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Black Canadians make up a sizable group within the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). The majority of Black Canadians are of Caribbean origin, although the population also consists of African American immigrants and their descendants (including Black Nova Scotians), as well as many African immigrants (particularly Somalis, Ethiopians, Ghanaians and Nigerians). [1]
Toronto's early Black community settled largely in an area called St. John's Ward, which no longer stands. In the 1850s, the city of Toronto had 1000 Black residents, Oakville had 400, the former city of York had 225, Etobicoke had 80, and Peel Region had 60. [2] [3] Toronto's Black population declined from 1,000 in the 1850s to 500 by the 1870s, due to significant out-migration to the United States. [4] The population remained relatively low until the 1950s when the city's Black population grew to 10,000. [4] Most of the early residents were born in Toronto or other areas in Southwestern Ontario, and could trace their roots to migration from the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the Underground Railroad.
In the 1960s, approximately 40,000 Black people lived in Toronto. Within this population there were over 600 teachers, 500 nurses, and 75 doctors. The population consisted of three main groups: Ontario-born Black Canadians, Caribbean immigrants, and Black Nova Scotians. Black Nova Scotians settled largely in Alexandra Park. Having moved to the city with low levels of education and without many marketable skills, the Nova Scotian group faced high unemployment rates. [4] Earlier waves of Caribbean immigrants came largely from Trinidad and Tobago and Barbados, although Jamaica would later outgrow these two nations as a source country.
In 1967, leaders of the Ontario-born Black Canadians merged their celebration of Emancipation Day with traditions of Trinidad and Tobago Carnival to establish Caribana. [5]
The 1980s and 1990s saw a large influx of East Africans move to the city from Somalia, Ethiopia and Eritrea. [6] More recent black immigrants to the GTA have come largely from West Africa, with Nigeria becoming one of the top sources of immigration to Canada in 2019. [7]
As of 2016, 442,020 Black Canadians resided in Toronto's Census Metropolitan Area, which contains a large portion of the GTA. [8]
In Toronto, many Blacks settled in St. John's Ward, a district which was located in the city's core. [9] [10] Others preferred to live in York Township, on the outskirts of the city. By 1850, there were more than a dozen Black businesses along King Street; [9] the modern-day equivalent is Little Jamaica along Eglinton Avenue, which contains one of the largest concentrations of Black businesses in Canada. [11] First Baptist Church, founded in 1826, is the oldest Black institution currently operating in the city. [12]
Several neighbourhoods in Toronto, including Jane and Finch, Rexdale, Malvern, Weston, St. James Town, and Lawrence Heights, are popularly associated with Black Canadians, although all are much more racially diverse than is commonly believed. The Toronto suburbs of Brampton and Ajax also have sizable Black populations, which have migrated outward from Toronto over the past decade. (Ajax has the highest percentage of Blacks of any municipality of 5,000 or more in Canada, with 16%.) The Greater Toronto Area is home to a highly educated middle to upper middle class Black population who continue to migrate out of the city limits, into surrounding suburbs. [13]
There are large variations in the income and poverty levels of different Black sub-groups in the Toronto area. In 2000, among Blacks in the Toronto area, Barbadians had the highest median income at $31,800, while Somalis had the lowest median income at $13,400. [14] At this time, the incidence for low-income among Barbadian families was 10.4%, while it was 72.2% for Somali families. The median income for all Torontonians, regardless of ethnicity, was $29,800 with 13.9% of families considered low-income. [14]
Media representation of Black people in Canada has increased significantly in recent years, with television series such as Drop the Beat , Lord Have Mercy! and Da Kink in My Hair focusing principally on Black characters and communities.[ citation needed ]
The films of Clement Virgo, Sudz Sutherland and Charles Officer have been among the most prominent depictions of Black Canadians on the big screen. Notable films have included Sutherland's Love, Sex and Eating the Bones , Officer's Nurse.Fighter.Boy and Virgo's Rude and Love Come Down .[ citation needed ]
In literature, the most prominent and famous Toronto-based Black Canadian writers have been George Elliott Clarke, Lawrence Hill and Dionne Brand, although numerous emerging writers have gained attention in the 1990s and 2000s.
