WEBVTT
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Thanks to West Coast Sheen for having me here,
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and thanks to the previous speakers, um, for reminding us
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that the stuff that I'm going to talk about here
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continues on in different forms, um, today,
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and that, um, people still continue to fight back.
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Um, what I'm gonna do is, uh, I've been doing research into the black history of this province
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for about 15 years now,
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and uh, Vancouver in particular,
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uh, and particularly a little neighbourhood called Hogan's Alley,
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that was in the east end, uh, and is right where the Georgia Viaduct is today.
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Uh, which was the nucleus of the original Black community of Vancouver.
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Um, over the years of doing just various work around this topic
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um, I wrote for a bunch of different sources, uh, in a bunch of different ways
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um, sort of ad hoc over the years
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and uh what I did when I went to put together this my latest book, which is called After Canaan
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uh, which is a book of 7 essays,
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I put all of the writing that I had done on Hogan's Alley and blacks in vancouver into one essay.
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And, um, it's the longest essay in this book
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and it's, um, as far as I know it's the single longest piece of writing, um,
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the single longest historical work on blacks in Vancouver.
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So there have, there has been a book of black history in the province
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that goes back to the 19th century,
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but the black history of Vancouver has not really been written yet in a comprehensive way.
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Hopefully someone will come along and do that.
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I do focus on this particular neighbourhood,
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it was sort of the, uh, where the majority of blacks in the city lived
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in the middle of the 20th century,
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but there are other black histories around the city as well
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and that should be acknowledged.
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I'm also gonna show some images and, um,
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I'm not going to read from the essay,
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if I'm reading an essay it doesn't work that well.
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It's better I think to talk, uh, extemporaneously like that
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so I have uh a way of guiding myself through this talk.
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So, I'll keep it relatively short and hopefully there'll be a bit of a chance
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to, um, answer some questions and have a bit of a dialogue.
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I think that's often where really interesting ideas come out anyway.
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What I'm gonna do is give a talk that runs through
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a kind of old but tried and true formula
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and that's the who, what, where when and why
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that's as good a way as any of organizing all of this stuff that I've gathered in my head
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on this topic over the years.
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Um, so the title there is "Vancouver Vs Hogan's Alley: Urban Renewal, Negro Removal,
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and The Myth of Livability", and uh, those topics will come up as we go along.
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But the first is who: who was the black community of vancovuer, and it's origins.
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Um, it was a group of people who came here
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not so much uh as part of that original group that came to BC in the 19th century,
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um, although some of the black pioneers from Victoria, um, came over to Vancouver,
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and that was one stream,
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and another stream was from the US that was probably the largest one,
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so lots of folks came up from the states,
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including Vancouver's most famous black family,
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which would have been the Hendrixes, Jimi's grandmother.
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Um, another stream came from Alberta, a lot of folks who were originally from the States themselves,
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came from Oklahoma
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to settle places like Amber Valley in northern Alberta.
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Uh, a lot of them came out to Vancouver in the 1930's during the depression.
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And so a lot of the old families are from alberta as well.
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American derived.
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But a lot of this immigration is before the main era of immigration wave,
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came from the Caribbean and Africa.
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Um, Nora Hendrix is a pretty good example of uh that group of people
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who were American derived, working class, um,
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a lot of them kind of mavericks in a way
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who sort of stepped out of, uh, out of the frame in some kind of way
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and decided to move to this crazy place with very few black people.
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_ what kind of personality traits they had to do something like that.
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These were folks who were brave enough to do that.
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um, a lot is made of Jimi Hendrix, but I always say that Nora was the real star
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of the black community here,
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and uh she was someone who helped to establish the first black church
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which is the _ Episcopal Church.
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Um, a few things too about women in the community.
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So, uh, if you look at the pioneers that came from, during the Gold Rush era to Victoria
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a lot of those migrants and that wave of migration were male
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and, uh, not so many women.
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This migration stream was different,
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it was families coming up, and so there were a lot of women in the community.
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It wasn't sort of one of those bachelor communities of immigrants.
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Um, it did coalesce because of the job ghetto of porters,
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so black men who were porters, and thats why Hogan's Alley is right at the train station,
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um, but the ones who created the most lasting institutions in the community were the women.
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So there were a series of what were called "chicken houses"
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which were restaurants that sold southern fried chicken in the community.
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Uh, Vie Moore was probably the most famous one, she had a place called Vie's Chicken and Steak House
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that was right down in Hogan's Alley.
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There was a whole archipelago of these different women-owned restaurants that were in the community
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Also, some doubled as bootlegging places, speakeasies, after hours.
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Also the church, the church was largely established by the women of the community,
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and that was a longstanding institution.
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Um, they shut it down just shortly after Nora Hendrix finally took sick
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She ?
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Um....
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So what was it, what was the neighbourhood like?
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It's a little bit confusing.
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Often people call it a black neighbourhood,
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and I correct them and say it's not quite true.
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It was a multi-ethnic neighbourhood, uh,
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I have to say Italians can call Hogan's Alley their original neighbourhood too,
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in the city, because it was an Italian enclave,
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it was right next to Chinatown as well.
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So it was really intermixed, there were all sorts of people who lived there.
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It was basically an immigrant enclave.
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The reason why it gets described as a black neighbourhood, why some say that,
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is that the majority of blacks in the city lived there at the time.
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Um, there's also a little bit of a debate about Hogan's Alley proper,
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and the East End, and so when you talk with some of the elders,
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they like to remind us that Hogan's Alley was sort of one section of it,
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and really, folks lived all through the east end.
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Hogan's Alley itself kind of had a series of institutions which, the church was there,
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Vie's was there
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some of the other night clubs were there
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and so it was sort of like maybe the commercial, most well known aspect commercially
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but people lived all around through Strathcona
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Um, still, it was a sort of pseudo-segregation,
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though there was no official segregation against the black community in vancouver
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the way there was against First Nations people and Asians,
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so there was no law on the books
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that blacks couldnt live here or there.
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Um, but i call it pseudo segregation because there are all sorts of stories
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of people saying you couldnt rent anywhere in the city just because of racism.
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So an unofficial kind of segregation existed.
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And this was a neighbourhood where you could go rent somewhere and people would leave you alone.
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It was that neighbourhood where sort of an ad hoc group of immigrants from all different places
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um, and at the edge of Chinatown, that's part of it too.
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So, um, pseudo segregation is the best way to describe that, I think.
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Um, it may also explain why there was, why there was some fluidity
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out of the neighbourhood later.
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But I'll get to that.
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Um, during the 1930's, a lot of the writing that went on about Hogan's Alley
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in The Province and The (Vancouver) Sun,
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um, referred to it as a slum,
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it also befell victim to a program that was, that called itself "slum clearance"
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um, described that way over and over again, um
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Now, whether or not it was a slum, when you talk to the elders, it's interesting.
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You get different stories from different people,
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and some people say "yeah it was a slum and you're lucky not to have lived there,
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and I'm glad I'm out of there...and... stop talking about it."
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All the way over to other people who were saying
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"well, you know, it was poor, but it was like a village in a lot of ways,
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because you knew everybody, and yknow, yeah,
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there was some violence and crime, but there was also this church there,
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there was also families that grew up there, uh, hard working people,
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all sorts of different types, right?
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There was a whole community that lived there."
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Um, and so just to call it a slum is inaccurate.
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Um, so it was a poor community, that's without doubt.
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Um, it was working class, uh, there was some crime there.
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A lot was made of that in the papers,
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in a way it seems like the only time people ever wrote about Hogan's Alley
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was when it was, uh, when there was either high profile crime that happened there
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uh, or they were talking about bulldozing the place because of the crimes that were happening.
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Those are the two news stories that seemed the most common.
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So to find out what went on, you really would have to talk to people, and read between the lines
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about what else was happening.
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Um, a little bit about the name too.
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Um, Hogan's Alley, uh, there are a bunch of different stories about where the name came from.
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But, uh, it seems that the most accurate one is
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there was a comic strip in the 19th century called Hogan's Alley,
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and another one called The Yellow Kid, by an artist named (Richard F.) Outcault
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who was an Anglo-American comic strip artist
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he kind of invented the form of comic strips in a way.
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And, uh, Hogan's Alley in his comic strip was this kind of Irish neighbourhood.
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So this is a time before Irish people were unanimously considered white.
