People's History of the Coast Salish Territories: Hogan's Alley

On Friday, Feb 25, at an event organized by Westcoast Sheen and Rhizome Cafe, the Vancouver-based writer and poet Wayde Compton spoke about the multi-racial neighbourhood that was once upon a time located where the Georgia Viaduct is situated now before getting dismantled by the city in the name of renovation and progress, the effect of which was depriving the dislocated populations of a sense of community. As Wayde Compton pointed out during his lecture, the Lower Mainland has more black people than all of Nova Scotia, whereas most people have this false notion that Vancouver is completely devoid of the African Diaspora.

The speaker also drew parallels between what happened to Hogan's Alley back then and the hand with which the city is dealing with the residents of the Downtown Eastside right now. Another point that was highlighted was how little significance the city has given and continues to give to this former multi-cultural enclave, as, one might argue, the dominant Anglo culture tends to behave with respect to diversity in general: ignore it and hope that it will go away.

As John Ralston Saul points out, the presence of a dominant French culture that was constantly challenging the English Canadian hegemony had a very profound effect on the psyche of (Eastern) Canada. However, that effect appears not to have made its way all the way to Western Canada, where the old colonial ideas of homogeneity and racial/ideological purity appear to have a firm grip on the popular consciousness, at the expense of an appreciation for genuine diversity and multiculturalism, not to mention the beautiful indigenous culture that goes on being trampled upon.

Thanks to West Coast Sheen for having me here,

and thanks to the previous speakers, um, for reminding us

that the stuff that I'm going to talk about here

continues on in different forms, um, today,

and that, um, people still continue to fight back.

Um, what I'm gonna do is, uh, I've been doing research into the black history of this province

for about 15 years now,

and uh, Vancouver in particular,

uh, and particularly a little neighbourhood called Hogan's Alley,

that was in the east end, uh, and is right where the Georgia Viaduct is today.

Uh, which was the nucleus of the original Black community of Vancouver.

Um, over the years of doing just various work around this topic

um, I wrote for a bunch of different sources, uh, in a bunch of different ways

um, sort of ad hoc over the years

and uh what I did when I went to put together this my latest book, which is called After Canaan

uh, which is a book of 7 essays,

I put all of the writing that I had done on Hogan's Alley and blacks in vancouver into one essay.

And, um, it's the longest essay in this book

and it's, um, as far as I know it's the single longest piece of writing, um,

the single longest historical work on blacks in Vancouver.

So there have, there has been a book of black history in the province

that goes back to the 19th century,

but the black history of Vancouver has not really been written yet in a comprehensive way.

Hopefully someone will come along and do that.

I do focus on this particular neighbourhood,

it was sort of the, uh, where the majority of blacks in the city lived

in the middle of the 20th century,

but there are other black histories around the city as well

and that should be acknowledged.

I'm also gonna show some images and, um,

I'm not going to read from the essay,

if I'm reading an essay it doesn't work that well.

It's better I think to talk, uh, extemporaneously like that

so I have uh a way of guiding myself through this talk.

So, I'll keep it relatively short and hopefully there'll be a bit of a chance

to, um, answer some questions and have a bit of a dialogue.

I think that's often where really interesting ideas come out anyway.

What I'm gonna do is give a talk that runs through

a kind of old but tried and true formula

and that's the who, what, where when and why

that's as good a way as any of organizing all of this stuff that I've gathered in my head

on this topic over the years.

Um, so the title there is "Vancouver Vs Hogan's Alley: Urban Renewal, Negro Removal,

and The Myth of Livability", and uh, those topics will come up as we go along.

But the first is who: who was the black community of vancovuer, and it's origins.

Um, it was a group of people who came here

not so much uh as part of that original group that came to BC in the 19th century,

um, although some of the black pioneers from Victoria, um, came over to Vancouver,

and that was one stream,

and another stream was from the US that was probably the largest one,

so lots of folks came up from the states,

including Vancouver's most famous black family,

which would have been the Hendrixes, Jimi's grandmother.

Um, another stream came from Alberta, a lot of folks who were originally from the States themselves,

came from Oklahoma

to settle places like Amber Valley in northern Alberta.

Uh, a lot of them came out to Vancouver in the 1930's during the depression.

And so a lot of the old families are from alberta as well.

American derived.

But a lot of this immigration is before the main era of immigration wave,

came from the Caribbean and Africa.

Um, Nora Hendrix is a pretty good example of uh that group of people

who were American derived, working class, um,

a lot of them kind of mavericks in a way

who sort of stepped out of, uh, out of the frame in some kind of way

and decided to move to this crazy place with very few black people.

_ what kind of personality traits they had to do something like that.

These were folks who were brave enough to do that.

um, a lot is made of Jimi Hendrix, but I always say that Nora was the real star

of the black community here,

and uh she was someone who helped to establish the first black church

which is the _ Episcopal Church.

Um, a few things too about women in the community.

So, uh, if you look at the pioneers that came from, during the Gold Rush era to Victoria

a lot of those migrants and that wave of migration were male

and, uh, not so many women.

This migration stream was different,

it was families coming up, and so there were a lot of women in the community.

