What’s race got to do with it?
I accept the argument. Those involved in the recent decision to provide a group of—white—residents in Lake Major with keys to an old logging road so they could avoid having to travel an extra 5.5 km through the—black—community of North Preston were providing a small but reasonable favour to those most inconvenienced by a local bridge construction project.
When they—the landowners who provided the keys, Councilor David Hendsbee who facilitated the arrangement, municipal bureaucrats who blessed it—came up with this favour, they weren’t thinking about the race of those involved, or about how those who weren’t given keys might regard this favour.
I accept that.
Just as I am prepared to believe a different set of “theys” harboured no particular ill will to the black residents of Upper Hammonds Plains back in the 1990s when they decided not to extend city water services from nearby Pockwock Lake to their homes, even though main water lines traveled through Hammonds Plains’ backyards en route way to providing water to white communities.
And I’ll buy the claims of other theys that race wasn’t a factor in deciding to locate a landfill in Lincolnville in 2006.
Just as it was not a consideration when they—another different they—dumped an earlier landfall beside the same black community in 1974.
Not to forget the landfill in East Lake in 1992. And the dump in Africville in…
By one estimate, over 30 per cent of Nova Scotia’s black communities happen to be located within five km of a waste dump.
That doesn’t mean the decisions were racially-based.
Race may not have been the prime motivator behind this year’s cross burning in Hants County either.
Or in the torching of the Black Loyalist Heritage Centre in Birchtown in 2006.
And that cop who stopped Kirk Johnston’s car in 1998—triggering a landmark human rights complaint—may not have done so just because the boxer was “driving while black.”
As a white person, I have no difficulty believing race was not behind any one of those specific incidents or individual decisions.
But I can understand why a black person might see a troubling pattern.
Is Corey Wright the wrong man?
When American sailor Damon Crooks was killed on Argyle Street, police had a strong suspect but a weak case. Luckily for a city embarrassed by the murder, the suspect cooperated. Stephen Kimber finds out how pleading guilty became Corey Wright’s best move, right or wrong.
Corey Wright Photo essay by Aaron Fraser
My blood is my ink
My tears are my tales
I did a couple years in jail
But I shall prevail
He smiled. Big smile. “What you doing after?” It was nudging four in the morning on Saturday, November 4, 2006, closing time at Rain, the downtown Halifax nightclub where Corey Wright had spent his evening. He’d glimpsed her earlier. She served drinks in the bar. Hot. He’d made eye contact. Smiled. She’d smiled back. Now, he chatted her up. Got her name, her number.
“Got to clean up,” she told him.
“Do your thing,” he shrugged. But they agreed, in the way such things are agreed to, that he would wait outside for her.
As he bounced down the steps from the second floor bar to Argyle Street, Corey Wright couldn’t help thinking just how well all the pieces of his life were coming together.
Finally.
He and two friends had spent the early evening hours at Wright’s apartment “chillin’, freestylin’” and drinking a six-pack of Corona, lubrication for their night ahead. At around midnight, they’d made their way downtown to Rain.
Wright had heard that Madd Links, the new host of Black Entertainment Television’s Rap City, and Big Apple, an American-based rapper, would be at the club tonight. He’d printed out a copy of his portfolio, grabbed a couple of his CDs—Vinny Deniroz was his rap name, Hali Hustler the name of his CD—and “got all dolled up and pretty.” Corey Wright was going to make it in the music business, and tonight would be his opportunity to start networking his way to the top.
The night had gone even better than he’d hoped. He’d handed Madd Links his card, inside-joked about the Rap City host’s perceived weaknesses—“How come you don’t rap in the booth?”—and engaged in some similarly familiar chit and chat with Big Apple.
“What you drinking?” he’d asked Apple at one point.
“I’m not a big drinker,” Apple replied.
Wright went over to the bartender anyway. “Send over a couple of drinks,” he said.
Before the two American rappers left for the night, Wright had even gotten a few pictures taken him of himself with them.
Which may explain why he hadn’t been paying attention to the booze-fueled storm brewing inside the club between some visiting American sailors and a group of local blacks, most of them guys Wright knew from the hood. When one of them, the half brother of a buddy, told Wright about a “nice chain” he’d seen around the neck of an American sailor—“I’m gonna take it”—Wright tried to discourage him. “Don’t do that man,” he said. “You got a nice chain too.”
Now, however, Wright spilled out onto Argyle Street and into the messy middle of the seething tension. To his right, familiar faces, friends; to his left, American sailors. Everyone was circling, puffed up, strutting, acting hard.
Wright looked around, then back up the stairs, saw the the woman coming down. “Fuck this,” he thought to himself, “I’m going with her.”
But just then, something happened—who knows what—and people started beating on each other. Someone punched Wright. He swung back. He hit some people, got swarmed. He kicked, punched, fought back. Someone pulled his shirt up over his head. He felt something cold against his skin—a blade! He knew what a knife felt like, knew what it meant. So he “spazzed,” swinging ever more wildly. Down, up, down again. Swallowed by the crowd. On his knees on the sidewalk at one point, he eyed the spoils of battle: scattered wallets, cell phones, watches, even a shoe that had come off in the melee. He grabbed what he could, shoved them in his pockets. Except the shoe. Who needs one shoe?
