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
Not “Africville all over again”… not yet
Rev. Rhonda Britten may have been guilty of hyperbole when she compared last week’s city council decision to sell the former St. Patrick’s-Alexandra School to a local developer to “the rape... of a community… Africville all over again!”
But she is not entirely canary-in-the-coal-mine wrong.
In 2009, Halifax Regional School Board—over the ongoing objections of the north-end community—decided to shutter St.Pat’s-Alexandra after the 2010-11 school year.
That suddenly freed up a tantalizing 3.85-acre chunk of valuable, edge-of-downtown real estate in a rapidly gentrifying poor neighbourhood.
Last summer, the city issued a call for proposals. Six groups—three for-profit and three non-profit—responded. After evaluating them, staff last week recommended a private developer’s proposal to tear down the school and replace it with a mixed residential/affordable housing/community space development.
But Britten, who is the well-connected pastor of Cornwallis Street Baptist Church, says she didn’t even learn about the call for proposals until 12 days before the deadline.
That’s interesting. Municipal policies call for residents to be consulted before the city invites proposals if surplus schools might have community uses.
Britten’s group did quickly manage to cobble together a plan to transform the former school into spaces for community. But staff scored that pitch—along with the two other non-profit community-based proposals—at the bottom of its evaluation sheet.
No wonder. “Community interest” wasn’t one of the criteria considered. Close to 50 per cent of the final score, in fact, was made up of the bidder’s financial capability and financial offer. Not easy hills for cash-strapped community groups to climb.
To add insult to injury, councillors—who routinely debate cat bylaws more times than Fluffy has lives, and who just put off a decision on a municipal stadium again—refused Coun. Dawn Sloane’s motion to defer a final decision on the school sale for a month because of alleged flaws in the process.
St. Pat’s-Alexandra isn’t, by itself, the new Africville.
But the community is clearly under siege.
Pushing out the poor in the interests of progress.
Where have we heard that before?
Copyright 2011 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
Entitled to their entitlements, aboriginal edition
The Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation is right. There, I’ve said it. And it only hurt a little.
While I can—and do, and will—dispute the larger goals of this never-met-a-public-expenditure-it-can-stomach crowd, the CTF did discover real slime under its latest freedom-of-information rock.
Though there are only a million aboriginals in Canada, 82 reserve politicians “earned” more than the prime minister’s $315,462 salary last yea
r, 222 pocketed more than their provincial-premier counterparts and 70
4 raked in the tax-free equivalent of $100,000-plus.
One Nova Scotia councilor—on a reserve with 304 members—took home $978,468 tax free.
Some First Nations leaders argue these CTF remuneration numbers are ripped from their context—that the packages lump together salaries, honoraria, travel expenses and contracts for native businesses, and that native political leaders don’t get plush pensions like their non-native colleagues.
Some complain darkly that singling out native leaders smacks of racism.
Mi’kmaq elder Daniel Paul blames the Department of Indian Affairs, which he says has been “well aware of what’s going on and have chosen not to do a thing about it.”
There is plenty of blame to go around.
Traditional government paternalism coupled with a more recent laissez-faire fear of appearing to question First Nations’ autonomy created fertile ground for nefarious native leaders who choose to take advantage.
Whenever politicians operate in secret and are unaccountable to the people who elect them, entitled-to-their-entitlements corruption is sure to follow. (See Nova Scotia MLA expense scandal, federal sponsorship scandal, David Dingwall, et al, ad nauseum.)
What makes this scandal more difficult to digest is the stark reality of non-leader aboriginal life in Canada.
Consider the third-world conditions that exist on many Canadian reserves. Consider that aboriginal young people are seven times more likely to commit suicide than the national average. Consider that the unemployment rate for aboriginals in Nova Scotia last year was 17.4 per cent compared with nine percent for non-aboriginals, and that employed aboriginals earned just 77 per cent of hourly waged non-aboriginals.
Now consider again those CTF numbers.
It is past time for transparency and accountability. It’s time to put power in the hands of native communities, not native leaders.
Copyright 2010 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
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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.