Celebrating Black History and the Works That Shape It

February 2026 marks the 30th anniversary of the first national celebration of Black History Month in Canada. This milestone offers an important opportunity to recognize the enduring legacy and resilience of Black Canadians and to reflect on a history that has often been overlooked.

Canadian historians especially must confront the mythology that depicts Canada solely as a haven from racism. In reality, the Canadian government and public have imposed deliberate, often legislated barriers to Black success. From immigration bans under the pretext of “climatic unsuitability” to provincial school acts that enforced racially segregated schools well into the 20th century, systemic exclusion was a core feature of the Canadian state. 

Given these historic and ongoing systemic injustices, Canadian historians can center the experiences of Black Canadians and concepts of anti-Black racism within their work. We must move beyond symbolic celebration toward a methodology that weaves these essential perspectives into the very fabric of our historical research.

With such a project in mind, members of the Active History editorial collective offer the following suggestion on scholarship and resources that have shaped our own learning journeys. These articles, book chapters, and monographs have challenged the way we undertake our historical pursuits, and we hope they inspire similar deep reflection for our readership. 

Alex Gagné

For my selection, I’ve included both Kristin McLaren’s “We had no desire to be set apart” and Afua Cooper’s “Black Canada and the Law,” which focus on the Black Canadian experience within the mid-nineteenth-century education and schooling system in Canada West/Ontario. As a historian of childhood and education, I believe these two works provide a comprehensive illustration of anti-Black racism within the burgeoning Common School System of 19th-century Ontario. More than that, they illustrate the high level of discrimination and prejudice exerted not only by early school promoters and school board trustees but also by government personnel at the highest level, such as Chief Superintendent of Education Egerton Ryerson.

Of the greatest importance in both works is an investigation of the Common Schools Act of 1850, which allowed for the segregation of schools based on race throughout Ontario. Originally, historians of schooling argued that this provision was pushed for by and empowered Black interest groups and communities in creating their own schools; however, both Cooper and McLaren push back against this notion, illustrating that there was no mass appeal by Black communities in Ontario for segregation. In fact, it was quite the opposite, with most leaders calling for Black integration.

For my own research, which focuses on the early history of child protection, this demonstrates the selectivity and sheer privilege afforded to Anglo-Saxon children by the government. Indeed, at the very same time that new provisions were being added to exclude Black children, the government was going to great lengths to ensure that impoverished British children were brought into the country and provided a stalwart education.

Sara Wilmshurst

I wish I could cite every single journalist, activist, social media user, comedian, artist, friend, friend-of-a-friend, colleague, and neighbour who have done me the service of changing my mind. I don’t mean “changed my mind” as in “convinced me of something”—I mean they changed the way my mind works. What I understand about white privilege, racial capitalism, carcerality, systemic racism, and colonialism is attributable to thousands of people, whether they wrote a book or a sentence, spoke a phrase or a monologue.

I cannot refer you to my long-ago classmate and my partner’s former boss and a lady on Twitter in 2019 and a poster I saw. But I can do the next best thing and refer you to a piece of writing that covers an astonishing amount of what those thousands of people taught me over many years: Rehearsals for Living by Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson.

The book is derived from an exchange of letters between two brilliant scholars and activists as they discuss how Black and Indigenous communities can survive and resist “the death-drive of white supremacy, racial capitalism, and constant and unceasing extraction”.[1] We, the readers, are most fortunate to be invited along. Rooted in Black and Indigenous solidarity, Rehearsals for Living imagines Black and Indigenous futurities. It recognizes that settler colonialism, racial capitalism, cannot survive, but “Indigenous and Black peoples have been building worlds and then rebuilding worlds for as long as we have been in existence.”[2]

I would encourage everyone to read this book and follow Mariame Kaba’s advice to “let this radicalize you rather than lead you to despair.”[3]

Laura Madokoro

The work that immediately came to mind when the Active History collective started thinking about this post to celebrate Black History Month was Sadiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (W.W. Norton, 2019). There is no way I can do justice to this beautifully written, artful, illuminating work and so I will just provide a debrief description here all the while urging everyone to have a read, and to sit with it before rushing off to the next busy thing. Hartman’s craft, research, and provocations, demand time, attention, and reflection.  

Wayward Lives is a critically acclaimed book that explores the history of young black women in New York City in the early 20^th century by imagining their lives beyond the surviving photographic and textual collections, including those generated by the state, which often saw the women in question as delinquents. In this work, Hartman further develops a methodology that she has described as critical fabulation in which she deliberately chooses to “use the archive to create another order of statements, to produce a different account of what had happened and what might be possible.”[4] Hartman’s intellectual and political commitments are foregrounded in this work and the resulting text is provocative and powerful in large part because it succeeds in opening up the notion of different possibilities and more complicated lives than what is normally encountered in the historical gaze. I loved it and have found it really helpful in my own work in thinking through what is known, or not, and what is possible, or not, in terms of the historical craft (I could rhapsodize about the rigour and artistry of Hartman’s approach to footnotes in Wayward Lives but I will leave that to the reader to explore). 

I will say, by way of encouraging further dialogue and reflection, that my universal admiration of this work was not shared in the classroom. It actually proved to be one of the more divisive texts I have worked with in my theory and methods courses in recent years. A number of students, for instance, rejected the ethical premise of Hartman’s approach, concerned that her creative imaginings – grounded as they were in historical evidence and a desire to counter existing oppressive narratives – were paradoxically perpetuating a parallel kind of discrimination and silencing. Spending time with Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments is therefore a worthwhile endeavour for multiple reasons: to explore her research and craft, the possibilities and limitations of a methodology such as critical fabulation, and to learn about the many ways that one might understand the lives of Black migrants and residents in US cities in the transformative years of the early twentieth century.

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[1] Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Rehearsals for Living, ProQuest ebook edition (Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2022), Part 1, Maynard to Simpson.

[2] Maynard and Simpson, Rehearsals for Living, Part 1, Simpson to Maynard.

[3] Maya Schenwar, “Radicalization is Vital,” in Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba, ProQuest ebook edition (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2023), Foreword.

[4] Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection?: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Revised and Updated edition. W. W. Norton & Company, 2022, 16.