“Oklahoma, where the wind comes sweeping down the plain….”
Oklahoma! is a classic work of American musical theatre. Probably everyone has heard at least some of the music even if they haven’t seen the stage play or movie. Composer Richard Rodgers and librettist Oscar Hammerstein’s first musical together immortalized the frontier conflict between “the cowman and the farmer.” But they left out a bigger, racially charged conflict surrounding Oklahoma’s accession to statehood in 1907. It in turn would have a strange and unfortunate impact on Canadian politics – but also a more or less happy ending on the Prairies.
The new state had a large Indian population because it had been carved out of the U.S. Indian Territory. The Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek and Seminole nations, known as the “Five Civilized Nations” of the southeastern American states, had been deported to this then-remote region west of the Mississippi River in the 1830s by Democratic President Andrew Jackson in the infamous Trail of Tears expulsion. This despite U.S. Supreme Court rulings protecting their land rights.
These tribes had acquired from their white neighbours Christianity, literacy, the practice of agriculture and – unfortunately – that of owning black slaves. When they crossed the Mississippi, they brought thousands of slaves with them. These became the nucleus of Oklahoma’s black population. Many of these slave-owning Indians sympathized with the Confederacy during the Civil War. One of the leading Cherokee public men of the time was Clement Vann Rogers, father of the famous comedian Will Rogers. He was also a slave-owner who served as an officer in the Confederate Army.
After the Union States won the Civil War, the Indian tribes emancipated their slaves, but former slave-owners continued to look down on black people. In this they were joined by many white settlers who flooded into the Indian Territory from nearby Southern states such as Texas and Arkansas. After the Supreme Court in 1896 enunciated the odious doctrine of “separate but equal” in Plessy v. Ferguson, which legally legitimized and added momentum to racial segregation, whites and Indians alike in Oklahoma started to think about further legislation to keep the future state’s approximately 140,000 blacks in their subordinate position – principally the extension and entrenchment of “Jim Crow” segregation laws.
‘So, my father, always ambitious and proud, wanted to go where every man was accepted on his merit or demerit, regardless of race, colour or creed. So, in the summer of 1909, we moved to Canada.’
This informal coalition held back when Oklahoma’s state constitution was written in 1907 because they knew Republican President Theodore Roosevelt would not admit Oklahoma into the Union with an explicitly segregationist constitution. But once Oklahoma was in, state legislators set to work with a vengeance, passing one Jim Crow law after another, segregating schools and public buildings, making inter-racial marriage illegal and so on.
This is where Canada enters the story. This was the period when Canada was actively seeking agricultural immigrants to fill up the nascent Prairie provinces. Best known today are the Ukrainians, whom Interior Minister Clifford Sifton famously called “stalwart peasants in sheepskin coats”; but Canada welcomed many nationalities and advertised its generous homesteading policies in newspapers across Europe and the United States. A filing fee of $10 allowed one to claim a quarter-section (160 acres) of land, convertible to full ownership after three years of modest improvements.
After becoming a state in 1907, Oklahoma passed segregationist “Jim Crow” laws that persecuted blacks. Some looked north to Canada, which was urging immigrants to settle the Prairies, as shown in this 1911 ad in the Boley Progress. Best-known were the Ukrainians, “stalwart peasants in sheepskin coats” (bottom left). (Sources of photos: (top left) Library of Congress, retrieved from pbs.org; (bottom left) Provincial Archives of Alberta, retrieved from breachmedia.ca; (right) citymuseumedmonton.ca)
Led by their Baptist ministers, small groups of Oklahoma blacks decided they didn’t like what statehood would mean for them without the protection of the Republican-controlled federal government. As one immigrant, Obidiah Brown, put it: “Things began getting worse for our people. So, my father, always ambitious and proud, wanted to go where every man was accepted on his merit or demerit, regardless of race, colour or creed. So, in the summer of 1909, we moved to Canada.”
