Wilson Lanier 🇺🇸

[Wynne @wynneflh]

In 1943, a Canadian soldier walked into a restaurant in his own hometown, in uniform, and asked for a meal.
The owner refused to serve him.

When he wrote to Ottawa to complain, the government told him there was no law against it.
The town was Dresden, Ontario.

It had been one of the end points of the Underground Railroad. People escaping slavery in the United States had settled there in the 1800s, and by the 1940s Black residents made up about 17 per cent of the town.

They went to school with white children. They lived on the same streets.

But they could not get a haircut in a single barber shop. They could not get a meal in a single restaurant. They could not shoot pool in a single pool hall.

One historian later described the discrimination in Dresden with one word.

Absolute.
The soldier was Hugh Burnett.

He was born on a farm just outside Dresden on July 14, 1918, a descendant of people who had escaped enslavement. He became a carpenter.

He had first felt it at 16. He stopped his truck to help a white motorist who had run out of gas. The grateful stranger insisted on buying him lunch in town.
Burnett thought that, in the company of a white man, maybe this time they would serve him.

They did not.
He decided then that he was going to do something about it.

When the war came, he enlisted. He was later discharged for medical reasons. In 1943, at 25, he was living in Windsor with his wife, Beatrice, and working at Ford. He came home to visit family, still in uniform, and was turned away.

So he wrote to the federal Minister of Justice, Louis St-Laurent.

Even in uniform, he wrote, a Black man could not be served in any restaurant in Dresden.
The reply from the Deputy Minister was simple. There was no law against racial discrimination in Canada.

Go and check. In 1943, that was true.

In 1948, Burnett moved his family back to Dresden. He joined his uncles in a small group of Black farmers and tradespeople called the National Unity Association.
He became its secretary, its organizer, and its voice.

They asked the town council for a bylaw banning discrimination in local businesses.

Council refused. Then it agreed to put the question to the voters.

In 1949, the people of Dresden voted on whether restaurants should be allowed to refuse service because of race, colour or religion.
The bylaw lost.

Five to one.

That was roughly the ratio of white residents to Black residents in town.

Burnett did not stop. He took the fight to Toronto, joining labour and human rights groups pushing for a provincial law.

In 1951, Ontario passed the Fair Employment Practices Act, banning discrimination in hiring. Burnett wrote to Premier Leslie Frost to point out that it still said nothing about restaurants.

In March 1954, he stood in front of the Premier and his cabinet and told them what Dresden was like.
Reports said Frost was moved.

That same year, Ontario passed the Fair Accommodation Practices Act. Refusing service because of race became illegal.

And in Dresden, nothing changed.

Two restaurants, Kay's Café and Emerson's Restaurant, kept refusing Black customers. So Burnett and his neighbours walked in, sat down, and asked to be served. When they were refused, they filed formal complaints.

These were sit-ins.

In 1954.
Years before lunch-counter sit-ins swept the American South.

The province was slow to lay charges. Some owners simply locked their doors when they saw the group coming. So the activists sent in out-of-towners the owners did not recognize, with a Toronto reporter along to watch. One test case went to court. The owner of Kay's Café was found not guilty.
They tried again.

In November 1955, two university students from Trinidad were refused at Kay's Café. The owner was charged again in early 1956. This time he was convicted and fined.

On November 16, 1956, members of the National Unity Association walked into Kay's Café.
For the first time, they were served.

Here is what it cost the man who led them.

His family received anonymous threats. The life of his school-age daughter, Patricia, was threatened. White residents boycotted his carpentry business until there was no work left.

That same year, Hugh Burnett was forced to leave Dresden.

He moved to London, Ontario, and kept a low profile for the rest of his life. His daughter later remembered her mother stretching meals with fewer potatoes and fewer onions as the money dried up.

"I think that he was on this earth to do what he did," Patricia said. "He had to do it."

Back in 1954, Burnett had explained what he expected the new law to do.

"It has been stated that you can't make a law to make one man love another," he said. "But it would eliminate the act of discrimination. And of course our personal feelings will come into it later. We will learn to like each other."

He died on September 29, 1991. He was 73.

Almost nobody outside Dresden knew his name.
On July 31, 2010, the Ontario Heritage Trust unveiled a plaque on the main street of Dresden, near the restaurant that had once turned him away. It credits Hugh Burnett and the National Unity Association with laying the groundwork for human rights law across Canada.

Think about the last time you walked into a restaurant and simply sat down.

Nobody asked who you were.