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So this is back when this immigrant population that were not considered model minorities,
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and really were not totally accepted as white Americans.
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And so he has this uh imaginary neighbourhood in Hell's Kitchen, New york, called Hogan's Alley,
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this is this completely chaotic and a scene of urban squalor
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I think I have a picture...
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And that's it there. And the caption is:
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"What they did to the dog catcher in Hogan's Alley"
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Which is, kick his ass apparently.
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Um, but this became a kind of euphamism for slum,
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for wild chaotic neighbourhood kind of crazy place where things are out of control,
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all across North America.
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So you actually see Hogan's Alleys in a bunch of different places
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because it was this sort of generic term for the part of town that you shouldn't go to.
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And there was also Hogan's Alley in Rossland, here in BC,
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which was the red light district there.
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So, and I think that the FBI or CIA, their shooting gallery,
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so where they train people, where they train their agents to shoot
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is called Hogan's Alley.
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Where you get citizens popping up and criminals and you're supposed to shoot the gun and the knife
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and not the woman with the baby or whatever.
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Um, they call it Hogan's Alley.
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Anyways, so, it was this epithet originally.
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It's come to be the term for the neighbourhood.
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It's sort of lost in time I think, as uh the comic strip stopped appearing.
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And, um, that's the name we have for it now.
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Uh, where, was it, so, I'll show the map.
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It's uh, that's the area, so this is one archival map of the neighbourhood.
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So, I'll just step over here.
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So there's Gore, Union, Prior, Main Street is right here
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So it's not like this any more, uh,
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you know where you are?
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The Georgia Viaduct sits here right now,
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right? That's where the Georgia Viaduct _ offramp is,
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it connects onto Prior Street, to Venables.
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So, there's a new condo is there, there the Jimi Hendrix shrine is there.
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All this stuff is gone
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As well as this.
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This is that green space.
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It's not actually a park, people think it's a park,
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but it's actually owned by the city not the Parks Board
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Cuz it was supposed to be, uh, the rest of this freeway plan,
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uh that was going to cut Chinatown in half,
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it doesnt exist there because they stopped it.
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But not before they wiped out Hogan's Alley.
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This is the heart of Hogan's Alley.
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People get confused sometimes about whether or not it was this
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it was running north/south
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or this east/west thing.
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Well it was both, it was this T-shaped part right there
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and it carried on um where it kind of stopped being Hogan's Alley
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which was an unofficial name
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seems to be about here
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this is where the church was.
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And just from kind of oral histories,
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people say that most of the black families lived here.
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There's a few apartment buildings here, that were mostly black.
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Um, so I want to say that that was more the Italian end
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and this was sort of the black end,
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but then that is really porous actually
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So Vie's Chicken and Steak House was over here
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the porter's quarters was here, that was really way back
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before World War I.
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That was really the origins of it as a black site.
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The porters union had a kind of like a way station for black porters
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who didn't have a place to stay, who had hit Vancouver, so they would stay there.
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And that's probably why it became associated with the black community.
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Um, now, so that is I think why it's there, it's because if you look sort of down the map_
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you get the train station, so, this is the place that people first hit
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I guess, if they'd gotten off that train
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and uh that's where they ended up staying.
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Um, I'll speak a little about tha freeway plan, because it came up.
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Um, that freeway plan goes way back.
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They were planning to put some kind of inter-urban freeway in Vancouver
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going back into the '40's
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Exactly how it was going to look was a little uncertain.
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But the plans would coalesce over the years
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and it dovetailed at a certain point with this concept of slum clearance
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um, and it became this really unholy conflict with different ideologies.
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So on the one hand, uh, this idea that in order to improve people's neighbourhood,
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you should knock down all of their houses and put up some high rises
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that they should go live in.
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This was the ideology that they called urban renewal.
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It happened all across North America
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and um it's responsible for creating the projects of the States
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The infamous projects, Cabrini-Green, places like that,
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widely known as a failure of social planning, right?
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This happened in just about every neighbourhood and every city in North America
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in one form or another
00:15:31.538 --> 00:15:35.878
Invariably it happened to a, um, black community or a Chinese_
00:15:35.878 --> 00:15:41.226
haven't found a place where it didn't happen in a poor neighbourhood
00:15:41.226 --> 00:15:43.065
Um, it's just really uniform.
00:15:43.065 --> 00:15:44.769
So basically, there's this switch to the car,
00:15:44.769 --> 00:15:48.284
so this is the same period where they're ripping up street cars,
00:15:48.284 --> 00:15:50.223
and they're switching everything over to the car
00:15:50.223 --> 00:15:53.265
and people are expected to live in the suburbs and commute to the city.
00:15:53.265 --> 00:15:55.605
It's a huge social shift, right?
00:15:55.605 --> 00:15:58.245
Uh, and so they decided well we have to have a freeway
00:15:58.245 --> 00:15:59.649
running, connecting the suburbs to the city,
00:15:59.649 --> 00:16:01.688
and where do we put it?
00:16:01.688 --> 00:16:02.965
We put it in the poorest neighbourhood,
00:16:02.965 --> 00:16:07.243
in the neighbourhood that's the least able to defend itself, um, the black neighbourhood.
00:16:07.243 --> 00:16:08.781
That happened here
00:16:08.781 --> 00:16:11.388
Exactly according to that plan.
00:16:11.388 --> 00:16:13.828
It's not talked about, nobody will cop to it,
00:16:13.828 --> 00:16:16.135
it's not _ to find anybody who will say this was the plan,
00:16:16.135 --> 00:16:20.786
but it's just the uniformity of how it took place all across the continent.
00:16:20.786 --> 00:16:23.133
It's pretty clear how it worked.
00:16:23.133 --> 00:16:28.608
Um, now in Vancouver, things didn't quite go according to the plan
00:16:28.608 --> 00:16:32.218
They had this huge eight lane freeway that was supposed to sweep
00:16:32.218 --> 00:16:36.275
from First Avenue to Clark to Venables, up Prior.
00:16:36.275 --> 00:16:40.213
This was the onramp to the part that went downtown
00:16:40.213 --> 00:16:43.656
But it was also supposed to dogway through Chinatown, rip Chinatown in half
00:16:43.656 --> 00:16:47.003
and go all the way to the Burrard Inlet.
00:16:47.003 --> 00:16:49.545
And there was even a proposed third crossing of the Inlet
00:16:49.545 --> 00:16:52.420
that was gonna be there to be either a tunnel or a bridge.
00:16:52.420 --> 00:16:57.567
Um, now none of that happened because the community got up in arms and stopped it
00:16:57.567 --> 00:17:00.409
when these plans saw light of day.
00:17:00.409 --> 00:17:03.083
They were trying to keep it as secret as they could over the years
00:17:03.083 --> 00:17:05.027
Bits and pieces leaked out,
00:17:05.027 --> 00:17:06.163
people knew something was up,
00:17:06.163 --> 00:17:09.305
cause they were passing a series of bylaws that made it, uh,
00:17:09.305 --> 00:17:12.347
that outlawed people from making certain improvements
00:17:12.347 --> 00:17:14.787
or from putting curbs in, and things like that.
00:17:14.787 --> 00:17:16.826
And all this area where you see a bunch of people live
00:17:16.826 --> 00:17:20.877
was designated industrial during this era.
00:17:20.877 --> 00:17:23.651
And you see, it's all houses, all housing lots, right?
00:17:23.651 --> 00:17:26.994
It's not industrial, industrial land.
00:17:26.994 --> 00:17:31.506
Um, but that was part of the plan to edge people out.
00:17:31.506 --> 00:17:34.147
And they actually did build projects here in Vancouver too,
00:17:34.147 --> 00:17:39.300
so the McLean Park projects, and the Reineer project were built because of this.
00:17:39.300 --> 00:17:42.008
The idea was that everybody living here would go live in those.
00:17:42.008 --> 00:17:45.317
Um, exactly the same plan as the States.
00:17:45.317 --> 00:17:48.091
Now what was different here was um
00:17:48.091 --> 00:17:52.075
one, they did it late. It took them a long time to get it started.
00:17:52.075 --> 00:17:55.017
Partly _ the way Canada copies things from the States
00:17:55.017 --> 00:17:58.660
10 years later, basically that's what happened.
