Disenfranchised
 
Black Nova Scotians, descendants of some of Canada's earliest settlers, suffer from poverty, unemployment, poor education and poor housing. Published: The Globe and Mail, July 2, 1988 FOCUS pg 1 BY DEBORAH JONES, NORTH PRESTON, N.S. NOREEN SMITH'S aspiration to become a teacher faltered in high school. Faced with commuting without bus service to a white-dominated high school in Dartmouth, the black woman instead quit school and began a lifetime of work as a domestic. Now a grandmother living in North Preston, Mrs. Smith says she wanted more for her nine children, and pushed them toward education - only to find that their color often outweighed scholastic accomplishments. In one case, she recalls, "The jobs were there, but people would say, 'Oh, I didn't know from your application that you were black.' And then the job was filled by someone else. When black kids get out of school it's like a slap in the face. Nobody wants to give them a chance." Mrs. Smith's children settled eventually, and now her concern focuses on the next generation. Her grandchildren are growing up in the environment of subtle discrimination and profound unemployment that is familiar to black Nova Scotians, but she fears they face even more hardship than preceding generations. Traditional jobs held by blacks, though they were almost always menial, are disappearing. In the black communities where 80 per cent of residents once held jobs, as many as 80 per cent now are jobless. To make things worse, pessimists say, community support systems have eroded and people feel isolated. "We're faced with cultural genocide," said Burnley (Rocky) Jones, an outspoken and respected activist whose quiet anger is almost palpable. "The gap is getting wider between the haves and the have-nots. The whites and the blacks. If that continues, eventually you're going to have, in a very technological society, a group of people who basically will have no role. No role at all." The 30,000 Nova Scotia blacks are the poorest people of a poor province. A celebrated few have succeeded in their various fields, and black people point out the proud traditions of compassion and support within their family, community and church groups. But most local blacks, descendants of some of Canada's earliest settlers, suffer from poverty, poor education and housing rivalled only within native groups. Unemployment is estimated at 50 to 80 per cent among blacks, compared to the provincial average of 10 per cent. Mrs. Smith, speaking with her granddaughter Samteen, 3, curled on her lap, expressed no illusions about the future the little girl will face unless the situation changes drastically. The prospects for Nova Scotia's black youth, in an economy where youth unemployment is rampant, are bleak. There is an almost total absence of formal statistics concerning blacks. Until the 1986 census, race-related questions were not permitted. (Statistics Canada will release the 1986 data about blacks in September.) But although they make up an estimated 3.4 per cent of Nova Scotia's population, blacks are not a particularly visible minority, and they are not very vocal about their difficulties. Most are concentrated in communities on the outskirts of country towns, or in the North End and Spryfield neighborhoods of Halifax. Their history in the province goes back to the mid-1700s, when the first blacks arrived with white explorers. Many more came as free Loyalists from the United States, lured by a British promise of land. But today there are no black MLAs and proportionately few community politicians. Ironically, most of the highly visible blacks in professions or upper middle-class circles have moved to Nova Scotia from other countries or Central Canada. For a period during the U.S.-based civil rights movements of the sixties and early seventies, some blacks spoke of their problems in strident voices and talked of forming a chapter of the U.S.-based Black Panthers group. Out of that period grew the Black United Front, an organization dedicated to becoming an umbrella group for black groups and a focal point for their concerns. But BUF has been plagued in recent years by management scandals and a series of interim directors, and its status has eroded. The work of a new organization, the Black Cultural Centre, is widely praised, but the centre has not yet become well-known. Apathy is the dominant attitude now; some blacks say they are just plain tired of talking. Education officials and many blacks blame a lack of formal schooling, amid a host of other problems, for the position blacks find themselves in. Blacks say their existence is barely acknowledged in Nova Scotia classrooms, although school texts are slowly improving. Government officials admit the problems are daunting. " There are so many ramifications there are no easy answers, " MLA Thomas McInnis, a Cabinet minister whose riding includes North Preston, has said. But he agrees that " education is the root of the unemployment. " Financial compensation is paid to those who stay in school, there is a college fund for black students, and entrance requirements for blacks (and native Indians) in some university programs are more lenient than for other groups. " But it's not enough, " he said. " We're ever so slightly making a dent, but all is not well. " In North Preston, a community often cited as the worst example of poverty here, the sturdy dwellings belonging to the Smith family are distinctive. Outside Mrs. Smith's neatly fenced