In the Canadian town of Oakville, Ontario, on 28 February 1930, 75 members of the Ku Klux Klan attempted to prevent the marriage of a white woman, Isabella Jones, to Ira Junius Johnson, a man presumed to be Black.
After burning a cross in the middle of a street in Oakville, the Klansmen searched for Johnson and Jones; they abducted Jones and threatened Johnson. Newspapers were sympathetic to the Klan at first, but the efforts of the Black community in Toronto turned public opinion against them; Johnson told the press that he was not Black, but of mixed white and Cherokee descent. Three Klansmen were brought to court. At first, only one was found guilty and fined $50; when he appealed, the court gave him a three-month sentence. Johnson and Jones married a month after the incident.
Background
Ira Junius Johnson's paternal grandfather George Branson Johnson was a free Black man from Maryland who migrated with his family of eleven children (including Ira Junius's father) to the Province of Canada in the 1860s, where they settled in Oakville. They may have used the Underground Railroad to get there. Johnson's maternal grandfather Junius B. Roberts was from Indiana and served in the African-American 28th Indiana Infantry Regiment during the American Civil War. He later migrated to Canada and served as a minister in Guelph, Oakville, and Hamilton for the British Methodist Episcopal Church. His wife Francis had Johnson's mother Ida in 1870. The Johnsons were members of the Church Roberts served in Oakville. Ida and John wed on 27 September 1887; John worked as a weaver, and Ida as a midwife. They had three children, of whom the second, Ira Junius Johnson, was born 30 April 1893. After the death of Junius, Francis moved in with Ida and John.
Johnson grew up in Oakville, and the community accepted him as Black; he later asserted he was half white and half Cherokee. Despite a weak economy, he found work as a tanner at Oakville's largest factory. In 1916 he enlisted for service in the First World War. He was sent to the front in November as a member of the 9th Canadian Machine Gun Company during the Battle of Passchendaele. He was one of about Black Canadians who were accepted into non-segregated sections of the Canadian military—officers were free to turn them down, and most did. Johnson participated in the Hundred Days Offensive that closed the war in 1918, during which he suffered a shrapnel wound that permanently injured his leg. He returned to Canada in May 1919 and was discharged that July.
Johnson returned to Oakville to live with his parents. He trained and found work as a motor mechanic, but was laid off after five years. Thereafter he did casual work for building contractors. By 1930, Johnson was working as a labourer and was living with a white girl, Isabella Jones; They intended to marry on 2 March, but Jones's mother Annie objected to the interracial pairing.
Oakville lies on Lake Ontario between Toronto and Hamilton. It developed in the late 19th century as a resort town for affluent southwestern Ontarians. Oakville suffered unemployment after the Wall Street Crash of 1929; in 1930 its population was about , overwhelming of British Isles-descent. Census figures are not available for the Black population, though the mayor of Oakville J. B. Moat told the press at the time the "coloured" population had recently decreased, and stood at "not more than forty with women and children".
Unlike in the United States with its Jim Crow and Anti-miscegenation laws, Canadian law did not bar those of different ethnicities from socializing or marrying; social pressures nonetheless made inter-ethnic associations difficult. The Ku Klux Klan had established itself in Canada, but had far less widespread membership and influence than it had in the United States. There were no anti-discrimination or anti-hate speech laws in effect in Canada as of 1930.
Incident
On the afternoon of 28 February 1930, Jones and Johnson went to New Toronto to get a marriage license. About 22:00 that evening 75 members of the Ku Klux Klan from Hamilton gathered in Oakville. They marched through the town at night, wakening hundreds of residents and were dressed in white gowns and hoods. They placed a cross in the middle of the road and set it on fire. When the cross had burned out, they sought the police chief, David Kerr, to communicate their intentions; as the hour was late, he was not at the police station. The Klansmen then looked for Jones and Johnson, and tracked them to the home of Johnson's aunt Viola Sault; the couple were playing cards with members of Johnson's family.