In the winter of 1889, Saint John threw itself a party and accidentally exposed some deeply uncomfortable truths about race, respectability and who was allowed dignity in public life. A closer look at the aftermath of the tainted celebration is revealing in how people reacted.
The first-ever Saint John winter carnival parade took place on February 27th, 1889. To say it was a huge event wouldn’t even do it justice. "The entire population turned out … crowds filled the entire space along the line of the march," gushed the Daily Telegraph newspaper.
The centrepiece of the carnival was a massive parade featuring no fewer than 100 fully decked-out floats. The weather was great, the mood was festive, and floats by labour unions marched peacefully alongside ones made by what the newspapers described as "businessmen who took part in the procession as an excellent opportunity to advertise their goods."
It wasn’t just businessmen though. Among the floats that day was one of the fastest-rising young entrepreneurs in the city — and she was no man.
She was a Black businesswoman named Georgina Whetsel.
Her float advertised her ice-cutting business. Before the invention of refrigerators, ice cutting was big business. As one Saint John paper put it, it was “the one indispensable commodity of the summer season.”
The business had been founded by her husband, Robert. It was small and still fledgling just four years before the parade, when he died suddenly. Despite being pregnant at the time and caring for several young children, Georgina Whetsel made the bold decision not to sell the business, but to take it over herself.
Within a year, she had bought out Robert’s business partners and became the sole owner. Emphasizing speed and efficiency, and using Lily Lake as the base of her ice-cutting operations, she soon had dozens of teams on the road daily, supplying homes, hotels, restaurants, butcher shops, and trains with ice.
That day, her covered float was painted bright white. The carriage was covered in flowers — it's unclear where they would have been sourced, given the season — and blocks of ice were prominently displayed. She hadn’t built her business by being shy about self-promotion. While most floats wished spectators a happy carnival, hers simply read “ICE” in giant letters, followed by the address of her office.
As the parade wound through the city, however, spectators noted that not all floats were celebratory. Four, in particular, were deeply problematic. They were openly racist, featuring actors and actresses in blackface — grotesque parodies of the worst stereotypes of Black people.
Even back in 1889, blackface was already considered shocking and unacceptable by many people who watched the parade, regardless of race.
On these floats, white actors and actresses in blackface performed ordinary, everyday activities — but deliberately portrayed as undignified, exaggerated, and foolish caricatures.
The examples mentioned by the newspapers make for uncomfortable reading. One float involved a hill with characters tobogganing down it. While the white actors and actresses sledded down as one would expect, the blackface performers slid down the hill without slides, tearing their pants and rolling around on the street.
Another float, sponsored by a local laundromat, showed blackface actresses struggling theatrically with old-fashioned washboards, while white women elegantly used washing machines.
Perhaps most telling was a pair of actors in blackface attempting to drive a wagon but swerving wildly, bickering, and striking one another. One newspaper reporter seemed to like that one, though, noting the actors “made a decided hit in their colored characters.”
As the floats passed, discomfort spread among the crowd. The Daily Telegraph quoted one white onlooker as saying: "The frequency of the representations is, to say the least, unfortunate.” The newspaper wrote that another white young woman was heard saying to her friends that she “feared that our colored fellow-citizens would be annoyed."
The following day, Georgina Whetsel intervened — publicly and forcefully.
She published an open letter in the Daily Telegraph, condemning the use of blackface in no uncertain terms. Calling it nothing more than "African caricatures, and always in the lowest and most degraded state,” she wrote with biting sarcasm: “This may be a mark of culture and refinement, but pardon me if I don’t think so … and I think that all the intelligent people of St. John will agree with me."
Falling back on her role as a businesswoman, she went on to remind Saint Johners that she, one of the very Black people those offending floats were making fun of, had created a lot of jobs in the city. Unlike those men and women in blackface, she declared, she did not judge people based on their races:
"I hire as many poor white men as I do poor colored men. It makes no difference to me as long as they can do their work what color they are."
Georgina Whetsel’s intervention opened the floodgates. In the days that followed, many other Saint Johners — seemingly all of them white — wrote letters to local newspapers condemning the blackface displays and criticizing the businesses that had sponsored them.
Days after her letter was published, the Daily Telegraph published an editorial noting that Whetsel "has evoked … favorable comment." The newspaper declared that, in its editor's opinion, she was right, and everything she said was "entirely justified."
Georgina Whetsel would go on to become the wealthiest Black woman in North America. A decade later, Boston’s ‘The Women’s Era’ would write: “Among those who are making their names and reputations for business capacity, there is probably no woman in the country who is a more striking example of pluck and intelligent perseverance than Mrs. Georgina Whetsel.”
Her decision to challenge blackface in the Saint John winter carnival of 1889 may seem like a small episode in a life filled with much larger achievements. But it shows that even in an era often dismissed as universally intolerant, people recognized racism when they saw it — and that a Black woman in New Brunswick was willing, and able, to force an entire city to reckon with itself.
