Black Canadians in New Brunswick
Black Canadians in New Brunswick, or Black New Brunswickers, are Black people from the province. Many ancestors came from the United States as slaves or freemen in the 1700s and early 1800s, similar to Black Nova Scotians. In 2021, 12,155 Black people lived in New Brunswick, the province’s largest visible minority group.
History starts with a Black man from New England who was captured during a French raid and taken up the Saint John River in the late 1600s. He was brought to Boston after being returned in 1696 during the Siege of Fort Nashwaak. He is considered the first Black person in what is now New Brunswick.
Around 1784–1785, about 3,300 Black Loyalists arrived in Saint John after the American Revolution, promised land for serving in the British army. They faced discrimination and some were given non-arable land, forcing them to work as indentured servants. Some Black settlers later left for Sierra Leone with Thomas Peters. Another group of 371 African-American refugees arrived in 1815 after the War of 1812. Elm Hill became one of Canada's first Black settlements in the early 1800s.
New Brunswick was the first British North American colony to ban slavery, with the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. Slavery was outlawed altogether. The province ran segregated schools in the 19th century. The University of New Brunswick admitted its first Black student, Arthur St. George Richardson, in 1883; the first Black woman, Mary Matilda Winslow, followed in 1901.
In 1916, Saint John's Black community helped lead protests against the showing of the film The Birth of a Nation. The St. Philips African Methodist Episcopal Church was a spiritual center for the Black community, though it was demolished in 1942. In 1935, Eldridge “Gus” Eatman, a Black sprinter and WWI veteran from Saint John, tried to form an Ethiopian Foreign Legion to defend Ethiopia, but no volunteers are known to have reached Ethiopia.
From the 1970s, immigration reforms brought in Caribbean and African migrants, including Jamaicans, people from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haitians, and Nigerians. Some NB Black residents also moved to Bangor, Maine for work in lumber.
George Elliott Clarke coined the term Africadia in the 1990s to describe Black communities in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick together. The NB Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NBAACP) started in 1959, following the Saint John Association for the Advancement of Colored People (SJAACP) founded in 1949. A notable action was a 1964 sit-in to protest barber shop discrimination and to push for fair housing and jobs.
In 2010, the New Brunswick Black History Society (NBBHS) was founded to document Black history in the province. In 2021, NBBHS opened the province’s first permanent display of Black history in Saint John. In May 2021, Kassim Doumbia was elected mayor of Shippagan, the first Black mayor in the province.
Independent all-Black settlements existed in NB since the 1800s, notably Willow Grove and Elm Hill. By 2022, Elm Hill remains, but Willow Grove declined due to infertile land and isolation. Woodstock and Kingsclear also had Black communities until the 1970s. In 2021, more than 60% of NB’s Black population lived in Moncton, Saint John, or Fredericton. The Indigenous Black population is concentrated in Saint John, while the other cities attract more immigrant African and Caribbean people.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 06:41 (CET).