Black Toronto History

Toronto, then York, had a Black presence dating to the late 18th century, but the community grew substantially as one of several Canadian termini of the Underground Railroad, the network that helped enslaved people escape the United States from the 1830s through the Civil War. One well-documented case is Thornton and Lucie Blackburn, who escaped enslavement in Kentucky in 1831 and reached Toronto in 1834; in 1837 Thornton Blackburn established what is considered Toronto's first taxi business, and the couple helped fund the construction of Little Trinity Anglican Church.

St. John's Ward

Toronto's first substantial Black neighbourhood formed in St. John's Ward, the same downtown district that later became home to Jewish and Italian newcomers: roughly 1,000 Black residents lived there in the 1850s, its public schools provided free education regardless of race, and the British Methodist Episcopal Church, established in 1845, served as the community's social, political and spiritual centre.

Decline, then Caribbean-driven growth

Despite this early growth, Toronto's Black population actually shrank in the following decades, falling to roughly 500 residents by the 1870s and remaining a small share of the city through the early 20th century, as restrictive, explicitly race-based Canadian immigration policy kept Black Caribbean immigration minimal. That changed with the removal of racial criteria from immigration regulations in 1962 and the introduction of the points system in 1967, which opened the door to substantial immigration from Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Barbados and elsewhere in the Caribbean — the wave that built the modern foundation of Toronto's Black community, connected to the same immigration story behind the city's Jamaican patty history.

Sources

• City of Toronto — The Black Community in St. John's Ward
• Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 — Immigration From the United States on the Underground Railroad