Dorrington, MacLean honoured
Perseverance and desire for change unite honourees
In an old high-ceilinged room under portraits of the ancients, they sang, Tuesday of being born by the river in a little tent.
In the Red Chamber of the Nova Scotia legislature the men of North Preston, who call themselves the Sanctified Brothers, filled the air with words about hard living and being afraid to die.
“It’s been a long time, a long time coming,” they sang as Sam Cooke did.
“But I know a change gonna come,” their voices rose, forming words that were the anthem of the American civil rights movement.
“Oh yes it will.”
In the front row sat Francis Dorrington, who, more than most, knew the meaning of those words.
Tall and stately, he walked with a cane to the front of the room to be invested, along with four others, into the Order of Nova Scotia, our highest honour.
Once the New Glasgowborn Dorrington couldn’t have a celebratory soft drink with his teammates in a restaurant after winning a basketball game because he was African Nova Scotian.
But, in time, he became the first African Nova Scotian to be elected to public office in New Glasgow, to serve on the executive of Nova Scotia School Boards Association, and as a director of the Union of Nova Scotia Municipalities.
Because he persevered in this community that “was not fair to you,” Premier Stephen McNeil said at the ceremony, Dorrington ensured “that every Nova Scotian has a role to play and that every Nova Scotian deserves to play a role in this province.”
It was a long time coming, too, for Elizabeth Ann Cromwell, the late Birchtown resident who fought against the environmental racism of a proposed landfill, which would have destroyed African Nova Scotian artifacts and records, in her community.
But change came, too, for this woman who helped block the landfill proposal and did so much to promote black loyalist and African Nova Scotia history.
Just as it came for Dave McKeage, who also received his award posthumously. When he first diagnosed with leukemia at age 11, he went to a camp with other kids facing serious illness.
“It was so profound for him, the people he found there, the friends he made there,” his wife Krista told me after the ceremony. “He just wanted other kids to feel what he felt.”
So in 2011, the four-time cancer survivor founded Brigadoon, a year-round camp for children with chronic illness in the Annapolis Valley.
Change has come as well to those who have encountered Noni MacDonald, a transplanted Nova Scotian, who was the first pediatrician in Canada certified in pediatric infectious diseases by the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, and who became the first woman in Canada to become the dean of a medical school, when she took that role at Dalhousie University.
MacDonald is now one of just 15 people globally who provide the World Health Organization with advice on immunization.
Ann MacLean didn’t set out to bring change to the world, just her small part of it: New Glasgow.
She grew up in Cape Breton’s Whitney Pier, she told me, that melting pot of races and societies, where people are expected to do their part for the greater good.
For MacLean, at first, that meant helping people with mental health and addictions issues as well as victims of domestic abuse.
Then, in 1985, her local arm of the Canadian Federation of University Women was looking around for someone to get involved in municipal government.
“They told me, ‘Ann you’re it,’” she said Tuesday.
Her plan was to run for one term on New Glasgow’s council. But one year turned into another, then another.
In 1991, the mayor was retiring. Not seeing anyone around to replace him, she decided to run.
It was win-win the way she saw it.
“If I win, I win, but if I don’t I’ll be going home,” Maclean, who became New Glasgow’s first female mayor, said.
She stayed for 17 years, making her the longest-serving mayor in the town’s history.
During that period she did lots of things for her town, which were listed on the official program for the investiture ceremony.
When I asked her if she was ever courted by federal or provincial political parties to run for higher office, she nodded.
“But I wasn’t a politically partisan person,” she said. “I always just wanted to be where I could contribute the most.”
Where real change, oh yes it will, gonna come.