Abstract
Canada has a history of de facto Jim Crow (1911–1954). It also has a historical Black press that is intimately connected to Black America through transnational conversations, and diasporic migration. This article argues that Canada’s Black newspapers played a pivotal role in promoting Black performance during a time when they were scarcely covered in the dominant media. Drawing on news coverage from the 1920s through 1950s of black dance, musicals, and jazz clubs this article examines three case studies: Shuffle Along (1921–1924), the first all- Black Broadway musical to appear at Toronto’s Royal Alexandra Theater, Alberta-born dancer Len Gibson (1926–2008), who revolutionized modern dance in Canada in the 1940s and 1950s, and the Montreal jazz club Rockhead’s Paradise (1928–1980), a pivotal site in the city’s Little Burgundy, a Black neighborhood that thrived in the 1930s through 1950s. The authors argue that when Black people were excluded from and/or derogatorily portrayed in the dominant media, Canada’s Black press celebrated collective achievement by authenticating Black performance. By incorporating Canada’s Black Press into conversations about Jim Crow and performance, we gain a deeper understanding of Black creative output and resistance during the period.
In 1941 Toronto’s Globe and Mail featured dancer Katherine Dunham (1909–2006) who was set to appear in the city as part of the off-Broadway production of Cabin in the Sky at the Royal Alexandra Theater. “Katherine Dunham was 8 when she gave her first dance recital,” the Globe and Mail reported, adding “she organized a dozen other small colored girls into the troupe and they performed one Sunday at the Baptist Church in Joliet, Illinois. Sixteen years later Chicago’s Century of Progress Exposition hired Katherine to direct a hundred and fifty young negroes in a production of Soldier Field” (“Cabin in Sky,” 1941). Dunham, who was born in Chicago to an African American father had a French-Canadian mother. The feature, which goes on to describe her as an anthropologist with a degree from the University of Chicago where she studied African and Caribbean traditional dance forms and their influence in modern and contemporary dance concluded, “she is the author of a great many articles of primitive dancing” (“Cabin in Sky,” 1941). The word “primitive” must be placed in context.
Dunham, who was also a choreographer, studied Caribbean and African American folkloric dances which had their roots in West African traditions. She made continual written and spoken reference to “primitive dance” in her research, training, and choreography (Gonzalez, 2015). As a trained dancer, the word denoted movement and culture, not embodiment or an essential nature. For example, in a 1941 interview Dunham said, “My desire was to see first-hand the primitive dance in its everyday relationship to the people” (Pierre, 2006, p. 249). “In explaining her use of the word primitive, Miss Dunham denies the connotations of either loose, or inferior, or simple,” read a footnote that accompanied another article she penned, titled “The Negro Dance” (Dunham 2006, p. 217). Dunham consistently used the word primitive with the highest respect, accrediting her study of primitive dance and rhythm and societal belief systems as primary to the creation and development of her technique (Gonzalez 2015). Thus, the “primitive” in Canadian news reporting must be read differently to Dunham’s use of the word. The dominant news coverage on her performance positioned Black dance as outside the “norm” and in turn, it discursively pigeonholed Black dancers within the realm of the primitive, as inferior. Further, the negative associations with the word “primitive” have much to do with how it was used in Europe in the early twentieth century. As African American performance scholar Archer-Straw (2000) observes, in 1920s Paris “‘the Primitive’ was the bottom line in a hierarchy of categories that placed European civilization at its pinnacle” (p. 11). “The Primitive represented the process through which Europeans suggested their own superiority by placing inferior status on others,” she writes further (p. 12).
The Royal Alexandra Theater, like the Globe and Mail performed the role of nation-building in early-twentieth-century Toronto. Like dominant newspaper audiences, theatre audiences comprised the country’s majority white, English speaking elites who determined what counted as “culture.” The Globe, founded in 1844 by journalist and politician George Brown was, by 1900, required reading for the educated and business community in Toronto through a mixture of news, features, forceful editorials, and technological innovation (Doyle et al., 2009). In 1936, The Globe merged with The Mail and Empire, which formed through the 1895 merger of two conservative newspapers, The Toronto Mail and Toronto Empire (Bradburn, 2014). By the 1940s, the newspaper had a national readership that was almost exclusively white and politically conservative. Similarly, when the Royal Alexandra opened to the public on August 26, 1907, Toronto’s business and governing elite was overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon and Protestant, and for the most part, its members served on the same boards of directors, and their families attended the same Anglican Presbyterian and Methodist churches, the same private clubs and private schools, and the same parties and weddings (Russell, 1990). When the Globe and Mail editorialized about Dunham’s return performance at the Royal Alexandra Theater in 1948, describing her “Tropical Revue” as “in part constructed from material gathered in Jamaica, Martinique, Cuba and Trinidad where the performers were said to have “learn[ed] the secrets of ritualistic dances” (“Katherine Dunham,” 1948) the association between her movements and the primitive as Other remained.
