of lost opportunities for young people”?
Should there be a public inquiry that could explore and expose what really happened? And why?
And there are other issues. Will the Seaview Baptist Church be rebuilt on its former location or, as some fear, on the edge of what is now called Seaview Park? On the outside again. Looking in.
Will the promised “African Nova Scotian Affairs function” within HRM be a genuine effort to improve the lot of black Haligonians? Or yet another game of smoke and mirrors?
Those are reasonable questions. They need to be asked and answered.
But not today.
Today, it is worth pausing briefly to savour the historic and profound nature of what actually happened this week in a basement gymnasium at the north end Community Y.
The City of Halifax, on behalf of all of us, said it was sorry.
As Mayor Peter Kelly explained to the hundreds of people gathered in the gym, many of them former Africville residents and their children: “You need someone from government to stand before you, to look you in the eyes and to say from the bottom of our hearts, ‘We are sorry.’”
This was not a weasel apology, not a we’re-sorry-if-we-hurt-your-feelings non apology. Nor was it an explanation-apology, one of those, those-were-different-time-and-we-meant-well-and-we’re-sort-of-sorry faux apologies.
In the course of 309 words over three minutes and 14 seconds, Mayor Peter Kelly used the word “apologize” seven times. He also said “we are profoundly sorry” and “we ask your forgiveness.”
While not glossing over the past, he made the point that, while “history can not be rewritten… the future is a blank page and, starting today, we hold the pen with which we can write a shared tomorrow.”
After last weekend’s Hants County cross-burning and this week’s city hall protest by municipal employees protesting racism in the workplace, a blank page would be nice.
Copyright 2010 Stephen Kimber
Reclaiming black history, acknowledging our own
Nova Scotia's black history is rich and remarkable—Birchtown, for example, was North America's largest settlement of free blacks when it was founded in 1783—but that realty is rarely acknowledged. Now finally, that may be about to change...
Shortly before 10 on the evening of March 31, 2006, residents along the Old Birchtown Road near Shelburne reported seeing what looked like a white Pontiac Sunfire speeding away from the site of the one-story wooden bungalow that housed the offices of Nova Scotia’s Black Loyalist Heritage Society. Within minutes of the car’s disappearance into the night, hot flames licked up an outside wall and into the building’s eaves, setting the roof ablaze and eventually causing parts of it to collapse into the offices below.
Inside those offices—inside computer hard drives, cardboard boxes and metal filing cabinets—the priceless fruits of nearly two decades of research into the often ignored, always marginalized history of Nova Scotia’s black community melted, burned, scorched, charred, disappeared into smoke.
It didn’t take the Mounties long to conclude the fire had been deliberately set.
But was it a hate crime?
Elizabeth Cromwell, the president of the heritage society, turns that question around. “Why,” she asks, not unreasonably, “would anyone burn down a building belonging to a group of black people?”
It wouldn’t have been the first time black people in Nova Scotia were targeted for nothing more than being who they are. Or the last. Just consider last weekend’s cross burning outside the home of a mixed race couple in Hants County. Or this week’s protest march at city hall to bring attention to the ongoing discrimination black municipal workers say they face in the workplace.
***
Birchtown was supposed to be different.
During the American Revolution, the British promised America’s black slaves their freedom—more, it should be acknowledged, as a military tactic than from some lofty commitment to racial equality—in exchange for abandoning their white masters and fighting for the crown. Thousands did.
But in 1783 after the British lost, the victors demanded the return of “the negroes or other property of the American inhabitants.” British negotiators in Paris were happy enough to send their erstwhile black friends back to vengeful former masters but Sir Guy Carleton, the man in charge of the British evacuation in New York, objected. He ordered one of his generals, Samuel Birch, to compile a “Book of Negroes,” a detailed listing of the 3,000 freed black men, women and children deemed eligible to sail in the British evacuation of New York.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the 1,500 of those who settled on the rocky edge of the new white loyalist city of Shelburne, N.S. named their community in honour of the general whose precious certificates they carried. Birchtown instantly became the largest settlement of free blacks in North America. But there were other freed black communities in the colony too, in places like Tracadie, Weymouth and Brindley Town.
