In The Black

B. Denham Jolly

Description

'A remarkable memoir about achieving prosperity in the face of relentless prejudice In the Black traces B. Denham Jolly s personal and professional struggle for a place in a country where Black Canadians have faced systematic discrimination. He arrived from Jamaica to attend university in the mid-1950s and worked as a high school teacher before going into the nursing and retirement-home business. Though he was ultimately successful in his business ventures, Jolly faced both overt and covert discrimination, which led him into social activism. The need for a stronger voice for the Black community fuelled Jolly s 12-year battle to get a licence for a Black-owned radio station in Toronto. At its launch in 2001, Flow 93.5 became the model for urban music stations across the country, helping to launch the careers of artists like Drake. Jolly chronicles not only his own journey; he tells the story of a generation of activists who worked to reshape the co

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Memoir

Informations

• Publié par: Ecw Press
• Date de parution: 14 mars 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781770909939
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

IN THE BLACK
MY LIFE
B. Denham Jolly



To my grandson Elias James Jolly Klym Who has brought new joy and meaning to my life.


CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1 In the Lion’s Den
CHAPTER 2 Growing Up British in Industry Cove
CHAPTER 3 Company Clerk at the Sugar Estate
CHAPTER 4 Ontario Agricultural College and Violet’s Refuge
CHAPTER 5 Nova Scotia Blues and Montreal Delights
CHAPTER 6 Jamaican Exile
CHAPTER 7 Putting Down Canadian Roots
CHAPTER 8 Teaching and Learning
CHAPTER 9 Building a Family, Building a Business
CHAPTER 10 Stepping Up: Black Business and Professional Association
CHAPTER 11 Businessman, Publisher, Activist
CHAPTER 12 Losing Loved Ones and Losing a Battle
CHAPTER 13 We Believed and We Deserved
CHAPTER 14 Number One Contemporary Radio Station in Canada
CHAPTER 15 Sailing against the Wind
CHAPTER 16 Esse Non Videri — To Be, and Not to Seem
Acknowledgements
Appendix
About the Author
Copyright


