Black Construction Battalion

While Black people were used by the British colonialists as cannon fodder to suppress the struggles for rights of others, their own legitimate rights and claims were marginalized and denied.

When the First World War broke out, Black men in Nova Scotia and other places who tried to enlist faced racist obstacles and justifications to keep them out. The Chief of the General Staff of the Canadian Army at the time asked in a memo: "Would Canadian Negroes make good fighting men? I do not think so." When a group of about 50 Black Canadians from Sydney, Nova Scotia, tried to enlist they were advised, "[T]his is not for you fellows. This is a white man's war."

In the face of repeated opposition to this state racism and discrimination, the Canadian government permitted the formation of No. 2 Construction Battalion (also known as the Black Battalion), based in Pictou, Nova Scotia. It was a segregated battalion that never saw military action because they were not permitted to carry weapons. Five hundred Black soldiers volunteered from Nova Scotia alone, representing 56 per cent of the Black Battalion. It was the only Black battalion in Canadian military history.

The Battalion was sent to eastern France armed with picks and shovels to dig ditches and construct trenches at the front, putting themselves in grave danger. They also worked on road and rail construction. Following the end of the War in 1918, the members of the Battalion were repatriated and the unit was disbanded in 1920.

According to Veterans Affairs Canada, another some 2,000 Black Canadians served on the front lines of World War I through other units, some with the armies of other countries.

Once returned, the Black veterans of the No. 2 Construction Battalion, and other returning Black veterans found that nothing had changed at home and they continued to face racism and discrimination in employment, veterans' benefits, and other social services.[1]

Note

1. The Canadian state likes to portray the participation of Black people in the Canadian military in the most self-serving manner. Veterans Affairs Canada notes, "The tradition of military service by Black Canadians goes back long before Confederation. Indeed, many Black Canadians can trace their family roots to Loyalists who emigrated North in the 1780s after the American Revolutionary War. American slaves had been offered freedom and land if they agreed to fight in the British cause and thousands seized this opportunity to build a new life in British North America."

A rosy picture, but far from reality. The enslaved people that ended up on the side of the British colonialists during the U.S. War of Independence, numbering some 30,000, served as soldiers, labourers and cooks. When the British were defeated, the British evacuated some 2,000 of these "Black Loyalists" to Nova Scotia with the promise of a better life and opportunities as free people. Others were thrown to the four winds landing on the Caribbean Islands, in Quebec, Ontario, England and even Germany and Belgium. Those the British outright abandoned in the U.S. were recaptured as slaves.

Many of the Black Loyalists landed at Shelburne, in southeastern Nova Scotia, and later created their own community nearby in Birchtown, the largest Black settlement outside Africa at the time. Other Black Loyalists settled in various places around Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.

Far from finding freedom, and new opportunities, most of the Black Loyalists never received the land or provisions that they were promised and were forced to make their living as cheap labour -- as farm hands, day labourers in the towns or as domestics. In 1791, in order to solve the "Black problem," the British Colonial authorities repatriated about half of these Black Loyalists from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick to Sierra Leone, Africa where the British wanted to found a colony and used the Black Loyalists to face the dangers, many of them dying in the process.

Those Black people who remained were used by the British colonial state in the War of 1812 to fight the Americans. Black people in Ontario and also from other places were part of a colonial militia called in to suppress the Upper Canada Rebellion in 1837.

(With files from Veterans Affairs, CBC and the Canadian Encyclopedia.)

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This article was published in

Volume 54 Number 52 - November 11, 2024

Article Link:
https://cpcml.ca/Tmlm2024/Articles/MS54528.HTM

Website:  www.cpcml.ca   Email:  editor@cpcml.ca