It wasn't sort of one of those bachelor communities of immigrants.

Um, it did coalesce because of the job ghetto of porters,

so black men who were porters, and thats why Hogan's Alley is right at the train station,

um, but the ones who created the most lasting institutions in the community were the women.

So there were a series of what were called "chicken houses"

which were restaurants that sold southern fried chicken in the community.

Uh, Vie Moore was probably the most famous one, she had a place called Vie's Chicken and Steak House

that was right down in Hogan's Alley.

There was a whole archipelago of these different women-owned restaurants that were in the community

Also, some doubled as bootlegging places, speakeasies, after hours.

Also the church, the church was largely established by the women of the community,

and that was a longstanding institution.

Um, they shut it down just shortly after Nora Hendrix finally took sick

She ?

Um....

So what was it, what was the neighbourhood like?

It's a little bit confusing.

Often people call it a black neighbourhood,

and I correct them and say it's not quite true.

It was a multi-ethnic neighbourhood, uh,

I have to say Italians can call Hogan's Alley their original neighbourhood too,

in the city, because it was an Italian enclave,

it was right next to Chinatown as well.

So it was really intermixed, there were all sorts of people who lived there.

It was basically an immigrant enclave.

The reason why it gets described as a black neighbourhood, why some say that,

is that the majority of blacks in the city lived there at the time.

Um, there's also a little bit of a debate about Hogan's Alley proper,

and the East End, and so when you talk with some of the elders,

they like to remind us that Hogan's Alley was sort of one section of it,

and really, folks lived all through the east end.

Hogan's Alley itself kind of had a series of institutions which, the church was there,

Vie's was there

some of the other night clubs were there

and so it was sort of like maybe the commercial, most well known aspect commercially

but people lived all around through Strathcona

Um, still, it was a sort of pseudo-segregation,

though there was no official segregation against the black community in vancouver

the way there was against First Nations people and Asians,

so there was no law on the books

that blacks couldnt live here or there.

Um, but i call it pseudo segregation because there are all sorts of stories

of people saying you couldnt rent anywhere in the city just because of racism.

So an unofficial kind of segregation existed.

And this was a neighbourhood where you could go rent somewhere and people would leave you alone.

It was that neighbourhood where sort of an ad hoc group of immigrants from all different places

um, and at the edge of Chinatown, that's part of it too.

So, um, pseudo segregation is the best way to describe that, I think.

Um, it may also explain why there was, why there was some fluidity

out of the neighbourhood later.

But I'll get to that.

Um, during the 1930's, a lot of the writing that went on about Hogan's Alley

in The Province and The (Vancouver) Sun,

um, referred to it as a slum,

it also befell victim to a program that was, that called itself "slum clearance"

um, described that way over and over again, um

Now, whether or not it was a slum, when you talk to the elders, it's interesting.

You get different stories from different people,

and some people say "yeah it was a slum and you're lucky not to have lived there,

and I'm glad I'm out of there...and... stop talking about it."

All the way over to other people who were saying

"well, you know, it was poor, but it was like a village in a lot of ways,

because you knew everybody, and yknow, yeah,

there was some violence and crime, but there was also this church there,

there was also families that grew up there, uh, hard working people,

all sorts of different types, right?

There was a whole community that lived there."

Um, and so just to call it a slum is inaccurate.

Um, so it was a poor community, that's without doubt.

Um, it was working class, uh, there was some crime there.

A lot was made of that in the papers,

in a way it seems like the only time people ever wrote about Hogan's Alley

was when it was, uh, when there was either high profile crime that happened there

uh, or they were talking about bulldozing the place because of the crimes that were happening.

Those are the two news stories that seemed the most common.

So to find out what went on, you really would have to talk to people, and read between the lines

about what else was happening.

Um, a little bit about the name too.

Um, Hogan's Alley, uh, there are a bunch of different stories about where the name came from.

But, uh, it seems that the most accurate one is

there was a comic strip in the 19th century called Hogan's Alley,

and another one called The Yellow Kid, by an artist named (Richard F.) Outcault

who was an Anglo-American comic strip artist

he kind of invented the form of comic strips in a way.

And, uh, Hogan's Alley in his comic strip was this kind of Irish neighbourhood.

So this is a time before Irish people were unanimously considered white.

So this is back when this immigrant population that were not considered model minorities,

and really were not totally accepted as white Americans.

And so he has this uh imaginary neighbourhood in Hell's Kitchen, New york, called Hogan's Alley,

this is this completely chaotic and a scene of urban squalor

I think I have a picture...

And that's it there. And the caption is:

"What they did to the dog catcher in Hogan's Alley"

Which is, kick his ass apparently.

Um, but this became a kind of euphamism for slum,

for wild chaotic neighbourhood kind of crazy place where things are out of control,

all across North America.

So you actually see Hogan's Alleys in a bunch of different places

because it was this sort of generic term for the part of town that you shouldn't go to.

And there was also Hogan's Alley in Rossland, here in BC,

which was the red light district there.

So, and I think that the FBI or CIA, their shooting gallery,

so where they train people, where they train their agents to shoot

is called Hogan's Alley.

