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Samuel Ringgold Ward and Canadian Racism
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flood of fugitive slaves arriving in Canada West during the
early 1850s brought a corresponding rise in racial tensions.
Samuel Ringgold Ward frequently wrote about the origins and
nature of Canadian racism. Ward believed that racism in Canada
was a reaction to the idea and practice of black equality;
it did not evolve directly from slavery as in the United States.
He worried that black Canadians reinforced these prejudices
by establishing separate institutions, by ignoring Victorian
social mores, and by failing to see the urgency of the antislavery
movement once they were safe in the Canadas. Ward reminded
the public that the tentacles of American slavery reached
well beyond the slave states, and he urged blacks to combat
these influences. "So long as these facts exist,"
he observed, "we shall want anti-slavery labors, organizations,
agitation, and newspapers." Ward's writings on the character
of Canadian society and on separate black institutions reveal
his vision for the black Canadian community-free, educated,
prosperous, staid, and socially integrated.
Source:
The Black Abolitionist Papers: Volume II, University
of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill and London, 1986, pp.
224
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