This article examines Black performance during the 1920s through 1950s in Toronto, Montreal, and Western Canada. This period was marked by de facto Jim Crow segregation. These three sites of inquiry are significant because scholars of dance and theater history have primarily studied them, and the spatiality of race and space have also been documented by Black Canadian historians and geographers (see Boye, 2017; Mensah, 2010; Moynagh, 2005; Williams, 1997). By focusing on Black dance, jazz clubs and theatrical performance not only in terms of Black contributions but also as editorialized about and promoted in Canadian newspapers – the dominant media form in the first half of the twentieth century – this article explains the ways in which intraregional and interregional migration impacted the stories that were told about Black performance during this period. There has been a noticeable absence of research on or about Black performance in Canada, as well as in the fields of communication studies and media studies. For example, in her examination of African Canadian theater, Moynagh (2005) states, “There is no single way of describing or defining … the black Canadas that … theatre practitioners, theatre institutions, playwrights, and performance traditions represented” (vii). “Any consideration of the history of African-Canadian theatre ought, I think, to begin by historicizing the performance of blackness in the nation,” she writes further (viii). Our aim is to historicize how Black performance was discursively brought into being via news media. By comparing the dominant newspaper coverage on Black dancers, theatrical performances, and jazz clubs and the coverage that appeared in African Canadian newspapers, this article aims to elucidate the tension between Black perceptions of Black performance and the representation of Black performance in the dominant Canadian media.
Importantly, while we are engaging in discussions about race that parallel critical race theory (CRT), which initially emerged from the field of critical legal studies (Crenshaw, 1991; Delgado & Stefancic, 2001), we are using a framework that is in conversation with CRT, but which has a different impetus. CRT scholars typically assert that racism is and has been an integral part of life, law, and culture in the United States, and that by unpacking historical movements and locating the voices of the underrepresented and marginalized, CRT can offer solutions to problems that have resulted from the institutionalization of race and operationalization of racism (Kumashiro, 2000). Our analysis, however, aims to bring the field of Black Canadian media studies into being. No such field of study currently exists because of a lack of knowledge of, and engagement with Black Canadian history. Second, there remains a blind spot towards centering Black Canadian voices in the field of communication studies. While there is discourse about Black representation, identity, and anti-Black racism in the media, the very idea of Black Canadian media-makers remains anathema to many in the field. Thus, while this article is in conversation with CRT, we aim to create a historical argument for unpacking Black Canadian content production, media ownership, and storytelling. Since the 1920s, Black Canadian editors have been writing about a profound sense of not being recognized in the dominant culture as media-makers. This article aims to unpack this erasure.
By examining the touring performances of Shuffle Along (1921), one of the first-ever Broadway musicals produced by African Americans, which came to Toronto in 1923 and 1924, the career of Leonard “Len” Gibson (1926-2008), an Alberta-born Black dancer who was one of the first African Canadians to join The British Columbia Ballet Company, and finally, Rockhead’s Paradise (1928–1980), a Black jazz club that reflected a bricolage of African American immigrants and African Canadians who helped to establish the “Little Burgundy” community in 1920s Montreal, we position Black media as fundamental to the actual experience and culture of Black Canadians, which is similar to CRT scholars who take into account “the actual experience, culture, and intellectual tradition of people of color in America” (as cited in Reynolds & Mayweather, 2017, p. 300).
These case studies were chosen for two reasons. First, Shuffle Along was the first “hit” with Blacks not performing in blackface or as part of a minstrel show; as such, it represents a starting point for understanding how Black bodies were perceived on Canadian stages during the period. Second, the career of Gibson much like the legacy of Rockhead’s provides us with a rare glimpse into the working lives of Black Canadian entertainers and entrepreneurs, for which there are very few documented histories. What connects these three cases is the discursive and representational examples drawn from newspapers of the era, which lead us to probe how anti-Black racism impeded Black performance. We examine the strategies used by Black Canadians to circumvent these impediments. By analyzing dance, theater, and jazz clubs as well as the role played by news coverage, this article probes the extent to which anti-Black racism impacted Black performance. To situate the period of this article, we first discuss how Jim Crow segregation functioned in Canada, the emergence of Black newspapers, and the migration history that links Black Canada and Black America in the first half of the twentieth century.
Canada’s de Facto Jim Crow
From the 1910s through 1950s, white Canadians quite effectively produced their own de facto Jim Crow. As Mathieu (2010) writes, “They rationalized their xenophobia and white supremacist propaganda by blaming nature – what they called ‘climatic unsuitability’ – and Black settlers themselves” (p. 26). Restrictive federal immigration policies, segregation in schools and in land ownership, and the refusal to hire people on racial grounds, were deemed beyond the Canadian court’s jurisdiction until the 1960s when these were matters to be decided by federal and provincial legislatures and the voting public, not courts of law (Alexander & Glaze, 1996). The provinces of Ontario, Alberta and Quebec provide us with tangible evidence of Canada’s Jim Crow. On March 31, 1911, the Edmonton chapter of the Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire, a white supremacist women’s group, petitioned the minister of the interior demanding that the Canadian government keep the country white (quoted in “Order-in-Council,” para. 8). On April 3, 1911, a Member of Parliament from Ontario, William Thoburn, rose in the House of Commons to ask whether the government would prefer “to preserve for the sons of Canada, the lands they propose to give to niggers” (quoted in Order-in-Council, para. 8). Finally, on August 12, 1911 the Cabinet of Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier approved Order-in-Council P.C. 1324, a proposed ban on Black persons entering Canada for a period of one year (Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21, 1911). Though these motions never became law, the actions of Canadian government officials made it clear that Black immigrants were not wanted north of the border.
