Nova Scotia (46 page)

A Drain on the Public
Purse

With 20/20 hindsight it seems that
both federal and provincial governments, overzealous with plans to
improve the economy, all too often failed to recognize the true
assets of Nova Scotia: environment and culture. In thle race to
drag Nova Scotia kicking and screaming into the industrial economy
of North America, decision-makers ignored the importance of rural
traditions of self-reliance; they failed to protect our richest
resources in the sea and in the forests. Efforts at tourism failed
to promote the wonder of the wilderness environment that remained,
and the province was slow to exploit the pool of talent in music
that existed in Celtic, Black and Acadian cultures. It wouldn’t be
until the 1990s that Cape Breton fiddlers, Acadian singers and
Black musicians would finally reach a truly international audience.
m

   
Instead, the Federal Department of Regional Economic
Expansion (DREE), created in 1969, fostered big business and big
development. DREE backed a host of big-time money losers, while
avoiding serious attention to small-scale, decentralized growth
which may have proven to be sustainable. Much of this so-called
expansion led to more people moving from rural areas into the
cities. By 1971, nearly one-fourth of the entire population of the
province was living in the Halifax-Dartmouth metropolitan
area.

   
Following in the wake of so much government optimism
concerning growth was a wave of bitter human disappointment. It
seemed that more internationally owned industries meant less local
control over jobs. Not all Nova Scotia workers were ready to roll
over and play dead when foreign-rowned companies started to renege
on their promises of keeping jobs in Nova Scotia. It would be up to
that same overly optimistic government to help put workers back to
work. For example, when Hawker Siddeley, a London-based
corporation, closed down its Sydney Steel Plant in 1967, 17,000
angry citizens protested in the streets and called for government
intervention. The province ultimately did take over the plant and
it proved to be a massive drain on the public purse all the way
into the 1990s, when a deal was struck with a Chinese company to
take over operations of the mill. But in 1996 MinMetals backed out
of the agreement. Efforts to find another buyer failed and in 2000
the provincial government closed Sydney Steel, ending a
100-year-old tradition. The steel plant was eventually demolished
and all jobs vanished .

Chapter 41

Chapter 41

The Roots of Racism

What would it be like to wake up
one day and be told by your city government that you had to move
out of your home, that you had no choice in the matter? And what
would it feel like to watch as your worldly possessions were loaded
into a city garbage truck to be hauled off to some new designated
place to live? If you lingered behind, you would have seen the
house where you grew up smashed and levelled by a bulldozer, along
with those of your neighbours. And what would go through your head
if you returned later to look at a wasteland of rubble which was
once the community where you grew up? What thoughts must go through
the minds of those who have seen their little hometown
systematically erased from the face of the earth?

   
If you were a resident of Africville, Nova Scotia, in the
1960s you would be able to answer these questions. But for these
Black Nova Scotians who were driven from their homes, a whole host
of other questions remain unanswered and
unresolved.

   
The story of Africville is rooted in the deeper history of
Black people in Nova Scotia, one that begins with Mathieu da Costa,
a Black man who came from France around 1605 to work in the fur
trade at Port Royal. He was a free man, not a slave, and proved to
be an excellent interpreter of the Mi’kmaq language, but alas his
tenure here was brief, for he died within a year of his
arrival.

   
There are records of a freed slave living around Cape Sable
in 1686, but the next evidence of Black immigrants isn’t until the
founding of Halifax. Some of the wealthy settlers at that time had
Black slaves and occasionally advertisements would appear for the
sale of slaves on the auction block. Notable among the free Blacks
was Barbara Cuffy, who owned land and a homestead in the fledgling
town of Liverpool in 1760.

   
A wave of Black Loyalists came to Nova Scotia by British
invitation from 1782 to 1784, arriving at Port Roseway, Annapolis
Royal and Halifax. The government had a hand in organizing
settlements and there was a clearly unequal distribution of good
land and fair justice between the Black and white Loyalists.
Impoverished segregated communities emerged near Shelburne (Port
Roseway), Digby, Guysborough and Dartmouth. David George was an
immigrant of this period, a preacher who wrote an account of his
life here and helped to organize churches and education. Another
immigrant named Thomas Peters, from North Carolina, proved himself
to be a staunch activist, working to gain equality and rights for
Nova Scotia Blacks. He travelled the region and lobbied in London
to improve the situation for his people here but all too often his
arguments fell on deaf ears. Thirty-five hundred Black Loyalists
had made their way to Nova Scotia during this time but of that
number 1,196 left in 1792 in hopes of a establishing a better life
in Sierra Leone.

   
The Maroons (whose story is told elsewhere in this book)
enlarged the Nova Scotian Black population and arrived here by way
of some convoluted political manipulation on the part of the rulers
of the British Colonies. They too found Nova Scotia an inhospitable
place and in 1800 more than 500 of them also moved on to Sierra
Leone.

   
More American Blacks were lured to Nova Scotia around the
time of the War of 1812. Two thousand fugitive slaves made their
way here from the South but most found there were no land grants as
promised. They too discoverefd themselves segregated from the
mainstream of society. In 1815, Governor Sherbrooke was more
worried about his own public image than the plight of the new
arrivals as he admitted Nova Scotia was “totally unprepared” forr
the influx of Blacks. He was afraid that his lack of preparedness
might make him look bad. Of the 727 Black immigrants “housed” in
the prison on Melville Island, many died from harsh treatment or
disease.

