A Sporting Chance. William Humber
are still heard in hockey rinks, successful Black athletes in expensive cars are stopped for no apparent reason and Blacks continue to be shut out of opportunities in coaching and ownership. Skin colour not only has been but continues to be a public issue.
The study of the Black athletic experience in Canada is not only a revealing portrait of the past but one more demonstration of some time honoured truths about human achievement and the necessity of the public order to provide open and fair forums for all to participate.
To the victor go the spoils if only he or she is given “A Sporting Chance.”
MARSHALL “MAJOR” TAYLOR’S TRIP TO OTTAWA in the summer of 1902 seemed a lost cause. All of his equipment, including his bike, had been lost. Walking among his fellow cyclists prior to the afternoon’s races, however, he met a young Toronto amateur Willie Morton. Taylor was a professional rider so they would not be competing against each other.
“I’ve got a bit of a problem,” Taylor told the young Canadian. “My bike got lost in transit but it’s a lot like yours.”
“Why not try mine then. If it fits, you can use it after my race,” Morton volunteered. In true storybook fashion they each won their respective races.
Major Taylor was a rarity in those days, usually the lone Black athlete at a cycling event. There were only a few others. C.E. Marshall, a Black Canadian rider, competed in match races around the same time in British Columbia.
Taylor was an American, originally from Indianapolis, who later moved to Worcester, Massachusetts. Here, his professional success earned him enough money to afford a house in a better neighbourhood. Today Worcester’s pride in Taylor is shown by plans for a monument in his memory, but while he was alive his fellow citizens took up a fund-raising campaign to buy his house and encourage him to leave town.
A few years before his Ottawa adventure, Major Taylor had arrived at the World Championships in Montreal in 1899 as the favourite in the one-mile professional event. He’d recently set that distance’s world record. European promoters were already inviting him to compete across the ocean. He was featured in their premier cycling publications.
Taylor’s major rivals in the championship race were the Frenchman, Courbe d’Outrelon, and the renowned Butler Brothers, Tom and Nat, who along with another brother, Frank, were among the most feared competitors in North America. They ensured that the championship field had some of the world’s most accomplished cyclists.
Marshall “Major” Taylor, a pioneering Black American cyclist, found success and support in Canada at the turn of the century.
“Fast and furious they came around the last turn,” said the Montreal Gazette. “Within sight of the white line, the coloured rider crouched lower than ever over his mount and made a finish that would have caused the most sensational of them all to turn green with envy.”
Taylor was ecstatic. “I’ll never forget the thunderous applause that greeted me and the thrill when the band struck up the Star Spangled Banner. I felt more American at that moment than I had ever felt in America,” he said.
The irony of the last comment is obvious. It took a Canadian crowd to illuminate Taylor’s nationality and it was in that same city, 47 years later, where the integration of modern baseball would commence with Brooklyn’s signing of Jackie Robinson to play for the minor league Montreal Royals.
Nor did the Canadian connection end there.
The Butler brothers provided Taylor with his greatest challenges. Andrew Ritchie’s biography about Major Taylor (1988) portrays them generously, particularly the youngest brother, Tom. He describes Tom Butler as a Boston cyclist but the family was from Nova Scotia. While they may have been occasionally ruthless in working together to deny Taylor victory, they were generally fair-minded and accepted his right to compete in this mainstream competition. Had they objected to his presence, as white American athletes were doing at the same time in other sports, Taylor probably would have been barred.
Above, Tom Butler’s display of polite and gentlemanly behaviour to the Black American cyclist Major Taylor has been credited with helping maintain that sport’s integrated character at the turn of the century. Right, Nat Butler (c. 1846-1943) of Nova Scotia’s renowned bicycle racing family who did much to support open competition in one of the few integrated sports of the day. Both photographs courtesy of the Sports Heritage Centre of Nova Scotia.
Ritchie describes Tom Butler’s behaviour in the 1899 season as, “Polite and gentlemanly compared with the racism of many of Taylor’s 1898 opponents. The 1899 races were marked by much greater fairness and recognition of his [Taylor’s] right to compete.” Ritchie calls the Butler brothers, liberal east coast athletes, but like the spectators at the world championships that year and like Willie Morton a few years later, they shared a Canadian identity.
Major Taylor’s Canadian success confirmed his status as one of the greatest and earliest Black sports champions in an integrated sport. He later toured Europe and Australia drawing the same sensational reviews earned in Canada. He returned to America in 1904 on his way to the world’s championships in Europe. In San Francisco, however, he was refused entry at restaurants and hotels. Strangers walked up to him on the street and racially abused him. His white travelling companion and good friend, the Australian racer Don Walker, rather disgustedly said to Taylor, “So this is the America about which you have been boasting in Australia?” Taylor had no response.
Canadians might think that Major Taylor’s treatment by their countrymen reflected a national virtue superior to that of Americans. The full story however is not so comforting.
THE OTHER SIDE
There are few records of Black sports participation in the pre-Civil War era but this was generally true as well of white working-class Canadians who did not have the financial means or status to compete in many sporting pastimes. Nevertheless at the time of the Rebellion of 1837, Sir Francis Bond Head had described “Several waggons full of the Black population in Canada, a most powerful, athletic set of men, who of their own accord, and at their expense, had come over to the frontier briefly to beg, in the name of their race, that I would accord them the honour of forming the forlorn hope in the anticipated attack on Navy Island….”
This athleticism was no doubt a response to the kinds of manual labour available to recent Black settlers, but there are other references in pre-Confederation accounts of sporting connections. A local history of Bowmanville, east of Toronto, claims that the town’s barber in the 1840s “was a coloured man named Smith. He was tall, straight and muscular, something of a pugilist, and up to all kinds of circus performances. He was here, off an on till well up in the sixties.” In 1866, the Toronto Daily Leader newspaper condescendingly described a sleighing party involving the local Black population by noting, “…a large number of darkies were rejoicing…The ebonies were got up in great style…this most comical portion of the great human family.”
But it was by the water that the first significant Black sporting opportunities emerged. So much of the economic life of new communities like Toronto depended on lakes, rivers and oceans as sources of food, power or transportation. Water taxis plied the lakeshore, schooners delivered goods, fish were caught and recreation was available.
Eli Playter’s diary of life in early Toronto (then known as York) provides a small portrait of what life may have been like. On July 1, 1802, he writes, “…walk’d down on the bank met Mr. Dean & stop’d some laughfing at a little black boy in a small skift working to get ashore in a very awkward manner & some one waiting for the