In the main hall of the Guelph Collegiate Vocational Institute (GCVI) is a plaque dedicated to the legacy of Alfred Mitchell Lafferty, just outside the school's auditorium which also bears his name.
Dr. Marsha Hinds Myrie and Natalie Brown-Lahey with the plaque at GCVI honouring former principal Alfred M. Lafferty.
GCVI honoured Lafferty in 2018, nearly 150 years after he became Ontario's first Black principal there. The school has a long history; it is the oldest continuously operating public high school in Guelph and the third oldest high school in Ontario. And yet, for well over a century, Lafferty's role as an educator there had been lost. His image too. His portrait is not hung alongside others depicting every principal of the school since its founding.
Putting Name to Face: Celebrating Black Excellence in Teaching in Guelph, Wellington, Waterloo is actively working to change that.
An exhibit featuring 12 Black educators past and present, it opens in the University of Guelph's McLaughlin Library Feb. 3 to mark Black History Month, inviting people to unlearn the history that left so many Black Canadians out of the country's narrative.
"This is why Black History Month is still important, and why it is important not just to look at history generally, but also the history of specific regions," says Dr. Marsha Hinds Myrie. "Black History Month events are still filling in enormous gaps."
Legacy of Black educators in Guelph, Wellington
The exhibit echoes the community-based education philosophy of Hinds Myrie, the organizer and a former U of G activist-in-residence who is now an adjunct professor of Black resistance and organizing in the Department of Political Science and educational developer, anti-oppressive and inclusive pedagogies, in the Office of Teaching and Learning.
For decades, anti-oppressive approaches to teaching and learning have been part of how Black educators approach their work, she says, distinct for being rooted in community.
"Anti-oppressive and inclusive pedagogy is not just a concept, it's a practice," Hinds Myrie says. The exhibit highlights that and offers an opportunity to recommit to the idea that there is not just one story of history, but multiple stories of multiple histories.
In this region, she says, there is a long and significant history of Black contribution to education.
"I want to make sure that all the names and the faces of the people who practice in this space become a part of our history going forward."
Public libraries and community learning
From McLaughlin, the exhibit will travel to the Main Library branch of the Guelph Public Library before it moves to the Westminster Square branch, an intentional choice to make the information as accessible as possible.
"I see it as a way of moving people back into libraries but more importantly to show that Black people have been in libraries and in positions of knowledge making and knowledge keeping for centuries," she says. "It pushes back against some of those stereotypes that feed anti-Black notions in Canada and more broadly."
Lafferty would eventually leave Guelph for Chatham, Ont. In 1875 where he became the first Canadian-born Black lawyer in the province. But his legacy fuels Black educators like Natalie Brown-Lahey, who is featured in the exhibit and walks the halls of GCVI today, an English teacher and chair of the Upper Grand Black Educators Network.
"Calling people into this work, to unearth these stories that still need to be told is not just the work of Black people, it is the work of all of us," says Hinds Myrie. "I believe that my own contributions are the seeds I can plant so that the generations coming after me carry this work further and hopefully create a world that is different than the one I live in."
Putting Name to Face: Celebrating Black Excellence in Teaching in Guelph, Wellington, Waterloo runs Feb. 3-7 at McLaughlin Library; Feb. 10-14 at the Main Library branch; Feb. 17-21 at Westminster Square branch. Following that it will live on the website of the Office of Teaching and Learning.
A screening of the exhibit's documentary, What We Deserve, takes place Feb. 11 at the Main Library branch at 7 p.m.
