A Fairfield woman has scored a winning goal with her design of a commemorative postage stamp honouring a little-known aspect of Canadian hockey history, the all-black Colored Hockey League of Eastern Canada.
Lara Minja is the artist behind Canada Post’s latest commemorative stamp, issued in late January in time for Black History Month. The stamp honours the Afro-Canadian hockey players who competed for “The Colored Hockey Championship” in the Maritimes.
Minja has previously designed other postage stamps, including five for Black History Month, starting with the first in 2009. She and her husband, Matthias Reinicke, operate the graphic arts company Lime Designs from their home, which they share with two teen daughters.
She said all postage stamps are great assignments, but she was especially intrigued by the story of the Colored Hockey League, which played in the Maritimes from 1895 to about 1930. Their sweaters, the old-style equipment and even the American spelling of coloured were all quirky details she wanted to include in her design.
“Your objective is to always communicate a very big story, but do it in a very small space,” Minja said. “That’s the nature of stamps.”
Minja based her illustration on a grainy black-and-white photograph of the Halifax Eurekas, winners of the 1904 Colored Hockey Championship.
But she also wanted to include names of other teams in the league. Her research indicated team names and emblems would sometimes contain double meanings. The surface meaning would be understood by everyone, but an underlying cultural code word or image was sometimes aimed directly at people of African ancestry.
For example, the Africville Sea Siders were formed in a black community near Halifax that was indeed near the sea. But their emblems carried a double S, which for black people still denoted “Slave Stealers” — conductors on the Underground Railway who guided escaped slaves northward prior to the U.S. Civil War.
“For the black community, these names hid some long-standing and empowering meanings,” said Minja.
She also said the league’s players always played their games outdoors. So the illustration on the Official First Day Cover, the collectable envelope available for sale, depicts two men playing hockey on Egg Pond in Halifax with the Citadel in the background.
Researchers told her that would be a likely spot for black hockey players to lace up in the late 19th or early 20th century, although no photos or written references were found.
George Fosty, historian and author of Black Ice: The Lost History of the Colored Hockey League of the Maritimes, said in a telephone interview from his home in New York that so little is known about the black hockey players , he is confident his is the only book devoted to the subject.
Fosty said the book took him and his brother and co-author, Darril, seven years to research. When they started, they went through about 6,000 sources on hockey and found only three mentions of black hockey players.
So forgotten is the story, Fosty said, that when his book was first published, people claimed the league had never even existed. Some bookstores assumed Black Ice was fiction and put it in the wrong section.
“It’s the kind of story that had really been eliminated almost 98 per cent from the historical record,” said Fosty.
One of his best early research clues turned out to be a book on black baseball teams in Canada that listed some Baptist Church teams in the Maritimes and mentioned, almost in passing, that the players would often turn to hockey in winter. That led the Fosty brothers to Baptist Church records in Nova Scotia, and names and records started to appear.
Fosty said he and his brother learned that players, because they were in a league of their own, adopted traits and styles that were near scandalous in hockey circles of the time.
He said the slapshot, a controlled and aimed shot, was invented by Colored Hockey League hockey player Eddie Martin in 1906. Newspaper accounts at the time called it “baseball hockey” and many organized leagues ruled it illegal. Fosty said he found accounts showing that even players in the Colored Hockey League didn’t approve.
“When you look at the Colored Hockey League, it was an incredible league for innovation, because it let these guys really show their talent,” said Fosty.
Other accounts talked of league goalies dropping down to their knees instead of standing up on their skates. One even described a player moving about the net “like a spider,” which Fosty believes was an early butterfly style.
“They wouldn’t have called it a ‘butterfly stance’ 120 years ago,” said Fosty. “But if you look at how butterfly goalies move around, you might describe it as looking like a spider.”
The league was disrupted by the First World War, then the 1917 Halifax Explosion, which wiped out much of the city. Many of the players moved elsewhere.
By the 1920s, the games of the National Hockey League were being broadcast into Canadian homes via radio, and the NHL dominance of hockey began.
“It makes sense that Canadians would end up paying so little attention to other leagues, even if they were historically significant,” said Fosty.
Jim Phillips, director of stamp services for Canada Post, said this is where public documents such as postage stamps can play an enormous role.
“Canada Post is very proud to be a Canadian storyteller and tell these little-known stories like the black hockey league in the Maritimes,” said Phillips. “This is what our mandate is.”
Not every commemorative stamp is a celebration, however.
In 2003, Canada Post struck a special stamp honouring the Vancouver Asahi, the 1940 baseball team that was forced to disband when many of the players were sent to internment camps.
Another stamp was struck in 2014 to mark the 100th anniversary of the Komagata Maru incident, where a boat carrying passengers from India who had been hoping to work in B.C. was stopped and forced to return to India.
“We don’t always celebrate things with our commemorative stamps, but we marked it and that’s what’s important,” said Phillips. “That’s what we are doing here with the Colored Hockey League.
“It was a difficult time to be a black man or a black person in Canada in the late 1800s and early 1900s.”
Were it not for the stamp, Elizabeth Cooke-Fumbu said she might never have known about her grandfather’s time playing hockey for the Amherst Royals in the Colored Hockey League.
Cooke-Fumbu, who lives in Amherst, NS, said she knew her grandfather, Frank Cook, but never once heard him talk about his playing days.
“It was a different time,” she said. “Even though segregation was supposed to be over, it was still a segregated hockey league and it wasn’t something you really wanted to talk about.”
Cooke-Fumbu said she was excited to hear Canada Post would be creating the stamp. “It’s the first formal recognition that has ever even been given to the strength, ability and contribution of the players and the fact the Colored Hockey League even existed.”
While they last, the stamp will sell for 92 cents each. The illustrated Official First Day Cover, an envelope with an illustration and specially designed postage mark, costs an extra $1.92.
