Meet the Colored People's Protective Association: Little-known history of Calgary's early Black community

Over 115 years ago, more than 150 members of Calgary’s Black community gathered at a venue called Eagle Hall on First Street S.W. for what a local newspaper called “one of the most successful balls of the season.”

In those days, only 16 years after incorporation, the city welcomed an influx of Black settlers — many seeking a life away from the discriminatory Jim Crow laws south of the border.

“Popular dances and ragtime two-steps were the order of the night, and many a giddy hour the dusky belles and their boisterous gentlemen friends reeled and swung about the spacious floor in one long round of enjoyment,” the Calgary Daily Herald story from Oct. 12, 1910, read.

The event, an annual affair, was held by the Colored People’s Protective Association (CPPA) — a group first formally organized by five Black men in January of that same year “for the advancement of the colored race,” the newspaper article says.

According to historian and multiplatform storyteller Cheryl Foggo, who has been researching the collective for decades, the first gathering took place in the home of William King.

The organization did far more than hold dances.

“The purposes were to socialize and let people get to know each other, but also to raise money for their other activities, because the CPPA supported people in whatever their needs were,” Foggo said. 

She described coming across a reference of a young, pregnant Black woman without a support system. The group helped her out, Foggo said.

“I think they were very generous and kind with people.”

Foggo has included the CPPA’s historical contributions in Making Place: A Map of Black Calgary, recently launched and made in collaboration with local artist Simone Elizabeth Saunders as part of the Calgary Atlas Project.

The Herald’s recounting of the ball continues: “there was music a-plenty, both vocal and instrumental” with the crowd bursting into song on the dance floor.

The story also leans into a number of racist tropes.

Written less than 50 years after the end of the American Civil War, the story recounts that several party attendees reminisced about old times: “There were people there who had seen sunny Alabama and dear ‘ole Georgia’ in their childhood days.”

In actuality, Black people were subject to immense racial violence, including lynchings, and segregation laws in states including Alabama and Georgia in the early 1900s.