It took 60 years and many supporters before a deserving Willie O’Ree was finally made a member of the iconic Hockey Hall of Fame.

It was in 1958 when O’Ree valiantly stepped on the ice and stick-handled his way into becoming the first Black player to ever play in the National Hockey League.
O’Ree, now 82, is often dubbed the “Jackie Robinson of hockey.” He is still very active and serves as a NHL diversity ambassador.
He was inducted last month into the cherished hall in the builders’ category and becomes the third Black person to make it to the top of the sport. O’Ree joins Edmonton Oilers goalie Grant Fuhr and Canadian women’s national team captain Angela James.
There are now about two dozen Black players on NHL rosters.
The partially-blind O’Ree has been instrumental the NHL’s Hockey is for Everyone program that introduces the game to children that might not normally see a path in the sport. The league even established the Willie O’Ree Community Hero Award last season.

“There’s not enough words to say how pleased I am. I was laughing and I was crying,” an ecstatic O’Ree told the Toronto Star after the induction. “I’m just so happy that I’m alive to be able to share this.
He was also honoured by the Boston Bruins last January 17 to mark the 60th anniversary of when he took to the ice for the team to become the league’s first Black player.
His first game with Boston resulted in a 3-0 win against the Montreal Canadiens. He recalled that he didn’t know the significance of the game until reading a newspaper the next day that said he had broken the NHL’s colour barrier.
“It was a nice feeling,” O’Ree recalled to The Canadian Press. “I just happened to be playing and just happened to be Black.”
He only played one more game with the Bruins that season. He returned to the team for the 1960-61 season, playing a total of 45 games in the NHL, scoring a respectable four goals and 10 assists.

The athlete touched Boston residents so much in his brief stint there that they also named a street and hockey rink after him.
Organizers received many letters of support for his induction; including one from Karl Subban, whose famous sons P.K. play for the Nashville Predators, Malcolm with the Las Vegas Golden Knights and Jordan, who was recently signed by the Toronto Maple Leafs.
Subban said O’Ree broke the colour barrier for the Bruins in 1958, the same year that he was born.
“He is a pioneer and a trailblazer,” he wrote. “Willie achieved in the face of adversity. He changed the game and he changed society and he changed minds.”
Subban noted that O’Ree made it possible for his sons to play professional hockey.
“He changed hockey which is now for everyone,” he said. “Hockey needed him and so does the Hockey Hall of Fame. The time is right!”

“Willie loved hockey so much that it helped him deal with and overcome all the challenges and racism he faced during his life and hockey career,” said Mike Eagles, a friend and former NHLer for 16 seasons.
O’Ree left Fredericton in 1954 at the age of 17 to play junior hockey with the Quebec Frontenacs. The next year he moved to Kitchener. It was during that second year in junior that he had an unfortunate accident.
“There was a slapshot, and I’m on the ice in front of the net. A ricochet came up and the puck struck me in the eye. I lost 97 per cent vision in my right eye. I was out of action for about six weeks,” he later recalled.
Throughout his career and the many obstacles he faced, O’Ree never told others that he was blind in one eye, which meant he would not be allowed to play in the NHL.
Following his stint within the Bruins, he played in other leagues for teams in Ottawa, Los Angeles and San Diego.

Little is known about the late civil rights champion Dorothy Cotton and the crucial role she played in helping to shape the U.S. civil rights movement.

Cotton, who was one of the closest advisers to Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., passed away earlier this month at her home in Ithaca, N.Y. She was 88.
She was forced into action after a white boy riding a bicycle sang “deep down in the heart of niggertown” as he rode by her.
The incident left Cotton outraged and she was soon helping to organize protests against segregation at libraries and lunch counters, in addition to teaching direct-action tactics to students.

