What Black People Inherited, Reclaimed, Created and Recreated from the Sixties

I am turning sixty this month, which has me thinking about the decade I was born in rather differently.

Not simply as history.

I keep wondering what was already in motion when my generation arrived. What had Black people inherited? What were they reclaiming? What were they creating for themselves, and what were they taking from older traditions and making new again?

Because the sixties were not just Motown, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Black Power, Afros, soul and protest.

All of that matters. American Black culture travelled widely through music, television, newspapers, film and international coverage of the Civil Rights Movement. For many people around the world, what they saw coming out of the United States became part of how they understood Black struggle everywhere.

But that reach had a strange side effect. North America can begin to look like one big America. Canada disappears. The Caribbean becomes background. Africa gets turned into symbolism rather than a continent of countries undergoing enormous political change. Britain gets treated as another place where American ideas simply arrived.

That is not what happened. The Black world was talking to itself.

The World Around the Sixties Was Changing

In 1960 alone, seventeen African countries gained independence. Sixteen newly independent African states joined the United Nations that year, part of a wave of decolonization so significant that 1960 is often remembered as the “Year of Africa.” The UN General Assembly also adopted its Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, declaring colonial rule incompatible with the right of people to determine their own futures.

Africa was not simply something Black people elsewhere were remembering. It was changing in real time. Countries including Nigeria, Senegal, Mali, the Congo, Côte d’Ivoire and others were becoming formally independent, while liberation struggles continued elsewhere. Independence did not erase colonial systems overnight or settle arguments about economics, language, national identity or political power. It opened them.

What should schools teach now? Which languages should governments use? What did economic independence mean if colonial trading relationships remained? How could newly independent countries reclaim political authority without pretending colonialism had left no mark?

The Caribbean was changing too. Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago became independent in 1962, with other Caribbean nations following later in the decade.

People carried those changes with them. A Caribbean woman arriving in Toronto or Montréal did not come merely as labour. She arrived with ideas about independence, class, colour, education, religion, family, music and what Britain had meant to the place she came from. An African student studying abroad brought another history. A Black Canadian whose family had lived in Nova Scotia for generations brought another still.

There was never one Black conversation. Many conversations happened at once.

Britain Had Its Own Black Story

Britain belongs in this history for the same reason Canada does. Postwar Caribbean migration had already begun transforming British cities by the sixties, particularly London. Black British communities built newspapers, churches, clubs, political groups, and cultural spaces while confronting discrimination in housing, employment, and public life.

Claudia Jones, born in Trinidad, founded the West Indian Gazette in London in 1958, one of Britain’s earliest major West Indian newspapers. She also helped organize early Caribbean carnival celebrations after the racist violence in Notting Hill in 1958 and the murder of Kelso Cochrane in 1959.

By the mid-1960s, what became the Notting Hill Carnival was taking shape as a public expression of Caribbean culture in Britain. It is worth placing it beside Caribana rather than underneath it: two Black diaspora communities in different countries taking Caribbean traditions and remaking them for new places. Neither was simply copying America.

Britain also had its own questions about who belonged, who was British, and what happened when people from colonies and former colonies arrived in the country that had once governed them. Black political ideas crossing the Atlantic were arriving in places already having their own conversations.

Notting Hill Carnival, London, 2016 — a later expression of Caribbean carnival traditions that took root in Britain in the late 1950s and 1960s. Photo: Kalexander2010 / Flickr via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.

Black Was Being Redefined

In the United States, Blackness itself was being publicly redefined. The phrase Black is Beautiful represented more than a hairstyle. It was part of a broader affirmation of Black history, skin colour, hair textures, African heritage and cultural identity. The Afro became one visible expression of that pride.

It is easy now to miss how significant that was. For generations, Black people had been told, sometimes violently and sometimes politely, that advancement required becoming less recognizably Black: straighten your hair, speak differently, do not make people uncomfortable, do not look too African, do not sound too Black.

Then came a growing insistence that perhaps Blackness was not the thing that needed correcting.