Between 1905 and 1911, about 1,000 black people from Oklahoma moved to Canada to homestead in the West. As many blacks had done in Oklahoma, they established five small farming villages, of which the best-known were Eldon, near Maidstone in Saskatchewan, and Amber Valley, north of Edmonton in Alberta.
Courage Met with Official Disdain
These people’s courage is still awe-inspiring. Shipped from Africa to America, their ancestors had been enslaved first by whites, later by Indians, then taken as slaves halfway across the continent to the Indian Territory west of the Mississippi. Legally emancipated by Republican President Abraham Lincoln through the 13th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, they were now faced with a new wave of Jim-Crow-style legislation in Oklahoma. They had had more than enough of subjection, and they were willing to travel overland more than 1,500 miles to Canada, a country where they had no connections, in search of freedom. Could anyone have asked for better citizens to help populate the young Dominion?
Their reception in Canada was mixed. Some settlers welcomed their new neighbours while others complained to the federal government, which controlled immigration and Dominion Lands in the West, that they didn’t want Africans moving in. “We view with alarm the continuous and rapid influx of Negro settlers,” the Alberta chapter of the Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire wrote to Edmonton MP Frank Oliver, Minister of the Interior in Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s Liberal government. “This immigration will have the immediate effect of the discouraging [of] white settlement in the vicinity of the Negro farms and will depreciate the value of all holdings within such areas.”
Wrote one senior Liberal government bureaucrat: ‘It is considered in this country that coloured people are not a class likely to do well on our free grant lands in the Western Provinces and we are therefore not encouraging the removal of any of your people to this country.’
At the time, the Liberals were the leading party in Alberta and Saskatchewan, winning three-quarters of the seats in those two new provinces in the 1908 Dominion election. Thus Laurier’s government was responsive to Western complaints. It also had few scruples about racially discriminatory immigration policy, in the late 1800s enthusiastically raising the Chinese head tax to prohibitive levels (and later banning Chinese immigration altogether). In 1911 Laurier’s cabinet passed an Order-in-Council prohibiting black immigration to Canada for one year because the “race is deemed unsuitable to the climate and requirements of Canada.”
The order, however, was never enforced because the Liberal government had already achieved the same objective in other ways. It had put ads in newspapers and sent speakers to Oklahoma to tell blacks that they would not be happy in the Canadian climate. W.D. Scott, federal Superintendent of Immigration, responded to one potential immigrant seeking guidance in 1910 by writing that, “Our winter climate would not be found congenial to you. It is considered in this country that coloured people are not a class likely to do well on our free grant lands in the Western Provinces and we are therefore not encouraging the removal of any of your people to this country.” It was a double message: the weather was cold, and Blacks would find a “chilly climate,” as we might call it today. Laurier’s government quickly rescinded the Order after losing the 1911 election, knowing that Robert Borden’s newly elected Conservative government would repeal it.
“Unsuitable to the climate and requirements of Canada”: The Liberal government of Sir Wilfrid Laurier (top left) passed an Order-in-Council in 1911 (right) banning black immigration for one year; some white settlers were hostile as well, as reflected in an Edmonton Journal cartoon from the time. (Source of bottom left image: citymuseumedmonton.ca)Credit Where it is Due
The black homesteaders survived and thrived in their villages; but, like the rest of Western Canada’s rural inhabitants, their children and grandchildren eventually moved to the cities, and indeed all over the world. The largest concentration of their descendants remains in Edmonton, the city closest to their original villages in northern Alberta. They founded Shiloh Baptist Church in Edmonton in 1910 because other churches didn’t want them as members. That church still functions today as the religious home of a mixed-race congregation.
My wife remembers attending a service at Shiloh more than 60 years ago, when she was a student at the University of Alberta. She was an active Mormon then, and she went with a group of Mormon students who made a practice of visiting other churches once a month. The visit was slightly adventurous because the Latter-day Saints had not yet ended their discrimination against blacks. She still remembers the welcoming atmosphere and the wonderful music she heard that day. For her, it was eye-opening to experience the clapping and swaying that characterizes the religious practices of southern black Christianity.
