“I wanted to engage the past, knowing that its perils and dangers still threatened and that even now lives hung in the balance,” writes historian and literary scholar Saidiya Hartman in Lose Your Mother. Confronting slavery and its “racial calculus,” Hartman illuminates the enduring and destructive effects of slavery in the present: “This is the afterlife of slavery–skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment” (6). In the United States and Canada, slavery’s afterlife shaped and continue to shape the conditions of Black life and death.
Since the early twentieth century, young Black people have been instrumental in contesting and reconstructing Canadian social, cultural, and political life. Tracing the social worlds of young Black men and women in Guelph, we explore the opportunities and barriers, longings and fears of young Black men and women in Guelph as they sustain, create, and improve the lives of their families, friends, and communities. We follow the different paths taken by ordinary, wayward, and aspirational young Black men and women across different decades, different neighbourhoods, and different institutions in and beyond Guelph during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The “Black Guelph” WebMap provides a spatial representation of the Black community in Guelph, Ontario from the late 1800s, to the early 1900s. Our stories of young Black lives in Guelph and beyond emerge from our use of a variety of archival sources, including census documents, tax assessment rolls, family photographs, college year books, and newspapers. The WebMap was created from census information and tax assessment records ranging from 1881 to 1921, excluding 1901 because of uncertain information. The plot points are formatted by the family name and can be expanded to see the family members and residents of the house. The WebMap generates a sense of Black presence, and provides more insight into possible walking routes, neighbourhoods, and community connections.