Comments on: 50 years ago: The rise of Black Power in Canada https://johnriddell.com/2019/01/27/50-years-ago-the-birth-of-black-power-in-canada/ MARXIST ESSAYS AND COMMENTARY Thu, 21 Jan 2021 16:24:37 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.1.10 By: Rob Lyons https://johnriddell.com/2019/01/27/50-years-ago-the-birth-of-black-power-in-canada/#comment-11656 Wed, 06 Feb 2019 00:14:50 +0000 https://johnriddell.com/?p=5220#comment-11656 Here is a good summary of the black workers who organized to change Canadian’s view of black people, politics and power.

Growing up in Truro, Nova Scotia in the 1950’s, a center for the Dominion Atlantic Railway, we learned the role that segregation played. My next door neighbor was an engineer, my black team mates on the Little League baseball team had fathers who were porters.

It was these families, and those of the Maxwell’s. White’s (famed opera singer Portia White sang in the local Black church choir, her Dad was the minister there for a time) and the Willis’ who taught me about the injustice of the way the railroad treated their people.

https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2019/02/01/the-madness-of-being-george-how-black-train-porters-demeaned-overworked-and-called-by-the-same-name-helped-transform-canada.html

]]> By: Rob Lyons https://johnriddell.com/2019/01/27/50-years-ago-the-birth-of-black-power-in-canada/#comment-11591 Mon, 28 Jan 2019 00:38:45 +0000 https://johnriddell.com/?p=5220#comment-11591 John: While I understand the importance of the Sir George Williams struggle, I take exception to the notion that it brought Black Power to Canada, even if we accept that the term means the movement as it appeared in the 1960’s, and not the original movements around the Underground Railroad, or the Above Ground railroad of the sleeping car porters movement.

In the 1960’s, a Toronto area truck driver, Burnley “Rocky” Jones, one of the first black members of SUPA, and a spokeperson against the Vietnam war, became an outspoken advocate of the rights of blacks and other people of colour.

In 1965 he returned to Nova Scotia (he and I were born in the same town, and I know his younger siblings) and with his wife Joan founded the first black self-help and advocacy project there. He was also the first person to bring the Black Panther party to Canada, and was on the list of the RCMP’s SS division as the most dangerous black revolutionary in Canada.

I say this, not to denigrate in anyway the causes championed by Rosie Douglas and the others involved in the movement, but to make sure people remember Rocky, Joan, Sharon and the others involved in creating the Black United Front, and the other initatives which provided a rallying point for social justice activists.

To support themselves, Joan and Rocky opened a leather clothing store, where leather articles were made to order. I had, up until a year ago, a leather vest that Joan made and which was purchased by me in 1968. It, like the rest of us, was put to good use, and lasted well, but like all things, just got worn out.

Rocky died in 2013, after becoming a civil rights lawyer and an expert in environmental racism. He was an activist for human rights until his heart finally gave out.

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