The North Carolina native met King Jr. in 1960 when he preached at her church. She was a teacher and was asked to join the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) which, was co-founded by King Jr., to organize peaceful protests and work for the increased rights of Blacks.
Cotton, who is called an “unsung hero” of the movement, worked with King Jr. as the group’s educational director, one of the few high-level positions for women in the SCLC at the time.
She was the only female member of King Jr.’s executive staff and became one of his closest colleagues. Cotton wrote in her biography “If Your Back’s Not Bent,” that her position in King Jr.’s inner circle put her at the forefront of the civil rights movement as an educator, planner, activist and leader.
She had managed to obtain a solid education by putting herself through college while working as a housekeeper for the president of Shaw University. She then earned an undergraduate degree from Virginia State University and a Master’s Degree in speech therapy from Boston University.
Cotton was placed in charge of the Citizenship Education Program, which was instrumental in teaching thousands of poor men and women of their rights to vote and “transform from poorly-educated and disenfranchised people from victims to full citizens.”

She said in a 2013 interview that her work was not publicized at the time for fears the program “would have been shut down for teaching all those old Black folk that they are citizens.”
The program focused on teaching voter registration requirements as well as community and individual empowerment. Most Southern states then had voting registration laws designed around literacy exercises specifically to disqualify Black voters, who to register to vote had to recite parts of the Constitution as well as signing one’s name in cursive writing.
Many of the Blacks were themselves illiterate and were turned away at the polls.
The program led to a wave of education that spread through the local communities, with the residents themselves becoming the teachers. It had a profound impact with more than 6,000 men and women taking part in workshops and classes.
Her “leadership contributed significantly to a movement that has altered the course of social and political life in the U.S. and transformed the place of African Americans and all people of color in civic engagement and leadership,” according to her biography posted on the Dorothy Cotton Institute that was founded by the Center for Transformative Action in 2010.

Cotton worked closely with King Jr. for 12 years and even accompanied him on his trip to Oslo, Norway to receive the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize.
Committed to the cause, she remained with the SCLC after King Jr. was assassinated in April 1968 outside the Lorraine Motel in Memphis.
She said her life’s work was based on his philosophy and practices of nonviolence, reconciliation, restoration and grassroots leadership development.
After leaving SCLC, she went on to become the Southeastern Regional Director of ACTION, the federal agency for volunteer programs, Vice-President for Field Operations at the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change and Director of student activities at Cornell University.
Cotton later founded Dorothy Cotton & Associates, a consulting company that organized seminars on social change, leadership development, and individual empowerment. She was also a co-founder of the National Citizenship School.

Family and friends are mourning the loss of George Ethelbert Carter, one of this country’s sharpest legal minds and first native-born Black judge.
Carter was surrounded by his family when he passed away last week at his Etobicoke home. He was 96. His funeral service will take place at the Glendale Chapel in Rexdale on June 12.
The Toronto-born Carter was the first of 14 children of John Carter and Louise Braithwaite Carter, who emigrated here from Barbados. He went on to become one of Canada’s first Black lawyers and the first native-born, Black judge.
His mom Louise made sure her children always attended church and school as their father laboured all day in an iron foundry to support the large family.

“I think back to the wonderful good fortune I had in having two great parents,” Carter would say. “They were just ordinary folks and it was at home where the real lessons were learned.”
Though money was tight, Carter attended Harbord Collegiate Institute, where he excelled at classes. He was a top learner and decided to attend university.
He attended University of Toronto, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree. The young man then enrolled and saw active duty in 1944 with the Canadian Infantry Corps before pursuing his dream of a legal career.
A large, silent-spoken man, Carter worked as a railroad porter to pay his tuition at Osgoode Hall Law School, from where he graduated in 1948. He was always interested in the community and regularly submitted articles to be published in Contrast Newspaper, where I was a cub reporter.
He was lucky to article with B. J. Spencer Pitt, the only Black lawyer practicing in Ontario in those days. He later he went to work for Sydney Harris, a Jewish Canadian lawyer, since no other law firms would accept Black law students for training.
Pitt and Harris at the time were among the very few firms that opened their doors to train Black law students.
After being called to the Bar in 1949, Carter opened his own firm on Bay Street in 1952. The firm handled mostly real estate, family law and criminal cases.
“I wanted to be a lawyer,” Carter recalled in an early interview. “I wanted to have my own practice and that I did, for 31 years.”
He defended others for decades before being appointed a Judge in the Ontario Provincial Court in 1979 and later, appointed to the Ontario Court of Justice, where he served for 16 years.

