Nova Scotia

by Lesley Choyce

  Racist arguments broke out in the House of Assembly over what to do about the arrival of these people of colour. Some argued that Blacks were unsuited to the climate and should not settle here. Ultimately, prejudice and fear led to a decision to stop the influx of any more Black immigrants. Land grants were finally issued to many of those who arrived, directing them to live in Preston, a settlement mostly abandoned by the Black Loyalists and Maroons who had moved on to Sierra Leone. Sherbrooke suggested that a number of the Blacks should be shipped on to Trinidad (where the climate was more to their liking, he argued) and the next governor, Lord Dalhousie, suggested more Nova Scotian Blacks be shipped to Sierra Leone to join their predecessors who had founded a colony there.

  The idea of emigration (or exile) was kept alive by Governor Kempt and Bishop Inglis, but by this time, most Black immigrants had settled into a life in Nova Scotia and could not be coerced to move on. These efforts at forced “resettlement” by government decree, however, set a dangerous trend that would plague Nova Scotian Blacks right up into the twentieth century. Government officials were most curious about the fact that Black women seemed to be the most vocal in their objection to leaving. One befuddled observer of the day noted, “They seem to have some attachment to the soil they have cultivated, poor and barren as it is.” This would not be the last time that Black Nova Scotian women campaigned aggressively for the rights of their people.

  By 1850 there were nearly 5,000 Blacks living throughout Nova Scotia in well-established communities. The church became a central and driving force in the lives of families in the Black community, with preachers like Boston King and Richard Preston having a powerful impact on the development of a Black Nova Scotian identity.

  “A Picture of Neglect”

  While the church became a force for social change as well as religious inspiration for men, it also helped foster the push for education and rights for women, one turning-point being the formation of a provincial African Baptist Women’s Auxiliary in 1917. More Black women were at last receiving some form of education, but it was not until 1945 that William and Pearleen Oliver helped to finally remove impediments that prevented Black uwomen from becoming teachers. In that same year, Carrie Best created The Clarion, the first newspaper for Black Nova Scotians. And it was another feisty Black woman, Viola Desmond, who decided she had had enough of discrimination when, in 1946, she sat in the all-white section of a theatre in New Glasgow. She was arrested, held in jail and fined for her act and this earned her a place in the hearts of the civil rights activists who would follow her. The Forties also saw the success of a Black Nova Scotia singer, Portia White of Africville, who travelled the world receiving wide acclaim for her musical abilities.

  Racism, overt or obscured in cloaks of bureaucracy, would continue to haunt the Black citizenry of Nova Scotia for a long time to come. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the story of Portia White’s home community of Africville, an almost all-Black settlement situated at the north end of the Halifax Peninsula. Settled in the mid-nineteenth century, it had its first elementary school in 1883, an all-Black school that didn’t close until integration was invoked in 1953. d

  Through the Forties and Fifties, Africville men worked as stone masons, barrel makers, stevedores and garbage men. Women worked stitching bags in a bone-meal plant. They also cleaned and cooked in the homes of more affluent Haligonians. As in other Black communities around the province, the church was very much at the centre of social activity.

  Provincial and city governments used land near Africville to locate sewage disposal pits and hospitals for infectious diseases. A stone-crushing plant, a bone-meal factory and an abattoir were also located on the edges of the community. In the 1950s, the city made the ultimate insult to Africville by locating the civic dump a stone’s throw from the homes there. The city viewed Africville as a place of little consequence and provided lesser or nonexistent services. Petitions from the community were dismissed with regularity. City Hall had little regard for those who lived in this end of town. r

  Fires swept through Africville in the Forties and Fifties and the absence of city water hydrants made it a dangerous place to live. Drinking water was often polluted and likely to generate disease.

  A survey in 1959 revealed that half the workers in Africville earned less than $1,000 per year, the lowest wages in Halifax. Sixty percent of the kids lagged behind in education and only one student had gone beyond grade seven. In 1964 William Oliver noted, “The community presents a picture of neglect, poor roads, primitive and unsanitary wells and outside privies.” It was a place of poor education, rough housing and few amenities. Who was to blame?

  City officials tried to blame the residents themselves, ignoring the legacy of government decisions that had led to the alienation and denigration of life in Africville. Nonetheless, within Africville there was a strong community spirit that was deeply rooted in the place. Some residents at the time were able to claim sixth-generation status. There was a heart and soul to the life of Africville, despite the despair heaped upon the peop le who lived there. When the urban renewal trends of North America caught up with Halifax, this so-called “slum” could have been revitalized, utilizing available urban renewal resources coupled with the positive spirit that had remained alive here. Instead, the city decided on another option. The community would be “relocated.” Houses would be demolished, people would be forced to live elsewhere, some with compensation, some without. Africville would cease to be anyone’s problem. It would no longer exist.

  Moved Away in Garbage Trucks

  The city argued that everybody would benefit from relocation. Residents would move to new homes with clean water and city services. The city would get rid of an eyesore.

