“Winnipeg, Man. February 24, 1911. The Dominion Government today decided to stop the immigration of Negroes from the United States, and stopped at the boundary a party which intended to go to Western Canada.”
By subsequent and fuller accounts it appeared this party numbering 200 were finally permitted to go on and settle, the correspondent of the London Times, writing to this paper as follows, from Toronto:
“There has been some discussion in Parliament and in the Press over the arrival in Western Canada of 200 Negroes, who will settle in the free homestead lands in the Athabasca Landing district, north of Edmonton. It is said the movement threatens to become formidable and within the year 5,000 Negroes may seek homes in the Peace River Country. This, however, is probably an exaggeration, arising out of the alarm which the invasion has excited. The 200 Negroes who have just arrived entered the country of Emmerson in the Province of Manitoba, and were subjected to rigorous examination by the Immigration officials, but, under the law, none of them could be refused admission. All had money, all were in good health and apparently of good moral standing. The least that any head of a family possessed in money was $300, and they brought also household effects and farm implements. A similar party of 200 came from Oklahoma to Canada over a year ago, and settled in the neighborhood of Athabasca Landing, where they seem to have prospered, and to have proved acceptable to the country.”[300]
The correspondent went on to observe that refusal of homesteads might arouse “feeling in Washington” and also fail to meet “the approbation of the Canadian people.” But he thought, if it was the beginning of a formidable movement from the Southern States, there would certainly be a demand for as vigorous regulations as could safely be devised to prevent or limit Negro immigration. From Washington came the news item that “if it appeared that the Canadian Government had decided to bar American citizens because of their color, the State Department would protest”, and later it was asserted that by representations to American railways interested in the movement, it had been stopped.[301]
In the light of the actual decline in the very small number of Negroes in Canada’s population, dropping from 17,437 in 1901, out of a total of 5,371,315 inhabitants, to 16,877 out of a total of 7,206,643 in 1911, the alarm and excitement over this “invasion” is absolutely incomprehensible. Yet there is a possible explanation in the following speculation. The Indians in Canada in 1901 numbered, with the half breeds, 127,914; presumably without, in 1911, they numbered only 105,492. At the same time two origins, “various” and “unspecified,” increased from 32,999 to 165,655, and it is not at all impossible that among these 165,655 we may find many mulatto “invaders,” as it is scarcely possible, no matter how prolific the Indian half-breeds may have proved themselves to be, that they could have supplied more than twenty percent of the increase of 132,656, whose origin were not disclosed in 1911.
Sir Harry Johnston’s estimate of the Negro and Negroid population for Canada in 1910 was 30,000. It may well have been much more.
Now, of the 4,880,009 Negroes in the United States in 1870, not more than 584,049 could be classed as mulattoes; while of the 9,827,763 colored of 1910, 2,050,686 are so classed;[302] it, therefore, appears as if miscegenation is preceding at a pretty rapid rate, the mulattoes increasing just about twice as fast as the entire colored population; but while the proportion of mulattoes in the Northern colored population is still much larger than it is in the Southern population, the increase of the mulattoes of the South is about four times as great as at the North. Under these conditions it would be amusing, if it were not tragic to hear the average Southerner, who thinks he thinks about the subject, placidly declare that his objection to the diffusion of the Negro in the United States is that, outside of the South, they amalgamate with the whites. Of course it is not pretended that this tremendous difference in the increase of this class in the two sections is due entirely to a greater amount of miscegenation between whites and colored in the South than at the North, for there is no way of ascertaining how many of the mulattoes of the North have in the last ten years passed on into Canada as “Unspecified” or “Various” in the “Origin”; but making every allowance which reasonably may be made, it does not seem as if there is any greater degree of miscegenation at the North than at the South, if there is as much; while the North possesses in Canada a safety valve, which practically insures that region from any serious injury from Negro immigration. How unfortunate, therefore, it is, that it has not occurred sooner to the Negro leaders, to preach the advantages to be derived from the members of their race in moving out to some degree from the South into the West.
Seventeen years after his famous advice—“Cast down your bucket where you are,” Booker T. Washington gave a glance Westward as follows:
“There are more than 270,000,000, acres of unused and unoccupied land in the South and West. In fact one-half of the land of the South and two thirds of the land of the West is still unused. Now is the time for us to become the owners and users of our share of the land, before it is too late.”[303]
Had Washington directed one-half of the phenomenal energy he exhibited in the eighteen years of his prominence in endeavoring to keep the Negroes in the South, towards assisting them in obtaining their share of the land in the West, what progress might they not have made?