Since 2017 the Alberta government has officially recognized February as Black History Month. While progress is slowly being made, the hundred-plus-year-old history of Alberta’s Black population remains largely unknown. It is therefore worth revisiting this fascinating history—a story that encapsulates the freedom and independence of spirit in which Albertans of all backgrounds take pride.
Alberta’s Black history dates back as early as the beginning of the 19th century. The first confirmed Black resident of the province is a fur trader and voyageur named Joseph Lewis (1772-1820), who settled in the Lac La Biche area in around 1800 as an employee of the Hudson Bay Company. However, the most famous early Black settler to the province was John Ware, a former slave turned cowboy who arrived in Calgary from Texas with 3,000 head of cattle in 1882, and in 1900 bought his own ranch near Millarville.
Alberta’s first true Black community was established in 1909, when a group of 160 African-American homesteaders established the community of Amber Valley in modern-day Athabasca County. A total of around 1,000 Black settlers arrived in Amber Valley and other small towns such as Campsie, Junkins (now Wildwood), and Keystone (now Breton) between 1909 and 1911, fleeing the oppressive “Jim Crow” laws in Oklahoma and Texas in response to advertising campaigns by the Canadian Immigration Department.
For Black Americans, Canada had long been seen as a promise land where freedom and equality awaited. Sadly, a racist backlash quickly followed this Black influx despite the Edmonton Board of Trade’s admission that “these people may be good farmers or good citizens.” Both provincial and federal governments did everything short of institute an outright ban to discourage further African-American settlement in the province, and for a time Black immigration to Alberta declined.
Nevertheless, this early contingent of Black settlers and their descendants (most of whom eventually moved to Edmonton, Calgary, and other large centres) had an outsized impact. Descendants of these original settlers include Violet King, who in 1954 became Canada’s first Black female lawyer, as well as author and documentary filmmaker Cheryl Foggo and Floyd Sneed, the Calgary-born drummer for the legendary 1970s rock band Three Dog Night.
Alberta’s next wave of Black migrants would come in the 1950s, primarily from Jamaica and elsewhere in the English-speaking Caribbean. Today around 129,000 Albertans (roughly 1.4 percent of the total population) identify as Black. This rate rises to 4.5 percent in Edmonton and close to four percent in Calgary. Nearly two thirds of this population are first-generation immigrants, with the top countries of origin being Nigeria, Ethiopia, Jamaica, Somalia, and Eritrea.
Want to learn more? The Royal Alberta Museum website has assembled a wonderful collection of resources on Alberta’s Black history, including links to documentary films. The University of Calgary has a collection of biographies of notable Black Albertans, including the aforementioned Joseph Lewis, John Ware, and Violet King. The CBC multimedia project entitled “Being Black on the Prairies” showcases the Black history of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba as well as modern narratives on Black life and culture in the prairie provinces.
We encourage you this month to explore these and other resources and share them via social media.