Nova Scotia’s last Black-only school closed in 1983

Nova Scotia’s last racially segregated school closed in 1983 in Lincolnville, Guysborough County, according to The Canadian Encyclopedia, 18 years after Ontario shut its last one.

The Canadian Encyclopedia reports that Nova Scotia and Ontario were the only provinces to put school segregation into law. Nova Scotia’s government created legally segregated common schools in the early 19th century and passed similar legislation in 1865. A provincial statute from 1836 allowed separate schools for “Blacks or People of Colour,” according to a 2004 Ontario Human Rights Commission report by Smith, as cited in Wikipedia’s summary of the history.

The encyclopedia says 1884 amendments stated that Black children could not be excluded from schools in the places where they lived. Segregation continued in some communities, including Halifax, and the encyclopedia says the original segregation provisions stayed on the books until 1950.

Housing helped keep the system in place. In Inglewood and Weymouth Falls, the encyclopedia says, segregated schools persisted because the neighbourhoods around them were also segregated.

In the harshest cases, there was no school at all. The encyclopedia says that in Fundy and Guysborough County, Black children had no access to a local public school and no separate school was provided for them.

The same report, as summarized by Wikipedia, records that Halifax City Council passed a by-law in 1870 excluding students of African descent from the city’s common schools, and that Black students were barred from the public school in Halifax County until the 1960s. Those details come from a single secondary summary and should be read as such. In 1959, according to the same account, school buses did not stop to pick up students in Black neighbourhoods.

As late as 1960, the same report says, Nova Scotia still had seven formal Black school districts and three more schools attended only by Black pupils.

Ontario offers a comparison. The encyclopedia says Ontario amended its Common Schools Act in 1850 to allow separate schools for Black children, and that the last segregated Ontario school, School Section No. 11 in Colchester, closed in 1965 after MPP Leonard Braithwaite pushed to remove the clause. This site has reported on how Ontario banned Black schools in 1964 while one stayed open.

The Government of Nova Scotia’s African Heritage Month materials say the last segregated school in Canada closed in Lincolnville in 1983 and mark the 1977 Canadian Human Rights Act as the point when such practices began to change. That page places Lincolnville just outside Halifax. The encyclopedia and Wikipedia’s summary place the school in Guysborough County. All three sources give 1983 as the year.

The sources reviewed do not describe the individual teachers, the conditions inside the Lincolnville school, or how the final closure was decided. Provincial and community archives would be the places to look.

The history sits alongside other Nova Scotia episodes of exclusion, including the razing of Africville and Viola Desmond’s 1946 conviction.

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