The Missing Middle

In 2023, artist Rebecca Bair spent hours searching the New Westminster Archives for traces of Black history. She found property deeds and newspaper mentions, evidence that Black barbers, labourers, and families had lived and worked in the area for over a century. But she couldn’t find their faces. No portraits. No photographs. No names attached to the stories.

“A gap — a ghost in the space,” Bair called it. Her public art installation, Curl Mapped, covered the Anvil Centre’s facade with curly tendrils of hair, heritage rendered as shadow, presence asserted through absence. When sunlight hit the windows, the shapes cast ghostly projections inside: “elusive,” she said, “like the history itself.”

What Bair encountered in New Westminster reflects a broader pattern across the Lower Mainland. Black communities have shaped this region since the 1850s, but the documentary record is fragmented, scattered, and often silent. In Burnaby specifically, the gap is even more pronounced: despite sitting between Vancouver and New Westminster, two cities with documented Black histories, Burnaby’s archives contain virtually no records of Black residents before the 1970s.

Dr. Handel Kashope Wright, a cultural studies scholar at UBC, has a metaphor for this situation: “Black history in BC is like a doughnut. It’s missing the middle. People might know a little bit about the original Black ‘settlers’, rounded off with a bit about present-day Blacks, but nothing in between.”

For Black History Month 2026, we wanted to understand what that doughnut looks like from Burnaby, a city now home to a growing and increasingly visible Black community. What history surrounds us? What’s missing from our own records? And who is filling the gap today?

The History That Surrounds Us

Black history in British Columbia begins with a mass migration. In the spring of 1858, roughly 800 free Black Americans left San Francisco for Vancouver Island. They came in response to California’s discriminatory laws, statutes that prevented Black citizens from voting, testifying in court, or claiming the same legal protections as white residents, and an invitation from Governor James Douglas, who promised equality under British law.

On April 25, 1858, the steamship Commodore arrived in Victoria carrying 35 members of a “Pioneer Committee” — scouts sent to assess the promise of a new life. By summer’s end, hundreds more had followed.

Many settled on Salt Spring Island, where 26 Black homesteads have been mapped by archivists. Among them was Sylvia Stark, born into slavery in Missouri around 1839, who pre-empted 200 acres of land and lived until 1944, 105 years old, one of the last survivors of that original migration. Her daughter Emma became the first Black teacher on Vancouver Island.

Closer to the Lower Mainland, one figure stands out: John Sullivan Deas, born enslaved in South Carolina around 1838. By the 1870s, Deas had established a salmon cannery on an island in the Fraser River delta — the island that still bears his name today. His operation was remarkable: during the 1872–73 season, it reportedly outproduced every other cannery on the river, packing between 200,000 and 400,000 cans annually.

Deas commissioned Grafton Tyler Brown, the first Black professional artist in the Pacific Northwest, to design his cannery labels, a rare example of Black entrepreneurship and Black artistry intersecting in BC’s early industrial history. The original labels survive in the Royal BC Museum’s collection.

Deas Island sits in Delta, just south of Burnaby. Deas himself sold his cannery in 1878 and died two years later in Portland, Oregon. No record suggests he ever lived in what is now Burnaby, but his story offers a reminder of how close Black history runs to our city’s borders.

The Neighbourhood Next Door

The most significant Black community in the Lower Mainland developed not in Burnaby, but in Vancouver’s Strathcona neighbourhood, specifically, in the blocks around Park Lane that became known as Hogan’s Alley.

By the 1940s, Hogan’s Alley was home to an estimated 800 Black residents. The community had its own institutions: the African Methodist Episcopal Fountain Chapel, founded in 1918; Vie’s Chicken and Steak House, which operated from 1948 to 1979; the Harlem Nocturne nightclub, a venue for jazz musicians from across the continent. Nora Hendrix, grandmother of guitarist Jimi Hendrix, co-founded the AME Chapel and lived in the neighbourhood for decades. Her former home on East Georgia Street is now a designated heritage site.

Then came the Georgia Viaduct. Between 1967 and 1972, the city demolished 15 blocks to make way for the elevated roadway. The Black community was scattered. Oral histories from the period, preserved in the BC Archives’ Strathcona Project Collection, describe the disruption: families separated, businesses closed, a way of life erased.

Where did displaced residents go? The historical record is thin. Some accounts suggest families moved east into Burnaby and New Westminster, but no systematic documentation exists. This is the gap in memory itself.

