(Canada Aviation and Space Museum) Retired Major Walter Peters stands in front of a Canadair CT-114 Tutor jet used by the Snowbirds at the Canada Aviation and Space Museum in Ottawa last February. Maj. Peters was born in Litchfield, Annapolis County,Nova Scotia in 1937, became Canada’s first black jet fighter pilot and also a member of Canada’s famed Snowbirds flight team

Walter Peters was a pioneer. He was this country’s first Canadian-born black jet fighter pilot, and helped to establish the premier aerial aerobatic performance team, the Royal Canadian Air Force Snowbirds. He was a flight instructor and also flew with the Snowbirds.

At age 24 he had enlisted in the RCAF and retired with the rank of Major, and from all accounts had an excellent record.

Mr Peters died in Ottawa on Sunday, February 24th; following complications from a stroke. He was 76.

A relative, Juanita Peters, said he was a gentle man, He spoke at a conference in 2011 and said he’d faced many challenges in his life but overcame them with hard work, perseverance, and education.

Mr Peters was deployed on several missions around the world, and also provided advice on tactical troop movement by air, and other issues to the UN Secretary-General and the Security Council.

Veterans Affairs Canada said Mr Peters “enjoyed a distinguished career on many levels”

A memorial service will be held this weekend in the national capital.
(MM)

(Canada Post) for standing up for her rights, Viola Desmond was honoured on a Canadian stamp in 2012.

The month of February, is annually recognized by the Canadian government as black-history month. It was in February back in 1965 that one of the first people to stand up for black rights in North America, died.

Years before American Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of a bus in Alabama, in the United States in 1955, Canadian Viola Desmond refused to move from the floor seating of a movie theatre, to the balcony where blacks were told to sit.

A successful businesswoman in Halifax Nova Scotia in 1946, she was on a business related trip in Cape Breton when her car broke down and she decided to see a film while waiting for repairs. She was sold a ticket for the balcony, but sat on the main floor, unaware that floor seating was “whites only” in the town. An usherette then told her that her ticket was not good for the floor, but when she tried to buy a floor ticket, she was told that being black, she couldn’t have one and must sit in the balcony. At that point she decided to return to her floor seat.

When the manager then told her to move, she refused and was later arrested -not for violating segregation laws, but under the thin disguise of not paying the one cent difference between floor and balcony seating (which she had tried to do). She spent the night in jail and then was fined 20$ (about $250 in today’s money).

After launching several legal challenges to her conviction, the attention and embarras Rosa Parks became the America’s version of “Viola Desmond”sment it brought to the province finally obliged Nova Scotia to dismantle its segregation laws, and repeal them entirely in 1954, one year before Rosa Parks became America’s “Viola Desmond”.

Courtesy of Andrew Searles Poster for Montreal Show February 17th, 2013

It went so well last year, they’re doing it again this year.

Andrew Searles is described on the poster as the ‘First Negro to play the Fiddle’ and Rodney Ramsey as the ‘First Negro on Skis’. It’s all in keeping with their tongue-in-cheek attitudes. These two young comedians grew up in Montreal and have taken a chapter from the canon of Black Canadian History and put a comic twist on it to make a point, and make people laugh. February is Black History Month in Canada, as it is in the United States, but with our harsh winter, perhaps we have a greater appreciation for getting together to laugh.

The historical Underground Railroad refers to the network of secret pathways and routes that connected safe-houses and brought slaves from the American south, north to freedom in Canada, where slavery, while practised, was not institutionalized, back in the mid-nineteenth century.

The railroad provided the code; people involved in helping the ‘passengers’ were known as ‘conductors’ and while thousands crossed into Canada all along the border from British Columbia to Nova Scotia, the majority made their escape at Detroit, known as Midnight, crossing the Detroit River, known as the Jordan, referring to the biblical river of the Promised Land, to present day Windsor, in Canada, then known as Dawn.

This history would be familiar to Andrew Searles and Rodney Ramsey and the other performers on the bill, as growing up in the Montreal area, Black History Month is an educational tradition in most Montreal schools today. This comedy tour got organized around the humour of the Black Canadian experience, as unique from the Black American experience.

Another catalyst was the reaction of a club owner who ran his establishment according to a quota system, refusing a third black comedian stage-time on an open mike night, asking how he could feature 3 black comedians; ‘what would people think?’

On their first outing last year, the Underground Comedy Railroad organized shows in Montreal, Ottawa and Winnipeg. While a big hit in Winnipeg, they are taking their stories and observations to Toronto this year, adding a couple of other acts and counting on a successful debut in Canada’s most multi-cultural city. (ck)

Carmel Kilkenny spoke with Andrew Searles to hear more about the experience last year, and the plans for this year.

(courtesy Ryerson University) The Ryerson Image Centre

February is Black History Month in Canada and that is drawing attention to a unique photo exhibition at Ryerson University in the heart of Toronto. The university has a dedicated image centre that currently features an exhibition called Human Rights Human Wrongs.
The exhibition showcases original press photographs of events from the U.S. Civil Rights Movement as well as images of the independence movements in Africa.
The centre is home to the famous Black Star Collection. This comprises 292,000 black and white photojournalistic photos drawn from events and conflicts of the 20th Century. It includes subjects from the Great Wars, European history, the American Civil Rights Movement. It also features major international political and cultural figures.  The photos come from the Black Star photo agency in New York City. They were gifted to Ryerson University by an anonymous donor along with $7 million dollars so it could be preserved, studied and shown.

Central to the Human Rights Human Wrongs exhibit is a large copy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights  whose principal author was Canadian John Humphrey. There are also images of independence movements in African countries including Kenya, Algeria, Chad, and Congo.

There is a multi-media exhibition called The Politics of Images. It shows the way western culture  sees Africa in clichéd pictures of starving children and animals and it critiques the indifference to the genocide in Rwanda.

Some of the photographs depict euphoric or violently explicit conditions and the exhibit is designed to help us understand the case for human and civil rights.

The Ryerson Image Gallery is open to the public.

For details RCI’s Lynn Desjardins spoke with Doina Popescu, director of the Ryerson Image Centre.

http://www.rcinet.ca/audio_on_demand/Web_Audio/english/Interviews/EN_Interview_1-20130220.mp3

Lanier Phillips

Lanier Phillips, 1940s

Lanier Phillips,was an American with an amazing story tied to Canada. In 1942, Phillips was a U.S. Navy seaman whose life was changed forever by the kindness he experienced from the people of St. Lawrence, Newfoundland.
Lanier Phillips died March 12th, 2012. He was 88 years old. Just a month before his death, Lanier Phillips visited the Canadian village that changed his life one last time. 70 years later, he insisted on climbing the steep cliff where he’d landed after surviving the wreck of the USS Truxton in 1942.

Victor Nerenberg tells us the story