Henry Walton Bibb - First Black Newspaper In Canada

Henry Walton Bibb

Henry Walton Bibb (1815–1854) was born to an enslaved woman, Milldred Jackson, on a Cantalonia, Kentucky plantation on May 10, 1815. His people told him his white father was James Bibb, a Kentucky state senator, but Henry never knew him. As he was growing up, Bibb saw each of his six younger siblings, all boys, sold away to other slaveholders. Bibb “received stripes without number, the object of which was to degrade and keep him in subordination.” The young man was sold and resold again to new masters, and transferred to different regions. Instead of learning a trade, he learned the desperate skills of self-preservation. He dangerously risked escape often, without success.

Able to marry, Bibb wed Malinda in 1833. The Bibbs had two children, one child unable to survive infancy. Bibb made good on an escape to Canada in 1838, thinking he would return for Malinda and their daughter, Mary Frances. Taking on the abolition cause, Bibb later returned to Kentucky to search for his family. They could not be located, and Bibb, still an escaped slave, was captured and sold. He learned “that Malinda had been sold as the mistress of a while slave owner,”

Escaping again in late 1840 with help from the Underground Railroad, Bibb fled to Detroit, Michigan. “There he joined the anti-slavery movement,” “travelling across Michigan, Ohio, and the northeastern states lecturing upon the evils of slavery.”

In June 1848, Bibb remarried. His new wife was Mary Elizabeth Miles, born in Rhode Island in 1820 to free black parents. Mary was of the Quaker religion, well-educated and trained as a teacher. (Her school principal, Reverend Samuel May, was an advanced thinker, promoting women’s rights and anti-slavery.) Schools in Massachusetts, Ohio and New York hired Mary to teach. The pair met at a New York abolitionist meeting the year before their wedding in Dayton, Ohio.

In 1849-50 he published his autobiography 'Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, An American Slave,' Written by Himself , which became one of the best known slave narratives of the antebellum years. The passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 increased the danger to Bibb and his second wife Mary E. Miles, of Boston. It required Northerners to cooperate in the capture of escaped slaves. To ensure their safety, the Bibbs migrated to Canada and settled in Sandwich, Upper Canada now Windsor, Ontario. Although Canada abolished slavery in 1833, blacks were still not treated well or equally, but the country’s policy was decades ahead of the United States.

In 1851, he set up the first black newspaper in Canada, Voice of the Fugitive. Due to his fame as an author, Bibb was reunited with three of his brothers, who separately had also escaped from slavery to Canada. In 1852 he published their accounts in his newspaper. Interviews of escapees published in its pages, the newspaper helped others find family members and included poetry, news and hope. The Voice of the Fugitive was printed every other week, according to the African American Registry, and was sold at a subscription rate of $1 per year. Bibb used space in his newspaper to appeal for funds to help the new refugees. Believing strongly that the freed black slaves should integrate into Canadian society, Bibb encouraged the refugees to become a part of Canadian culture, not segregated by separate schools or institutions.

Elected to Toronto’s North American Convention of Coloured Freemen in 1851, Bibb was also elected president of the Windsor Anti-Slavery Society. The Bibbs were founding members of Detroit’s Refugee Home Society, an organization to help the tens of thousands of escaped slaves trying to make new lives in Canada. The Society purchased land to help the refugees who came north with absolutely nothing but themselves. “Each settler received 25 acres, five of which would be free if the land was cultivated within three years and the remainder of which was to be paid for in nine installments,” said John K.A. O’Farrell. The Society used profits to construct schools, pay teachers and obtain more land for more refugees.

On August 1, 1854, the man who established the first black newspaper in Canada died after a brief illness in Windsor, Ontario. Henry Walton Bibb was only 39 years old.