None of them were really free, of course. The British had promised the freed blacks land. But then offered them only the rockiest, most barren scraps of a generally unfriendly land, if they gave them any at all. Some white loyalists even tried to grab that from them. Unlike more well-to-do white loyalists, the blacks arrived with no money or resources. That meant many ended up as indentured servants—slaves by another name—for whites in Shelburne. Some whites even pocketed the rations the British designated for the freed blacks.
Because the desperate blacks were prepared to work for less than the almost as desperate, disbanded white soldiers, the soldiers attacked them. In July 1784, the first race riot in North America took place in Shelburne. It lasted a week.
Things didn’t get better after that. There were fires and famines, recession and drought. Whites moved on; blacks died of starvation.
By January 1792, the colony’s black loyalists had endured all they could of British freedom in frigid Nova Scotia. More than 1,100 of them—including 550 from Birchtown and Shelburne—set sail from Halifax in an armada bound for Sierra Leone where they were, once again, promised they would be free.
Those who remained in what was left of Birchtown—as well as in other black and poor communities huddled on the outskirts of richer white communities—hunkered down, survived, made lives and communities. For two centuries, they—and their history—were either ignored or dismissed.
To cite but one example: in 1963, Birchtown residents approached the Nova Scotia Historic Sites Advisory Board seeking historic designation for their community. The board’s chair, prominent author Will R. Bird, wrote to the then-premier, Robert Stanfield, dismissing Birchtown as “a sort of shack town, a settlement of the slaves who came with the loyalists and were left there by the loyalists who moved on.” The community, he suggested, was not important enough—or white enough—to be considered historic.
***
Elizabeth Cromwell, who grew up in the area, knows all about the ways in which black history was marginalized in Shelburne. “They’re very good,” she says simply, “when they’re talking to your face.” After being mostly invisible in official celebrations to mark the 200th anniversary of the loyalists’ 1783 arrival in Shelburne, the few hundred remaining members of the local black community began to band together in the mid-1980s. Although the traditional United Empire Loyalists’ organizations were “upset we were organizing,” Cromwell recalls, “that just gave us another little push.”
So too did government plans to situate—what else?—a landfill in Birchtown.
Their success in stopping the landfill not only led to the incorporation of the Black Loyalist Heritage Society in 1991 but it also sparked an archaeological dig on land just a few hundred yards from the Cromwell family home. Researchers uncovered a treasure trove of more than 16,000 “exceptional” artifacts from the late 1700s, which helped cement Birchtown’s place in black history—and in Canadian history.
By 1996, the group had convinced the National Historic Sites and Monuments Board to finally erect a plaque to recognize Birchtown as “a proud symbol of the struggle by blacks… for justice and dignity.”
The society also began to create spaces—acquiring an old church and a one-room school house from the 1830s—to store and display their growing collection of information and artifacts of the black experience. It partnered with the Nova Scotia Museum to mount a traveling exhibit called “Remembering Black Loyalists, Black Communities.” The exhibit ended up on permanent display in Birchtown. The society also developed an 800-metre Heritage Walking Trail for visitors that circled around the museum past a black burying ground and a replica of the sort of pit house where the early residents might have lived. Its first official visitor was then-Governor General Adrienne Clarkson.
In 2000, the society hired experts to train four members of the local black community to conduct genealogical research in order to handle the ever growing number of calls from around the world asking for help in tracing their black family histories. They began to put together a Black Loyalist Registry, identifying those descended from the original settlers. More than 2,000 self-identified black loyalist descendants joined the society.
The operational hub for this growing web of activity was the small, non-descript $66,000 bungalow on the Old Birchtown Road, built in the mid-1990s with the help of an ACOA grant.
Or at least it was, until fire destroyed it.
***
Police refused to call the fire a hate crime. The criminal code, which defines a hate crime as one designed to intimidate or harm an identifiable group of people, provides for stiffer sentences for such crimes. Within weeks of the fire, however, an RCMP spokesperson confidently told a reporter from Shunpiking that investigators knew who did it and “the motive of the individual involved… was not race-related.”
Eight months later, police finally charged Gaylord Avery Perry, a 41-year-old local ne’er do well, with the crime. Perry was already in jail, serving time for a laundry lists of unrelated offences: “assault causing bodily harm, assault with a weapon, criminal assault, uttering threats, criminal harassment, dangerous operation of a motor vehicle, committing an offense while operating a motor vehicle, a breach of undertaking, causing a disturbance, and evading a peace officer.”