Finally, he saw his escape. A few of his buddies were inside a nearby car. He jumped in. His hand stung. He looked down. He was bleeding from where the knife had sliced him. Before he could stanch the bleeding, a patrol car pulled up behind them.
“Get out of here,” Wright shouted at the driver.
“No, man,” his friend replied. “We ain’t done nothing.”
Wright knew that wouldn’t matter. I know how it goes. Besides, he was on parole, less than two months away from the end, less than two months from freedom.
From off in the distance, he heard someone shouting, “My friend’s been stabbed…”
He opened the car door, jumped out, ran for it.
***
The murder of Damon Crooks—he’d been stabbed four times, including once through the heart—shocked and appalled Haligonians.
For starters, his killing was just the latest, worst example of the crazily escalating mindless mayhem plaguing downtown Halifax. In June, The Coast had published a cover story about what one criminologist called Halifax’s “dirty little secret,” the reality the city “had the highest violent crime rate among the 17 Canadian cities surveyed.” As if to drive the point home, in the week before the murder the press had reported that four more people had been assaulted in two separate attacks near Pizza Corner, the traditional final pit stop for local late-night bar-hoppers.
To make this murder more reprehensible, the victim, Damon Crooks, was not only a visitor to the city—a 28-year-old US navy Petty Officer 1st Class from the USS Doyle—but also the soon-to-be father of a baby girl.
Not surprisingly, the story of his death had media legs, not only in Canada but also in the United States as well.
As if to atone for the sins of its city, the Chronicle-Herald quickly set up a “Damon Crooks Family Fund” to raise money for the child’s upbringing. The fund would eventually raise $60,000.
In the legislature, opposition leader Darrell Dexter introduced a motion to express Nova Scotians’ “deepest condolences to the family and friends and shipmates of Damon Crooks… and urge that every step be taken to ensure the safe enjoyment of Nova Scotia port cities by the visitors that we welcome to our shores.” The resolution passed unanimously.
Not to be outdone, Halifax mayor Peter Kelly promised to set up what would become the much publicized Mayor’s Task Force on Violence in Halifax.
In death, Damon Crooks became larger-than-life. His shipmates claimed his only role in the brawl had been as unlucky good Samaritan—coming to the aid of a sailor friend whose necklace had been ripped from his neck.
“He was a great man, a great person,” his grieving fiancee told CTV News. “He’s really going to be missed.”
***
If this narrative now had its hero, it also needed a villain.
Corey Wright—initially charged with first degree murder—fit that role perfectly. He’d been arrested within minutes of the stabbing fleeing the scene of the crime. Damon Crooks’ wallet was in his pocket. And he had a history of knife violence.
In 2002, Wright had been convicted of aggravated assault in connection with the stabbing of a man and his girlfriend. Despite the prosecutor’s plea that Wright be locked up for 12 years, the judge sentenced him to just five and a half years, which—thanks to time credited for the period he’d spent in jail before his trial and a positive recommendation from the parole board—meant Wright was on the streets, on parole, when Crooks was murdered.
That, predictably, transformed Corey Wright—described as an “unpredictable psychopath” and a “knife-wielding maniac”—into the poster boy for a justice system run amuck.
“If [the judge] had listened to a crown attorney two-and-a-half years ago,” thundered David Rodenhiser in the Halifax Daily News, “Corey Wright would still be safely behind bars in a federal penitentiary and Damon Crooks might still be alive and looking forward to the birth of his first child.”
Rodenhiser’s guilty-as-charged diatribe —widely shared—came just three days after Damon Crooks’ murder, one day after Corey Wright’s arraignment, and years before the facts of the case against Wright could be argued in court!
And yet…
Corey Wright was not without his supporters. During his second of many courtroom appearances, the court house filled with family and friends. Some handed out flyers showing a photo of “a beaming [Wright] with a toothy grin… cradling his newborn son” with the words: “Society Please Don’t Condemn A Man To Life Because Of His Past” and “Help An Innocent Black Man Accused By Halifax Police.” Others chanted, “Free Vinny D!” as sheriff’s deputies escorted the shackled Wright from the courtroom.
“He’s innocent,” a family member told reporters. “He said he didn’t do it.” Added a neighbour: “Corey is one of the sweetest guys I have ever known.”
***
I wouldn’t be this strong if it wasn’t for my moms
Discipline, dedication, determination and honour
This is what she taught me
Same for my stepfather
Corey Wright, named after his biological father, was born in Halifax on April 25, 1983, the middle of Valerie Wright’s three sons. His parents split when he was very young, and he never had a relationship with his father. He was raised instead by his mother. She calls him DeeWan.
“My mother was great,” Wright says from his prison cell today. “Growing up… I wouldn’t change it for the world.”
When he was 15, however, he got into “an altercation with my mother that changed my life.” It was, he admits now, a stupid teenager-thing. That morning, Corey was rushing around, late for school—“I had tests that day in math, in science, an essay due in English, and I always did things last minute”—when he saw his younger brother, Marvin, in the living room. Lounging around. Still in his pajamas.
“Get ready for school,” Corey ordered him.
