with the racism of many of Taylor’s 1898 opponents. The 1899 races were marked by much greater fairness and recognition of his [Taylor’s] right to compete.” Ritchie calls the Butler brothers, liberal east coast athletes, but like the spectators at the world championships that year and like Willie Morton a few years later, they shared a Canadian identity.
Major Taylor’s Canadian success confirmed his status as one of the greatest and earliest Black sports champions in an integrated sport. He later toured Europe and Australia drawing the same sensational reviews earned in Canada. He returned to America in 1904 on his way to the world’s championships in Europe. In San Francisco, however, he was refused entry at restaurants and hotels. Strangers walked up to him on the street and racially abused him. His white travelling companion and good friend, the Australian racer Don Walker, rather disgustedly said to Taylor, “So this is the America about which you have been boasting in Australia?” Taylor had no response.
Canadians might think that Major Taylor’s treatment by their countrymen reflected a national virtue superior to that of Americans. The full story however is not so comforting.
THE OTHER SIDE
There are few records of Black sports participation in the pre-Civil War era but this was generally true as well of white working-class Canadians who did not have the financial means or status to compete in many sporting pastimes. Nevertheless at the time of the Rebellion of 1837, Sir Francis Bond Head had described “Several waggons full of the Black population in Canada, a most powerful, athletic set of men, who of their own accord, and at their expense, had come over to the frontier briefly to beg, in the name of their race, that I would accord them the honour of forming the forlorn hope in the anticipated attack on Navy Island….”
This athleticism was no doubt a response to the kinds of manual labour available to recent Black settlers, but there are other references in pre-Confederation accounts of sporting connections. A local history of Bowmanville, east of Toronto, claims that the town’s barber in the 1840s “was a coloured man named Smith. He was tall, straight and muscular, something of a pugilist, and up to all kinds of circus performances. He was here, off an on till well up in the sixties.” In 1866, the Toronto Daily Leader newspaper condescendingly described a sleighing party involving the local Black population by noting, “…a large number of darkies were rejoicing…The ebonies were got up in great style…this most comical portion of the great human family.”
But it was by the water that the first significant Black sporting opportunities emerged. So much of the economic life of new communities like Toronto depended on lakes, rivers and oceans as sources of food, power or transportation. Water taxis plied the lakeshore, schooners delivered goods, fish were caught and recreation was available.
Eli Playter’s diary of life in early Toronto (then known as York) provides a small portrait of what life may have been like. On July 1, 1802, he writes, “…walk’d down on the bank met Mr. Dean & stop’d some laughfing at a little black boy in a small skift working to get ashore in a very awkward manner & some one waiting for the Boat on shore swearing at him & frittened him out of half his witts…”
The first organized rowing competitions in Canada date back at least to 1813 in Newfoundland and the 1830s in Halifax, before arriving in Toronto by 1839. The first major competition occurred in 1848. “On those two historic days,” said rowing historian Robert Hunter in 1933, “the waters of Toronto Bay fairly boiled in the wake of lumbering fours-with-keel, pairs, doubles and singles.” Physical supremacy and prizes varying from £7.10 to silver sculls provided motivation for those competing in what were derisively referred to as barges. Among the early stars was Richard Tinning whose wharf was at the foot of York Street. There were no distinctions between amateur and professional. Everyone competed for money and races were often interrupted by emergency calls to save nearby sailors in distress.
ROBERT BERRY: CONFEDERATION-ERA ROWER
For working-class citizens, a rowing competition was an extension of their daily work. In the first month after the birth of the Dominion of Canada on July 1, 1867, members of the Toronto Rowing Club, the premier such organization in the country, passed a resolution “Precluding any coloured man to enter in any but the fisherman’s race at the upcoming regatta.” The club’s president, Angus Morrison, was both a Member of Parliament and a future Toronto mayor. Their actions were directed against a man many knew and had competed against. The “coloured” man was Robert Berry, a fisherman by trade who worked for the Ward family, after whom a Toronto island was named.
A letter writer identified only as “ JUSTICE” commented in the August 9, 1867, Globe, “Your correspondent would like to enquire…why such an order has passed in a Canadian club, where justice and freedom is claimed for all men. If the coloured man is so made inferior to all other classes of men, why should our generous Club admit one of the humblest of the people in the fisherman’s race, and allow him at a former regatta to take some of the principle prizes. And if such a frivolous distinction has been forced on the coloured citizens simply on account of the colour, it should meet with the strongest disapproval by all logical men.”
The Globe agreed with the letter writer and said, “The Regatta Club has acted unjustly, illiberally, and illogically. If coloured men are not fit to run all the races they are not fit for the fisherman’s race. This is the first instance within our memory of a stigma being attached in Canada to the colour of a man’s skin in an open and public manner. No injustice of that sort would be tolerated in England. It is an importation of one of the least excusable Yankee prejudices.”
Another writer of August 13, 1867, and identified simply as “A Voice From the Bush” in the County of Simcoe (and possibly a Black resident for whom the “bush” often described lands such as the Queen’s Bush in Wellington County which were part of the Crown reserves and therefore not open to titled ownership) wrote, “It was with feelings of astonishment and indignation, that I learned by your paper of yesterday, that the Toronto Regatta Club had prohibited coloured people from competing in their races. I am a loyal man, and endeavour to instill loyalty in others. But loyalty, Sir, implies not simply devotion to our Queen, but attachment to the constitution, to the laws, and to the force of moral feeling which prevails in our country. Now, Sir, I contend that the constitution, the monarch, the laws, and the people of Britain frown upon this miserable distinction of colour—a distinction which is nothing less than an insult to our Creator.
“I lament that in the capital of the Province of Canada, and in the midst of all the light which extended education and science throws on our days, such an outrage on the fair fame of England should have been perpetrated. I look upon this war of colour as a vile Republican prejudice, imported from our neighbours…
“Let me remind them that one of the greatest men of whom England could ever boast, Dr. Samuel Johnson, appointed his servant Francis Barber, formerly a slave in Jamaica, to be his residuary legatee, a position which no British nobleman would have objected to hold…
“God grant we may have no repetition of doings so unseemly and anti-British.”
Robert Berry was one of the first significant Black athletes in Canada in an era in which records are sketchy. He was a friend of the Tinning boys, the Ward family and later Ned Hanlan, the greatest Canadian athlete of the 19th century. One year before Confederation, Berry combined with J. Durnan, son of the lighthouse keeper, and W. Montgomery to row their boat Silver Arrow to victory and a prize of $30 at the annual regatta of the Toronto Rowing Club.
This club, formed in 1856 with clubhouse and rowing quarters at Tinning’s Wharf, was captained by E.G. O’Brien. Over time separate prizes were provided to the gentlemen amateurs of the club. Fishermen were assumed to have an unfair advantage because their occupation contributed to their prowess. Such logic was eventually used to rationalize the establishment of the amateur movement. Although
