Land of the free , but not for black people.

Many generations later, Black Canadians still await the opportunity for success.

Even before the American Civil War, Canada was a refuge for people escaping slavery from the United States. Canada was whispered as the 'promised land'; tens of thousands travelled a dangerous underground railway, a clandestine network of people who helped them reach freedom in the north.

As Canadians, we created and embellished this image of ourselves: a polite nation without slavery, resolving differences without guns, violence, or racial prejudice. It was a myth that drew a stark distinction between Canada and the U.S. and spoke to the inherent 'goodness' of white Canada.

Afro-Canadian workers have faced a long history of inequality and discrimination.

But today historians ask, "Was that tale even real?" Although Black people were free to cross the border and found relative safety here, Canadians struggled to keep their hearts open to the poor, dispossessed Black souls who immigrated to their towns and villages. These freedom seekers discovered that racial discrimination and oppression persisted north of the border.

It's no surprise that throngs of fugitives eventually returned to the United States as the promise of real freedom was never realized.

Myths like this one are hard to break because they create a shared psyche that plays a role in forging our identity. But in not telling the whole truth, the myth distorts the reality of Black Canadians' arduous experiences over the centuries.

Going back to slavery, systemic racism in the labour market still continues today .

Since the days of slavery, Black workers have been targeted as a source of cheap labour, a practice that has impacted Afro-Canadians' labour opportunities over time, and still continues today.

Now new generations are reclaiming the rich history left behind.

Once known as "Harlem of the North," Little Burgundy in Montreal was a destination for Afro-descendants from the United States, West Indies and other areas of Canada.

Its proximity to two railway stations attracted Black men who worked as train porters when it was the best of the low-paying jobs available to them. That history gave birth to a unique Black community along with a vibrant Canadian jazz scene and thriving Black institutions which continued to thrive until the community was torn about in the name of urban renewal beginning in the mid-1960s.

“What do you want for your own people?”

That’s the question Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton suggested Union General William T. Sherman pose to 20 Black pastors in Savannah, Georgia, as the Civil War neared its end and enslaved African Americans neared freedom.

The Black leaders gathered for the January 12, 1865, meeting with the military officials in a mansion called the Green-Meldrim House. They explained that they didn’t want to live among white people, as they feared it would take years for racial prejudice to dissipate in the South. Instead, they wished to live amongst themselves on their own land. That would entail redistributing the land of Southern plantation owners.

“The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land and turn it and till it by our own labor,” said the Rev. Garrison Frazier, a 67-year-old Baptist minister and spokesman for the group, which included individuals who had been enslaved and lived as free men alike. “We want to be placed on land until we are able to buy it and make it our own,” Frazier told the Union military officials.

Stanton knew that the meeting was a groundbreaking one, remarking that for the first time, government officials had asked Black Americans “what they wanted for themselves.” He gave the minutes taken at the meeting to Henry Ward Beecher, brother of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” author Harriet Beecher Stowe.

After Beecher read the notes to the congregation of his New York church, the New York Daily Tribune printed the transcript in its February 13, 1865 edition, providing a historical record that still exists today. A Black publication named the Christian Recorder printed the transcript as well.

The government didn’t keep its promise. Following President Abraham Lincoln's assassination on April 15, 1865, President Andrew Johnson rescinded Field Order 15 and returned to Confederate owners the 400,000 acres of land—“a strip of coastline stretching from Charleston, South Carolina to the St. John’s River in Florida, including Georgia’s Sea Islands and the mainland 30 miles in from the coast.”

Roy L. Brooks, a distinguished professor of law at the University of San Diego School of Law, described Johnson as a segregationist “who wanted to basically return African Americans to a position of subordination.” Johnson, though, was not the only politician who opposed this form of reparations for Black Americans.

“After the Civil War, there just wasn't that appetite for Black reparations,” Brooks says. “There were other proposals made after the war for reparations for African Americans. Congress declined to go forward with reparations. So, it was not just Johnson. There was an attitude among the Congress that African Americans should simply be happy with being freed.”

Without land of their own to work, the 3.9 million members of the formerly enslaved population struggled to control their own destiny after the Civil war ended. Many found themselves working white people’s land as sharecroppers or tenant farmers, a system that was only slightly better than slavery, given the meager wages and exploitation associated with it.

“You had a massive system of sharecropping evolving in the South in the aftermath of Blacks not being able to acquire the land that they thought the federal government was going to make available to them,” “In the case of the sharecropper, you did it so that you could get a share of the crop which rarely was shared with Black people when all the cost of production had taken place.”

Some Black people defeated the odds and managed to become landowners. Most, however, had no land to pass on, which prevented them from accumulating multi-generational wealth and left them largely under the control of Southern white landowners.

The failed promise of “40 acres and a mule denied African Americans the ability to generate financial self-sufficiency, which was needed in order to resist as much as possible the Jim Crow policies of the local government in the South,” Brooks says.

“It would have provided a very timely reparation for African Americans, which would have changed the course of racial history. It would have changed the trajectory of racial inequality in our society.”