“I’m not going,” Marvin replied.
“What do you mean, you’re not going?” One thing led to another and “I clipped him in the back of the head. He went all dramatic, crying to my mother and such.”
His mother admonished Corey not to hit his brother.
“Why do you worry about him?” Corey shot back. “You don’t worry about me.”
“As soon as I said it,” he says today, “I knew I was wrong. I hurt her feelings.”
Valerie lashed back, “slapping and hitting me” with little effect.
“I was smiling. I couldn’t help it,” Wright remembers. “But then she’s all, ‘Get out! Get out! Don’t come back!’”
Today, he shakes his head. “It was pride, stupid pride.” Corey stormed out, didn’t come back.
He ended up couch surfing. “I had three aunts and two best friends, so that was five couches and I just kept moving…” He stopped going to school. “I started smoking weed but I didn’t have any money.” One morning, one of his best friends showed up at the apartment where he was staying and began “to count his money. I figured he was selling weed, so I says, ‘Let me sell some too.’ And he says, ‘No, I don’t sell weed. I sell crack.’ And I thought, screw it, I’ll try it. I sold crack so I could smoke weed.”
He was 16.
Selling crack cocaine wasn’t just illegal; it was dangerous.
One night in July 2000, one of his best friends, Tyrone Oliver, who’d also allegedly been selling drugs, was gunned down on an outdoor basketball court. After that, Wright, in the words of his parole officer, would “drink the ‘hard stuff’ and continue to ingest alcohol until he could not drink any more.”
He was scared, but he wasn’t about to show it.
“I was always a fighter, you know, I was this skinny, short kid, but I loved to fight, especially the bigger guys who picked on the little kids or girls,” Wright says today. “When you’re a teenager, fighting is fun.” It’s less fun when others are carrying guns. “I’d never carry a gun,” Wright insists. “Guns make me nervous. But I got a knife. For protection.”
It was the knife that got him into trouble. In the early morning hours of April 20, 2002, he went to a birthday party at an after-hours spot on Gottingen Street, where he ended up dancing with a girl who turned out to be someone’s girlfriend.
“Why you hitting on my girlfriend?”
“I’m not hitting on your girlfriend.”
Words led to words, and the other guy went outside to get something from his car. “’Hold on,’ he said to me, ‘I’ll be right back.’” He returned moments later. “I’m trying to leave and he says, ‘I got something for you.’… I thought he had a gun. I panicked. I pulled out my knife and started swinging.” Wright stabbed the guy 14 times and, when the guy’s girlfriend tried to intervene, he cut her too. Today, he shakes his head. “He didn’t even have a gun on him.”
Wright pled guilty to the assault—“Your lordship,” he told the judge at his sentencing, “I acknowledge what I done wrong, and the weight of my sins is greater than I can bear”—and began, it seemed, to turn his life around.
***
But I’m gonna rise to the occasion
I’m driven by my ambition
While in jail, Wright earned his GED high school equivalency and enrolled in Second Chance, a one-year program to provide entrepreneurial skills to young people who’d been in “conflict with the law.”
Wright had already launched his own small business, opening up a north end storefront with his mother—with whom he’d reconciled—and one of his brothers. “We’d go out to Costco and buy in bulk—toothpaste, coffee, jerseys—and sell them in the neighbourhood” to people who couldn’t afford transportation to shop themselves.
He and a friend also got into the party promotion business. “We’d pay for the flyers—$40 for a thousand—and organize the shows. The club would get the bar; we’d get the door. We made a lot of money.” But then they got burned in a deal with a San Francisco promoter who was supposed to do in a show in Halifax and didn’t, and Wright and his partner “decided to go our separate ways.”
Wright’s separate way was to begin making his own music. When he was still selling crack, he remembers going to a house party and seeing some kids he’d grown up with performing, pretending to be the gangsters he actually was. “I saw these guys rapping what I’m doing, but they weren’t really doing it. They were going to school. They were good kids. So I thought, I’ll give rapping a try. At least I’m doing it.”
Wright ended up at Village Sound, Stephen Outhit’s north end recording studio. “He was an exceptionally talented rapper,” Outhit recalls, and he remembers being equally impressed by Wright the person. “He wasn’t a thuggy, peer-pressured kind of guy. He was a smart businessman who’d been born in an unfortunate situation.”
Outhit’s encouragement “put something in me,” Wright acknowledges. “I thought, this guy doesn’t know me and he’s saying I’m good. Maybe I can do this.” He made a CD, got a manager, made plans for a tour. “Two thousand and seven,” Wright says wistfully. “That year was going to be my dream, going to be all music for me.”
And then, on the morning of November 4, 2006, the dream became a nightmare.
***
Well at least my pain
Is more than a rhyme to me
How can I complain
When he’s doing more time than me
From the beginning, there were questions about what really happened outside Rain that night. Even about what had started it. A fight over a girl? A chain?
Although the circumstantial case against Corey Wright was compelling, even overwhelming—he was caught running for the crime scene with blood on his hand and the victim’s wallet in his possession—there was little hard evidence to connect him to the actual murder. It had happened in the confusing middle of a sprawling brawl involving, by some accounts, more than two dozen participants. Virtually every one of them—not to mention non-combatant witnesses—was intoxicated, their memories fogged, their evidence unreliable. Some, perhaps understandably, weren’t keen to talk to the police.
