An Ontario city has celebrated Emancipation Day — marking slavery’s end — for 158 years. This year feels different

Seventy-one-year-old Doug Johnson has been attending the Owen Sound Emancipation Day Festival every August for as long as he can remember.

“My aunt would cook chicken like nothing I’ve ever tasted anywhere else,” he recalls, about the Aug. 1 holiday, marked on the first weekend of the month. “I always looked forward to the games and foot races. And when I was 16, I finally outraced my uncle, who was fast as a bullet. That was heaven.”

Johnson, of London, Ont., is one of the descendants of the 30,000 enslaved African Americans who made their way to Canada from the U.S. via the Underground Railroad. While Juneteenth commemorates the end of slavery in the U.S., Emancipation Day commemorates the end of slavery in the British Empire, including Canada and the West Indies.

The British Slavery Abolition Act received royal assent on Aug. 28, 1833, and took effect Aug. 1, 1834. It was a huge victory for those who were enslaved and for those who advocated against slavery, says Natasha Henry, an expert on slavery in Canada and president of the Ontario Black History Society.

“It meant that people of African descent were no longer chattel property, but were now officially recognized as persons entitled to the same rights and privileges as white European citizens.”

It’s estimated that almost 800,000 people were freed from bondage in the Caribbean and South Africa and a small number in Canada as a result of the Act.

Communities across Canada have been celebrating that freedom ever since. But Owen Sound has the longest continuously running Emancipation Day festival in Canada, now in its 158th year. It’s part of a long but little-known tradition of picnics, parades, church services, music and speeches. “A gathering of the clans,” Johnson calls it.

Henry, author of “Emancipation Day: Celebrating Freedom in Canada,” says the day not only “acknowledges a particular point in time when slavery was abolished, it’s also a call to action for racial justice.”

“After emancipation, people agitated for freedom for those who remained enslaved in the U.S. and parts of the Caribbean,” she says. In later years Emancipation Day was a forum for “continuing the fight for full citizenship.” The 1942 event in Toronto called out the barring of women of African descent from working as nurses.

“That’s a legacy that continues today with people continuing to agitate for racial justice,” says Henry.

While celebrations have waned in some cities over the years, others continue to thrive. Windsor, one of the most important entry points for those seeking freedom from slavery, has been celebrating Emancipation Day since 1932.

In Toronto, Emancipation Day grew into Caribana in 1967. The Underground Freedom Train, an event that began in Toronto eight years ago, invites people to board a special midnight train at Union Station. The event, honouring those who travelled the Underground Railroad, seeking freedom from slavery, will be live-streamed this year because of COVID-19.

A march against anti-Black racism is set for Aug. 1 at 11 a.m., starting at the Children’s Aid Society of Toronto at 30 Isabella St.

While Owen Sound organizers have struggled to keep their festival alive in the face of COVID-19, regular attendees like Johnson say the gathering is more important than ever this year.

“I feel something in my heart that I’ve never felt before,” says Johnson. “It’s like there’s hope for the future. There is a tiny possibility for change in anti-Black racism in Canada.”

When Johnson describes walking with his wife and son in the recent Black Lives Matter protest in London, Ont., he is almost in tears. He says he was amazed at the number of young and old, Black and white and Indigenous people marching together for change.

“With these young people behind us and helping us, I felt hope for the first time in my life. I stopped three young boys and said to them, ‘Has anybody thanked you today for coming to this? We can’t do it by ourselves anymore.’ ”

That’s why Johnson was looking forward to Emancipation Day this year. “There’s a feeling I had that I never thought I’d experience in my lifetime,” he says. “And I wanted to get up to Owen Sound to share that feeling.”

Though the festival has had to move online because of COVID-19, Johnson says he will tune in to events today from his kitchen. He’s sad there will be no physical gathering but happy that the community of Owen Sound has rallied to raise funds to create a virtual festival.

“This year, COVID or no COVID, there had to be some kind of festival,” says 71-year-old Dorothy Abbott, the festival board’s treasurer, and a regular at the event since she was a toddler. Abbott, 71, says financial support from the community has been “lovely and uplifting,” and there was even a surprise donation from a student group from Cameroon with ties to Owen Sound.

The fundraising has allowed organizers to transform the usual three-day festival into a 90-minute digital event that includes performances from legendary musician Eugene Smith as well as past festival performers Michael Dunstan and David Sereda, and Canadian poet George Elliott Clarke.

Bernice Carnegie is speaking about her father, Herb Carnegie, a talented hockey player and member of Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame, blocked from playing in the NHL because he was Black.