Where you get citizens popping up and criminals and you're supposed to shoot the gun and the knife

and not the woman with the baby or whatever.

Um, they call it Hogan's Alley.

Anyways, so, it was this epithet originally.

It's come to be the term for the neighbourhood.

It's sort of lost in time I think, as uh the comic strip stopped appearing.

And, um, that's the name we have for it now.

Uh, where, was it, so, I'll show the map.

It's uh, that's the area, so this is one archival map of the neighbourhood.

So, I'll just step over here.

So there's Gore, Union, Prior, Main Street is right here

So it's not like this any more, uh,

you know where you are?

The Georgia Viaduct sits here right now,

right? That's where the Georgia Viaduct _ offramp is,

it connects onto Prior Street, to Venables.

So, there's a new condo is there, there the Jimi Hendrix shrine is there.

All this stuff is gone

As well as this.

This is that green space.

It's not actually a park, people think it's a park,

but it's actually owned by the city not the Parks Board

Cuz it was supposed to be, uh, the rest of this freeway plan,

uh that was going to cut Chinatown in half,

it doesnt exist there because they stopped it.

But not before they wiped out Hogan's Alley.

This is the heart of Hogan's Alley.

People get confused sometimes about whether or not it was this

it was running north/south

or this east/west thing.

Well it was both, it was this T-shaped part right there

and it carried on um where it kind of stopped being Hogan's Alley

which was an unofficial name

seems to be about here

this is where the church was.

And just from kind of oral histories,

people say that most of the black families lived here.

There's a few apartment buildings here, that were mostly black.

Um, so I want to say that that was more the Italian end

and this was sort of the black end,

but then that is really porous actually

So Vie's Chicken and Steak House was over here

the porter's quarters was here, that was really way back

before World War I.

That was really the origins of it as a black site.

The porters union had a kind of like a way station for black porters

who didn't have a place to stay, who had hit Vancouver, so they would stay there.

And that's probably why it became associated with the black community.

Um, now, so that is I think why it's there, it's because if you look sort of down the map_

you get the train station, so, this is the place that people first hit

I guess, if they'd gotten off that train

and uh that's where they ended up staying.

Um, I'll speak a little about tha freeway plan, because it came up.

Um, that freeway plan goes way back.

They were planning to put some kind of inter-urban freeway in Vancouver

going back into the '40's

Exactly how it was going to look was a little uncertain.

But the plans would coalesce over the years

and it dovetailed at a certain point with this concept of slum clearance

um, and it became this really unholy conflict with different ideologies.

So on the one hand, uh, this idea that in order to improve people's neighbourhood,

you should knock down all of their houses and put up some high rises

that they should go live in.

This was the ideology that they called urban renewal.

It happened all across North America

and um it's responsible for creating the projects of the States

The infamous projects, Cabrini-Green, places like that,

widely known as a failure of social planning, right?

This happened in just about every neighbourhood and every city in North America

in one form or another

Invariably it happened to a, um, black community or a Chinese_

haven't found a place where it didn't happen in a poor neighbourhood

Um, it's just really uniform.

So basically, there's this switch to the car,

so this is the same period where they're ripping up street cars,

and they're switching everything over to the car

and people are expected to live in the suburbs and commute to the city.

It's a huge social shift, right?

Uh, and so they decided well we have to have a freeway

running, connecting the suburbs to the city,

and where do we put it?

We put it in the poorest neighbourhood,

in the neighbourhood that's the least able to defend itself, um, the black neighbourhood.

That happened here

Exactly according to that plan.

It's not talked about, nobody will cop to it,

it's not _ to find anybody who will say this was the plan,

but it's just the uniformity of how it took place all across the continent.

It's pretty clear how it worked.

Um, now in Vancouver, things didn't quite go according to the plan

They had this huge eight lane freeway that was supposed to sweep

from First Avenue to Clark to Venables, up Prior.

This was the onramp to the part that went downtown

But it was also supposed to dogway through Chinatown, rip Chinatown in half

and go all the way to the Burrard Inlet.

And there was even a proposed third crossing of the Inlet

that was gonna be there to be either a tunnel or a bridge.

Um, now none of that happened because the community got up in arms and stopped it

when these plans saw light of day.

They were trying to keep it as secret as they could over the years

Bits and pieces leaked out,

people knew something was up,

cause they were passing a series of bylaws that made it, uh,

that outlawed people from making certain improvements

or from putting curbs in, and things like that.

And all this area where you see a bunch of people live

was designated industrial during this era.

And you see, it's all houses, all housing lots, right?

It's not industrial, industrial land.

Um, but that was part of the plan to edge people out.

And they actually did build projects here in Vancouver too,

so the McLean Park projects, and the Reineer project were built because of this.

The idea was that everybody living here would go live in those.

Um, exactly the same plan as the States.

Now what was different here was um

one, they did it late. It took them a long time to get it started.

Partly _ the way Canada copies things from the States

10 years later, basically that's what happened.

So by the time they were trying to initiate this plan,

it was the 60's, and people were, instead of the 50's and 40's,

when they were doing these things in New York and other big American cities,

so people were very empowered, it was a different era.

