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Local News: Toronto Black Leaders Honoured
One person came to Canada
to become a man of the
cloth and ended up becoming
a man of the cause. Two others
took up that same cause
with fiery determination.
And another captured every
flickering flame of it.
Their cause, kindled by
the times they lived in, still
burns a path forward today.
Together, Charles Roach,
Eddy Grant, Sherona Hall
and Dudley Laws represent
nearly 200 years of service to
Toronto’s black community.
And Sunday night, at Etobicoke’s
Club Paradise, they
were recognized for their efforts.
The purpose of the event
was “to honour these people
for the community work that
they’ve done in the past and
continue to do,” says Hewitt
Loague, a member of the Nia
Social Committee, a Toronto
organization established this
year to recognize leadership
in the African-Canadian
community.
“The meaning of Nia is
‘purpose,’” says Loague, one
of its five members — purpose
“to make our collective
vocation the building and developing
of our own community,
in order to restore our
people to their traditional
greatness.”
Roach chalks up his career
turn, from aspiring priest to
pioneering lawyer, to timing.
Within months of his arrival
from Trinidad and Tobago
in 1955, Rosa Parks made
headlines by refusing to yield
her bus seat to a white passenger
in Montgomery, Ala.,
and Martin Luther King Jr.
started stirring black pride.
“It had repercussions all
over the world for people of
colour, including myself,” recalls
Roach, who was studying
at Thomas More College
in Kentucky, with his eyes on
the priesthood.
“In Toronto, across Canada,
and indeed the whole world,
people were having more
consciousness of civil rights.”
Determined to take up the
battle in Canada, Roach
abandoned his dream of a
full-time religious life and
enrolled in law school at the
University of Toronto.
“After the ’50s, I started
being more political,” he
says. “This was the spirit of
the times. I’m really from the
civil rights era.”
He organized and joined in
countless pickets, marches
and demonstrations, all the
while defending, from the
Toronto law firm he founded
in 1968, those whose rights
had been trampled.
A desire to promote
Caribbean culture led him to
help found the Caribana festival
in 1967.
By 1978, he had established
the Movement of Minority
Electors, with one
simple mission: “to get more
people of colour to run for
different political offices.”
The other honourees are:
■Dudley Laws, who founded
the Black Action Defence
Committee, which he still
presides as executive director.
He is also an irrepressible
voice on police, immigration
and social issues.
■Sherona Hall, who cofounded,
with Laws, the
Black Action Defence Committee,
and championed
causes that encompassed the
rights of aboriginals as well
as blacks.
■Eddy Grant, a Jamaicanborn
photojournalist who
was honoured, says Loague,
for “giving coverage to the
work that community
groups are doing.” Whether
it be fundraisers or birthday
parties, for decades, the message
has gone out: Call Eddy.
“I don’t know how he gets
paid,” Loague says. “But he’s
always there.”
TORSTAR NEWS SERVICE
Posted on Tuesday, December 20 @ 00:00:00 UTC by jcohen
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