Contrasting Black Canadian perspectives on intermarriage c. 1930

[breathedout]

On February 28, 1930, after burning a cross in the main street of Oakville, Ontario, a group of 75 masked and hooded Ku Klux Klan members converged on the home where Black (or possibly First Nations—his racial background was a point of contention) resident Ira Johnson was living with his white fiancée Isabel Jones. The Klansmen demanded that Jones return to her mother's house, and promise not to see Johnson again. To Johnson, they threatened to return if he continued to associate with Jones.

After much agitation on the part of the Black Canadian community, the initial complacence of the Oakville police was overcome enough to track down and prosecute three of the 75 white men who participated: although, putting aside many more serious potential charges, the defendants were only put on trial for "going disguised by night." Two of the them were let off entirely, and the third was found guilty and charged $50. Even this lenient verdict the Klan announced its intention to appeal. The two trials became an opportunity for both Black and white Ontarians to reflect on, among other things, interracial marriage: a practice against which, unlike in the US, there were no laws anywhere in Canada, but which was nonetheless discouraged and punished by other means. As quoted from Constance Backhouse's Colour Coded: A Legal History of Racism in Canada 1900-1950:

[Black attorney and activist] Lionel Cross was one of a few lone voices to claim that Ira Johnson's and Isabel Jones's right to wed, and that interracial marriage in general, was a positive thing. 'The white people talk of racial purity,' he said scornfully. 'Yet it is a fact that sixty-five percent of the colored people of the South have white blood in their veins.' It was not the fact of racial intermixture that caused white consternation, but the legitimizing of the interracial sexual liaisons. Thousands of Black women had been forcibly coerced into sexual relations with whites during and after the decades of slavery in North America. The Klan did nothing to contest those non-consensual sexual connections. It was the voluntary, egalitarian unions between the races that alone provoked their ire. Asserting that there could be 'no biological reason against intermarriage,' Cross objected to the Klan's campaign of terror. The Oakville raid was not merely 'a question of intermarriage,' insisted Cross, 'but of constitutional right.'

[Black pastor] Rev. [H. Lawrence] McNeil was considerably less sanguine about this point. McNeil told the Toronto Daily Star that he held 'no brief for the promiscuous intermingling of the races,' and directed his complaint solely against 'the substitution of the purely authorized law enforcement agencies by such an intolerant organization as the Ku Klux Klan.' B.J. Spencer Pitt, the other Black lawyer who had pressured the attorney general to prosecute the Klan, was similarly inclined. 'Personally, I do not believe that intermarriage is advisable,' he indicated. 'Indeed, I would say from my own general experience and observation that such marriages lead more often to discord.' He was even willing to accede to a legislative ban on racial intermarriage: 'If the Canadian government saw fit to prohibit intermarriage of negroes and whites, I am certain that we negroes would abide by the law.'

Both McNeil and Pitt espoused egalitarian philosophies and demonstrated sustained anti-racist activism in the face of the Oakville raid. It is unlikely that they meant to be understood as suggesting that interracial marriages were problematic because of any inherent hierarchialization of racial groups. Their position is reflective of an affirmative pride in Black identity as a source of community, culture, and solidarity. In the interests of sustaining and strengthening the distinctiveness of the Black community, single-race Black families have been fundamentally important. Even if McNeil and Pitt had accepted that marital integration ought to be a matter of free choice, given the pervasive racism that suffused Canadian society in employment, housing, schooling, access to public facilities, and social structures, they probably felt that racial mixing caused more problems than it was worth.

Lionel Cross took a quite different perspective with regard to the most effective strategy on this question. Speaking also from a commitment to Black race consciousness, he argued that the white community needed a transfusion of Black energy. Jabbing right to the heart of white racist arrogance, Cross told the Daily Star:

It is claimed that there is a sort of marasmus afflicting the white race and it requires some leaven to strengthen it. Scientists who do not permit sentiment to get the better of their knowledge say that the negro is the best source from which that leaven might be obtained. [...]

Lionel Cross carried his message of racial pride in the legacy of Black heritage to the 'Labour Forum,' when he spoke before a large audience in the Labour Temple in Toronto on 6 March. Making common cause with those branded as 'communists, bolshevists and Reds' by the Ku Klux Klan, he gave a fiery address to the enthusiastic crowd, blasting the bullying tactics of the Klan. 'Seventy-five men, wonderfully brave, started after one man,' he declared, demanding that Attorney General Price force the Klan to make public the names of its members. He ridiculed the hooligans of the Klan, ashamed to reveal their names or faces, who 'boasted' of their 'superior British traditions.'

Cross instructed those who believed Blacks to be intellectually inferior to 'look past [their own] noses' to the richness of African history and civilization. 'Racial difference,' he claimed, 'has been a ruse used by scheming men to subjugate others ... from the beginning of history.' Cross lambasted Canadians for the level of racial discrimination they continued to tolerate: 'Negroes do not enjoy the free rights of citizens in this country no matter what you may say. They are not allowed in certain hotels and theatres. I have been told because I was a negro, people would not give me business fearing I would not get a square deal in the courts.' Labour organizations responded to Cross's address by forwarding resolutions to Attorney General Price demanding more serious charges be pressed.

Other groups condemned by the Klan swelled the ranks of those demanding anti-racist action. Jewish leaders joined forces with Black activists, their interests melded together because of shared persecution. Rabbi Maurice Nathan Eisendrath of Holy Blossom Synagogue in Toronto denounced the Ku Klux Klan as 'a group of law-defying anarchists' inflated with 'bigotry and fanaticism.' No stranger to the southern roots of the Klan, Rabbi Eisendrath had had his first religious posting at the Virginia Street Temple in Charleston, Virginia, whence he was transferred only one year prior to the Oakville incident. A Reform rabbi, who had trained at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Eisendrath would become a leading peace activist in Toronto during the 1930s. Pronouncing himself perplexed that a so-called Christian organization could insist upon the racial supremacy of Nordic peoples, he pointed out that 'Christ, most unfortunately for the purpose of Nordic mythology, seems to have been a dark-eyed, dark-skinned and dark-haired oriental.'

Cross was debarred in 1937 for "conduct unbecoming a barrister and solicitor"; Backhouse doesn't go into details about the specifics of his debarring. Amid ongoing controversy, including the burning of Johnson's home to the ground (an incident which the Oakville police declined to investigate), Ira Johnson and Isabel Jones were married on 22 March 1930.

Comments

[alessnox]

I am glad they got married.

[breathedout]

Yeah I hope they went on to thrive. Backhouse doesn't provide any information (if indeed any is available) about what may have happened to them after their wedding, which took place while they were still in the midst of all the controversy surrounding the raid. I hope everything settled down & they were able to lead fulfilling lives. :-P

[ruinsplume]

Wow, what an iimportant point that miscegenation itself was not what the Klan objected to, since the rape of black women by white men was beneath their notice. Thank you for bringing that forward.

[breathedout]

Yeah, I felt like all of Cross's points were so spot-on! Although I can also see where McNeil and Pitt were coming from. But yeah, definitely, the Klan was primarily invested in maintaining white male Protestant control of whatever institutions at whatever cost; racial mixing or no racial mixing. Cross was amazing for lifting that up.