CHAPTER ONE
IN THE LION’S DEN
When you are Black in Canada, the arrival of the police on the scene is not always, or even often, reassuring.
Three years ago, on Parliament Street in Toronto’s Cabbagetown neighbourhood, not far from where I live, I had a fender bender. I was exchanging insurance information with the other driver when a police officer came to take charge of the situation. There was nothing really for him to do, but he told me that I should call a tow truck to get my car towed away.
I told him, very politely, that it wasn’t a problem. The car was only dented, and I could easily drive it to a garage. But he insisted.
When I balked, he immediately escalated. “You have to get a tow truck,” he said.
I found this incomprehensible — towing a car away when it only had a dent. But the officer looked at me contemptuously.
“What do I have to do to make sure you do, put a gun in your face?”
For a moment, I could not believe my ears. A threat like that, made almost casually on a busy Toronto street. I was in my late seventies and my first thought was, what if I had been a Black kid in his twenties? Would he have threatened to draw his gun or have simply done so? Far too often in Toronto’s recent history that had been the case, and dozens of Black kids had been killed that way.
That thought angered me, but I was not seeking a confrontation. I said nothing. I called the tow truck.
But I did not want to let the matter pass. I filed an official complaint with the department. I made it clear that I wasn’t asking that the officer be fired but that he receive some kind of counselling to address his threatening behaviour before someone was hurt.
At first, the department brushed aside my complaint with the excuse that the officer was already in trouble for other indiscretions and he was about to be charged. This turned out to be untrue. I pursued my case as far as I could, but it was clear the Toronto police department wasn’t interested in dealing with it. I complained and appealed all the way to the chief of police, Bill Blair.
The department’s investigation showed that the officer had his body speaker turned off during the confrontation. They believed him when he denied saying those words. The verdict was clear. “We can’t substantiate your claim.” End of story.
I did get to see the police report, however, and the opening phrase told me everything I needed to know about what was behind the incident. The report began with, “The complainant, a seventy-seven-year-old Jamaican immigrant . . .”
At the time, I had lived in Canada more than fifty-five years, longer than the officer had been alive, and I had been a citizen for almost fifty years. If I had been a white man, my origins would have been irrelevant. But a Black man, by definition, had to be identified as the “other,” not as someone who had been a Canadian for half a century. I was forever a “Jamaican immigrant.” That is why he could threaten to put a gun in my face and then lie about it.
Who would believe a Jamaican immigrant?
—
Part of my story is about Canada’s uncomfortable struggle with Blackness, which I experienced that day on Parliament Street and on thousands of other occasions. This is a reality in Canada. Even though the first Black in Canada, Mathieu da Costa, arrived with Samuel de Champlain in 1603, Blacks were prevented from settling in Canada in any great numbers until well into the 1970s and that legacy of exclusion continues today.
I arrived on a student visa two decades before the immigration gates were opened to any degree. I am today, even though I visit Jamaica often, thoroughly Canadian. But I hope I will not disappoint my white Canadian friends, of which I am happy to have many, when I say I am not one of those who unrelentingly sing the praises of my adopted country. Despite meeting many nice people, I discovered when I arrived in Canada that it was an unapologetically and insistently white country with a tiny Black minority kept at a fairly steady .02% of the population and largely assigned to jobs as domestics (for women) and railway porters (for men). Things have improved, of course, and the fight to make a better Canada is part of the story I am telling here, but Canada still has a distance to go before it lives up to its ideals.
This is a story of progress made, as well as the challenges remaining. My journey is the journey of a Jamaican who left his country at the age of twenty and who has been part of the evolution in Canada since 1955. Now, as I have entered my eightieth year, I would like to lay down a record of my personal experiences and recount something of the Black struggle in Canada in the last half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. Along the way, I would like to introduce readers, Black and white, to some remarkable women and men that I have had the privilege of knowing and often fighting alongside over the past many decades. These Black Canadians are important for our people to know because they are part of our inspiring legacy in this country. They are important for white people to know because they worked, often in opposition to governments and enforcement bodies, to make Canada a better, more just country. This is an opportunity for you to get to know them, and for the white reader to better get to know Black Canada.
This, I believe, is essential if we are truly to build a harmonious society together. You’ll notice, though, that I do not say “get to know each other.” Because the fact is, we Black Canadians already know white Canada very well. We have to. We know you the same way that the hare knows the lion, from following its every move. And for the same reason. Because in certain circumstances, you can be dangerous to us. My hope is that when you, the white reader, let yourself know us in a more profound way, you will become a little more human and a little less the lion in your dealings with us.
So I welcome all of you, Black and white and all my brothers and sisters of other races, to accompany me on my journey into our collective past. My story is largely a Canadian one because it is in Canada where I built a life, first as a student, then as a high school teacher, and finally as a businessman and media owner and activist. But it begins in a little village in Hanover Parish in Jamaica at a time when Britannia still ruled the waves and most of our small blue planet.


CHAPTER TWO
GROWING UP BRITISH IN INDUSTRY COVE
As it turned out, the Empire would even be involved in my naming.
It was August 26, 1935, and my mother was lying in labour with her second child in an upstairs room in our house. Someone had already sent for the doctor, but he had not yet arrived, and my father was waiting nervously on the side of the road when a passing labourer told him that the newly appointed British governor was touring the Island; that afternoon, he was scheduled to drive through Industry Cove, our hamlet in Hanover Parish just north of the town of Green Island. My father, Benjamin Augustus Jolly, was already in his mid-fifties. He was far from a British loyalist. In fact, he was not really interested in politics at all, but for some reason, perhaps to kill time while he waited for news of my birth, he decided to look around for a Union Jack to fly from the flagpole near the road where the new governor would be passing. If nothing else, this simple act would kill another half an hour while he waited for the results of my mother’s labour.
But this unpremeditated act had unintended consequences. When Sir Edward Brandis Denham drove by in his open car and spotted the flag, he ordered the driver to stop so he could get out and greet the person who’d raised it. Our region had a reputation for unrest among the interior sugar estate workers, and Sir Edward must have felt that this symbol of loyalty should not go unrewarded. My father was probably caught off guard by the governor’s gesture, but they exchanged pleasantries.
Sir Edward was a moderately impressive man. A career imperial bureaucrat, he had served as governor of the Gambia and British Guiana before his Jamaican posting. He was known well enough in the Empire to have his own cigarette card in the Ardath Tobacco Company Empire Personalities series (he was card forty-nine of fifty; George VI was number one). I can’t imagine that my father would have much to say to him, and I don’t know if he mentioned that he was awaiting the birth of his second child, but after a few minutes, the governor headed on his way to Lucea, where he would meet with the officials of our parish. News of his visit was carried up to my mother, Ina Euphemia Jolly (née Arthurs), who was enduring a long labour. It obviously made an impression on her because when I was finally born later that day, she decided to