Colour-coded


Book Description

"Backhouse presents detailed narratives of six court cases, each giving evidence of blatant racism created and enforced through law."--BOOK JACKET.




Pearleen Oliver


Book Description

In a winning new book, Pearleen Oliver: Canada's Black Crusader for Civil Rights brings to life a compassionate and passionate African Nova Scotian, the story of her growth and activism--a book that shows how one woman's voice changed the course of Nova Scotia's history. Pearleen Oliver pushed open doors that blocked Black girls from nurses' training. She kicked Little Black Sambo out of public schools. She was spokesperson for Viola Desmond's appeal of her 1946 conviction for challenging racist customs. A founder of the Nova Scotia Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, the Black United Front and the Black Cultural Centre, she was the first female moderator of the African United Baptist Association, and a founder of the AUBA Women's Institute. Editor Ronald Caplan weaves Pearleen's voice from her interviews and speeches. We experience Pearleen's awareness of injustice as she grew up in segregated New Glasgow schools. A married woman, we see her outrage re-kindled by a bewildered teenager at her door who was barred from nurses' training by her skin colour. Pearleen began to speak out before civic and religious and community groups?Boards of Trade, Rotary luncheons, B'nai B'rith and Baptist services and nuclear disarmament conferences. Newspapers carried her voice?a voice of reason and determination and common sense?across the province, and then across Canada. While raising five sons and carrying on the duties of a minister's wife, Pearleen mentored young girls and women in summer camps, church groups, continuing education, and women's groups. She was the organist in her churches, and she wrote histories of Black communities. In this eye-opening book Pearleen Oliver tells stories of activist journalist Carrie Best who published Nova Scotia's first Black newspaper, of successful businesswoman Viola Desmond who was sidetracked by petty racism, of Black soldiers who fought Nazi racism in the Second World War and then came home to racial discrimination in Canada. This book keeps alive a determined fighter for social justice who should not be forgotten. Pearleen Oliver demonstrated what one person, one voice, can do.




Viola Desmond’s Canada


Book Description

In 1946, Viola Desmond was wrongfully arrested for sitting in a whites-only section of a movie theatre in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. In 2010, the Nova Scotia Government recognized this gross miscarriage of justice and posthumously granted her a free pardon. Most Canadians are aware of Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her seat on a racially segregated bus in Alabama, but Viola Desmond’s act of resistance occurred nine years earlier. However, many Canadians are still unaware of Desmond’s story or that racial segregation existed throughout many parts of Canada during most of the twentieth century. On the subject of race, Canadians seem to exhibit a form of collective amnesia. Viola Desmond’s Canada is a groundbreaking book that provides a concise overview of the narrative of the Black experience in Canada. Reynolds traces this narrative from slavery under French and British rule in the eighteenth century to the practice of racial segregation and the fight for racial equality in the twentieth century. Included are personal recollections by Wanda Robson, Viola Desmond’s youngest sister, together with important but previously unpublished documents and other primary sources in the history of Blacks in Canada. NEW: Teaching Guide Available Here




The African Canadian Legal Odyssey


Book Description

The African Canadian Legal Odyssey explores the history of African Canadians and the law from the era of slavery until the early twenty-first century. This collection demonstrates that the social history of Blacks in Canada has always been inextricably bound to questions of law, and that the role of the law in shaping Black life was often ambiguous and shifted over time. Comprised of eleven engaging chapters, organized both thematically and chronologically, it includes a substantive introduction that provides a synthesis and overview of this complex history. This outstanding collection will appeal to both advanced specialists and undergraduate students and makes an important contribution to an emerging field of scholarly inquiry.




Surviving in the Hour of Darkness


Book Description

Surviving in the Hour of Darkness: The Health and Wellness of Women of Colour and Indigenous Women addresses the health issues - physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual - of black women, First Nations women, and other women of colour. The book is a collection of scholarly essays, case studies, personal essays, poetry, and prose written by over 45 contributors. It illustrates, through the voices of many women, that gender, religious, cultural, and class background strongly influence how one experiences illness, how and when one is diagnosed, and how one is treated within the healthcare system. The book also focuses on the need for cultural sensitivity and inclusiveness in the delivery of health services. Surviving in the Hour of Darkness: The Health and Wellness of Women of Colour and Indigenous Women aims to promote and generate knowledge with and about minority women while identifying key strategies for promoting their health, thus contributing to a broader understanding of how the experience of being a minority woman affects one's health and well-being. With Contributions By: Byllye Y. Avery Dr. Wanda Thomas Bernard Dr. Ana Bodnar Shirley Brozzo Nora Burrell Bishakha Chowdhury LindaCornwell Charmaine Crawford Karen Flynn Randa Hammadieh CiajDiannHarris Layla Hassan Troy Hunter Rolanda C. Kane Rosamond S. King Heather MacLeod Kristine Maitland Marisa Marharaj Notisha Massaquoi Naomi North Sima Qadeer Talata Reeves Carla R. Ribeiro Ingrid Rivera Anakana Schofield Beldan Sezen Farah M. Shroff Neeta Singh Lorraine Thomas Roxane Tracey Wendy Vincent Vera M. Wabegijig Ingrid Waldron Pitche Wasayananung Crystal E. Wilkinson Gitane Williams Judith K. Witherow Valerie Wood




The Trailblazing Life of Viola Desmond


Book Description

Key Selling Points This book celebrates Canada's civil-rights struggles, a chapter of history that often goes unmentioned. This book is co-authored by and uses rare firsthand interviews with Wanda Robson, Viola Desmond's youngest sister, as well as with civil-rights expert Dr. Graham Reynolds, professor of history and Viola Desmond Chair in Social Justice at Cape Breton University. This book goes beyond Viola's pivotal moment in the movie theater to tell the story of her childhood, her career as a teacher in a segregated school and her role as a pioneering entrepreneur in Black beauty culture. It will inspire readers aged 9 to 12 and show how one ordinary person can overcome obstacles and make a positive difference in the world. Viola's legacy is commemorated on the Canadian $10 bill. She's the first woman other than Queen Elizabeth II to appear alone on a bill in Canada.