Canadian Jim Crow was enforced in practice and sentiment not legislated through law. Between the 1910s and 1950s, there are many documented cases of Jim Crow segregation. In 1919, a Black man from Montreal sued Loew’s Theater for refusing to allow him to sit in an orchestra seat; at Loew’s and most other theaters Black people were restricted to sitting in the balcony, euphemistically called “Nigger Heaven” in some places (Alexander & Glaze, 1996). Even after the passage of anti-discrimination legislation such as Ontario’s Racial Discrimination Act (1944), which prohibited the publication or broadcast of anything which discriminated based on race or creed, making it illegal to use “whites-only” trade signs and other public postings that singled out ethnic groups for separate and unequal treatment, Black people were still discriminated against. In 1954 when a Black couple from Toronto visited the southwestern Ontario town of Dresden and were refused service in two restaurants, they took their plight to the media to demonstrate that de facto segregation was still being practiced even though there were laws prohibiting the practice (Donaldson, 1954).
For most the twentieth century, Canadian media actively reported on racial incidents under Jim Crow in the United States, but for the most part, the same acts of racial violence and discrimination in the Canadian context were often minimized as “isolated” or being the actions of a few, not reflective of long-standing, community-wide anti-Black racism (Thompson, 2019). For example, on August 12, 1965, in a Globe and Mail editorial on the southwestern Ontario town of Amherstburg, sub-titled “Burning Cross Hoodlum’s Work, OPP Says,” Deputy Attorney General A. Rendall Dick is quoted as dismissing a five-day affair where the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross in the town center, made threatening phone calls to Black residents, defaced the Black Baptist church, and spray-painted a sign welcoming visitors to the town with the words “Amherstburg Home of the KKK [Ku Klux Klan].” “If any crimes were involved in these incidents they were of the petty types,” Dick said, adding “there was no organized racial disturbance” (“Amherstburg Racial Trouble,” 1965). While Toronto’s dominant media minimized anti-Black racism, Black Canadians were able to connect locally and transnationally via Black newspapers, which served as platforms to launch quiet protests and non-violent resistance to Canadian Jim Crow.
Black Canadian Newspapers as Outlets for Resistance
The first Black Canadian newspapers appeared in the mid-nineteenth century, but they were primarily run by African Americans who had lived in Canada before the U.S. Civil War; by the turn of the twentieth century all had disappeared. The Canadian Observer (1914-1919), founded by Canadian-born Joseph R. B. Whitney, and published out of Toronto, was a Black Canadian “war-baby” like the Atlantic Advocate, a monthly journal published out of Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1915. Both were created specifically in response to Black men being barred from joining the Canadian Expeditionary Forces (CEF) during World War I. As Shaw (2016) writes, “Whitney founded the Observer on behalf of Blacks dissatisfied with racially biased injustices that denied them the full benefits of their rights and responsibilities as British subjects and loyal Canadians” (p. 549). “He wanted to start a ‘Revolution of Thought by Our People’” she writes further (p. 549). As the editor of the only Black Canadian newspaper circulating across Canada, Whitney realized he had a unique platform to launch Black activism in Toronto through the Observer, which ultimately resulted in the creation of the No. 2 Construction Battalion, officially authorized on July 5, 1916 by the CEF (Shaw, 2016).
By the 1920s, Canadian cities, especially Toronto, became sites of diasporic migration as African Americans, Blacks from the Caribbean and other parts of Canada also headed to the nation’s cities creating milieus that required intra-racial associations and multi-generational connections. West Indians arriving from Halifax, Montreal, New York, Central and South America, and directly from the Caribbean found a small but growing Black population in Toronto during this period (Toney, 2010). This emergent West Indian population helped to bring Pan-Africanism to Canada, a socioeconomic ideology that was first propagated by Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey. In 1916, Garvey moved his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) headquarters from Kingston, Jamaica to Harlem, and between 1918 and 1923, UNIA associations expanded across Canada. Montreal’s UNIA division, located in the Little Burgundy, and operating out of 243 Saint Antoine Street opened in 1919. In his doctoral study, Bertley (1980) notes that this was the same building that housed the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) sleeping car porters many of whom did not live in Montreal, but who were awaiting trains to take them back to their home base. Since the 1890s, the CPR and the Pullman Palace Car Company funneled thousands of Black railroaders into Canadian urban centers (Mathieu, 2010).
These Black men, many of whom came from New York, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., and Chicago, primarily headed to Montreal. Williams (1997) explains that the first wave of African American porters used Montreal as a three- or four-day stopover; the second wave, arriving just before and during World War I, were employed in the war industries situated in the Montreal region but were squeezed out of their jobs after the war by a white labor force; and the third wave consisted of African Americans who came to Montreal solely for summer employment on the railroads. As porters became UNIA members, they travelled on the rails between Montreal, Toronto, and Western Canada, they also spread Pan-Africanism and Garveyism, and contributed to the performative arts, all of which fostered a sense of diasporic connection across North America (Mathieu, 2010). Most of the members of Toronto’s UNIA, also opened in 1919, were West Indian immigrants and African American porters.
