As the Chair of the Council on African Canadian Education I want to welcome you to the CACE website. As we mark 2004, as the 10th anniversary of the release of the BLAC Report on Education (1994), we immediately turn our attention to the wisdom, foresight, and visionary thinking of the BLAC Task Force – the body responsible for establishing CACE. This Task Force took decisive action when it legislatively mandated CACE to assume the role of "soliciting the views of member of African Nova Scotian communities and bringing their matters of interest and concern to the attention of the Minister of Education;" and what better tool than technology and the world wide web to aid in carrying-out this goal?

But the contributions of African Nova Scotian educators to empowering Black learners and redressing educational inequities didn't begin with the triumph of the BLAC Report. As the BLAC Report itself has shown us, the journey began more than a century ago when preachers were teachers, when churches served as schools, when African Nova Scotians petitioned for the establishment of schools and against separate and unequal segregated schools.

Educators such as: Richard Preston a Black refugee, who established the African United Baptist Association in 1854; Catherine Abernathy a Black Loyalist woman who established a school in Preston in 1791; Madeline Symonds the first African Nova Scotian graduate from Provincial Normal College - now Teachers College; Rev. Dr. William Pearly Oliver who pioneered adult education in the Black community; and Dr. Anthony (Tony) Johnston who headed up an Ethnic Services Division in the Nova Scotia Department of Education in 1975. These are just some of the women and men whose contributions to education remain all to obscure. With the launch of the CACE website we now have a powerful communication vehicle which will allow us to tell their story to school children in Nova Scotia, across Canada, and around the word.

It is in the tradition of the work of our many unsung educational heroes of the historic past and the work of the BLAC Task Force, in the more recent past, that CACE looks forward to using technology to promote the rights and interests of African Nova Scotian learners. Being acutely aware of the legacy of victory CACE is heir to, the board and staff of CACE look forward to ensuring CACE makes its own contributions to empowering Black learners and redressing educational inequities. I am confident that our new website will play a vital role in CACE achieving this goal.

Charles Sheppard