Why can’t we have Viola Desmond day and…?
As Canada Post prepares issue a new stamp next month to celebrate the life of Viola Desmond, our own government seems about to quietly take a pass on the opportunity to honour the Halifax woman whose personal courage remains a symbolic inspiration in the fight for human rights in Canada.
Viola Desmond Won't Be Budged
In 1946—nine years before Rosa Parks’ refusal to get off a Montgomery, Alabama, bus helped trigger the U.S. civil rights movement—Desmond refused to give up her seat in the “whites-only” section of New Glasgow’s Roseland Theatre. She was hauled out of the theatre, thrown in jail, charged, convicted and fined $20. She fought her conviction and lost, but the embarrassing publicity helped galvanize the fight against Nova Scotia’s state-sanctioned segregation and led to changes in the law.
Nova Scotians have only recently begun to acknowledge Desmond’s significance—and suffering. Two years ago, Premier Darrell Dexter publicly apologized for the “injustice” she’d suffered and his government issued a rare posthumous pardon.
In 2010, Tory MLA Alfie MacLeod introduced a resolution in the House of Assembly calling on the province to declare Nov. 8—the day of her arrest—Viola Desmond Day.
Some in the black community argued that date was inappropriate; others complained they hadn’t been consulted.
Fair enough.
The Dexter government consulted, but the question it asked— “how to establish a lasting form of recognition that would honour the contributions and experiences of African Nova Scotians”—seemed blandly beside the point of Macleod’s original motion.
No surprise its final report doesn’t even mention Desmond. Or that the idea for the Day now seems dead. “People,” explains a government spokesperson, “have been saying they want something that recognizes the broad scope of African-Nova Scotian accomplishments.”
Is there some reason we can’t have both?
As Desmond’s sister Wanda wrote in a recent letter to the government: “Naming a day after a popular and iconic figure does not lessen the larger ambitions of creating such a day… In fact they give the day an identity and create an entry point into an issue that otherwise may be ignored with a more generic title.”
It’s time we celebrated Viola Desmond Day.
Related links:
- Viola Desmond Will Not Be Budged Facebook page
- Sister to Courage: Stories from the World of Viola Desmond, Canada's Rosa Parks
- "Past Time for Nova Scotians to Honour Viola Desmond"
- "Community Consultations Report," Office of African Nova Scotian Affairs
Copyright 2012 Stephen Kimber
City council stumbles… again, always
The lesson from last week’s reversal of council’s decision to sell the former St. Patrick’s-Alexandra school to a private developer? Even when our councillors finally, belatedly get it right, they bungle the process so badly everyone walks away more than slightly soiled and embarrassed by the whole exercise.
In December, over angry objections of north-end residents—who already believed they were being squeezed out of their own community by urban redevelopment and gentrification—council voted to peddle a local community school site to a private developer.
The problem—as quickly became apparent and should have been clear before the vote—was that council hadn’t followed city policy for disposing of surplus property. They were supposed to consult the community first.
Not that it mattered. City staff had stacked the evaluation process to make it virtually impossible for proposals from non-profit community groups to compete with those from private developers.
There were rallies. Hundreds protested. There was a petition. Close to a thousand people signed.
Last week, the issue made its way back to council. After four-and-a-half hours of “other business”—before a packed gallery present only for the school issue—councillors finally got around to debating a motion to rescind.
Coun. Jennifer Watts had barely moved her motion when city manager Richard Butts advised councillors to go into secret session to talk the motion over with city legal staff. Another secret meeting to discuss public business? Where was this city manager when Occupy Nova Scotia protestors got turfed? Oh, right. He was home in Toronto.
Council voted down the secret meeting, then voted down a motion to adjourn, then met in secret anyway, then—it’s now closing in on one in the morning—finally voted 17-5 to rescind their original decision. And they asked city staff, who, of course, had devised the flawed process in the first place, to report back on whether the process had been correctly followed.
As usual, nothing is settled.
Once again, Council has managed to alienate the community, the developers who submitted bids in good faith and average citizens who expect better.
Let’s hope there’s a lesson in that too.
Copyright 2012 Stephen Kimber
Rocky Jones: The past and future of the Nova Scotia human rights’ struggle
I wanted to ask Rocky Jones about his Wednesday lecture: “The Struggle for Human Rights in African Nova Scotian Communities, 1961-2011.”
No problem.
When?