By crossing the border, African Americans affirmed that they “included Canada in their vision of a Great Migration” (Marano, 2010, p. 253). Foster (2019) also notes that “Black people, even when born in Canada, were viewed as having a different nationality and treated as if they belonged elsewhere. They were simply Negroes” (p. 99). This experience compelled Canada’s Black newspapers “to convey the discriminatory way Black people were being treated with respect to Canadian citizenship and employment” (Foster, 2019, p. 99). Significantly, discussions about race during this period were marked not only by theories of eugenics which sought to position non-white Europeans as inferior – mentally, spiritually, and socially – there was also an overwhelming fear of “too many” Black people in Canada. As Mathieu (2010) explains, “As a result of always positioning blacks as an invading foreign force, Canadian immigration and historiography persistently framed African Canadians through the lens of recent immigration, erasing their investment in the formation of the Canadian nation-state, even when it had meant working against a rising tide of xenophobia” (p. 6–7). If you consider that Black people were consistently framed as a threat or “alien problem” the ways in which Black Canadian newspapers functioned as outlets for the celebration of Black performances must be underscored.
When The Dawn of Tomorrow (hereafter The Dawn) appeared in 1923 it promoted Garveyism, but it became the most significant outlet for the promotion of Black performance during the decade. On July 14 of that year, The Dawn began publication in London, Ontario, a small city a few hours southwest of Toronto. The new weekly, published by African American James F. Jenkins, who had moved to the city as a young adult, dubbed itself as “Devoted to the Interests of the Darker Races,” a declaration that was clearly in conversation with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP’s) The Crisis (1910 –) and its claim to be “A Record for the Darker Races.” The Dawn, though published in Canada, reflected a history of diasporic connection with the United States. In its first issue, assistant editor Robert Paris Edward (1923) described the paper’s mission as follows: “In inaugurating ‘The Dawn of Tomorrow’ it is to be remembered first, that our people in Canada do not possess a newspaper; second, that the circulation of the American Colored newspaper in Canada is very small; third, very little news of our people in Canada is found in America” (p. 2). Two days later, Edwards (1923) penned another article for Claude A. Barnett’s Associated Negro Press that described The Dawn as “of inestimable benefit to the colored citizens of the country” (p. D4). In July 1923, for instance, The Dawn reported on the enforcement of a color line in Canada. “At lunch hour last Friday, Mr. W. V. Franklin, colored, of Kitchener, a well-dressed and educated gentleman, entered White’s restaurant at the corner of York and Richmond Sts. [sic] and asked to be served a meal,” the newspaper reported, adding, “The waitress refused to serve him” (“London’s Mayor,” 1923). “Mr. Franklin then asked to be shown the proprietor, who soon appeared and … he was asked why he refused to serve colored people and he replied with a total lack of courtesy, and very abruptly ‘Because we don’t,’” the newspaper added (“London’s Mayor,” 1923). But for the pages of The Dawn, such material evidence of de facto Jim Crow would not be remembered as part of the historical record.
Importantly, as a social and cultural project of humanization, Black newspapers reinvented Blackness, locally and transnationally, through its coverage of community-based events. For example, in 1930 a front-page photograph in The Dawn, reprinted from the Boston Chronicle, celebrated seven young Black women who took part in the “The Beacon,” a beauty pageant that was held during Boston’s Tercentenary Celebration (“Dancers Who Appeared,” 1930). As White and White (1998) note, the Black beauty contest was one of the institutions that rose to prominence in the 1920s and which embodied the political, literary, and artistic manifestations of the New Negro Woman, a shift in consciousness that also entailed a deliberate and prideful display of Black bodies, particularly those of women, in a manner that transcended hoary white stereotypes. Black newspapers’ role in the promotion of Black performers formed part of the New Negro consciousness, and as it spread across America this New Negro headed north to Canada where, through performance, audiences were infected with songs and movements that transcended the stage. These performances rendered into being forms of Blackness that had not existed before, and in many ways, were not available to Black people in the public sphere. The stage, in this sense, became a liberating entity.
Shuffle along Heads North of the Border
In 1923, The Dawn widely promoted Shuffle Along, which was written, performed, produced, and directed by African Americans. The show, which began on Broadway in 1921, went on to become one of the most successful musicals of the decade. As Thompson (2012) explains, while Shuffle Along was not the first show to feature an entirely African American cast, what made it unique was that it was the first to create a book and musical score that “featured a non-burlesqued love song between an African American couple, a rarity for any venue at the time and the first such moment in a musical performed in a Broadway theatre” (p. 97). Additionally, the show paired two renowned vaudeville talents: musician-songwriters Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake and comedians Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles (Thompson, 2012). Shuffle Along featured some of the most talented African American performers of the Harlem Renaissance such as Josephine Baker, who later went to Europe where she mesmerized audiences in Paris, eventually becoming known as “the girl who put Harlem on the map of Europe” (as cited in Russell et al., 1992, p. 143).