“It was a great experience,” the judge once said. “I loved listening to people and their stories and all their problems.”
Carter, who was well-known in the courtroom, was also instrumental in the implementation of Legal Aid in Ontario, for which he is best remembered.
In addition to his distinguished legal career, he never forgot his roots and was always there to help others in need.
He was a founding member of the Toronto Negro Veterans; a member of The Committee for the Adoption of Coloured Youngsters – a group that promoted the adoption of Black children; a founding member of The National Black Coalition of Canada; a founding member and past President of Toronto Negro Business and Professional Association and a Board member of the Ontario Black History Society (OBHS).
The Black community in return loved Carter and let their feelings be known. He has bestowed with many awards including the: Harry Jerome Lifetime Achievement Award; Osgoode Hall Law School of York University Award For Excellence and Honorary Life Membership to The Ontario Judges Association.
He was also honoured by the Canadian Association of Black Lawyers (CABL) and is a recipient of Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal.
He was so highly thought off that a bust of Justice Carter was unveiled at the Osgoode Hall Library in May 2014. A television documentary The Making of a Judge was made about his life in 2010 and he was awarded the Order of Ontario in 2014.

The first Black heavyweight boxing champ Jack Johnson loved white women and that lust led to his downfall more than 100 years ago in a racially-segregated U.S.

A strapping Johnson, who was known as the “Galveston Giant” in the ring, was born in 1878 to the son of slaves in Houston. He had strong ties to Canada and was a fugitive here while on the lam from U.S. police.

Canadian boxing champ Lennox Lewis, actor Sylvester Stallone and family members watched as President Donald Trump last month granted a posthumous pardon to Johnson some 105 years later at an event in the White House.

Johnson defeated Canadian World Heavyweight champ, Tommy Burns, for the title in 1908 at a time when Blacks and whites rarely entered the same ring. He then went on to beat a series of “great white hopes,” culminating in 1910 with a win over champion, James J. Jeffries.

The battle for racial supremacy between Johnson and Jeffries was billed a “Fight of the Century,” which at that time earned the Black fighter a hefty $65, 000. Johnson won the bout in the 15th round.

His victory angered many who wanted a “great white hope” to finish off the uppity Johnson. That night there were race riots in Texas, Colorado, New York City, Washington, D.C. and in more than 50 cities in 25 states.

At least 20 people were killed in the U.S. from the riots, and hundreds more were injured.

Blacks, on the other hand, were jubilant, and celebrated Johnson’s win as a victory for racial advancement. Many held spontaneous parades and gathered in prayer meetings.

Still, the U.S. federal authorities thought Johnson was becoming too big for his britches and placed him under investigation. They went after his weakest spot, which was for white women.

The boxer was envied by many whites and Blacks for earning considerable sums endorsing various products, including patent medicines. He had expensive hobbies as automobile racing and a penchant for tailored suits and purchasing jewelry and furs for his wives.

With his wealth, Johnson also purchased fine cars and opened a nightclub in Harlem in 1920; that would later become the Cotton Club. He also drank expensive champagne and owned exotic pets.

Johnson was convicted in 1913 of violating the Mann Act, a Jim Crow-era law that made it illegal to transport a white woman across state lines “for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.”

By then, his first wife, a white woman, had committed suicide. He took a second wife, Lucille Cameron, who was also white. Police managed to find a white prostitute who the boxer had an affair with who testified against him in 1913. An all-white jury took less than two hours to convict him.

District attorney Harry Parkin declared the conviction was a victory for the white race and the cause of anti-miscegenation.

“This Negro, in the eyes of many, has been persecuted,” Parkin bellowed. “Perhaps as an individual he was. But it was his misfortune to be the foremost example of the evil in permitting the intermarriage of whites and Blacks.”

Johnson skipped bail after the trial and fled to Montreal, posing as a member of a basketball team. For the next seven years he then traveled through Europe and South America before surrendering to U.S. police at the Mexican border in 1920.

He was sent to Leavenworth Penitentiary to serve his sentence and was released in July 1921.

Johnson died in a car crash in June 1946 as he was speeding away from a restaurant that had refused to serve him. He was 68.