00:17:58.660 --> 00:18:01.000
So by the time they were trying to initiate this plan,
00:18:01.000 --> 00:18:04.710
it was the 60's, and people were, instead of the 50's and 40's,
00:18:04.710 --> 00:18:07.523
when they were doing these things in New York and other big American cities,
00:18:07.523 --> 00:18:10.398
so people were very empowered, it was a different era.
00:18:10.398 --> 00:18:13.005
It was after the Civil Rights movement, right?
00:18:13.005 --> 00:18:15.479
And so, um, people weren't having it.
00:18:15.479 --> 00:18:21.736
And um there was an organization called SPOTA, Strathcona Property Owners and Tenants Association
00:18:21.736 --> 00:18:25.580
that spearheaded this campaign.
00:18:25.580 --> 00:18:27.986
Um, and they stopped it.
00:18:27.986 --> 00:18:30.828
So, now, that's sort of the story that we hear most often,
00:18:30.828 --> 00:18:33.100
and that's the myth of livability we're talking about.
00:18:33.100 --> 00:18:34.905
So if you hear Harcourt, Mike Harcourt tell the story,
00:18:34.905 --> 00:18:37.618
um, he saved Vancouver, right?
00:18:37.618 --> 00:18:39.256
It's paradise now.
00:18:39.256 --> 00:18:40.426
[audience laughing]
00:18:40.426 --> 00:18:41.496
That's a book title.
00:18:41.496 --> 00:18:43.735
Um, City Making In Paradise.
00:18:43.735 --> 00:18:50.120
Well, what they don't mention is, um, this is the part of the plan that did go ahead, right?
00:18:50.120 --> 00:18:53.703
So they struck ground and started knocking these places down,
00:18:53.703 --> 00:18:56.343
expropriating these building, going back to '67.
00:18:56.343 --> 00:18:59.719
And the real protests took a while to get started,
00:18:59.719 --> 00:19:02.059
so people were angry about it, they were trying to stop it.
00:19:02.059 --> 00:19:07.507
Um, you know, but not before this was destroyed.
00:19:07.507 --> 00:19:11.223
Even so, the black community was mostly leaving before that point,
00:19:11.223 --> 00:19:15.101
it was really during the late 50's, early 60's, when were go,
00:19:15.101 --> 00:19:17.440
and were not moving into the McLean Park projects,
00:19:17.440 --> 00:19:20.649
they did not move there.
00:19:20.649 --> 00:19:24.867
And, uh, that's the point where the black community of Vancouver integrated.
00:19:24.867 --> 00:19:27.040
So if you have a friend coming from out of town who says
00:19:27.040 --> 00:19:28.310
"where are all the black people in Vancouver?"
00:19:28.310 --> 00:19:33.057
you say, "well, they used to be there, and then they knocked it down and put these projects up
00:19:33.057 --> 00:19:37.502
and the black folks didn't move into them, they moved everywhere. They scattered all across the city".
00:19:37.502 --> 00:19:43.925
Um, but still those numbers didn't get smaller, they got bigger, right?
00:19:43.925 --> 00:19:46.733
So it's not like the community evaporated or something like that.
00:19:46.733 --> 00:19:48.438
It's really the community integrated.
00:19:55.176 --> 00:19:58.673
So, thats the negro removal part.
00:19:58.673 --> 00:20:04.923
In the States, where our African American cousins are, are more sardonic and wittier,
00:20:04.923 --> 00:20:07.297
they called urban renewal negro removal, right?
00:20:07.297 --> 00:20:10.138
Because they saw it happening over and over again.
00:20:10.138 --> 00:20:14.054
In our case, uh, blacks removed themselves,
00:20:14.054 --> 00:20:18.132
and I think that, you know, I've looked at the statistics really closely
00:20:18.132 --> 00:20:20.405
and tried to locate where there's anothe black locus,
00:20:20.405 --> 00:20:22.845
and the closest thing is right where we are right now actually,
00:20:22.845 --> 00:20:26.729
in Mount Pleasant and, I guess largely because of the new waves of African immigration.
00:20:26.729 --> 00:20:32.745
But otherwise, there is no black enclave int he Lower Mainland, anywhere.
00:20:32.745 --> 00:20:35.152
When you look at the map, when you look at stats Canada,
00:20:35.152 --> 00:20:37.759
it looks as if, you know, black folks were given a directive
00:20:37.759 --> 00:20:42.043
to live as far apart from other black folks as they possibly could [audience laughing]
00:20:42.043 --> 00:20:46.088
plan into action, it's really just spread out everywhere across the city.
00:20:46.088 --> 00:20:52.205
Whether or not it's a good or bad thing, I think it's a good thing,
00:20:52.205 --> 00:20:54.645
it's better than being segregated, right?
00:20:54.645 --> 00:20:56.583
You have the right to live wherever you want to live.
00:20:56.583 --> 00:21:00.601
It has had some downsides to it.
00:21:00.601 --> 00:21:06.083
One is, um, you know, the community is not recognized as existing.
00:21:06.083 --> 00:21:10.462
It's really ironic, if you look at newspaper articles from the Hogan's Alley period,
00:21:10.462 --> 00:21:15.013
um, it's pretty clear that, um, Vancouverites were quite aware
00:21:15.013 --> 00:21:17.186
that they had a black population in the city.
00:21:17.186 --> 00:21:19.392
You know, they had all sorts of fucked up ideas about who they were,
00:21:19.392 --> 00:21:21.865
but they were aware that they were there, right?
00:21:21.865 --> 00:21:23.470
And if you look at today,
00:21:23.470 --> 00:21:25.609
you know,
00:21:25.609 --> 00:21:26.545
it's uh
00:21:26.545 --> 00:21:28.323
you'll hear people say, how many people have heard people say
00:21:28.323 --> 00:21:29.860
"there are no black people in vancovuer"?
00:21:29.860 --> 00:21:33.905
A black person talking to someone will say to you "there are no black people here..."
00:21:33.905 --> 00:21:35.142
[audience laughing]
00:21:35.142 --> 00:21:41.660
You know, well, there are more, there are more here now that there were back then
00:21:41.660 --> 00:21:42.427
percentage wise, right?
00:21:42.427 --> 00:21:47.184
So there are 20,000, more than 20,000 black folks in the Lower Mainland.
00:21:47.184 --> 00:21:49.992
And that's not huge compared to other minority groups,
00:21:50.376 --> 00:21:52.261
but that's a lot of people.
00:21:52.261 --> 00:21:55.069
If all those people lived in one neighbourhood?
00:21:55.069 --> 00:21:57.454
We'd have a whole bunch of things that we don't have right now,
00:21:57.454 --> 00:22:02.663
like a community centre, or some civic markers that we were in certain places.
00:22:02.663 --> 00:22:07.944
Um, we'd have some remnants of whatever community had existed.
00:22:07.944 --> 00:22:14.115
I often say when people ask me "ok if you're not against integration, um, then yknow,
00:22:14.115 --> 00:22:20.381
what do you wish would have happened in a place like Hogan's Alley? So what would you have preferred?"
00:22:20.381 --> 00:22:24.763
And I often say, yknow, if things, if they hadn't destroyed it,
00:22:24.763 --> 00:22:27.427
if they'd left it alone, if they'd let it just develop organically,
00:22:27.427 --> 00:22:33.493
uh, yknow, even if they hadn't funded it, or yknow tried to improve anybody's lives,
00:22:33.493 --> 00:22:35.432
if they'd just left it alone,
00:22:35.432 --> 00:22:39.319
I think what you would have had in Hogan's Alley was something similar to, um,
00:22:39.319 --> 00:22:42.988
what you have on Commercial Drive, in terms of Little Italy, right?
00:22:42.988 --> 00:22:47.307
It was, we know that Commercial Drive is/was Little Italy,
00:22:47.307 --> 00:22:49.075
not a whole lot of Ialians living there, right?
00:22:49.075 --> 00:22:52.234
But there's a lot of cafes, and there's Il Mercato, there's things that,
00:22:52.234 --> 00:22:57.012
there's still institutions that are there, that are remnants of, um,
00:22:57.012 --> 00:23:00.728
the time when it was an Italian enclave residentially, right?
00:23:00.728 --> 00:23:03.766
And I think that's sort of what you would have had there too.
00:23:03.766 --> 00:23:07.934
You still would have had certain places, certain institutions, and chicken houses,
00:23:07.934 --> 00:23:11.243
and um whatever had evolved over the years, right?
