Amid sweeping change, a pivotal anniversary goes unremarked

With the province's dramatic revamp of human-rights system, events rooted in 1948 deserve new attention

Jul 06, 2008 04:30 AM
Kenneth Kidd
Feature Writer

When Ontario Attorney General Chris Bentley unveiled sweeping changes to the Human Rights Commission last week, he spoke forcefully about the crucial role of those rights, how the province had long been a leader in promoting them, and thanked everyone who'd worked so hard for the cause of civil justice.

But then, the briefing he'd received earlier induced Bentley to say something else. He talked about how Ontario's approach to human rights – and by that he meant the 1962 human rights code – was modelled on similar efforts that came out of the U.S. civil rights movement.

"It almost knocked me off my chair," says Lorne Foster, a professor of public policy and administration at York University.

By highlighting the U.S. experience, Bentley unwittingly omitted one of the darker chapters in Ontario history, a time when segregation in a small town sparked a civil rights campaign that predated the big efforts south of the border.

That it happened in Dresden, Ont. – the home of Uncle Tom's cabin and terminus of the old Underground Railroad that brought escaped slaves to Canada – could have been invoked as one of history's tragic ironies.

And that it all began in 1948, when an African-Canadian carpenter named Hugh Burnett launched the National Unity Association, could have made for a 60th anniversary celebrating Ontario's home-grown march of human rights.

"The people like the minister know nothing about 1948," says Bromley Armstrong. "It's tragic but it's true."

It was also a personal slight – it was a 21-year-old Armstrong who had stared down a racist wielding a meat cleaver in long-ago Dresden.

Hugh Burnett grew up on a farm just outside of Dresden, near Chatham, Ont., a descendant of escaped American slaves, like most of the African Canadians in that part of the province.

The small routines of racism were part of Burnett's everyday childhood, like having to eat ice cream in a restaurant's kitchen, lest his dark presence alarm the white patrons in the dining room. But after returning from service in World War II, any hint of being second-class on his home turf began to grate.

To push for their rights, Burnett and other African Canadians in Dresden formed the National Unity Association in 1948 and gathered 115 names on a petition calling for the local council to prevent businesses from discriminating.

It led to a referendum the following year, in which locals were asked: "Do you approve the passing of legislation compelling restaurant owners to serve, regardless of race, creed or colour?"

The result: 108 in favour, 517 against.

But Burnett was undaunted. "The great thing about Hugh was that he had this never-say-die attitude," says John Cooper, the author of Season of Rage: Hugh Burnett and the Struggle for Civil Rights.

Nor would he toil alone for long. In the late 1940s, a number of ethnic and labour organizations had begun pushing for civil liberties, sending joint delegations to Queen's Park and Ottawa to lobby, initially, for an end to discrimination in the workplace.

"They used to tell me, the motto was, `Agitate, agitate, agitate, make alliances,'" recalls Foster, who, as a 16-year-old, was best man at the wedding of Burnett's daughter. "Those were the four rules."

Slowly, it began to pay off. And it helped that activists had a sympathetic ear in Ontario Premier Leslie Frost, who began enacting legislation on fair employment practices and equal pay for women, often over the objections of his caucus.

All the while, Dresden loomed in the background as the next test. After the province's then-attorney general told Burnett that Ontario had no legal power to end discrimination in municipalities that had not themselves passed laws banning it, Burnett turned to Toronto labour groups for help.

That spawned a legal brief – penned by, among others, lawyers Bora Laskin and David Lewis – and another delegation to Frost in early 1954, led by the Toronto Association for Civil Liberties.

Burnett became the delegation's most prominent voice and adopted a clever tack, given that this was also the height of the Cold War. He took to wondering aloud about whether racial discrimination might be linked to any rising popularity of communism.

"There are no Communists among the coloured people of Dresden," Burnett said, "but I don't know how long we can assure that, if the discrimination practised there is to continue."

Less than a week later, Frost introduced Canada's first Fair Accommodation Practices Act, banning the sort of commercial discrimination that reigned in Dresden.