Not today. He’s on a panel at a national conference on public policy. Saturday, he’s in Truro, keynote speaker at an International Year for People of African Descent symposium. Then Ottawa for the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council; he’s on the private broadcast industry’s regional self-regulatory panel. And, finally, back to Halifax for the inaugural talk in Dalhousie University’s James Robinson Johnston Distinguished Lecture Series.
I thought you’d retired.
He laughs.
No one is better positioned to speak about the struggle for human rights in Nova Scotia over the past 50 years—and the next 50—than Burnley “Rocky” Jones. He’s central to that struggle.
During the mid-sixties, Jones and his then wife set up Kwacha House, a drop-in centre for inner-city black youth. It so frightened city fathers they lobbied to shut it down.
In 1968, he invited the Black Panthers to Halifax. In response, Ottawa quickly funded the “moderate” Black United Front just to undercut his growing popularity among “disaffected negroes.”
Someone set his house on fire—twice—and the RCMP began not-so-secretly following him.
In 1970, he helped lead a March on city hall by thousands of activists after city council secretly—some things never change!—hired a racist city manager. This time, the good guys won.
In 1970, he helped launch Dalhousie’s unique Transition Year Program to assist local blacks and natives succeed in university. Later, he developed innovative employment programs for ex-inmates, ran unsuccessfully for political office and launched a massive oral history project to record the stories of black elders.
After graduating from Dalhousie’s then-new Indigenous Black and Mi'kmaq law program in 1992, he went on to become one of Nova Scotia’s preeminent civil rights lawyers, arguing cases all the way to the Supreme Court.
Recently, he was in the news again—at 70—lobbying successfully against the appointment of a white outsider to head up the Africville Heritage Society.
Unsurprisingly, he has opinions on the current state—and future direction—of our province's human rights movement.
“But you’ll have to come to the speech for those,” he says.
I’ll be there.
Related posts:
- Encounter at Kwacha House. an NFB documentary.
- Dalhousie's Transition Year Program: It All Began in a Duck Blind
- The Unlearned Lesson of Africville
- Here's a 1995 profile I wrote on Rocky for the Halifax Daily News.
Information on the Lecture:
The James Robinson Johnston Chair in Black Canadian Studies at Dalhousie University launches its Distinguished Lecture Series by featuring
BURNLEY ROCKY JONES,
Lawyer and Human Rights Advocate, speaking on
THE STRUGGLE FOR HUMAN AND CIVIL RIGHTS IN THE AFRICAN NOVA SCOTIAN COMMUNITY, 1961-2011
Date: Wed. 23 Nov. 2011
Time: Reception: 6-7; Lecture: 7:15
Venue: Kenneth C. Rowe Management Building, Potter Family Auditorium, Dalhousie University, 6100 University Ave (at Henry St.) Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
Admission: Free
Copyright 2011 Stephen Kimber
Africville: The lesson still unlearned
No one asked them. Again.
The real lesson of the original Africville relocation—which should be seared into our collective consciousness after 50 years of hard-learned lesson-living—is that outsiders, even well intentioned ones, cannot make decisions for a community without at least asking the people of that community what they really want.
Back in the 1960s, many well-intentioned outsiders (and some, it must be said, not so well intentioned) believed Africville, a poor black community on the edge of Bedford Basin, was a blight and an eyesore, a health risk to its 400 inhabitants.
They unilaterally determined the families who lived there would be better off in massive new concrete-and-asphalt public housing complexes.
So they grabbed their land for far less than its prime waterfront location should have commanded; eliminated Africville’s traditional communal subsistence economy; moved residents in city trucks and dumped them in places that were not their own—and expected a thank you for a job well done.
They didn’t get it.
Africville’s residents never asked to be relocated. They liked their community precisely because it was filled with family, friends, neighbours and “other mothers.” They did want long-denied city services like sewer, water and fire protection, of course, but the city could have provided them for less than it cost to relocate the community.
No one had asked the residents what they wanted.
Which is why “No More Africvilles” is still the looped refrain in Nova Scotia’s remaining black communities whenever well-intentioned outsiders try to make decisions for them.
Now, another even more well-intentioned group, the Africville Heritage Trust, has decided it knew best who to hire to run the new non-profit group’s Africville memorial.
They hired a white woman from out of the province.
Even if the woman had turned out to be otherwise qualified—which it now seems she was not—the fact the community was not consulted made her a non-starter.
Last week, 200 members of the local black community voted unanimously to demand the trust find a new executive director. Belatedly, the Trust de-hired the woman.
