Exhibition | Moving Against the System: The 50th Anniversary of the Congress of Black Writers
The Congress was one of the most important Black international gatherings of the post-Second World War period. The idea to organize a Congress of Black Writers was first proposed by Raymond Watts, an accomplished musician who moved to Montreal from London to work as a train porter in order to support his family. Watts and fellow Trinidadian Wally Look Lai had been members of a study group that met in the London home C.L.R and Selma James in the early sixties, a group that included young Caribbean intellectuals such as Jamaica’s Joan French, Orlando Patterson, Richard Small, and briefly Robert Hill, and Walter Rodney of Guyana.
The Congress, held at McGill between October 11th and 14th, 1968, was dedicated to the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, whose images, along with Frantz Fanon, Patrice Lumumba, and other black political figures, adorned the walls of the student union ballroom. Following King’s assassination, there was a shift in consciousness of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee towards the Black Panther Party. This shift was explicit in the gathering’s statement of purpose, signed by co-chairs Elder Thébaud of Haiti, a future New York psychiatrist, and Rosie Douglas, future prime minister of Dominica. The statement declared that “modern white oppression… has always sought to justify its oppressive control over the other races by resorting to arrogant claims of inherent superiority, and attempting to denigrate the cultural and historical achievements of the oppressed peoples.” “Here, for the first time in Canada,” the text continued, “an attempt will be made to recall, in a series of popular lectures by black scholars, artists and politicians, a history which we have been taught to forget...in short, the history of the black liberation struggle, from its origins in slavery to the present day.”
Congress participants included Trinidadian-American Stokely Carmichael, as well as Americans James Forman, Alvin Poussaint, Ted Joans, Harry Edwards, Trinidadian C.L.R. James, Darcus Howe who traveled from the UK, Richard B. Moore of Barbados, Jamaicans Richard Small and Robert A. Hill, Walter Rodney of Guyana, and Canada’s Burnley “Rocky” Jones, the only Canadian to play a prominent role in the conference.
Moving Against the System: The 50th Anniversary of the Congress of Black Writers features newspapers, documents, and books associated with this historic event that both anticipated the gathering and came in its aftermath. Materials are courtesy of Kristen Young, the Alfie Roberts Collection, The McGill University Archives and Maitre Daniel Boyer. Special thanks to the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada and the McGill Library’s Rare Books and Special Collections.
The exhibition was curated by Kristen Young.