Black Power developed alongside that cultural shift, emphasizing self-determination, community control and the building of institutions serving Black communities. Not every Black person agreed on strategy, and that matters too. Black communities were publicly debating integration, nationalism, class, gender, political power and what freedom was supposed to mean. They were not waiting for somebody else to answer for them.

Culture Travelled Faster Than People Sometimes Could

The soundtrack was part of all of this. Motown, soul, gospel, jazz, blues and freedom songs moved between homes and countries. Spirituals and gospel helped sustain civil-rights activists through marches, mass meetings and arrests.

But music did not have to announce itself as political to matter. A record could get into a home where a speech never would. It could cross an ocean. It could make someone feel recognized before they had language for why. And sometimes it could simply make people dance.

I do not want to lose that part of the story. Black history cannot only be an inventory of suffering. Joy belongs in the archive too, along with dressing up, dancing, doing hair, falling in love, and buying a record and playing it until everybody in the house knew it whether they wanted to or not.

Black writers were also changing who had the right to speak and what Black writing was allowed to sound like. The Black Arts Movement brought writers such as Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez and Nikki Giovanni into a broader cultural insistence that Black speech, Black beauty, anger, family life and everyday experience were worthy subjects in their own right.

Black newspapers, radio and magazines were doing something similar. There is a difference between being visible and being able to tell your own story. Black people increasingly demanded both.

Much of Culture Never Entered an Archive

This may be the part I find myself thinking about most as I turn sixty.

History books tend to organize decades around presidents, elections, legislation, assassinations and famous speeches. Culture often survives somewhere else: through grandmothers and mothers, aunties, barbers, beauticians, church women, teachers, domestic workers, people braiding hair and preparing Sunday dinner; through sayings, recipes, nicknames, warnings, prayers, ways of grieving and ways of laughing; through things a child learned without anyone ever announcing that a lesson was taking place.

Some of the most durable Black culture never entered a museum. It survived because somebody kept doing it.

Canada Was Not Watching From the Sidelines

African American history matters enormously, but Black Canadian history is not American Black history with colder weather. Black communities had existed here for generations by the sixties, with histories shaped by slavery, settlement, migration, segregation, labour, resistance and community-building in Canada itself.

Africville is one of the clearest examples. In October 1962, Halifax decided to eliminate Africville and relocate its residents. The relocation began in 1964. By the end of 1967, most residents had been moved and their homes demolished, although the final resident did not leave until January 1970. Halifax formally apologized to former residents and their descendants in 2010.

This did not happen in Alabama. It happened in Canada. Canada has often been comfortable defining itself by what it believes it was not compared with the United States. Africville makes that comparison harder to hide behind.

Africville, Halifax, early 1960s. Halifax Municipal Archives, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Women Who Carried More Than Labour

Between 1955 and 1967, about 3,000 Caribbean women entered Canada through the West Indian Domestic Scheme. They arrived at a time when immigration policies continued to restrict non-white immigration. Most settled in Toronto and Montréal.

Parks Canada records that participants faced racial discrimination and were paid less than white domestic workers. After completing their required domestic service, many pursued education and other careers, sponsored family members and became important contributors to the growth of Caribbean communities in Canada.

These women were not simply imported labour. They were cultural carriers. They brought food, music, religion, accents, understandings of family and education, and memories of places undergoing enormous political change. Some had qualifications that did not translate easily into the Canadian labour market. Some became teachers, nurses, organizers and professionals. Some brought family later.

They did not merely enter Canada. They helped remake it.

Culture Was Being Recreated Here Too

Then came Caribana. It began in Toronto in 1967 as a community-led celebration of Caribbean heritage during Canada’s Centennial and grew into what is now the Toronto Caribbean Carnival.

Calling it merely a festival misses something. Carnival traditions themselves carry histories of emancipation, masquerade, resistance, satire, music and community. When those traditions came to Toronto, they changed. They became Caribbean-Canadian.

That is what diaspora so often does. People remember something from home, carry it somewhere else and make it fit a new place without completely surrendering where it came from. That is not necessarily cultural dilution. Sometimes it is cultural survival.

