Anna Greenup

It was 1902, in Montreal, in the Saint-Antoine district.

Seven Black women founded a club. Their husbands were sleeping-car porters. Their work on the railways often kept them far from home.

And segregation shut Black women out of white women's clubs.

Their first president was named Anna Greenup.

Anna was born Anna Hurd on May 5, 1874, in Harveysburg, Ohio. It was a small abolitionist village.

Her father was a schoolteacher from Georgia. Her mother came from Virginia. Her two brothers became schoolteachers too.

Anna went to school until she was fourteen. Then, in her turn, she taught.

In December 1900, in Essex, Ontario, she married Charles Greenup. He did a bit of everything on the railways: cook, attendant, sleeping-car porter.

The couple settled in Montreal, in the neighbourhood now called Little Burgundy.

Anna's club was first called the Women's Club of Montreal. In 1904, it took the name Coloured Women's Club of Montreal.

It was inspired by an American association of Black women's clubs, founded in 1896.

One of its first projects was to welcome veterans home from the Boer War. To find them a roof.

The club's women opened soup kitchens. They gave clothing and blankets to newcomers from the West Indies and the United States.

They helped new mothers. They taught nutrition, budgeting and hygiene. They built a library of Black history.

They even thought of the dead. The club organized a burial ground at Mount Royal Cemetery.

In 1907, they helped found a church, Union Church. Today it is the oldest Black church in Montreal. Later came scholarships for Black students as well.

Around 1910, Anna left for Vancouver. Her husband worked there for the Canadian Pacific Railway. He died in 1920.

In Vancouver, Anna kept bringing people together. In the 1920s, she organized social activities at the Baptist church on Burrard Street.

She died on March 15, 1952, in Vernon, British Columbia. She was 77.

In Montreal, the club she had founded did not stop. It kept feeding and sheltering people through the First World War, the Great Depression and the Second World War.

In the late 1950s, her niece, Elsie Lam, became its president.

The club still exists.

In 1997, Quebec created a prize in her name, the Prix Anne-Greenup. Each year, it honours one person and one organization working against racism.

In 2004, in the Sud-Ouest borough, the Habitations Anne-Greenup opened: twenty-six social housing units.

Anna Greenup came from an African American community shaped by the fight against slavery. Her way of living together echoes Ubuntu: when one family lacks bread or a roof, the whole neighbourhood carries that worry.

She left soup kitchens, and blankets given to those just arriving.

And, in Montreal, homes that bear her name.