CTV News Montreal

Updated: Thu Jan. 29 2009 6:27:04 PM

ctvmontreal.ca

An updated historical work on Montreal's black community coincides with the start of black history month.

Historian Dorothy Williams, author of Blacks in Montreal, an Urban Demography, spoke with Mutsumi on CTV News at Noon.

Williams says many Canadians don't realize that blacks have been in Montreal for 300 years.

"It's part of the way history has been portrayed in Montreal," said Williams, who says traditional history focuses almost exclusively on the British and the French.

"There's little room in the narrative for other communities that have also helped to build Quebec."

Williams says she has been asked countless times where she's from and says that replying "Montreal" is not enough for some people who want to know where her parents, grandparents and great-grandparents come from as well.

"The idea or the implication is that you couldn't possibly be Canadian -- you couldn't possibly be from here," says Williams.

"Nobody has told you that your people are Canadian so there's this constant need to defend your Canadian-ness to other people. "

Personal journey

The re-issue of Blacks in Montreal includes a DVD in which Williams talks about her personal journey as a child in Little Burgundy. The book also deals with the misconceptions people have about the neighbourhood that's the centre of Montreal's black Anglophone community.

"I was really writing about my own experience and was trying to really understand what made me different from everybody else," she said.

"You just sort of wake up one morning and realize you're not there. And at some point I think I had that kind of awareness that I'm invisible. And my story is invisible."

Blacks in Montreal 1628-1986: An Urban Demography was originally published in 1989.

It chronicles 400 years of Black history in the city including the impact of discrimination, housing exclusion and socio-economic disadvantage suffered by blacks right up to the present day.