It was after the Civil Rights movement, right?

And so, um, people weren't having it.

And um there was an organization called SPOTA, Strathcona Property Owners and Tenants Association

that spearheaded this campaign.

Um, and they stopped it.

So, now, that's sort of the story that we hear most often,

and that's the myth of livability we're talking about.

So if you hear Harcourt, Mike Harcourt tell the story,

um, he saved Vancouver, right?

It's paradise now.

[audience laughing]

That's a book title.

Um, City Making In Paradise.

Well, what they don't mention is, um, this is the part of the plan that did go ahead, right?

So they struck ground and started knocking these places down,

expropriating these building, going back to '67.

And the real protests took a while to get started,

so people were angry about it, they were trying to stop it.

Um, you know, but not before this was destroyed.

Even so, the black community was mostly leaving before that point,

it was really during the late 50's, early 60's, when were go,

and were not moving into the McLean Park projects,

they did not move there.

And, uh, that's the point where the black community of Vancouver integrated.

So if you have a friend coming from out of town who says

"where are all the black people in Vancouver?"

you say, "well, they used to be there, and then they knocked it down and put these projects up

and the black folks didn't move into them, they moved everywhere. They scattered all across the city".

Um, but still those numbers didn't get smaller, they got bigger, right?

So it's not like the community evaporated or something like that.

It's really the community integrated.

So, thats the negro removal part.

In the States, where our African American cousins are, are more sardonic and wittier,

they called urban renewal negro removal, right?

Because they saw it happening over and over again.

In our case, uh, blacks removed themselves,

and I think that, you know, I've looked at the statistics really closely

and tried to locate where there's anothe black locus,

and the closest thing is right where we are right now actually,

in Mount Pleasant and, I guess largely because of the new waves of African immigration.

But otherwise, there is no black enclave int he Lower Mainland, anywhere.

When you look at the map, when you look at stats Canada,

it looks as if, you know, black folks were given a directive

to live as far apart from other black folks as they possibly could [audience laughing]

plan into action, it's really just spread out everywhere across the city.

Whether or not it's a good or bad thing, I think it's a good thing,

it's better than being segregated, right?

You have the right to live wherever you want to live.

It has had some downsides to it.

One is, um, you know, the community is not recognized as existing.

It's really ironic, if you look at newspaper articles from the Hogan's Alley period,

um, it's pretty clear that, um, Vancouverites were quite aware

that they had a black population in the city.

You know, they had all sorts of fucked up ideas about who they were,

but they were aware that they were there, right?

And if you look at today,

you know,

it's uh

you'll hear people say, how many people have heard people say

"there are no black people in vancovuer"?

A black person talking to someone will say to you "there are no black people here..."

[audience laughing]

You know, well, there are more, there are more here now that there were back then

percentage wise, right?

So there are 20,000, more than 20,000 black folks in the Lower Mainland.

And that's not huge compared to other minority groups,

but that's a lot of people.

If all those people lived in one neighbourhood?

We'd have a whole bunch of things that we don't have right now,

like a community centre, or some civic markers that we were in certain places.

Um, we'd have some remnants of whatever community had existed.

I often say when people ask me "ok if you're not against integration, um, then yknow,

what do you wish would have happened in a place like Hogan's Alley? So what would you have preferred?"

And I often say, yknow, if things, if they hadn't destroyed it,

if they'd left it alone, if they'd let it just develop organically,

uh, yknow, even if they hadn't funded it, or yknow tried to improve anybody's lives,

if they'd just left it alone,

I think what you would have had in Hogan's Alley was something similar to, um,

what you have on Commercial Drive, in terms of Little Italy, right?

It was, we know that Commercial Drive is/was Little Italy,

not a whole lot of Ialians living there, right?

But there's a lot of cafes, and there's Il Mercato, there's things that,

there's still institutions that are there, that are remnants of, um,

the time when it was an Italian enclave residentially, right?

And I think that's sort of what you would have had there too.

You still would have had certain places, certain institutions, and chicken houses,

and um whatever had evolved over the years, right?

I still think people would have integrated,

I don't think you would have had um, maybe this kind of en masse, really fast integration,

but I think people gradually would have,

you would still have this recognition that yeah the city has a black community,

yes they used to live there, and everybody knows it, right?

Um, what they took away from us with this freeway plan

was I think that memory of the city as a black site.

Um, that's why, yknow, I persistently defend Black History Month

as a fantastic institution and as something that's really well suited to Vancouver.

In a place where you don't have a physical site, we have this time of year, right?

Where people get together intentionally, uh, at events like tonight,

and talk about this history.

Y'know, if it weren't for this, it really would fade away,

really would be even more sporadic than it is.

And so, another reason to thank the organizers for doing this.

Um, so, people are there, they get together intentionally,

um, we don't have those sort of organic institutions that might have been there,

but, um, what I've been doing over the years and a lot of other people have in various different ways

is trying to intentionally memorialize the community.

