Ontario's African-Canadian Heritage: Collected Writings by Fred Landon, 1918-1967

by Karolyn Smardz Frost (Editor), Bryan Walls (Editor), Hilary Bates Neary (Editor)

Ontario's African-Canadian Heritage is composed of the collected works of Professor Fred Landon, who for more than 60 years wrote about African-Canadian history. The selected articles have, for the most part, never been surpassed by more recent research and offer a wealth of data on slavery, abolition, the Underground Railroad, and more, providing unique insights into the abundance of African-Canadian heritage in Ontario. Though much of Landons research was published in the Ontario Historical Societys journal, Ontario History, some of the articles reproduced here appeared in such prestigious U.S. publications as the Journal of Negro History.

This volume, illustrated and extensively annotated, includes research by the editors into the life of Fred Landon. It is the Legacy Project for the Bicentennial of the Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade, an initiative of the OHS, funded by a "Roots of Freedom" grant received from the Ontario Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration.

368 pages, Paperback

First published December 4, 2008

About the author

Karolyn Smardz Frost is an archaeologist, historian, educator, and author specializing in African American/Canadian transnationalism. She is Senior Research Fellow for the Harriet Tubman Institute, York University, Toronto, and a Harrison McCain Visiting Professor at Nova Scotia’s Acadia University. Her biography of fugitive slaves Thornton and Lucie Blackburn, I’ve Got a Home in Glory Land: A Lost Tale of the Underground Railroad, won the Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction, Canada’s highest literary honor.

Reviews

[P.M.C. Smy · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are few resources that cover this kind of detail. Not the Underground Railroad but the life of those refugee slaves who found themselves in Ontario.
The book is highly repetitive, due to the fact that it is a collection of articles - so in each article similar background stories and facts are repeated. But this is a resource and reference book, not a novel.
There is some amazing history covered here. I grew up not far from this part of southwestern Ontario and the details I have never heard before.
Great work.