Until recently I had a small collection of "black americana" I'd been collecting for about 25 years but I've sold most of it off to another collector only keeping my cookie jar. BTW it's far from the truth that Canada was an accepting society. Yes many blacks came here on the underground railroad but that doesn't mean that they were welcomed with open arms because they weren't. They were discriminated against all the same and shuffled about with most ending up in Nova Scotia living on the wrong side of the tracks where many of the original families that came still live today. As for opportunites in some ways blacks in Canada were worse off because they were so few and far between there was no way of getting ahead and all were relegated to the "traditional" roles of cooks/porters,laborers etc as late as the late 1960's. It was the future prime minister Pierre Trudeau in 1968, then the justice minister that turned this country on its ear with sweeping changes to the divorce laws, multi-culturalism and of course his most profound statement that "the government has no business in the bedrooms of the nation" referring to the decriminalization of homosexuality in Canada. I wished we had another one of him now, he would point blanketedly tell any neo-cons exactly what to do in no uncertain terms and show them the way with his middle finger.. He really was a great man. And he could pirrouette.