His story is the basis of a play and 1970 movie The Great White Hope, starring James Earl Jones as Johnson. He was inducted into the Boxing Hall of Fame in 1954 and a film of the 1910 Johnson-Jeffries fight is deemed “historically significant” and kept in the U.S. National Film Registry.

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The late Dr. Wilson Head was the son of a Georgia sharecropper and not one to walk away from a fight for civil rights and justice for the downtrodden.

Head brought with him a lifetime of civil rights activism, which he shared with many in Toronto’s Black community when he moved here in 1959.

He is credited for being among “the first to put racism on the agenda of the Canadian conscience,” and even helped to end segregation at a golf course in Windsor.

His activism started in the 1930s in a series of “sit-in” protests against U.S. restaurants and bars, barbers, shopkeepers and movie house owners who would not serve Blacks. These protests took place a decade before the civil rights movement began.

Head was born in Milner, Georgia, in 1914. He passed away in 1993 at the age of 79.

His father died when he was 11, but his mother stressed the importance of education, telling him he would have to be “twice as smart as whites to compete,” words that he never forgot.

He once complained that he was fired from a job for glancing at a newspaper. His boss didn’t think Blacks should know how to read.

Head took two years to save enough tuition to graduate from Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute with a Bachelor of Science in Education. He was named in a 1939 Who’s Who Among Students in American Universities and Colleges.

He was shaped by his work with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He became a director at Flanner House in Indianapolis, which served needy Black people.

Head said he decided to move to Windsor “to get my children away from a racist society.” Here he found a job as the Executive Director of the Windsor Group Therapy Project. In 1965 he became the Director of Research and Planning for the Social Planning Council of Metropolitan Toronto.

He also lectured in social work at the University of Windsor, University of Michigan, Wayne State University and Sir Williams College, in Chicago.

The academic is best known for being one of the co-founders in 1975 of the Urban Alliance on Race Relations (UARR), which stood up for the rights of Blacks and racial minorities then, as it still does today. That was during a time of much more racial unrests involving police and Blacks in Toronto.

I remember Head as a tall, quiet, articulate man who would often visit the office of Contrast Newspaper, on Bathurst St., where I worked, to pick up a paper or seek coverage for an upcoming event.

He was busy with a list of organizations including the Canadian Civil Liberties Association of Toronto as Vice-President in 1967, the National Welfare Council as a founding member and the National Black Coalition of Canada as Chairman and President from 1977 to 1982.

As Coalition head in 1981 he testified before the Joint U.S. House Senate Committee on the “Canadian Constitution.”  He was also on the executive of The Metro Committee on Race Relations and Policing.

Even back then Head was an “outspoken critic of Metro Police,” citing racial profiling in their practices. The fight against racial profiling still continues today more than 40 years later.

“He opposed segregation of the races all his life,” according to reports. “He denounced the idea of all-Black schools and social services, asserting, ‘segregation is inherently inferior'”.

Head was assaulted in 1980 while climbing the steps to the offices of UARR, on College St., at Spadina Ave. He was attacked from behind with several blows to the head, resulting in a fall down the stairs. No one was ever arrested for that offence.

Unfazed, in 1988 he took part in the Donald Marshall Inquiry Commission in Nova Scotia. This investigation led to his ground-breaking paper entitled “Discrimination Against Blacks in Nova Scotia: The Criminal Justice System.”

The well-respected sociologist and community planner leaves behind a rich legacy in Toronto for his work in race relations, human rights, city and community building.

 

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For those of us who yearly attend the Canadian International Air Show at the CNE to see the iconic Snowbirds, it is comforting to learn that the world-famous flying team was partially established by the nation’s first Black fighter jet pilot.

The late Major Wally Peters was a trailblazer who retired after reaching heights never attained by a Black man in the Royal Canadian Air Force.
He didn’t let racism stop him from becoming Canada’s first Black fighter jet pilot, who worked as a flight instructor and who flew with the famed Snowbirds, the RCAF aerial performance team, which is a main attraction at the CNE air show every September.
Peters is listed in RCAF records as being a member of the aircrew servicing the Snowbirds in 1981 and 1982.
The native of Litchfield, Annapolis County, Nova Scotia, was born in 1937, and was the youngest of six children. They were the only Black family in that county.

