Exhibition in Old Montreal museum looks at Black community's work on the railways
An event at the Montreal Museum of Archaeology and History (Pointe-a-Calliere) Museum highlights the role of Black railway porters in a local neighbourhood.
The St. Henri community is one that some say has been long forgotten. The community is crisscrossed by train tracks, and its history is linked to the rails, being home to the oldest railway in Canada.
The working-class neighbourhood was immortalized by author Gabrielle Roy as a French-Canadian community, but there were also pockets of Black Montrealers living there.
"The other reality is that push against the myths or the romantic narrative of it being only Quebec francophone working class community," said historian Dorothy Williams.
The museum's exhibit dives into St. Henri's history and includes a section on railway porters. Williams found that many of them were Black men with university educations working as valets and living in St. Henri.
"We're not talking an uneducated class of people," she said. "We're talking about people who were pre-med, pre-law, the same person who would shine your shoes could also have a discussion with you about Aristotle and Socrates."
Working as a porter at the time was seen as a good job, but Williams said that even if Jim Crow laws weren't in place in Canada, abuse existed throughout the system.
"So you have you have stories of Black men being spit and hit, vomited on," she said.
For the museum, highlighting the porters' stories was a priority.
"Of course, if one community is predominant, you will mostly talk about them, but you don't want to forget the smaller stories that are important," said expositions director Samuel Moreau.
Williams will be giving a presentation at the museum on Feb. 22, which will look at the little-known community.
CTVNews.ca Top Stories
Parents of infant who died in wrong-way crash on Ontario's Hwy. 401 were in same vehicle
Ontario’s Special Investigations Unit has released new details about a wrong-way collision in Whitby on Monday night that claimed the lives of four people.
Three Quebec men from same family father hundreds of children
Three men in Quebec from the same family have fathered more than 600 children.
B.C. mayor stripped of budget, barred from committees over Indigenous residential schools book
A British Columbia mayor has been censured by city council – stripping him of his travel and lobbying budgets and removing him from city committees – for allegedly distributing a book that questions the history of Indigenous residential schools in Canada.
OPP's mandatory alcohol screening during traffic stops 'not acceptable': CCLA
A spike in impaired driving-related collisions has caused Ontario’s provincial police to begin enforcing mandatory alcohol screening (MAS) at all traffic stops in the Greater Toronto Area -- a move one civil rights group says is ‘not acceptable.’
Maple Leafs down Bruins 2-1 to force Game 7
William Nylander scored twice and Joseph Woll made 22 saves as the Toronto Maple Leafs downed the Boston Bruins 2-1 on Thursday to force Game 7 in their first-round series.
Jurors in Trump hush money trial hear recording of pivotal call on plan to buy affair story
Jurors in the hush money trial of Donald Trump heard a recording Thursday of him discussing with his then-lawyer and personal fixer a plan to purchase the silence of a Playboy model who has said she had an affair with the former president.
Southern Alberta store broken into by burly black bear
Staff at a small southern Alberta office supply store were shocked to find someone had broken into the business last week, but they were even more confused when they discovered the culprit was a bear.
Captain sentenced to 4 years for criminal negligence in fiery deaths of 34 aboard scuba boat
A federal judge on Thursday sentenced a scuba dive boat captain to four years in custody and three years supervised release for criminal negligence after 34 people died in a fire aboard the vessel.
New scam targets Canada Carbon Rebate recipients
Fake text message and email campaigns trying to get money and information out of unsuspecting Canadian taxpayers have started circulating, just months after the federal government rebranded the carbon tax rebate the Canada Carbon Rebate.