00:23:11.243 --> 00:23:14.118
I still think people would have integrated,
00:23:14.118 --> 00:23:18.502
I don't think you would have had um, maybe this kind of en masse, really fast integration,
00:23:18.502 --> 00:23:21.069
but I think people gradually would have,
00:23:21.069 --> 00:23:24.970
you would still have this recognition that yeah the city has a black community,
00:23:24.970 --> 00:23:28.360
yes they used to live there, and everybody knows it, right?
00:23:28.360 --> 00:23:32.012
Um, what they took away from us with this freeway plan
00:23:32.012 --> 00:23:36.766
was I think that memory of the city as a black site.
00:23:36.766 --> 00:23:42.153
Um, that's why, yknow, I persistently defend Black History Month
00:23:42.153 --> 00:23:47.261
as a fantastic institution and as something that's really well suited to Vancouver.
00:23:47.261 --> 00:23:51.505
In a place where you don't have a physical site, we have this time of year, right?
00:23:51.766 --> 00:23:56.051
Where people get together intentionally, uh, at events like tonight,
00:23:56.051 --> 00:23:57.522
and talk about this history.
00:23:57.522 --> 00:24:00.636
Y'know, if it weren't for this, it really would fade away,
00:24:00.636 --> 00:24:02.836
really would be even more sporadic than it is.
00:24:02.836 --> 00:24:08.159
And so, another reason to thank the organizers for doing this.
00:24:08.159 --> 00:24:12.246
Um, so, people are there, they get together intentionally,
00:24:12.246 --> 00:24:18.866
um, we don't have those sort of organic institutions that might have been there,
00:24:18.912 --> 00:24:25.377
but, um, what I've been doing over the years and a lot of other people have in various different ways
00:24:25.377 --> 00:24:28.020
is trying to intentionally memorialize the community.
00:24:28.020 --> 00:24:32.032
So, in 2002, I can't believe it's so long ago, _
00:24:32.032 --> 00:24:37.686
In 2002, uh, I helped to establish a group called the Hogan's Alley Memorial Project
00:24:37.686 --> 00:24:45.682
um, which originally we just, we just wanted there to be a plaque of some kind down there,
00:24:45.682 --> 00:24:48.515
some marker that there was this black community there.
00:24:48.515 --> 00:24:50.559
But when we got into the work of it,
00:24:50.559 --> 00:24:53.194
we realized that, um, a couple things:
00:24:53.194 --> 00:25:00.218
One, um, most Vancouverites it seemed like didn't even know that there was this black community
00:25:00.218 --> 00:25:01.556
that had been there.
00:25:01.556 --> 00:25:04.073
And so we realized that, well, yknow, wanting to get a plaque was one thing,
00:25:04.073 --> 00:25:10.186
but informing people that this existed, that this was the history, um, became a large part of our task.
00:25:10.186 --> 00:25:12.757
And two: WE didn't know that much about it.
00:25:12.757 --> 00:25:19.073
So everybody in our group, nobody descended from, uh, any of those original groups,
00:25:19.073 --> 00:25:21.441
although we ended up hooking up with people who did,
00:25:21.441 --> 00:25:22.448
uh, who came and did work with us.
00:25:22.448 --> 00:25:31.101
So... the sons and daughters and grandsons and granddaughters of some of the elders
00:25:31.101 --> 00:25:33.237
uh, have also worked with us,
00:25:33.237 --> 00:25:40.883
So [coughing] we ended up being this kind of information gathering group
00:25:40.883 --> 00:25:46.008
and sort of, I like to think of, um, an activist group or sort of a pressure group,
00:25:46.008 --> 00:25:48.754
to kind of keep the name Hogan's Alley in the media as much as possible,
00:25:48.754 --> 00:25:51.673
remind people that there is this black community here,
00:25:51.673 --> 00:25:53.299
there was a black community here,
00:25:53.299 --> 00:25:55.110
uh, it's around.
00:25:55.110 --> 00:25:59.661
And uh, trying to gather up wahtever information there is, um, out there.
00:25:59.661 --> 00:26:03.477
So, I'll show a few of those things now.
00:26:03.477 --> 00:26:08.670
So, this is, sort of jumping around a bit with these images...
00:26:09.831 --> 00:26:13.268
Um, for example, this is an article from 1952.
00:26:13.268 --> 00:26:20.003
That's actually the, uh, one of the few pictures that we have of the black church in in its time.
00:26:20.003 --> 00:26:23.531
Although it's not showing the church, it's taken from the top of the steps of the church,
00:26:23.531 --> 00:26:25.391
looking outward.
00:26:25.391 --> 00:26:29.134
And that's the Krump [sp?] family there, and they're coming up the steps of the church.
00:26:29.134 --> 00:26:30.892
And this was an article Bruce Ramsey did.
00:26:30.892 --> 00:26:33.513
Every once in a while, if you read all the newspaper articles, yknow,
00:26:33.513 --> 00:26:40.739
on maybe a 7 to 10 year cycle, um, reporters kind of realize there's a black community
00:26:40.739 --> 00:26:44.362
and have some article that's like "Hey _"
00:26:44.362 --> 00:26:46.555
and then it sort of goes away for several years,
00:26:46.555 --> 00:26:48.771
and it comes back and someone says "hey there are black people here!"
00:26:48.771 --> 00:26:49.964
and they write an article about it.
00:26:49.964 --> 00:26:51.418
That's why Black History Month is good,
00:26:51.418 --> 00:26:58.754
because, instead of this cycle, it's once a year [audience laughing] so it's a good thing.
00:26:58.754 --> 00:27:03.217
Um, so yeah, that's one image of... the other thing I like about this is
00:27:03.217 --> 00:27:07.162
that a lot of the photos of black folks in Hogan's Alley,
00:27:07.162 --> 00:27:08.740
not a lot of people had cameras back then,
00:27:08.740 --> 00:27:11.870
it seems like, when they did take photos, they're often interior shots,
00:27:11.870 --> 00:27:13.524
so it could be anywhere.
00:27:13.524 --> 00:27:18.214
But I like he fact that you see behind you the False Creek Flats there,
00:27:18.214 --> 00:27:23.648
that's Prior Street, it kind of gives you an image of black folks in this city.
00:27:26.786 --> 00:27:29.625
This is an image of, um, Vie's Chicken and Steak House.
00:27:29.625 --> 00:27:31.364
This is another example, right?
00:27:31.364 --> 00:27:35.709
Instead of having images, you have uh, you know, an artist's rendering of it.
00:27:35.709 --> 00:27:39.586
So this is Keith McKellar's, uh, drawing, from a great book called Neon Eulogy
00:27:39.586 --> 00:27:45.079
where he Vancouver sites, mostly, uh, on the East Side.
00:27:45.079 --> 00:27:47.079
Um, Vie's was a very important institution.
00:27:47.079 --> 00:27:52.162
So it was the longest running of those chicken and steak houses, um,
00:27:52.162 --> 00:28:00.196
and, um, Vie's granddaughter's writing a biography of her grandmother
00:28:00.196 --> 00:28:02.843
so it'll be great to read that book when it comes out.
00:28:02.843 --> 00:28:07.301
An amazing woman who had descended from the original black pioneers from Victoria.
00:28:07.301 --> 00:28:12.054
Um, ran a brothel there for a while.
00:28:12.054 --> 00:28:15.893
Um, cashed out at a certain point, got out of the game, moved back to Vancouver,
00:28:15.893 --> 00:28:18.224
used the money to buy Vie's.
00:28:18.224 --> 00:28:23.212
And was actually was I think one of the only black property owners in _ town.
00:28:23.212 --> 00:28:25.738
Most people weren't.
00:28:26.830 --> 00:28:30.203
And that's Vie's.
00:28:31.721 --> 00:28:39.391
[audience comment] I'm a little confused, could you go back to that, to there?
00:28:39.391 --> 00:28:45.297
So you said that African Canadian community lived largely over by Jackson,
00:28:45.297 --> 00:28:52.301
and you said the freeway construction largely wiped out the area opposite Jackson, right?
00:28:52.301 --> 00:29:00.196
So, where's the evidence of this place where it actually becomes part of the highway construction
00:29:00.196 --> 00:29:01.450
?__?"]
00:29:01.450 --> 00:29:05.537
[Wayde] Yeah, well, it was more the destruction to the neighbourhood itself, right?
00:29:05.537 --> 00:29:08.834
That was, yeah, I'm sort of mixing up the eras too.
