In 1954, Black porters called for ‘a country of equality’
On April 26,1954, a train arrived in Ottawa. Inside one of its cars: a 35-member delegation of the Negro Citizenship Association. In They Call Me George, sociology professor and novelist ( Independence) Cecil Foster makes the case that the moment was exceptional, a consequential threshold-crossing episode.
The men, former and current porters (popularly known as “George’s boys” after American magnate George Pullman’s famous train service franchise), had journeyed to meet federal government representatives with a goal to transform the country. In place of one dominant idea — Canada as a “white country” created “for the habitation and benefit of people of European ethnicities” — they offered another: “a new nation state created out of all peoples of the world, a country of equality, where specific ethnic groups would not have all the privileges and others none.”
For Foster, “these unobtrusive men on the transcontinental railway” are “as much iconic representatives of Canada and Canadian experience as Mounties, moose, beavers, and iced-over hockey ponds.” He champions them, while pointing out that they’d been long regarded as “smiling darkeys” (as he quotes Stephen Leacock), and part of a Black population that was “politically invisible,” a numerical minority (about 1 per cent of the population) outside the Canadian social imagination, and residents in a nation whose “commitment to whiteness” wasn’t exactly a secret. Based on the experiences of these men, Canada, a newly “cohesive and affluent society,” evidently needed to do some soul-searching.
Foster provides context and detail. This includes still prevalent views of white superiority and worries about racial “mongrelization” (supported by pseudo-science about “physiological laws” governing racial hierarchies). Foster touches on infra-organizational conflicts related to Black political organizing, interviews retired porters, highlights the tireless work of key figures (such as Stanley Grizzle), depicts the grind of train portering, and outlines immigration regulations tethering nonwhite immigrants to a “caste-like system that denied them job opportunities.”
Aside from shortcomings (the book is repetitive and, from time to time, a reminder that reading history can feel like a chore), Foster’s account is a hopeful document, even as it highlights the gradualness of social change and how old discredited ideas remain obstinate and prevent a “true blossoming of equality in Canada.”