The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - What Dresden Can Teach Ontario About Black History

Episode Date: February 15, 2025

During Black History Month, The Agenda invites author Marie Carter to discuss her latest book, In The Light of Dawn: The History and Legacy of a Black Canadian Community. She will be joined by Dr. Afua Cooper, Canadian historian and scholar to discuss how a small, rural town in Ontario shaped Black history across the nation.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In her new book, In the Light of Dawn, The History and Legacy of a Black Canadian Community, author Marie Carter shares the story of how a small, rural Ontario town helped to shape Black history across the country. She's joined by Afua Cooper, Professor of History and Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto Scarborough and leading expert in Black Canadian studies who wrote the foreword to the book, and they're both with us in studio.

Welcome. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you. This book is so detailed, so dense. Marie, we were having a conversation about how long it must have been to do the research, and reading it, myself and the producer, so much history in this book that I was like,

I never knew this, I never learned this in school. And Marie, in the myself and the producer, so much history in this book that I was like, I never knew this. I never learned this in school. And Marie, in the introduction of the book, you actually write that you wanted to be careful with how you wrote this story of the Dawn Settlement, that you didn't want to be an apologist or to cause any pain. As a historian, why was it important to acknowledge that? And what did you mean by that? Well I think it's a really, as a white historian writing black history to begin with, I'm aware of the sensitivity of that.

I'm also very aware of being rooted in the community I'm writing about. And a lot of these people are my friends and neighbors and I want to really respect and take care of their history, of their legacy. I think you did a terrific job of doing that. And other people of African descent who settled in Don, you write that they shouldn't be described as fugitives or refugees, but to see them like their white contemporaries as pioneers and founders.

What did you mean by that? Well, they played the same role in the community and I think we've for too long seen them as something that wasn't somehow lesser because the perception is that they were slaves who didn't weren't here to contribute something but rather to come and actually almost take something. The usual kind of narrative describes people of African descent as being people who came here kind of on the largesse of white people. Where in fact, when you look at the whole Underground Railroad

story, or even the settlement story that proceeds that and follows after. That what you really see is people who are contributing, who have abilities, agency, that they're acting on the landscape, on the community, the same way that white pioneers did. And so that's just not a description that we're used to using, when we've been so used to using the slavery to freedom narrative where we talk about them as fugitives.

And I hope that the language of this book changes that, you know, that gets people to think about people of African descent who came in those early years differently. And Afwa, throughout this book, it's the first of a series of books exploring the history of this country. As you read this book, I know you're trying to find, define this authentic history of the people who were here. You learn about black elite freemen who are part of that. I'm going to show you a picture, an afwai, if you can explain to us what we're looking here. Can you describe those images

that we're seeing? Well, we're, we're seeing an image of a man with a sack over his back running. It's a kind of stereotypical image of the fugitive slave running away from slavery. And beside that image is a picture of a young woman, beautifully dressed, in a photograph studio, having her picture taken, looking very refined. She is a member of one of the families of this area. She's from the Whipper family, right? So it really contrasts what we're talking about. Marie talked about this image of the running fugitive, running to Ontario and being looked after by white people, which wasn't the case.

And then Miss Whipper, their beautiful address, educated, giving a different story, presenting a different narrative of the history of these people. And in the book, we learn that Whippor is a family that's from Philadelphia, from Pennsylvania, what you would call a black elite of women. Why was it important to challenge those stereotypical images?

It's important for a number of reasons. First, because we want to dispel this image of, you know, this picture of white largesse that here are these poor downtrodden fugitives rushing into Ontario and other provinces and they can't help themselves, right? But we know, I mean, the whippers were black elites, certainly. But even people who were working class, who were ordinary people, who were farmers, were also helping themselves. It is not to say that, you know, at the very,

for example, when the Fugitive Slave Act was passed in the United States Congress, and there was a rush of African-Americans, both enslaved and free, coming into the Canadian provinces. And you know, it was an emergency, so people needed help. Many people needed help. That's not to say, oh, you know, they didn't need help. There were people who needed help. If you think of today, when we have refugees coming in

into Canada, they're helped, they're given a purse, they're given a place to live. There are so many examples today. So the same thing then, but at the same time, there were groups of people who brought their own money, thousands of dollars sometimes, who came, who established farms, who lived in urban areas and established businesses. So we want to showcase the multidimensional nature of this experience.