So, in 2002, I can't believe it's so long ago, _

In 2002, uh, I helped to establish a group called the Hogan's Alley Memorial Project

um, which originally we just, we just wanted there to be a plaque of some kind down there,

some marker that there was this black community there.

But when we got into the work of it,

we realized that, um, a couple things:

One, um, most Vancouverites it seemed like didn't even know that there was this black community

that had been there.

And so we realized that, well, yknow, wanting to get a plaque was one thing,

but informing people that this existed, that this was the history, um, became a large part of our task.

And two: WE didn't know that much about it.

So everybody in our group, nobody descended from, uh, any of those original groups,

although we ended up hooking up with people who did,

uh, who came and did work with us.

So... the sons and daughters and grandsons and granddaughters of some of the elders

uh, have also worked with us,

So [coughing] we ended up being this kind of information gathering group

and sort of, I like to think of, um, an activist group or sort of a pressure group,

to kind of keep the name Hogan's Alley in the media as much as possible,

remind people that there is this black community here,

there was a black community here,

uh, it's around.

And uh, trying to gather up wahtever information there is, um, out there.

So, I'll show a few of those things now.

So, this is, sort of jumping around a bit with these images...

Um, for example, this is an article from 1952.

That's actually the, uh, one of the few pictures that we have of the black church in in its time.

Although it's not showing the church, it's taken from the top of the steps of the church,

looking outward.

And that's the Krump [sp?] family there, and they're coming up the steps of the church.

And this was an article Bruce Ramsey did.

Every once in a while, if you read all the newspaper articles, yknow,

on maybe a 7 to 10 year cycle, um, reporters kind of realize there's a black community

and have some article that's like "Hey _"

and then it sort of goes away for several years,

and it comes back and someone says "hey there are black people here!"

and they write an article about it.

That's why Black History Month is good,

because, instead of this cycle, it's once a year [audience laughing] so it's a good thing.

Um, so yeah, that's one image of... the other thing I like about this is

that a lot of the photos of black folks in Hogan's Alley,

not a lot of people had cameras back then,

it seems like, when they did take photos, they're often interior shots,

so it could be anywhere.

But I like he fact that you see behind you the False Creek Flats there,

that's Prior Street, it kind of gives you an image of black folks in this city.

This is an image of, um, Vie's Chicken and Steak House.

This is another example, right?

Instead of having images, you have uh, you know, an artist's rendering of it.

So this is Keith McKellar's, uh, drawing, from a great book called Neon Eulogy

where he Vancouver sites, mostly, uh, on the East Side.

Um, Vie's was a very important institution.

So it was the longest running of those chicken and steak houses, um,

and, um, Vie's granddaughter's writing a biography of her grandmother

so it'll be great to read that book when it comes out.

An amazing woman who had descended from the original black pioneers from Victoria.

Um, ran a brothel there for a while.

Um, cashed out at a certain point, got out of the game, moved back to Vancouver,

used the money to buy Vie's.

And was actually was I think one of the only black property owners in _ town.

Most people weren't.

And that's Vie's.

[audience comment] I'm a little confused, could you go back to that, to there?

So you said that African Canadian community lived largely over by Jackson,

and you said the freeway construction largely wiped out the area opposite Jackson, right?

So, where's the evidence of this place where it actually becomes part of the highway construction

?__?"]

[Wayde] Yeah, well, it was more the destruction to the neighbourhood itself, right?

That was, yeah, I'm sort of mixing up the eras too.

That was sort of a later era.

If you go way back to the original black community, there was a series of, um,

cabins, that appear,

right along this part.

A bunch of cabins.

And they were actually cited as the reason for the urban renewal plans.

Cause they were, uh, kind of a weird architecture compared to the rest of the neighbourhood.

They were these sort of single dwelling cabins, I guess where, kind of for bachelors

And that was where, there was a kind of, that was a bit of a black part [black mark?] of Hogan's Alley

for a certain period

The porter's quarters were there, Vie's was there.

So a lot of the businesses and things were down here.

The church was here and there was _.

But that's sort of a bit later too.

So there's a different overlapping of eras _.

But like I said, I mean, the reason why black folks left,

it really wasn't, uh, it wasn't like Africville [in Halifax, Nova Scotia], it wasn't like, people were all living there,

the land was expropriated, and then it was bulldozed, right?

It wasn't like that.

It was much more like the plans were instituted 10 years beforehand,

people were,um, given the message thatt this neighbourhood is going down, right?

We're building these projects, and you're gonna live there.

So people got out, it wasn't as thought they were, yknow,

had their house expropriated out from under them.

Bulldozed, right?

It was more like, people got out of their own accord.

[audience comment:] Do you want to just contextualize Africville?

Yeah, I don't know if people know,

Africville, I mean, I'm not an expert on Africville either,

as I understand it, that was um, in Halifax.

It was a black community that was, it was a much faster expropriation as far as I know.

And it was taken over and... what was put there?

[audience comment] I think it just ended up being a vacant space for a long time.

It was supposed to be a roadway, or some other kind of urban development

that actually didn't materialize.

[Wayde] Yeah. This same idea, that same language of blight, right?

That the neighbourhood was a blight on the civic body

and had to be renewed in some kind of way, which meant knocked down.

