Never in a million years would I have come across this album, 1783 by Aquakultre (Lance Sampson), if not for a friend who sent me the link. It could not have been more timely. The week was filled with news about the racist decisions of our Supreme Court and subsequent actions by Southern states to cull Black voters’ rights for fair representation. All were embraced with glee and loudly-voiced satisfaction by those who relish the fact that they no longer have to hide their longing for White Supremacy. The Voting Rights Act, meant to protect disenfranchised minorities, is, by all intents and purposes, dead.

The music recounts, in loosely connected tracks, the experience of a particular population of Blacks from 1873 onwards to the present day. It retells both historical facts and deeply personal family history of what it meant to arrive in Nova Scotia after the end of the Revolutionary War, when some 3500 Black loyalists, slaves who had helped the British in exchange for freedom, fled to the area around Halifax. I had, of course, never heard of any of this, and did a deep dive into the history.

Charleston, SC close to slave exchange.

Luckily, the joy brought by the music – funk, R&B, and soul that so dominated my younger years, bringing back terrific memories of good times suffused with d’Angelo, Curtis Mayfield, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye – softened the horrors of what I heard described, and found written later.

From the beginning, the Black loyalists were exposed to mistreatment, cheated of land grants, forced to work on public projects under severe conditions and refused to be given equal status. Things did not improve with the arrival of some 2000 other Black refugees in the Province, displaced by the War of 1812.

Despite exposure to open racism and school segregation lasting until 1954, Black communities formed and flourished. One such example was Africville, founded in 1848 by Black refugees, centered around The Seaview African United Baptist Church, established in 1849. The township was systematically cut off from neighboring Halifax. No roads, health services, water treatment or sewer provided. City government located industrial waste sites as well as the town dump next to the township, increasing health problems for the inhabitants. Residents relied on local springs that were soon contaminated by the railway and surrounding industrial waste. No schools with properly educated instructors. Because it was an unregulated area, it attracted people selling illicit liquor and sex, largely to the mass of transient soldiers and sailors passing through Halifax, exposing Africville’s inhabitants to more poverty and crime.

Africville suffered damage and deaths during the 1917 Halifax explosion. It received modest relief assistance from the governmen, but none of the reconstruction and none of the modernization invested into other parts of the city at that time. It was widely regarded as a “slum” populated by “squatters”, but residents paid taxes, had meaningful employment, tended their gardens, raised their children and took pride in their homes, however modest. Those who lived there recall a community of brightly painted houses where neighbour helped neighbour.” (Ref.)

And then, before you knew it, Halifax decided to raze Africville completely in the 1960s, to make way for industrial development. Between 1964 and 1970, residents were removed with many families being placed in public housing projects, their belonging transported, literally, in dump trucks. Homes were demolished and the church bulldozed in the middle of the night. The entire population, a close-knit community, was displaced. The areas where people were relocated were openly hostile and aggressive towards their new neighbors.

Eventually, people organized and fought for decades, to seek redress. In 2010, after a long struggle, a settlement was finally reached with the city which included 2.5 acres of land to serve for the reconstruction of the church, $3 million toward the construction costs and a formal public apology by Mayor Peter Kelly. Something immaterial but equally important, namely community bonds, could not be as easily brought back to life. Easily being a relative term, given a half century of fight for justice….

Aquakultre learned to play the guitar in prison. His album recounts both the violence his family had to endure (his great-great grandfather was hung on the gallows as an innocent man), black-on-black violence festering among economic duress, but also the love and nurturance extended towards children. He sings of the importance of mail to both soldiers in the field and fathers in prison. Audio tapes of grandmothers recounting stories are interspersed, and gospel choirs reinforce a sense of spirituality that helped struggling folks through it all. 1783 is a beautiful album for its music and its spirit. And a testament to hope, willpower and resistance, not to give up and lay down. Exactly what we need to remember, in 2026.

Denial is no longer an option: there is a war on Blackness going on, on so many levels. It is not just the attack on voting rights by federal forces, including a Supreme Court that acts as a group of far-right operatives serving Trump’s et al. goals. It is enacted in the education “reforms” that ban teaching of racism in schools, erasing the nation’s memory of the toll exerted by anti-black violence. It is the discrimination against and attacks of scholars who document the cost of institutionalized racism. It is the removal of Blacks from administrative offices, government related jobs and the military. It is the language now publicly used again by politicians that reveals their racisms, from “quiet, boy” to get your “cotton picking” hands out of here….

But the spirit of the Civil Rights movement is not easily silenced. We saw that spirit this weekend in Selma, where over 5000 people marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge protesting against Jim Crow 2.0. Here is an eyewitness report and analysis of the threat to multiracial democracy by Sherrilyn Ifill.

To cite Rep. Justin Jones (D-Tn), acknowledging the courage and valor of those coming before us in a fight for justice, equality and a multiracial democracy:

“Our ancestors have carried us too far, our martyrs sacrificed too much, our movement grown too large to stop now. We stand in a legacy of liberation, a legacy of good trouble, a legacy of elders who trained us for this moment. No Jim Crow. No New Confederacy. No Going Back!”

Let the rest of us be worthwhile allies.

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The second track of the 1783 album, Bags packed, references a 1999 documentary film, Loyalities, about the story of two women in Nova Scotia in this century, one White, one Black, who realize they are related through slavery, and return to South Carolina to explore the history.

The award winning film is remarkable, describing the history as well as the personal tensions between the descendants of slaves and plantation owners, respectively. Very much worth viewing.

Since I have never been to Nova Scotia, photographs today are from South Carolina, Magnolia plantation and Charlestown. Plantations surrounded by swamps with poisonous snakes and alligators – flight was a risky endeavor even before the slave hunters caught up.