In November 1923, a photograph and an accompanying editorial in The Dawn paid special attention to Shuffle Along’s jazz orchestra: “Stirring tunes that set your feet pattering and when rendered in their own peculiar style it is given a manner of presentation that for sincerity, vigor and enjoyment is unequalled by any other class of entertainment” (“Famous ‘Shuffle Along’ Jazz,” 1923). The show coincided with the optimism of the era in that it restored Black artistry to the mainstream of the American theater and had an enormous impact on the development of the Broadway musical, especially as it relates to jazz music and Black dance. The show included “some of the staples of vaudeville blackness but steering clear of anything that might offend adherents of the New Negro Movement. Every song that utilized a bygone image was balanced by a romantic ballad or a production number that gently refuted the stereotype” (Thompson, 2012, p. 105). When Sissle and Blake brought Shuffle Along to Toronto in August 1923 for a week-long engagement at the Royal Alexandra it appeared in the Globe and Mail as a photograph and blurb read, “Stars and Authors of the Tuneful Music in the Dixie Musical Success, Shuffle Along. Royal Alexandra Theatre Next Week” (“Sissle & Blake,” 1923). Conversely, in the pages of The Dawn, this groundbreaking Black musical was framed in ways that sought to highlight what the creators of Shuffle Along intended in the creation of their show – that it would not only appeal to white audiences but that they had produced a show that would entertain both Black and white audiences (Thompson, 2012).
“‘Shuffle Along’ the greatest all Colored musical success since the days of [Burt] Williams opened at The Royal Alexandra, Canada’s premier theater, last Monday night,” reported The Dawn (“Shuffle Along,” 1923). “For two years this sensational musical attraction was the society fad at the 63rd Street Music Hall, New York, after which it captivated Broadway, and is now on tour. Despite the Exhibition attractions this big Dixie Hit breezed, speeded and varietied its tuneful music, catchy songs and lavish staging until its vast audiences, who were kept in a state of hilarious laughter and uninterrupted interest, insisted on numerous encores,” the newspaper added (“Shuffle Along,” 1923). Two weeks later, the Dawn paid more attention to the songs of the show, its creators, and the ways in which they refuted the stereotypes of Blackness that had dominated the vaudeville stage. First, The Dawn reported, “When Joe Simms sang ‘If you’ve never been vamped by a brown skin you’ve never been vamped at all’ on the first night when ‘Shuffle Along’ starring Sissle and Blake opened at the Royal Alexandria” (“Theatrical News,” 1923). The editorial then explained why the Black performers on stage stood in resistance to rampant anti-Black racism: For the 60 odd brown-skinned flexible voiced singers and versatile dancers in gorgeous costumes, set in the most lavish and original scenery that ever graced a Canadian stage; so completely vamped the exacting patrons of this famous playhouse that hundreds turned away nightly, and various movements were inaugurated to persuade the management to lengthen their stay…. Needless to say that they swelled chests (and heads too), glaring eyes and smiling faces of the sons and daughters of Ham bespoke their pride in the performers, whose skin and hair was like ours. And the Elites (as Bert Williams used to say) hurriedly wended their way to the Royal Alexandria to make inroads on the box office to get 2nd and 3rd glimpses of these annihilators of the Ku Klux. (“Theatrical News,” 1923)
Len Gibson and the Struggle for Black Artistic Expression
Len Gibson (1926–2008) was a dancer, choreographer, founder of the Negro Workshop Dance Group, and he worked with the Ballet British Columbia. Born in Athabasca, Alberta, 90 miles north of Edmonton his mother, Leona Faye, was born of African American parents who had migrated to the province in 1909, and his father, originally from Tennessee, worked on the Canadian railway as a porter (Citron, 2008). Following violent mob attacks by white supremacists in Oklahoma between 1905 and 1930, many Black families immigrated to Western Canada. Desperate for people, the Canadian government began advertising land in the prairies in newspapers in Oklahoma to lure prospective American immigrants; they did not anticipate, however, that African Americans would respond to this call. As a result, many headed north. Now known as the “Black Pioneers,” Black Oklahomans began arriving on the prairies in 1905, but the first sizeable group of settlers arrived in Saskatchewan in October of 1909, settling in the Eldon district, 150 railroad miles north of Saskatoon (Utendale, 1985). Many of these migrants from Oklahoma settled in all-Black communities in Alberta at Junkins (now Wildwood) and Campsie (in the County of Barrhead, northwest of Edmonton), while larger settlements were established in Keystone (now Breton, southwest of Edmonton), and Amber Valley (situated just east of the town of Athabasca).
As a Black community began to grow in Alberta, live entertainment venues and newspapers grew. In Edmonton, the Lotus Art Club formed in the 1920s by and for Black women interested in needlework, painting, and other arts (Vernon, 2014). Saskatchewan’s Melfort Moon, a Black-owned and edited newspaper run by Alfred Shadd was, according to Vernon (2014), one of the few examples of preserving Black history in the province. The newspaper, which now forms part of “The Black Prairie archive,” stood as the antithesis to white fears and perceptions about Black migration to the region from Oklahoma. Mathieu (2010) found that in the early twentieth century, Canadian newsmen aggravated tensions in the prairies and stirred many white westerners into frenzy with sensational and often outlandish reports. Canadian news articles depicted Black migrants as either inarticulate simpletons, daring denizens, or smiling servants but on the other hand, newspapers presented certain types of Black immigrants as “a tolerable alternative to African Americans roused by … ideals and dreams of free land” (Mathieu, 2010, pp. 50–51). As a native-born Canadian, Gibson did not fit into the category of immigrant but because Black “Canadianness” did not exist in the public discourse at this time, there were few opportunities for him to account for his identity as a Black Albertan.
