Black History Month

A selected list of titles in celebration of Black History Month, where Canadians honour the legacy of Black Canadians, past and present. 

The Black Battalion:1916-1920: Canada's Best Kept Military Secret

Black military heritage in Canada is still generally unknown and unwritten. Most Canadians have no idea that Blacks served, fought, and died on European battlefields, all in the name of freedom. The story of the overt racist treatment of Black volunteers is a shameful chapter in Canadian history. -Good Reads


The Blacks in Canada : a history by Robin W. Winks. 

Using an impressive array of primary and secondary materials, Robin Winks details the diverse experiences of Black immigrants to Canada, including Black slaves brought to Nova Scotia and the Canadas by Loyalists at the end of the American Revolution, Black refugees who fled to Nova Scotia following the War of 1812, Jamaican Maroons, and fugitive slaves who fled to British North America.  -GoodReads

The Book of Negroes a novel by Lawrence Hill


Abducted as an 11-year-old child from her village in West Africa and forced to walk for months to the sea in a coffle—a string of slaves— Aminata Diallo is sent to live as a slave in South Carolina. But years later, she forges her way to freedom, serving the British in the Revolutionary War and registering her name in the historic “Book of Negroes. 

Chasing freedom : a novel by Gloria Ann Wesley 

The American Revolutionary War is being waged, and the fate of slaves in the colonies is on the line. Sarah Redmond, a slave on a South Carolina plantation, watches with a heavy heart as her father steals away in the dead of the night to join the British army, enticed by promises of freedom, land and provisions for his whole family. But before her father can return, the war draws to a close and the Loyalist slaves are all freed, including Sarah and her grandmother, Lydia. Uncertain of their future, Sarah and Lydia join the thousands who are rounded up and sent to New York to prepare for their journey to a new home somewhere in the British colonies. After months of waiting, the Redmonds are assigned to a ship bound for the first all-black community in North America: Birchtown, Nova Scotia. With their Certificates of Freedom in hand, Lydia and Sarah wait anxiously, hoping beyond hope that their new life will bring acceptance and happiness. But once they reach Birchtown they find that their new home is barren, cold and isolated, and in a world slow to forget old fears and hate, their Certificates offer them freedom in name only.

I came as a stranger : the Underground Railroad by Bryan Prince. 

Prior to abolition in 1865, as many as 40,000 men, women, and children made the perilous trip north to freedom in Canada with the help of the Underground Railroad. It was neither underground nor was it a railroad, and was most remarkable for its lack of formal organization, so cloaked in secrecy that few facts were recorded while it “ran.”  - GoodReads

Rush home road : a novel by Lori Lansens. 

A lonely 70-year-old woman takes in an abandoned girl in this heart-wrenching tale of love and loss set in the black communities of southwestern Ontario. 

The freedom-seekers : Blacks in early Canada by Daniel G. Hill. 

Black Loyalists and their families were among the first settlers in Nova Scotia and Upper Canada. As abolitiion movements and the Underground Railroad gained support, Black slaves and refugees flooded into Canada determined to build new lives for themselves and their children. The Freedom-Seekers chronicles the phenomenal success story of their struggle to break the chains of slavery and gain the full rights of citizenship in their adopted country. - GoodReads

The underground railroad : next stop, Toronto! by Adrienne Shadd 

A richly illustrated book, examines the urban connection of the clandestine system of secret routes, safe houses and "conductors." Not only does it trace the story of the Underground Railroad itself and how people courageously made the trip north to Canada and freedom, but it also explores what happened to them after they arrived.  - GoodReads