Um, the last little bit, just before I stop,

um, is the why. Why is it important?

I think, um, partly, to talk about Hogan's Alley and remembering it knocks down several myths.

One is that myth of black absence in the city, right?

So yeah, folks are here.

Um, yknow, if you look at those numbers,

it's a little bit less than 1% of the population.

So, you think, "I don't see a lot of black people in the city",

you have to sort pf re-train your eyes.

It's kind of like, well, look on the streets,

and, uh, out of every hundred people who walk by, one of them is black.

Does that sound a bit like Vancouver?

Yeah it does.

Well, that's because that's how Vancovuer is...[audience laughing]

That's how it works.

So the myth of black absesce is something I'm always pushing against.

Um, one of the things, I mean, there are more black folks in Greater Vancouver

than there are in Nova Scotia,

and people don't believe me when i say that,

but I'll send you to Stats Canada to look at the numbers.

Um, there's a lot folks here, it's just a very big city with a lot of other people here too.

So it's, an optical illusion.

[audience comment] And, and to your point too, Nova Scotia has held on to the historical presence.

[Wayde] Yeah, it's older, it's older presence, it's very rooted, uh, more homogeneous in certain ways,

And so it's been, we know, well,

I'm not sure that's true that everyone knows there's a black community there,

but I think they have a high profile nationally, more than we do, that's for sure.

Um, another myth that it knocks down

is the myth of black ahistoricality.

yknow, blacks haven't been here for, yknow, a long time,

but blacks have been here, yknow, from before this was a province, right?

In the colonial days.

All the way back, including in Vancouver.

So, some of the first black folks who were here were, uh, here at the very beginning.

So, there are blacks all through the history, um.

There are different waves of immigration, that's true,

and there's some sort of, uh, waves and recessions,

but uh, but they've been here all along.

So that's another myth that it knocks down.

The other is this uh, this whole, Vancouverism,

that Vancouver is this model of urban planning,

this sort of self-congratulatory, let's all pat each other on the backs

about how wonderful Vancouver is and how horrible those other cities are

that did those terrible things to people.

Y'know, it's like, uh I'm always saying, if you read like Douglas Copeland talk about Vancouver

he said something like "Vancouver never lost its innocence

because it never put a freeway into the city

and so on and so forth, right.

Well, I want to debunk that. That's not true.

There WAS a community that paid the price for this.

We DID have urban renewal here and it did mess with people for years and years and years,

it made their lives really hard,

and eventually pushed this one community out altogether.

So, um, it was a pernicious plan, it did happen here, and it was the same as everywhere else.

So there's nothing really particularly wonderful about Vancouver's planning history at all.

Um, and that leads up to my last point,

which is that, uh, where we're sort of left with,

so often when people ask me about Hogan's Alley

and they ask what should be done down there now,

and what do you think the community should be like now?

And [coughing] um, the answer is pretty simple.

It's the same thing that should have happened then,

which is, you know, the people who live there now,

not the people that own there, or the people who are speculating there, yknow, or anything like that,

but the people who live there are the experts on what should happen in that place, right?

So the people who live their now in, yknow, what used to be called Hogan's Alley,

who now talk about it as the Downtown Eastside,

um, the parallels are very clear between how

that neighbourhood is spoken about now,

and how the slum of Hogan's Alley was spoken about, uh, back then, right?

It's the same kind of, uh, othering voice that talks about, uh, that talks about, uh,

this community as though they're a problem

that we need to figure out what to do with, right?

And really the answer is that people down there know what should be done to their neighbourhood

They are the experts on what should happen to the neighbourhood.

Consult with them

That's everybody that lives there,

people who are renting there, people who live on the streets there, um

people who are using that neighbourhood

are the ones who should decide what happens down there.

That's what didn't happen uh, dusing the 40's, 50's and 60's,

And that's why we had the situation that destroyed the community.

Now it's no longer really the black community at all, right?

So that's not, um, the claim that we have on it is really this historical claim,

so I'm pushing for some kind of memorial in physical form down there.

There are a few things at play, and things that have happened,

I used to say you know there's no marker down there that there was ever a black community,

and now that that's changed I can't say that anymore.

There's the Jimi Hendrix shrine is there.

It's very eccentric, a very Vancouver memorial [audience laughing]

And there's, very very recently, there's the Hogan's Alley Cafe

right at the corner of Gore and Union.

So the name is down there now.

So, um, there are some things there now.

I'd like there to be something a bit more official and, uh, something that's

maybe interpretive, to maybe give some sense of the history.

So we'll keep pushing for that.

I think some things are in play.

There's um, yknow, there's some stuff happening,

so I feel like we've hit that critical mass of uh educating people,

Now people kind of know about the history, there are some things happening,

I think over the next few years, there will be some memorial there.

Uh, in some kind of form.

So, um, tha's great.

Um, but, uh, the other thing too is to continue talking about it,

and keeping it as a living history, so, yknow, sometimes,

I know somebody said the thing about how memorials are is that they allow us to forget about something.

