Remembering Hogan Alley and the Black Urban Landscape at Schema : more than ethnic

Remembering Hogan Alley and the Black Urban Landscape

On Saturday February 24th, 2007, special guest speakers David Hilliard and Dr. Afua Cooper will be at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre where they will be discussing the topic of black urban sites in different North American contexts and will illustrate the commonalities of the experiences of Black Canadians with the cultural legacy of the Black Panther Party and their agenda for empowering Black communities in the US.

"Hogan's Alley" was the local, unofficial name for Park Lane, an alley that ran through the southwestern corner of Strathcona during the first six decades of the twentieth century. While Hogan's Alley and the surrounding area were an ethnically diverse neighbourhood during this era, a number of Black families, Black businesses and the city's only Black church -- the African Methodist Episcopal Fountain Chapel -- were located there.

As such, Hogan's Alley was the first and last neighbourhood in Vancouver with a substantial concentrated black population. Most of Hogan's Alley was destroyed circa 1970 by the City's construction of the Georgia Viaduct, the first phase of a planned interurban freeway. The freeway was stopped by Strathcona community activists, but not before Hogan's Alley was effectively obliterated. Today, the block or so that is left of the alley itself bears no mark that there was ever a black presence there, having become part of greater Chinatown. The Hogan's Alley Memorial Project was founded in 2002 with the goal of preserving the public memory of this original black neighbourhood. This "lost" community deserves to be highlighted, as an important cultural component of Vancouver's history; which brings us to our Black History Month Celebration.

Remembering Hogan's Alley and the Black Urban Landscape will be a means of raising the profile of Hogan's Alley, while also illustrating the commonalities of the experiences of Black Canadians with the cultural legacy of the Black Panther Party.

David Hilliard was a founding member and Chief of Staff of the Black Panther Party, and is author of "This Side of Glory", a compelling personal narrative and electrifying eyewitness account of the Black Liberation Movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

Dr Afua Cooper is an award-winning poet, author and historian, and is considered one of Canada's premier experts and chroniclers of the country's hidden history of Black peoples.

Special guests include: Junie Desil (Haitian-Canadian poet), Wayde Compton
(Vancouver writer) and hip hop emcee Ndidi Cascade.

Generously sponsored by the Georgia Straight, tickets are available at Ticketmaster

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