A Sporting Chance. William Humber

immigration policy with greater regard for skill, merit and occupational needs, though often this continued to favour white Europeans.

      The integrated line-up of Patterson Collegiate (Windsor) basketball team which won the All-Ontario basketball title in the early 1940s. Left to right Fred Thomas, Jack Shuttleworth, Charlie Wells, Lyle Browning, Clarence Britten and coach Eddie Dawson. Courtesy of Tony Techko.

      The first significant Black entry into Canada since the pre-Civil War period began at this time. The arrival of upwards of 10,000 West Indian female domestic workers in the 1950s eventually led to a campaign for family reunification. Supporting legislation was passed in 1967. A more confident Black community began to assert its political identity. Explicit restrictions and segregationist practises were eliminated. The last legal vestiges of Black separation, such as segregated schools, were wiped from the books in Ontario and Nova Scotia. Black Canadians had become proactive citizens initiating campaigns for equal justice. They created cultural events to celebrate their heritage even though subtle and systemic racial discrimination remained.

      The country gradually became a more diversified place. West Indian immigration reached nearly 160,000 in the seventies and 115,000 in the eighties. Caribbean immigration to Canada between 1967 and 1990 accounted for nearly ten per cent of the country’s three and a half million new arrivals. This immigration peaked in the mid-seventies with nearly 28,000 coming in 1974. Numbers declined in the eighties matching similar reductions from other countries. Jamaicans accounted for nearly 36 per cent of Caribbean immigration followed by Guyana at 21 per cent, French-speaking immigrants from Haiti at 17.4 per cent, and 13.6 per cent from Trinidad and Tobago. Sixty-six per cent of these immigrants went to Ontario followed by 26 per cent to Quebec.

      There were expanded vehicles for Black entry into mainstream Canadian society. Emery Barnes was an Olympic high jumper and professional football player before becoming a long-serving member of the British Columbia legislature in the company of another prominent Canadian Black, Rosemary Brown. Abdi Mohamoud, a former member of Somalia’s national basketball team, came to Canada as a refugee from civil war and helped establish the Somali Canadian Sports and Arts Centre in Toronto.

      Others entered the public arena through community channels. Barbados-born Anne Cools became the first Black appointed to the Canadian Senate in 1984. Nova Scotia-born Dr. Carrie Best earned the Order of Canada for her community activism and writing accomplishments. Lincoln Alexander became the first Black cabinet minister in Canada and achieved one of the highest ceremonial posts in the country with his appointment as Ontario’s first Black Lieutenant-Governor in 1985.

      It may be pointless anymore to talk about a separate and united Black community, as it once was when it was generally ostracized within isolated rural and inner city enclaves. It has changed, through immigration from all over the world; disagreements among people of colour as to their identity within this description; the integration of Black citizens into the various class, income and employment categories defining the wider Canadian society; and even the problematic description of what it means to be Black, racially or culturally.

      The latter has created a need for a new interpretative direction. It may be one founded on examining a rising generation described as “ethnically ambiguous” and a social context in which cultural symbols from music to clothes and language cross what were once accepted boundaries. Hence Bill Clinton was, ironically, described by some as the first “Black” President not because of his race but for his cultural references and interests.

      As Lincoln Alexander has pointed out however, skin colour still makes it impossible for those broadly seen as Blacks to completely disappear into the great Canadian mosaic available to other hyphenated Canadians. The distinction of race and its particular history in Canada renders it a category, which still has meaning. There is a public tendency to assume that a level playing field exists but even successful members of the Black community often lack the kind of economic resources achieved by the white mainstream community over several generations. Blacks have had to remain somewhat wary of the larger white Canadian society. Nevertheless they have had enough confidence in their identity as members of this wider society to participate in its mainstream customs.

      One of the most important of these has been sport.

2 THE SPORTING SCENE

      SPORT, AS AN ELEMENT OF HISTORY, provides a lens for examining and interpreting the wider experience of Black people in Canada. It reveals life stories, which have often been ignored or bypassed. It is part of a larger North American account about an often parallel sporting culture alongside the mainstream white one. This aspect of the story has been progressively uncovered over the past 30 years, particularly in reference to Black baseball history. The Canadian experience, however, can never be submerged within a larger American context. The different historical influences, the mixture of English and French culture and the attempts to define a separate path from Americans ensures that each element of Canadian history will reveal distinct pieces of a national identity.

      In a world without racial bias this study would have meaning only as a piece of one community’s self-definition and evolution. Perhaps, as a result, there are few sporting histories of communities defined by ethnicity or race in Canada. Communities defined by their ethnicity have vibrant and extensive stories but their sports experiences are usually fashioned within a larger public arena. Ethnic leagues and teams have played within their own community as an extension of local community esprit de corps and not out of necessity.

      Playing in mainstream leagues or broad-based competition signals for any distinct group its integration into the larger society. For groups like First Nations, Chinese, Japanese and Blacks, however, this path to integration has been more problematic. It was convenient to bar professionals from lacrosse in the 1880s as a way of effectively banning paid Aboriginal players. Many of them grew moustaches and passed themselves off as whites. Following attacks on Chinese and Japanese workers in Vancouver in 1907, the latter community adopted the novel solution of forming Japanese-Canadian hockey and baseball teams to play against white mainstream teams.

      Blacks, however, faced additional challenges. Like Aboriginals and those from Asia, they were different in appearance. The history of their race’s slavery and the continuing victimization of Blacks through legal means after emancipation created a unique situation. Their treatment, itself an affront to American notions of equality and liberty for all, became a kind of excuse for even more severe restrictions. White Americans demonized Blacks in grotesque racial caricatures and in daily encounters as a way of repudiating their basic humanity.

      Many Canadians accepted the American belief that the races were not equal but throughout their history they often refused to introduce the practice of sporting apartheid, as in the United States. In this, as many other features of Canadian life, the reality is more nuanced and ambiguous than that available in any simple explanation.

      After a brief period of tentative integration following the Civil War, Blacks in the United States were banned from open participation in most sports and could play games only amongst themselves. There were limited exceptions in sports like boxing and bicycling, and in Olympic Games participation, but even here the limited numbers indicate that athletes like Jack Johnson and Jesse Owens were exceptions to the general practice. Sports segregation continued well into the post-Second World War period. It was gradually removed through acts like Jackie Robinson’s integration into organized baseball in 1946 and the eventual introduction of Blacks in the basketball and football line-ups of American colleges in the south by the 1970s. Even today there are private golf clubs that retain exclusionary policies.

      Integration, however, has been a cruel double bind. The world of sports has often shortchanged American Blacks from pursuing more realistic careers. Even the successful athlete suffers. Unlike their white athletic counterparts, applauded for the well-roundedness of their intellectual and sporting pursuits, Black sporting accomplishment has often been seen as proof that members of their race had a genetic advantage in sports.

      The above are largely American examples.