About the Book

Through My Eyes, tells a remarkable encounter of the black migration to Western Canada in the early 1900s. The book examines why thousands of black Americans left their homes in Oklahoma, Texas, Mississippi, and other southern states, for a new life in western Canada.

When researching the exodus to western Canada, I discovered that many free migrates were searching for a place where they could be treated with dignity and respect. However, the end of slavery did not bring an end to the problems of the black American. Despite the fact that blacks were free, in many ways their lives were actually worse.

The Jim Crow laws were implemented to legalize segregation between black and whites, mostly by southern state governments and their municipalities. The Supreme Court ruling of Plessy versus Ferguson in the 1896 deemed separate facilities for blacks and whites to be legal. This was applied to public transportation and schools, as well as facilities such as washrooms, parks ,diners and many other areas. Despite the impact of such legislation and intimidation by white groups, many blacks challenged the laws in court, but to no avail. Protest occurred against the Jim Crow transport ion Laws and the State of Oklahoma for their continued support of the grandfather clause that denied blacks the right to vote. Violent racial confrontation erupted, as blacks and whites fought and killed each other in towns and cities throughout the United States. Racial attacks against blacks ranged from individual lynchings and other murders to the entire communities being terrorized by organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan.

"There's a popular held notion about racial difference," wrote Langston Hughes, an American novelist playwright born in 1902 in Joplin, Missouri. Circular evidence claimed the enslavement of the Africans as proof of inferiority. Above all, it granted to each a superior status over every black. Its impact on all whites thus was assured.Those few who dared to challenge the creed stood little chance of influencing others and risked their position in the community, if not their very lives.

"America was never America to me. This country was infected with an ideology
that declared the natural inferiority of black people. Originally created to justify
those traded in, or otherwise profited from, African men, women, and children, thisbelief soon affected more slave ships captains, plantations masters, and overseers.As bondage became entrenched, became sine qua non of southern life, taught to eight million whites from the pulpits, schoolrooms, newspapers, books, lectureshalls and legal codes. Its argument drew from spurious science, a twisted history and selected quotations from the Bible. Its acceptance rested on life and limb."

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