Upper Canada Was a Segregated Society with Racial Persecution

Most of the African Canadian members of the Niagara community were recent refugees from the United States and slavery. The legal freedom they found in this northern sanctuary did not free them from the rigours of the British colonial justice system, or from racial persecution. Jason Silverman has written that the American fugitive slave arriving in Upper Canada 'often found a segregated society, along with antagonism and resentment... Many Canadians deeply shared the prejudices and racial practices of their American neighbours; an attitude which ultimately manifested itself in anti-black newspaper attacks, discriminatory legislation, and an educational system reminiscent of the antebellum American North and the later Jim Crow South.' These refugees were promised equality under British law, but even the legal records perpetuated the discrimination they suffered.

--David Murray, Colonial Justice: Justice, Morality, and Crime in the Niagara District, 1791-1849, Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History (2002; repr., Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 170.