Black history month items

CBC has been running a lot of pieces around the Black History Month theme. Black Changemakers profiles active people doing all kinds of things around Montreal. I haven’t linked one each day because they’re features, not news; presumably CBC will keep running more till the end of the month.

CTV also has some features on the theme including the first Black player in the CFL (1946!), and the story of Fred Christie, a Black Montrealer who was denied service in a tavern in 1936, and took the discrimination to the Supreme Court, where he was stood up by a ruling that a private business had the right to serve whomever it pleased. This item mentions a 1975 ruling in Quebec that contravened that principle, but doesn’t expand on it. Possibly they mean the Quebec Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which was passed that year.

There’s also some coverage of an upcoming CBC series, The Porter, about the lives of Black railway workers in Montreal a century ago.