February 22, 2024
Now a prominent academic, York’s Faculty of Education Jean Augustine Chair reflects on experiences of Black community in 1970s Toronto
It was at the now-closed Brockton High School near the new Dufferin Mall on what was then called Awde Street, where a young Carl James met with other community organizers on a September Saturday. That morning they launched the Caribbean Alliance Council (CAC) and that evening they celebrated with dinner and dance at the Soul Palace Restaurant, just north of what is now Sankofa Square.
Like other Black immigrants of his generation from Antigua, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, Jamaica, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, Trinidad and Tobago and other Caribbean islands, James came to Canada in the post-1967 period after the state had removed race-based immigration restrictions.
While pursuing his education, James engaged in youth work, volunteering with organizations such as the Black Education Project. Located just north of Davenport on Bathurst, James describes the organization as “central” to the education experiences of Black parents and students at the time. He also worked with Harriet Tubman Centre at St. Clair and Oakwood, which still operates today as the Harriet Tubman Community Centre close to Don Mills subway.
“I was at the time going through school, volunteering and working with the other volunteers – an adolescent working with younger Black adolescents,” recalls James. “I came to the work that I do through working on issues of Black life. The situation that I was observing and trying to understand with regard to Black youth informed my work.”
Later, he worked in Regent Park, a neighbourhood located in Toronto’s east downtown that’s now a mix of condominiums and social housing. Back then it was exclusively a public housing project – Canada’s first and largest. Many of the youth with whom James worked saw their participation in sports as the key to their future success and were not often going into academic areas because of streaming practices in their schools.
This inspired his early research at York University. Today, James is a prominent academic who has dedicated his career to studying some of the very issues he first observed and experienced four decades earlier.
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