About
For almost two decades Bruce County was home to one of Canada’s once forgotten revolutionaries. Robert Sutherland was Canada’s first Black university graduate and first Black lawyer, who lived and established a successful law practice in Walkerton for most of his adult life. For decades Sutherland’s achievements and career went largely overlooked, however in recent years historians have pieced together Sutherland’s life to acknowledge and honour his momentous accomplishments. Robert Sutherland was born c. 1830 in Jamaica. According to many sources, he was born to a Scottish father and a freed African-Jamaican mother. Sutherland arrived in Kingston, Canada West (now Ontario) in 1849 to attend Queen’s University. At that time Queen’s was a young Presbyterian college and the closest Presbyterian school to the West Indies. Sutherland became Queen’s sixtieth registered student within a class of fourteen freshmen. Sutherland graduated from Queen’s university in 1852 with an honours in mathematics and classics, which was a notable achievement at that time. Sutherland also made history as the first Black person to attend and graduate from a university in Canada.