convenient to bar professionals from lacrosse in the 1880s as a way of effectively banning paid Aboriginal players. Many of them grew moustaches and passed themselves off as whites. Following attacks on Chinese and Japanese workers in Vancouver in 1907, the latter community adopted the novel solution of forming Japanese-Canadian hockey and baseball teams to play against white mainstream teams.
Blacks, however, faced additional challenges. Like Aboriginals and those from Asia, they were different in appearance. The history of their race’s slavery and the continuing victimization of Blacks through legal means after emancipation created a unique situation. Their treatment, itself an affront to American notions of equality and liberty for all, became a kind of excuse for even more severe restrictions. White Americans demonized Blacks in grotesque racial caricatures and in daily encounters as a way of repudiating their basic humanity.
Many Canadians accepted the American belief that the races were not equal but throughout their history they often refused to introduce the practice of sporting apartheid, as in the United States. In this, as many other features of Canadian life, the reality is more nuanced and ambiguous than that available in any simple explanation.
After a brief period of tentative integration following the Civil War, Blacks in the United States were banned from open participation in most sports and could play games only amongst themselves. There were limited exceptions in sports like boxing and bicycling, and in Olympic Games participation, but even here the limited numbers indicate that athletes like Jack Johnson and Jesse Owens were exceptions to the general practice. Sports segregation continued well into the post-Second World War period. It was gradually removed through acts like Jackie Robinson’s integration into organized baseball in 1946 and the eventual introduction of Blacks in the basketball and football line-ups of American colleges in the south by the 1970s. Even today there are private golf clubs that retain exclusionary policies.
Integration, however, has been a cruel double bind. The world of sports has often shortchanged American Blacks from pursuing more realistic careers. Even the successful athlete suffers. Unlike their white athletic counterparts, applauded for the well-roundedness of their intellectual and sporting pursuits, Black sporting accomplishment has often been seen as proof that members of their race had a genetic advantage in sports.
The above are largely American examples. Over the years Canadians smugly asserted their own country’s more tolerant culture in race relations but, as this story of Black participation in sports demonstrates, the record is far more troubling. Canada’s record in matters of race has been a disturbing mixture of occasional good intentions and ugly practices. The story of Black athletic participation in Canada has nevertheless been a record of remarkable accomplishment in one of the few fields (the arts being the other) in which some integrated accomplishment was possible. The key word is “some” and this story is often full of heart-breaking acts of exclusion.
Canada’s sporting culture is not the same as that in the United States; commercial sports in Canada have had a less successful heritage. Athletes have often had to balance their sporting accomplishment with employment in other fields. Black athletes in Canada never had the luxury of assuming that a sports career could be an occupation in itself. If they intended to make it one, they often had to move to the United States. By their accomplishments in other fields, however, African-Canadian athletes disproved the racist conclusion that they were somehow only suited to sports.
Even in its own right, however, sport is not a field of physical excellence separated from mental challenge. It is above all else a field of culture. It is as important to self-definition and expression as any branch of artistic, industrial or business life.
The Black athletic experience has been shaped by its history as a separate identity whether because of real segregation or, as in Canada, because the African-Canadian community was so small until the last 40 years. This chapter has now largely ended though there is continuing fascination with the limited number of Black hockey players in the National Hockey League. This is at best, however, a small item of curiosity.
However, an examination of Black sports participation remains a current issue in at least two ways. One of these is the problematic field of racial genetic exploration, which reduces the dynamic of public life to a lifeless debate on predetermined genetic capabilities of racial groups. In sports, as in every field, one’s original talent, if that could be measured (a dubious proposition at best), only takes one so far. It is the sheer willpower, determination and dedication of the athlete that matters.
Rather than looking at genetic profiles based on absolute categories of racial definition (recognizing that 90 per cent of all Black Americans have some white ancestry), more can be gained by looking at social context. The significant involvement and success in sports by American Black athletes owes much to its being a field largely open to advancement and employment based on demonstrated ability.
The second and more pertinent area of current study is immigration. Public discussion on the meaning, necessity and challenges of integrating new residents into the life of the country remain with us today. Often the customs, religion, lifestyle and appearance of newcomers are different from those of the majority population.
Trinidad-born Nick Benjamin was first overall pick in the Canadian Football League’s 1985 draft of Canadian players. Here, Benjamin (number 65) is shown in the pulling guard position as a member of Montreal’s Concordia University team where he won All-Canadian honours.
For much of Canada’s first hundred years no group, with the possible exception of the Chinese and Japanese, was more subject to these discussions as its Black population. In some ways that conversation continues though sports provides a partially liberating resolution by bringing communities together.
This examination will uncover forgotten stories of tribulation and triumph; examples of the marvellous legacy of human diversity; the profound and often neglected strengths and contributions of immigrants; and the experiences of a community of people defined by race.
As a distinct and at times almost invisible minority in a country that most chose to come to, the experience of African Canadians is markedly different from that of African Americans. Canadian Blacks sought out and participated in most sports choosing hockey in some cases, despite its cost and nearly all-white makeup, because it was the essence of a Canadian identity they wished to celebrate.
The Black sporting experience in Canada has five distinct characteristics. The first are those athletes with deep roots in the country. They share a common 19th century immigrant heritage with new European arrivals and Loyalists fleeing from the United States. They include Ferguson Jenkins, Herb Carnegie and Fred Thomas, the sons of American and West Indian descended parents. Jenkins as well as Sam Richardson descended from slaves who had escaped to southwestern Ontario through the Underground Railroad. Boxer George Dixon grew up in Africville, the most famous Canadian Black settlement and the home of Loyalist Blacks and Jamaican Maroons. Reuben Mayes’s family dated back to the immigration of Oklahoma land seekers around the turn of the century. Among baseball player Jimmy Claxton’s ancestors in British Columbia are freedom-seeking American Blacks, French Canadians, Aboriginals and Scottish immigrants.
A second group are those immigrants who arrived throughout the 1970s and ’80s in the wake of changes in Canada’s immigration policies. Recent gold medallists including Donovan Bailey, Mark McKoy and Lennox Lewis have a West Indian background and in Lewis’s case a British one as well. Outstanding female athletes like Molly Killingbeck are also West Indian immigrants.
Action shot of the Toronto Raptors in their second season. Courtesy of Seneca College.
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