Black History in Ottawa Streets

This was the second of the tours of Ottawa that I took in 2025.  It was organized the by Black History Ottawa, and was a bus tour rather than a walking tour.  I was fine with the bus, because it looked like it was about to rain all morning, and many of the sites were far away from each other. 

The tour started from the Lisgar Street entrance of City Hall, as that’s the best place to park a minibus without obstructing traffic.  I’d been waiting at the Laurier Street entrance but one of the security guards told me about the tour bus at the other entrance just in time. There was a script, schedule and handout, which I liked, because I could see where we would be going and approximate the schedule in my head, while some other tours had me wondering about timings. 

There were two spots where we got out of the bus, the first was at the Rockliffe Lookout, and the second was at the War Memorial.  It was nice to stretch my legs, but I don’t feel that this was particularly necessary to get the sense of what the tour was discussing.  It also meant that we ran into some disturbance because of the loud street preacher at Parliament Hill, and the changing of the guard at the top of the hour, complete with bagpipe accompaniment.

It was a small tour group, about ten in all, including myself.  Everyone was polite and eager to learn. The tour guides were friendly and knowledgeable. 

The tour was fairly apolitical, which was an interesting decision.  While acknowledging a history of racism, both overt and systemic, the decision was made not to dwell upon that aspect, and the tour was more of a celebration of Black excellence in the arts, sports, politics, and other fields.  Even when we drove past the central police station, the discussion was about the history of Black police officers and civil participation. 

The surprising takeaway that I learnt was that the first Black city councillor (Rawlson O’Neil King), wasn’t elected until 2019. I thought that must have been wrong, so I looked it up… and yeah. Wow. That’s much later than I would have thought.