The Black Loyalist Heritage Centre arson case never went to trial. In February 2008, the prosecutor stayed the charges because he wasn’t convinced he could get a conviction based on the evidence “available.” One key prosecution witness had apparently refused to testify.
While that decision may not matter much in the criminal justice scheme of things—Perry was already back in jail, having been convicted of assaulting his parents by throwing a tea kettle at his mother and beating his 70-year-old father with a shovel—staying the charges means there will never be a judicial airing of the reasons for the crime.
While there are no shortage of rumours in the community about what really happened, the one thing that is clear is that whoever decided to burn down “a building belonging to a group of black people” didn’t do it randomly or accidentally.
And publicity about the fire itself also brought out even more crazies. “It was a terrible time,” Crowell recalls. “There were horrible telephone calls, threats, insults…” The police traced much of it to the United States, but there was local fallout too. “Things were written on the side of the building, or in the snow…”
Ironically, however, the fire may yet turn out to be as much an opportunity as it was, quite clearly, a disaster.
Or not.
***
The fire—and the publicity it generated—brought the community, white and black, together. “This,” says Elizabeth Cromwell, “was not the way the community wanted to be seen.”
The congregation of Shelburne’s Christ Anglican Church—which can also trace its roots back to the town’s earliest days—donated $10,000 to the rebuilding campaign. Acadia University offered $6,000 and two senior students to help “reconstitute” the society’s destroyed genealogical records. The owners of the Whirligig, Shelburne’s popular new and used bookstore, organized a sponsor-a-book program, inviting its customers to help buy replacement books for the Society’s burned-out library. They raised more than $3,000. David Bradley, a Halifax-based computer guru, even volunteered what ended up being 80 hours of his time to rescue almost all of the priceless data stored on the society’s burned computer hard drives.
During a successful June 2006 Birchtown Healing Weekend staged by the society to both raise funds and also promote a greater spirit of community, Stanley Jacklin, the society’s then-president, told the Halifax Herald: “A lot of good things do come from bad things, I guess… We will rebuild and become bigger and better than ever.”
Even before the fire, it was clear the society had not only outgrown its too-small bungalow-office space but also that it needed bigger and better space than a renovated old one-room schoolhouse in which to display its valuable collection for the growing number of tourists, black and white, who wanted to understand the black loyalist experience.
In 2000, there’d been ambitious talk of building a new $9-million interpretive, tourism and community economic development project in Birchtown. But the best federal and provincial governments were prepared to offer then was $200,000 to help “preserve rural culture.” The project died.
And then the bungalow burned down.
Today, a more modest $3-million proposal is working its way through the long and complicated funding food chain.
Cobbling together seed money from Canadian Heritage, Nova Scotia Museums and the province’s department of economic and rural development, the society hired a team of Halifax-based architects—lead architects Peter Henry and Christine Macy, the dean of Dalhousie’s architecture department, and project architect Judy-Ann Obersi—to come up with a design for a new centre that could not only combine exhibit and display space with offices, meeting rooms, a theatre and gift shop but also represent the black experience architecturally.
The result is visually stunning and aesthetically pleasing. The exterior design incorporates traditional granaries of west Africa, which is where many of the black loyalists began their journey as captured slaves. The granary motif will serve as both a building feature and also as display cases for artifacts. The low-rise building will be built into its surroundings and covered with a gently sloping “green” roof. That will be environmentally friendly but also a living reminder of the pit-house architectural style the first residents were forced to adopt. A massive curving stone wall, reminiscent of the remnants of manmade stone walls found around Birchtown, will lead visitors in to and out of the main exhibit area, and may even include the names of all of those recorded in the original Book of Negroes etched into the stone.
The architects’ blueprints are expected to be ready by the end of March, and then the real work of raising the money to make it a reality will begin. Cromwell’s group has already met with the provincial minister, made its first overtures to the cabinet. “Money is always short when we come to the table,” she allows. “But it’s time for Canadians to step up and take ownership of this history. It’s not just our history; it’s Canadian history.”
Are we finally ready to claim it?
Copyright 2010 Stephen Kimber
Africville… a look back at the struggle for redress
Today's announcement (February 24, 2010) of an agreement between the Africville Genealogy Society and various governments will mark the culmination of a decades-long, sometimes seemingly endless and too often hopeless struggle.
