“Let Us Forget Whether We Are Americans, Canadians, or West Indians”: Race Politics in Ontario during the Interwar Period

During the interwar years, Black Canadians in Toronto were relegated to the most menial jobs. Many Black men and women were also barred from hotels, restaurants, and other public spaces. Reeling from Jim Crow, Black Canadians responded by creating organizations that pragmatically asserted their right to full socio-economic inclusion. This paper considers how the city’s two most successful social welfare organizations: The Home Service Association (HSA) and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) provided crucial spaces for Black Canadians to challenge racial discrimination and advocate for citizenship rights.

This paper explores how moral reform discourses on assimilation, integration, and selfisolation, were performed through social welfare activism. It shows both groups aimed to improve the lives of Black Canadians in Ontario, albeit with very different strategies. The HSA was a private inter-racial social work agency headed by elite Blacks with ancestral ties to Canada dating back to the early 1800s. The UNIA’s race activism provided recreational programs for Blacks. Run by middle and working class Caribbean Blacks, these Black Canadians had migrated to Canada in the early 1900s and were committed to Marcus Garvey’s ideas on race consciousness and Pan African solidarity.

While committed to improving the lives of Black Canadians, these two organizations also shed light on the race politics in Ontario during the interwar period. Indeed, claims for Black belonging in Canada were rhizomatic; rooted in the physical, 3 ontological, and intellectual migrations of Black people and ideas on Blackness. Moreover, conflicts of class and color comparisons, alongside Black British imperial identity, manifested in the social dynamics of burgeoning 20th century Canadian race politics. Encompassing an understanding of heterogeneity, this paper examines scales of Diaspora identities and considers how this mélange of Blackness was prevalent in Black Canadian claims for citizenship and social rights on the local level.