By TOM GODFREY

It was 90-years ago that members of the Ku Klux Klan were running wild and free in southern Ontario hiding behind their white hoods as they openly attacked Blacks and other visible minorities.
The town of Oakville on what would be Black History Month made national news, when on February 28, 1930 some 75 hooded Klansmen openly burned a cross on a main street to prevent the impending marriage of a Black man to one of their local white women.
Oakville then had a population of about 4,000 residents; including an estimated 40 Blacks, who were descendants of U.S. slaves who had arrived in Canada on the Underground Railroad.
The KKK had waited until Ira Junius Johnson, then 37, and a Canadian army veteran, and his fiancee, Isabella Jones, had returned from a trip to Toronto to obtain a marriage permit.

The mob marched to a Kerr St. home where the couple were staying. There they separated the lovers and took Johnson away. The WW1 veteran could do little to comfort his soon-to-be wife, who was taken in another vehicle for “treatment” by the Salvation Army.
Johnson had paid his dues. He was one of 2,000 Blacks who were accepted into non-segregated sections of the military. He was in the 9th Canadian Machine Gun Company during the Battle of Passchendaele and fought in the Hundred Days Offensive that ended WW1 in 1918, during which he suffered a shrapnel wound to his leg.
That night he, his horrified aunt and uncle, were driven by the Klan to a Head St. house and forced to watch as a second cross was burned in his yard.
The vet was warned if he was ‘seen walking down the street with a white woman again, he would be dealt with,’ according to news reports.
As the Klansmen returned to Hamilton, they were stopped by Oakville police Chief David Kerr, who recognized some as prominent businessmen and let them go. Kerr was at the cross-burning earlier and declared “no crime had been committed.”
The coverage of the incident by the Toronto Daily Star and Globe and Mail were sympathetic to the Klan at first, but outrage by the Black community turned public opinion against them.

It turned out that Jones mother, Annie, had called on the Klan for help after admitting she had failed to break up the bi-racial couple. She then asked Oakville police to intervene but they said their hands were tied because Isabel was an adult.
Due to pressure from the Black community in Toronto, church groups, some brave politicians and public figures, an investigation by the Attorney General of Ontario was launched and the instigators behind the racist incident were charged and convicted in Canada’s first prosecution of the Ku Klux Klan.
“There was a strong feeling against the marriage which the young girl and the negro had planned,” Oakville’s then mayor, J.B. Moat, told the Star. “Personally I think the Ku Klux Klan acted quite properly in the matter. The feeling in the town is generally against such a marriage”
The A-G’s probe led to charges being laid on March 7 against three pillars of the community, who included the town’s chiropractor William E. Phillips, his assistant Harold Orme and Hamilton Presbyterian Church pastor Ernest Taylor, a police interpreter.
Charges were dropped against Orme and Taylor, while Phillips was slapped with a $50 fine due to the huge respect he carried in the community.
Community leaders were outraged by the outrageous fine and demanded further legal action. Johnson’s home was also mysteriously burned down at the time and no was ever arrested for that.
There was an appeal of the sentence, which Chief Justice Sir William Mulock called “a travesty of justice,” before sentencing Phillips to three-months in jail.
The couple were finally married on March 24, 1930 and had two children and a happy life. Johnson died in 1966.

A proposal by Trillium Health Partners to build a major redevelopment and expansion of the Queensway Health Centre is expected to be decided this week.

Etobicoke York Community Council members will decide on June 17 if a nine-storey inpatient hospital wing at 150 Sherway Dr., containing 416 beds to the north of the existing hospital, and a new eight-storey parking structure with 910 spaces will go ahead.

The hospital has been raising funds and lobbying government officials to get a green light so they can “provide more patients with the right care in the right place at the right time.”

This new wing would be connected by a covered walkway to the existing hospital building and pedestrian entrances would be from The West Mall side.

In addition to the 910 parking spots within the new proposed parking garage structure, 527 existing surface parking spaces unaffected by the new buildings would remain bringing the total number of parking spaces to 1,437 for the entire site. The proposal also would also provide 124 new bicycle parking spaces.

“The project aims to increase the capacity of health care services for the community,” Queensway Health Centre officials say. “It is also working with partners to advance plans for new long-term care beds and palliative services in Mississauga.”

Organizers have raised $38.8 million for the hospital to ensure they are able to provide high-quality care and meet the increasing demands.

The site will be located at the southwest corner of The Queensway and The West Mall, where some small hospital buildings stand.

The hospital says they are gearing up for the next 20-years and to meet this demand, they are planning major expansion projects at the Mississauga Hospital and the Queensway Health Centre.

Trillium Health Partners is one of the largest community-based hospital systems in Canada, which includes the Credit Valley Hospital, the Mississauga Hospital and the Queensway Health Centre.

The hospital last year received over 1.7 million patient visits and 276,003 visits to the hospital’s Emergency Departments and Urgent Care Centre. This is a significant increase from previous years. They have also performed 65,520 surgeries and delivered 8,364 babies.

We love our parks and gardens at this time of the year.

This summer the Lakeshore Environmental Gardening Society (LEGS) is heralding and celebrating beneficial insects of the garden.

LEGS Chair Monika Meulman says summer is a time of growth for your garden and for watering, weeding and pest control to ensure an abundant harvest.

This season the group will be giving out Bug Garden Kits that contain bugs that are beneficial for your garden and plants.

The beneficial bugs, as they are called, go after those that eat your lettuce, torment your trees or chew the roots of your vegetables, Meulman says.

“Knowing more about the beneficial bugs in our gardens can help you protect your crops,” she says, adding the beneficial bugs can prevent the use of dangerous pesticides for your crops.

“Many bugs we might consider pests actually do the work they are meant to do to help our garden grow,” Meulman insists.

The beneficial bugs include: Rove beetles, solitary bees, lacewing eggs and Trichogramma wasps.

“By turning back to the wisdom of nature we use less harmful pesticides and still have abundance in our parks and gardens,” Meulman says.

Gardners say the beneficial bugs feed on codling moth, cabbageworm, tomato hornworm, corn earworm, corn borer, gypsy moth, leafworms, fruitworms, peach borer, diamond back moth, tomato pinworm, cutworms, bollworms, armyworms and tent caterpillars.

Thanks to a TD Park People grant, LEGS will be giving out Bug Garden Kits to help you with your yield.

The kits are available on June 20 and 21 from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at The Healing Muse Apothecary, at 2859 Lake Shore Blvd. W., near Fifth St.

Other good pest-eaters for your garden includes toads, spiders for aphids or caterpillers for eating other insect pests and birds, which eat bugs.