A Black Enclave in Atlantic Canada

Next week marks the beginning of Black History Month, and in commemoration of this event, I want to share an interesting bit of history that most people may not know about.

On the remote northeastern edge of Canada, there are a handful of communities in which Black people make up the vast majority of the population (as much as 99% in some towns, such as North Preston and East Preston). And it’s been this way in Nova Scotia for quite a long time due to waves of migration of Black Americans as early as the 1700s. In addition to North and East Preston, there are also large Black populations farther south on the peninsula’s Atlantic coast. Different from other Canadian cities with sizable Black populations, like Toronto and Montreal, most of the Black people in Nova Scotia are not Caribbean or African immigrants, but rather the descendants of African Americans who migrated centuries ago.

The beginning of Black Nova Scotia

The first Black people arrived in Nova Scotia as long ago as the early 1600s, and more were brought as enslaved people from West Africa and the West Indies throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. The Black population grew most significantly, however, during the American Revolutionary War and again after the War of 1812. Here's why.

During the Revolutionary War, Great Britain offered freedom and land in Canada to enslaved Black Americans if they would fight on the side of the British Army. This population came to be referred to as “Black Loyalists.” After the war, more than 3,000 formerly enslaved Black soldiers who had fought with the British were evacuated from the States and transported by the Crown from New York to Nova Scotia, where they were given certificates of freedom, land grants, and modest resources for resettlement. Most of these Black Loyalists resettled just outside the city of Shelburne, Nova Scotia. They named the community Birchtown, and for a time it was the largest settlement of Black Loyalists, as well as the largest settlement of free Africans, in North America.

During the War of 1812, the British government made the same offer of freedom to Black men in the U.S. in exchange for fighting on behalf of the British, which prompted another large migration of Black refugees to Canada. In the years immediately after the war’s end, roughly 2,000 more Black Americans landed in Nova Scotia. This time, more people settled near and outside Halifax, where they created a Black community called Africville.

Not all Black people migrating to Nova Scotia at this time became free after their arrival in the province. Some were, in fact, free before leaving the United States but fled to escape the turmoil and entrenched racism of the country. Around 30 percent of those arriving after the Revolutionary War were still enslaved to British settlers and White Loyalists. But in the period between the two wars, the British government, which had never legally sanctioned slavery, outlawed the slave trade. Slavery in Canada grew less and less common at the same time as more and more Black people fled enslavement in the U.S. And by 1834, Great Britain abolished slavery in the Commonwealth altogether—30 years before the United States would do the same.

The legacy of Africville

When you start looking into Black Nova Scotia, stories about Africville pop up everywhere. Like Birchtown before it, Africville was a tightly knit community with a vibrant culture—neighborhoods full of children playing, running from one house to the next, and families communing, worshiping, socializing, and working together. Founded around 1848, it was a community created by Black people, for Black people, celebrating Black people. There was even a Black ice hockey team.

Birchtown, Beechville, Hammonds Plains, and Windsor were similarly close-knit Black communities but of a smaller scale. North Preston was yet another community outside Halifax founded around the same time as Africville, but it remained intact for longer. In fact, North Preston, which sits on beautiful Long Lake and is surrounded by dense forests, is currently the largest Black community in Canada.

But all is not rosy. White supremacy always finds a way to emerge. The history of some of these early communities is fraught with racism. Black people were given land grants but were often relegated to the outskirts of their towns, and were given harsher and less arable land. Local municipalities also neglected, and even outright refused, to provide the Black communities with adequate sewage, clean water, and garbage disposal services. 

Such was the case in Africville. The City of Halifax took the brutality even further, choosing to build its prison, dump, and an infectious disease hospital in and surrounding Africville. Eventually, in the 1960s and 70s, the city embarked on a campaign to “industrialize” the area, which meant forcibly relocating Africville’s residents and destroying their community as a result. Afterward, the former residents of Africville spent years fighting for justice and reparation. It took until 2010 before they received a settlement and public apology from the mayor of Halifax.

The historical legacy of Africville is strong, and the community’s story is publicly celebrated and commemorated in a local museum as well as others across Canada. Although it took much sacrifice to receive this reparation and recognition, all too often Black communities never receive the appropriate celebration and compensation they deserve. Africville’s story seems to function as part cautionary tale and part roadmap toward restitution for modern-day Nova Scotians, Canadians (including Indigenous and First Nations populations), and North Americans in general.

