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Canada
2 articles on Canada
Canada
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass
Word Count: 3780 Includes: Eighteenth-Century Policies and Attitudes toward Blacks | Slavery Ends, but Racism Lingers | Effects of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 | Last Stop on the Underground Railroad | BibliographyThe passing of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850created an atmosphere of anxiety and urgency for abolitionists, who encouraged many slave men, women, and children to leave the South and travel north. Roused with news of the Underground Railroad—a network of antislavery advocates who would provide guidance, food, and shelter along the way—slaves gathered together in secret to plan escape. Comforted by news of blacks living free in Canadian settlements with housing, employment, and dignity, those who were resolute prodded the undecided. Runaways were instructed to travel under the cover of darkness—over mountains, through forests, across waterways—always heading north, where liberal sentiments promised to shield them from the slaveholders' encroachment on their right to be free. But was Canada really the utopia that abolitionists promised and enslaved men and women imagined? ...
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Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 5784 Includes: Slavery in Canada | Black Settlement in Canada | Black Immigration Since 1865 | Economic Life | Community and Family | Church and School | Participation in Mainstream Affairs | Culture and Identity | BibliographyCountry occupying the northern half of the North American continent that served as a final destination for fugitive slaves traveling on the Underground Railroad. Black people have lived in Canada since the beginnings of transatlantic settlement. A few came as explorers, more came as slaves in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, still more as former American slaves fleeing to Canada between 1783 and 1865, and since then as free immigrants from the United States, the West Indies, and Africa. Until the 1980s very few came directly from their ancestral continent, yet the label African Canadian is being used increasingly to include all Canadians of African descent, wherever they were born. In the 1996 census, African Canadians composed about 2 percent of the total Canadian population. ...
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