Emancipation Day celebrations coincide with the Simcoe Day long weekend in Toronto, honouring John Graves Simcoe, first lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada. He and John White, attorney general at the time, attempted to abolish slavery in Ontario in 1793.

“But they were up against a legislative assembly and council where half the members were enslavers themselves,” says Henry. Peter Russell, a member of Simcoe’s executive council, enslaved a woman named Peggy and her three children, Jupiter, Amy and Milly.

Simcoe’s compromise was the 1793 Act to Limit Slavery in Upper Canada, which stopped the importation of slaves and attempted to gradually phase out slaveholding. But Henry says “what’s really important is that the legislation actually confirmed the legality of enslavement in Upper Canada by stating that enslaved persons who were in the province at the time of its enactment would remain the property of their masters or mistresses for life, unless freed by their owners.” And Henry says she knows of none who were.

Slavery would exist in Canada for another 40 years after Simcoe’s attempts to abolish it. By the time the 1834 British legislation got rid of it for good, there were still people enslaved in Upper Canada, like the 15-year-old Toronto boy for whom Henry has seen documents showing that he was hired out in 1824 for a period of 10 years.

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While the 1834 Act to Abolish Slavery freed many more people in the West Indies than in Canada, its impact here was huge because it made Canada a free land for enslaved African Americans, who would wait another generation before slavery was finally abolished in the U.S. in 1865.

“It’s how the image of Canada as a safe haven was born,” says Henry.

And it set the stage for the Underground Railroad reaching north into Canada. The Underground Railroad was not an actual railroad but a secret network of people and safe houses that helped persons enslaved in the southern U.S. reach freedom in the northern U.S. and Canada.

Owen Sound’s status as the most northern post on the Underground Railroad is marked by the Black History Cairn in Harrison Park, unveiled at the 2004 Emancipation Day Festival. The cairn has become the focal point of the festival; opening ceremonies for the virtual event will take place there. It was designed by Johnson’s sister, local artist Bonita Johnson-deMatteis, to represent the idea of sanctuary and safety.

The cairn’s floor plates are quilt patterns, part of the secret code used to pass messages to those trying to escape enslavement. Quilts, slung over a fence, seemingly to air, passed on information to enslaved people without alerting plantation owners.

The cairn is a touchstone for the community, a favourite spot for weddings and for quiet contemplation. Blaine Courtney, former chair of the Emancipation Day Festival, visited the cairn to sit and grieve after the death of George Floyd.

Doug Johnson, eldest of six siblings, is a descendant of Elias Earlls, who was born enslaved in Kentucky in 1821 and arrived in Canada in 1871. His son, Solomon Levi Earlls, married Sarah Ann from Scotland.

“Sarah Ann was white and she married a Black man,” says Johnson. “That was really ballsy of them back then.” They had 10 daughters and two sons. Johnson’s grandmother Susanna was the eldest.

A photo of the entire family taken in 1924 at Solomon Earlls’s funeral is printed on T-shirts that Johnson and other family descendants wear each year at the Emancipation Day Festival.

“Our families are all descendants of former enslaved people who made that journey on the Underground Railroad,” says Abbott, the festival board treasurer, whose great-great-grandfather escaped from a plantation in Tennessee.

Several years ago a family tree was on display at the festival showing all the different families and their connections — “the Greens, the Johnsons, the Wilsons, the Courtneys, the Earlls, and the Blackburns,” says Johnson — in this part of Ontario

Growing up Black in London, Johnson says, was “blood, sweat and tears.” He says “racism in Canada is convoluted because it’s so behind your back. You never know when it’s going to come and stick its ugly head out.”

Johnson says that when he was walking his dog a few weeks ago, a young man called him the N-word. “That’s what’s happened my whole life. I feel like one of those advertisement things that go up with the air waves and then … flop. It’s very painful.”

Johnson’s 30-year-old son, Joshua, says his most important memory about Emancipation Day is that “it was a place where I could go as a little boy and feel safe.”

Sen. Wanda Thomas Bernard, who will be speaking at the Owen Sound virtual festival, wants to see Emancipation Day and the history it represents commemorated in every town and city in Canada. She’s been pushing to get the federal government to designate Aug. 1 as Emancipation Day; Ontario designated it in 2008.

“The designation is important for getting the reforms needed to reduce systemic racism in Canada,” Bernard says.

“But a backdrop to all of that would be national recognition of a fuller history. And part of that fuller history is the history of slavery. And part of that recognition would be recognizing Emancipation Day.”

Karen Black is the former manager of Museums and Heritage Services for the City of Toronto and is co-founder of Doors Open Toronto.