**If you missed my last post on Black Segregation in Commercial Establishments check out my last blog post.**

There are many examples of segregation that occured in Canada over the years but today we’re going to focus the segregation of the school system for Black Canadians.

The act of treating a person as property was abolished in Canada (along with most British colonies) in 1834. However, the idea of racial inferiority among Canadians was harder to shake.

In Ontario and Nova Scotia schools were legally segregated so that Black and white students were kept seperate. The options for Black students was often attending school in another building or going to school when the white students weren’t.

In other provinces segregation was informally enforced by parents. Yeah, that sounded a little scary to me too…

In case you think this happened a long time ago…it wasn’t. The last segregated school in Ontario closed its doors in 1965 and the last one in Nova Scotia closed in 1983. I was in elementary school myself that year. This type of segregation, a mere forty years from now, is important because the symptoms can still be seen in certain areas and how they treat outsiders in their schools.

If a student was fortunate to leave elementary school with a full education there were still plenty of other obstacles. Canadian universities, in particular medical schools, often rejected Black students’ applications on the basis of race. Those Black students who were accepted faced restrictions that white students did not have.

These restrictions still effect the amount of Black Canadians who become doctors in Canada and, in turn, the type of care minorities have in the Canadian healthcare system to this day (I’ll address this in another post).