A carpenter lost his business, his town, and his home so that question would never be asked again.

[Cynthia McKinney PhD @cynthiamckinney]

THE U.S. STERILIZED BLACK WOMEN AGAINST THEIR WILL AND ISRAEL STERILIZED ETHIOPIAN JEWS WITHOUT THEIR KNOWLEDGE. Please read about the history of Eugenics in the U.S. in my chapter entitled, Genocide," in my edition, WHEN CHINA SNEEZES. Margaret Sanger is no heroine of mine . . . https://t.co/MRn0NdivvH

[Wilson Lanier 🇺🇸 @chillwil44]

@BurbsBecky This guy is an idiot. No hope for him.

[Wilson Lanier 🇺🇸 @chillwil44]

@Fiuernt You are out of your mind.

[Wilson Lanier 🇺🇸 @chillwil44]

@BurbsBecky YES !!!!!

[Wilson Lanier 🇺🇸 @chillwil44]

@BurbsBecky So true !!!

[Wilson Lanier 🇺🇸 @chillwil44]

@polo_man404 All giving me serious gold digger vibes.

[Wilson Lanier 🇺🇸 @chillwil44]

@td_nash Jeff Hostetler

[Jim Heath @JimHeath2001]

@Its_ereko We really don't hate the British enough.

[New Direction AFRICA @Its_ereko]

Africans haven't forgotten who the Queen was to us. She was the head of an empire built on our subjugation.

The 'First Star of Africa'—the Cullinan Diamonds in her crown and scepter—was mined in South Africa in 1905 under colonial rule. It was taken without the consent of the African people. They have demanded its return for decades. The wealth of the empire was built on what they took from us.

We remember the real history and we must teach our children.

[Wilson Lanier 🇺🇸 @chillwil44]

@diliciousssss Fantastic !!

[Wilson Lanier 🇺🇸 @chillwil44]

@DannyDeraney @BulwarkClips The Moors invented that not the Arabs.

[Carl Niehaus @niehaus_carl]

I listened this morning to Eugene de Kock’s evidence before the Khampepe Commission and I am sick to the pit of my stomach. He is Prime Evil — a mass murderer who earned that name at Vlakplaas. I hold no brief for him. But what he described is a deliberate, systemic protection of the true decision-makers: the senior politicians and the generals of the SAPS and the old SADF, covering the entire State Security Council.

P.W. Botha personally ordered the bombings of Khotso House and COSATU House. Adriaan Vlok honoured those who carried them out. Louis le Grange ordered the bombing of the ANC offices in London and honoured the perpetrators. F.W. de Klerk, longstanding member and former chair of the State Security Council, gave orders for people to be killed. He does not deserve the Nobel Peace Prize; it must be withdrawn posthumously. Roelf Meyer sat on that same Council and served as Minister of Defence. He must be recalled immediately as South Africa’s ambassador to the United States. It is unconscionable that he continues to represent this Republic.

This protection continued under every ANC presidency. Specifically, under former President Jacob Zuma, de Kock was granted parole and a state pension. The facts speak for themselves. Successive ANC administrations chose silence and cover over accountability.

All indemnities and amnesties granted to those responsible must be recalled and rescinded. Those who are dead must be charged posthumously. Those still alive must be charged, face the consequences, and go to prison. There is no other way. Their estates must be sequestrated and the proceeds used for restitution to the victims and their families.

The dead elephant remains in the room: who inside the ANC, including senior leaders, served the apartheid apparatus. These questions can no longer be avoided. The families of the victims have waited long enough. Prestige, amnesty and wealth cannot continue to shield the men who ordered the killings. The evidence demands action. It must be taken.

https://t.co/nwxhyyFeiq

[Wilson Lanier 🇺🇸 @chillwil44]

@Ruthxbsn 3

[Wilson Lanier 🇺🇸 @chillwil44]

@g_morkert The Hall of Shame

["Nkosi, sikelel' iAfrika"-The Negro Subversive @negrosubversive]

This has had more legs than anything else I've ever written, and it was composed in a hurry before I had to clock in for work, because a friend of a friend on Facebook pissed me off.

[Wilson Lanier 🇺🇸 @chillwil44]

@BurbsBecky Ridiculous !!!

[Wilson Lanier 🇺🇸 @chillwil44]

@FirearmBeasts 21

[Wilson Lanier 🇺🇸 @chillwil44]

@1hv_n2 C

[Wilson Lanier 🇺🇸 @chillwil44]

@TheDividedStat3