Since the late 19th century, Black Canadians have made significant contributions to the culture of sports. In North America's four major professional sports leagues, several Black Canadians from the Toronto area have had successful careers, including Jamaal Magloire, Andrew Wiggins, P. K. Subban, and RJ Barrett. In athletics, Ben Johnson and Donovan Bailey were the Toronto area's most prominent Black sprinters in recent decades; the current generation is led by Andre De Grasse.[ citation needed ]
The largest and most famous cultural event is the Toronto Caribbean Carnival (also known as Caribana), an annual festival of Caribbean Canadian culture which typically attracts at least a million participants each year. [15] The festival incorporates the diversities that exist among the Canadians of African and Caribbean descent.
Black Canadians have had a major influence on Canadian music, helping pioneer many genres including Canadian hip hop, Canadian blues, Canadian jazz, Canadian Afrobeat, R&B, Caribbean music, pop music and classical music. [16] Some Black Canadian musicians have enjoyed mainstream worldwide appeal in various genres, such as Dan Hill, Glenn Lewis, Tamia, Deborah Cox, Melanie Fiona, Kardinal Offishall, The Weeknd and Tory Lanez.
While African American culture is a significant influence on its Canadian counterpart, many African and Caribbean Canadians reject the suggestion that their own culture is not distinctive. [17] In his first major hit single "BaKardi Slang", rapper Kardinal Offishall performed a lyric about Toronto's distinctive Black Canadian slang:
We don't say 'you know what I'm sayin', T dot says 'ya dun know'
We don't say 'hey that's the breaks', we say 'yo, a so it go'
We don't say 'you get one chance', We say 'you better rip the show'...
Y'all talking about 'cuttin and hittin skins', We talkin bout 'beat dat face'...
You cats is steady saying 'word', My cats is steady yellin 'zeen'...
So when we singin about the girls we singin about the 'gyal dem'
Y'all talkin about 'say that one more time', We talkin about 'yo, come again'
Y'all talkin about 'that nigga's a punk', We talkin about 'that yout's a fosse'...
A shoe is called a 'crep', A big party is a 'fete'
Ya'll takin about 'watch where you goin!', We talkin about 'mind where you step!'
Because the visibility of distinctively Black Canadian cultural output is still a relatively recent phenomenon, academic, critical and sociological analysis of Black Canadian literature, music, television and film tends to focus on the ways in which cultural creators are actively engaging the process of creating a cultural space for themselves which is distinct from both mainstream Canadian culture and African American culture. [17] For example, most of the Black-themed television series which have been produced in Canada to date have been ensemble cast comedy or drama series centred around the creation and/or expansion of a Black-oriented cultural or community institution. [17]
Black activism also has a presence in Toronto; the Black Action Defence Committee was founded in the city in 1988, in response to the killings of several Black men by Toronto Police officers over the previous decade. [18] [19]
Black is a racialized classification of people, usually a political and skin color-based category for specific populations with a mid- to dark brown complexion. Not all people considered "black" have dark skin; in certain countries, often in socially based systems of racial classification in the Western world, the term "black" is used to describe persons who are perceived as dark-skinned compared to other populations. It is most commonly used for people of sub-Saharan African ancestry, Indigenous Australians and Melanesians, though it has been applied in many contexts to other groups, and is no indicator of any close ancestral relationship whatsoever. Indigenous African societies do not use the term black as a racial identity outside of influences brought by Western cultures.
Freetown is the capital and largest city of Sierra Leone. It is a major port city on the Atlantic Ocean and is located in the Western Area of the country. Freetown is Sierra Leone's major urban, economic, financial, cultural, educational and political centre, as it is the seat of the Government of Sierra Leone. The population of Freetown was 1,055,964 at the 2015 census.
