Confronting "Controlled Democracy" at Canadian Universities: West Indian Students in Canada and the Global Struggle for Racial Justice

During the First World War, thousands of West Indians lived, worked, and studied in Canada.  Many encountered racist attitudes and exclusionary practices that sometimes turned violent.  West Indians contested these racist practices by publicizing specific episodes in the press, establishing periodicals to articulate their claims for equality, forming protective associations, and appealing to their imperial and colonial governments for redress.  Deploying the language of racial justice and imperial citizenship, they negotiated the terms of their engagement with Canada.  In this paper I explore three episodes of racial conflict between white Canadians and West Indians of color at Dalhousie, McGill and Queen’s universities during and immediately following the war. I argue that West Indian responses to these conflicts were local manifestations of colonized peoples’ global struggle for racial justice, political representation and self-determination.  

By advocating self-determination for subject peoples and exposing the increasingly blatant contradictions of contemporary colonialisms, West Indians in Montreal, Kingston and Halifax participated in, and expanded, what Michelle Ann Stephens has called a “global political imaginary” of black subjects.  Through trans-national protest and organization, West Indians students in Canada established crucial political alliances that ultimately proved subversive to existing structures of imperial rule.