2021 $20 The Black Loyalists Commemorating Black History, DCAM PR69DCAM 认证号46072242, PCGS号886817

Black Loyalists were people of African descent who sided with the Loyalists during the American Revolutionary War. In particular, the term refers to men who escaped enslavement by colonial masters and served on the Loyalist side because of the Crown's guarantee of freedom. Nova Scotia’s Black Loyalists were at the heart of the greatest historical events of our continent. Theirs is a story of slavery, the American Revolution, and of the settlement of North America. Unlike the stories of the United Empire Loyalists and the American revolutionaries, this is a story that has rarely been told. Birchtown’s Black Loyalist Heritage Centre is a place to tell this story. “People of African descent have been in what is now Canada since the opening years of the 17th century, but the first massive wave of Black immigration into Canada took place in 1783, when about 3,000 Black Loyalists fled New York City after aiding the British on the losing side of the American Revolutionary War and sailed to Nova Scotia. They settled in Annapolis Royal, Digby and Saint John (then Nova Scotia) among other communities, but the largest Black settlement became Birchtown, just outside the booming town of Shelburne. The story of the Black Loyalists—how they served the British in the war in exchange for the promise of freedom in peace time, and how they travelled to Nova Scotia only to endure hardships of slavery, indentured servitude, landlessness and hunger—is one of the great stories of Canadian history. Their perseverance, as well as the decision made by about 1,200 of them to leave Canada and to sail across the Atlantic Ocean to found the colony of Freetown in Sierra Leone in 1792—suggests the breadth and complexity of the world-wide migrations they had experienced as a result of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and its aftermath. Although many Nova Scotians joined the exodus to Sierra Leone in 1792, even more stayed behind to continue to build the province of Nova Scotia as we know it today.