Choltu
My name is Choltu and I am the founder of Toronto Black Archives, a social media platform that I started because I’m a history nerd, and I just saw a need to bring our history and our stories to the forefront.
Daysha Loppie
When did you start it?
Choltu
We celebrated our one year anniversary on February 1. I started it last year [2024] for Black History Month.
Loppie
Happy one year anniversary. You spoke about a gap that you were looking to fill. I was wondering if you can talk a little bit more about that gap and how it feels to you. Why did you feel the need to fill it in this way?
Choltu
I’m working on a film that will be based on the historical Black community of Blackhurst. I’m currently in the process of directing that film, but when I was doing my research for it, I was looking for a lot of archival imagery.
I noticed that if I’m looking through pages of an archival text, for every 20 or 50 pages, I’ll come across a Black image, but there’s so much documentation of white people in Toronto, in Canada. I was very upset by that—to know that we have such an impact and influence on the city, yet, a lot of our histories aren’t documented. I wanted to make that accessible and share our impacts and our stories, because we have a lot to bring to the forefront.
Loppie
How did you engage in this research?
Choltu
One of my first areas of research was my mom’s personal archive. A big influence for me to work on this film is my personal connection to the neighborhood. My mom has worked there my whole life, at a beauty salon that shut down last February. I was going through her hairdressing photos of women from the city. That was my first step – looking around at my own personal archive.
In my mom’s personal archive, there were a lot of photos that she had in a hairstyle book that she kept from back in the day before there was Instagram or Tik Tok, a lot of hairstylists would just take pictures of their clients when they were done doing their hair, and then put the physical pictures in an album.
She has all those pictures of the women’s hair that she would do in that book. There were a lot of people of Caribbean descent in that book. It was really cool. That was my first reference point.
Choltu
I also did some research at the Reference Library and found a publication called Spear magazine.
Loppie
Yes, I’m familiar with Spear. I don’t think I was actually looking for the publication. I was at Toronto Metropolitan University’s library, doing work for something else. When I looked to my left, there was a bookshelf all about cultural newspapers in Canada. There was an anthology, I think that would be the right term, of ethnocultural newspapers in Ontario. As I flipped through it, my first question was, “What are the Black newspapers and magazines that I’m not aware of?”
Spear was one of them. There was also Contrast, and there were quite a few others, like obviously the Provincial Freeman, but that’s also from a different time.
Something that I thought was interesting about the magazines was that their lifespans were often very short, or it would be kind of sporadic. But tell me more about what you learned about Spear.
Choltu
I was so excited when I came across [Spear]. I scanned a lot of the images, took photos, used that as one of my references. Yeah, I was looking for a lot of stuff that I could relate to the Bathurst and Bloor area. Because one thing I learned when looking through those archives was that a lot of the Black community was centered in that part of downtown. That really was really one of many the hubs for the Black community from the ‘60s to the ‘90s.
Loppie
Yeah, totally. Have some of these images made it onto the Toronto Black Archives page?
Choltu
Yeah, they have. A few of them have.
Loppie
Can you talk to me about one?
Choltu
This is just one of the many I put in my story. It was about African Liberation Day in 1975 and that was a page from Spear. It was an article that talked about the Liberation Day that happened. There was a protest, and that also speaks to the times–protesting for basic human rights.
Loppie
How do you decide what to post?
Choltu
The number one filter would be the year. I try not to post things after 2010 and I have particularities around what I post on the actual page. Quality is a big one. I try to post pictures that have more context, that other people can relate to and that are kind of familiar to the audiences.
Loppie
Why use an Instagram page for this kind of work?
Choltu
Accessibility. I wanted to make it as accessible as possible to the average person, because so many people are on Instagram, and a lot of people otherwise wouldn’t have access to these archives and their history. I wanted to make it appealing for people our age to learn about our history.
Loppie
Yeah, you mentioned connection, people having connection to the images themselves, or maybe the context in which they were taken. Do you feel like having this as an Instagram account creates some sort of connection to the community?
Choltu
The people who follow my pages are a community in itself. I like the engagement under the photos. They’ll add to the story, because every photo or video is a story and they’ll expand upon it. That’s one of my favorite parts.
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Through the Instagram account @torontoblackarchives, Choltu centers documentation of Black history in Toronto, creating a community of people across the city who interact with each other, sharing intimate stories and photographs. On April 10th, Choltu co-hosted an exhibit called Waves Cont’d at It’s OK* Studios where some submissions to @torontoblackarchives were showcased. Choltu’s work builds on a legacy of Black women scholars, activists and community members who began this work decades ago.
Want to learn more? Check out the links below!
About the interviewee
Choltu Curlin is a Jamaican Canadian writer and director born and raised in Toronto. Curlin has over five years of experience writing, creating, filming, and editing video content. Curlin’s passion for culture, community, writing and media infused with her love for history, archival content is what informs her chosen art form and expression of film-making with a focus on the stories of the Black experience.