A gifted athlete, he won a scholarship to Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick, where his presence on campus proved controversial. Some of his classmates refused to room with him because he was Black.
He soon earned a reputation, while completing his engineering degree, as the fastest running back on campus and won several awards for his skills on the football team, including rookie of the year and most valuable player.
While at the university, he met and married Nancy, a white woman from Sackville. The couple faced discrimination at the time due to their interracial marriage. But, Peters kept his head down and never publicly complained about the racism he faced at the time.
He enlisted in the RCAF to be a pilot in the early 1960s at the age of 24, thinking if he could drive a car, he can fly a plane, according to a Department of Veteran Affairs video.
“Up to that point, I had never known any Black pilots in the military and it was a feeling of accomplishment,” Walters told Veterans Affairs.
He recalled his graduation was tainted by racist comments made by the guest presenter. “What are you doing here?” the man asked Peters. When he replied that he was graduating, the man asked him as what. Peters told him that he was graduating as a pilot.
To which the man responded: “In my day … you would never had got past rear gunner,” Peters relived in the Canada Heroes Remember video.

He went on to a distinguished aviation career that included becoming the Canadian Armed Forces’ first human rights officer, as well as an adviser to the United Nations Security Council, offering advice on the tactical movement of troops by air.
At the UN, he was called on to analyze and brief a security council after the Soviet military shot down a Korean civilian jet in a controversial 1983 incident.
“I remember sitting on the 32nd floor of the United Nations, allowing myself to daydream, and say: ‘Boys, this is a long way from Litchfield, Nova Scotia,’ ” he recalled in the video series.
The RCAF never forgot Peters and in a memoriam credited him for being Canada’s first Black jet fighter pilot and A1 flying instructor.
“He was involved in the development of the Snowbirds and later flew with them,” the Air Force said on its website. “Mr. Peters also piloted Hercules cargo aircraft on assorted missions around the globe.”
Peters also played a role in the creation of the Canadian Aviation Safety Board (CASB), which investigated Air India Flight 182 that was brought down in the Atlantic Ocean in June, 1985, by a terrorist bomb.

That led to a job at Transport Canada, where he was promoted to director and director general with responsibility for systems safety before retiring in 1998.
The highly-respected Peters was also an adviser in the 1991 Nation Air accident investigation in Saudi Arabia, chaired the International Data Exchange Aviation Safety and developed and implemented risk management training programs.
Through his rise he never forgot his roots and was a founder and first president of the New Brunswick Association for the Advancement of Coloured People.
The airman passed away in 2013 at the age of 76. He left behind a wife, three daughters and five grandchildren.

Civil rights and union activist Bromley Armstrong has been in the trenches fighting to improve the lives of Black people in Ontario long before it became trendy or cool.

Armstrong, who is now 92, arrived in Toronto from Jamaica in 1947 and dedicated most of his life to the civil rights movement and helping others as a trade unionist.

He started off as a shop steward for Local 439 of the United Automobile Workers (UAW) and became a leader in the Canadian trade union movement. He was also a member of the Toronto & York Region Labour Council, who will be presenting the Bromley L. Armstrong Award for the 14^th year on May 18.

Described as a “blood and guts” ally of the working poor, Armstrong will best be remembered for taking part in the Dresden sit-ins held in the early 1950s to highlight some Ontario restaurants that refused to serve Blacks.

Since 1948, a group called the National Unity Association (NUA) of Chatham, Dresden and North Buxton had been fighting city officials unsuccessfully to stand up for social justice and end discrimination for Blacks.

Some of the businesses in Dresden were not complying with the April 1954 Fair Accommodation Practices Act, which made it illegal in Ontario to refuse service to Blacks at any establishment.

Dresden was important because it is the home of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and a terminus of the Underground Railroad, which brought hundreds of fugitive slaves from the U.S. to freedom in Canada. Blacks made up nearly 20% of Dresden’s residents by the 1950s, yet a number of restaurants and barbershops refused to serve them.

Realizing it was time for a change, Armstrong and other activists from the Toronto-based Joint Labour Committee for Human Rights conducted sit-ins at the racist restaurants, testing the owners’ non-compliance with the law.