Within hours of the incident, however, a very different narrative began circulating in the black community. Someone else, also black, had murdered Damon Crooks—and bragged about it. The alleged killer had a well-known fetish for knives and for other people’s gold chains. The night before the murder, or so the story went, the man had stabbed someone else and taken his gold chain. Valerie Wright began compiling affidavits to show her son was not Crooks’ killer. It wasn’t easy. Everyone, it seemed, was scared of the other guy.
According to emails between the Crown lawyers and police, detectives knew soon after the murder that “someone else confessed to the murder to a third party.” What police did with that information isn’t clear.
They certainly had the information from several sources. The summer after the murder, for example, Stephen Outhit, the producer who’d befriended Corey, wrote to mayor Kelly expressing his concerns about delays in the case, as well as explaining that he’d been told that someone else—he named the individua—had allegedly confessed to the crime. Kelly wrote back, “essentially thanked me for my letter and said he’d forwarded it to the police,” Outhit explains. “The police never contacted me about it.”
He says he knows several other people contacted Crimestoppers with similar information, but were never contacted either.
The crown’s case against Corey Wright was no slam dunk. Within months, the crown had reduced his first degree murder charge to second degree, and eventually settled for manslaughter. Wright’s preliminary hearing, which had been scheduled to run for 20 days, lasted only five. The case had dragged on for close to a two and a half years when, in March 2009, on the edge of the beginning of his trial, Wright surprised everyone by changing his plea to guilty of manslaughter.
To understand just how big a surprise—not to mention relief—Wright’s plea must have been for prosecutors, it’s instructive to read Justice Felix Cacchione written judgment.
“Having reviewed the evidence in this case,” he noted at Wright’s sentencing hearing, addressing his comments to Crooks’ family, “I can say to you with certainty that this case was not an open and shut case of either murder or manslaughter. The crown acknowledged to me the difficulty that it would have in proving the charge as originally laid… It is very possible that a jury hearing the evidence that the prosecution had available to it could have decided that they either could not decide who did what and hence… been hung as a jury… Or the jury could in all likelihood have had a reasonable doubt that Mr. Wright was the offender who caused Damon Crooks’ death.”
The flimsiness of the crown’s case was not the only surprise on sentencing day. The crown and defence lawyers told the judge they’d agreed on a joint sentencing recommendation: 15 years for manslaughter.
In the complicated ways of the criminal justice system, that meant Wright typically would have been credited with double the time he’d already spent in jail while awaiting trial, reducing his actual sentence to 10 years. And—normally—he would have been entitled to apply for parole after serving just one-third of his sentence, meaning he would have been eligible to apply for parole after roughly three and a half years in prison.
Instead, Cacchione—“mindful of society’s abhorrence of what occurred and the prevalence of these types of activities in our community”—allowed Wright to claim just four years of remand time instead of five and ordered that “you serve at least half the sentence before you are considered eligible for parole. That means, sir, that on the 11-year sentence you will have to serve five-and-a-half years before you can even apply for parole.”
***
Lookin’ in the mirror
when I’m all by my lonesome
Pictures getting clearer
Play the cards that I’m holding
Pornographic magazine keeps me with a pin up
But it’s the pen and pad that keeps me with my chin up
Still unsigned so they think I’m a beginner
But it’s my inner that’s telling me I’m a winner
“Do you mind if I turn on the tape recorder?” I ask. We are sitting in a small windowless room inside the Springhill Institution, the prison where Corey Wright is serving his sentence. It’s the first time I’ve met Wright. But I’ve been following his story almost from the beginning.
As a columnist for the Daily News, I’d written about the media rush-to-judgment after it was revealed that Wright had been on parole at the time of Crooks’ killing. I’d spoken to Outhit, who believed an injustice might have been done, and to Valerie Wright, Corey’s mother, who was his number one and, seemingly, sometimes his only defender. I’d followed the case as it worked its way through the courts.
After Wright’s sentencing, we’d begun an email and letter correspondence. “I really want to share my story, the trials and tribulations I have gone through,” he wrote at one point. “I’ve done a lot of wrong things, but who hasn’t?... I always knew when I was doing wrong, but I am not and was never a bad person… Sorry for talking about my past,” he added, “but everyone new I meet I try to shed light on me as a person. Just because the newspapers and the media painted me out to be something I’m not. Well, anyway, we will talk soon, I hope.”
Now we sit, face to face, both eying the tape recorder between us. Wright is a handsome young man with an easy smile, the slight gap between his front teeth making him seem more boyish than his 26 years. The intelligence that’s obvious in his conversation serves as a counterpoint to the muscles he’s been building, lifting weights in prison, and to his tattoos: there’s one on the back of each hand containing the names of each of his two young sons and another on his shoulder that declares he is “My Brother’s Keeper.”
“It depends,” he says finally in response to my question about the tape recorder. “How honest do you want me to be?” We don’t turn on the tape recorder.
