During the American Revolution, the British solicited the help of slaves seeking freedom in the war against the Colonies. For any slave who would fight on the side of the “Red Coats,” they were promised to be taken away from the Colonies to freedom in Great Britain.
When the British lost the American Revolution, they loaded up these former slaves, who had fought for them, and headed home. On the way, the British made a pit stop in Canada and dropped their black “brothers” in arms (and their families) off in Nova Scotia.
The British kept their promise that the former slaves would remain free, but they broke the part of the promise that would have seen these former bondsmen as free men in Great Britain.
Take these former slaves, free persons of color who wanted to go further than the North to guarantee they would remain free, and runaways from the American Colonies, and you have a good majority of the black population that originally made up this group of people of African descent on Canadian soil.
Read more about this topic in Africa's Children: A History of Blacks in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia by Sharon Robart-Johnson.
The description of the book on Amazon.com states for the following:
Chronicling the history of Black families of the Yarmouth area of Nova Scotia, Africa’s Children is a mirror image of the hopes and despairs and the achievements and injustices that mark the early stories of many African-Canadians. This extensively researched history traces the lives of those people, still enslaved at the time, who arrived with the influx of Black Loyalists and landed in Shelburne in 1783, as well as those who had come with their masters as early as 1767. Their migration to a new home did little to improve their overall living conditions, a situation that would persist for many years throughout Yarmouth County.
If you would like to introduce this piece of black history to younger readers, please check out the Newberry Medal and Coretta Scott King Award winner Elijah Of Buxton by Christopher Paul Curtis. The book is informative, funny, a little sad in places and definitely appropriate for young people.
The description of the book on Amazon.com states for the following:
Eleven-year-old Elijah lives in Buxton, Canada, a settlement of runaway slaves near the American border. Elijah's the first child in town to be born free, and he ought to be famous just for that — not to mention for being the best at chunking rocks and catching fish. Unfortunately, all that most people see is a “fragile” boy who's scared of snakes and tends to talk too much. But everything changes when a former slave steals money from Elijah's friend, who has been saving to buy his family out of captivity in the South. Now it's up to Elijah to track down the thief — and his dangerous journey just might make a hero out of him, if only he can find the courage to get back home.
Happy reading! ?
