Author: Nicole Bernhardt
At a very young age, many grown-ups would bend down to tell me stories about my grandfather, Wilson O. Brooks and how he shaped education in the City of Toronto. They told me about his work to establish human rights protections in this province, and how he built community organizations that fought discrimination while celebrating Black accomplishment. In the early 1970s, my grandpa became the city’s first Black principal.
I was twelve-years-old when he passed away, so most of my memories of him consist of family stories and artifacts in family homes—including newspaper clippings of his life that he haphazardly maintained and stacks of records he marked with his initials and stars next to his favourite songs. The clippings he kept tell me pieces of his life that he never got the chance to tell me himself.
My grandpa was not tall, but he always felt like a big man to me as a child. He seemed to know someone in every neighbourhood. And there was a drawn portrait of his face on a City of Toronto Parks & Recreation poster that hung in our home, as well as the homes of my aunties and uncle. In it, his warm face with a faint smile appeared along prominent human and civil rights activists such as Carrie Best and Donald Willard Moore, hockey player Herb Carnegie (one of the first Black Canadian hockey stars) and community activist Sonny Atkinson.
How did Brooks become the first Black principal?
Wilson Oliver Brooks was born in Windsor in 1924. He grew up in the west end neighbourhood of Parkdale, on Dufferin Street across from Alexander Muir Elementary, where he attended public school. The son of a railway porter, in 1986 he told the Toronto Star that his parents believed that education would be his “salvation.” He described his childhood as shaped by “the pressure of being poor” and the racial barriers he faced trying to live and work in the city.
In 1942, as a high schooler at Parkdale Collegiate, he and his friends tried to go see Count Basie at The Palais Royale only to learn that the venue—along with other Toronto venues—had a policy of “no Blacks.” My grandfather described this as leading to his “first picket line,” as he and others mounted a protest to challenge segregation practices.
My photocopy/clipping of April 9, 1992 Toronto Star article: “Confrontation at Palais Royale.
He graduated high school and enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) during World War II. A family preserved clipping from May 1944 describes him as the “Youngest Colored Officer” in RCAF, though the Juno Beach Centre in France, which recently added him to their “Faces of Canada” gallery, lists him “as one of the first” Black officers in the RCAF. His service in the armed forces provided a pathway to university.
According to his university transcript (which I keep a copy of in my University of Toronto office) he was “granted standing in the Second Year of the Pass Course for Active Service.”
My grandpa completed his Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Toronto, but after graduation, he struggled to find meaningful career opportunities in the city where he was raised and educated. He had ambitions of attending medical school, but as he shared in the documentary Hymn to Freedom: the history of blacks in Canada, the admissions committee “didn’t see fit to admit any of us into premeds.” And so he accompanied his first wife Phyllis Brooks (neé Simmons) to her country of birth, Bermuda, where he taught elementary school for a year. After returning to Toronto, he worked as a “delivery boy with an oil company.”
In his 1986 interview with the Toronto Star, he said further that he was among at least three there “with our degrees” and claimed that “ambitious Canadian blacks whose ancestors had fled American repression found themselves going to the States in order to get ahead.” As Debra Thompson writes in The Long Road Home: “Many of those who escaped to Canada eventually found it necessary to escape from Canada as well.”
Despite the structural discrimination, my grandfather persevered and eventually he attended teacher’s college at what was called the Normal School, and in 1952, he earned his qualifications to become a teacher.
University of Toronto historian Funké Aladejebi has documented the experience of Black teachers in Canada. In an article for Canada’s History magazine, Aladejebi writes that: “Although Toronto had had a significant Black population since the 1800s [. . .] no Black educator had been employed in the city’s public schools until Wilson Brooks was hired in 1952.”
While my grandfather is recorded as Toronto’s first Black teacher, he often claimed that there were Black women who came before him but that they may have been “passing.”
Ornella Nzindukiyimana, Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Kinetics at St. Francis Xavier University, whose work uncovers Black Canadian sports stories through archival research, cautions that an overemphasis on Black firsts can obscure deeper stories. Black firsts are often lauded as ending discriminatory practices or reduced to celebratory narratives that avoid their ongoing experiences of differentiation. For example, my grandfather is quoted in the September 25, 1952 issue of Jet magazine, which dubbed him as Toronto’s “First Negro Teacher,” saying:
“Now they know me as a teacher and a person. I think the first impression has disappeared. They can see that the colour of a person’s skin is not important.”
