Over 115 years ago, more than 150 members of Calgary’s Black community gathered at a venue called Eagle Hall on First Street S.W. for what a local newspaper called “one of the most successful balls of the season.”

In those days, only 16 years after incorporation, the city welcomed an influx of Black settlers — many seeking a life away from the discriminatory Jim Crow laws south of the border.

“Popular dances and ragtime two-steps were the order of the night, and many a giddy hour the dusky belles and their boisterous gentlemen friends reeled and swung about the spacious floor in one long round of enjoyment,” the Calgary Daily Herald story from Oct. 12, 1910, read.

The event, an annual affair, was held by the Colored People’s Protective Association (CPPA) — a group first formally organized by five Black men in January of that same year “for the advancement of the colored race,” the newspaper article says.

According to historian and multiplatform storyteller Cheryl Foggo, who has been researching the collective for decades, the first gathering took place in the home of William King.

The organization did far more than hold dances.

“The purposes were to socialize and let people get to know each other, but also to raise money for their other activities, because the CPPA supported people in whatever their needs were,” Foggo said. 

She described coming across a reference of a young, pregnant Black woman without a support system. The group helped her out, Foggo said.

“I think they were very generous and kind with people.”

Foggo has included the CPPA’s historical contributions in Making Place: A Map of Black Calgary, recently launched and made in collaboration with local artist Simone Elizabeth Saunders as part of the Calgary Atlas Project.

Calgary’s early Black community ‘protected their joy’

The Herald’s recounting of the ball continues: “there was music a-plenty, both vocal and instrumental” with the crowd bursting into song on the dance floor.

The story also leans into a number of racist tropes.

Written less than 50 years after the end of the American Civil War, the story recounts that several party attendees reminisced about old times: “There were people there who had seen sunny Alabama and dear ‘ole Georgia’ in their childhood days.”

In actuality, Black people were subject to immense racial violence, including lynchings, and segregation laws in states including Alabama and Georgia in the early 1900s.

From roughly 1910 to 1970, approximately six million Black people moved from the U.S. south to northern, midwestern and western states in a movement now known as the Great Migration, with many turning to Canada for a better life.

The first main wave of Black immigrants — several hundred, primarily from Oklahoma — arrived in Western Canada between 1905 and 1912 in response to Canadian government advertisements, but continued to face discrimination in their new home.

In 1911, the Canadian government passed an order-in-council banning “any immigrants belonging to the Negro race, which is deemed unsuitable to the climate and requirements of Canada.”

While the order was not invoked officially, or put into the Immigration Act, it signified “a powerful indication” of the government’s desire to prevent any Black Americans emigrating to Canada, according to cultural and special education consultant, and third-generation African American Albertan, Deborah Dobbins.

In the face of this kind of adversity and stereotypical, negative portrayals in local newspapers, Foggo said, Black Albertans carved out space for themselves and their communities.

“If you look at the venom that was aimed at the [Black] community at that time, and then you look at their lives, that they were working and raising families and socializing and having fun and looking after each other and getting married,” Foggo said.

“You realize that they protected their joy, while also being incredibly courageous and steadfast in their dignity.”

Another newspaper clipping revealed the CPPA held an Easter dance in 1911. A Herald article notes these events had become “yearly functions, and guests attend from all over the province.”

At the time, Black settlers had begun establishing several communities across the province, including in Amber Valley, Junkins (now known as Wildwood), Keystone (now known as Breton), and Campsie, near the town of Barrhead in central Alberta.

Foggo noted community members were actively writing and submitting columns to papers like the Calgary Herald, though many didn’t identify themselves as Black.

“In some cases, yes, [Black people] were dependent upon what a white writer or editor might say and how they might say it. That’s why the language of that article about the coloured ball is … not language that we would necessarily want to think of as respectful today,” Foggo said.

“But you do see that people, the community, was very proactive, that they understood the importance of the media. They were very savvy. These were smart people. And they did also find ways to control, or at least to impact, the narrative that was being shared about themselves.”

The CPPA comes under attack

In one Calgary Herald article from Dec. 11, 1911, the CPPA came under fire from a police magistrate who believed the group “was a society for the purposes of raising money to engage legal advice to protect any of their members accused of charges in the court.”

“He was of the opinion that it was the duty of the Crown prosecutor to investigate whether this was the case,” the article continued.

The case in question involved Harry and Bertha Palmer of Lethbridge, Alta., two Black people who were sentenced to six months imprisonment by the magistrate for keeping a “disorderly house.”

In another Calgary Herald report, the Palmers were reported to have pleaded not guilty, “claiming that they kept a lodging house and had six or seven steady roomers, several of them being porters on runs out of Calgary.”

“It was kind of like they were in a situation where they couldn’t win no matter what they did … Black people were criticized for existing,” Foggo said. 

“People would complain when Black people had, you know, restaurants or businesses that were to support other Black people, and then they would try to shut those businesses down.”

A lasting legacy 

Despite the adversity the CPPA faced, its legacy has lived on in the generations of organizations that came after it, Foggo said.

“People needed to organize at every stage, and they did. And then future generations built upon their work. … You see the same people linking between different organizations over the generations.”

According to Foggo, the CPPA fed into the local Universal Negro Improvement Association, which was linked to an international Black nationalist movement founded by Marcus Garvey in Jamaica. 

That led up to the formation of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, which then paved the way for the Alberta Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (AAACP), Foggo said.

Black Calgarian Corporal Theodore (Ted) King was president of the AAACP from 1958 to 1961, according to Jennifer Kelly, professor emeritus from the University of Alberta, who has written extensively about Alberta’s Black history.

There are still several questions about the CPPA that need to be answered, such as how large its membership was in Calgary. It’s one of the details Foggo hopes to uncover in her research for a book chapter she’s working on.

But of what she does know about the trailblazing group of early Black Calgarian settlers, Foggo said: “I have incredible admiration and respect for them.”