It is a story whose heroes have been emerging over the last seventy five years. It is a story that moves us beyond the constraints of the Robin Winks coverage of our history, and which needs to be articulated at the National, the Provincial and the local community levels. But there is a new story emerging at the National level out of the evolving Canadian landscape (Multiculturalism as a state policy) that highlights minorities and redefine and integrate them as integral components of the Canadian experiment with diversity. Immigration policies and Provincial jurisdictions under the Canadian Charter served to exacerbate this.
Each Province boasts of its local heroes almost to the exclusion of other significant developments in other Black communities elsewhere in the Country. Robin Winks’ work, “The Blacks in Canada”, is a story that links the early Black settlements to the USA and slavery via the myth of the “Star of the North” and the “Underground Rail Road.” But as Winks and other historians have shown, there were significant differences in the patterns of the development of Black communities across Canada. The Sir George Williams University Riots of 1968 and the Equality Report (Report of he Special Committee on Visible Minorities in Canada, Government of Canada ) of 1984 provide ample evidence of that. Over the years that followed, Black heroes of that time were resurrected and re-introduced to the community and the Canadian diversity as dynamic immigrant Blacks who boldly claimed proprietorship and demanded a more equal place in the Canadian Mosaic.
His work spans the period from the mid-seventeenth century to the mid twentieth Century. Robin Winks in his book “The Blacks in Canada” lays out the struggle of Blacks fleeing slavery in the USA to establish themselves as free beings in the various Provinces across the Canadian landscape.
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