The national declaration of February as Black History Month was passed in December 1995. February 2023 marks the 27th year since it was first celebrated nationally. Rosemary Sadlier, an author, consultant, speaker and one of the key people who pushed for the commemoration of Black History Month with The Honourable Jean Augustine, says she hoped it would help to fuel an interest and an appetite for inserting more Black history into the curriculum.
Happy #BlackHistoryMonth ! #DYK we celebrate this significant event in Canada because of the efforts of @OBHistory which initiated it, along with the Honourable Jean Augustine who introduced a motion to Parliament in December 1995. pic.twitter.com/f5NOK64TAR
โ Amherstburg Freedom (@Aburgfreedom) February 1, 2023
โWhat happened instead is that Black History Month became almost like the add-on: the only time that many schools might approach doing anything in terms of Black history,โ says Sadlier, who also served as the president of the Ontario Black History Society.
She says that in order to include systemic racism, police brutality, privilege and more in the school curriculum it must begin with Black history.
โBlack history is seminal anti-racist education. You canโt do anti-racist education unless you have some understanding of the things, the events, the people, the problems, the challenges that have taken place in this place we call Canada that led us to the position that we are in now,โ says Sadlier.
She notes that educators are equipped with the skills to break down complex ideas and make them palatable to their students, one of which should be how systemic racism is an outgrowth of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade.
โFirst understand what it meant to be a slave and what it meant to be a slave owner, in terms of the building of wealth. Who was able to benefit from that development of wealth?โ explains Sadlier. โWhen you can look at that, you can also look at why it is the people who identify as Black who are not always in the same positions of privilege.โ
Sadlier has personally contributed toward creating information that would be useful for educators such as Black history curricula and textbooks that are now used in every school in Nova Scotia, and she also contributed toward an Afro-centric resource with Ontarioโs Ministry of Education.
One of her recent focuses, along with Senator Wanda Thomas Bernard and MP Majid Jowhari, was achieving a national commemoration of Aug. 1 as Emancipation Day in Canada โ as the Slavery Abolition Act was passed on Aug. 1, 1834, to end the practice of enslavement of African peoples in all British colonies. MPs unanimously voted to declare Aug. 1 Emancipation Day in Canada on Mar. 21, 2021.
Pamella Houston, an administrator with the Ontario Black History Society, has helped co-ordinate the societyโs celebrations of Emancipation Day each year.
Houston says the city is full of Black history, and the Ontario Black History Society has held walking tours in Toronto that students often find engaging, as they can see the history rather than read about it.
โFor example, Thornton Blackburn, he brought the first taxicab to Toronto and he lived at King and Sackville,โ says Houston. One tour passes by what was the home of Thornton and his wife Lucie Blackburn. He was a self-emancipated former slave whose case established that Canada would not return slaves to the United States, making it a safe terminus for the Underground Railroad.
Another significant spot on King Street is the site of the building where Mary Ann Shadd Cary published the Provincial Freeman. It was a weekly newspaper that highlighted the success of Black people living in freedom in Canada, and it made her the first Black woman in North America to publish a newspaper.
When it comes to these significant people and events pertaining to Black history in Canada, Sadlier says all of it needs to be taught in the school curriculum and not just in a Black history assembly in February.
โThere are kids who are Black, and theyโre Black every day, not just for the day of the assembly. And there are kids who are not Black who are without any information or understanding,โ says Sadlier. โBecause itโs not taught to us.โ
This story was originally published in 2021.