Conspicuous Peripheries: Black Identity, Memory, and Community in Chatham, ON, 1860-1980

The history of the black population in Chatham, Ontario is incomplete by virtue of partiality and distortion. This partiality and distortion has had real, if difficult to quantify costs for Chatham's local black population. While it is a worthwhile and necessary project to recuperate lost local histories for their own sake in order to encourage and inform the reframing of larger national and historically more influential histories, this study also focuses on the history of black people who lived in Chatham in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in order to explore situated black lives that were actively constructed and performed. This deliberate attempt to expand the historiography of blacks in Canada from that of black-as-object to black-as-subject required an investigation into the local history of blacks in Chatham, their socio-philosophical and socio-economic heritages and the construction of particular identities shaped by race, class, and gendered interests forged within a shared experience of ongoing white racism. Informed by census data, primary fraternal order documents, and oral testimony, this study also holds that dislocations occurred at the turn of the twentieth century that concretized class membership, exacerbated class distinctions all while complicating the tenability of a coherent and cohesive black community.Ph.D