George Elliott Clarke, is a Canadian poet, playwright and literary critic who served as the Poet Laureate of Toronto from 2012 to 2015, and as the 2016–2017 Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate. His work is known for its use of a wide range of literary and artistic traditions, as well as its physicality and political substance. One of Canada's most illustrious poets, Clarke is also known for chronicling the experience and history of the Black Canadian communities of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, creating a cultural geography that he has coined "Africadia."
Black Canadians, also known as African Canadians or Afro-Canadians, are Canadians of full or partial sub-Saharan African descent. The majority of Black Canadians are of Caribbean and African origin, though the Black Canadian population also consists of African Americans in Canada and their descendants.
Filipino Canadians are Canadians of Filipino descent. Filipino Canadians are the second largest subgroup of the overseas Filipinos, surpassed only by the United States, and one of the fastest-growing groups in Canada.
The Toronto Caribbean Carnival, formerly and affectionately known as Caribana, is a festival of Caribbean culture and traditions held each summer in the city of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is a pan-Caribbean Carnival event and has been billed as North America's largest Festival, frequented by over 1.3 million tourists each year for the festival's Grand Parade and an overall attendance of 2.3 million.
Samaná English is a variety of the English language spoken by descendants of black immigrants from the United States who have lived in the Samaná Peninsula, now in the Dominican Republic. Members of the enclave are known as the Samaná Americans.
Mount Dennis is a neighbourhood in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It was initially an urban area within the former township of York. Primarily located along Eglinton Avenue between the Humber River and the Kitchener commuter rail line, the neighbourhood was best known for Kodak Heights, once a major film manufacturing facility owned and operated by the Eastman Kodak Company. According to the 2016 Toronto Ward 11 Census, 62,620 residents are in the area, with a median age of 39.3 as of 2016, and a population growth of over 0.4% as of 2016. 24, 895 households are in Ward 11, and 230 net new households were built in 2016. A total of 31,125 of 62,620 are immigrant populations as of 2016. Unemployment rate is 9.5% in Ward 11 as of 2016, with an average household income of $66,447 and is much lower than Toronto's average of $102,721 as of 2016. Average rent price is $940/month as of 2016's census as well.
Black Nova Scotians are Black Canadians whose ancestors primarily date back to the Colonial United States as slaves or freemen, later arriving in Nova Scotia, Canada, during the 18th and early 19th centuries. As of the 2021 Census of Canada, 28,220 Black people live in Nova Scotia, most in Halifax. Since the 1950s, numerous Black Nova Scotians have migrated to Toronto for its larger range of opportunities. The first recorded free African person in Nova Scotia, Mathieu da Costa, a Mikmaq interpreter, was recorded among the founders of Port Royal in 1604. West Africans escaped slavery by coming to Nova Scotia in early British and French Colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries. Many came as enslaved people, primarily from the French West Indies to Nova Scotia during the founding of Louisbourg. The second major migration of people to Nova Scotia happened following the American Revolution, when the British evacuated thousands of slaves who had fled to their lines during the war. They were given freedom by the Crown if they joined British lines, and some 3,000 African Americans were resettled in Nova Scotia after the war, where they were known as Black Loyalists. There was also the forced migration of the Jamaican Maroons in 1796, although the British supported the desire of a third of the Loyalists and nearly all of the Maroons to establish Freetown in Sierra Leone four years later, where they formed the Sierra Leone Creole ethnic identity.
Caribbean Americans or West Indian Americans are Americans who trace their ancestry to the Caribbean. Caribbean Americans are a multi-ethnic and multi-racial group that trace their ancestry further in time mostly to Africa, as well as Asia, the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, and to Europe. As of 2016, about 13 million — about 4% of the total U.S. population — have Caribbean ancestry.