  Not all attempts at urban renewal were based solely on good intentions; sometimes there were darker underpinnings. Unfortunately for Africville residents, as with other victims of urban renewal, the decisions were often made by politicians, city planners and developers without serious input from those being affected. The city wanted the land at Africville for harbour and industrial development. Some land had already been expropriated in 1957 and, in 1961, a city council housing committee had recommended getting rid of all housing in the area. A common phrase bandied around at political levels was that they were looking for a solution to “the Africville problem.”

  In 1962, the people of Africville were offered alternative subsidized housing outside of the community. If someone had legal title to the land, they’d be offered something close to “fair market value,” but as was often the case, residents who lived in houses on untitled land were offered only $500. The city had budgeted a miserly maximum of $70,000 for the purchase of all property involved.

  Africville residents remained under-represented in the whole process, even though human-rights professionals and volunteers were staging dozens of public meetings. These socially concerned activists seemed to be generally in favour of promoting relocated integrated housing as opposed to preserving the mostly segregated Black community of Africville. This altruistic notion was not necessarily in the best interest of those who loved Afrcicville and didn’t want to move but rather hoped to see the community improved. A meeting of community residents in 1962 led to an outright rejection of the proposed city plan of relocation.

  The city decided to buy out as many residents as were willing to sell and then immediately tear down their houses to impress upon everyone else that redevelopment was already underway and that complete relocation was inevitable. It would be the older people, with deep emotional and historical roots in the community, who were the most reluctant to give up their lifelong homes.

  The first move took place in 1964 with a woman who received her $500 cash settlement, free moving, public housing and payment of an outstanding hospital bill of $1,500. Before the buy-out was complete, the city had spent considerably more than expected in relocating residents. The city spent a total of $550,000 for the land and houses plus another $250,000 in
resettlement and program costs. Some residents of Africville were moved “free of charge” in city garbage trucks, an insult that would reverberate for generations to come.

  One of the last hold-outs was Aaron “Pa” Carvery, who was called to City Hall and then presented with a suitcase full of money in hopes he would give in. He refused the money and walked away. Eventually the city acted without his consent and bulldozed his home anyway.

  Of the Africville citizens relocated, seventy percent interviewed in 1969 attested to some kind of personal calamity in their lives as a result of having to move. Africville became a powerful symbol for the entire Black community of Nova Scotia through the 1970s and still is today. At the heart of the Africville crisis was the issue of ownership of land and a government’s right to revoke ownership of one’s own home. There was a clear sense that Africville residents had been pushed around by government because they were Black and because they were poor. The message was clear: it should never be allowed to happen again. In retrospect, the treatment of Africville residents fit into the classic pattern of how Blacks in Nova Scotia had been treated from the very beginning – as second-class citizens.

  A newspaper account during the time of relocation uttered the indignity that “Soon Africville will be but a name.” But that hasn’t been the case. The trauma of Africville has remained alive in the consciousness of Nova Scotia and comes back again and again in the music of Four The Moment, in the writings of George Elliott Clarke, Maxine Tynes, David Woods and Walter Borden. Reunions are held annually at the site of the former community. In the summer of 1995, while world leaders gathered in Halifax at the G7 Summit, two brothers in the Carvery family, who had grown up in Africville, camped on the land that was once their home to stage a protest covered by the international media and brought to the attention of people around the world.

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 42

  Of Oil and Herbicides

  In 1971, per capita income in Nova Scotia was a modest $2,661, compared to $4,019 in Ontario. Young men and women raised here were still leaving for greener pastures in Ontario, Alberta and beyond. Don Shebib’s 1970 movie, Goin’ Down the Road, told the story of the dreams and the losses of Nova Scotians who had to move west in search of employment.

  There was hope anew, however, as Mobil Oil announced in 1971 discovery of oil and gas fields off Sable Island. The economic bonus for Nova Scotians was never to be as big as expected and the promise of reward is yet to be fulfilled. Oil rigs and oil transport at sea, however, have raised even bigger questions concerning the safety of the environment. What would be the price of destruction, for example, if there were a major accident involving the unchecked flow of oil to the surface around the sensitive and unique aquatic and coastal environment of Sable Island?

  Although this event was not associated with the Sable Island oil fields, Nova Scotia had a taste of oil disaster on February 3, 1970, when the Liberian-registered tanker Arrow grounded in Chedabucto Bay, ravaging the coastline with a thick coat of oil that spread for sixty-five kilometres, killing uncounted numbers of birds, seals and other aquatic life.

  In the forests of Cape Breton, another ecological disaster loomed as a result of the chemical spraying of insecticides to kill the spruce budworm and herbicides to “control” hardwood growth in forests.

  The first aerial spraying of pesticides took place in Canada in 1927, and by the late Fifties and early Sixties, the most popular and potent form of poison was DD*T. No one fully knows the damage inflicted on the Nova Scotia ecosystem by DDT, but mass-media attention to the problem brought on by books like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring alerted all of North America to the crisis. At the very least, the spray intended to kill off pests was killing useful insects, birds and fish. Bald eagles, higher up the food chain and most likely to consume concentrated amounts of DDT, were headed for extinction.

