Atkinson Series: Part 2
As a Black student, he was told to dream small. He had hoped things would change for his son.
“I can’t believe what you say because I can see what you do.” — James Baldwin
One fine morning in the mid-1960s, Donald Edward Sharpe, a Black undergraduate student at Oxford University, was walking to his church, where he taught Sunday school. He passed a house where a little white girl sat on the steps in front of her home. He said hello and walked on. Common courtesy, or crime? Soon after, a group of white men surrounded him and almost beat him to death.
That incident was a nasty jolt for the man who in hopes of escaping racism, set his sights on the other side of the Atlantic. America was glowing from its recently passed Civil Rights Act that outlawed discrimination based on race. But he saw Canada, specifically Ontario, where the last racially segregated school had just closed, as an ideal place to settle with his wife.
Donald Sharpe was likely unaware of Canada’s own history of slavery and certainly unaware that Indigenous children were being scooped from their homes and fostered or adopted out to mainly white families, or that they had been dying in abusive residential schools estimated to be in the thousands.
He would soon find out, though, that desegregation was not the same as integration.
The couple settled in London, Ont., and a year later bore their first of six children, a son, Richard.
Richard Sharpe, now in his 50s, sits in an Ottawa café as he tells of his family’s experiences. What they had to contend with is part of a broader pattern that establishes how anti-Blackness is deeply entrenched in Ontario school practices.
Sharpe has vivid memories of the first day of Grade 1 at Lord Nelson Public School in London in the early 1970s.
“I remember going to the schoolyard and a group of white kids surrounded me and said, ‘Why are you here? You don’t belong here.’ So I turned around
When Nie Yuanzi put up a vitriolic wall poster one day in 1966, she plunged into the political maelstrom of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. For the rest of her life, Nie wrestled with the fame, and the infamy, that her act of rebellion would bring.
The poster brazenly denounced the Communist Party secretary of Peking University, where Nie worked, as well as two other Beijing officials. After Mao praised the poster, Nie vaulted to the front of the Red Guard movement, which Mao was stoking to attack his foes.
For a couple of heady years, Nie touched the peaks of power, meeting Mao, consorting with his aides and urging Red Guards to pillory fallen officials and scholars.
Yet even before Mao died in 1976, Nie (pronounced n’yeh) fell from favour, a casualty of the ruthless politics of that time. When Mao’s successors turned on the Cultural Revolution, a decade of upheaval, persecution and purges, they also turned on Nie.
She was imprisoned and made a political pariah, accused of persecuting innocent officials, scholars and students, including Deng Xiaoping’s son, Deng Pufang, who became disabled after jumping from a building at Peking University to try to escape torment by radical Red Guards.
Nie died Aug. 28 at 98. Her death was confirmed by her son Yu Xiaodong, who said the cause was respiratory failure. She was cremated Aug. 30 in a brief ceremony that brought together about 10 relatives, Yu said. The Chinese news media has remained silent about her death, a sign of how sensitive the traumas of the Cultural Revolution remain. Next month, the country will mark the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, and any reflection on the dark times of the republic is unwelcome.
Chinese scholars who interviewed Nie said that she exemplified how the Cultural Revolution could turn on its own
loyalists. The persecutors often became persecuted themselves.
“At the early stage of the Cultural Revolution, she became an important card played by Mao Zedong,” said Bu Weihua, a historian of the Cultural Revolution. “She experienced the Cultural Revolution as a high point for the first two months, only to be followed by tragedy.”
In her later decades, Nie tried to rescue her reputation. She denied some of the worst accusations against her, including that she played any role in abusing Deng’s son. But she never offered the full penitence that her critics called for. She instead dwelled on the notorious poster — a public denunciation called a “big-character poster” in Chinese political argot — that she and six other activists put up outside a restaurant on the Peking University campus.
“I accomplished just one thing in the Cultural Revolution: taking the lead in writing that big-character poster,” she said in a profile published in 2016 by the Chinese website of the New York Times. “That poster brought me tremendous fame and prominence, yet it also brought endless pain and torment for the rest of my life.”
Nie was not a typical Red Guard. When Mao began the Cultural Revolution in 1966, Nie was a midlevel Communist Party functionary at Peking University. At 45, she was more than two decades older than the high school and university students who formed the bulk of the Red Guards.
Nie was born April 5, 1921, in rural Henan province in central China, the youngest of eight children. (She had four brothers and three sisters.) Her father belonged to a long family line of well-off landowners and doctors, but many of his children embraced revolutionary politics.
Despite her limited education, Nie was among the party loyalists sent to watch over the university, regarded as a seedbed of unorthodox ideas. In1963 she was promoted to Communist Party secretary of the philosophy department, which was turning out teachers and theorists trained in Marxist-Maoist doctrine.
When Mao called for a Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, Nie did not question his accusations that dangerous “revisionists” and “capitalist roaders” had infiltrated the party and were trying to derail his revolution.
“I thought that I had to obey Chairman Mao,” she wrote in her memoirs, In the Vortex of the Cultural Revolution, published in Hong Kong.
“This was personally launched and led by Chairman Mao; of course I had to respond positively.”
Nie said that she and six other party activists associated with the philosophy department came up with the idea of a big-character poster laying out their frustrations with the university leader, Lu Ping, and that they had no plans to ignite a wider political firestorm. But some historians have said that Nie was no innocent and that she became part of a scheme to undermine party leaders by lighting a political fuse at Peking University.
“She was attuned to the political struggles in the high ranks,” said Ye Yonglie, a popular historian who was a student at Peking University from 1957-63.
After Nie put up her poster on May 25, 1966, Peking University erupted in debate. Officials and students were unsure how far attacks could go. The campus was soon awash in rival posters supporting or rejecting the accusations that Lu, the university’s party secretary, and two other officials were resisting Mao’s orders.
A few days later, Kang Sheng, a powerful security official, reported to Mao about the poster. Mao immediately grasped it as kindling for his Cultural Revolution. He ordered that it be reprinted and spread and later praised it as the “first Marxist-Leninist big-character poster in the country.”
Nie leapt to political stardom. She joined Mao when he reviewed an ocean of fervent Red Guards in Tiananmen Square. Pictures from that time show Mao and Nie in cheerful conversation.
But Nie later said she had developed private misgivings about the Cultural Revolution.
“I didn’t know we were heading toward disaster,” she told the New York Times in 2006. “Once I understood,” she added, referring to the party’s orders, “I stopped following them.”
“I’ve been described as a counterrevolutionary careerist and schemer, an unforgivably wicked madwoman,” Nie wrote in her memoirs, which grew to almost 1,000 pages when reprinted in 2017.
“I tell you readers: Thanks be, I’m still alive, and still fighting!”