Explore Black Canadian literature and how it intersects with immigration from the Caribbean and Africa. We hear words from the writings of an unknown Canadian domestic worker from the Caribbean, one of the many who immigrated in the mid 20^th century. The first Black Canadian novel was ‘Clarence and Corinne; or, God’s Way’, 1890, by Amelia Johnson. We had to wait until 1964 for the second one, ‘Survivors of the Crossing’, Austin Clark. Mary Ann Shad, who came to Canada West in 1852 and published ‘A Plea for Emigration; or, Notes on Canada West’, became a newspaper publisher and integration advocate. Other authors featured include Peter E. McKerrow (The History of the Coloured Baptists, 1895), Dione Brandt, Makeda Silvera, Cecil Foster, dub poet Lillian Allen, Afua Cooper, and Lawrence Hill (The Book of Negroes),

The first Black person in Canada was probably Mathieu da Costa, a multilingual interpreter for Champlain. Most of Black Canadian early literature was oral, and much of it was rooted in poetry. Today the tradition is carried on in hip hop and there is now an explosion of Black writers and publishers. George Eliot Clark is a prominent chronicler of the lives of Black Canadians and writers, a University of Toronto professor of Black Canadian literature. With his African Anthropology Project, he hopes to create an online living museum gathering institutional and family collections, oral and written stories of the ways the Black Canadians have triumphed and impacted our culture.