yard, community life is very insecure - defined first by the residents' color, second by rampant unemployment. Other communities in depressed regions of Canada suffer extreme joblessness. In Nova Scotia, only three others, all black and adjacent to North Preston, are within easy commuting distance - a 10-minute drive - of prosperous metropolitan Halifax-Dartmouth, where the unemployment rate is 6.6 per cent. The poverty here is evident from the road, which winds past tiny shacks cobbled together from tarpaper and scrap building materials, interspersed with the occasional well-kept suburban-style house. And it goes deeper than appearances. Community health is affected: for example, nearly one-third of residents are infected with roundworm. The parasite thrives in situations like that in North Preston, where more than 10 families use a shared hole in the ground for a well, Mr. McInnis said. " We shouldn't have Third World conditions here. It's shocking, " he added bluntly. The Government is working on a major sewage system that will solve the problem; the province has also built new housing in North Preston in recent years. Mrs. Smith, a respected leader in the Baptist church and community, a trustee for the area high school and a member of the board of the Black United Front, joins other black activists in calling for more affirmative action programs. Although programs are in place in the provincial civil service and private business, and government grants are available for black entrepreneurs, they charge that progress is slow. But there is no unified voice speaking out on black-related issues, and many blacks refuse to talk publicly at all, saying they distrust the media for portraying only problems while ignoring successes. The silence angers Mr. Jones. " People have avoided articulating the problems, so there's no pressure to solve the problems. If it hurts people's feelings, so be it. The kids are getting screwed. People don't want to say things, but the reality is there are massive problems, " he said. " Racism exists everywhere here. No matter how you try to play that, when you see large numbers of black kids in the general programs of our high schools, in non-university programs, when you see incredibly high rates of unemployment in our communities, when you see large numbers of black people going into our federal and provincial jails and serving longer percentages of their sentences, that only happens because of the color of their skin. There is no other explanation. " Not only government inaction and discrimination are blamed. " The responsibility lies within the black community itself. Too many young black people fail to relate to their own people, " said Baptist church minister and elementary school teacher Donald Skeir. " Many of the cultural heritages we have are being ignored by the young people. Whether they feel it's a liability to retain their culture . . . whether it's due to a sense of shame about the past . . . I don't know. " " It's a crisis, " Mr. Jones said. " Something has got to be done. The community's got to wake up. " Copyright Deborah Jones 1988 ~~~ Africville’s bitter memories Nova Scotia’s Africville bitterly and romantically remembered for what was promised -- and not delivered, to hundreds of people relocated against their will. Published: The Globe and Mail, July 2, 1988 FOCUS BY DEBORAH JONES, HALIFAX TODAY WHAT used to be Africville , with all the rich and negative connotations of that name, is a little-used park on the windswept edge of Halifax harbor. From a stark concrete building nearby emanate the clamor and stench of the city's garbage transfer station, which replaced the dump where many Africville residents once scavenged a living. Nearby, cars speed past on a busy artery. Little is left here of the vibrant and controversial community of about 400 black people who had to leave the area in the mid-sixties because it was thought to be unfit for human habitation. The exiles continue to feel their loss. "There was one family on social assistance in Africville," said Irvine Carvery, who was 12 when his family left their Africville home. "Now we have third-generation people on social assistance." The dispersion of residents from Africville, mostly into public housing, remains a sore point for Nova Scotia blacks. Africville is bitterly and romantically remembered as an impoverished but solid community wiped out by discrimination. At the time, the government-organized move was supported by black leaders outside the community. Critics now charge that they considered Africville only as a blight affecting the stature of the rest of Nova Scotia's blacks. Linda Mantley, whose family roots in Africville went back to the last century, was a teen-ager when her family was moved into public housing in the North End of Halifax. "I only wish I had been older at the time," she said ruefully. The objectors to the move, mostly young people, were hushed by others who did not want anyone branded as a troublemaker, she said. "If we had been older . . . if we knew what we know now, we would have fought it. We would have asked for money to fix up the houses and install city sewers and water. "Now a lot of people got a lot of heartaches." Despite being a distinct community for about a century, Africville did lack public services such as sewers and drinking water. Houses were condemned in several reports as woefully inadequate. And as government officials investigated ownership of the land before the