Remembering April 27

TORONTO:

Seventy years ago, a 35-member delegation, led by community icon, Barbados-born Donald Willard Moore, which included Jamaican leaders Bromley Armstrong, Harry Gairey Sr, and Stanley Grizzle, who was of Jamaican heritage, travelled to Ottawa to meet with the federal government about Canada’s restrictive immigration policy pertaining to “black British subjects”. Their efforts helped to remove racial discrimination from Canada’s immigration laws.

All the delegates are now deceased, but a few people in the community still remember the significance of the April 27, 1954 occasion. One community historian, Kathy Grant, has requested on Facebook that 35 individuals share “a story and connected image”; another, Dewitt Lee, has planned a train ride from Toronto to Ottawa on April 26 and a virtual gathering while there.

A plaque installed by the City of Toronto outside a building at 20 Cecil Street in Toronto — once a community centre, Donavalon Centre, owned by the Negro Citizenship Association (NCA), which was founded by Moore in 1951 to “end the systematic denial of Black West Indians seeking to enter Canada” — notes that in April 1954, Moore led a delegation to Ottawa that included members of the NCA, as well as unions, labour councils, and community groups.

“The delegation highlighted Canada’s discriminatory immigration laws, which strongly favoured white migrants, and proposed change. Moore’s work with the government of Jamaica, Barbados, and Canada let West Indian nurses and domestic workers enter Canada and become permanent residents. In 1962, Canada stopped selecting immigrants based on race, switching in 1967 to a system that assessed newcomers on their skills,” notes the plaque.

WORTHWHILE IMMIGRANT

Moore was born in Lodge Hill, St. Michael’s, Barbados in 1891, and at the age of 21 emigrated to the United States, but soon left New York for Montreal. He died in August 1994 at the age of 102.

In the memoirs of Bromley L. Armstrong titled, Bromley: Tireless Champion for Just Causes, written with historian Sheldon Taylor, both noted that in December 1953, the NCA “ scored a major success when the Canadian Immigration Branch granted permission to Beatrice Massop to enter Canada and work as a registered nurse”.

Since that time, Massop has been touted as “Canada’s first West Indian immigrant nurse”. The book notes that her initial attempts to be accepted as an immigrant from Jamaica had been refused by Ottawa in late 1952. “She contacted Don Moore in October 1952 and asked for the intervention of the NCA. It would take Massop 14 months before the Immigration Branch recognised her as a worthwhile immigrant and allowed her to enter Canada through Malton Airport under the exceptional merit category.”

In early 1954, the NCA requested a meeting with Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent, but instead they would meet Walter Harris, the minister responsible for the immigration portfolio who represented the prime minister.

“ Reading from the final draft of the NCA’s brief Moore requested that the St. Laurent government amend its understanding of ‘British subject’, to include all British subjects and citizens of the United Kingdom and Commonwealth,” wrote Armstrong who was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1926, and immigrated to Canada in 1947. He died on August 17, 2018.

NATIONAL HISTORIC EVENT

Harry Gairey Sr, who was the treasurer of the NCA and a porter instructor for the Canadian Pacific Railway, managed to secure free sleeping car accommodation for the delegation.

In his book, A Black Man’s Toronto, 1914-1980: The Reminiscences of Harry Gairey, Gairey also noted that they met Norman Manley, then premier of Jamaica, in Toronto.

“ We told him that no immigration was allowed, and he said he would see about that. That’s how the first bunch of girls got in. The immigration people would tell us that so many girls were coming in, they would inform Don Moore, and in turn he’d get hold of me. Don would call me up all hours of the morning and we would go down and meet them at Union Station,” said Gairey who was born in Jamaica in 1898 and emigrated with his mother and siblings to Cuba before coming to Canada in 1914. He died in 1993.

This was the early stage of the West Indian Domestic Scheme which brought approximately 3000 women from the Caribbean to work as domestic servants from 1955 to 1967. It was designated as a national historic event in 2020.

In his book, My Name’s Not George: The Story of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in Canada, Stanley G. Grizzle, with John Cooper as co-author, writes that, “ since 1923, Canada’s Immigration Act had denied equal immigration status to areas of the British Commonwealth with large non-white populations”.

Regarding the meeting with Minister Harris in 1954, Grizzle writes: “ I told Harris that we were prepared to continue fighting “unremittingly for the right of all peoples of this planet to enter Canada and become its citizens without penalty or reward because of their race, colour, religion, national origin or ancestry.” We assured Harris that we had taken our stance based on the findings that Canada’s immigration laws against blacks were premeditated and discriminatory.”

Grizzle was born in Toronto in 1918 to parents who emigrated from Jamaica in 1911; he died in November 2016.

Sixty-five years after the NCA bought and created Donavalon Centre in 1956, Black Lives Matter Canada purchased a building at 24 Cecil Street, almost next door to where the Donavalon Centre stood, to make it the home of the Wildseed Centre for Art & Activism, a “multi-purpose community space that serves to nurture black radical experimentation and creation”. On April 27, it will launch its Liberation Library featuring two black authors under the theme ‘Writing New Worlds’.