Canadian sports for over a hundred years. They usually returned to the United States when their sports employment ended. In 1946, baseball provided Canadians, particularly the French-speaking population of Montreal, with an opportunity to accord a lone champion, Jackie Robinson, the kind of life-affirming support that helped change the world. The Toronto Blue Jays won the World Series in 1992 and 1993 led by Manager Cito Gaston and their homerun hero Joe Carter, both later inducted into Canada’s Baseball Hall of Fame despite their American citizenship. A Canadian invented basketball but its greatest practitioners have been Americans. Black American general managers, Stu Jackson and Isiah Thomas, were in charge of the Vancouver Grizzlies and Toronto Raptors when they entered the National Basketball Association in 1995. The Grizzlies later left Vancouver but Toronto’s star player was the Black American, Vince Carter. Another American immigrant, Mike “Pinball” Clemons of the Toronto Argonauts, became the face of the team as first its premier player, later its coach and as a permanent Canadian resident.
Perdita Felicien competing for the University of Illinois. She followed her 2003 world championship tide by winning the Women’s 60-metre Hurdles Final at the 2004 World Indoors Athletics Championships in Budapest. Courtesy of the University of Illinois Sports Information.
A fourth category now encompasses the entire world. Ethiopian and Somali soccer teams have their own leagues in larger Canadian centres. Daniel Igali, an immigrant from Nigeria, went on to win gold in wrestling at the 2000 Olympics for Canada, while a National Hockey League star, Jarome Iginla of the Calgary Flames, is the son of a Nigerian father. In the process, the meaning of what it is to be Black is being transformed as people of colour include immigrants from Sri Lanka, the Indian subcontinent and Arabic countries. The Canadian national cricket team at the 2003 World Cup was a picture of the new Canada.
Each of the above has been a stage in the evolution of Black participation in sports in Canada as skin colour and immigration background have diminishing significance. The selection of Perdita Felicien of Pickering, Ontario, as the country’s female athlete of the year in 2003 recognized her gold medal triumph in the 100 metre hurdles at that year’s world athletics championships in Paris. Hers was perhaps a final stage, as it was essentially a mainstream Canadian story without reference to racial identity. Included in this fifth and final stage are African-Canadian hockey players who no longer raise eyebrows of surprise when they step on the ice. At the same time, young Blacks can form their own teams like the BigUp volleyball team, not because they have to but because they are friends and that’s what friends do.
It would be naïve, however, to suggest that the distinct story of the Black athlete in Canada has ended. Racial taunts are still heard in hockey rinks, successful Black athletes in expensive cars are stopped for no apparent reason and Blacks continue to be shut out of opportunities in coaching and ownership. Skin colour not only has been but continues to be a public issue.
The study of the Black athletic experience in Canada is not only a revealing portrait of the past but one more demonstration of some time honoured truths about human achievement and the necessity of the public order to provide open and fair forums for all to participate.
To the victor go the spoils if only he or she is given “A Sporting Chance.”
MARSHALL “MAJOR” TAYLOR’S TRIP TO OTTAWA in the summer of 1902 seemed a lost cause. All of his equipment, including his bike, had been lost. Walking among his fellow cyclists prior to the afternoon’s races, however, he met a young Toronto amateur Willie Morton. Taylor was a professional rider so they would not be competing against each other.
“I’ve got a bit of a problem,” Taylor told the young Canadian. “My bike got lost in transit but it’s a lot like yours.”
“Why not try mine then. If it fits, you can use it after my race,” Morton volunteered. In true storybook fashion they each won their respective races.
Major Taylor was a rarity in those days, usually the lone Black athlete at a cycling event. There were only a few others. C.E. Marshall, a Black Canadian rider, competed in match races around the same time in British Columbia.
Taylor was an American, originally from Indianapolis, who later moved to Worcester, Massachusetts. Here, his professional success earned him enough money to afford a house in a better neighbourhood. Today Worcester’s pride in Taylor is shown by plans for a monument in his memory, but while he was alive his fellow citizens took up a fund-raising campaign to buy his house and encourage him to leave town.
A few years before his Ottawa adventure, Major Taylor had arrived at the World Championships in Montreal in 1899 as the favourite in the one-mile professional event. He’d recently set that distance’s world record. European promoters were already inviting him to compete across the ocean. He was featured in their premier cycling publications.
Taylor’s major rivals in the championship race were the Frenchman, Courbe d’Outrelon, and the renowned Butler Brothers, Tom and Nat, who along with another brother, Frank, were among the most feared competitors in North America. They ensured that the championship field had some of the world’s most accomplished cyclists.
Marshall “Major” Taylor, a pioneering Black American cyclist, found success and support in Canada at the turn of the century.
“Fast and furious they came around the last turn,” said the Montreal Gazette. “Within sight of the white line, the coloured rider crouched lower than ever over his mount and made a finish that would have caused the most sensational of them all to turn green with envy.”
Taylor was ecstatic. “I’ll never forget the thunderous applause that greeted me and the thrill when the band struck up the Star Spangled Banner. I felt more American at that moment than I had ever felt in America,” he said.
The irony of the last comment is obvious. It took a Canadian crowd to illuminate Taylor’s nationality and it was in that same city, 47 years later, where the integration of modern baseball would commence with Brooklyn’s signing of Jackie Robinson to play for the minor league Montreal Royals.
Nor did the Canadian connection end there.
The Butler brothers provided Taylor with his greatest challenges. Andrew Ritchie’s biography about Major Taylor (1988) portrays them generously, particularly the youngest brother, Tom. He describes Tom Butler as a Boston cyclist but the family was from Nova Scotia. While they may have been occasionally ruthless in working together to deny Taylor victory, they were generally fair-minded and accepted his right to compete in this mainstream competition. Had they objected to his presence, as white American athletes were doing at the same time in other sports, Taylor probably would have been barred.
Above, Tom Butler’s display of polite and gentlemanly behaviour to the Black American cyclist Major Taylor has been credited with helping maintain that sport’s integrated character at the turn of the century. Right, Nat Butler (c. 1846-1943) of Nova Scotia’s renowned bicycle racing family who did much to support open competition in one of the few integrated sports of the day. Both photographs courtesy of the Sports Heritage Centre of Nova Scotia.
Ritchie