My visit to Black Nova Scotia

Before I learned about the history of Black Nova Scotia, I had no idea that a large community of descendants of Black Americans had existed in this remote Canadian province for centuries. Nova Scotia is hardly the first place you think of as a bastion of Black culture. And yet, not only have Black people lived in this province, they have also played a part in governing it. In fact, one recent Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia, Mayann Francis, is a Black woman. I was both inspired and intrigued and decided to experience the province first hand.

When I arrived in Halifax, I was eager to get to North Preston. Reaching city limits, I was immediately greeted by a sign declaring it “Canada's Largest Black Community (Est. 1784)”. When some people think of all-Black communities, they think of poverty, high population density, and little greenspace. Those weren’t the characteristics of the all-Black community in Lexington, Kentucky, that I grew up in, and they certainly weren’t the characteristics of North Preston. What I found was a thriving community nestled among pine forests around the scenic Long Lake. It was beautiful, and the people seemed happy and prosperous, a place—like my neighborhood growing up—where neighbors smiled and waved at Black folk driving down the street, whether they knew you or not. I encountered so many welcoming people tending to their yards, chatting with neighbors, or sitting on the porch.

There is also a lot of attention to sustainability in the community. You see it not only in the pristine nature and clean, pine-scented air but also in people’s homes. Here is a photo of one Black family’s home near North Preston that shows a clear investment in solar energy, despite the northern latitude.

What was even more beautiful was seeing the prominent and active efforts to commemorate and honor the history of Black Nova Scotians. I visited community centers and museums, including the Black Cultural Centre for Nova Scotia, located near North Preston. They provided maps that showed the locations of all of the Black communities scattered across the peninsula. They told the story of the first Black Loyalists founding the community of Birchtown, and that of the second wave of Black Loyalists taking ships from Chesapeake Bay north. They told the story of Black struggle in Nova Scotia.

The woman on Canada’s $10 bill is a Black Nova Scotian

They also shared the history of prominent Black Nova Scotians who were at the forefront of Canada’s civil rights movement, often called the Rights Revolution. One woman in particular, Viola Desmond, led the way. Her story rings familiar.

In November of 1946, Desmond went to the Roseland Theatre in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. After purchasing her ticket, she took a seat downstairs in the theater, which was informally designated as a Whites-only section. Roseland’s management asked Desmond to move upstairs to the balcony, where they allowed Blacks to sit, but she refused. They promptly had her arrested and jailed with the unlikely charge of tax evasion. At the time there was a one-cent amusement tax applied to tickets for downstairs seats at the theater. The theater’s case alleged that since Desmond’s ticket was for an upstairs seat, she had not paid the additional cent to sit downstairs, and her refusal to do so amounted to tax fraud.

Desmond initially lost the case, but thankfully, upon appeal, the presiding judge, Justice William Lorimer Hall, saw that it was not Desmond who was the fraudulent party: “Had the matter reached the court by some other method than certiorari [wherein a higher court reviews the decision of a lower court], there might have been an opportunity to right the wrong done this unfortunate woman,” he wrote in his dismissal. “One wonders if the manager of the theatre who laid the complaint was so zealous because of a bona fide belief that there had been an attempt to defraud the province of Nova Scotia of the sum of one cent, or was it a surreptitious endeavor to enforce a Jim Crow rule by misuse of a public statute.”

Desmond’s case provided an important spark for many others to fight for the civil rights of Black people in Canada, similar to the Rosa Parks case in Montgomery, Alabama. In 2018, Desmond was chosen to be the new face on the Canadian $10 bill, further cementing and celebrating her role in Canadian history and Black empowerment. We are still awaiting the face of a Black person on U.S. currency. There was a plan to put Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill, but it never reached fruition.

A land of beauty and bounty

Beyond its historical and cultural offerings, Nova Scotia is a place worth visiting simply for the food and the sheer natural beauty. Being a seafood lover, I made it a point to stop at a small, quaint, coastal town spot for a lobster roll I’d read about in a travel magazine. I live in Boston after all—a mecca for lobster roll connoisseurs—and I have to say, Nova Scotia has Boston beat by a long shot. I’m not sure if it’s the difference in water temperature or something about the ecosystem, but the lobster in Nova Scotia is unbelievably succulent and flavorful.

But more than the delicious seafood and stunning nature, I noticed just how friendly the people were—even more so than in other areas of Canada, which is a high bar. The Black Nova Scotians were very happy to engage with me, and seemed to see Black Americans as their brothers and sisters. Given our unique shared history and Black experience, indeed we are.

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If you’re interested in reading more about Black Nova Scotia, I recommend this great article by Shayla Martin of The New York Times, which was published in September 2022.