The issue, it turns out, is practical—as was his decision last spring to plead guilty to manslaughter. He hadn’t been impressed by the performance of his lawyer, Warren Zimmer, during the preliminary hearing. “He just took my case for the publicity,” Wright argues. “I’m at the police station [after his arrest] and a cop says to me, ‘You’ve got a call.’ It was Warren. He told me he was going to fight for me. I take people at their word. But we did the preliminary and he wasn’t fighting. Some days he wasn’t even there.”
Which is why, about a month before his trial was scheduled to begin, Wright asked to speak to Zimmer. He’d been thinking about his prospects in court and about what a long stretch in prison could mean to his dream of a music career. “I’ve got a bright future,” he tells me today. “I can feel it. I’m destined for something. Give me a pen and a roll of toilet paper and I can make rhymes… Doesn’t matter where I am. I can do time. But I can’t do forever…
“So I said to him, ‘Honestly Warren, this is my life. Be straight with me. What are my chances?’ And he says, ‘Well, it’s 50–50.’ So a coin toss is going to determine my life. I said, ‘Warren, go to them, get them to drop it to manslaughter…’ And that’s what happened.”
After he went to jail, Wright appealed Cacchione’s decision to reduce his remand credit and force him to serve more time before he would be eligible for parole. Just last month, the appeal court reversed those conditions. Which means Wright can now apply for parole in 2012 instead of 2014.
Which may be one more reason Corey Wright isn’t keen to go on the record, arguing he didn’t kill Damon Crooks. Call it the Donald Marshall, Jr., conundrum. Marshall famously spent 11 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit, unable to get parole because he refused to admit his guilt, and therefore, according to the parole board, wasn’t ready to be rehabilitated.
Wright’s situation is different, of course. He did plead guilty to being responsible for Crooks’ death.
But did he really do it?
There are those who remain convinced Corey Wright is innocent.
While Wright answers most of my questions about the events of the night of November 4, 2006, he steers clear of the key question about whether he stabbed Crooks.
“I can’t talk about that,” he tells me.
It would be easy to take from that that Wright is guilty. But he is also—not to put too fine a point on it—someone who understands the justice system well enough to know guilt and innocence often matter less than luck and cunning.
Having been branded for a stabbing he admits he did commit, what were his chances of getting a jury’s benefit of the doubt if he was on trial for something he actually didn’t do? And, if he was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison?
Corey Wright would rather not go there. He can do the time he’s been given.
He fills his days working on his rhymes. Whenever he has something ready, he sets up a phone call with James McQuaid, aka Homegrown, his Halifax-based producer. While Wright raps to the beat of an unrelated song playing from his CD player into his earphones, McQuaid records Wright’s voice over the telephone and later marries it to a beat in his studio.
Wright says his new music is very different from his earlier, more gangsta-inspired raps. “It’s like a different me,” he says. “It’s more party, more chill. I’m now more conscious, more motivational.”
Corey Wright still dreams. Destiny calls. We turn on the recorder. He raps:
You be waiting a long time
If you think I’m going to fade out
Not in this lifetime
Check my lifeline
Known for the gap in my teeth
And writing nice rhymes…
Corey Wright laughs, shows the gap in his teeth.
Stephen Kimber, The Coast’s Senior Features Writer, is the author of eight books. He teaches journalism at the University of King’s College.
Reclaiming black history, acknowledging our own
Nova Scotia's black history is rich and remarkable—Birchtown, for example, was North America's largest settlement of free blacks when it was founded in 1783—but that realty is rarely acknowledged. Now finally, that may be about to change...
Shortly before 10 on the evening of March 31, 2006, residents along the Old Birchtown Road near Shelburne reported seeing what looked like a white Pontiac Sunfire speeding away from the site of the one-story wooden bungalow that housed the offices of Nova Scotia’s Black Loyalist Heritage Society. Within minutes of the car’s disappearance into the night, hot flames licked up an outside wall and into the building’s eaves, setting the roof ablaze and eventually causing parts of it to collapse into the offices below.
Inside those offices—inside computer hard drives, cardboard boxes and metal filing cabinets—the priceless fruits of nearly two decades of research into the often ignored, always marginalized history of Nova Scotia’s black community melted, burned, scorched, charred, disappeared into smoke.
It didn’t take the Mounties long to conclude the fire had been deliberately set.
But was it a hate crime?
Elizabeth Cromwell, the president of the heritage society, turns that question around. “Why,” she asks, not unreasonably, “would anyone burn down a building belonging to a group of black people?”
It wouldn’t have been the first time black people in Nova Scotia were targeted for nothing more than being who they are. Or the last. Just consider last weekend’s cross burning outside the home of a mixed race couple in Hants County. Or this week’s protest march at city hall to bring attention to the ongoing discrimination black municipal workers say they face in the workplace.
***
Birchtown was supposed to be different.
During the American Revolution, the British promised America’s black slaves their freedom—more, it should be acknowledged, as a military tactic than from some lofty commitment to racial equality—in exchange for abandoning their white masters and fighting for the crown. Thousands did.
