PLACE - Timeline of Black Toronto

This is an interactive timeline of Black Toronto from the nineteenth to the end of the twentieth century. I used the open-source program TimeMapper to add text, pictures, and videos to my dataset.

It starts with Necropolis, a cemetery east of the downtown core in Cabbagetown. It is not just a site for the deceased but one for the living. One can still walk the cemetery's paths and visit the City of Toronto’s most prominent people, including William Peyton Hubbard, Thornton Blackburn, and Lucie Blackburn.

William Hubbard was born in Toronto's outskirts, now the intersection of Bloor Street and Bathurst Street, in 1842. His formerly enslaved parents came to Toronto via the Underground Railroad from Virginia and joined a small community of African-Canadian peoples in Upper Canada's largest city. Hubbard became successful through his work ethic and inventions as a professional baker. Later on, he ran for local office, spurred on by George Brown, one of the most prominent abolitionists in the colony. He became the first Black councilor in any political office in Upper Canada in his second election in 1894. Over the decades, Hubbard was active in local government, advocating for the poor, other immigrant groups, public works, green spaces, and labor rights. He retired from politics and moved outside of the city, where he lived until the age of 93.

Thornton Blackburn was born in Mason County, Kentucky, under the bondage of chattel slavery. He was the "third child of Sibby Blackburn, a slave from Virginia who was brought to Kentucky as the country expanded." Sold and taken from his family, Thornton lived in Louisville, where he met his future wife, Lucie, and they later married in 1831. When her enslavers sold her for $300, the Blackburns decided to emancipate themselves by running north, landing, and settling in Detroit, Michigan. Eventually, bounty hunters found them in 1833 and attempted to bring them back to Kentucky under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. As they waited in jail, Detroit's Black community collectively attacked law enforcement to free the Blackburns so that they could escape to Canada. Upper Canada refused to extradite the Blackburns because, under the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, the government could not send an enslaved person back to the United States if they had not committed a punishable crime in Upper Canada. The Blackburns made their way to Toronto and lived out their years as pillars of the community.

Through archival research, we know that the Blackburns once resided in the St. Lawrence Market neighbourhood. When they passed in the 1890s, Lucie and Thornton moved further east to the Necropolis, where they exist to this day.

I want to acknowledge the long history and lived experience of Blackness in the land we now know as Canada.

Data for this exhibit comes from the same dataset used on the CARTO map.

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Islands in the North by Marlene H. Gaynair is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

WSU Department of History
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