Friday 14 February 2025
Dr. Howard Douglas McCurdy-Canada’s 2nd Black MP
by Dave Tulloch
In 1984, four years after the first Black MP exited the Canadian parliament, the second Black member was sworn in. Dr. Howard Douglas McCurdy represented the riding of Lake St. Clair in Windsor, Ontario for the New Democratic Party (NDP) under the leadership of Ed Broadbent. Although the two trailblazing Black MPs were from southern Ontario ridings, they represented opposite ends of Canada’s political spectrum. But notwithstanding their political ideology, both became ardent advocates for racial justice, seemingly from incidences of racism that they encountered in their youth. Dr. McCurdy was not just a representative of Canada’s New Democratic Party. He was one of its founding members.
Howard McCurdy was born in London, Ontario in 1932 the second of two children in his family. He and his sister Marylin spent their formative years at 709 William Street living in a house that his grandparents had purchased some 80 years earlier. Howard’s great-grandparents were fugitive slaves who escaped to Canada from Kentucky in the mid-1800s, via. the Underground Railroad, “a secret network of abolitionists (people who wanted to abolish slavery). They helped African Americans escape from enslavement in the American South to free Northern states or Canada.” In his Autobiography, “Black Activist Scientist Icon” McCurdy stated, “William Street boyhood decided my racial attitudes.”
In 1937 Howard started to attend kindergarten at St. George’s Public School. Four years later, his family moved to Amherstburg Ontario, a small town approximately 32 kilometers southeast of Detroit, near the mouth of the Detroit River in Essex County. His father had ended his career as Porter after securing a job at the Ford Motor Company in Windsor.
Howard enrolled at Amherstburg Public School and immediately distinguished himself as a smart student. “I vaunted my smarts”. He was a cub scout in London and intended to continue his scouting experience in Amherstburg. But he learned quickly that Amherstburg’s scout organization was a segregated entity and was told to sign up with the other negroes in their league. When he started at Amherstburg High School he was the youngest student in his grade 9 class, and the only black, but he emerged as an elite athlete in track and field, basketball, and baseball.
Following high school graduation, he enrolled at Windsor’s Assumption College, then a satellite of the University of Western Ontario (now the University of Windsor) to pursue an undergraduate degree. After earning a BA, he attempted to enter Medical School and ran into the racism wall. He worked briefly with the Federal Health Department and then enrolled at Michigan State University (MSU) to pursue a MSc degree.
He was a stellar student at MSU. “By spring of ’54, I’d triumphed in all classes (including a thesis), incurring just one B… I scored straight As in all tests”. In 1955 he earned his MSc. Four years later he earned the title Dr. McCurdy after completing a Ph.D. in Microbiology and Public Health. While at MSC he also forayed into social activism, becoming a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) and later elected president of the MSU chapter.
McCurdy then became a professor at his Alma Mater and was the “first African-Canadian to secure a tenure-track position at a Canadian University.” This was at the onset of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. McCurdy got involved whenever racial injustice raised its ugly head. He leveraged the acumen gained in social activism at MSU and was a consummate activist for social justice, determined to address racial injustice wherever it surfaced.
After being denied access to play at a golf course in his area, the course had the misfortune to become McCurdy’s initial target. He penned an Op-Ed about the incident. But nothing happened “until I entered a complaint under “Ontario’s Fair Accommodation Act’. The golf course responded by offering him membership, which he summarily declined. Instead, he embarked on a mission to expose other golf courses that had similar practices. “My procedure: (was to send) pairs of Blacks followed by pairs of Caucasians” to apply for club memberships. The result was “a depressingly unambiguous revelation of racism”. McCurdy made his findings public in as many media outlets as was available. He was also involved in “Canada’s greatest racial protest” the 1969 student protest at Montreal’s Sir George Williams University (now Concordia University).
Dr. McCurdy co-established and was the first President of the Guardian Club “to guard the interest of the Black community”. He was a founding member and first president of the National Black Coalition of Canada and was elected to the Windsor City Council and Canada’s Parliament. His phenomenal career and contributions to public life earned him many accolades including the Order of Ontario and the Order of Canada. “Persecution of others of different religion, ethnicity, gender and/or sexual orientation leads to oppression unto death. My political engagement in opposition to all of the above ills and wrongs.”
Dave Tulloch was born in Jamaica. He immigrated to Canada in 1970 to pursue post-secondary education. He earned a diploma in electronics engineering technology from Algonquin College, a Bachelor of Administration and a Bachelor of Commerce (Hon) from the University of Ottawa, and a Master of Business Administration from Concordia University. He has had an extensive career in information technology; as a computer engineer with Digital Equipment, an information systems consultant with Systemhouse, KPMG, and then with Oracle Corporation in the USA where he retired as a director in the Oracle Cloud Services Organization. He taught information systems and business courses at CEGEP (Hull) and later tutored at Wake Tech College in North Carolina. Dave wrote many articles for the Ottawa Spectrum, a publication focussing on Ottawa’s Visible Minority community within Ottawa during the 1980s and 90s. Dave’s publication of the book entitled Ottawa’s Caribbean Community – History and Profiles since 1955, documents the history of Blacks in Ottawa and the life stories of early Caribbean Immigrants to Canada’s Capital City. This book is being distributed by Amazon worldwide, by the publisher at petrabooks.ca, and it can be purchased from major book resellers including Indigo in Canada and Barnes & Noble in the USA where it was promoted as one of the best books in 2023.