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The Secret Life of Canada: Season 6, Episode 2. Crash Course: How Black students led Canada's largest student protest

Hosts: Leah-Simone Bowen and Falen Johnson

FALEN JOHNSON: This is a Secret Life of Canada crash course. Just a little bit of history.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: And just a warning, this episode contains strong language and content because history does sometimes.

SOUNDCLIP

FIRST SPEAKER: Fortunately, they were able to axe the door down for us to get out.

SECOND SPEAKER: And that's when the riot squad went and started to get the guys out.

THIRD SPEAKER: They started beating us as we came through the door.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: That was a clip from the 2015 NFB film Ninth Floor. It's directed by Mina Shum, and it's an account of Canada's biggest student protest, which happened in 1969. It's known as the Sir George Williams Affair, and it's seen as a turning point for black activism and race relations in Canada.

FALEN JOHNSON: Okay, I haven't heard about this. So what happened?

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Okay. So in the spring of 1968, six black students, Terrance Ballantine, Douglas Massup, Kennedy Fredrick, Wendell Gooden, Allan Brown and Rodney John, all of whom were originally from the Caribbean, were attending Sir George Williams University in Montreal. Sir George Williams University is now known as Concordia University. They ended up lodging a formal complaint against their biology professor, Perry Anderson, alleging racial discrimination.

FALEN JOHNSON: And what was this complaint about specifically?

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Well, they said he was failing them. He was giving them lower grades because they were black, which, you know, that was not uncommon at this time. I have older people in my family who have told me these same stories about, you know, you didn't have the option to fail, by the way, if you're an immigrant from the Caribbean going to school in Canada. You have to have good grades. And so profs would make up new rules for the black students and find excuses to fail them. It was terrible.

FALEN JOHNSON: Right. Right. Okay. So what happened?

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: So after the students submitted their claims to the university, a committee was appointed to look it all over. But they rejected the students’ claims of racism. The decision came down on January 29th, 1969, which was months and months after they filed the original complaint. And pretty soon after, 200 students and other demonstrators started a peaceful sit in at the computer centre on the ninth floor of the Henry F Hall building.

FALEN JOHNSON: And for any Montrealers, the building is on Maisonneuve Boulevard West, in between McKay Street and Bishop Street. It's now known as the H building by students. Okay, so 200 people showed up, which that's like a decent number for a sit in.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Yeah.

FALEN JOHNSON: That's like pretty impressive.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Yeah, it was good. But, you know, it was also 1969, and this was a time where mass protests were happening all around the world.

SOUNDCLIP

FIRST REPORTER: More than 50,000 persons took part, and thousands of them marched on the Pentagon to protest the war.

SECOND REPORTER: In Toronto, 5000 people join in a sidewalk parade to protest against the war.

FALEN JOHNSON: Right. The war in Vietnam was in its 12th year, and there was a massive societal shift going on, and a lot of major protests were student-led at the time.

SOUNDCLIP

REPORTER: Students have been making their voice heard for years. Japanese students have brought down governments. In Indonesia, in India and Egypt, they've been major instruments of political power. This tradition of student protest has only lately spread to the West.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Yeah. And even more context for this particular story is that this is also the height of the black liberation period. So 1960, that's called the Year of Africa for many pivotal reasons, but it includes the fact that 17 different African nations became independent by either leaving or rejecting their colonial states. Around this same time period, 10 different Caribbean nations formed the West Indies Federation. This was a plan to form a union and gain their independence from Britain. It didn't work out for the West Indies Federation, but that was the beginning of this idea of leading independent black states worldwide. So throughout the world in the 60s, you see also many formidable black leaders and philosophers take the stage. People like Angela Davis, Frantz Fanon, Rocky Jones, Elaine Brown and Stokely Carmichael. Here's a bit of Carmichael speaking in 1969.

SOUNDCLIP

STOKELY CARMICHAEL: Now, the second battle that we're now fighting is whether or not we will have the right to use the terms to decide how our movement is going to go. They don't want us to use Black Power, I got news for them.

[cheers]

FALEN JOHNSON: You know, I miss when… like I feel like so much of our activism now is through our phones. And so like hearing someone speak…

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: And then a crowd responds. Yeah.

FALEN JOHNSON: And a crowd responding, it's like, wow. I feel like maybe we could move things along a little faster if we did things in-person.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Yeah. Yeah. No, it's nice. In 1968, one year before the protests began, Stokely Carmichael came to Montreal and participated in the Black Writers Congress at McGill University. It was a huge event attended by black thought leaders around the globe, and 2000 people came to hear him speak.

FALEN JOHNSON: And 1968 was also the year Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered, right?

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: That’s right. Yeah. And actually, one of the key people of the Sir George Williams protests was a man by the name of Rosie Douglas. We're going to talk about him some more later on. But when MLK was shot, Rosie Douglas was one of the organizers of a memorial protest through the streets of Montreal.

