Tom Flanagan: Why the Liberals once tried to ban Black immigration

Bit silly to tie this ban to the Liberals as Conservative government’s of that and other early periods were equally exclusionary:

“Oklahoma, where the wind comes sweeping down the plain….”

Oklahoma! is a classic work of American musical theatre. Probably everyone has heard some of the music even if they haven’t seen the stage play or movie. Composer Richard Rodgers and librettist Oscar Hammerstein immortalized the frontier conflict between “the cowman and the farmer” — but they left out a bigger, racially-charged conflict surrounding Oklahoma’s accession to statehood in 1907. This conflict included an inspiring Canadian dimension.

The new state had a large Indian population because it had been carved out of the United States’ Indian Territory. The so-called “Five Civilized Nations” of the southeastern American states (most notably the Cherokee), had been deported there in the 1830s by Democrat President Andrew Jackson in the infamous Trail of Tears expulsion.

These tribes had acquired, from their southern white neighbours, the practice of owning Black slaves. They brought along thousands of slaves, who became the nucleus of Oklahoma’s Black population. After the Union States of the North won the Civil War, the Indian tribes emancipated their slaves, but former slave-owners continued to look down on Black people. In this, they were joined by many white settlers who flooded into the Indian Territory from nearby southern states.

After the U.S. Supreme Court in 1896 enunciated the odious segregationist doctrine of “separate but equal” in Plessy v. Ferguson, whites and Indians alike in Oklahoma began planning to entrench and extend “Jim Crow” segregation laws. Once Oklahoma became a state, legislators set to work, passing one Jim Crow law after another, segregating schools and public buildings, and outlawing interracial marriage.

Canada during this same period was actively seeking agricultural immigrants to fill up the Prairie provinces. Small groups of Oklahoma Blacks, led by their Baptist ministers, decided they didn’t like what statehood would mean for them without the protection of the U.S. federal government. As one immigrant put it: “Things began getting worse for our people. So, my father, always ambitious and proud, wanted to go where every man was accepted on his merit or demerit, regardless of race, colour or creed. So, in the summer of 1909, we moved to Canada.”

It was a long overland journey of more than 3,000 km. Between 1905 and 1911, about 1,000 Black people from Oklahoma moved to Canada to homestead in the West, establishing five small farming villages, of which the best-known were Eldon, near Maidstone in Saskatchewan, and Amber Valley, north of Edmonton in Alberta.

Some Canadians welcomed their new neighbours while others complained to the federal government. “We view with alarm the continuous and rapid influx of Negro settlers,” the Alberta chapter of the Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire wrote to the minister of the interior in Wilfrid Laurier’s Liberal government.

In response, Laurier’s cabinet passed an order-in-council prohibiting Black immigration to Canada for one year. Its rationale? The “race is deemed unsuitable to the climate and requirements of Canada.” The order, however, did not need enforcement because the Liberal government had already run newspaper ads and sent speakers to Oklahoma to tell Blacks that they would not be happy in the cold Canadian climate. Laurier rescinded the order after losing the 1911 election, knowing that Robert Borden’s newly elected Conservative government would repeal it.

The Black homesteaders survived and thrived in their villages; their children and grandchildren eventually moved to the cities, and indeed all over the world. Today the largest concentration of their descendants remains in Edmonton. They founded the Shiloh Baptist Church there in 1910 because other churches didn’t want them as members. That church still functions as the religious home of a mixed-race congregation.

The U.S. was the world’s first large-scale democracy, which was truly a historic achievement. But the democratic rule of the majority can lead to the oppression of racial minorities. Black Oklahomans found greater toleration in Canada’s constitutional monarchy than in American democracy.

Is it surprising that a Liberal government deliberately excluded the Black race from immigrating to Canada? Not really. Liberal governments wrote the first Indian Act in 1876, banned Chinese immigration in the 1920s and interned Japanese Canadians during World War II.

Because of their suffering on the notorious Trail of Tears, the Five Civilized Nations are one of the prime victim groups of American history. Yet they adopted the practice of Black slavery from the whites who drove them out of their ancestral homes and continued it in the West.

Despite all these ironies and hypocrisies, this story had a happy ending. Freedom-seeking people found refuge and a new life in Canada, and that’s worth celebrating.

The original, full-length version of this essay was recently published in C2C Journal.

Tom Flanagan is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Calgary.

Source: Tom Flanagan: Why the Liberals once tried to ban Black immigration