Gibson first performed tap dance at a young age on stages in front of majority white audiences such as Edmonton’s Elk’s Club in 1931 (Citron, 2008). In 1947, he danced in Dunham’s company during a tour of Vancouver and eventually he joined her school in New York City where he expanded his dance training (Citron, 2008). Upon his return to Vancouver in 1949, Gibson choreographed with Mara McBirney (a white woman who was born in London, England) and founded his company, The Negro Workshop Dance Group (Dance Collection Danse [DCS], n.d.). In the 1950s, he was one of the first Black producers of a variety television show on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) for which he wrote and choreographed CBC Vancouver’s Bamboula: A Day in the West Indies, which became the first Canadian television show with a mixed-race cast (DCS, n.d.). Gibson’s production was halted after three episodes due to concerns that it would raise controversy from its viewers in Canada in light of the civil rights protests in the United States (Citron, 2008). Historically, dance artists have advocated against racial discrimination favoring interracial performances in an effort to push back against the normalization of racial segregation, though such acts of resistance came with consequences. In its place, CBC Vancouver created a more “conventional” show starring Bamboula singer Eleanor Collins for which Gibson choreographed (Citron, 2008).
Canadian news coverage in the early twentieth century seldomly mentioned Black Canadian dancers. The narrative of modern dance history has tended to prioritize “the all-white ‘big four’ of modern dance,” namely, Martha Graham (1894–1991), Doris Humphrey (1895-1958), Charles Weidman (1901–1975), and Hanya Holm (1893–1992), all of whom are American (Dils & Albright, 2001, p. xvi). In addition to Dunham, other African American choreographers such as Helmsley Winfield (1906–1934) and his dance company the Bronze Ballet Plastique, who performed as the first Black modern dance company in the United States in 1931, Pearl Primus (1919-1994) who like Dunham, drew upon African and Caribbean traditional dance forms in her work, and New Jersey-born Edna Guy (1907–1982) who played a role in moving dance away from vaudeville (when Black and white performers seldomly performed on stage together), have frequently been ignored and/or minimized in dance history. Canadian racism, however, a more subtle form than the American variety has, as Citron (2001) opines, “played a part in holding back the growth of professional black dance [in Canada]” (p. 69).
By the late 1950s, after touring Europe, Gibson returned to Canada where he created the Len Gibson Dance Ensemble, as well as opened the Len Gibson Dance studio for training in professional dance in Toronto, which he ran until 1995 (DCS, n.d.). In the 1980s, Gibson also became a singer, actor, writer, producer, and teacher at Sheridan College in Toronto. Importantly Gibson was a gay man who faced many closed artistic doors when he relocated to Toronto in 1955 because of his race but undoubtedly because of his sexuality. As noted, the city was staunchly conservative during the period, and there simply were few opportunities for Black dancers. Like many Black Canadian performers, Gibson was forced to leave Canada where he found international recognition as a dancer, a reality that continues today. As former contemporary Black Canadian dancer turned scholar Seika Boye (2018) observes, “There was a moment for me in my dancing life, probably in my early twenties, when I felt like there was something missing in how I understand my experience as a mixed heritage, Black dancer in Toronto, then Vancouver and Montreal. I realized that all of my points of reference for Black people dancing were from somewhere else – from outside of Canada” (para. 2). Beyond Toronto and Western Canada, Montreal also has a Black performative history. Though the city did not produce a dance or theater success, it had a very vibrant jazz scene that included clubs such as the Nemderoloc Club, the Terminal Club, the Boston Café, and Rockhead’s Paradise. This article focuses on Rockhead’s Paradise because it was not only the most acclaimed of Montreal’s Black-owned jazz clubs, but it has also been written about more extensively than other clubs. By examining Rockhead’s we gain a deeper understanding of the interrelationship between Black community, diasporic migration, and jazz as an outlet to resist anti-Black sentiments.
Rockhead’s Paradise in Little Burgundy
In Meilan Lam’s National Film Board of Canada film Show Girls (1998), Montreal’s Black jazz scene from the 1920s to the 1960s is remembered through the lives of the Black women who danced at clubs like The Terminal, Café St. Michel and the most famous of them all, Rockhead’s Paradise. “We had good little bands then, dressed up in tuxedos, and all the big shots would come down the Mountain to see the colored show…. Everybody had a hell of a time, sitting, talking, drinking, dancing all night,” recalled Rufus Rockhead in a 1973 interview with the Toronto Star (Stewart, 1973, p. 22). The jazz careers of Little Burgundy talents Oscar Peterson, Oliver Jones and Billy Georgette were launched at Rockhead’s Paradise in addition to African American jazz legends like Louis Armstrong, Pearl Bailey, Cab Calloway, Sarah Vaughan, and even a teenaged Sammy Davis Jr., who performed there. Its Black chorus line of dancers mirrored the great nightclubs of Harlem such as Connie’s Inn, the Cotton Club, and the Hot-Cha Bar and Grill (Stewart, 1973). From a white dominant culture perspective, Montreal’s jazz scene represented a negative influence on social life as it was frequently described as a neighborhood with drug trafficking, gambling, and immorality, which was attached to its majority Black residents and Black porters who were blamed for the neighborhood’s problems. For Americans, however, Little Burgundy was such a popular destination that it was euphemistically known as the “Harlem of the North” to many (Mathieu, 2010, p. 151).
