Zanana Akande was the first black woman to be appointed to Ontario’s Cabinet.  She was Minister of Community and Social Services in Premier Bob Rae’s government.

Ms. Akande was born in 1937 and was raised in Toronto by parents who immigrated to Canada from St. Lucia and Barbados, where they had worked as teachers. They were prohibited from working as teachers in Canada but encouraged Ms Akande to strive for a good education, and also to aspire to work in a professional field. She attained a Bachelor of Arts and a Masters of Education from the University of Toronto and worked as a teacher before entering politics.

Ms. Akande described her and her party’s greatest achievement during their time in office as  “We helped to keep the rudder straight, and not destroy the hope of the most vulnerable people.”

After leaving politics, Ms. Akande served as president of the Urban Alliance on Race Relations and  Canadian Alliance of Black Educators and the Toronto Child Abuse Centre.  She worked with several other community-based endeavours including the United Way of Greater Toronto, the Family Services Association, the Elizabeth Fry Society and Doctors Hospital. She was the recipient of the African Canadian Achievement Award for Education and the Award of Distinction from the Congress of Black Women.

Ms. Akande is quoted as saying “A city as large and culturally diverse as Toronto owes whatever success in racial harmony it enjoys to the constant vigilance of its citizens, its officials, and its organizations.” In her years of public service she demonstrated the vigilance necessary to promote and encourage Toronto’s attempts towards racial harmony.

Harriet Tubman

Portia White

Michaëlle Jean

Carrie Best

Carrie Best was well-known and admired for her many years of work on behalf of her people. Dr. Best died in 2001 but not before she had made her mark and helped to dispel some of the egregious racism that existed throughout her life.

Carrie Prevoe was born in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia in 1903. In 1925, she married Albert T. Best and changed her name to the one that under which she would rise to prominence. Her first brush with notoriety came in 1942 when she and her son Cal were arrested and charged with disturbing the peace for sitting in the whites only seats of The Roseland Theatre in New Glasgow (they were ultimately convicted and fined). Mrs. Best attempted to fight this injustice by undertaking anti-racist litigation against her home town. However, nothing came of it, and most of history seems to have forgotten about this episode.

From that point on, Mrs. Best became a vocal advocate for racial equality and social justice. In 1946, she founded The Clarion, the first black-owned, black-published newspaper in Nova Scotia. She used the newspaper to publicize the case of Viola Desmond, another black woman arrested and fined for sitting in the whites-only seats at Roseland. When Desmond appealed the ruling, Carrie Best travelled to Halifax to be in the courtroom to hear the case. Viola Desmond lost her first appeal, but continued to fight, and Mrs. Best continued to follow the case both in person and in The Clarion. Desmond won her second appeal, helping to put an end the Jim Crow laws in Nova Scotia.

The Clarion continued to be published until 1956, when it changed its name to The Negro Citizen and began national circulation. During that period, Mrs. Best also began broadcasting a radio show called The Quiet Corner. That show remained on the air for 12 years and was broadcast on as many as five stations across the Maritimes. In 1968, Carrie Best was hired as a Human Rights columnist for the Pictou Advocate. For seven years, she used that platform to fight for better conditions on Native Reserves, to end discrimination against black property owners, and to end racism in Canadian legal and political institutions.

She was well-known across the country as an equal rights activist and was a founding member of the Kay Livingstone Visible Minority Women of Nova Scotia, an organization which works with women and young people to promote a sense of identity and pride of race, integrity and self-discipline “and to lift others, as we ourselves climb toward dignity and self-respect.”

Her last doctorate was awarded in 1992 by the University of King’s College in Halifax. In 1970, she was awarded the Lloyd McInnis Memorial Award for her work in social justice. In 1973, she received the first annual award of the National Black Coalition of Canada. In 1974, she was appointed to the Order of Canada. In 1975, she was granted the degree Doctor of Laws by St. Francis Xavier University.  In December of 1991, she received an award for outstanding contributions to human rights on the anniversary of the day the United Nations ratified the Declaration of Human Rights.

She was the author of an autobiography, That Lonesome Road (which is also a social history of Nova Scotian Blacks.)

Carrie Best died in her home town of New Glasgow, Nova Scotia on July 24, 2001. In 2002, she was posthumously awarded the Order of Nova Scotia.

See more here: http://rabble.ca/news/carrie-best-good-anyone-better-most
See more here: http://blogs.mcgill.ca/raceandethnicrelations/2014/02/12/black-history-month-carrie-best/

Harriet Tubman

Portia White

Michaëlle Jean

Zanana Akande

Gov. Gen. Michaëlle Jean has described Canada as “a country of so many possibilities.” Her own story is proof of that.