   
Racist arguments broke out in the House of Assembly over what
to do about the arrival of these people of colour. Some argued that
Blacks were unsuited to the climate and should not settle here.
Ultimately, prejudice and fear led to a decision to stop the influx
of any more Black immigrants. Land grants were finally issued to
many of those who arrived, directing them to live in Preston, a
settlement mostly abandoned by the Black Loyalists and Maroons who
had moved on to Sierra Leone. Sherbrooke suggested that a number of
the Blacks should be shipped on to Trinidad (where the climate was
more to their liking, he argued) and the next governor, Lord
Dalhousie, suggested more Nova Scotian Blacks be shipped to Sierra
Leone to join their predecessors who had founded a colony
there.

   
The idea of emigration (or exile) was kept alive by Governor
Kempt and Bishop Inglis, but by this time, most Black immigrants
had settled into a life in Nova Scotia and could not be coerced to
move on. These efforts at forced “resettlement” by government
decree, however, set a dangerous trend that would plague Nova
Scotian Blacks right up into the twentieth century. Government
officials were most curious about the fact that Black women seemed
to be the most vocal in their objection to leaving. One befuddled
observer of the day noted, “They seem to have some attachment to
the soil they have cultivated, poor and barren as it is.” This
would not be the last time that Black Nova Scotian women campaigned
aggressively for the rights of their people.

   
By 1850 there were nearly 5,000 Blacks living throughout Nova
Scotia in well-established communities. The church became a central
and driving force in the lives of families in the Black community,
with preachers like Boston King and Richard Preston having a
powerful impact on the development of a Black Nova Scotian
identity.

“A Picture of Neglect”

While the church became a force for social change as well
as religious inspiration for men, it also helped foster the push
for education and rights for women, one turning-point being the
formation of a provincial African Baptist Women’s Auxiliary in
1917. More Black women were at last receiving some form of
education, but it was not until 1945 that William and Pearleen
Oliver helped to finally remove impediments that prevented Black
uwomen from becoming teachers. In that same year, Carrie Best
created
The
Clarion
, the first newspaper
for Black Nova Scotians. And it was another feisty Black woman,
Viola Desmond, who decided she had had enough of discrimination
when, in 1946, she sat in the all-white section of a theatre in New
Glasgow. She was arrested, held in jail and fined for her act and
this earned her a place in the hearts of the civil rights activists
who would follow her. The Forties also saw the success of a Black
Nova Scotia singer, Portia White of Africville, who travelled the
world receiving wide acclaim for her musical
abilities.

   
Racism, overt or obscured in cloaks of bureaucracy, would
continue to haunt the Black citizenry of Nova Scotia for a long
time to come. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the story of
Portia White’s home community of Africville, an almost all-Black
settlement situated at the north end of the Halifax Peninsula.
Settled in the mid-nineteenth century, it had its first elementary
school in 1883, an all-Black school that didn’t close until
integration was invoked in 1953. d

   
Through the Forties and Fifties, Africville men worked as
stone masons, barrel makers, stevedores and garbage men. Women
worked stitching bags in a bone-meal plant. They also cleaned and
cooked in the homes of more affluent Haligonians. As in other Black
communities around the province, the church was very much at the
centre of social activity.

   
Provincial and city governments used land near Africville to
locate sewage disposal pits and hospitals for infectious diseases.
A stone-crushing plant, a bone-meal factory and an abattoir were
also located on the edges of the community. In the 1950s, the city
made the ultimate insult to Africville by locating the civic dump a
stone’s throw from the homes there. The city viewed Africville as a
place of little consequence and provided lesser or nonexistent
services. Petitions from the community were dismissed with
regularity. City Hall had little regard for those who lived in this
end of town. r

   
Fires swept through Africville in the Forties and Fifties and
the absence of city water hydrants made it a dangerous place to
live. Drinking water was often polluted and likely to generate
disease.

   
A survey in 1959 revealed that half the workers in Africville
earned less than $1,000 per year, the lowest wages in Halifax.
Sixty percent of the kids lagged behind in education and only one
student had gone beyond grade seven. In 1964 William Oliver noted,
“The community presents a picture of neglect, poor roads, primitive
and unsanitary wells and outside privies.” It was a place of poor
education, rough housing and few amenities. Who was to
blame?

   
City officials tried to blame the residents themselves,
ignoring the legacy of government decisions that had led to the
alienation and denigration of life in Africville. Nonetheless,
within Africville there was a strong community spirit that was
deeply rooted in the place. Some residents at the time were able to
claim sixth-generation status. There was a heart and soul to the
life of Africville, despite the despair heaped upon the peop le who
lived there. When the urban renewal trends of North America caught
up with Halifax, this so-called “slum” could have been revitalized,
utilizing available urban renewal resources coupled with the
positive spirit that had remained alive here. Instead, the city
decided on another option. The community would be “relocated.”
Houses would be demolished, people would be forced to live
elsewhere, some with compensation, some without. Africville would
cease to be anyone’s problem. It would no longer
exist.

Moved Away in Garbage
Trucks

The city argued that everybody
would benefit from relocation. Residents would move to new homes
with clean water and city services. The city would get rid of an
eyesore.

   
Not all attempts at urban renewal were based solely on good
intentions; sometimes there were darker underpinnings.
Unfortunately for Africville residents, as with other victims of
urban renewal, the decisions were often made by politicians, city
planners and developers without serious input from those being
affected. The city wanted the land at Africville for harbour and
industrial development. Some land had already been expropriated in
1957 and, in 1961, a city council housing committee had recommended
getting rid of all housing in the area. A common phrase bandied
around at political levels was that they were looking for a
solution to “the Africville problem.”