Past Event

You are welcome to attend in person at the Carleton Dominion Chalmers Centre at 355 Cooper St.
Alternatively, you can join online and the zoom details will be sent to you separately. Please RSVP to be sent the link.

Description:  In 1934 in the heart of the southwest Black community, the first race paper in Montréal,was inaugurated. The Free Lance newspaper published for eight years under the editorship of three Black men. This broadsheet was very similar in style and content to other race papers in the United States. Though its readership spanned the hemisphere, no original copies have been preserved. However using copies I have personally retained, this will be an intimate look into editorial and typographical elements, advertisements, the distribution and other distinguishing features of a unique cultural product of Montreal’s early 20th century Black neighbourhood. Launched in the fourth decade of the porters’ community, The Free Lance was an unrepentant, anti-fascist organ, and a staunch promoter of Garveyism. Before its demise, as the world marched toward global conflict, The Free Lance created a buzz on the national and international scenes. It led the campaign for the Fred Christie case to the Supreme Court, and it was the catalyst for recruitment of a Canadian army to fight Italy’s colonial designs in Ethiopia.

Biography: Dorothy Williams, Ph.D., is a historian who specializes in Black Canadian history. She has authored three books, and has contributed to other scholarly and academic publications. Her first book was Blacks in Montreal: 1628-1986 An Urban Demography, was written at the behest of the Quebec Human Rights Commission, in 1989, during their study of racism in Montreal’s housing market. Her second work published in 1997, The Road to Now: A History of Blacks in Montreal, remains the only chronological study of Blacks on the island of Montreal. Her most recent book in 1998, Les Noirs à Montréal, Essai de démographie urbaine, was a translation of Blacks in Montreal. While studying for her Ph.D., she contributed chapters on Black Canadian print culture, for two volumes of The History of the Book in Canada, (University of Toronto, 2005, 2007). Her thesis, “Sankofa: Recovering Montreal’s Heterogeneous Black Print Serials”, (McGill University, 2006) focused specifically on the range of Black print culture in Montreal. In addition, she has penned popular articles in magazines and newspapers.