FALEN JOHNSON: Okay. So clearly, there's a lot going on around this time period. And this is sort of when these black students feel empowered to, you know, stand up for themselves and lodge this complaint.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Exactly. And so the sit in was started with the aim of getting the university to reconsider the students’ claims. And, you know, it was pretty peaceful. It was a mixed group of both white and black kids. And the students sat in the university’s then state of the art computer room, which was not a room of computers, by the way. It was a room that held one giant computer. Think of… if you've ever seen the movie Hidden Figures. I don't know if you have, but…

FALEN JOHNSON: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Think of the computer room in that movie.

FALEN JOHNSON: Yeah. At this time, the power of one personal computer could, you know, take up an entire room.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: That's right. That's right. And it was rare and really expensive. So it made sense that the students picked a spot that would hold up some work and slightly scare the administrators in the sense that they would speed up a resolution.

FALEN JOHNSON: Absolutely. I am all for this because I'm Mohawk and we love a barricade. But no, it's true. I guess the thing that I've thought a lot about is that the only way that you can really get the attention of, you know, politicians or people is to stand between them and their money. That's kind of it.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Yeah. Yeah.

FALEN JOHNSON: Okay. So did holding this computer room hostage work?

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Well, yes and no. After the sit in had been going on for days, the students and administrators did try to negotiate a deal where the students would agree to leave the building in exchange for a new committee that would re-evaluate the original complaint of racism. But that's not what happened on February 11th, 1969. Falen, can you read the account of Rodney John, one of the students that filed the original complaint?

SOUNDCLIP

FALEN JOHNSON: In the early morning of February 11th, the police were brought to the hall building through the garage and up to the 13th floor. After the students had all gathered in the computer centre, Professor Chet Davis asked the acting principal, D.B. Clark, to have the police allow the students to leave the occupation peacefully. Clark refused the entreaty, stating that they were waiting on the arrival of the riot police.

FALEN JOHNSON: I mean, I am unsurprised by this, to be honest.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Yeah, exactly. It's terrible. And many of the protesters barricaded themselves in the computer room, while others sheltered in places all across the building. The phone lines were cut and the elevators were taken out of service. And many people who were there say that what happened next was not the original group of protesters, that there were other folks who showed up just to be instigators.

FALEN JOHNSON: Okay. So what happened?

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: So protesters started checking equipment. And these computer cards, they look kind of like flash cards or small pieces of paper. They threw those out the window. And this was particularly bad because these cards held the data. They were the code. So they were extremely important. They were basically the computer, you know? And so then after they started throwing those out the window, people started destroying the computer itself and a fire broke out. The riot police moved in and started beating and arresting people, and the streets were in chaos. The crowd below on the streets started chanting, burn, N word burn. Let the N words burn.

FALEN JOHNSON: I'm… yeah. I'm not… again, not surprised by that, unfortunately.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Yeah. I mean, it was 19, you know, 69. It was awful. And, you know, many of the people who were there maintained that they actually didn't destroy anything or start a fire or throw any cards out the window. Here is Rosie Douglas, one of the organizers, speaking about the incident 20 years later on the CBC program, Midday, in 1989.

SOUNDCLIP

ROSIE DOUGLAS: So I have not been able to convince myself that, in fact, the original group of about two or three dozen students who went inside that computer centre were in fact responsible. There are a number of students who joined us later, apparently in solidarity.

HOST: Yeah.

ROSIE DOUGLAS: Some of which I have never seen after the actual day, February 11th. I’ve never seen them or never brought before the courts. And it leads one to believe, given some of the things that were going on at the time, whether in fact, the whole thing was provoked and whether we were not being used to project us not as people seeking basic human and civil rights, but as communists or as a bunch of redneck radicals. I am not convinced that the students that went in there were the ones who committed the violence, and I very much regret that the violence in fact did take place.

FALEN JOHNSON: Well, it would not be the first time undercover cops have been sent in to join protests and then cause chaos.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Yeah, it is a tactic. But, you know, when it was all over, 97 people, both black and white, both students and non-students were arrested. And the estimate was that there was over $2 million in damage. Now, this is 1969, so that's a lot of money.

FALEN JOHNSON: Okay. And what happened to the original complaint, the complaint that the students lodged? I can imagine this is going to end well.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: You're correct. The following day, on February 12th, 1969, the university acquitted the professor of all charges of racism and gave him his job back. Yeah.

FALEN JOHNSON: Yeah.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: So the really interesting thing was that this was world news. It wasn't just covered in Montreal or in Canada. Several protests erupted in the Caribbean at Canadian consulates and other places, and these were people protesting the university and the Canadian government.

