The UNB History Department’s 4th Annual Black History Month Public Lecture: The Honourable Leonard Braithwaite: Black Canadians and Civic Belonging in Postwar Ontario, featuring Dr. Barrington Walker

Time: 7 – 9 p.m.
Location: Provincial Archives of New Brunswick, 23 Dineen Dr., Fredericton

In this Black History Month public lecture, Barrington Walker considers the life of Leonard Braithwaite, an Ontario M.P. and one of the first Black Canadians elected to a parliamentary body in Canada. Dr. Walker’s research suggests that Braithwaite was both an agent of change and a figure through which we can map Ontario’s shift—albeit contested- from a post-slavery settler-colony with a long history of racial exclusions to a racially unmoored (at least formally) concept of Ontario’s polity, of civic belonging in the province. Dr. Walker argues that it is this move that situates Braithwaite’s modernizing or ‘multiculturalizing’ influence upon Ontario and the nation. Dr. Barrington Walker is Wilfrid Laurier University’s new Senior Advisor: Equity, Diversity and Inclusion and a distinguished scholar of Modern Canada who focuses on the histories of Blacks, race immigration and the law. He is the author of Race on Trial: Black Defendants in Ontario’s Criminal Courts (University of Toronto Press and the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, 2010). He has also edited two collections: The African Canadian Legal Odyssey: Historical Essays (University of Toronto Press and the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, 2012) and The History of Immigration and Racism in Canada: Essential Readings (Canadian Scholars Press, 2008).