But in 1783 after the British lost, the victors demanded the return of “the negroes or other property of the American inhabitants.” British negotiators in Paris were happy enough to send their erstwhile black friends back to vengeful former masters but Sir Guy Carleton, the man in charge of the British evacuation in New York, objected. He ordered one of his generals, Samuel Birch, to compile a “Book of Negroes,” a detailed listing of the 3,000 freed black men, women and children deemed eligible to sail in the British evacuation of New York.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the 1,500 of those who settled on the rocky edge of the new white loyalist city of Shelburne, N.S. named their community in honour of the general whose precious certificates they carried. Birchtown instantly became the largest settlement of free blacks in North America. But there were other freed black communities in the colony too, in places like Tracadie, Weymouth and Brindley Town.
None of them were really free, of course. The British had promised the freed blacks land. But then offered them only the rockiest, most barren scraps of a generally unfriendly land, if they gave them any at all. Some white loyalists even tried to grab that from them. Unlike more well-to-do white loyalists, the blacks arrived with no money or resources. That meant many ended up as indentured servants—slaves by another name—for whites in Shelburne. Some whites even pocketed the rations the British designated for the freed blacks.
Because the desperate blacks were prepared to work for less than the almost as desperate, disbanded white soldiers, the soldiers attacked them. In July 1784, the first race riot in North America took place in Shelburne. It lasted a week.
Things didn’t get better after that. There were fires and famines, recession and drought. Whites moved on; blacks died of starvation.
By January 1792, the colony’s black loyalists had endured all they could of British freedom in frigid Nova Scotia. More than 1,100 of them—including 550 from Birchtown and Shelburne—set sail from Halifax in an armada bound for Sierra Leone where they were, once again, promised they would be free.
Those who remained in what was left of Birchtown—as well as in other black and poor communities huddled on the outskirts of richer white communities—hunkered down, survived, made lives and communities. For two centuries, they—and their history—were either ignored or dismissed.
To cite but one example: in 1963, Birchtown residents approached the Nova Scotia Historic Sites Advisory Board seeking historic designation for their community. The board’s chair, prominent author Will R. Bird, wrote to the then-premier, Robert Stanfield, dismissing Birchtown as “a sort of shack town, a settlement of the slaves who came with the loyalists and were left there by the loyalists who moved on.” The community, he suggested, was not important enough—or white enough—to be considered historic.
***
Elizabeth Cromwell, who grew up in the area, knows all about the ways in which black history was marginalized in Shelburne. “They’re very good,” she says simply, “when they’re talking to your face.” After being mostly invisible in official celebrations to mark the 200th anniversary of the loyalists’ 1783 arrival in Shelburne, the few hundred remaining members of the local black community began to band together in the mid-1980s. Although the traditional United Empire Loyalists’ organizations were “upset we were organizing,” Cromwell recalls, “that just gave us another little push.”
So too did government plans to situate—what else?—a landfill in Birchtown.
Their success in stopping the landfill not only led to the incorporation of the Black Loyalist Heritage Society in 1991 but it also sparked an archaeological dig on land just a few hundred yards from the Cromwell family home. Researchers uncovered a treasure trove of more than 16,000 “exceptional” artifacts from the late 1700s, which helped cement Birchtown’s place in black history—and in Canadian history.
By 1996, the group had convinced the National Historic Sites and Monuments Board to finally erect a plaque to recognize Birchtown as “a proud symbol of the struggle by blacks… for justice and dignity.”
The society also began to create spaces—acquiring an old church and a one-room school house from the 1830s—to store and display their growing collection of information and artifacts of the black experience. It partnered with the Nova Scotia Museum to mount a traveling exhibit called “Remembering Black Loyalists, Black Communities.” The exhibit ended up on permanent display in Birchtown. The society also developed an 800-metre Heritage Walking Trail for visitors that circled around the museum past a black burying ground and a replica of the sort of pit house where the early residents might have lived. Its first official visitor was then-Governor General Adrienne Clarkson.
In 2000, the society hired experts to train four members of the local black community to conduct genealogical research in order to handle the ever growing number of calls from around the world asking for help in tracing their black family histories. They began to put together a Black Loyalist Registry, identifying those descended from the original settlers. More than 2,000 self-identified black loyalist descendants joined the society.
The operational hub for this growing web of activity was the small, non-descript $66,000 bungalow on the Old Birchtown Road, built in the mid-1990s with the help of an ACOA grant.
Or at least it was, until fire destroyed it.
***
Police refused to call the fire a hate crime. The criminal code, which defines a hate crime as one designed to intimidate or harm an identifiable group of people, provides for stiffer sentences for such crimes. Within weeks of the fire, however, an RCMP spokesperson confidently told a reporter from Shunpiking that investigators knew who did it and “the motive of the individual involved… was not race-related.”
Eight months later, police finally charged Gaylord Avery Perry, a 41-year-old local ne’er do well, with the crime. Perry was already in jail, serving time for a laundry lists of unrelated offences: “assault causing bodily harm, assault with a weapon, criminal assault, uttering threats, criminal harassment, dangerous operation of a motor vehicle, committing an offense while operating a motor vehicle, a breach of undertaking, causing a disturbance, and evading a peace officer.”
The Black Loyalist Heritage Centre arson case never went to trial. In February 2008, the prosecutor stayed the charges because he wasn’t convinced he could get a conviction based on the evidence “available.” One key prosecution witness had apparently refused to testify.
