Marcus Garvey might have loved the Diaspora synthesis: an African-born clergyman teaching African-Americans, blacks from the Caribbean, and African-Canadians about black churches in Nova Scotia.

The scene was the Cornwallis Street Baptist Church in Halifax, Nova Scotia, mid-afternoon on July 27, 2006. Nineteen African-Americans from the Brooklyn-based St. Paul Community Baptist Church (SPCBC) and other New York congregations fellowshipped, studied, and broke bread with members of Cornwallis and the encompassing African United Baptist Association (AUBA) of Nova Scotia, Canada.

Black Heritage Tours, operated by African-Canadian Carolyn Thomas and her family, transported the African-Americans around Halifax and Preston.

That morning, the African-Americans had prayed at Africville, an almost two-century old black neighborhood that the Halifax government destroyed in the 1960’s to build a park – urban renewal a.k.a. black removal. They also visited the hilltop fort partially built by Jamaican Trelawny Maroons in the late 1790’s.

Afterward, they toured the Black Cultural Center of Nova Scotia (BCCNS), including its exhibit concerning Africville. The U.S. blacks bought books, T-shirts, and souvenirs, and heard Dr. Henry Bishop, director of BCCNS lecture on Nova Scotia’s black history.

It is quite a history, involving “black loyalists”, Maroons, “refugees”, and “new arrivals”.

During the American Revolution (1775-1781), the British offered freedom to blacks who fought in British armies or otherwise escaped from “rebel” slave masters to British lines. Southern colonies lost an estimated 65,000 slaves, approximately 15% of their enslaved population. After the war, the British evacuated approximately 3,550 of these “black loyalists” to Nova Scotia. About two-thirds were free and approximately one-third were slaves of white loyalists.

The British promised farmland in Nova Scotia for all “loyalists”, but mostly reneged on the blacks. They forced our people to build roads in return for food rations. In Shelburne, white loyalists drove out blacks and burned their homes.

By 1791, fed-up with such ill treatment, 1,196 black “loyalists” migrated to Sierra Leone, which was then a British-controlled patch of West African seacoast.

Later in the 1790’s, The British transported Trelawny Maroons to Nova Scotia from Jamaica after more than a century of Maroon guerrilla resistance to enslavement. The warlike Maroons helped strengthen British fortifications in Halifax and offered to help the British fight Napoleon. But the British instead sent them to Sierra Leone to crush the rebellion that had by 1800 erupted among the African-Nova Scotians nee African-Americans who had migrated to Sierra Leone from Nova Scotia in the early 1790’s.

The next black wave into Nova Scotia was the “refugees” of the War of 1812. During that armed conflict, British troops snatched blacks from American plantations, depositing approximately 2000 of them in Nova Scotia. The refugees later rejected an offer to migrate to Sierra Leone.

During the 20th century, more blacks immigrated into Nova Scotia from the Caribbean and elsewhere. These are the “new arrivals.”

Today’s black Nova Scotian families typically trace their roots to the black loyalists, the Maroons, the refugees, or the new arrivals.

Although the British Commonwealth calls the earliest group “Black Loyalists,” I think freedom, not loyalty to Great Britain, was the escaped African-Americans’ primary objective. They appeared more loyal to themselves and to God.

Christ’s role in black Nova Scotia history is indisputable. The leaders of the black loyalists were typically churchmen. David George, who helped establish the first black Baptist church in America and later founded the Baptist denomination in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone, evangelized the length of Nova Scotia. Moses Wilkerson, blind and crippled, pastored the black Methodists, a militant bunch concerning black rights. Thomas Peters, a major organizer of the migration to Sierra Leone, was Methodist.

In Sierra Leone, white Christians’ presumption of authority over black Christians – in worship matters as well as governance – entered the mix. The substance of those 1790’s theological battles are instructive to our 2006 Christian walk.

Among the refugees after the War of 1812, Richard Preston evangelized across Nova Scotia as David George had 30 years earlier. Preston pastored several churches and organized African United Baptist Association.

The black church remains a central force in Nova Scotia’s black community today, likely contributing to the low crime rate compared to the U.S. It is also at the core of most battles for black progress.