By the late-nineteenth century, Montreal had become the leading economic city of the country in large part because it was the hub of the national rail network that was the first project to link Canada to the United States (Hardy, 2007). By the 1890 s, a semi-permanent community of African American porters established roots in the city. Most lived and socialized in Little Burgundy, which was the colloquial name for the St. Antoine District, due to its proximity to the CPR tracks and headquarters, and because of the availability of affordable housing (Marano, 2018). By the 1920s, this area claimed a hotel, night club, café, barbershop, social clubs, a lodging house for porters, and family dwellings for those porters who were transient. At the same, the area was labelled derogatorily “a West Indian ghetto,” a misnomer given that African Canadians and African Americans also lived in this neighbourhood, as did many other ethnic groups including Irish, Italian, and Finnish immigrants (Marano, 2018). As previously mentioned, porters were some of the few Black men during the era who had stable and financially beneficial employment; this meant that they could provide for their families but also actively fund Black creative expression. Rufus Rockhead, for instance, who was born in Jamaica before immigrating to Canada (Halifax, then Montreal), earned his living as a porter, which allowed him to be in a financial position to open Rockhead’s Paradise.
Founded in 1928, Rockhead’s Paradise was a three-storey cabaret located at Mountain (now de la Montagne) and St-Antoine Streets. For the most part, the club was known locally and transnationally through a tight network of porters, jazz performers, Jewish and white Montrealers who frequented Black clubs. In 1973, the Toronto Star featured a two-page profile on Rockhead. “His [Rockhead’s] tavern (beer parlor) and cocktail bar have remained neighborhood haunts even though the physical neighborhood has largely vanished,” the Toronto Star explained, “His customers may live in the suburbs now, or in the new urban renewal project in nearby Little Burgundy, but black or white, if they come from around St. Antoine Street, Rockhead’s is still their meeting place” (Stewart, 1973, p. 21). Like other clubs Rockhead’s Paradise was eminently affected by city policies. “For the most part, Montreal is a tolerant town,” the Toronto Star observed, quickly adding, “but look deeply enough and discrimination is there” (Stewart, 1973, p. 22). When Rockhead first applied for a license to operate a tavern in Montreal in 1927, he could not get one. “My wife and I went to see the liquor commissioner at the time and asked about it personally. He said, ‘You know we don’t give licenses to colored people’,” said Rockhead to the Star (Stewart, 1973, p. 22). It is unknown how Rockhead got his license but in 1934 Rockhead’s opened its doors as a three-story venue across the street from the Monte Carlo Grill (later known as Café St-Michel) (Miller 2001). However, Quebec’s conservative politics helped to usher in a decline in Black clubs like Rockhead’s. In 1936, Premier Maurice Duplessis passed a law, commonly known as the Padlock Law (Loi du cadenas), that made disseminating Communist propaganda illegal, and it also permitted authorities to lock down buildings that would allow these materials to be circulated (Wellington, 2017). Even though Rockhead’s Paradise, as a jazz club, was not connected to Communist movements, once Duplessis’ Union Nationale party came to power in 1936, clubs like Rockhead’s Paradise became sites of suspicion and surveillance. “All the licenses for Negroes, Jews and Chinese were cancelled at the same time – whoosh – just like that,” recalled Rockhead (Stewart, 1973, p. 21).
It is unknown how Rockhead got his license back, but when he did, Rockhead brought customers back to a place that by the 1950s, was changing. In 1981, as a tribute to Rockhead who passed in September of that year, the Montreal Gazette observed, “He opened a tavern more than 50 years ago, when blacks weren’t notably successful in obtaining liquor permits. No one knows how Rockhead cut through red tape – or at least no one is telling” (History through our eyes, 1981). When Jean Drapeau was elected mayor in 1954, he set a campaign promise to “clean up the city” and he did so by wielding a puritanical broom against the nightclubs, especially Black-owned jazz clubs (Stewart, 1973), which had become intertwined with mafia connections and violence. While the 1960s brought a short-lived boom in terms of immigration from the Caribbean and African Americans who enjoyed the city’s nightclubs and restaurants in the absence of discrimination, a Quebec sovereignty movement, beginning in 1962, had the effect of enfranchising a francophone wave of nationalism while marginalizing historically Black communities like Little Burgundy. Further, as urban renewal projects spread across North America in the 1960s, Little Burgundy was no exception. High (2017) found that during this period the neighborhood was cast as an urban slum in need of state intervention; 265 acres of St. Joseph and Sainte Cunégonde parishes (in what is today Little Burgundy) was designated as a “pilot zone” for urban renewal. However, “according to the detailed report of the city, used to justify the clearance, the pilot area was characterized by three-storey row-housing, and home to 16,997 people, 70 per cent of whom were francophones” (High, 2017, p. 33). Since there was no mention of race in the report, “Black residents, their institutions, and their history were rendered invisible by the report’s focus on poor white francophones…. Nobody mentioned Oscar Peterson or Rufus Rockhead; no jazz age…. Instead, articles on the history of the area highlighted early French settlement and industrial development…. Little Burgundy was almost universally presented as a poor francophone slum” (p. 34).
