Okeyo Jumal:The Black Loyalist Nova Scotia, Canada Sept. 2011

Between the years 1776-1783, the British offered freedom to Blacks joining their cause. 1000's would join, forming the nucleus of the Black Loyalist. Canada was no crystal stair. In Gloria Ann Wesley's historical novel, "Chasing Freedom", she vividly describes the harsh "Jim Crow" existence the Black Loyalist had to endure, including the burning out of Black settlements in the dead of the harsh Canadian winter.

In the war of 1812, the British again offered freedom to Blacks. This would constitute the second large migration of Black Americans to Nova Scotia.
In 1796, Maroons of Jamaica refused British slavery after the Spanish were expelled from the island. A group of over 500 Trelawny Maroons were resettled in Nova Scotia. Many would join a second voyage (1796), to Sierra Leone, West Africa.
In an odyssey beginning on American plantations to Nova Scotia over treacherous seas to Africa, those many Loyalist that survived would help establish the port of Freetown and the country of Sierra Leone.

Viola Desmond, often referred to as the Canadian Rosa Parks, in 1946 refused to give up her seat in a whites only section of a theater. Her refusal would lead to the abolishment of segregation in Canada in 1954.
Jamaican Marcus Garvey's connection to Nova Scotia is steeped in the Jamaican Maroon settlement of 1792. Today, there is still a chapter of Garvey's UNIA in Nova Scotia.

The African Diaspora: The over 300 million individuals who's ancestors survived the middle passage between Africa and the Americas.

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• Black Loyalist
• Nova Scotia
• African Canadian History
• Black Canadian
• African American
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• The Path
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• Okeyo Jumal
• George Elliott Clarke
• Gloria Ann Wesley
• Elle
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[varickwt]

FREEDOM IS NOT GIVEN.

[LabeerehnGbanna]

It takes a great struggle to achieve advancement. The struggle continues.

[RobertSHilton]

Teach, Jumal