Caribana in Toronto, 2008 — a later expression of the Caribbean-Canadian festival launched in 1967. Photo: David Craig / Wikimedia Commons.

Black Canadians Were Speaking for Themselves

Carrie Best understood the importance of controlling the record. In 1946, she and her son Calbert helped establish The Clarion, one of the earliest Black-owned and published newspapers in Nova Scotia. In 1968, she began writing a weekly Human Rights column for the Pictou Advocate, continuing until 1975.

Newspapers do more than report events. They help determine which events are remembered at all.

Harry Jerome was simultaneously becoming one of the most accomplished sprinters in the world, setting or equalling multiple world records during the 1960s. In 1968, Lincoln Alexander entered the House of Commons as Canada’s first Black Member of Parliament.

Black Canada was not waiting at the border for history to arrive.

Montréal Shows How Connected the Black World Really Was

The Sir George Williams protest may be one of the clearest examples. Six Black and Caribbean students had complained in 1968 that a professor was discriminating against them. After months in which they felt the university had failed to deal properly with their complaints, students occupied the university’s computer centre beginning January 29, 1969.

The occupation continued until February 11. When negotiations broke down, police entered the building. A fire broke out in the computer centre; accounts remain disputed over how it began. Ninety-seven protesters were arrested. Some faced jail, deportation and long-lasting consequences.

More than fifty years later, Concordia University formally apologized. In 2022, the university acknowledged that its actions and inactions in 1969 were a stark manifestation of institutional racism.

The story is about what happens when Black students say an institution is treating them unfairly and the institution decides their complaint is the problem.

The protest also travelled politically beyond Montréal because many of the students were Caribbean. American civil-rights politics mattered, but so did Caribbean politics, African decolonization and international student networks. Ideas were moving in several directions at once.

What We Were Carrying

The categories that first got me thinking about this were inherited, reclaimed, created and recreated. But the more I sit with them, the less neatly separated they seem.

We inherited music, spirituality, oral storytelling, foodways, humour, community responsibility and ways of building family beyond biology. Some of those traditions had survived slavery, colonialism and migration long before the sixties.

We reclaimed things Black people had repeatedly been taught to distrust in themselves: African ancestry, natural hair, dark skin, Black speech, Black history and Black aesthetics.

We created organizations, newspapers, festivals, political movements, artistic movements and new Black communities strengthened by migration.

And then we recreated almost everything. A Caribbean carnival became Caribana in Toronto and Notting Hill Carnival in London. Gospel moved into soul. A saying crossed an ocean and changed slightly in somebody’s kitchen. A recipe survived because nobody wrote it down but somebody watched somebody else’s hands. A hairstyle became beauty, fashion, politics and memory at the same time.

That is what people do with culture. We inherit it, change it and hand it over again.

I was born from this period, and that makes the sixties different to me now. I am not simply reading about a historical decade. I am looking at what was already moving through the world when my generation arrived.

Some of it reached us as politics. Some as music, food, hair, language, family expectations, ways of surviving and ways of laughing. And some of it probably reached us so quietly that we never thought to call it history at all.

That is why I keep coming back to one question:

What did Black people inherit, reclaim, create and recreate from the sixties that we are still carrying now?

Canada belongs in that question. So do the United States, the Caribbean, Africa and Britain. Not because all of those histories are interchangeable. They are not. But because Black people were moving among them, reading one another, listening to one another, disagreeing with one another and making new cultures wherever they landed.

Maybe that is what I am really celebrating as I turn sixty: not simply the decade, but what survived it, what changed because of it, what people carried out of it, and what somehow made its way to us.

Sometimes history is sitting behind glass in a museum. But sometimes it is in the music you still know every word to, the food you make without measuring, the way you wear your hair, the warning your grandmother used to give you, the festival that takes over a Toronto street every summer, or the story you thought belonged to somebody else’s country until you discovered it happened here.

Sometimes history is sitting right beside you at the kitchen table.

You simply have to ask where it came from.