While that decision may not matter much in the criminal justice scheme of things—Perry was already back in jail, having been convicted of assaulting his parents by throwing a tea kettle at his mother and beating his 70-year-old father with a shovel—staying the charges means there will never be a judicial airing of the reasons for the crime.
While there are no shortage of rumours in the community about what really happened, the one thing that is clear is that whoever decided to burn down “a building belonging to a group of black people” didn’t do it randomly or accidentally.
And publicity about the fire itself also brought out even more crazies. “It was a terrible time,” Crowell recalls. “There were horrible telephone calls, threats, insults…” The police traced much of it to the United States, but there was local fallout too. “Things were written on the side of the building, or in the snow…”
Ironically, however, the fire may yet turn out to be as much an opportunity as it was, quite clearly, a disaster.
Or not.
***
The fire—and the publicity it generated—brought the community, white and black, together. “This,” says Elizabeth Cromwell, “was not the way the community wanted to be seen.”
The congregation of Shelburne’s Christ Anglican Church—which can also trace its roots back to the town’s earliest days—donated $10,000 to the rebuilding campaign. Acadia University offered $6,000 and two senior students to help “reconstitute” the society’s destroyed genealogical records. The owners of the Whirligig, Shelburne’s popular new and used bookstore, organized a sponsor-a-book program, inviting its customers to help buy replacement books for the Society’s burned-out library. They raised more than $3,000. David Bradley, a Halifax-based computer guru, even volunteered what ended up being 80 hours of his time to rescue almost all of the priceless data stored on the society’s burned computer hard drives.
During a successful June 2006 Birchtown Healing Weekend staged by the society to both raise funds and also promote a greater spirit of community, Stanley Jacklin, the society’s then-president, told the Halifax Herald: “A lot of good things do come from bad things, I guess… We will rebuild and become bigger and better than ever.”
Even before the fire, it was clear the society had not only outgrown its too-small bungalow-office space but also that it needed bigger and better space than a renovated old one-room schoolhouse in which to display its valuable collection for the growing number of tourists, black and white, who wanted to understand the black loyalist experience.
In 2000, there’d been ambitious talk of building a new $9-million interpretive, tourism and community economic development project in Birchtown. But the best federal and provincial governments were prepared to offer then was $200,000 to help “preserve rural culture.” The project died.
And then the bungalow burned down.
Today, a more modest $3-million proposal is working its way through the long and complicated funding food chain.
Cobbling together seed money from Canadian Heritage, Nova Scotia Museums and the province’s department of economic and rural development, the society hired a team of Halifax-based architects—lead architects Peter Henry and Christine Macy, the dean of Dalhousie’s architecture department, and project architect Judy-Ann Obersi—to come up with a design for a new centre that could not only combine exhibit and display space with offices, meeting rooms, a theatre and gift shop but also represent the black experience architecturally.
The result is visually stunning and aesthetically pleasing. The exterior design incorporates traditional granaries of west Africa, which is where many of the black loyalists began their journey as captured slaves. The granary motif will serve as both a building feature and also as display cases for artifacts. The low-rise building will be built into its surroundings and covered with a gently sloping “green” roof. That will be environmentally friendly but also a living reminder of the pit-house architectural style the first residents were forced to adopt. A massive curving stone wall, reminiscent of the remnants of manmade stone walls found around Birchtown, will lead visitors in to and out of the main exhibit area, and may even include the names of all of those recorded in the original Book of Negroes etched into the stone.
The architects’ blueprints are expected to be ready by the end of March, and then the real work of raising the money to make it a reality will begin. Cromwell’s group has already met with the provincial minister, made its first overtures to the cabinet. “Money is always short when we come to the table,” she allows. “But it’s time for Canadians to step up and take ownership of this history. It’s not just our history; it’s Canadian history.”
Are we finally ready to claim it?
Protecting privacy or covering up?
So whose privacy are they protecting?
On Dec. 2, 2008, an RCMP constable shot and killed John Andrew Simon, a member of Cape Breton’s Wagmatcook First Nation. Simon, everyone agrees, was alone inside his house, drunk and suicidal, at the time he was killed. According to what police reportedly told Simon’s family, he was unarmed, sitting on the toilet and smoking a cigarette when Cst. Jeremy Frenette first entered the house. They claim Simon then fled to the kitchen where he grabbed his shotgun. Frenette fired three times, killing Simon.
What was Cst. Frenette doing inside the house without a warrant? And without backup? Especially considering that Simon, at that point, was no threat to anyone except himself.
The Halifax Regional Police, who led what was supposed to be an arms-length investigation into the shooting, concluded he only fired “after reasonably perceiving that John Simon posed a threat of grievous bodily harm or death and believing that he could not otherwise preserve himself from grievous bodily harm other than by using deadly force.”
Simon’s widow and members of the local band council would beg to disagree.
But that’s not the issue here.
Why are the Mounties now refusing to release the report into the incident? Just as importantly, why is it even the RCMP’s call whether to release this supposedly independent review?
RCMP Chief Supt. Blair McKnight told reporters in December the Mounties weren’t “permitted” to release the report under Canada’s privacy laws.