And unintentionally reminded us again that we still need to learn the real lesson of the Africville relocation.
Previous Africville-related columns, etc.
Copyright 2011 Stephen Kimber
TYP: It all began in a duck blind
What became the “most important (educational) program ever” for Nova Scotia’s black and aboriginal communities began inauspiciously enough in a duck blind in the middle of the Nova Scotia nowhere.
Dalhousie University’s Transition Year Program—a unique-for-its-time scheme to bring marginalized black and native students into the academic mainstream through a year-long process to “transition” them into university—celebrated its 40th anniversary this past weekend with a reception, symposium, dinner and dance.
Its conception was decidedly more humble.
In October 1968, Rocky Jones, then a black radical student activist, invited his friend Jim Walker, then a freshly minted white Dalhousie grad student, for a duck hunting weekend. “Rocky is an avid hunter,” Walker jokes today. “I am not.”
They built a lean-to but it was so cold they zipped their sleeping bags together and even invited Rocky’s Labrador retriever into the bag to stay warm.
“I should mention,” Walker adds, “we had a bottle of rum we passed back and forth.”
They talked through the night—about Mississippi freedom schools, the fledgling American “head start” school programs, a recent report documenting the shockingly low numbers of black Nova Scotians in university…
At some point, remembers Jones, they concocted a scheme that—after two years of discussion and the perhaps surprising support of then-Dalhousie president Henry Hicks—became the Transition Year Program.
Today, Jones is one of Canada’s most prominent civil rights lawyers, Walker is a history professor and author of the seminal book on Nova Scotia’s black loyalists, and TYP is a model for programs across North America.
Its most important accomplishment, Jones suggests, is that it helped foster a cadre of educated local black and aboriginal grads who returned to their own Nova Scotia communities and became leaders there.
Is the program still needed?
Yes, says Jones. But it needs to return to its roots. In recent years, it has admitted more students from outside Nova Scotia. Many don’t stay after they graduate. “We’re losing leadership,” Jones says. Which is especially troubling, he adds, at a time when many local black and native communities desperately need a new generation of educated leaders.
So a toast to TYP. To what it was. And still needs to be.
***
If you'd like to read more of Jim Walker's recollections of the beginnings of the Transition Year Program, you can find his emailed response to my queries here.
Copyright 2010 Stephen Kimber
Keep hate laws for real haters
It’s difficult to summon a scintilla of sympathy for the Rehberg brothers. Twenty-year-old Justin was convicted Friday of criminal harassment and inciting hatred against blacks by setting a two-metre cross ablaze last February in front of the Hants County home of a mixed-race couple. His brother Nathan faces similar charges this week.
But since this decision may be precedent-setting, it’s worth asking whether we want to set this precedent. The law requires proof not only that the accused did the deed but also that their “motivation” was to incite hatred.
Justin’s lawyer argued the motivation for this crime—his client pleaded guilty to criminal harassment—was something else.
Justin was convinced Michelle Lyons—a distant cousin who shared the house with her black partner and their children—was spreading rumours the Rehberg brothers had herpes. In his dumb-as-dirt way, Justin lashed back, zeroing in on her partner’s race and upping the offensive ante in the process.
The intent, his lawyer insisted, was personal vengeance.
It’s complicated, of course. Cross-burning carries symbolic connotations. That this torching failed to ignite racist nutbars says more about the community, which rallied to support the family, than the act, or those who perpetrated it.
Still, we need to be careful when we attach the most heinous intent—inciting hatred is heinous—to messy personal vendettas.
One criminologist argued after the verdict that “hate laws were created for this reason… We need to prosecute more, not less.”
I’d suggest hate crimes are, and should be, so reprehensible we must designate them such only in clear-cut cases.
Consider another recent case involving a New York street gang that discovered one of their recruits was gay. They allegedly beat and sodomized him, tortured another gay man, then beat up that man’s roommate and brother. Police call those hate crimes. No kidding.
In a slightly different context, American comedian Jon Stewart got it exactly right during his recent Rally to Restore Sanity when he urged caution in our use of language. We must learn to “distinguish between real racists and Tea Partiers, or real bigots and Juan Williams and Rick Sanchez.”
We also need to distinguish between real race haters and dumb-assed vengeance seekers.
Copyright 2010 Stephen Kimber
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About
STEPHEN KIMBER, a Professor of 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 seven non-fiction books.
Buy his books at Amazon.