Odysseys Home


Book Description

Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature is a pioneering study of African-Canadian literary creativity, laying the groundwork for future scholarly work in the field. Based on extensive excavations of archives and texts, this challenging passage through twelve essays presents a history of the literature and examines its debt to, and synthesis with, oral cultures. George Elliott Clarke identifies African-Canadian literature's distinguishing characteristics, argues for its relevance to both African Diasporic Black and Canadian Studies, and critiques several of its key creators and texts. Scholarly and sophisticated, the survey cites and interprets the works of several major African-Canadian writers, including André Alexis, Dionne Brand, Austin Clarke, Claire Harris, and M. Nourbese Philip. In so doing, Clarke demonstrates that African-Canadian writers and critics explore the tensions that exist between notions of universalism and black nationalism, liberalism and conservatism. These tensions are revealed in the literature in what Clarke argues to be – paradoxically – uniquely Canadian and proudly apart from a mainstream national identity. Clarke has unearthed vital but previously unconsidered authors, and charted the relationship between African-Canadian literature and that of Africa, African America, and the Caribbean. In addition to the essays, Clarke has assembled a seminal and expansive bibliography of texts – literature and criticism – from both English and French Canada. This important resource will inevitably challenge and change future academic consideration of African-Canadian literature and its place in the international literary map of the African Diaspora.




Mothers of the Municipality


Book Description

Highlighting women's activism in Halifax after the Second World War, Mothers of the Municipality is a tightly focused collection of essays on social policy affecting women. The contributors - feminist scholars in history, social work, and nursing - examine women's experiences and activism, including those of African Nova Scotian 'day's workers, ' Sisters of Charity, St. John Ambulance Brigades, 'Voices' for peace, and social welfare bureaucrats. The volume underscores the fact that the 1950s and 60s were not simply years of quiet conservatism, born-again domesticity, and consumption. Indeed, the period was marked by profound and rapid change for women. Despite their almost total exclusion from the formal political arena, which extended into the tumultuous 1970s, women in Halifax were instrumental in creating and reforming programs and services, often amid controversy. Mothers of the Municipality explores women's activism and the provision of services at the community level. If the adage "think globally; act locally" has any application in modern history, it is with the women who fought many of the battles in the larger war for social justice.




Cross-Border Cosmopolitans


Book Description

African American history from 1900 to 2000 cannot be told without accounting for the significant influence of Pan-African thought, just as the story of twentieth-century U.S. foreign policy cannot be told without accounting for fears of an African World. In the early 1900s, Marcus Garvey and his followers perceived the North American mainland, particularly Canada following U.S. authorities' deportation of Garvey to Jamaica, as a forward-operating base from which to liberate the Black masses from colonialism. After World War II, Vietnam War resisters, Black Panthers, and Caribbean students joined the throngs of cross-border migrants to denounce militarism, imperialism, and capitalism. In time, as urban uprisings proliferated in northern U.S. cities, the prospect of coalitions among the Black Power, Red Power, and Quebecois Power movements inspired U.S. and Canadian intelligence services to collaborate, infiltrate, and sabotage Black organizations across North America. Assassinations of "Black messiahs" further radicalized revolutionaries, rekindling the dream for an African World from Washington, D.C., to Toronto to San Francisco to Antigua to Grenada and back to Africa. Alarmed, Washington's national security elites invoked the Cold War as the reason to counter the triangulation of Black Power in the Atlantic World, funneling arms clandestinely from the United States and Canada to the Caribbean and then to its proxies in southern Africa. By contending that twentieth-century global Black liberation movements began within the U.S.-Canadian borderlands as cross-border, continental struggles, Cross-Border Cosmopolitans reveals the revolutionary legacies of the Underground Railroad and America's Great Migration and the hemispheric and transatlantic dimensions of this history.




The Black Church Studies Reader


Book Description

The Black Church Studies Reader addresses the depth and breadth of Black theological studies, from Biblical studies and ethics to homiletics and pastoral care. The book examines salient themes of social and religious significance such as gender, sexuality, race, social class, health care, and public policy. While the volume centers around African American experiences and studies, it also attends to broader African continental and Diasporan religious contexts. The contributors reflect an interdisciplinary blend of Black Church Studies scholars and practitioners from across the country. The text seeks to address the following fundamental questions: What constitutes Black Church Studies as a discipline or field of study? What is the significance of Black Church Studies for theological education? What is the relationship between Black Church Studies and the broader academic study of Black religions? What is the relationship between Black Church Studies and local congregations (as well as other faith-based entities)? The book's search for the answers to these questions is compelling and illuminating.