Sheila White recounts the racism her mother faced after marrying a Black man
August 15, 2023
Uncommon in the 1940s in some parts of Canada, interracial marriages were frowned upon and the daring couples knew the backlash would be harsh.
Vivian Keeler, a White woman from Dartmouth, Nova Scotia and the daughter of a decorated World War 1 veteran, taking the bold step in 1947 to wed Haligonian social worker William ‘Bill’ White didn’t go down well with her own family and the community.
In a stack of letters she saved after making the decision to relocate to Toronto to be with White who got a job in Canada’s largest city, the wrath is evident.
“These letters were from her family and it was a campaign orchestrated by her mother, the community and people of the cloth all penning letters that my mom saved,” said her daughter Sheila White. “They told a story of attitudes that existed at the time. Maybe, she thought it would blow over and didn’t expect the intensity of the seven-month letter writing campaign. It did have an impact on her as we learn from the writings in her five-year diary.”
Vivian Keeler on her wedding day (Photo contributed)
White turned those letters into a biographical novel, ‘The Letters: Postmark Prejudice in Black and White’, that was launched on July 18.
She said her maternal grandmother’s letters were scathing.
“They stood out,” said White. “When you are about to be married, the one person you want at your side is your mother. At the juncture where the wedding is about to happen, she comes to Toronto and my mom gets the impression it would be the last time she would see her because she would be disowned from the family going forward. That didn’t happen and reconciliation took place.”
The letters and other family artifacts, including the diary chronicling the couple’s first few years in Toronto, are on display at the Don Heights Unitarian Church at 18 Wynford Dr.
“The diary provides an idea of the very progressive climate in this city that supported their marriage,” noted White. “So there is a lot of history woven in and it is all about their decision to get married.”
In the book’s afterword, educator Sandy Macdonald said she met Bill and Vivian White when they joined DHUC in 1960.
“They quickly became very involved members, Vivian using her formidable secretarial and archiving skills for organizing and storing church records and Bill as Music Director, ever the contributor to dialogue and a facilitator of thoughtful and new approaches,” the widow of late Urban Alliance on Race Relations co-founder Dr. Wilson Head wrote. “It is remarkable to me that Bill White always said discrimination never personally affected him or held him back which his life bore out. If he were alive today, I know Bill would be leading workshops on how to address racism and I know his solution would involve the universal language of music.”
White said the book’s focus is on ‘change for the better and on the enlightened community of progressive change-makers who welcomed my parents and the move for world brotherhood, a call never more urgent than today’.
“There is no place for racism in our world and we must do everything in our power to end it,” the descendant of Virginian slaves and Mayflower Pilgrims added. “I’d like this book to be part of the solution to countering nonsensical race-based conspiracy theories and the poisonous hate that flows from them.
“Everything my parents stood for would have been lost if care hadn’t been taken to save the hard copies. I do wish I had asked them substantive questions and I would advise any person today to consider interviewing the older adults in the family for details about lives lived, highlights, turning points, challenges and lessons learned.”
Bill White was the first Black Canadian to run for federal office in 1949 when he stood as the Co-Operative Commonwealth Federation candidate in Spadina. Founded in 1932, the CCF merged in 1961 with the Canadian Labour Congress to form the New Democratic Party.
Bill White was the first Black Canadian to run for federal office in Canada
Yorkland Publishing, led by Ed and Rosemary Shiller, published the book.
Sheila White & publisher Ed Shiller (Photo by Ron Fanfair)
“From the moment Sheila, my wife and I first discussed the possibility of a book, the project promised to become a beacon of hope, especially today when bigotry is on the rise and democracy and social justice are under siege,” he said. “This book is an uplifting affirmation that the goodness within any of us can overcome the evil perpetrated by the misguided and the malevolent.
“It is a reminder that the struggle for social justice never ends, that any progress thus far attained, including Vivian and Bill’s contribution, can only be sustained through constant vigilance and that complacency inevitably leads to regression. ‘The Letters’ reassures us that we too can make a palpable contribution, regardless of how big or small that contribution might be, to meeting the existential challenges of our time. It exemplifies the golden rule – Vivian and Bill responded to those who perpetrated bigotry and hatred, not with anger or violence, but with compassion and understanding.”
White started writing the novel just before the COVID lockdown in early 2020.
“The early narrative from my childhood was all about these letters,” she noted. “None of my mother’s family wanted her to marry my father because of his colour. The fact that the evidence exists so tangibly enabled me to weave together what I think is a really interesting story about some incredible people like the Brewton’s.”
Community leaders in the 1920s and 30s, Oscar and Leona Brewton were Yonge St. business owners.
He was a podiatrist who provided debt relief to the British Methodist Episcopal and the Grant African Methodist Episcopal churches and she was a beauty counsellor and founder of a religious boys’ school.
The Brewton’s were close friends of the White’s whose family patriarch was the executor of their estate.
Oscar & Leona Brewton (Photo contributed)
Co-founders of the High Park Emancipation Day Picnic, the couple who came from Ohio just after the First World War, resided in Rosedale.
“They were pillars in the community and had an incredible amount to offer as successful business people showing the way for others,” White said.
In addition to the lantern plates on display, there is a copy of Professor Merl Eppse’s book, ‘A Guide to The Study of the Negro in American History’, that he signed for the Brewton’s in 1937,
The cover of Professor Merl Eppse’s groundbreaking book (Photo by Ron Fanfair)
There are also a hand-painted fan that’s a prop used in the all-Black production of ‘The Mikado’ by the Toronto Negro Choral Society in 1949, a World War II rejection slip issued on racial grounds and a book containing the first race relations course that the United Church of Canada developed in 1946 for young people.
The book is available through Chapters, Barnes & Noble, Amazon and Yorkland Publishing @www.yorklandpublishing.com.
It costs $39.95 plus shipping, GST and HST.