I have another image to show you here. Marie, where was the Don settlement? The thing is that we don't really know where the borders of the Don settlement are. Don was more of an idea than it was an actual place. But we do know that it was established when there was an area of Lambton County. That still is Don Township. But over time, we lost track of that,

because in our area, it became Camden Gore. And so we've lost this idea of why the Dawn settlement was called Dawn because it's been divorced from that geographic location. So my kind of rough estimate of it is that it was in this in this gore of Camden township. In the book we also learn about the British American Institute. How was the Dawn settlement different from the British American Institute, Afua? Well, the Dawn settlement itself was a town, was a settlement. The British American Institute was an industrial center or an industrial academy

that was established to teach the manual arts to boys and also the domestic arts to girls. So it was an institute. Today we think of it, you know, when you're in high school today they say you go to shop, right? But it was one of the first manual institutes in all of the Canadian provinces. So it was really pioneering. I'd like to explain to people that it's one of the constituent parts of the Don. It used to be considered that it was all of what Don was, was the Institute which was on about 300 acres. But what the research found through the mapping was that it's a much wider area than that. Well a name that keeps coming up throughout the book

is Josiah Henson. Who was he, Afoa? Josiah Henson was an African-American man. He was enslaved in Maryland. We have a picture of him. Yes, he was enslaved in Maryland. He eventually escaped from slavery in Maryland with his family, wife and children, and came over to Upper Canada or to Ontario.

He was first in Colchester and then he went to the area we're talking about, the Don settlement, and established himself there. He was an anti-slavery advocate, an abolitionist. He actually also helped many people to escape from slavery, from United States into Canada. But he became a sort of patriarch of Don, and wrote his autobiography. And when he wrote his autobiography, I think maybe there's Josiah Henson before the autobiography and Josiah Henson after

the autobiography. Because the autobiography blew him up, as we say in today's language. He blew up. He became very famous. It is said that Harriet Beecher Stowe modeled her book, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Uncle Tom in the cabin title, on Josiah Henson. And it is true. She did read his book. She took a lot of liberties with the narrative. And she blew up, too.

She became hugely, hugely famous and very wealthy as a result of liberties with the narrative. And she blew up, too. She became hugely, hugely famous and very wealthy as a result of that. Finally, Josiah Henson also went to the World's Fair in London and took some wood from lumber, rather, from Ontario in the area where he was. He met Queen Victoria and also that added to his fame. He was a larger-than-life figure so we can say abolitionist, author, freedom fighter and resident of the area that we're talking about and maybe I'm sure Marie has more on I'm just saying, Henson. I know you both. She does all the work on him.

So not to speak out of turn because one of the things about reading this book, you do additional research on the side. Is it too much to say that his story played a role in the free slavery being ended in America? Well, according to Abraham Lincoln, Mrs. Stowe was the woman who fired the first shot in the Civil War because of her book, Uncle Tom's Cabin. So millions of people read that book and were apparently swayed to the abolitionist cause,

even though there were some very stereotypical tropes in her book. She presented this Uncle Tom as an Uncle Tom, and that's why today the name of the museum is changed, because Josiah Henson certainly was no Uncle Tom. Can you explain what an Uncle Tom is? So an Uncle Tom, it's a black person who sort of licks the boots of white people, who is very subservient, who says yes to everything, and who will sell out members of his or her race.

I suppose a woman can be Uncle Tom too. So over the years, because Mrs. Stowe presents this figure in her book as really subservient, as really kind of leave it to God, don't really fight the power. And Josiah Henson was not that person. He fought the power. He was a strong black man. He was an abolitionist. So, you know, she has that stereotypical image of this man in her book. At the same time, though, when the millions of people who in her book. At the same time though when the millions of people who read that book I would suppose that many of them their hearts were moved towards the anti-slavery cause and really engendered a huge conversation on the anti-slavery movement, or on the wrongs or rights of slavery.

