Black Canadians: Resistance, Rights and Contributions, 1945–1982

Before we begin

This lesson is about anti-Black racism in Canada and how Black Canadians resisted it and pushed for change. Some Canadians believe racism was only an American problem. The evidence shows that segregation and discrimination also happened here. It also shows Black Canadians leading the fight for equal rights and contributing to every part of Canadian life.

As you read, ask the same questions a historian would: What changed because of these efforts? What stayed the same?

Remember from Grade 8

In Grade 8 you learned about Black communities in Canada West in the 1850s, Black pioneers in Victoria, and Black Canadians who faced both opportunity and discrimination from the 1860s to 1914. By 1945, Black communities had lived in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Ontario, Quebec and the West for generations. Newer arrivals had come from the Caribbean and the U.S.

Segregation in Canada

In the 1940s and 1950s, anti-Black racism in Canada took many forms:

• Some restaurants, barbershops, hotels, dance halls and skating rinks refused to serve Black customers. In 1945, a Black teenager, Harry Gairey Jr., was refused entry to a Toronto skating rink; his father's protest at City Hall drew public attention to discrimination in Toronto.
• Some theatres made Black customers sit in separate sections.
• Black workers were often limited to certain jobs. For example, many Black men worked as sleeping car porters on the railways, and porters were not promoted to better-paid jobs like conductor.
• Segregated schools for Black children still existed in Ontario and Nova Scotia. Nova Scotia removed the legal provisions for segregated schooling around 1950, but its last segregated school did not close until 1983. Ontario's law allowing separate schools for Black children was repealed in 1964.
• Landlords and employers could legally refuse Black people in many places.

Viola Desmond, 1946

Viola Desmond was a successful Black businesswoman from Halifax who ran a beauty salon and a school for beauticians. On November 8, 1946, her car broke down in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, and she went to a movie at the Roseland Theatre. She sat on the main floor. The theatre's unwritten rule was that Black customers sat in the balcony. When she refused to move, she was physically removed by the manager and a police officer, jailed overnight and fined. She was convicted of a tax offence: the main-floor ticket cost one cent more in tax than the balcony ticket she had been sold.

With support from her church and the Nova Scotia Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NSAACP), founded in 1945, she appealed. Her appeal failed, but her case drew attention to segregation in Nova Scotia. Carrie Best reported on it in The Clarion, a Black-owned newspaper she founded in 1946.

In 2010 the government of Nova Scotia granted Viola Desmond a free pardon and apologized. In 2018 she became the first Canadian woman portrayed on a regularly circulating Bank of Canada note, the $10 bill.

Organizing for rights in Ontario

In Ontario, Black activists worked with labour unions, Jewish organizations and other allies.

• Stanley Grizzle, a sleeping car porter and union leader with the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, fought for porters' rights and joined campaigns against discrimination. He later became a citizenship judge.
• In Dresden, Ontario, Hugh Burnett and the National Unity Association campaigned against restaurants and barbershops that refused Black customers.
• Their pressure helped win new laws: the Fair Employment Practices Act (1951), banning discrimination in hiring, and the Fair Accommodation Practices Act (1954), banning discrimination in places that served the public.
• Laws did not enforce themselves. In 1954, activists including Bromley Armstrong and Ruth Lor tested a Dresden restaurant that still refused service and filed complaints, pushing the government to act.
• In 1962, Ontario combined its anti-discrimination laws into the Ontario Human Rights Code and created the Ontario Human Rights Commission. Daniel G. Hill, a Black sociologist, became its first full-time director.
• In 1954, the Negro Citizenship Association, led by Donald Moore, sent a delegation to Ottawa to protest immigration rules that kept out most Black immigrants from the Caribbean. This pressure was one of the causes of the 1962 change to immigration rules you learned about in the previous lesson.

Africville

Africville was a Black community on the shore of Bedford Basin in Halifax, settled in the mid-1800s. Residents owned homes and land and had a church at the centre of community life. But the City of Halifax gave Africville few services (no paved roads, running water or sewers) while placing an open dump, a prison and other unwanted facilities nearby.

Between 1964 and 1970, the city relocated Africville's residents in the name of "urban renewal" and demolished the community, including its church. Many families received little compensation and lost the community that had supported them for generations. Former residents and their descendants kept organizing. In 2010, Halifax apologized, and a replica of the Seaview church was built as a museum.

Africville shows how a policy described as "improvement" could destroy a community when the people affected were not truly listened to.

New voices: immigration, politics and protest

• The West Indian Domestic Scheme (1955–1967) brought about 3 000 women, first from Jamaica and Barbados, to work as household workers for one year, after which they could become permanent residents. The work was hard and the rules strict, but many women used the scheme to build new lives and later sponsor family. Jean Augustine came to Canada through it in 1960; she later became a teacher, a principal and, in 1993, the first Black woman elected to Parliament.
• After the 1962 and 1967 changes, many more immigrants came from the Caribbean and Africa, growing Black communities in Toronto, Montreal and other cities. Caribbean Canadians founded Caribana in Toronto in 1967, and newspapers such as Contrast (founded 1969) reported on Black communities.
• Political firsts: Leonard Braithwaite (Ontario MPP, 1963) spoke against the law allowing segregated schools in his first speech, and it was repealed in 1964. Lincoln Alexander became the first Black Member of Parliament in 1968 and the first Black federal cabinet minister in 1979. Rosemary Brown became the first Black woman elected to a provincial legislature (British Columbia, 1972) and in 1975 ran for leader of the federal NDP, finishing second.
• Protest: in 1969, Black students at Montreal's Sir George Williams University protested how the university handled their complaints of racism by a professor. The occupation ended with police action, a fire and many arrests. It became a turning point for Black activism in Canada. In Nova Scotia, activists such as Burnley "Rocky" Jones helped found the Black United Front in 1969.
• In 1979, Albert Johnson, a Jamaican Canadian, was shot and killed by Toronto police in his home, sparking protests against police treatment of Black people. Issues of policing and racism continued after 1982.

Contributions to Canadian life

Black Canadians shaped Canadian culture, sport and public life:

• Oscar Peterson, a Montreal-born jazz pianist, became one of the most celebrated musicians in the world; his "Hymn to Freedom" (1962) became an anthem of the civil rights movement.
• Portia White, a contralto from Nova Scotia, sang in concert halls across North America in the 1940s.
• Harry Jerome, a sprinter from British Columbia, won a bronze medal in the 100 metres at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and set world records.
• Willie O'Ree of Fredericton became the first Black player in the NHL in 1958.
• Ferguson Jenkins of Chatham, Ontario, won baseball's Cy Young Award in 1971, the first Canadian to do so.
• The Ontario Black History Society, co-founded in 1978 by Daniel G. Hill and others, worked to make Black history part of Canadian history.