And I hope that's not the case, I hope it's, uhu, I hope we can keep, continue to connect up the

past to what's going on now.

And previous speakers are a good example of that, so,

recognizing that racism still happens,

still happens against black people,

still happens in very particualar ways against black people, um,

we maybe hear those scripts player over and over again,

and we have to continue to fight them,

Um, things have changed, , it is a different world,

it's not the exact same demographic,

um, things do move around a bit,

but there are some fundamental issues that we still face

and uh I think we have to continue fighting them.

My role in that right now is to fight for this memory,

so, um, I'll continue to do that.

I'll stop when I just show you one photograph.

I hadn't seen this photograph until, uh, Sunday night.

So at East End Blues and All That Jazz, which was where Vancouver Moving Theatre

did a wonderful,uh, show that had some of the voices of some of the original residents

of Hogan's Alley, the elders from the black community, um,

created this fantastic review,

it's kind of like a cabaret history of the community.

Um, that's over now, it ran on Sunday night.

But, um, Chip Gibson, who was there, was narrating it

and shared with us this image, so I took this from the program.

This is an image of the congregation of the African Methodist Episcopal Church,

around 1935, at a picnic at Stanley Park.

And when I saw this, it was just like, that's it right there,

that's the kind of thing we're trying to keep alive.

The memory that this is Vancouver, right?

Um, folks dressed very nicely [audience laughing]

Um, so now I'll open it up to questions and we can have a bit of a discussion.

[audience comment:] Wayde, I just want to say about the Stanley Park picture,

um, hi everybody, my name's Vanessa,

I grew up in his city as well, and I know our family, the Caribbean community would meet in Stanley Park,

the cricket matches used to look like that, and we used to have that many black people

in Stanley Park_ playing cricket, but...]

[Wayde] Anyone take a picture?

[audience laughing]

[commenter: I know! I was thinking that, but I don't think we have one.

But I think I might have to take a little digging around for that]

[Wayde] What this shows me, that's the other thing,

the archive, this stuff is not in the city archives, right? There's some stuff there.

Where it is right now is in family albums and in people's attics and things like that.

...terrified if things get lost.

And you can see this is a damaged photo, but , that keeps me awake nights

Thinking... what gets tossed out or thrown away or forgotten_

[audience comment] First of all, this is really great, very enlightening, but I have a question.

[can't make out] I was curious as to _any of this _ archives ...

So I take it that none of this was documented at that time, I don't know...

I was curious as to, is any of this in the municipal archives?

and if so, why isn't it being implemented in the curriculum_]

...?

so, like looking at maybe 2036, which is the _ point, you know, getting this stuff...?

[Wayde] It's interesting, you know, in terms of curriculum, it seems like the stuff about

the black pioneers, from Victoria, from the Gold Rush,

that that's entered first or something like that.

I've done a couple talks at high schools where I'm talking about that,

and they're like "yeah yeah we know, we did a section on that"

?_

Maybe that was a special class, teacher.

Um, but it does seem like that's a little more well known,

and that's sort of the next thing.

In terms of the archives, I mean I know the archives are very open to acquiring this kind of stuff

It's a funny thing _ at a certain point one of the members of the group,

uh, Sheilagh Cahill, was saying, we went to the archives, couldn't find much stuff,

and she was saying, you know, they're not looking hard enough.

It's like, there's stuff in the back, stuff that got in boxes back there

that they just haven't found,

there's something on he black community,

there's gotta be, right?

And I was like, there's nothing in the back, it's not a conspiracy,

they're not trying to like keep it from us.

They're archivists, if they've got a picture they'll put it up.

She's like, no no, they're not looking hard enough for it.

And so she was, her prompting really, we wrote a letter to them

saying well we're this group, we're hoping that you have some material on the black community

we have very very little.

And so, I was more thinking this could get them to thinking about acquiring stuff, right?

And it took a while, it was about a year later and they wrote back to me

and they said, well, yknow, we got your letter and we were thinking about it,

and you know, we looked through our files,

and we found a box in the back.

[audience laughing]

I swear to you.

And it was the images from the expropriation.

It was the city's photographs they took of the,

of the, um, buildings that were extant in the late 60's,

um, to price them,

And they found this huge thing _[audience laughing]

So, yknow,...?...

But anyway, they were, they've also put up a big section on African Canadian stuff.

They've actually, at that, before then it was really hard to find stuff,

because nothign was organized by the community, it was just,

you already had to know a person's name to find them, images of a black person

and now, that's easier to find.

You can go looking for the black community.

But we still don't have a lot of stuff.

[audience comment] People don't always recognize?

[Wayde] Yeah I think that's very true.

And I think that's partly why, um, yknow, it takes a person that's a bit outsiderish

like myself, who's like yknow very light skinned, not a member of that particular community,

um, my dad came as an immigrant in the 50's, he didn't live down there,

um, an academic, they were a few steps removed from all of that stuff

partly, it takes a person who's kind of thinking of it in these cultural terms,

and not just like their family's history sometimes.