00:29:08.834 --> 00:29:10.574
That was sort of a later era.
00:29:10.574 --> 00:29:14.268
If you go way back to the original black community, there was a series of, um,
00:29:14.268 --> 00:29:16.772
cabins, that appear,
00:29:16.772 --> 00:29:19.376
right along this part.
00:29:19.376 --> 00:29:21.003
A bunch of cabins.
00:29:21.157 --> 00:29:24.484
And they were actually cited as the reason for the urban renewal plans.
00:29:24.484 --> 00:29:28.802
Cause they were, uh, kind of a weird architecture compared to the rest of the neighbourhood.
00:29:28.802 --> 00:29:32.412
They were these sort of single dwelling cabins, I guess where, kind of for bachelors
00:29:32.412 --> 00:29:38.649
And that was where, there was a kind of, that was a bit of a black part [black mark?] of Hogan's Alley
00:29:38.649 --> 00:29:40.553
for a certain period
00:29:40.553 --> 00:29:42.306
The porter's quarters were there, Vie's was there.
00:29:42.306 --> 00:29:45.522
So a lot of the businesses and things were down here.
00:29:45.522 --> 00:29:48.122
The church was here and there was _.
00:29:48.122 --> 00:29:50.026
But that's sort of a bit later too.
00:29:50.026 --> 00:29:51.930
So there's a different overlapping of eras _.
00:29:51.930 --> 00:29:54.441
But like I said, I mean, the reason why black folks left,
00:29:54.441 --> 00:30:01.849
it really wasn't, uh, it wasn't like Africville [in Halifax, Nova Scotia], it wasn't like, people were all living there,
00:30:01.849 --> 00:30:03.211
the land was expropriated, and then it was bulldozed, right?
00:30:03.226 --> 00:30:03.726
It wasn't like that.
00:30:03.726 --> 00:30:08.370
It was much more like the plans were instituted 10 years beforehand,
00:30:08.370 --> 00:30:14.361
people were,um, given the message thatt this neighbourhood is going down, right?
00:30:14.361 --> 00:30:20.537
We're building these projects, and you're gonna live there.
00:30:20.537 --> 00:30:23.742
So people got out, it wasn't as thought they were, yknow,
00:30:23.742 --> 00:30:26.389
had their house expropriated out from under them.
00:30:26.389 --> 00:30:28.050
Bulldozed, right?
00:30:28.050 --> 00:30:30.945
It was more like, people got out of their own accord.
00:30:31.237 --> 00:30:33.749
[audience comment:] Do you want to just contextualize Africville?
00:30:33.749 --> 00:30:35.654
Yeah, I don't know if people know,
00:30:35.654 --> 00:30:37.616
Africville, I mean, I'm not an expert on Africville either,
00:30:37.616 --> 00:30:40.992
as I understand it, that was um, in Halifax.
00:30:40.992 --> 00:30:47.064
It was a black community that was, it was a much faster expropriation as far as I know.
00:30:47.064 --> 00:30:51.126
And it was taken over and... what was put there?
00:30:51.126 --> 00:30:56.784
[audience comment] I think it just ended up being a vacant space for a long time.
00:30:56.784 --> 00:30:59.965
It was supposed to be a roadway, or some other kind of urban development
00:30:59.965 --> 00:31:01.622
that actually didn't materialize.
00:31:01.622 --> 00:31:04.144
[Wayde] Yeah. This same idea, that same language of blight, right?
00:31:04.144 --> 00:31:08.012
That the neighbourhood was a blight on the civic body
00:31:08.012 --> 00:31:11.823
and had to be renewed in some kind of way, which meant knocked down.
00:31:12.746 --> 00:31:16.351
Um, the last little bit, just before I stop,
00:31:16.367 --> 00:31:20.786
um, is the why. Why is it important?
00:31:20.786 --> 00:31:25.623
I think, um, partly, to talk about Hogan's Alley and remembering it knocks down several myths.
00:31:25.623 --> 00:31:28.809
One is that myth of black absence in the city, right?
00:31:28.809 --> 00:31:30.128
So yeah, folks are here.
00:31:30.128 --> 00:31:32.519
Um, yknow, if you look at those numbers,
00:31:32.519 --> 00:31:35.433
it's a little bit less than 1% of the population.
00:31:35.433 --> 00:31:38.417
So, you think, "I don't see a lot of black people in the city",
00:31:38.417 --> 00:31:40.715
you have to sort pf re-train your eyes.
00:31:40.715 --> 00:31:43.758
It's kind of like, well, look on the streets,
00:31:43.758 --> 00:31:46.590
and, uh, out of every hundred people who walk by, one of them is black.
00:31:46.590 --> 00:31:47.891
Does that sound a bit like Vancouver?
00:31:47.891 --> 00:31:48.912
Yeah it does.
00:31:48.912 --> 00:31:51.012
Well, that's because that's how Vancovuer is...[audience laughing]
00:31:52.720 --> 00:31:53.835
That's how it works.
00:31:53.835 --> 00:31:56.575
So the myth of black absesce is something I'm always pushing against.
00:31:56.575 --> 00:32:00.508
Um, one of the things, I mean, there are more black folks in Greater Vancouver
00:32:00.508 --> 00:32:04.028
than there are in Nova Scotia,
00:32:04.028 --> 00:32:07.117
and people don't believe me when i say that,
00:32:07.117 --> 00:32:09.941
but I'll send you to Stats Canada to look at the numbers.
00:32:09.941 --> 00:32:15.389
Um, there's a lot folks here, it's just a very big city with a lot of other people here too.
00:32:15.389 --> 00:32:17.241
So it's, an optical illusion.
00:32:17.241 --> 00:32:22.447
[audience comment] And, and to your point too, Nova Scotia has held on to the historical presence.
00:32:22.447 --> 00:32:28.758
[Wayde] Yeah, it's older, it's older presence, it's very rooted, uh, more homogeneous in certain ways,
00:32:28.758 --> 00:32:31.451
And so it's been, we know, well,
00:32:31.451 --> 00:32:34.674
I'm not sure that's true that everyone knows there's a black community there,
00:32:34.674 --> 00:32:38.371
but I think they have a high profile nationally, more than we do, that's for sure.
00:32:38.371 --> 00:32:40.182
Um, another myth that it knocks down
00:32:40.182 --> 00:32:42.509
is the myth of black ahistoricality.
00:32:42.509 --> 00:32:46.823
yknow, blacks haven't been here for, yknow, a long time,
00:32:46.823 --> 00:32:51.640
but blacks have been here, yknow, from before this was a province, right?
00:32:51.640 --> 00:32:53.046
In the colonial days.
00:32:53.046 --> 00:32:54.782
All the way back, including in Vancouver.
00:32:54.782 --> 00:32:59.826
So, some of the first black folks who were here were, uh, here at the very beginning.
00:32:59.826 --> 00:33:04.377
So, there are blacks all through the history, um.
00:33:04.377 --> 00:33:07.290
There are different waves of immigration, that's true,
00:33:07.290 --> 00:33:10.229
and there's some sort of, uh, waves and recessions,
00:33:10.229 --> 00:33:13.373
but uh, but they've been here all along.
00:33:13.373 --> 00:33:14.866
So that's another myth that it knocks down.
00:33:14.866 --> 00:33:17.706
The other is this uh, this whole, Vancouverism,
00:33:17.706 --> 00:33:22.712
that Vancouver is this model of urban planning,
00:33:22.712 --> 00:33:26.668
this sort of self-congratulatory, let's all pat each other on the backs
00:33:26.668 --> 00:33:29.424
about how wonderful Vancouver is and how horrible those other cities are
00:33:29.424 --> 00:33:32.056
that did those terrible things to people.
00:33:32.056 --> 00:33:37.071
Y'know, it's like, uh I'm always saying, if you read like Douglas Copeland talk about Vancouver
00:33:37.071 --> 00:33:40.426
he said something like "Vancouver never lost its innocence
00:33:40.426 --> 00:33:42.969
because it never put a freeway into the city
00:33:42.969 --> 00:33:45.006
and so on and so forth, right.
00:33:45.006 --> 00:33:48.031
Well, I want to debunk that. That's not true.
00:33:48.031 --> 00:33:50.074
There WAS a community that paid the price for this.
