Canada is not the first place that comes to mind in association with Black Power. That honor is reserved for the United States, and most non-Canadians areusually surprised to discover the sizeable population of people of African and Caribbean descent in Canada; African Canadians still tend to be exoticized as a kind of quaint "lost tribe." But Canada has a long history of people of African descent struggling for their freedom and dignity, not simply as African American
fugitives following the Underground Railroad, or African American draft dodgers during the Vietnam War, but as black Canadians fighting the inhumanities of slavery and racial oppression. It should then come as no surprise
that Canada, and the city of Montreal in particular, had its own expression of Black Power which, like so many movements around the world in the 1960s and
1970s, drew inspiration from African American struggles against economic and racial oppression, but was nonetheless native to Canada.
During the first quarter of the 20th century, African Canadians established numerous organizations such as the Negro Community Centre (organized by the community's oldest religious institution, the Union United Church), the Negro
Citizenship Association, the Colored Women's Club, and a chapter of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), in which Louise
Langdon, Malcolm X's mother, played an active role. African Canadians in Montreal created these institutions to accommodate their communal needs and to
lighten the blow of racial discrimination.1 Of an estimated national African Canadian population of 18,291 and 20,559 in 1921 and 1931 respectively,Montreal's black community was comprised of descendents of African Canadians who had lived in the city for several decades. Many had migrated
from Ontario or the Maritime provinces in order to work on the railways. A
handful of Caribbean students also came to study in Montreal, and some West Indian women worked as domestics in Canadian cities. U.S. African Americans
from Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, and several southern states immigrated to Canada, joining and supporting the black institutions as a way of sustaining themselves socially and spiritually.2