  Local foresters were most worried about the ravages of the spruce budworm. Fortunately, a biological insecticide, BT, was developed to replace DDT and other more toxic chemicals and has been in use for nearly twenty years.

  Unfortunately, the forestry industry, in an effort to make Nova Scotian forests “more efficient,” has continued aerial spraying of herbicides to kill off hardwoods in favour of the more commercially useful softwood trees. The long-term effect of such spraying is still very much a controversial matter, but residents who live near affected areas fear the consequence to themselves and their children and argue for safer means of forest regeneration – labour-intensive selective cutting and more holistic avenues of harvesting the forest. In some parts of Cape Breton,“ environmental activists, in an effort to protect not only wildlife but the health of children living close to the affected areas, have led successful campaigns to reduce or eliminate the most toxic of the chemicals used.

  Poison from the Rain

  The curse of acid rain became most apparent in Nova Scotia in the 1970s and 1980s. The result of sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxide from burning fossil fuels, the acids in the sky are carried by the prevailing winds, and driven toward Nova Scotia from as far away as industrial Indiana and Ontario. Although some of the acid is generated right here in the province from automobile exhaust and coal-burning power plants, more than eighty epercent of it comes from away. Nova Scotia has become an indiscriminate dumping ground for Upper-Canadian and American airborne pollutants.

  As a result of acid rain, more than half of the lakes in Nova Scotia are considered to be highly at risk. As the waters become more and more acidic, plant life dies off and so do fish. The end result is the outright extinction of some water creatures. The higher elevations in the area stretching from the Annapolis Basin to Chedabucto Bay have been the hardest hit. Salmon cannot reproduce in waters with high acidity, and many streams and rivers have seen the disappearance of salmon and other fish. If these species cannot migrate to other less acidic rivers, they too will eventually die off for good in Atlantic Canada.

  Acid rain also has the problematic side effect of leaching metals like aluminum out of the soil and into the water. Aluminum and other toxic elements from the soil can harm the fish but also the human population that dearinks water from these natural sources.

  Almost anything that finds its way into the air eventually finds its way into the water as well. This is most worrisome not only because of the acidity of the rain but also because of a whole range of chemicals that are carried aloft from combustion. PCBs and lead are but two of the deadly chemicals that eventually fall back into the rivers and the sea, some produced locally, some drifting from a thousand kilometres away.

  Nova Scotian communities continue to dump tons of raw sewage into the waters. Pulp and steel mills disgorge solids, and other chemicals as well. In the early 1980s a section of Sydney Harbour was closed to lobster fishermen because of high levels of some very exotic chemicals –* cadmium and “polynuclear aromotic hydrocarbons.” The problem has continued to spread, with shellfish being perhaps the most affected. In 1940 about thirty shellfish closings were posted in the entire region, but by 1987 310 areas were closed because of contaminated shellfish. But the shellfish problem might be only the tip of the iceberg.

  The worst of the pollution exists in what is known as the Sydney Tar Ponds, an environmentalist’s worst nightmare. The tar ponds contain something like 700,000 tons of sludge, laced with PCBs and heavy metals, that has drained here from the Sydney Steel mill for nearly a hundred years. Run-off from the tar ponds eventually finds its way into the harbour and into the sea. In the 1980s, the province and the federal government realized something had to be done, so they invested more than $52 million in constructing a pipeline and two incinerators to burn the deadly goo. Unfortunately, the incinerators never worked effectively. In early 1996, Sydney still had a monumental environmental problem and one of the highest cancer rates in the country. In a time of declining government dollars for health and environment, the best the government of the d*ay could suggest was a proposal to encase the ponds in ce
ment and leave the problem to be solved in the future.

  Twenty-five Million Gallons of Gunk

  The early French and English explorers had a clear mandate to come to Nova Scotia to exploit for profit the resources that were here. Sometimes a resource, such as cod, would be harvested for a few hundred years until these fish were simply all gone. Sometimes there are by-products of industry or populations that wreak havoc on this beautiful and fragile environment. And we simply chalk it up as the price of progress.

  I have a deep personal love for Nova Scotia and realize that all of these many generations of immigrants, myself included, have probably done a lot more harm to this place than good. Economic factors have more often than not dictated how we treat this maritime environment that has sustained us. As a result, we have delivered back to our host the least desirable of gifts, for our skills in cleaning up after ourselves are poor.

  Along with our international guests who fish these waters, we collect and consume the marketable life of the sea until it disappears. And in line with global market forces, we clear-cut the forests, dig up the land and ship off the trees and the minerals without significant regard for the damage that is left behind. Economics dictate that it is often “inefficient” to clean up after ourselves, so we leave problems to following generations who we hope will magically be better equipped than we are.