Figures

In The 6ix: A Black Baker Rises to the Top. Runner-Up in History Would’ve Burned This Page Challenge. Top Story - February 2024.

The man made good cakes. And following an apprenticeship, he got a job as a baker. It was 1861, he was nineteen years old. It wasn’t his first job - he’d been working since he was a kid to pay for school supplies - and it wouldn’t be his last. For the next sixteen years he kneaded dough, decorated cakes, baked pies. Then, he started driving horse-drawn cabs for his uncle’s livery stable. Years later, at the age of fifty-two, he became Toronto’s first Black elected politician.