00:33:50.074 --> 00:33:54.505
We DID have urban renewal here and it did mess with people for years and years and years,
00:33:54.505 --> 00:33:56.019
it made their lives really hard,
00:33:56.019 --> 00:33:59.218
and eventually pushed this one community out altogether.
00:33:59.218 --> 00:34:04.796
So, um, it was a pernicious plan, it did happen here, and it was the same as everywhere else.
00:34:04.796 --> 00:34:09.374
So there's nothing really particularly wonderful about Vancouver's planning history at all.
00:34:09.374 --> 00:34:11.344
Um, and that leads up to my last point,
00:34:11.344 --> 00:34:13.931
which is that, uh, where we're sort of left with,
00:34:13.931 --> 00:34:15.736
so often when people ask me about Hogan's Alley
00:34:15.736 --> 00:34:17.567
and they ask what should be done down there now,
00:34:17.567 --> 00:34:21.485
and what do you think the community should be like now?
00:34:21.485 --> 00:34:26.497
And [coughing] um, the answer is pretty simple.
00:34:26.497 --> 00:34:28.946
It's the same thing that should have happened then,
00:34:28.946 --> 00:34:32.522
which is, you know, the people who live there now,
00:34:32.522 --> 00:34:37.838
not the people that own there, or the people who are speculating there, yknow, or anything like that,
00:34:37.838 --> 00:34:41.855
but the people who live there are the experts on what should happen in that place, right?
00:34:41.855 --> 00:34:46.081
So the people who live their now in, yknow, what used to be called Hogan's Alley,
00:34:46.081 --> 00:34:48.305
who now talk about it as the Downtown Eastside,
00:34:48.305 --> 00:34:52.443
um, the parallels are very clear between how
00:34:52.443 --> 00:34:54.697
that neighbourhood is spoken about now,
00:34:54.697 --> 00:34:59.843
and how the slum of Hogan's Alley was spoken about, uh, back then, right?
00:34:59.843 --> 00:35:04.935
It's the same kind of, uh, othering voice that talks about, uh, that talks about, uh,
00:35:04.935 --> 00:35:07.675
this community as though they're a problem
00:35:07.675 --> 00:35:10.183
that we need to figure out what to do with, right?
00:35:10.183 --> 00:35:13.712
And really the answer is that people down there know what should be done to their neighbourhood
00:35:13.712 --> 00:35:15.849
They are the experts on what should happen to the neighbourhood.
00:35:15.849 --> 00:35:17.335
Consult with them
00:35:17.335 --> 00:35:18.356
That's everybody that lives there,
00:35:18.356 --> 00:35:22.118
people who are renting there, people who live on the streets there, um
00:35:22.118 --> 00:35:23.558
people who are using that neighbourhood
00:35:23.558 --> 00:35:25.787
are the ones who should decide what happens down there.
00:35:25.787 --> 00:35:29.456
That's what didn't happen uh, dusing the 40's, 50's and 60's,
00:35:29.456 --> 00:35:33.821
And that's why we had the situation that destroyed the community.
00:35:33.821 --> 00:35:36.189
Now it's no longer really the black community at all, right?
00:35:36.189 --> 00:35:41.158
So that's not, um, the claim that we have on it is really this historical claim,
00:35:41.158 --> 00:35:45.756
so I'm pushing for some kind of memorial in physical form down there.
00:35:45.756 --> 00:35:48.310
There are a few things at play, and things that have happened,
00:35:48.310 --> 00:35:51.607
I used to say you know there's no marker down there that there was ever a black community,
00:35:51.607 --> 00:35:54.533
and now that that's changed I can't say that anymore.
00:35:54.533 --> 00:35:56.530
There's the Jimi Hendrix shrine is there.
00:35:56.530 --> 00:36:04.312
It's very eccentric, a very Vancouver memorial [audience laughing]
00:36:04.312 --> 00:36:07.397
And there's, very very recently, there's the Hogan's Alley Cafe
00:36:07.397 --> 00:36:09.660
right at the corner of Gore and Union.
00:36:09.660 --> 00:36:12.087
So the name is down there now.
00:36:12.087 --> 00:36:15.245
So, um, there are some things there now.
00:36:15.245 --> 00:36:17.996
I'd like there to be something a bit more official and, uh, something that's
00:36:17.996 --> 00:36:21.468
maybe interpretive, to maybe give some sense of the history.
00:36:21.468 --> 00:36:23.233
So we'll keep pushing for that.
00:36:23.233 --> 00:36:24.673
I think some things are in play.
00:36:24.673 --> 00:36:27.831
There's um, yknow, there's some stuff happening,
00:36:27.831 --> 00:36:31.967
so I feel like we've hit that critical mass of uh educating people,
00:36:31.967 --> 00:36:36.097
Now people kind of know about the history, there are some things happening,
00:36:36.097 --> 00:36:39.905
I think over the next few years, there will be some memorial there.
00:36:39.905 --> 00:36:41.763
Uh, in some kind of form.
00:36:41.763 --> 00:36:44.339
So, um, tha's great.
00:36:44.339 --> 00:36:52.072
Um, but, uh, the other thing too is to continue talking about it,
00:36:52.072 --> 00:36:55.230
and keeping it as a living history, so, yknow, sometimes,
00:36:55.230 --> 00:37:01.871
I know somebody said the thing about how memorials are is that they allow us to forget about something.
00:37:01.871 --> 00:37:09.069
And I hope that's not the case, I hope it's, uhu, I hope we can keep, continue to connect up the
00:37:09.069 --> 00:37:11.438
past to what's going on now.
00:37:11.438 --> 00:37:13.713
And previous speakers are a good example of that, so,
00:37:13.713 --> 00:37:16.039
recognizing that racism still happens,
00:37:16.039 --> 00:37:17.510
still happens against black people,
00:37:17.510 --> 00:37:21.135
still happens in very particualar ways against black people, um,
00:37:21.135 --> 00:37:23.894
we maybe hear those scripts player over and over again,
00:37:23.894 --> 00:37:26.159
and we have to continue to fight them,
00:37:26.159 --> 00:37:28.388
Um, things have changed, , it is a different world,
00:37:28.388 --> 00:37:29.967
it's not the exact same demographic,
00:37:29.967 --> 00:37:31.778
um, things do move around a bit,
00:37:31.778 --> 00:37:34.750
but there are some fundamental issues that we still face
00:37:34.750 --> 00:37:37.212
and uh I think we have to continue fighting them.
00:37:37.212 --> 00:37:41.066
My role in that right now is to fight for this memory,
00:37:41.066 --> 00:37:43.655
so, um, I'll continue to do that.
00:37:43.655 --> 00:37:46.766
I'll stop when I just show you one photograph.
00:37:47.612 --> 00:37:50.943
I hadn't seen this photograph until, uh, Sunday night.
00:37:50.943 --> 00:37:56.496
So at East End Blues and All That Jazz, which was where Vancouver Moving Theatre
00:37:56.496 --> 00:38:02.243
did a wonderful,uh, show that had some of the voices of some of the original residents
00:38:02.243 --> 00:38:04.658
of Hogan's Alley, the elders from the black community, um,
00:38:04.658 --> 00:38:09.302
created this fantastic review,
00:38:09.302 --> 00:38:12.460
it's kind of like a cabaret history of the community.
00:38:12.460 --> 00:38:15.589
Um, that's over now, it ran on Sunday night.
00:38:15.589 --> 00:38:18.822
But, um, Chip Gibson, who was there, was narrating it
00:38:18.822 --> 00:38:22.491
and shared with us this image, so I took this from the program.
00:38:22.491 --> 00:38:26.658
This is an image of the congregation of the African Methodist Episcopal Church,
00:38:26.658 --> 00:38:31.450
around 1935, at a picnic at Stanley Park.
00:38:31.450 --> 00:38:34.319
And when I saw this, it was just like, that's it right there,
00:38:34.319 --> 00:38:38.604
that's the kind of thing we're trying to keep alive.
00:38:38.804 --> 00:38:42.761
The memory that this is Vancouver, right?
00:38:45.499 --> 00:38:49.599
Um, folks dressed very nicely [audience laughing]
00:38:54.353 --> 00:38:59.689
Um, so now I'll open it up to questions and we can have a bit of a discussion.
