well-organized, huge functions served as political platforms, classrooms, networking arenas, places for family reunions, and a dating scene where couples met or wed.
A couple from Detroit, Forest Nathaniel Shelton Jr. and Earlene Lucy McGhee, were married on the stage at Jackson Park in Windsor in 1954 as part of the August First celebrations. This was Windsor’s first public wedding.
By the 1850s African Canadians had created a very consistent and well-defined practice of commemoration around the international public observances of British Emancipation which continued to evolve over the decades to address the objectives of the time. The organization of Emancipation Day celebrations also became more complex as its size and importance grew, involving the booking of speakers and the various public and private venues, organizing food availability and preparation, setting up overnight accommodations and transportation, and securing event permits.
However, before an appreciation and understanding of Emancipation Day can be developed, it is important to grasp the history and background leading up to these celebrations.
Let us make our own intensions crystal clear. We must and we will be free. We want freedom now. We do not want our freedom fed to us in teaspoons over another one hundred fifty years. Under God we were born free. Misguided men robbed us of our freedom. We want it back.
— Martin Luther King Jr., from a speech given at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference Crusade for Citizenship, February 12, 1958.
The trade in African peoples began in 1441 with the development of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, a complex international economic system operated by European merchants. Portugal was the first European country to establish the trafficking of Africans followed by Spain, Holland, and France. Britain entered the Transatlantic Slave Trade in 1562 and became the leading slave-trading power by the early 1700s. Ships from Europe brought horses, guns, cutlery, fabrics, copper, and alcohol to West Africa to exchange for captive Africans who were then transported across the Atlantic Ocean to the New World, on the horrific Middle Passage, along with African products such as ivory, gold, palm oil, spices, and animal skins. Africans were forced to work as household servants and on plantations and farms to produce massive quantities of sugar, cotton, rice, tobacco, coffee, and rum that were shipped back to Europe and sold. All of these goods traded in the Transatlantic Slave Trade moved across the Atlantic Ocean in the shape of a triangle and became the foundation of the flourishing economies of these European nations — all based on the successful trade in African bodies.
Advertisements were used by slave owners to deter the public from assisting runaway slaves.
The participating European powers wanted to increase their wealth, power, and size through the expansion of new colonies in the Caribbean, South America, the United States, and Canada, and believed this could be accomplished by utilizing a large pool of cheap labour. Africans were kidnapped, sold, bought, and traded as chattel goods for the purpose of providing free labour as farm hands, domestics, and many other skilled and unskilled positions. By the time the Transatlantic Slave Trade was deemed illegal by Britain in 1807 and the United States in 1808, over twenty million Africans had been captured or purchased from Africa and almost ten million died in the Middle Passage. Although the transportation of Africans across the Atlantic Ocean was banned, the practice of slavery continued, but not without constant opposition from those who were held in bondage. Enslaved Africans resisted their slave status from the moment they were taken from Africa by revolting on slave ships, refusing to eat, and committing suicide rather than suffer along the Middle Passage. Some political leaders on the continent of Africa — kings, queens, and chiefs — also fought against the enslavement of their people by taking various measures to halt the trade of Africans.
In the Western world, slaves protested their conditions in their daily lives including breaking tools, working slowly, leaving for short periods of time, running away, obtaining an education, and practising African cultural traditions. A dramatic act of resistance was committed by Marie-Joseph Angélique, an enslaved Portuguese woman of African descent in Montreal, who allegedly set fire to her owner’s house to protest her pending sale. In total, forty-seven buildings burned down. Immediately after, she was tried, found guilty, tortured, and hanged for her alleged crime of contestation.1 Taking slave masters to court was another kind of resistance enslaved Blacks employed, which in Canada, with the support of anti-slavery judges, was a key mechanism in the attack and destruction of slavery. For example, in 1899 an enslaved woman in New Brunswick named Nancy Morton legally disputed her masters’ ownership rights.2 Enslaved Africans also engaged in large-scale resistance schemes. In fact, continuous slave-led armed rebellions were instrumental catalysts in the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, largely because slave owners were incurring too many expenses for slaveholding to remain lucrative.
People of African descent continued to be enslaved after the passage of the 1793 Act to Limit Slavery.
In the Haitian Revolution, hundreds of slaves on the island of Saint Domingue, the portion that is now Haiti, were led by Toussaint L’Overture in an uprising against the French in a fierce, long battle, which lasted from 1791 to 1804. The captive resistors were victorious and Haiti was established, the first independent Black country outside of the African continent. After this long, gruelling fight, colonial powers began to recognize the economical, political, and military threats of such insurrections, a factor that was influential in outlawing the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Revolts also happened in the United States under such leaders as Gabriel Prosser in Virginia in 1800, Denmark Vesey in South Carolina in 1822, and Nat Turner in Virginia in 1831. Caribbean revolts included the four-month long Sam Sharpe Rebellion in Jamaica, also in 1831. Two British Guiana (now Guyana) revolts included the Berbice Slave Rebellion in 1762 and one in Demerara in 1795. Grenada and St. Vincent also had slave uprisings in 1795, and Brazil was the site of the Bahia Rebellion in 1835.
The abolition movement gained momentum and international attention through the persistent agitation of enslaved men and women throughout North America, South America, Europe, and the Caribbean, combined with the varied contributions of Black abolitionists, such as self-emancipated slaves Olaudah Equiano,3 Harriet Tubman, and Frederick Douglass.4 White anti-slavery activists such as Toronto newspaper editor George Brown, Belleville doctor and ornithologist Alexander Ross, the St. Catharines politician, architect, and engineer William Hamilton Merritt, the Ohio Quaker Levi Coffin, and British abolitionists William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson were also champions of the cause.
Native people comprised a large percentage of the slaves owned in Canada.
Canada was not only involved in the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the enslavement of Africans, but would eventually be the first British territory to adopt legislation leading to the eradication of slavery. To this day, it is still not common historical knowledge in Canada that Africans were enslaved in both the French and British colonies from as early as 1628.5 Furthermore, very few Canadians are aware that at one time their nation’s economy was firmly linked