SOUNDCLIP

HOST: Demonstrations in other countries against the United States are by now a matter, of course. But against Canada, well, it happened this week in the West Indies. In Trinidad, 200 students invaded the Royal Bank of Canada building. The purpose of the demonstrations, to protest against alleged discrimination in Canada and to show solidarity with the black students charged following the computer burning incident at Sir George Williams University last year.

FALEN JOHNSON: That's interesting that they protested in front of the Royal Bank of Canada. And this kind of makes me think of the episode that we did a few seasons back about Canada's relationship with the Caribbean.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Yeah. Yeah.

FALEN JOHNSON: And why the Royal Bank is, you know, such a major force in the West Indies.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Yeah. Why is it when you go to the West Indies, you can go to a Royal Bank of Canada or like Scotia Banks all over the Caribbean? It's weird.

FALEN JOHNSON: Yeah.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Anyway, but that's what was happening all over the Caribbean. People started protesting against the Canadian government and this university.

FALEN JOHNSON: What were Canadians saying? What was the public reaction?

SOUNDCLIP

HOST: Do you think the students were right?

FIRST UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: The students are right.

SECOND UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: I think it's deplorable.

THIRD UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Smashing of the computer, I don't know that that's all bad. If they can prove their point by doing so, I think that that's okay.

FOURTH UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: I think that if these people want to act like this, they’ve got fighting in their system, send them to Vietnam. Maybe that'll get it out of their system.

FALEN JOHNSON: Ma'am, here's your ticket to the Mayflower. Bye. Why don't you go back to where you came from?

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: I mean, good point. Yes.

FALEN JOHNSON: You're not from here.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Yeah, exactly. Great. Great point. You know, I listened to a lot of this tape. Obviously, we couldn't play it all in here. And a lot of people actually supported the students, so I thought that was pretty interesting.

FALEN JOHNSON: Okay. So what happened to the students? Did they end up going to jail or were they, you know, sort of acquitted?

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Well, it was kind of all over the place. The two people that were identified as the kind of ringleaders served jail time. And they were Rosie Douglas, who we heard from a bit earlier in the episode, and Anne Cools. Rosie Douglas got two years and Anne Cools got four months.

FALEN JOHNSON: Oh my God.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: I know, two years. Can you imagine? There were more protests against their sentences, but unfortunately, both had to serve their time. And then Rosie Douglas was actually deported back to Dominica. I want to play a bit from an incredible interview I listened to from 1970 with Rosie Douglas and CBC reporter Doug Collins.

SOUNDCLIP

ROSIE DOUGLAS: But first of all, it is necessary that black people begin to fight against racism in any form, wherever it appears. And this is what the Sir George Williams University incident was all about.

DOUG COLLINS: Does that include violence?

ROSIE DOUGLAS: Well, I mean, if you are racist, by implication, you are imposing your values and your imposing your power on people in a manner which is not in the best keeping with the basic human integrity. And this is a form of violence. In other words, when you have black people living in Preston, Nova Scotia, in houses that are not heated when temperatures are up to 20 below zero during winter, this is a form of violence.

FALEN JOHNSON: I like him.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: I know. I thought you would. I do too. And you know what, so did the people of Dominica. Because after he was deported back home, he would eventually go on to become Prime Minister.

FALEN JOHNSON: That's amazing. Boom!

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Yes. And the other person I mentioned who did jail time, Anne Cools, she became a senator under Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. Here she is talking about the Sir George Williams Affair on CBC in 2015.

SOUNDCLIP

ANNE COOLS: They were all offered a deal, plead guilty and that's it. And I thought that would be a terrible thing to do because I didn't think I had done anything that was wrong. I had no part in any of the damage, but that was just, I guess, how I was raised. I was raised that if you see an injustice, you should object. And if you are asked to do something that you think is wrong, you should not do it. In later years, in respect, I looked back, I realize that's a youthful approach to the issue, but that's the fact of what happened.

FALEN JOHNSON: Okay. So out of this emerged a senator and a prime minister. Okay. I'm curious, what about the other students that filed the complaint?

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Well, you know, five of them went on to complete their education, many earning multiple degrees. Because why? Because they were great students who were not actually failing, which was the point. You know, one of the six, though, did not. He actually really struggled and had a breakdown due to all the stress of the incident. So, you know, there were multiple repercussions. And all of them, even the ones who went on to do more schooling, are still very much, you know, affected by this incident. But many black organizations and community groups were formed and inspired by these six students and those other protesters. And that's why it's considered such a turning point for black organizing and activism in Canada.

FALEN JOHNSON: Well, you know, this is something to celebrate, I think. So Leah?

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Yes?

FALEN JOHNSON: I got you these flowers.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Thank you. Invisible flowers.

FALEN JOHNSON: Happy Black History Month, Leah.

LEAH-SIMONE BOWEN: Happy Black History Month to you too.

TRANSCRIPT: The Secret Life of Canada, Season 6: How Black students led Canada's largest student protest

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