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FREEDOMWAYS          FOURTH QUARTER 1971

To the student familiar only with the standard studies of American history, this volume is an informative and important supplement. It details the successive waves of black immigration into Canada, beginning with the Revolutionary War when the defeated British, who had held out the promise of freedom to the slaves who took refuge behind their lines, negotiated with George Washington to permit their transport out of the former colonies, along with the Black Pioneers—free Negroes who had joined the Loyalist troops—and thousands were shipped to Canada and the Caribbean. Much of the same process was repeated in the War of 1812, where enslaved blacks were again induced to support the British, and again many settled in Canada. To these were joined the militant Jamaican Maroons, subdued in their fight for independence by the British, who went into exile in Nova Scotia, later seeking to return to Africa.

The historian traces the stream of American black slaves escaping into Canada, beginning in the early 1800's, and continuing until the Civil War.  He tells the story of the free blacks from the United States who joined them in emigrating, and their abortive attempts to form black Utopias there. He details the close ties between the Canadian and American anti-slavery leadership and movements, and the influx of Canadians, black and white, 18,000 strong, into the Union armies; and finally recounts the reverse migration from Canada to the States, when the involuntarily exiled black refugees returned en masse to their former homes after chattel slavery had been abolished.

The author pursues the fate of Canadian blacks after the Civil War up to the present time, documenting the inescapable parallels to racism in the United States—the ghettos, the separate schools, the job bias and the prevailing poverty, even the intrusion of the Ku Klux Klan into Canada. He recounts, as well, the development of resistance movements, such as the formation of the Canadian Association for the Advancement of Colored People (modeled on, but not a branch of the NAACP); the formation of labor unions among the blacks, especially railroad porters even before the A. Philip Randolph ascendancy; bringing his story up to the Black Power advocates and the militant campus black students' groups of recent years.

Every historian has his bias, and Winks is no exception. In recounting the black experience in Canada, he is usually understanding, always sensitive to the subtle evidences of prejudice and racism in the episodes he relates. One becomes conscious though of an over-anxiety to expose the "holier-than-thou" position of the Canadians vis-a-vis the American record of treatment of the black population.

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