Oh.

Babylon (1981) 

Have you ever heard of Viola Desmond? I hadn’t until a book about her arrived on my desk. She was essentially the Rosa Parks of Canada, a black woman who refused to leave her seat in a white section of a theatre in Nova Scotia, just as Parks refused to give up her seat in the white section of a bus in Montgomery, Ala. Who really knew there was this type of racism in Canada? Desmond was arrested and charged with breaking the law in 1946. Her pardon came decades after her death in 1965.

Cape Breton University history professor Graham Reynolds writes about her in Viola Desmond’s Canada: A History of Blacks and Racial Segregation in the Promised Land. The book includes stories shared with the author by Wanda Robson, Desmond’s sister.

Our conversation has been edited for length.

Canadians always think we were better about accepting others than the Americans. Who knew that J.S. Woodsworth, leader of the left-wing CCF, was against the immigration of people of colour or different religions? Who knew the Ku Klux Klan was huge in Canada in the 1930s? I grew up in Toronto in the 1960s and knew about anti-Semitism and bias against Italian immigrants but didn’t appreciate the difficulties blacks had experienced since their arrival in Canada with the French in the 18th century.

There isn’t a tremendous amount of awareness of the history of race relations and how things were in the past. Decidedly race relations today are better than they were 10 years ago, but we can’t fool ourselves into thinking there aren’t problems today. In 2010 there was a cross burning in Nova Scotia, and recently in Dartmouth a hangman’s noose was placed near the desk of a man working at Leon’s.

BERWYN - I AM BLACK (Official Visualiser) (youtube.com)

A solid boom-bap beat paired with a chorus that has the makings of an anthem!

More info on Berwyn: ‘Theresa May made the whole country rally against migrants’: UK rapper Berwyn on poverty, perseverance and hostile politics | Music | The Guardian