Black History Month (February)

A collection of films back Black Canadian filmmakers and creators that focus on the Black Community in Canada

This is a quiz to assess your understanding of the history and achievements of Black Canadians.

Learn about the events leading to the BLM that spread around the world. Learn how social media was used by activists in the movement.

This Heritage Minute follows Chloe Cooley, an enslaved Black woman in Upper Canada in 1793. Her acts of resistance in the face of violence led to Canada’s first legislation limiting slavery.

This Heritage Minute follows Canada’s most honoured jazz musicians from his humble beginnings in the Black neighbourhood of Little Burgundy in Montreal to his rise to fame.

Thornton and Lucie Blackburn were freedom seekers who fled enslavement in Kentucky and established the first taxi business in Upper Canada.

Watch this short video celebrating Jackie Robinson. "Montréal Royals players and fans welcome the first African American player, marking the beginning of the end of major-league baseball's colour barrier (1946)."

In this Heritage Minute video, an Afro-Canadian coal miner describes how he and his fellow workers survived eight days trapped underground during the 1958 mining disaster in Springhill, Nova Scotia.

Learn about Richard Pierpoint, a man born in Senegal who become a slave, a soldier and an amazing Canadian.

This short video depicts what it may have been like to use the Underground Railroad, a secret path for some enslaved African Americans to escape to freedom in Canada in the 1850s.

This Heritage Minute tells the story of Viola Desmond, an entrepreneur who challenged segregation in Nova Scotia in the 1940s. Viola Desmond is the first Canadian woman to appear on the face of a Canadian banknote, the $10 bill.

Children's book about John Ware, Canada's legendary Black cowboy and pioneer rancher, who blazed a trail of kindness despite adversity.

This is a 35 minute video from the National Film Board about Africville. a small black settlement that lay within the city limits of Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Oscar Peterson was among numerous Black working-class families to call Little Burgundy home. Part of Montreal, this neighborhood became a jazz mecca in the early 20th century. Learn more in this companion video to our newest Heritage Minute.

This animation is part of TED's series, "There's a Poem for That," which features animated interpretations of poems both old and new that give language to some of life's biggest feelings.

This TED lesson takes a look at Martin Luther King, Jr.'s pivotal speech "I have a dream".

Get to know the history of Juneteenth, a commemoration of the end of slavery in the United States after the Civil War.

Eva Bailey remembers her experience coming to Canada well. She arrived shortly after the West Indian Domestic scheme, a recruitment initiative that brought young women from English-speaking Caribbean countries to Canada as domestic workers from 1955 to 1967.

Learn about Rosemary Brown, Canada's first Black female member of a provincial legislature and the first woman to run for leadership of a federal political party.