By erasing Black presence in Little Burgundy, Black immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa arriving in Montreal in the 1970s did not view Little Burgundy as a Black space. Under Drapeau’s leadership, the city had embarked on rapid modernization with the building of highways, a Metro system, slum clearances, and the expansion of the downtown core which decimated Black presence in Little Burgundy by the end of the 1960s (High, 2017). By the 1990s, most of Montreal’s Black community lived in Montreal-Nord and LaSalle in the city’s southwest (Mensah, 2010). As a result, when Rockhead’s Paradise closed its doors permanently in 1980, the building demolished to make way for the Ville Marie Expressway, the heydays of Little Burgundy as a Black cultural hub were long forgotten. In fact, until Williams’ (1997) The road to now: A history of Blacks in Montreal, the history of an Anglophone Black community in Little Burgundy had largely been ignored in the Canadian historical record.
Conclusion
In February 1970 Contrast (1969-1991), a Black newspaper founded in Toronto by Alberta-born Alfred W. Hamilton featured a page-length article title, “Dasheiki Party.” The Dasheiki was a form of clothing that coincided with the “soul aesthetic” of the late-1960s and early 1970s. The “soul aesthetic” was an amalgam of African cultural elements into a personal style, clothing, and an Afro hairstyle. As Van Deburg (1992) explains, “soul style was a type of in-group cultural cachet whose creators utilized clothing design, popular hair treatments, and even body language (stance, gait, method of greeting) as preferred mechanisms of authentication” (p. 195). “To keep everyone in step and in tune with what is happening our designer Ola Skanks had a fashion fun-all at her home on Saturday,” Contrast reported, adding “Everyone sported an exclusive designed dasheiki and had a chance to sample an African dish” (“Dasheiki Party.” 1970). While this feature was about fashion, Ola Skanks (1926 - 2018) was a Black Canadian dancer and choreographer who, as Boye (2017) writes, “grew up in downtown Toronto and … was unprotected from the discrimination against black people in Toronto’s downtown core” (p. 186). In an interview with Skanks in 2014 about her career, the former dancer began by decrying those who played down racism towards Black people in the early twentieth century. “You couldn’t walk down the street without being called n—r. The teachers were prejudiced – you did well if you got through [school]. I wanted to go to university but blacks weren’t allowed. You couldn’t get an apartment or a job…. We fought our way all the way. It’s not like the States. Racism here was all subtle” (as cited in Boye, 2017, p. 187).
Skanks’ emergence in the 1970s as a cultural icon in Toronto’s Black community, and her reflection forty years later of the anti-Blackness she experienced as a dancer gives voice to those performers who are no longer alive and/or did not have the opportunity to share their stories with today’s Black dancers. Skanks speaks for the performers in Shuffle Along and for Gibson whose life is often forgotten in Canadian dance. When asked why she agreed to participate in Boye’s (2017) study of Black dance in Toronto Skanks said, “She wanted young people today to understand their origins, as well as to realize that black people have been in Canada for generations” (p. 187). This response echoes the impetus for our article. The contributions of Black performers in Canada but also the hardships and challenges faced by Black people due to pervasive anti-Black racism need to be told so that they are counted and situated as part of the Canadian narrative, not separate to it, or viewed as an “invading force.”
The mere presence of newspapers in the early twentieth century like The Dawn means that we can retrace some of the contributions of Black Canadians during a period where Black people – histories, stories, and communities – were scarcely documented in a positive light in the dominant media’s news coverage. As one Black reviewer of Shuffle Along concluded, “Old Southern traditions associate the colored race with a type of music all their own – sweet haunting melodies that have been carried to the utmost corners of the earth…. The players enter into the spirit of the entertainment with a dash and vim that carries one along a speedway strewn with song, dance and humor” (“Famous ‘Shuffle Along,” 1923). The importance of Black newspapers lay in the fact that they were conceived as an answer to African Canadians and Black Canadians’ desires to report on, and spread news about, various aspects of Black life and developments. In their pages we can also locate Black performers who challenged perceptions of Blackness that extended beyond social life onto the stage, into the jazz clubs, and later, on television.
Song, dance, and humor entertained audiences during the first half of the twentieth century, but these elements of performance empowered, emboldened, and gave Black performers an opportunity to cultivate an identity that was pro-Black, even as they were restricted by the social, political, and structural constraints of their times. Like Dunham before her, “Skanks created her own unique and progressive blend of modern dance and traditional African dances from Ghana and Nigeria. She learned modern forms from a Toronto teacher, Willy Blok Hanson, and traditional African dances from Nigerian students on exchange at the University of Toronto. She combined these in unique ways to form her own style” (Boye, 2017, p. 188). This blending of forms, styles, and geographic locations represent the performative legacy of Black dancers and jazz clubs in Canada. From Shuffle Along to Gibson, and Rockhead to Skanks, Black community in the context of de facto Jim Crow engendered transnational connections, diasporic collaboration, and intra-group networking that functioned as both performance and resistance.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Lucy Wowk and Carianne Shakes who catalogued newspaper clippings for this essay.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author/authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author/authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This article was funded through a SSHRC Insight Development Grant.
