and the development of popular culture that was impacting all forms of early culture across Canada and the United States and not just freedom festivals.44 By 1915, Emancipation Day observances in Sandwich had ceased. Consequently, it appears as though the original meaning of August First as a commemoration of freedom, rights, and opportunities could not be reconciled with the emergence of mass entertainment.
By the 1830s and 1840s sizeable Black communities had developed in places such as Windsor, Sandwich, Amherstburg, and the surrounding vicinity. Hundreds of fugitives entered Canada by crossing the Detroit River, taking advantage of the more straightforward access point. Many came to Windsor because the town was a major terminus on the Underground Railroad, and along with Sandwich offered an initial safe haven for fugitive slaves. Dr. Daniel Hill identifies the first influx of refugees as arriving between 1817 and 1822.45
By the mid-nineteenth century, Windsor was emerging as a booming commercial and industrial centre. There were over fifty Black families living there by 1851 and seven to eight hundred individuals by 1868. Many of the Black men worked for the Great Western Railway in the construction of the rail lines and later as porters for the trains. Others were employed as labourers, barbers, coopers, draymen, preachers, and sailors. One man was working as an engineer, and another man, named Labalinin Harris, was a postman. Members of the town’s African-Canadian community owned an array of businesses including plastering, masonry, and carpentry companies, blacksmith shops, tailor shops, grocery and general merchandise stores, shoemaking shops, a confectionery shop, a paint and varnish store, and several farms. Black women were mainly employed as washerwomen and domestics, while a few were teachers.
Most Blacks in Windsor resided on McDougall, Assumption, Pitt, Pellisier, Church, and Goyeau Streets as well as on Bruce Avenue. With the Black population growing daily, several cultural institutions were established to aid in settlement, provide a sense of solidarity, challenge American slavery, and to help their members weather the increasing racism that punctuated their daily lives.
Although not welcomed in many White churches, Blacks in Windsor actually preferred to worship amongst themselves and several Black churches took root in Windsor. The British Methodist Episcopal Church was constructed on McDougall and Assumption Streets in 1863. The First Baptist Church used two buildings on McDougall Street near Albert in 1856 and 1862, and then in 1915 they relocated to a new location at Mercer and Tuscarora Streets. A Baptist Church formed the Amherst Regular Missionary and the African Methodist Episcopal Church, although in existence for decades, through worship in homes, erected a building at Mercer and Assumption in 1889.
To meet the educational needs of the community, mission schools or private schools were established to serve the children and the adults of the Black community, the African-Canadian children in Windsor having been barred from attending common schools. Before earning the distinction of becoming the first female editor of a newspaper in North America, Mary Ann Shadd was hired as a teacher in a private school for Black children in Windsor. Classes were held in the old military barracks in 1851 until a schoolhouse was built in 1852. A handful of White children also attended this school. When Shadd left in 1853, there were no separate common schools for the growing Black population until 1858 when the Board rented an old, run-down building to serve its purpose. In 1862, the St. George School was built for African-Canadian children at McDougall and Assumption Streets. By 1864, the school was accommodating 150 students.
Blacks in Windsor organized other self-help societies to further strengthen the community like the Temperance Society formed by Robert Ward and Henry Bibb, the Mutual Improvement Society established by Mary Bibb “to hear speeches and improve their minds,” and the African Enterprise Society led by William Jones.
Anti-slavery initiatives flourished in Windsor with its high concentration of fugitive supporters. Henry Bibb was appointed as the local vice-president of the Windsor branch for the Anti-Slavery Society of Canada. Bibb’s newspaper, the Voice of the Fugitive, which began in Sandwich in 1851 and moved operations to Windsor shortly after, played an integral role in the Black community by providing information to local Blacks and attacking the enslavement of Africans in the southern United States. Bibb himself was a fugitive slave from Kentucky and was very active in the abolition movement through his paper and assistance in the settlement of recent escapees. He also managed the Refugee Home Society in Sandwich. White sympathizers active in the movement included John Hurst, who worked with fugitives in Amherstburg before being assigned to Windsor in 1863. As minister of the All Saints Anglican Church, he attempted to integrate his congregation.
Blacks in Windsor also organized themselves to protest and challenge the many forms of racism they faced on a daily basis. In 1855 they were denied the right to purchase town land lots. Blacks like Clayborn Harris and a Mr. Dunn launched legal challenges against the school board in 1859 and 1884 respectively. Mr. Harris complained that the property rented for the Black school was inadequate, but he lost his case. Mr. Dunn took the school board to court for denying admissions to his child. The superintendents’ defence was that it was unsanitary to admit Black children and the courts ruled in favour of the school board. People of African heritage who visited Windsor were refused hotel accommodations. They were not allowed to join Boy Scout troops or the local YMCA. On occasion there were incidents of physical attacks by Whites.
Blacks in Windsor also sought to secure their rights and freedoms through military service. About two hundred Black men defended the Detroit frontier against attacks from Americans during the Rebellion of 1837–38. Josiah Henson, one of the founders of the Dawn Settlement, commanded Black volunteer companies, part of the Essex Militia that commandeered a rebel ship attacking Sandwich. During the First World War, dozens of Windsor’s Black men enlisted in the all-Black No. 2 Construction Battalion in 1916, whose duties included logging, milling, and shipping.
Emancipation Day festivities, which have been held in Windsor since the 1830s, were a culmination of these social dynamics. Because the villages of Windsor and Sandwich were only three kilometres apart (Sandwich amalgamated with the City of Windsor in 1935) and Amherstburg about thirty kilometres away, at times the locale for these commemorations alternated among the three locations. These Ontario towns always received support from the African Americans living in nearby American states, which meant many additional participants. In 1852, large numbers of celebrants from Detroit (their city’s Emancipation Day event had been cancelled), attended the festivities in Windsor.
Because of proximity, Canada shared a close relationship to Detroit and in fact that city was a part of Upper Canada until 1796 when the British surrendered, transferring British administration to the Canadian side thirteen years after the end of the American Revolutionary War. For some time African Canadians had fostered strong social and economic ties to African Americans in Michigan cities like Detroit and Ypsilanti. People from both sides would attend each other’s social events and African Canadians often found employment across the border.
On this day in 1852, as every year, American residents took the ferry across the Detroit River. The street parade began at the military barracks, the present-day site of City Hall Square and Caesar’s Windsor. At the time, the barracks also served as temporary shelter for incoming fugitive slaves. Marchers went to meet the Detroit visitors including the Sons of Union, a Black lodge who arrived by ferry and joined the procession. The grand marshal and assistant marshal escorted them on horseback, and participants carried banners with the phrases, “God, Humanity, the Queen, and a Free Country” and “Am I not a man and a brother?” A Black militia from Amherstburg arrived and were “given the right of the line of march.”46 Another group participating in the parade was the Canadian Friends of the North American League who were identified by the badges they wore.47 The procession continued on to the Pear Tree Grove for a Thanksgiving church service where an anti-slavery song was sung, and Reverend W. Munroe from Detroit delivered an the sermon.
Participants