00:39:03.846 --> 00:39:07.497
[audience comment:] Wayde, I just want to say about the Stanley Park picture,
00:39:07.497 --> 00:39:09.361
um, hi everybody, my name's Vanessa,
00:39:09.361 --> 00:39:16.082
I grew up in his city as well, and I know our family, the Caribbean community would meet in Stanley Park,
00:39:16.082 --> 00:39:20.332
the cricket matches used to look like that, and we used to have that many black people
00:39:20.332 --> 00:39:22.189
in Stanley Park_ playing cricket, but...]
00:39:22.189 --> 00:39:23.861
[Wayde] Anyone take a picture?
00:39:23.861 --> 00:39:25.626
[audience laughing]
00:39:25.626 --> 00:39:27.483
[commenter: I know! I was thinking that, but I don't think we have one.
00:39:27.483 --> 00:39:30.956
But I think I might have to take a little digging around for that]
00:39:30.956 --> 00:39:33.010
[Wayde] What this shows me, that's the other thing,
00:39:33.010 --> 00:39:36.632
the archive, this stuff is not in the city archives, right? There's some stuff there.
00:39:36.632 --> 00:39:43.343
Where it is right now is in family albums and in people's attics and things like that.
00:39:43.343 --> 00:39:45.293
...terrified if things get lost.
00:39:45.293 --> 00:39:51.528
And you can see this is a damaged photo, but , that keeps me awake nights
00:39:51.528 --> 00:39:56.726
Thinking... what gets tossed out or thrown away or forgotten_
00:39:56.726 --> 00:40:00.247
[audience comment] First of all, this is really great, very enlightening, but I have a question.
00:40:00.247 --> 00:40:10.347
[can't make out] I was curious as to _any of this _ archives ...
00:40:10.347 --> 00:40:16.671
So I take it that none of this was documented at that time, I don't know...
00:40:16.671 --> 00:40:19.241
I was curious as to, is any of this in the municipal archives?
00:40:19.512 --> 00:40:22.559
and if so, why isn't it being implemented in the curriculum_]
00:40:22.559 --> 00:40:25.940
...?
00:40:25.940 --> 00:40:33.566
so, like looking at maybe 2036, which is the _ point, you know, getting this stuff...?
00:40:33.566 --> 00:40:38.026
[Wayde] It's interesting, you know, in terms of curriculum, it seems like the stuff about
00:40:38.026 --> 00:40:40.682
the black pioneers, from Victoria, from the Gold Rush,
00:40:40.682 --> 00:40:43.824
that that's entered first or something like that.
00:40:43.824 --> 00:40:46.106
I've done a couple talks at high schools where I'm talking about that,
00:40:46.106 --> 00:40:48.070
and they're like "yeah yeah we know, we did a section on that"
00:40:48.070 --> 00:40:53.644
?_
00:40:54.225 --> 00:40:59.406
Maybe that was a special class, teacher.
00:40:59.406 --> 00:41:02.248
Um, but it does seem like that's a little more well known,
00:41:02.248 --> 00:41:06.516
and that's sort of the next thing.
00:41:06.516 --> 00:41:09.999
In terms of the archives, I mean I know the archives are very open to acquiring this kind of stuff
00:41:09.999 --> 00:41:15.015
It's a funny thing _ at a certain point one of the members of the group,
00:41:15.015 --> 00:41:19.134
uh, Sheilagh Cahill, was saying, we went to the archives, couldn't find much stuff,
00:41:19.134 --> 00:41:22.631
and she was saying, you know, they're not looking hard enough.
00:41:22.631 --> 00:41:25.825
It's like, there's stuff in the back, stuff that got in boxes back there
00:41:25.825 --> 00:41:27.596
that they just haven't found,
00:41:27.596 --> 00:41:29.000
there's something on he black community,
00:41:29.000 --> 00:41:30.108
there's gotta be, right?
00:41:30.108 --> 00:41:32.175
And I was like, there's nothing in the back, it's not a conspiracy,
00:41:32.175 --> 00:41:34.009
they're not trying to like keep it from us.
00:41:34.009 --> 00:41:35.785
They're archivists, if they've got a picture they'll put it up.
00:41:35.785 --> 00:41:38.600
She's like, no no, they're not looking hard enough for it.
00:41:38.600 --> 00:41:41.775
And so she was, her prompting really, we wrote a letter to them
00:41:41.775 --> 00:41:45.480
saying well we're this group, we're hoping that you have some material on the black community
00:41:45.480 --> 00:41:47.625
we have very very little.
00:41:47.625 --> 00:41:51.836
And so, I was more thinking this could get them to thinking about acquiring stuff, right?
00:41:51.836 --> 00:41:56.811
And it took a while, it was about a year later and they wrote back to me
00:41:56.811 --> 00:42:00.108
and they said, well, yknow, we got your letter and we were thinking about it,
00:42:00.108 --> 00:42:01.603
and you know, we looked through our files,
00:42:01.603 --> 00:42:04.444
and we found a box in the back.
00:42:04.444 --> 00:42:07.492
[audience laughing]
00:42:07.492 --> 00:42:08.421
I swear to you.
00:42:08.421 --> 00:42:11.997
And it was the images from the expropriation.
00:42:11.997 --> 00:42:14.179
It was the city's photographs they took of the,
00:42:14.179 --> 00:42:18.220
of the, um, buildings that were extant in the late 60's,
00:42:18.220 --> 00:42:20.193
um, to price them,
00:42:20.193 --> 00:42:22.366
And they found this huge thing _[audience laughing]
00:42:22.366 --> 00:42:28.924
So, yknow,...?...
00:42:28.924 --> 00:42:33.135
But anyway, they were, they've also put up a big section on African Canadian stuff.
00:42:33.135 --> 00:42:36.645
They've actually, at that, before then it was really hard to find stuff,
00:42:36.645 --> 00:42:39.280
because nothign was organized by the community, it was just,
00:42:39.280 --> 00:42:41.834
you already had to know a person's name to find them, images of a black person
00:42:41.834 --> 00:42:46.130
and now, that's easier to find.
00:42:46.130 --> 00:42:47.447
You can go looking for the black community.
00:42:47.447 --> 00:42:49.520
But we still don't have a lot of stuff.
00:42:51.074 --> 00:43:12.554
[audience comment] People don't always recognize?
00:43:12.554 --> 00:43:14.366
[Wayde] Yeah I think that's very true.
00:43:14.366 --> 00:43:18.917
And I think that's partly why, um, yknow, it takes a person that's a bit outsiderish
00:43:18.917 --> 00:43:23.886
like myself, who's like yknow very light skinned, not a member of that particular community,
00:43:23.886 --> 00:43:28.205
um, my dad came as an immigrant in the 50's, he didn't live down there,
00:43:28.205 --> 00:43:31.920
um, an academic, they were a few steps removed from all of that stuff
00:43:31.920 --> 00:43:35.728
partly, it takes a person who's kind of thinking of it in these cultural terms,
00:43:35.728 --> 00:43:38.206
and not just like their family's history sometimes.
00:43:38.206 --> 00:43:40.233
Although, there are people who have hooked up with us who are
00:43:40.233 --> 00:43:44.562
within the community, from the community, who were activists during that period,
00:43:44.562 --> 00:43:50.111
and they were much more interested in thinking culturally about it collectively
00:43:50.111 --> 00:44:00.852
[audience comment, cannot make it out]
00:44:00.852 --> 00:44:05.171
[anothe audience comment] probably the oldest person in the room _
00:44:05.171 --> 00:44:10.206
I was born in Vancouver, in 1945,
00:44:10.206 --> 00:44:14.784
and I didn't know anything about Hogan's Alley.
00:44:14.784 --> 00:44:18.360
Um, the only black person I ever heard about was Joe For...
00:44:18.360 --> 00:44:19.892
[Wayde] Joe Fortes
00:44:19.892 --> 00:44:24.443
[audience commenter] because he, well my mom called him Joe Ford, he taught her to swim
00:44:24.443 --> 00:44:32.013
Down at English Bay, when she came out from Winnipeg in I'd say she was 8,
00:44:32.013 --> 00:44:40.140
so that would've been in uh, 1916, they moved here from Winnipeg, and Joe For taught her to swim
00:44:40.140 --> 00:44:49.289
And that was, as far as I knew, until I was in university and spent a lot of my time
00:44:49.289 --> 00:44:54.011
?with the Caribbean students right?
00:44:54.011 --> 00:44:58.344
I mean that was the only black in Vancouver,
00:44:58.344 --> 00:45:17.663
uh, until, so that would be mid 60's, early 60's. ?