About 45 years ago, we lived for a few years in the same condominium complex as Napoleon “Nap” Sneed, a descendant of Henry Sneed, the Baptist preacher who led his followers to settle at Amber Valley. Our condo manager, a white man from Alabama, got on swimmingly with Nap. I’ll never forget the two of them singing Negro Spirituals together.
“Ambitious and proud”: That’s how one immigrant described his father, who vowed to go “where every many was accepted on his merit or demerit, regardless of race, colour or creed.” On the left, the Shiloh Baptist Church congregation, 1925, Edmonton; on the right, the present-day service at Shiloh. (Sources of photos: (left) Jenna Bailey, retrieved from CBC; (right) Shiloh Baptist Church)
But these were just brief and superficial encounters with the black immigrants from Oklahoma. It’s only in the last few years that I have learned more, after our adopted daughter started researching her background and found that one strand of her ancestry led back to these freedom-seeking people. One of these progenitors became an advocate for black people in the Calgary chapter of the Alberta Association of Coloured People. Spurred on by her discovery of long-lost relatives, I started digging into the political backstory, which I found intriguing and inspirational.
As a political scientist who was born and educated in the United States but who became Canadian by choice, I cannot help putting a political spin on the story. The United States was the world’s first large-scale democracy, which was truly a world-historical achievement. But the democratic rule of the majority can lead to the oppression of racial minorities, as illustrated in the tragic American history of slavery, Jim Crow, lynching and mob violence. This small group of Oklahoma black people sought and found greater toleration in Canada’s constitutional monarchy. They met some resistance from other settlers and from Wilfrid Laurier’s federal government, but ultimately were allowed to find their own way as Canadians.
A small group of oppressed people found refuge and a new life in Canada, and that’s worth celebrating. Think about it the next time you hear the immortal music of Rodgers and Hammerstein.
Another important aspect of the political story is the role played by Laurier’s Liberal Cabinet in passing the odious Order-in-Council barring further black immigration to Canada. So often in the rush to condemn historical figures it is Conservatives of the past who are decried as racist oppressors. Foremost is Canada’s founding prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, who’s accused of perpetrating genocide against the Indigenous people when in fact his policies saved tens of thousands and his politics leaned to respecting minority rights.
Today’s Liberals like to pose as the defenders of racial minorities, but history tells a different story. A Liberal government wrote the first Indian Act in 1876. It was Liberals who agitated for Chinese exclusion, as mentioned above. It was the Liberal government of Mackenzie King, Canada’s longest-serving prime minister, that first banned Chinese immigration and, later, interned Japanese Canadians during the Second World War.
Something to celebrate: The next time you hear the stirring music of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, remember the 1,000 oppressed people who found freedom and a new life in Canada. (Source of photo: JSTOR Daily)And then there is the role played by the Five Civilized Nations. Because of their suffering the notorious Trail of Tears – the deportation from the southeastern United States across the Mississippi River to Indian Territory – they are one of the prime victim groups of American history. Yet many of them adopted the practice of slavery from the whites who drove them out of their ancestral homes and continued it in the West, even to the point of supporting the Confederacy in the Civil War (and Jim Crow laws for decades after black slaves were emancipated).
It is important to note the ironies and hypocrisies of history, but it’s even more important to emphasize the story’s happy ending. A small group of oppressed people found refuge and a new life in Canada, and that’s worth celebrating. Think about it the next time you hear the immortal music of Rodgers and Hammerstein. By the way, you can still catch the musical, almost 70 years after it was written, in its current incarnation in West End London’s Wyndham Theatre. And – for good or ill – the lead role is now played by a black actress.
Tom Flanagan is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Calgary.
Source of main image: Canada Post, retrieved from CBC.
