Plain Racism by R. Bruce Sheppard Summary

Nativism is the “othering” of immigrated groups to Canadian land during the settlement time. This is part of what the black people of America and Canada experienced when they immigrated trying to find a home. The basis or origin for black vs. white discrimination comes from original encounters that were not friendly in the past and stayed that way for a very long time, well into the settlement period. Some American immigrants saw Canada as a place to escape from the black people who were moving into sections of the United States. The Canadian government was not welcoming to black settlers, but they still came because of the intriguing ads the government and black newspapers were releasing about the promise land of Canada. The black people coming form the states mostly moved into the prairie land because that was the toughest land to farm. At that time the land was still unbroken. The province of Saskatchewan originated as a black settlement community because of this. When the Jim Crow laws were established in the states, the black community heavily considered their options of moving out of the state more so then they did before. Many black community members did end up moving out of the state and into the newly forming Canada because of those laws in the state making it difficult to life there. When coming into Canada the black immigrants were checked vigorously medically to try and stray people from wanting to move to Canada. There was also an attempt to ban the black people as race from Canada that did not work. The Canadian settlers already had strong racist opinions toward the black community upon their arrival. They felt as if assimilating all white people as they came to their border was enough and that they did not want to add colour into the issue. Only one reporter for the newspaper was able to write unbiasedly about the black farmer immigration and he wrote that although the negro race may not be something to be desired there is no reason or regulation that should deny the better class of negro farmer to be rejected. Black immigration caused a lot of uneasiness with the white settlers. Canada was anxious to take everything that the US did not want to.  The black settlers were all immediately associated with anything bad that happened in Canada. A young girl answered the door and got chloroformed and a robbed and she said it was because of a black man who later got jailed. The girl then admitted that she had made the whole thing up, but it doesn’t change the ideas and fears that stemmed from it. The black settlers tried to argue against the idea that every black person was bad with the fact that it was the black men who protected the white women during the war. It did not matter because the white person’s beliefs were so strongly bad. People in Alberta and British Colombia were trying to overthrow the government and get someone that would agree and listen to them about the “black problem” in their provinces. They believed this was their right to have someone in power that had the same beliefs as them.  A petition to stop black immigration was started and signed by thousands of people in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Colombia. The petition did not follow through, but the act was still hurtful to many. The actions from the white settlers can be described plainly as racism in its purest form.