00:45:17.663 --> 00:45:22.502
[Wayde] It's funny, you get things like, in, um, Rosemary Brown's autobiography
00:45:22.502 --> 00:45:27.415
she talks about, yknow, coming to the city with your husband in the 50's,
00:45:27.415 --> 00:45:30.574
and there's this big chunk of autobiography where they're just like
00:45:30.574 --> 00:45:33.546
trying to rent from places, experiencing all this racism,
00:45:33.546 --> 00:45:35.589
trying to figure Vancouver out,
00:45:35.589 --> 00:45:38.285
and they're like, this is so weird, there's no black people in this city, it's bizarre.
00:45:38.285 --> 00:45:48.151
And then they, years, they bump into, uh, a black couple and they realize there's Hogan's Alley.
00:45:48.151 --> 00:45:50.729
they realize there's this East End black community.
00:45:50.729 --> 00:45:51.797
And they really had no idea it was there.
00:45:51.797 --> 00:45:57.602
So, that's possible__ the circles you're in.
00:45:57.602 --> 00:46:02.263
[audience] Thank you, that was awesome. Um, I don't know if you have any answer to this,
00:46:02.263 --> 00:46:07.354
but um I'm wondering if there's any specific stories or histories that you know of
00:46:07.354 --> 00:46:11.209
of the black community's relationship to other communities of colour,
00:46:11.209 --> 00:46:15.065
particularly Indigenous communities_ it's not an easy answer,
00:46:15.065 --> 00:46:21.147
and hearing some of the Chinese elders talk about some of the different stories
00:46:21.147 --> 00:46:25.433
of the Chinese community's relationship to Indigenous communities in particular.
00:46:25.433 --> 00:46:30.346
So, during the race riots there was a lot of untold stories of the Musqueam and Squamish
00:46:30.346 --> 00:46:33.686
taking in a lot of folks from Chinatown during the race riots.
00:46:33.686 --> 00:46:37.540
But at the same time, a lot of conflict around the laying of the railroads, of course.
00:46:37.540 --> 00:46:40.373
So I'm wondering if there are stories in the black community_
00:46:40.373 --> 00:46:47.478
the relationship_ Chinatown, or the Musqueam, Squamish, or particularly the relationship
00:46:47.478 --> 00:46:49.946
?__.
00:46:49.946 --> 00:46:54.862
[Wayde] Yeah, well, in terms of BC, that's a very big question.
00:46:54.862 --> 00:46:57.556
Maybe I'll just talk about Vancouver specifically.
00:46:57.556 --> 00:47:00.375
I mean, it's kind of, it's a really interesting question.
00:47:00.375 --> 00:47:04.986
It's kind of one of the untold sides of the story, right?
00:47:04.986 --> 00:47:09.373
_that whole proximity to Chinatown, there's a whole lot of attraction for Chinese folks.
00:47:09.373 --> 00:47:11.348
I know Nora Hendrix talks about it kind of jokingly,
00:47:11.348 --> 00:47:16.039
about trying to cook sould food while shopping in Chinatown
00:47:16.039 --> 00:47:17.295
[audience laughing]
00:47:17.295 --> 00:47:20.358
And it can be done, right.
00:47:20.358 --> 00:47:21.844
Things like that.
00:47:21.844 --> 00:47:23.609
I'd love to have some of those recipes.
00:47:23.609 --> 00:47:26.292
See these are some of the things that are lost.
00:47:26.292 --> 00:47:30.853
But yeah, there was a lot of interaction, um, and when we look at,
00:47:30.853 --> 00:47:37.308
there's a photograph of the congregation, there's a later one, of the African Methodist Episcopal
00:47:37.308 --> 00:47:39.601
church that has some Asian faces in it.
00:47:39.601 --> 00:47:46.039
So you're like, I'd love to know who these people are, and what the interactions were like
00:47:46.039 --> 00:47:48.426
It's just kind of here and there sporadically.
00:47:48.426 --> 00:47:50.164
But in terms of First Nations people,
00:47:50.164 --> 00:47:54.013
this is another one of those stories that I can't figure out where I heard this,
00:47:54.013 --> 00:47:56.767
I have the memory of it now, but I can't remember if I've read it somewhere,
00:47:56.767 --> 00:47:58.810
or if somebody told it to me.
00:47:58.810 --> 00:48:09.128
But, um, somebody, um, said that at Vanier Park, like where um the um...
00:48:09.128 --> 00:48:15.981
Planetarium is, right, that that used to be called Brown Skin Beach, when Kits was,
00:48:15.981 --> 00:48:20.527
So sites were segregated, Vancouver wasn't segregated as a city,
00:48:20.527 --> 00:48:22.604
but sites were, and Kits Beach was,
00:48:22.604 --> 00:48:27.742
so black folks and native folks couldn't got there to swim, probably Asians couldnt either,
00:48:27.742 --> 00:48:32.498
And um, so they would go there, what was left of the beach there at Vanier Park,
00:48:32.498 --> 00:48:37.727
and it was called Brown Skin Beach because that was where indians and black folks would go swim.
00:48:37.727 --> 00:48:42.324
Um, I wish I could corroborate that, but it's one of those things you hear
00:48:42.324 --> 00:48:46.690
and you should have writen down where that was or who told you.
00:48:46.690 --> 00:48:48.408
But I don't know. I haven't heard anything since,
00:48:48.408 --> 00:48:50.922
so if anybody knows anything more about that, let me know.
00:48:50.922 --> 00:48:56.906
But yeah, it was such a mixed neighbourhood, yeah.
00:48:56.906 --> 00:48:59.418
James Douglas is Victoria...
00:48:59.418 --> 00:49:11.792
[audience comment, cannot make out]
00:49:11.792 --> 00:49:15.870
[Wayde] Yeah, he [Jimi Hendrix] was here sporadically, it was kind of like, it sounds like,
00:49:15.870 --> 00:49:20.984
I mean, his parents were pretty bad alcoholics and had lots of problems,
00:49:20.984 --> 00:49:26.024
and um it sounds like when they, when things completely broke down in Seattle,
00:49:26.024 --> 00:49:30.081
his dad would send him up to Vancouver to live with Nora.
00:49:30.081 --> 00:49:33.123
And so he was never here really for a long uninterrupted stretch of time.
00:49:33.123 --> 00:49:36.752
He was here long enough to go to school here, he went to elementary school
00:49:36.752 --> 00:49:38.516
for awhile.
00:49:38.516 --> 00:49:43.137
Um, so, but it would be a portion of a school year, that kind of thing.
00:49:43.137 --> 00:49:47.456
So, and, mostly as a kidm when he was little.
00:49:47.456 --> 00:49:52.797
And later on as a young man would start playing music and stuff like that, he would play up here.
00:49:52.797 --> 00:49:56.512
So he did a bunch of shows here, before he hit it really huge, right.
00:49:56.512 --> 00:50:00.041
And um, there are stories of him playing The Smiling Buddha and places like that.
00:50:00.041 --> 00:50:03.084
So he was here, but it wasn't really like this was his home town.
00:50:03.084 --> 00:50:04.589
It was more like...
00:50:04.589 --> 00:50:09.794
[audience comment, cant make out]
00:50:09.794 --> 00:50:12.617
[Wayde] I think becaue she [Nora Hendrix] was one of those people who was, her life really
00:50:12.617 --> 00:50:15.692
spans the whole history of the period.
00:50:15.692 --> 00:50:19.267
She was really here kind of at the beginning of it, very very early.
00:50:19.267 --> 00:50:24.097
She was here at the foundation of the church, helped to establish it,
00:50:24.097 --> 00:50:27.064
and was here all throughout, and stayed in the East End.
00:50:27.064 --> 00:50:29.805
She was there, right up until her last days.
00:50:29.805 --> 00:50:33.989
They did take her to Seattle, because she had no more family left, she outlived everybody.
00:50:33.989 --> 00:50:36.868
So they took her down to Seattle to die, but that's it.
00:50:36.868 --> 00:50:38.586
Apparently, on here death bed she was saying
00:50:38.586 --> 00:50:40.908
OK I gotta get better so I can go back home to Canada.
00:50:40.908 --> 00:50:46.435
And um, so she was in Strathcona right up until the end.
00:50:46.435 --> 00:50:51.737
So she's sort of this person who just saw everything, just this repository of all this information
00:50:51.737 --> 99:59:59.999
about the community.