There was also an enforcement process, in which complaints could be laid, triggering a bureaucratic investigation, an attempt at mediation and, if necessary, prosecution.

Some businesses in Dresden continued to flout the law. Complaints poured in, prompting Queen's Park to appoint Judge William Schwenger as a kind of one-man commission on the town.

More than 200 people attended a public hearing in Dresden in September 1954, centred on whether African Canadians were still being refused service at Kay's Café, owned by Morley McKay, and Emerson's Soda Bar Restaurant.

McKay remained defiant. "I have to break the law to protect my business," he said. "My customers have told me if we serve Negroes, they won't come in."

The provincial minister of labour later refused to make public Schwenger's ensuing report.

But the pressure of activists wasn't about to go away. And by then, they'd already delivered what came to be seen as the decisive blow: a test, shrewdly played out before the media.

Bromley Armstrong had come to Ontario from Jamaica to study business at the University of Toronto, but he wasn't here long before he got caught up in the events surrounding Dresden.

A plan was hatched, partly by a Toronto freelance writer named Gordon Donaldson, to send people of colour to Morley McKay's restaurant. Armstrong, a budding student activist who was astonished anyone in Canada could be refused service, ended up being one of them.

But this time, there would be a reporter and cameraman in tow to record the evidence.

Armstrong met with Burnett in Dresden. They walked into McKay's restaurant and took their places at a booth.

"We sat there, and nobody would pay any attention to us and the waitress didn't come over," recalls Armstrong. "I got up and went to the waitress and said to her, `Excuse me, we've been here for awhile and we'd like to have something to eat.'

"She looked at me, no reaction at all. I kept talking to her, but she wasn't responding so I finally said to her, `Where's the manager?'"

Her eyes directed Armstrong back to the kitchen, where Morley McKay stood in a white apron.

"He was at a chopping block with a meat cleaver in his hand and I said, `Excuse me, are you the manager?' No word out of him. He was chopping at the block. Chop, chop, chop, chop."

Armstrong, who went on to be a member of the Ontario Human Rights Commission in the 1970s, was undaunted.

"The more I talked to him, the faster the cleaver was going. And I said, `You know, I've come all the way from Toronto, and I'm thirsty and hungry.'

"I could see his face turning, his complexion, it was getting redder and redder and redder, so I knew he was getting angry and I figured he may throw the damn cleaver."

Armstrong retreated to his booth, when Donaldson and a cameraman came in to sit at an adjacent booth. They were promptly served.

When the cameraman started taking pictures of the haves and the have-nots, McKay finally realized how he'd been set up.

He locked the front door, closed the blinds, and turned off the lights. "Left us all in darkness," says Armstrong.

The restaurant might have been closed for the day, but it was front-page news in Toronto the next afternoon.

Not long afterward, McKay and the wife of the owner of Emerson's became the first to be prosecuted and found guilty under the Fair Accommodations Act.

They appealed. A county judge overturned the decision, ruling that a restaurant owner couldn't be held responsible if a waitress refused service and, at any rate, there was evidence merely that service had been "postponed."

It was only after activists arranged another sting operation that McKay was successfully prosecuted, this time losing his appeal before a different judge. His penalty: $50 on each of two counts, plus costs of $600.

And while the Ontario Supreme Court granted McKay leave to appeal, he never followed through.

By 1956 – eight years after Burnett began his campaign – McKay was serving African Canadians.

Hugh Burnett may have won, but he was scarcely a local hero. He ended up moving to Chatham.

"He was ostracized," says Armstrong.

"That poor guy died almost a pauper for what he believed in."

And though he's buried in Dresden, there's no memorial or statue in town testifying to his legacy.

"That's the irony of it," author Cooper says of the town. "Here you have this fantastic historic site, the end point of the Underground Railroad, and justifiably we are proud of it as Canadians.

"At the same time, you've got this other side of history just a stone's throw away, this other side of our history that we've been denying and we've been trying to cover up or just ignore and hope that it goes away."
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sweeping change, a pivotal anniversary goes unremarked