Governor General's History Award for Scholarly Research presented to Dr. Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey
December 11, 2024
History is a study of the past and a recognition of those who have made lasting contributions.
As the first Black Professor to receive the Governor General’s History Award for Scholarly Research, Dr. Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey (Nii Laryea Osabu I, Atrékor Wé Oblahii kè Oblayéé Mantsè) marked the notable event by having retired Justice of the Peace Arthur Downes accompany him to the celebration in Winnipeg last month.
“He is a beloved friend, confidante and comrade,” said the first-generation high school attendant and graduate. “It was important for me to share the occasion with him and, by extension, our African-Canadian elders to whom Canadian society denied basic rights that it afforded other groups, ensuring their social mobility on the one hand and our marginalization on the other.”
The product of Caribbean immigrants, 97-year-old Downes was also a Humber College lecturer and Republic of Guinea Honourary Consul for 16 years until 2009. He served on several boards supporting service organizations, including the Doctor’s Hospital Foundation (now Kensington Foundation) where he was the inaugural Board of Directors Chair, the Hospital Council of Metro Toronto, the Ontario Hospital Association and St. Michael’s Day Care Centre for Children.
With the support of then National Black Coalition Regional Chair Kay Livingstone, he joined late Research Chemist Thomas Massiah and historian/curator Sheldon Taylor in making a presentation on behalf of the Black community to Toronto Police in 1972. They were the first community members to develop and implement liaison committees between the Black community and Toronto Police Service.
Downes, whose family has a street in the Lower Yonge Precinct bearing their name, thinks highly of Adjetey who, in 2018, was the first Ghanaian-born to matriculate from Yale University with a PhD in history.
“That is why I accepted his invitation,” he said. “We talk regularly and have collaborated on a few things for his book. It was a humbling experience and an opportunity for me to see the greatness of the country.”
Administered by Canada’s National History Society with the support of the Government of Canada through the Department of Canadian Heritage, and Power Corporation of Canada, the Governor General’s History Awards celebrate the best in Canadian achievements to ensure the country’s national past has a vibrant presence in society.
Adjetey was recognized for his book, ‘Cross-Border Cosmopolitans: The Making of Pan-African North America’, which explores the pivotal role of Pan-African thought in shaping African-American history from 1900 to 2000 and its influence on United States foreign policy.
“This book looks at the 20th-century span of the ways Black people in Canada, the United States, the Caribbean and Africa navigated systems of colonization, imperialism, inequality and the instruments of warfare directed at ensuring that they were kept in a subordinated and subjugated class,” he said. “It sheds light on a chapter of Canada’s past that is very seldom acknowledged or documented.”
What motivated the William Dawson Associate Professor of History in the Department of History & Classical Studies at McGill University to write the book?
“In my early to mid-20s, I did a lot of mostly gang-intervention work in North Toronto supporting and advocating for young Black men who had been to prison,” said Adjetey who was a runner-up for the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize from the American Historical Association, honouring the best book in American History by a first-time author.
“The questions that I asked of the elders in the community were to get a better grasp of what was happening and why was it that certain issues afflict Black people in Metropolitan Toronto more than any other group. They gave me some good answers, but not the totality of responses I desired. That is why I went to the United States to pursue my doctorate because I could see some strong parallels between what was happening in inner cities in Toronto and the United States.”
He was a Case Manager in the Jane-Finch community with the $5 million federally-funded Prevention Intervention Toronto program aimed at steering young people in the city’s designated priority neighbourhoods away from gang culture.
Following an increase in gun violence in the city in 2005, Adjetey started the Forster Terrace after-school program for young people residing in challenged communities. Through role-playing, film and professional workshops, he taught non-violent conflict resolution techniques to the youths.
Governor General Mary Simon presented the awards to Adjetey and the other recipients on November 20.
Governor General Mary Simon made the presentation to Dr. Wendell Nii Laryea Adjetey (Photo by Anne-Marie Brisson)
“In colleges and universities across Canada, history courses are challenging the traditional narratives of stories,” she noted. “They are focussing on a greater diversity of perspectives from the past – on the perspectives of communities that have been ignored for far too long. I also feel that Canadians really want to learn about the history they were never taught. Just think about the wave of compassion that emerged after the release of testimonies from survivors of the residential school system. People were deeply moved to discover this dark chapter of our national history and I believe they are eager to learn more. Your work helps to present the diverse stories that have shaped the country we know today.”
The weight of being the first Black person to earn the Governor General’s History Award, said Adjetey, is humbling.
“While thrilled, a big part of all of this is knowing that we have much work to do in this country still to ensure that our history is recognized and acknowledged as being integral to the foundations of this country as well as the United States and the Western World in general,” the 2010 DiversCity Fellow added.
Spending the first seven years of his life in a slum just outside Accra where most young people are unable to attend high school because of its unaffordability, Adjetey completed his undergraduate degree in International Relations and History and a Master’s in Political Science at the University of Toronto.
As an undergraduate student at the University of Toronto, he took 16 young people to the St. George campus to meet Dr. Sheldon Taylor and late Superior Court Judge Romain Pitt and show the youths they belonged there.
In 2014, Adjetey was the recipient of a Trudeau Scholarship that supports outstanding doctoral students who are committed to solving issues of critical importance to Canada and the world. A year earlier, the scholar was awarded the Canadian Studies Prize for graduate students for his essay, ‘Saving Jimmy Wilson: Canadian Racial Consciousness and Alabama Justice 1958.’
Born in either 1903 or 1904, Wilson – an illiterate Black handyman who was convicted of stealing $1.95 from an 82-year-old White woman – was sentenced in 1958 to death by an all-White jury in an Alabama court. An appeal against the death sentence was unsuccessful at the state Supreme Court which held that ‘the amount of the money taken is immaterial’.
The case received global coverage and petitions were sent demanding the overturn of the death sentence. Wilson was paroled in 1973 after serving 16 years in prison.