The deal—like almost anything to do with Africville—will be controversial. But as we consider what it means, it is worth looking back at how long—and how hard—it has been to get to this point.
Over the years, I've done a number of stories and columns—not to mention a novel, Reparations—about the struggles of Africville's former residents. Here are a few of them:
- Irvine Carvery's a 'born optimist'
- A 1994 profile of the former Africville resident who started the Afrciville Genealogy Society and launched the fight for recognition of the injustices done to them.
- Column on the Carvery sit in
- A May 1991 column about the Carvery brothers' sit-in
- Seaview Park church replica will honor memory of Africville
This Halifax Daily News column originally appeared on December 18, 1991. Incredibly, today's settlement includes yet another promise to build the replica of the still unbuilt-church. - Irvine, the UN and the Hotliners
- The local aftermath of the 2004 UN report on reparations.
- The compensation issue drags on
- The city attempts to pressure the Geneaology Society. A column from March 1995.
- Victor and Eddie's excellent adventure
Revisiting the story of Irvine's brothers who staged a camp-in at the site of their old community to try and force the city to acjknowledge their grievances. - An update on the eve of another Africville reunion
From The Coast, July 27, 2006 - Yet another year... and still no church
From The Daily News, July 26, 2007
If you'd like to know more about the real Africville, you may also want to check out these web sites, as well as the Africville Genealogy Society website.
From Wikipedia
From the CBC Archives
Pamela Brown
Dissident Voice: The Ethnic Cleansing of Africville
Copyright 2010 Stephen Kimber
MLA expenses a scandal but….
Yes, the MLA expenses scandal is a scandal. Some of what some MLAs filed as legitimate expenses were not. A few claims may even be criminal. Let’s make MLAs pay back what they can’t justify, and prosecute those whose actions crossed the line. Let’s fix a screwed-up system. Then let’s move on.
When it comes to scandalous wastes of taxpayers’ dollars, MLA expenses represent a piddling amount, even within the auditor-general’s report that started the current tsunami of public outrage.
The auditor-general’s report painted with a broad brush, flagging items he deemed excessive, lacked receipts or were otherwise questionable without digging deeper to determine which might actually be justifiable.
While many expenses—can you say the Dance Dance Revolution video game in the hands of ex-Tory MLA Len Goucher’s grandson, or the patio furniture in Liberal Dave Wilson’s backyard?—seem indefensible, others are more iffy.
Take ex-premier Rodney MacDonald’s $3,250 purchase of a projection screen for presentations. Hardly something for your rec room. MacDonald says community groups still use it. Did he pay too much? Should such items be paid out of constituency expenses? Good questions. But neither justifies labeling MacDonald a pig or a crook.
Or take the pink Nano—valued at $261.06 —that shows up among NDP MLA Leonard Preyra’s expenses. Preyra says he donated it to the Italian-Canadian Cultural Association of Nova Scotia for a fundraiser. He’s not alone. NDP Transportation Minister Bill Estabrooks proudly acknowledges he spent much of his flagged $44,424 in advertising, donations and gifts on local schools and sports teams. Should MLAs use constituency funds to help not-for-profit groups and teams? Another good question. But is doing so a flogging offence?
And, while the auditor general noted over half of legislative members—28 of 51—filed duplicate receipts, the report shows the total cost was $14,123, or approximately $92.31 per MLA per year of the audit.
“The types of wrongdoing… and the scale of it… simply would not warrant more work from my office,” the auditor-general initially said. Partly because of the outcry and new information he’s received, he is now looking at possible criminality. Go for it. Prosecute the cheaters.
Then let’s reform the system: make new expense rules in public, require tendering for purchases, demand receipts for everything and then publish every MLA’s expense report every month on the web.
With those—easy—changes in place, let’s finally turn our attention to the same auditor general’s report, which identifies a $52 million windfall private developers get to pocket from those infamous P-3 school projects. Now that’s scandalous!
Copyright 2010 Stephen Kimber
Whose best interests?
For Family Court Judge Beryl MacDonald, the question seemed simple. Does she have the authority to order the minister of community services to provide a service the department, by policy, doesn’t offer? Her answer, delivered during a family court hearing this week, was equally simple. She does not.
The legal issue may be simple; the case is anything but. And her defensible judicial answer may conflict with the ultimate goal of our child protection legislation: the best interests of the child.