The owners were taken to court and the law upheld in a legal case, which was Canada’s first successful test of laws making discrimination illegal.

Armstrong, some recalled, in one encounter calmly demanded service of a bigoted restaurant owner, who was angrily wielding a meat cleaver in his kitchen.

The Dresden sit-ins received prominent coverage in Toronto newspapers and propelled the civil rights movement to success. The incident convinced then Ontario Premier Leslie Frost to publicly affirm the province’s commitment to anti-discrimination laws and contributed to the creation of the Ontario Human Rights Commission in 1961.

Armstrong in the 1950s and 60s took on the Toronto “rent-ins,” in which Black or mixed-race couples were refused apartments for rent by bigoted owners claiming the unit was already rented. Instead it was offered to a white couple who appeared later and were part of the tests.

Similar legal cases were successfully built by the activists against the “rent-ins,” and later “private clubs,” to help bring them to attention of the legal system.

He also in 1954 led a delegation to Ottawa to protest the federal government’s restrictive immigration policy that shut out Blacks and other visible minorities.

Armstrong kept busy publishing The Islander, a weekly newspaper in the 1970s. He also served as a commissioner on the Ontario Human Rights Commission, adjudicator with the Ontario Labour Relations Board, convinced then North York Mayor Mel Lastman to set up the first municipal race relations committee and sat on the Board of Governors of the Canadian Centre for Police Relations.

For his services, he was presented the Order of Distinction in Jamaica, Order of Ontario in 1992 and the Order of Canada two years later.

He also received an honourary Doctor of Laws degree from York University in 2013 for his lifelong battle against racism.

Armstrong along the way helped to establish a list of community organizations; including the Caribbean Soccer Club, the Canadian Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, the Jamaican Canadian Association, the Jamaican Canadian Credit Union, the Urban Alliance on Race Relations, the National Black Coalition of Canada and the National Council of Jamaican and Supportive Organizations in Canada.

His autobiography Bromley: Tireless Champion for Just Causes was published in 2000.

 

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The late and fearless civil rights activist Dudley Laws inspired many in the community for leading dozens of protests and marches to end the many police shootings of Black men in Toronto and surrounding cities.

Laws, who died this week in 2011 at the age of 77, gained prominence for heading dozens, if not hundreds, of anti-police brutality marches and rallies during the 1970s and 1980s to highlight young Black men who were being shot by Toronto and other GTA officers, most who were acquitted of all charges at trial.

A life-long activist, Laws left Saint Thomas Parish, Jamaica, for Britain in 1955 and soon began helping members of the West Indian community, including the Somerleyton and Geneva Road Association in Brixton.

He moved to Toronto in 1965 and joined the Universal African Improvement Association (UAIA), an organization founded by Marcus Mosiah Garvey in 1914 that helped fellow Blacks.

Frustrated and concerned by the escalating number of police slayings of Black youths then and still now, he and other community leaders vowed to act.

In 1988, Laws, along with the late lawyer Charles Roach, activist Sherona Hall and teacher Lennox Farrell co-founded the Black Action Defense Committee (BADC) following the police shooting of Lester Donaldson. The organization is now marking its 30-years of service.

I have been covering the anti-police protests as a reporter since the 1980s and it seems that little has changed today to improve relations between police and the Black community in Toronto.

Donaldson, 44, of Jamaica, was diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia when killed while brandishing a small paring knife in August 1988 by Const. David Deviney, who was charged with manslaughter and not surprisingly acquitted at trial.

The acquittal led to protests and demonstrations by members of the Black community, who wanted Deviney jailed for murder. Front page photos in Toronto newspapers the next day showed a smiling Deviney celebrating his acquittal by smoking a large cigar and surrounded by his police friends.

Donaldson was the latest in a series of shootings of young Black men in Toronto by what appeared to be ‘trigger happy cops.’ In December that same year Michael Wade Lawson, 17, was shot by Peel police in the back of the head and killed in an incident relating to a stolen car.

Once again, the two officers charged in that shooting were acquitted of all charges in 1992.

The police slayings continued with Faraz Suleman, 16, who was slain by a York Regional Police officer in a suspected car jacking. The charge against the officer was thrown out in court.