And there was a time many people are saying, well, this is wrong. Eventually, there was a civil war. So that's why Lincoln said Mrs. Stowe fired the first shot. But the thing is, though, many, many people, thousands and thousands of people, contributed to that cause and to the eventual ending of slavery. It was enslaved people themselves.

They had the agency. They fought. They ran away. They wrote their autobiographies, people like Mr. Henson. So it wasn't just one person. It was a collective. We know that it was a very violent time and trust was something that, you know, between if you were a free person running away from slavery,

at any time you could become enslaved again. How were freed slaves who escaped to Dresden able to trust white abolitionists? Marie? I think there was a partnership of sorts with some the abolitionists that were there. I think the book I tried to show to where we had some very committed white abolitionists that were there and white people who were against segregation. Reverend Thomas Hughes is one of my

favorite characters in the book, one of my heroes. He founded the British Colonial Church and School Societies Thomas Hughes is one of my favorite characters in the book, one of my heroes. He founded the British Colonial Church and School Society's Mission to the Slaves there. And he actually left a very comfortable life in England when he was in his 40s and came with his family to Dresden and founded this mission and he really championed the cause of desegregation in Dresden. I wanted to read a letter to just give everybody at home a sense of what was happening at that time and this is a letter of the death of Mrs. Jackson. Mrs. Jackson, a lady of intelligence and piety, was last

spring on her way from Chatham to Detroit. She took passage in the Steamer Brothers, which plies between these places. The weather being cold and stormy and her health very poor, she went into the cabin and the captain came in immediately and drove her out and she had to sit on deck in cold winds, heavy rains and dashing waves from 7 o'clock in the morning till late at night. She took cold and in a few days was no more. Her physicians say prejudice was the cause of her death. Was this letter representative of the times? I don't know what you say is how you determine what's representative, because I think you get in any time period this range of attitudes,

a range of responses to people. So I think one of the mistakes we make is by trying to oversimplify some of these things or boil them down to one passage. And I think what I tried to do in the book was to give a very nuanced account that shows a lot of different responses to the new people that were moving into the neighborhood then and also showing their response in return. And one of the amazing things to me was that there was this whole network of transportation that was developed by the Freeman themselves where they had their own hotels, had their own transportation

systems like stages. There was a daily stage from Chatham to Dresden, which I never knew this before. Absolutely amazed me to see this whole system developing. I think that also happened during the civil rights movement with the Green Book, where people would document what hotels were safe to stay at, what roads to take. I have another picture from the book. It says, men of color to arms, to arms, if we wish to be free in this land, if we would be

regarded men, if we would forever silence the tongue of calamity, of prejudice and hate, let us rise now and fly to arms. Afuak, why were African descendant residents of Dawn's settlement inclined to listen to the American Civil War? In many ways they saw it as their war. It was the war to help their brethren, the families that they had in there in the United States who were enslaved. So that's one. Second reason was that they felt that they would be successful, that the Union Army would win the war. And that being the case, then slavery would be abolished, would be expunged from the North American continent,

because the British had abolished slavery earlier in 1834. So they didn't feel that they could just sit back and just watch the war go on. They wanted to participate, they wanted to help, they wanted to die for freedom. It was a very personal thing. Even if it was personal and even if they were sacrificing they still had a lot of barriers to overcome. I just wanted to read another passage from the book.

African descent soldiers face the same or at times even greater perils than their white counterparts. If captured, they were often harshly treated by the Confederates and in some cases tortured to death. Rates of disease for black soldiers were also appreciably higher than for white soldiers. Of the 190,000 who served, 40,000 would die with 30,000 of those deaths being from infection or disease. Their service, however, would not be equitably rewarded. After the harsh conditions of serving during the American Civil War, these men, black men, also enlisted in World War I just a few

years later. How come? I think there's a great deal of pride, you know, among the black population. And I think the passage you read from, and that's actually from Frederick Douglass who said the two arms, two arms quote. And within that was this whole idea of manhood to prove that they were truly men. And I think that that whole elevation of the race to be able to see people as being equal to their white counterparts, to be real contributors in ways that required sacrifice was something very much

on their minds when they were saying this. Dresden, Ontario, eventually, and the Don settlement, eventually become gateways to emigration across Ontario for freed people of African descent. How did this come about? Don is one of the places that they came. I think we have a lot of different places across Ontario where they did come through. This is not a unique story to Dresden. I think we have a lot of communities that would probably find these same stories.