Canada’s 27th Governor General was born in Port-au-Prince on Sept. 6, 1957, during the era of the Duvalier dictatorships in Haiti.

Her parents, Roger and Luce, were teachers. Roger and Luce’s marriage soon fell apart. Luce and the daughters moved to Montreal. To pay the rent on their basement apartment, Luce worked in a clothing factory and then a psychiatric hospital.

Michaëlle Jean completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Montreal, earning a degree in Spanish and Italian language and literature. By 1985, she was fluent in five languages: French, English, Italian, Spanish and Haitian Creole. She could also read Portuguese.

While completing her university studies, Michaëlle Jean was also deeply involved with helping women and children who were the victims of domestic violence. Her own mother had been such a victim.

Jean co-ordinated a groundbreaking study — published in 1987 — that looked at abusive relationships in which women were the victims of sexual violence at the hands of their spouses.

She won many awards for her journalism, including a Gemini in 2001. She also received awards from the Human Rights League, Amnesty International, CBC, the City of Montreal and the Canadian Association of Cable Television Providers. In 2003 she received France’s Médaille del’Ordre des Chevaliers de La Pléiade des Parlementaires de laFrancophonie for promoting francophone culture.

Jean was the third journalist in a row to be appointed to the viceregal post of Governor General. At her installation speech she said, “I know how precious that freedom is…. I whose ancestors were slaves, who was born into a civilization long reduced to whispers and cries of pain, know something about its price, and I know too what a treasure it is for us all.” At a Black History Month event in Montreal a few months later, she spoke about racial discrimination.

“It has no place in a society that prizes above all the values of respect, openness and sharing, which are paramount for me,” she told the audience.

 Historians will probably best remember Jean for her political role, something for which very few past governors general are remembered. In 2008 she cut short a trip to Europe because of a political crisis in Ottawa. The opposition parties were threatening to defeat Stephen Harper’s minority government and replace it with their own coalition. Harper wanted her to prorogue Parliament before the opposition could pass a non-confidence motion.

In a June 9, 2009, interview on The Hour, she said, “It wasn’t an easy decision.” She consulted constitutional experts and she kept the prime minister waiting for over two hours while she decided.

“I was in a position where I could have said no. The decision in my mind had to be in the best interests of the country,” she told Stroumboulopoulos. “And I have no regrets,” she added. Parliament was prorogued and Harper’s government was saved.

According to University of Toronto political scientist Nelson Wiseman, that was when, “many Canadians woke up to realize that the Governor General might wield real power.”

On Sept. 30, 2010: Jean stepped down as Governor General. She officially became UNESCO’s special envoy in Haiti on Nov. 8, 2010.

Read full article here: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/micha%C3%ABlle-jean-a-life-of-many-possibilities-1.910435

Harriet Tubman

Portia White

Carrie Best

Zanana Akande

Portia White was the first Afro-Canadian singer trained only in Canada to reach an international stage. As an Canadian, her popularity helped to open previously closed doors for talented blacks who followed. Portia May White was born in Truro, Nova Scotia, the third child of Izie Dora and William Andrew White.

Her father, a Baptist minister, graduated from Acadia University in Nova Scotia in 1903. When he became the minister at Cornwallis Street Baptist Church in Halifax, young Portia joined the choir at age six, thus beginning her musical career.

When she was eight years old, Portia White had learned the soprano parts from the opera Lucia di Lammermoor, and was given the opportunity to sing on Canadian radio broadcasts. Portia White attended Dalhousie University in 1929, and in the early 1930s found a teaching job in Africiville, a community just outside of Halifax, founded by former slaves from the United States after the War of 1812. She continued her musical training at the Halifax Conservatory with the support of the Halifax Ladies Musical Club.

In 1941 Portia White met Edith Read, a fellow Nova Scotian, and principal of a private girl’s school in Toronto, Ontario. Recognizing White’s talent, Read made arrangements for her to perform at Eaton Auditorium in Toronto on November 7, 1941, the first of several performances on the Toronto concert stage over the next few years.

In 1944 White auditioned with Edward Johnson, the Canadian-born general manager of the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, New York. Through Johnson White made her United States debut at New York’s Town Hall before a packed audience, becoming the first Canadian to sing there. Her repertoire included both classics and Negro spirituals with which most critics and audiences felt she really excelled.