relocation, they found only a few deeds and some claims of squatter's rights. The ownership of some land was simply untraceable. Nonetheless, residents liked the place. "The community was independent; it functioned on its own without the help of the city, with its own school, hall, church, a number of stores and a post office," Ms Mantley said. "A lot of people, if it was possible to get their land back somehow, would live back there again. I don't blame them. Home is home is home." In 1981, the Africville Geneology Society was formed by a group of ex- residents to bring people from the neighborhood together each year "and to deal with past, present and future fears that involve Africville," said Ms Mantley, a founding member. More than 3,000 are expected to gather in what is now Seaview Park for a reunion July 28 to 31. Mr. Carvery says they will come from throughout Canada and the United States. "The word Africville continues to have powerful meaning for many of the former residents, and indeed for Nova Scotian blacks in general," said Donald Clairmont, a sociology professor at Dalhousie University. Last year, he and Dennis Magill of the University of Toronto published the second edition of the Life and Death of a Canadian Black Community. "Gone are the people, their community, their - and especially others' - debris. Yet Africville still generates warm memories and purposive identity for its relocated people and their children and is still a rallying symbol in the black subculture," they wrote. "Subsequent to the relocation, Africville became a kind of red alert, signalling danger to black community and traditions in the guise of city development projects, area upgrading and gentrification . . ." Africville life was not sanitized or homogeneous, but offered a rich texture, Prof. Clairmont said. "And the fact that the community was taken away from them rather than they themselves migrating from it adds a profundity to their grievance." Ms Mantley now lives with her family in Uniacke Square, a dilapidated public housing project in Halifax's rough North End which the provincial and federal governments are renovating. Elderly people who were moved from Africville found the change especially difficult, and are still struggling, she said. When the restoration of Uniacke Square was announced in 1986, for example, many feared it would mean another relocation. One main reason why the memory of Africville remains a bitter one, observers say, is that promises of better housing and job training made at the time were not kept. People "never did get the new start promised them in the relocation rhetoric. Many indeed are still suffering from socio-economic disadvantages, and live in more crowded and bureaucratic public housing," Prof. Clairmont said. "Very little groundwork had been done to really help people deal with what was an absolutely massive transition," recalled Alexa McDonough, whose first job as a young city social worker was to help with the relocation, and who says she had doubts about it even then. "People had rent and other expenses to pay all of a sudden. There was no really coming to terms with the amount of disruption, massive transition. There was a community support and way of life in Africville that was devastated in the relocation," said Mrs. McDonough, who is now leader of the Nova Scotia New Democratic Party. "Although I think it's not entirely accurate to have romantic notions about how idyllic existence was in Africville . . . what they gave up was not compensated for." She noted that many "have taken advantage of new opportunities . . . but there is also an overwhelming sense of loss of cultural identity." Critics of the relocation have charged that the city simply wanted the land. Mrs. McDonough has another explanation. "I really think it was just incredible naivete - you don't solve a community problem by eliminating the community." "People did feel then you could solve all the problems," Prof. Clairmont said. "Put a social worker in there and he would look after their interests. When I (later) went to the human rights group and asked them what happened, most of them were surprised to learn there never was any employment program. Yet they were the ones who were supposed to be the watchdogs . . . Many of them were naive. They felt the relocation had been successful." "Nova Scotia blacks remember Africville . . . also because of what has happened to the rank and file of Nova Scotia blacks," added historian Bridglal Pachai, director of the provincial Black Cultural Centre. "A few black professionals are in good places . . . but for as long as some 50 to 70 per cent unemployment rates apply to many of the predominantly black settlements of Nova Scotia, Africville will also be a symbol of the difficulties facing blacks in Nova Scotia." Most former residents admit Africville will never spring back to life. But Ms Mantley, for one, wants more information about it to be available in libraries and schools, and for its story to be told in history classes. To no avail, Mr. Carvery petitioned the city last year to review the lot of Africville residents, and make good on promises of housing, job training and job opportunities. Copyright Deborah Jones 1988 About this website: Text and photos by Deborah Jones except where otherwise noted. Please contact me for reprint rights. All material copyrighted ../About.htmlshapeimage_1_link_0
Black Nova Scotians in a separate world
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