Item – Theses Canada

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OCLC number
46530964
Author
Nitkin, David Alexander.
Title
Negro colonization as a response to racism : a historical geography of the southwestern Ontario experience, 1830-1860.
Degree
M.A. -- York University, 1973
Publisher
Ottawa : National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1997.
Description
4 microfiches.
Notes
Includes bibliographical references.
Abstract
The founding of separate Negro communities repeatedly has been--and still is--one response to racism in North America. In the three decades before the Civil War, four organized colonization settlements of this kind were attempted in Southwestern Ontario. This study in historical geography uses largely primary sources to reconstruct and examine the plans of these communities, evaluating them in terms of the society of that day, the agro-physical possibilities of their locations, and the capabilities and final achievements of the participants. The four experiments had enough similarities in their design and direction that valuable, general conclusions can be drawn about the strengths and weaknesses of this type of social problem resolution. The analysis continually attempts to juxtapose plans with their subsequent realization. With reference to the condition of blacks, their white neighbours, and other group experiments of that day, these four colonization community plans are examined in terms of, first, their conceptual limitations (Chapter One); second, their Southwestern Ontario environment or setting (Chapter Two); and, third, the accomplishments achieved within and by the communities (Chapter Three). The failure of these particular experiments is shown to lie in their inadequate and inappropriate plans. Students of past responses to such problems as racism can offer fruitful, analytic perspectives upon social change, illuminating the possible traditions, efficacy, and meaningfulness of particular forms of reform behaviour for today's world as well as that of the past.
ISBN
0612155633
9780612155633