Whose privacy is being protected here? Simon himself is dead. His widow and the local band council—which contract the RCMP to police their reserve—both say they want to read a copy of the report.
Others have seen it. Nova Scotia’s Justice Minister, Ross Landry, for example—himself a former RCMP officer—told reporters this week he has read the report and believes the band council should too before he makes his decision on their request for a public inquiry into Simon’s death. His office, in fact, is trying to help the band get a copy.
But RCMP brass seem happy to hide the report behind the privacy veil.
Little wonder the Wagmatcook band council has decided to replace the RCMP when its policing contract expires at the end of next month. Little wonder too that the council has called for a public inquiry to determine why “policing hasn’t changed in our First Nation territories” in the two decades since the Marshall Inquiry report.
She was someone’s daughter
On Monday, the Chronicle Herald carried an In Memoriam advertisement for Kimber Leane Lucas, a young woman who died on November 23, 1994 at the age of 25. The notice featured a photograph of a strikingly attractive, smiling young woman above a message that read, in part: “You will never be forgotten. Forever loved and missed, Mom, Charles and Ryan.”
Kimber Lucas was murdered. She was seven months pregnant at the time of her death. Her case is one of 48 murders in Halifax that currently remain unsolved.
Kimber came from a good home, loved sports, did well in school and, at one point, considered a career as a fashion model. But somewhere along the road, she became addicted to crack cocaine, and that led her into prostitution and petty crime. Before she was murdered, she had talked about getting off the streets.
The question today is whether one of the reasons Kimber Lucas’s case remains unsolved 15 years later is because she was a prostitute, a woman who, in the parlance, was “known to police.”
Last week, I did a story for The Coast on Halifax’s unusually high number of unsolved homicides. As part of my research, I spoke with Chris McNeil, the deputy chief of the Halifax Regional Police.
Essentially, McNeil argues there will always be unsolved homicides and these can usually be “categorized…many of them deal with individuals involved with the criminal subculture.”
In fairness to McNeil, his point was that such cases are harder to solve because potential witnesses won’t talk to police. But the reality is that there also does seem to be a double standard.
We hear a lot about investigations involving victims the police refer to as “pure victims”—people like 19-year-old Jason McCullough, a straight-arrow kid who shoveled snow for the elderly, and was killed in the summer of 1999 simply because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, or Kimberly McAndrew, a 19-year-old RCMP officer’s daughter who punched off work as a Canadian Tire clerk one afternoon in August 1989 and disappeared forever—but very little about what the police are doing to solve cases like Kimber’s.
When was the last time investigators dusted off her file and began asking questions? When was the last time anyone talked with Kimber’s family about the progress of their investigation? When was the last time police made a public appeal for assistance in the case?
The fact is—as this week’s Herald In Memoriam makes clear—Kimber Lucas was someone’s daughter. And her family still misses her.
Past time for Nova Scotians to honour Viola Desmond
Damn. Missed it. Again. I’m not the only one. Which is unfortunate. For everyone.
Last Sunday marked the anniversary of an event that symbolizes—or should—the beginning of the modern civil rights movement in Canada.
On November 8, 1946, a 32-year-old black beautician named Viola Desmond was driving from Halifax to Sydney when her car broke down. After a mechanic in New Glasgow informed her he wouldn’t be able to fix it until the next day, Desmond decided to put in time catching a movie at the nearby Roseland Theatre.
The theatre—like far too many public places at the time—was segregated. Blacks could only sit in the balcony. Desmond found a better seat in the whites-only section and sat down. When she refused to leave, the manager called the police. They physically removed her from the theatre and trucked her off to jail.
She was charged, not with violating the un-posted but nonetheless strictly enforced code of segregation, but with defrauding the federal government. Since downstairs ticket prices were higher than in the balcony, she’d paid one cent less tax than required.
Desmond was convicted and fined $20.
Desmond’s story galvanized the newly-formed Nova Scotia Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, which raised funds to appeal her conviction. Although the appeal itself was unsuccessful, the white Halifax lawyer who’d taken on the case—Frederick Bissett—donated his fees back to the organization so it could continue the fight against state-sanctioned segregation.
Ironically, Desmond’s brave contribution to the beginning of the civil rights movement—Rosa Parks’ far more famous refusal to get off a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, wouldn’t happen for another nine years—is barely even acknowledged in her home province.
Nova Scotia’s Human Rights Commission web page, for example, features a link to the story of Anne Frank’s diary but nothing about Desmond. A search for her name on the Black Cultural Centre website draws a blank—even on pages devoted to “Our Heroes.” The province’s Department of Education only finally approved last spring a black history textbook in which Desmond is at least mentioned.
Compare that with Toronto’s Ryerson University. Last year, it made “Viola Desmond Day” the “highlight” of its Black History Month events.
It’s long past time we in Nova Scotia officially recognized Viola Desmond’s important contribution to our history. So that we don’t forget. To Remember. Next year.
Subscribe
About
STEPHEN KIMBER, the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King's College in Halifax, is an award-winning writer, editor and broadcaster. He is the author of one novel -- Reparations -- and eight non-fiction books.