Next to die was Hugh Dawson, 31, who was killed by a Toronto officer in March 1997 during an alleged drug takedown. The officer was acquitted. Tony Romagnuolo, 44, was buried next. He was shot after getting in a dispute with a York officer. The officer was acquitted of all charges.

The deaths by police continued with Darren Varley in 1999. Otto Vass, 55, in August 2000; Eric Osawe, 26, in September 2010 and Mehrdad Bayrami in 2012 and so on.  Today more than three dozen Black men have since been killed by police in the GTA; including the high-profile July 2015 slaying of Andrew Loku: who was shot by a Toronto cop, who was not charged.

Laws due to his anti-police activism in the early 1990s was targeted by police who charged him with alien smuggling; which was overturned on appeal.

Still BADC activists, aided by Black Lives Matter Toronto, soldier on in countless marches and protests in a 30-year fight to end the police shooting and killing of Black men.

The demonstrations led to the creation of Ontario’s Special Investigations Unit (SIU) in 1990 to probe police shootings or killing of civilians and sexual assault allegations.

BADC will be celebrating its first 30-years of service with the Dudley Laws Scholarship Fundraising Brunch being held on May 6 at the Jamaican Canadian Centre (JCA). Long-standing supporters Kingsley Gilliam, Nancy Simms and Oliver Rose will be honoured for their many years of activism.

Tickets are $55 and available at the JCA.

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By TOM GODFREY

It was one of the first police beatings of a Black man that was captured on grainy videotape before the Internet age and it sparked the deadliest racial riots in Lost Angeles, which is still simmering 26-years later.

The name Rodney King still brings back to many haunting memories of a Black man laying bleeding in the middle of Florence and Normandie Sts. in South Central L.A. as he was pummelled, kicked, beaten and Tasered by four police officers in March 1991.

Bystander George Holliday videotaped the vicious beating and released it to the Media, where it spread like wildfire worldwide, way before the age of Facebook or Twitter.

Even though the 81-second video showed the officers kicking and clubbing King 56 times as he laid on the road, all four were found not guilty of any offences on April 29, 1992, despite the many witnesses. The video showed 20 Los Angeles police officers standing around the scene.

Seventeen of the cops were not indicted or disciplined for failing to intervene to help King as he was being assaulted.

King, then 25, suffered multiple cuts and bruises, 11 fractures, a black eye, broken leg and a scar from a stun gun which jolted him with 50,000-volt shocks.

Within hours, thousands of outraged African Americans in South Central began taking to the streets to protest the all-white jury verdict. The looting, shooting, burning and stealing went on for five days. I had never seen such brazen acts of vandalism in my life.

City leaders introduced a strict dusk-to-dawn curfew that was in place for a week and enforced in the city and county of Los Angeles.

Some 1,100 Marines, 600 Army soldiers, and 6,500 National Guard troops were dispatched to quell the riots, which by then had led to the deaths of 55 people and injury to 2,000 others. More than 1,100 buildings, including 700 retail stores, were torched or destroyed by fire. Damages exceeded $1 billion.

The story made major news in Canada and across the world. At the Toronto Sun newspaper, myself and photographer Fred Thornhill were dispatched that Friday night to cover the lawlessness.

Large tracts of L.A. were covered in smoke when we arrived. We were able to secure a cabbie at the airport and headed to the hotspots. We saw a pick up truck ram into a gas station, where culprits loaded the vehicle with batteries and other parts, before setting the place on fire as they sped off.

Thornhill then had a bottle thrown at him that smashed a passenger side window of the taxi where he sat. We also watched as armed cops escorted and guarded emergency workers as they restored power in some areas. It turned out gangbangers were firing at the hydro workers.

In time, King refused a $200,000 scholarship from the city and launched a lawsuit instead. He settled a civil suit with the city for $3.8 million and went on to live a relatively quiet life.

He still had a number of drinking and driving type run-ins with police over the years. He last known DUI was in 2011.

Ironically, it was during his lawsuit against the city when he met his fiancée, Cynthia Kelly, who was a juror at the proceedings.

King at one point wrote a book, “The Riot Within: My Journey From Rebellion to Redemption,” about his experience during the riots and being in the media spotlight.

