Canada and the Ku Klux Klan are not an obvious partnership. I explored their relationship on this ramble around the city centre. My stroll started at the intersection of Toronto and Adelaide Streets, where the Ku Klux Klan rented office space in 1926. I walked around the block, which was filled with historic stone-clad and new glass-and-steel architecture. Most of the buildings had ground-floor stores and offices above.
The Ku Klux Klan were on a massive expansion drive in Canada in the 1920s. It was so successful that it seems they had supporters in every province. In Saskatchewan, they had some 40,000 paid up members. So far from being a fringe white supremacy organization, the KKK influenced the politics of the province.
Yet, whenever I think of the men in white robes, it is images from the USA that come to mind. You know, the ones of burning crosses and Black bodies hanging from trees. And white families grinning as they lynched and barbecued Black people for fun.
The Ku Klux Klan never lynched a Black person in Canada.
The KKK did lynch an Indigenous youth in 1884. Louie Sam was murdered in British Columbia by a mob from the USA. The rabble crossed the then fluid border, and killed the teenager, with the possible connivance of the Canadian police officers who were supposed to guard the youth. Louie Sam was the scapegoat for the robbery and death of a white man. The two main suspects in the murder were white and were part of the lynch mob.
Delivering Lynching Postcards
I drifted pass the historic Toronto First Post Office on Adelaide Street. The old red-bricked building was three storey high with plenty of slim rectangular windows. A flight of steps lead to the large front door.
Albert Jackson was the first Black postman in Toronto. He was hired in 1882 and had to fight to do his job. There was something about his skin that coloured his white colleagues the wrong way.
Lynching was as American as apple pie. People made, sold or collected postcards of their favourite local lynchings. These lynching postcards were popular from the 1880s until the 1930s. They were sent through the regular mail.
Postcards are souvenirs, ephemera of vacations, the ‘don’t you wish you were here enjoying this trip, just like me’ note. I have sent scores in my time. Postcards evoke memories of happy times. I suppose they did the same for the white families posing next to the bashed, burnt and butchered Black corpses hanging in their breeze.
I wondered how many lynching postcards Albert Jackson had to see, touch and deliver? He worked in the post office for almost 40 years.
Billie Holiday sang in Toronto many times. Her torch song is Strange Fruit, which she recorded in 1939. A jazz singer with white gardenias in her hair, framing her face like a halo, singing about the southern trees, and their strange fruit of Black bodies hanging from the poplar trees. Holiday might have seen the fruits herself or knew people who had. Lynchings were that close and personal.
Canadian Values
I strolled up to Dundas Street and followed it all the way out to the east end of the city. It took an hour but I needed to clear my head from the mess of academic concepts, theories and frameworks feasting in my head.
I stopped at 1439 Dundas Street East. Today it’s a private house on a busy residential street. The houses here are nondescript – two storeys with a large verandah set in a pocket-sized front yards. They are detached or semi-detached. Look straight down the street to the south, and the blue waters of Lake Ontario shimmered in the distance.
This particular house was the headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan in the early 1980s. So, some six decades after the KKK had left Toronto, they were back in the city. Some may argue that they had never left at all. Their latest office did not last long this time, as local residents formed an anti-racist group, and drove them out of town.
It’s almost a century since the KKK were popular in Canada. Their brand of patriotism was based on protect, promote and power the WASPS – white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, do they still used that term today? – resonated with the country. The Ku Klux Klan were anti anyone that did not look or sound like them. Their targets were Catholics, Jews, French speakers, immigrants, Indigenous and Black people.
The Canadian Ku Klux Klan were proud of their patriotism. A maple leaf was sewn on their robes and they often posed with the British flag. 50 Places: A Black History Travel Guide of London
I turned north and walked up to Gerrard Street, passing the Chinese and Vietnamese fruit and vegetable stores, an Indigenous restaurant, and the restaurants and sari shops of the once mighty Little India. My next stop was Monarch Park. In the 1980s the Ku Klux Klan stood outside the nearby high school gates, handing out flyers in a recruitment drive.
Gone Camping
Lynchings are part of the collective memory and trauma from slavery for African Americans. In her book Black Faces, White Spaces Carolyn Finney writes that these ghosts of lynchings form part of the cognitive map of the outdoors for African Americans.
In other words, it’s hard to think of going camping and relaxing in the woods around a campfire, when the ghosts of the KKK and their lynchings haunt your imagination.
But what about for Black Canadians? The Ku Klux Klan was here. But, remember, we have no history of lynching Black people in this country. And yet we are still reluctant to go into the wilderness. Sailing on a Half Moon
Perhaps lynching links to the deeper issue of restricting Black mobility. In the cities we feel safe, as there are more of us and there are witnesses. The countryside, the woods, the wilderness. There are few Black people there. Add the fear of white violence. This fear – based on historic reality – limits Black mobility, confining us to spaces where we feel safe.
The Ku Klux Klan enforced that geographical separation and containment. They did that literally in the past. Today their presence or artefacts does that psychologically. One can buy KKK Halloween costumes online. And it seems that every year or so some kid or student group will have a fun party wearing those costumes.
Nations tell stories of the things that they consider the cornerstone of their identity. In Canada, this means that we are nice and polite, we love the great outdoors, and that we are proud of our multicultural cities. All of that is true. And the presence of the Ku Klux Klan is also true.
© Jacqueline L. Scott. Wanted: Donations to support the blog.
Black Outdoors 
Thanks for educating. The myth-busting role of historical fact is certainly part of the rebuilding of the Canadian identity. That identity is laced with historical denial.
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