While often called the only all black hockey team in Canada at the time, the St. Catharines Orioles, who were established in 1937, were actually the first black team in Ontario, not the entire country.
It turned out that the Maritimes actually had an all black hockey league up and running well before the Orioles. In fact, the Colored Hockey League, which was founded in Nova Scotia in 1895 ran for three decades, saw over 400 players and is credited with the first known slapshot.
Nonetheless, it’s a significant chapter in local history because the players were all descendants of African American freedom seekers who settled in St. Catharines and after both the War of 1812 and the Harriet Tubman-lead Underground Railway, that list is a long one.
The Orioles were founded in 1937 by Ben Walker, a local St. Catharines quarry operator and were sponsored by H.G “Touch” Wood, owner of Dominion-Consolidated Transport and area florist Wally Walker.
While the team was already formed with players all being members of the still-standing Salem Chapel – British Methodist Episcopal Church in St. Catharines, they simply playing scrimmage on their own as there were no other black teams in the area.
However, once Wood and Walker got involved offering sponsorship, they asked the squad if they were interested in playing in the eight-team Niagara District Hockey League, where they would travel to hit the ice against teams from Fonthill, Homer, Jordan, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Port Weller, Thorold and Welland.
The athlete-churchgoers accepted the sponsorship offer and ended up wearing orange sweaters with four black stripes on the arms and the letters TST stitched across the chest, for Toronto-St. Catharines Transport, the name of Woods’s trucking company.
Bill Humber, the historian who wrote about the Orioles in his book “A Sporting Chance: Achievements of African-Canadian Athletes,” said the athletes faced no small amount of racism on opposing rinks, which were all outdoor – including one right on the Welland Canal.
And it wasn’t just the spectators – some teams simply refused to play them because of their skin colour. “Those attitudes were there without question,” said Humber in his book. “We [Canadians] were neither as open-minded and as great as we thought we were, nor were we as miserable and horrible as some of the things that happened in the United States.”
“We were on a tightrope as Canadians on some of these issues: You can make as strong a case that we were open-minded and liberal as you can make that we were close-minded and racist,” said Humber. “Both [arguments] can be made if you look at the entire history of the black athlete in Canada.”
And getting to the games sounded equally uncomfortable for the players. The squad travelled in the back of Wood’s flatbed truck with only a tarp protecting them from the winter element. “It wasn’t uncommon for the Orioles to have only one extra player on the bench, while the other teams were rolling two or three lines off their bench every three minutes,” one of the late Orioles, Laverne Dorsey, told Humber.
The team was completely ignored by the press and when they were mentioned, it was simply as a novelty act of sorts – something that was different but would soon fade away.
According to a Sportsnet story, the Toronto Daily Star ran a story on the team with the headline “Negro Puck Club, 16 Colored Lads on Team —All They Need is Ice.” That was kid’s gloves treatment. The story referred to the players as “boys” and included the sentence, “They may not get anywhere as pucksters, but the club suah (sure) has colah (colour)…yeah mam!”
None of the men who were draped in the Orioles’ orange and black jersey are still alive but their legacy for their part of St. Catharines folklore lives on.
From left, back row: Ben Walker, Secretary, Chester “Chuck” Smith, Doug Nicholson, Ted Smith, “Touch” Woods (sponsor), Alex Nicholson, Business Manager; Richard “Dick” Nicholson, Amos Dorsey, Rev. J. Ivan Moore (pastor of the BME Church, which the Orioles represent). Front row, from left: George West, Ted Wilkins, Wilfred Bell, Ken Bell, Larry Dorsey, Hope Nicholson (captain) Gordon Dorsey, and in the front, little Sylvia Moore, the Orioles mascot.