When Curtis Whiley’s great-great-great-grandfather, a cooper from Virginia, took refuge in Nova Scotia in 1815, this group was nothing however pine forest.
Settled removed from facilities, he and the various freed slaves from the Chesapeake space opened up lumber mills and barrel outlets and turned Higher Hammonds Plains into considered one of Nova Scotia’s 52 historic Black communities, and Nova Scotia into the birthplace of Canadian Black tradition. This city produced Canada’s first all-Black volunteer fireplace station.
Right now, as Mr. Whiley drives round his childhood neighborhood, the development of multiunit condos rumbles on. A whole lot of recent residents have moved in – amid gentrification, rising rents in close by Halifax, and report low-vacancy charges throughout the Maritime Province – and the descendants of the unique settlers personal simply 38% of the land.
Why We Wrote This
Canada’s Black group has an extended historical past in Nova Scotia, courting again to its earliest days as a French colony. Now, the group is making an attempt to make sure that it isn’t washed away amid gentrification and financial shifts.
Mr. Whiley is combating to verify this historic group doesn’t change into simply any commuter suburb – utilizing a radical rethink of each land and property. He’s the founding father of the Higher Hammonds Plains Neighborhood Land Belief, a property mannequin with roots within the American civil rights period, however which has grown in pressure throughout Canada amid a protracted housing disaster.
“Now we have such a way of rootedness right here,” he says, pulling as much as the plot the place they’ve proposed 136 reasonably priced items. “So we have to attempt to shield and protect our heritage whereas managing all this progress that’s taking place.”
Neighborhood land trusts all look totally different however converge within the singular concept that it’s the group itself, not simply a person proprietor, that advantages. The belief acquires land, promising by no means to promote it, and affords group advantages like reasonably priced housing in perpetuity. Particular person households don’t accumulate as a lot wealth as they may in the true property market. As an alternative, proceeds are reinvested again into the group.
The Canadian Community of Neighborhood Land Trusts counts greater than 40 initiatives throughout the nation, most begun previously decade. Of these, seven particularly serve Black Canadians, 5 of that are in Nova Scotia.
Nova Scotia’s Black inhabitants is the oldest within the nation, tracing again 4 centuries for the reason that arrival of French colonists within the 1600s. Vital settlement adopted in distinct waves: Black loyalists fleeing to the British Empire after the American Revolution; Jamaican Maroons, or former slaves, who resettled right here; and refugees who fought within the Warfare of 1812 for guarantees of freedom and land.
The Black newcomers escaped enslavement, however had been met with racism throughout Nova Scotia. The small group of Africville, on the Bedford Basin in Halifax, was demolished by town within the Nineteen Sixties. Right now there stays solely a duplicate of the Seaview United Baptist Church, as soon as the middle of the neighborhood within the 1800s, which serves as a small museum. “Most [of the 52 communities] exist solely by way of historic title now,” says Isaac Saney, a Black research professor at Dalhousie College in Halifax.
That dispossession continues to impression the Black group’s potential to move down wealth alongside generations. Based on the African Nova Scotian Prosperity and Nicely-Being Index, the Black group lives in insufficient or unaffordable housing at twice the speed of the inhabitants general.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Workers
Lynn Jones, who in 2023 was appointed to the Order of Canada, the nation’s second-highest civilian honor of advantage, has devoted her life to combating towards racial inequities in a province thought of the center of Black activism. Her newest initiative is a Black group land belief referred to as “Down the Marsh.”
It’s named after considered one of three historic Black communities in Truro, the place she grew up. It was a tightly knit group then. Now, hardly any Black households reside there, and she or he usually looks like a stranger, she says.
In 2019, she was watching deer graze within the marsh when a police officer approached her automotive. He’d obtained a name from somebody complaining about “suspicious” individuals within the neighborhood – which she took to be about her race. The incident spurred her to write down a livid letter to the Truro mayor entitled “Watching deer whereas Black.”
“I can’t wait till the group comes and reclaims the land,” says Dr. Jones, sitting in her household house, which is situated throughout from the plot the place she plans to construct the challenge.
That sense of reclamation is what drives Mr. Whiley, too. Lots of those that arrived in Higher Hammonds Plains in the course of the Warfare of 1812 by no means obtained the land titles promised to them. Metropolis authorities appropriated their water supply, Pockwock Lake, to offer water to Halifax residents however didn’t service Higher Hammonds Plains for 2 extra many years.
“So many issues have occurred to us. And I feel this mannequin can be utilized to liberate Black individuals particularly who’ve been dispossessed of the land and marginalized in ways in which nonetheless makes it laborious to have possession of issues,” he says.
The land belief, fashioned two years in the past, just isn’t a bid to halt improvement or change into a gated group, Mr. Whiley says. “We simply need a say sooner or later.”