This cheery and hopeful account at the start of his teaching career stands in contrast to how my grandfather is described by one of his former students, Keith Black, in Black’s autobiographical account of growing up in the 1950s in the Beach neighbourhood of Toronto:
“And then, around 1958, a new teacher appeared at the school named Mr. Brooks. Mr. Brooks holds a unique distinction; he was black and he could very well have been the first black person that I had ever met face to face; in the flesh. Really! I could be wrong about that, but I don’t think so. And I was eleven years old!”
Blackness and education
Notwithstanding my grandfather’s optimistic claims that the colour of his skin was not seen by his students to be important, his presence in Toronto schools disrupted an established racial order and spurred white students to reflect on their own taken-for-granted understandings of race.
Canadian racism—which is structurally powerful, but frequently less explicit—greatly shaped my grandfather’s life. In an August 5, 1990 Toronto Star article, he described having to be constantly “prepared for the ‘showdown’” and having to ask himself “Can I go in there?” He credited the Ontario Human Rights Code of 1962—which he had lobbied for along with its precursors the Fair Employment Practices Act of 1951 and the Fair Accommodation Practices Act of 1954—as making it possible to stop “thinking like that and [begin] enjoying public places.”
My grandfather stated: “I didn’t ever want to be white. . . I wanted to belong.” As part of broader community efforts to build a sense of belonging amongst Black Canadians, my grandfather helped create the Urban Alliance on Race Relations in 1975 and —alongside Daniel Hill and others—established the Ontario Black History Society in 1978 and successfully petitioned Toronto City Hall to recognize February as Black History Month.
In 1971, my grandfather became the first Black Principal in Toronto when he took on the post at Shaw Public School. His path to this position included earning a Master of Education from OISE, multiple vice-principal positions, and pseudo-principal position of the Niagara Reading Unit. In a taped interview during his time as a principal at Shaw Public School, my grandfather continued to stress that education is crucial to “getting ahead,” especially for Toronto’s diaspora communities. Retiring in 1986, my grandfather was credited in Share magazine with having paved the way for Black educators.
There are traces of my grandfather’s legacy in the stories of other Black Canadian leaders. Bev Salmon spoke of him at his funeral as a “marvellous teacher” and a “beloved friend.” The first director of the Ontario Human Rights Commission Daniel Hill eulogized him as a “beloved role model.” Stanley G. Grizzle described him as “not a headline seeker” but instead someone who worked “quietly” and “effectively” behind the scenes.
I hold only a handful of tactile memories of my grandfather: the firmness of his belly when we hugged, the sound of his chuckle, the taste of his favourite treats—ice cream waffle sandwiches from the CNE each summer, and peanut butter cookies that my sister and I learned to bake just for him.
Despite being so well-esteemed, it has been a struggle to get my grandfather the recognition that his lifetime of battling direct and collective racial discrimination deserves. The school my daughter currently attends was almost named in his memory—but the proposal was ultimately blocked. To date, there is no award or school that bears his name. And so in lieu of grand recognition, his stories are largely preserved through oral history and scattered clippings.
Last February, my five-year-old daughter presented the legacy of her great grandfather to her class and her principal. The Black History Month that he helped establish provided an avenue for his impact on Toronto education to continue.
Being a Black educator means living our ancestors’ wildest dreams. But I also imagine that my grandfather might well have dreamt it possible that one of his grandchildren would teach about human rights at the University of Toronto. He believed in our right to belong here and our right to be valued and celebrated in academic spaces. His legacy made it possible for me to believe that too.
About the author:
Nicole Bernhardt is an Assistant Professor in Political Science at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Her research focuses on human rights policy as a response to structural racism. She received her PhD in Politics from York University for which she was awarded the Abella Scholarship for Studies in Equity. Nicole has worked as a policy advisor for the Anti-Racism Directorate and as a human rights officer for the Ontario Human Rights Commission. Nicole teaches courses on Canadian government and public policy, and currently serves on the executive for the Black Canadian Studies Association.