Gangs in Canada are mostly present in the major urban areas of Canada, although their activities are not confined to large cities.
Alexandra Park is a neighbourhood located in downtown Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Alexandra Park is bounded by Dundas Street West on the north, Spadina Avenue on the east, Queen Street West on the south, and Bathurst Street on the west. Alexandra Park consists of private and public housing, with at grade retail along Queen Street West and Spadina Avenue, some institutional, and several commercial buildings scattered through the neighborhood. The neighborhood takes its name from Alexandra Park, a municipal park at the south-east corner of Dundas Street West and Bathurst Street. The park is named for Queen Alexandra, whose husband, King Edward VII, was the first future monarch to visit Toronto.
The Jamaican Maroons in Sierra Leone were a group of just under 600 Jamaican Maroons from Cudjoe's Town, the largest of the five Jamaican maroon towns who were deported by the British authorities in Jamaica following the Second Maroon War in 1796, first to Nova Scotia. Four years later in 1800, they were transported to Sierra Leone.
The Nova Scotian Settlers, or Sierra Leone Settlers, were African Americans who founded the settlement of Freetown, Sierra Leone and the Colony of Sierra Leone, on March 11, 1792. The majority of these black American immigrants were among 3,000 African Americans, mostly former slaves, who had sought freedom and refuge with the British during the American Revolutionary War, leaving rebel masters. They became known as the Black Loyalists. The Nova Scotian Settlers were jointly led by African American Thomas Peters, a former soldier, and English abolitionist John Clarkson. For most of the 19th century, the Settlers resided in Settler Town and remained a distinct ethnic group within the Freetown territory, tending to marry among themselves and with Europeans in the colony.
Somali Canadians are Canadians of Somali origin or are dual Somali and Canadian nationality.
Now known as the Toronto Caribbean Carnival, Caribana began as a one-time celebration of the Canadian Centennial in Ontario's provincial capital city. The festival continues to bring a full display of Caribbean culture and traditions, attracting more than a million viewers each year. Caribana has continued to draw people from across the world to Toronto, with travellers coming from places such as the Caribbean, Europe and the United States.
The Sierra Leone Creole people are an ethnic group of Sierra Leone. The Sierra Leone Creole people are descendants of freed African-American, Afro-Caribbean, and Liberated African slaves who settled in the Western Area of Sierra Leone between 1787 and about 1885. The colony was established by the British, supported by abolitionists, under the Sierra Leone Company as a place for freedmen. The settlers called their new settlement Freetown. Today, the Sierra Leone Creoles are 1.2 percent of the population of Sierra Leone.
Black Canadians, numbering 198,610, make up 11.3% of Montreal's population, as of 2021, and are the largest visible minority group in the city. The majority of Black Canadians are of Caribbean and of continental African origin, though the population also includes African American immigrants and their descendants
Multicultural Toronto English (MTE) is a multi-ethnic dialect of Canadian English used in the Greater Toronto Area, particularly among young non-white working-class speakers. Emerging in the early 1990s and first documented in linguistic research in the late 2010s and early 2020s, the dialect is popularly recognized by its phonology and lexicon, commonly known as the Toronto accent and Toronto slang, respectively. It is a byproduct of the city's multiculturalism, generally associated with Millennial and Gen Z populations in ethnically diverse districts of Toronto. It is also spoken outside of the GTA region enclosed by these diverse cities, which include Hamilton, Barrie, and Ottawa.
Black Canadians in New Brunswick refers to Black Canadians from the province of New Brunswick, notably of those whose ancestors, much like those of Black Nova Scotians, originated from the Colonial United States as slaves or freemen and arrived in New Brunswick during the 18th and early 19th centuries. As of the 2021 Canadian census, 12,155 Black people live in New Brunswick, making them the largest visible minority group in the province. The first recorded Black person in present-day New Brunswick was a Black man from New England who was forcibly taken during a French raid in the late 17th century.
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