He also made a movie about his life and invested some of his settlement in a record label, Straight Alta-Pazz Records, hoping to employ minority employees, but it went out of business.

He sobered up during the last stages of his life and helped others by becoming a celebrity rehab speaker known for shaking off alcohol and drugs.

King was found dead in his swimming pool in June 2012 at the age of 47. His death was the result of accidental drowning, with alcohol and drugs being contributing factors, authorities said.

“Some people feel like I’m some kind of hero. Others hate me,” King once told the BBC. “They say I deserved it. Other people, I can hear them mocking me for when I called for an end to the destruction, like I’m a fool for believing in peace.”

 

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By Tom Godfrey

Ontario’s first Black MPP Leonard Braithwaite fought valiantly to end racial segregation in our schools for which he is still fondly remembered by many in the community who are gearing up for the upcoming elections in June.

The well-liked Braithwaite opened the door for Black MPPs as Alvin Curling, Zanana Akanda, Michael Coteau, Mitzie Hunter; not including MPs as the late Howard McCurdy, Lincoln Alexander, Hedy Fry, Jean Augustine and today’s Greg Fergus, Celina Caesar-Chavannes and immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen.

Lenny, as he was affectionately called, represented the riding of Etobicoke while serving as a Liberal member of the Ontario legislature from 1963 to 1975. He was re-elected in 1967 and 1971 and served as a Liberal critic for labour and welfare.

The popular lawyer and Air Force veteran died in his hometown of Toronto last March 2012. He was 88.

He narrowly captured his seat by just 443 votes and a headline in the Toronto Daily Star then read: “Wins Etobicoke: Braithwaite Ontario’s First Negro MPP.”

Braithwaite is best known for his 1964 maiden speech to the Legislature in which he spoke passionately about the racial segregation that was taking place in some Ontario schools.

It seems incredible now, but Ontario in 1964 still had a law on its books mandating so-called “black schools,” which segregated students by colour.

“There has not been a need for such schools since before the beginning of this century,” Braithwaite told his fellow MPPs. “There may have been a call for “coloured” schools when the Underground Railroad brought U.S. blacks out of slavery to Ontario, but “those days have passed.”

Under the terms of the Ontario Separate Schools Act, the heads of five or more families in a “city, town or village, being coloured people,” could petition the local municipal council to establish “one or more separate schools for coloured people.”

It so happened that a group of black parents had spent a year lobbying unsuccessfully for their children to be integrated into a new school in a nearby town.

Braithwaite would rarely back down in his many fights for the rights of visible minorities and gender equality.

He began his political career in 1960 as a member of the Etobicoke Board of Education. Two years later he was elected as an alderman on the Etobicoke council and ran in the provincial election in 1963, defeating the Progressive Conservative candidate.

He was proud of his service and friendships made in the Royal Canadian Air Force during WW11.

Braithwaite was a graduate from the University of Toronto, where he earned a Bachelor of Commerce degree. He earned a Master of Business Administration from the Harvard Business School, graduating in 1952, and graduated from Osgoode Hall Law School in 1958. He was the first Black lawyer elected as a member of the Governing Council of the Law Society of Upper Canada.

At Osgoode, he was elected class president in his first year and by his fourth, he was president of the student body and was awarded a Gold Key for leadership.

He would never forget about the racism that he faced at the time, during which he was armed with a first-rate education and spotless war record but could not find a job. It was back in the days when your photo had to be attached to a resume.

He was finally given a job working on the night shift at a chocolate factory after the plant’s foremen, who had never received a Black applicant, decided he could not turn away a war veteran.

Through the years he established a small law practice in his beloved Etobicoke, which he would operate for many years.

Following his defeat in 1975, he returned to municipal politics, winning a spot on Etobicoke’s Board of Control. In 1985, he was persuaded to run as a last-minute Liberal hopeful in that year’s provincial election, but lost to the Conservative incumbent.

He managed to gain local fame by helping to erect the first sound barriers to absorb traffic noise between homes and highways in the Etobicoke area.

Braithwaite is still loved and cherished in Etobicoke for his 12-years of unselfish service to the community.

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