What Burnaby’s Archives Don’t Show

Search the Burnaby Village Museum’s collection. Look through city records. Consult local histories. You’ll find detailed documentation of Japanese Canadian farmers before internment, of European immigrants building homes in Edmonds and Metrotown, of Indigenous presence predating all of it. But documented Black residents before the 1970s? Almost nothing.

Black people weren’t recorded, or that records weren’t preserved, or that we haven’t yet found what exists. The BC Archives published a research guide for Black history in March 2024, developed in partnership with the BC Black History Awareness Society. The guide notes that Black individuals appear in census records, property transactions, and newspaper mentions across the province, but often without photographs, often without biographical detail, often in passing.

The gap is a research problem, but it’s also something more. It shapes how cities understand themselves. When a community isn’t visible in the historical record, it can feel like the community has no history, which makes present-day belonging harder to imagine.

Building Belonging Now

In May 2024, Dr. June Francis presented findings from a two-year research project to a coalition of community organizations at the Ismaili Centre. The study, “Building Belonging in Burnaby,” was based on more than 50 meetings and 100 focus groups with racialized residents. Its conclusions were sobering: immigrants in Burnaby are twice as likely to be overqualified for their jobs as non-immigrants. Residents from Southeast Asia, Southern Asia, the Caribbean, and Sub-Saharan Africa reported persistent barriers in employment, housing, healthcare, and education.

Francis, who directs SFU’s Institute for Black and African Diaspora Research and Engagement, has deep roots in community work: she chairs the Hogan’s Alley Society, co-founded SFU’s Black Caucus, and serves as Chair of BC’s Anti-Racism Data Committee. The research she led was a foundation for policy.

Two months later, in July 2024, Burnaby City Council approved an Anti-Racism Framework built on that research. The framework commits to roughly 29 action items across leadership, training, inclusion, and evaluation. It’s early days — 17 of those items are designated as “future actions” — but the commitment represents something new: a city officially acknowledging systemic barriers and pledging to address them.

Meanwhile, community organizations are doing their own work. The SFU Black Caucus, established in 2020, hosts an annual Black Brilliance Graduation Celebration and is building a Black Student Centre on the Burnaby campus. The Black Girl Collective, founded by SFU graduate Itse Hesse, runs mentorship programs and a Black Business Directory serving Metro Vancouver. Alegría Soy, based in Edmonds, hosts the Las Divinas folklore dance group and organized an Afro-Caribbean celebration last February that drew Mayor Mike Hurley and MP Peter Julian alongside Dr. Francis.

And in schools, something remarkable has grown. Burnaby School District launched Black Excellence Day in 2022 at Byrne Creek Community School, a virtual broadcast featuring Black professionals, artists, and speakers, aimed at students in grades 4 through 12. In its first year, 17 districts and 12,000 students participated. By January 2025, that number had grown to 28 districts and more than 20,000 students across the province.

Filling the Doughnut

Black history in Burnaby may be thin in the archives, but it’s being written now — in policy documents, in school auditoriums, in community centres across Edmonds and Metrotown and near SFU’s campus on the mountain. The gap Dr. Wright described isn’t being ignored. It’s being addressed.

This doesn’t erase the silence. We still don’t know who lived here before the 1970s, what brought them, where they came from, what they built. Those stories may be recoverable, in family photographs not yet donated to archives, in oral histories not yet recorded, in documents not yet digitized. The BC Black History Awareness Society’s 230-page “Catalogue” of Black BC history, first compiled in 1978 and still being updated, shows how much can be found when people look.

But history isn’t only about recovery. It’s also about what we choose to document going forward. The organizations working in Burnaby today — the SFU Black Caucus, Black Girl Collective, Alegría Soy, the Burnaby Together Coalition, the School District’s Black Excellence Day team — are creating records that future researchers will find. They’re building the archive that doesn’t yet exist.

“Two Black women went into those archives and looked for several hours for signs of Blackness and were unable to find it,” Rebecca Bair said of her research. The absence shaped her art. But absence isn’t the end of the story. It’s an invitation — to look harder, to record better, to make sure the next generation finds more than ghosts in the space.

If you live in Burnaby and you’re Black, your history here may not be in the archives yet. But it’s being written: in the programs your children attend, in the policies your neighbours helped shape, in the communities gathering at Edmonds and on Burnaby Mountain. History isn’t only what we inherit. It’s also what we leave behind.