Community rallies behind bid to preserve home of Nova Scotia’s first Black doctor – Halifax | 24CA News

Prominent members of Nova Scotia’s Black group are supporting a bid to guard the Halifax dwelling and clinic of the late Clement Ligoure, the province’s first Black physician and an unsung hero of the 1917 Halifax Explosion.

Originally from Trinidad, Ligoure graduated in 1916 with a medical diploma from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., and he would later turn out to be editor of Nova Scotia’s first Black newspaper, the Atlantic Advocate. He was additionally co-founder of the No. 2 Construction Battalion, Canada’s solely all-Black unit to serve through the First World War.

“He was a leader in many fields and he had a lot of courage,” mentioned Peggy Cameron, director of the Friends of Halifax Common and the one who utilized to have Ligoure’s former dwelling granted heritage standing.

“He understood that he had a role as a leader in the Black community. He was outstanding on many levels _ personally, professionally, locally and nationally.”

The proposal to guard the home was filed final yr and will probably be debated by regional council Tuesday, however Cameron says it’s not a accomplished deal. Members of the general public is not going to be allowed to talk to council as a result of the appliance didn’t come from the present house owner, who occurs to be a developer. Louis Lawen, head of Dexel Developments, couldn’t be reached for remark.

“There’s a lot of concern that the city is following the lead of developers,” mentioned Cameron, who has a grasp’s diploma in environmental research and is vice-president of a renewable vitality firm.

“The public can’t speak, but they can write letters.”

Cameron’s group has obtained letters of help from six outstanding Black leaders together with Sharon Brown Ross, a member of the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission.

“The historical contributions of Dr. Ligoure are generally unknown by the public, including many Black African Nova Scotians,” Brown Ross wrote in her letter, noting that the physician’s many successes got here regardless of deeply embedded systemic racism on the flip of the century.

Two years after Ligoure graduated from Queen’s, the college banned all Black college students. He was additionally barred from getting into the navy when he moved to Halifax.

In her letter, Brown Ross says Ligoure was additionally denied hospital privileges when he arrived within the port metropolis, which is why he established a personal clinic in his dwelling. The stately Queen Anne Revival fashion home, in-built 1894, sits on North Street within the metropolis’s north finish. It’s now a rental property.

“Dr. Ligoure’s efforts are exemplified during the 1917 Halifax Explosion in treating the injured in the city, which is an example … of the lost history of Halifax,” Brown Ross wrote.

On the morning of Dec. 6, 1917, a large explosion levelled a lot of the town after a two wartime ships collided within the harbour, considered one of them laden with explosives. The blast killed virtually 2,000 individuals and injured one other 9,000 — a lot of them blinded by flying glass.

On Jan. 25, 1918, Ligoure instructed the Halifax Disaster Record Office that his clinic was stuffed with injured individuals instantly after the explosion. “Very severe cases, jaws cut in, noses off,’ the file says. With only his housekeeper and a boarder to help him, Ligoure “worked steadily both night and day.”

He handled a whole bunch of individuals, freed from cost.

Brown Ross mentioned council members ought to recall the “blemish in Canadian history” that resulted after the town’s 1964 choice to bulldoze Africville, an African Nova Scotian group that was additionally within the metropolis’s north finish.

The choice “was done to make way for urban renewal … coupled with purposefully entrenching advantages of the well-connected and wealthy,” Brown Ross wrote. “Please don’t be coerced in repeating yet another historic erasure of a segment of Black African history in Halifax.”

The metropolis issued a proper apology to the previous residents of Africville in 2010, however no compensation was supplied.

Cameron says Ligoure’s home stays liable to demolition as a result of the town is planning to widen close by Robie Street. Since 2020, the regional municipality has issued 440 demolition permits, reflecting the truth that Halifax is now one of many quickest rising cities in Canada.

George Elliott Clarke, a former parliamentary poet laureate, additionally wrote a letter of help for Cameron, saying a heritage designation would assist protect a little-known however necessary a part of Halifax’s historical past.

“Late have we been to recognize the civic charity of Nova Scotia’s first Black doctor — just as we have been slow to salute the heroism and self-sacrifice of the Nova Scotia-mustered No. 2 Construction Battalion that he helped to found,” wrote Clarke, who grew up in Halifax and is now a professor on the University of Toronto.

“It would be a terrible irony were a survivor of the (Halifax Explosion) … to have his residence and clinic destroyed a century later by ‘development,’ a process often ignorant of the past and over eager to exploit present ‘opportunity,’ without a care for posterity.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first revealed Jan. 23, 2023.

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