Portia White’s international career was unfortunately quite brief. Between 1945 and 1948 she toured extensively in Canada, United States, and Latin America.  She found these tours to be gruelling partly because her body and voice had little rest between concerts.

By 1952 she gave up the concert stage and returned to Toronto to teach music. There White became the voice and music instructor of such well known performers as Lorne Greene, Dinah Christie, Don Francks, and Robert Goulet. On October 6, 1964 White gave a command performance before Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.

Portia White died in Toronto in February 1968 after a long battle with cancer. Since then many honours have been bestowed on her. Canada Post has issued a Portia White stamp. In 1997 the Nova Scotia government created a special award for artists in her memory. A plaque in Truro declared Portia White to be a person of historic significance, the first Canadian woman of African descent to receive this designation, a fitting tribute to a remarkable woman who figured so prominently in the musical life of her community and the world.

Sources: Lian Goodall, Singing Towards the Future: The Story of Portia White (Toronto: Napoleon Publishing, 2004). See more at: http://www.blackpast.org/gah/white-portia-1911-1968#sthash.pKfitekh.dpuf

Harriet Tubman

Michaëlle Jean

Carrie Best

Zanana Akande

Harriet Tubman was born on a large plantation in Maryland. As a child, she toiled as a field-hand, doing tasks that demanded strength and endurance. She experienced many of the cruelties that were inherent in the American slave system.

When she was about 13, she was struck in the head by a weight hurled by an overseer; the resulting injury would cause seizures and bouts of somnolence for the rest of her life. In 1844 she married a free black, John Tubman, and she would retain Tubman as her surname after her second marriage.

Fearing that she would be sold to the Deep South after the death of her master, Tubman escaped in 1849 without her husband and headed north to Philadelphia. There she worked as a cook in hotels and clubs to finance her clandestine excursions to liberate other slaves via the Underground Railroad, a loosely organized network of safe houses and people who helped fugitives pass from the slave states to free states in the north.

Tubman first returned to the slave states in 1850 to rescue her sister Mary Ann Bowley of Baltimore and Bowley’s two children. However, the enactment of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 vastly increased the ability of slave-owners to pursue escapees. Since northern states could no longer offer freedom-seekers the same degree of protection, Tubman began to bring them across the border to Upper Canada at Niagara Falls. From there they travelled to nearby St Catharines, where they were aided by the Reverend Hiram Wilson, an abolitionist and the leader of the local refugee community.

In the fall of 1851 Tubman moved to St Catharines, which would be the centre of her anti-slavery activities for the next seven years. A member of the interracial Refugee Slaves’ Friends Society, she became indispensable, not only in bringing escaped slaves to Canada but also in helping them adjust to freedom in a new country.

After 1850 St Catharines quickly grew as a result of this influx, with 123 black families listed on the assessment rolls in 1855. Between 1852 and 1857, the period when she regarded St Catharines as her home, Tubman made 11 trips into the United States to rescue fugitives. These trips were especially fraught with danger, chiefly because of the $40,000 reward posted by a group of slave-owners for her capture, dead or alive.

In late 1857 she undertook what was probably her most venturous journey, the rescue of her elderly parents from Maryland. In St Catharines Tubman rented a boarding-house where she lodged some of the escaped slaves. In the spring of 1858 the famous American abolitionist John Brown stayed with her in St Catharines, though by then Auburn had become her permanent home.

Tubman none the less continued to maintain a high profile in St Catharines society; she was there during the winter of 1860–61 and served on the executive committee of the newly formed Fugitive Aid Society of St Catharines in 1861. In addition, she continued to receive private funding from Canada, much of it conveyed to her in Auburn by the Reverend Michael Willis of Toronto.

Following the war Tubman returned to Auburn. She remained active until her death, raising money for such causes as the education of freed men and women in the south and the Harriet Tubman Home for Aged and Indigent Colored People in Auburn.

Much of the profit from a biography of Tubman written by Sarah Elizabeth Hopkins Bradford in 1869 went toward these causes. Tubman died of pneumonia in 1913 at the age of 93. Never able to read or write and physically challenged, Harriet Tubman had still been able to put aside these difficulties and, over the course of 15 to 19 trips into the slave states, personally liberate up to 300 people. No other conductor on the Underground Railroad rivalled Tubman in the number of trips and the number of slaves liberated. Her life remains a testament to bravery, altruism, and human ingenuity. See more here: http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio.php?BioId=41802

Portia White

Michaëlle Jean

Carrie Best

Zanana Akande