The case involves a troubled Cole Harbour teenager whose grandparents raised him. Two years ago, when they realized they could no longer cope—he has serious psychological problems—they sought help from community services. Instead, the government assumed his guardianship and—because Nova Scotia doesn’t have secure long-term youth facilities—shipped him off to Bayfield, an Ontario institution “for boys experiencing difficulties.”
His grandparents objected and began to act as the boy’s advocates. That made them intruders in the government’s and the institution’s father-knows-best care program.
At one point, after the grandmother complained publicly about his treatment, Bayfield refused her a face-to-face visit despite the fact she’d travelled to Ontario just to see her grandson. Bayfield has also occasionally cut off all communications between the child and his grandparents.
These days, telephone contact is tightly controlled and monitored. A recent note from Bayfield staff claims one conversation “was beginning to turn negative as it was ending.” This apparently referred to the fact the grandmother “asked about his medication again, and was more assertive that he she did not believe he should just be taking medication whenever he wanted.”
Doctors at Bayfield, who have prescribed Seroquel XR, an antipsychotic medication, allow the boy to take some of his daily dosage “as needed.” The province has authorized a dosage of up to 850 mg. per day. According to the website healthcentral.com, “the safety of doses above 800 mg/day has not been evaluated in clinical trial.” Drugs.com says Seroqel XR “should not given to anyone younger than 18 years old.”
The grandparents are just as concerned by what they see as escalating “incidents” of violence during which Bayfield staff “restrained” the boy.
My non-legal question is equally simple: Is this boy better off now than he was when he left Nova Scotia? What will he be like in three years when he becomes an adult and Bayfield spits him back out—as it has other Nova Scotia children.
The judge may see this as a narrow legal question. The Minister of Community Services should see it as a larger question. Is what her department is doing in the best interest of this—or any other—child?
Copyright 2010 Stephen Kimber
Visionless NS Tories look for leader before vision
Tonight, 600 Nova Scotia Tories will gather at the Westin Hotel to pay perfunctory tribute to Rodney MacDonald, their thankfully former, now hardly ever mentioned leader.
After that—if not before—conventioneers will get down to the real, if unspoken business at hand: making sure the party doesn’t blow it again like they did in 2006.
That’s when delegates chose the awkward, inexperienced and visionless MacDonald, not because of what he stood for or what he promised to do, but because what passed for the Tories’ brain trust convinced delegates MacDonald’s youthfulness (he was 33), good looks and cheerful bonhomie could help them sway the youth vote, win back metro from the socialist hordes and restore the party of John Hamm and John Buchanan to its rightful majority in the legislative firmament.
I’d say that worked out rather well for them…
The irony, in retrospect, is there were more qualified candidates. Neil LeBlanc, a former finance minister, for one. And Bill Black, a political neophyte but a successful businessman with clear views on policy.
Their names are now being bandied about again as party members prepare for a late October leadership convention. They’re not the only could-be contenders, of course. Karen Casey, the party’s interim leader, may want the job permanently. But so might fellow MLA and former health minister Chris d’Entremont. Or Cape Breton’s Cecil Clarke. Or—Lord forbid—Halifax Mayor Peter Kelly, who admits he still hasn’t shuttered his political ambitions.
The current front runner, at least according to allnovascotia.com’s political reporter Brian Flinn, is Jamie Baillie, 43, the president and chief executive officer of Credit Union Atlantic. Baillie, a former chief of staff to John Hamm, is a longtime backroom organizer. But his Wikipedia biography was deleted in 2006 as “not a notable enough person to warrant a page.” Ouch.
Still, any of them could do better than the hapless MacDonald. But is that really the question? What the party needs at this point—with at least two-and-a-half years to go before even an early next election—is not a leader but a vision.
They need to distinguish themselves from the increasingly conservative NDP, on the one hand, and the suddenly far less laughable Liberals on the other.
Like Michael Ignatieff’s federal Liberals, Nova Scotia’s Tories need to stop scrambling to find the magic leader button back to power and start doing the hard but necessary work of creating policies and programs that will make voters see them as relevant alternatives.
Don’t hold your breath.
Copyright 2010 Stephen Kimber
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About
STEPHEN KIMBER, a Professor of Journalism at the University of King's College in Halifax, is an award-winning writer, editor and broadcaster. He is the author of one novel -- Reparations -- and seven non-fiction books.
Buy his books at Amazon.