Although, there are people who have hooked up with us who are

within the community, from the community, who were activists during that period,

and they were much more interested in thinking culturally about it collectively

[audience comment, cannot make it out]

[anothe audience comment] probably the oldest person in the room _

I was born in Vancouver, in 1945,

and I didn't know anything about Hogan's Alley.

Um, the only black person I ever heard about was Joe For...

[Wayde] Joe Fortes

[audience commenter] because he, well my mom called him Joe Ford, he taught her to swim

Down at English Bay, when she came out from Winnipeg in I'd say she was 8,

so that would've been in uh, 1916, they moved here from Winnipeg, and Joe For taught her to swim

And that was, as far as I knew, until I was in university and spent a lot of my time

?with the Caribbean students right?

I mean that was the only black in Vancouver,

uh, until, so that would be mid 60's, early 60's. ?

[Wayde] It's funny, you get things like, in, um, Rosemary Brown's autobiography

she talks about, yknow, coming to the city with your husband in the 50's,

and there's this big chunk of autobiography where they're just like

trying to rent from places, experiencing all this racism,

trying to figure Vancouver out,

and they're like, this is so weird, there's no black people in this city, it's bizarre.

And then they, years, they bump into, uh, a black couple and they realize there's Hogan's Alley.

they realize there's this East End black community.

And they really had no idea it was there.

So, that's possible__ the circles you're in.

[audience] Thank you, that was awesome. Um, I don't know if you have any answer to this,

but um I'm wondering if there's any specific stories or histories that you know of

of the black community's relationship to other communities of colour,

particularly Indigenous communities_ it's not an easy answer,

and hearing some of the Chinese elders talk about some of the different stories

of the Chinese community's relationship to Indigenous communities in particular.

So, during the race riots there was a lot of untold stories of the Musqueam and Squamish

taking in a lot of folks from Chinatown during the race riots.

But at the same time, a lot of conflict around the laying of the railroads, of course.

So I'm wondering if there are stories in the black community_

the relationship_ Chinatown, or the Musqueam, Squamish, or particularly the relationship

?__.

[Wayde] Yeah, well, in terms of BC, that's a very big question.

Maybe I'll just talk about Vancouver specifically.

I mean, it's kind of, it's a really interesting question.

It's kind of one of the untold sides of the story, right?

_that whole proximity to Chinatown, there's a whole lot of attraction for Chinese folks.

I know Nora Hendrix talks about it kind of jokingly,

about trying to cook sould food while shopping in Chinatown

[audience laughing]

And it can be done, right.

Things like that.

I'd love to have some of those recipes.

See these are some of the things that are lost.

But yeah, there was a lot of interaction, um, and when we look at,

there's a photograph of the congregation, there's a later one, of the African Methodist Episcopal

church that has some Asian faces in it.

So you're like, I'd love to know who these people are, and what the interactions were like

It's just kind of here and there sporadically.

But in terms of First Nations people,

this is another one of those stories that I can't figure out where I heard this,

I have the memory of it now, but I can't remember if I've read it somewhere,

or if somebody told it to me.

But, um, somebody, um, said that at Vanier Park, like where um the um...

Planetarium is, right, that that used to be called Brown Skin Beach, when Kits was,

So sites were segregated, Vancouver wasn't segregated as a city,

but sites were, and Kits Beach was,

so black folks and native folks couldn't got there to swim, probably Asians couldnt either,

And um, so they would go there, what was left of the beach there at Vanier Park,

and it was called Brown Skin Beach because that was where indians and black folks would go swim.

Um, I wish I could corroborate that, but it's one of those things you hear

and you should have writen down where that was or who told you.

But I don't know. I haven't heard anything since,

so if anybody knows anything more about that, let me know.

But yeah, it was such a mixed neighbourhood, yeah.

James Douglas is Victoria...

[audience comment, cannot make out]

[Wayde] Yeah, he [Jimi Hendrix] was here sporadically, it was kind of like, it sounds like,

I mean, his parents were pretty bad alcoholics and had lots of problems,

and um it sounds like when they, when things completely broke down in Seattle,

his dad would send him up to Vancouver to live with Nora.

And so he was never here really for a long uninterrupted stretch of time.

He was here long enough to go to school here, he went to elementary school

for awhile.

Um, so, but it would be a portion of a school year, that kind of thing.

So, and, mostly as a kidm when he was little.

And later on as a young man would start playing music and stuff like that, he would play up here.

So he did a bunch of shows here, before he hit it really huge, right.

And um, there are stories of him playing The Smiling Buddha and places like that.

So he was here, but it wasn't really like this was his home town.

It was more like...

[audience comment, cant make out]

[Wayde] I think becaue she [Nora Hendrix] was one of those people who was, her life really

spans the whole history of the period.

She was really here kind of at the beginning of it, very very early.

She was here at the foundation of the church, helped to establish it,

and was here all throughout, and stayed in the East End.

She was there, right up until her last days.

They did take her to Seattle, because she had no more family left, she outlived everybody.

So they took her down to Seattle to die, but that's it.

Apparently, on here death bed she was saying

OK I gotta get better so I can go back home to Canada.

And um, so she was in Strathcona right up until the end.

So she's sort of this person who just saw everything, just this repository of all this information

about the community.