Windsor would be a major crossing from Detroit, the Niagara area. And I think that one of the things that I'm trying to say in the light of dawn is that this is a story that everybody needs to dig into further, needs to look at and say how does this apply to my community? How was my community a gateway? How is my community part of this international exchange that went back and forth, not just one way into Canada, but that a lot of these people were going also back to the United States and helping with the cause there.

Well, something that was unique in Dresden, schools were integrated in the 1880s. Afua, how did a move like this compare to other settlements and towns across Canada and the US? I think in the 1880s across the Canadian provinces there was some integration but not everywhere because remember that the last segregated school in Ontario closed in 1964. But in the 1880s there was a civil rights movement if you will in education in southwestern Ontario to integrate the schools. So the schools were integrated in Dresden and in Chatham but not everywhere. In Nova Scotia the schools remained segregated until 1983. There were segregated schools

in Alberta and Saskatchewan way after that date. Well, people could say, well, you know, Saskatchewan and Alberta weren't part of Canada in 1883. But nonetheless, in the 20th century, the schools were segregated there. So it's not a triumphant story. It's not a story of success because segregation for the black community was was a fact of life. In Toronto the schools were not segregated by the way but in some of the the schools the benches were segregated they would put the black kids on benches separate from the white kids so it's

it's a story of struggle we all love to say it's a story of resilience and resistance. But the fact remains that that's why we say racism is structural and systemic, that within these structures, education, entertainment, the economic situation, these structures were really stacked against black people. And so black people had to fight really hard. It goes beyond just people being called names. And even one of the things that shocked me about this book was that we know this happened in the US where mobs would burn black towns.

The fact that that also happened here to me was kind of shocking. We only have a few minutes left. Marie, can you tell me about Reverend Jenny Johnson and all the moves that she made? That's an amazing story because her life really straddles a time period that is really fascinating because she knew Reverend Josiah Henson and yet lived into a time when Reverend Martin Luther King was giving his speeches.

And so you see this whole continuum playing out in her lifetime of how these things from slavery were connected to our modern times in such a short period of time. Jenny is an amazing woman because she was the first ordained minister in Canada, not just the first ordained black minister, female minister, but the first female minister. Dr. Nina Maureen Moroney did a really excellent biography on her if people want to know

more about her. But within the book I tried to at least highlight her role, especially during the time of the Great Migration that happened in the United States. And she ended up going to Flint, Michigan the time of the Great Migration that happened in the United States. And she ended up going to Flint, Michigan to help with the Great Migration, but came back to Dresden to try to advocate for the establishment of what is now the Josiah Hansen Museum. But we only have one more minute.

And I just wanted to point out that reading this book, you get a sense of the role that multiculturalism played before it became government policy before Canada. You had black people living with white people. I know that you said that this history, you want to create an authentic history and one that shows the path towards people understanding the contributions of all the people. Was that the thing that drove you to write this book? Yes, I think too I wanted to write it for my neighbors and my friends. I've never seen my community in the way

that I've seen it portrayed in other places. A lot of the Dawn's history didn't seem to match what I experienced as a child growing up. And so I really wanted to present a history that would show more nuance, more of the diversity, more of the interplay between black and white and indigenous people. That was part of the reality of that time and place and through my lifetime too. And Afua, can you explain to us this book is the first of a series of other books?

Yes, this book is the first of the Henry and Mary Babe book series. Henry and Mary Babe were abolitionists from the Windsor area who founded Canada's Black Press with their newspaper The Voice of the Fugitive in 1851. And so the series is with the University of Regina Press. This is the first. And we will have other publications in the Henry and Mary Bates book series, Black History book series. So we are highlighting the Black History of Canada with this series. We're so grateful that you both made time for us. We've learned so much from this book and I recommend that we all have an opportunity

to read from it because we just never stop learning, right? Thank you so much for your time. We appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you.