Black Ice: The Val James Story - Softcover

Gallagher, John J.; James, Mr Valmore

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1770413634 ISBN 13: 9781770413634

Publisher: ECW Press, 2017

Synopsis

The first Black American in the NHL tells his story — now in trade paper

Val James received his first pair of skates for his 13th birthday and by 16, he left his home in New York to play in Canada, where he was the only black person on his junior team and, often, in the whole town. While popular for his tough play and winning personality, the teenager faced racist taunts at opposing arenas. The prejudice he encountered continued at all levels of the game. He became the first African American NHLer when he took to the ice with the Buffalo Sabres in 1982, and in 1987 he was the first black player of any nationality to skate for the Toronto Maple Leafs. In his two NHL stints, James defined himself as a team player known for his pugilistic skills.

As featured in a Fox News Black History Month documentary, on NHL.com, NPR’s Morning Edition, ESPN’s Olbermann, and in Newsday, the L.A. Times, and the New York Times, Black Ice is the untold story of a trail-blazing athlete who endured and overcame discrimination to realize his dreams and become an inspiration for future generations. This edition includes a new afterword that explores James’s legacy.

About this title

About the Authors

After nearly 20 years playing junior and professional hockey, Valmore James settled in Niagara Falls, ON, Canada with his wife, Ina.

Currently a federal prosecutor, John Gallagher is a former White House Fellow and former New York City police officer. He lives with his family in Emmaus, PA.

After nearly 20 years playing junior and professional hockey, Val James settled in Ontario with his wife, Ina. Currently a federal prosecutor, John Gallagher is a former White House Fellow and former New York City police officer. He lives with his family in Pennsylvania.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

CHAPTER ONE: IN THE LION’S DEN

When you are Black in Canada, the arrival of the police on the scene is not always, or even often, reassuring.

Three years ago, on Parliament Street in Toronto’s Cabbagetown neighbourhood, not far from where I live, I had a fender bender. I was exchanging insurance information with the other driver when a police officer came to take charge of the situation. There was nothing really for him to do, but he told me that I should call a tow truck to get my car towed away.

I told him, very politely, that it wasn’t a problem. The car was only dented, and I could easily drive it to a garage. But he insisted.

When I balked, he immediately escalated. “You have to get a tow truck,” he said.

I found this incomprehensible — towing a car away when it only had a dent. But the officer looked at me contemptuously.

“What do I have to do to make sure you do, put a gun in your face?”

For a moment, I could not believe my ears. A threat like that, made almost casually on a busy Toronto street. I was in my late seventies and my first thought was, what if I had been a Black kid in his twenties? Would he have threatened to draw his gun or have simply done so? Far too often in Toronto’s recent history that had been the case, and dozens of Black kids had been killed that way.

That thought angered me, but I was not seeking a confrontation. I said nothing. I called the tow truck.

But I did not want to let the matter pass. I filed an official complaint with the department. I made it clear that I wasn’t asking that the officer be fired but that he receive some kind of counselling to address his threatening behaviour before someone was hurt.

At first, the department brushed aside my complaint with the excuse that the officer was already in trouble for other indiscretions and he was about to be charged. This turned out to be untrue. I pursued my case as far as I could, but it was clear the Toronto police department wasn’t interested in dealing with it. I complained and appealed all the way to the chief of police, Bill Blair.

The department’s investigation showed that the officer had his body speaker turned off during the confrontation. They believed him when he denied saying those words. The verdict was clear. “We can’t substantiate your claim.” End of story.

I did get to see the police report, however, and the opening phrase told me everything I needed to know about what was behind the incident. The report began with, “The complainant, a seventy-seven-year-old Jamaican immigrant . . .”

At the time, I had lived in Canada more than fifty-five years, longer than the officer had been alive, and I had been a citizen for almost fifty years. If I had been a white man, my origins would have been irrelevant. But a Black man, by definition, had to be identified as the “other,” not as someone who had been a Canadian for half a century. I was forever a “Jamaican immigrant.” That is why he could threaten to put a gun in my face and then lie about it.

Who would believe a Jamaican immigrant?

—

Part of my story is about Canada’s uncomfortable struggle with Blackness, which I experienced that day on Parliament Street and on thousands of other occasions. This is a reality in Canada. Even though the first Black in Canada, Mathieu da Costa, arrived with Samuel de Champlain in 1603, Blacks were prevented from settling in Canada in any great numbers until well into the 1970s and that legacy of exclusion continues today.

I arrived on a student visa two decades before the immigration gates were opened to any degree. I am today, even though I visit Jamaica often, thoroughly Canadian. But I hope I will not disappoint my white Canadian friends, of which I am happy to have many, when I say I am not one of those who unrelentingly sing the praises of my adopted country. Despite meeting many nice people, I discovered when I arrived in Canada that it was an unapologetically and insistently white country with a tiny Black minority kept at a fairly steady .02% of the population and largely assigned to jobs as domestics (for women) and railway porters (for men). Things have improved, of course, and the fight to make a better Canada is part of the story I am telling here, but Canada still has a distance to go before it lives up to its ideals.

This is a story of progress made, as well as the challenges remaining. My journey is the journey of a Jamaican who left his country at the age of twenty and who has been part of the evolution in Canada since 1955. Now, as I have entered my eightieth year, I would like to lay down a record of my personal experiences and recount something of the Black struggle in Canada in the last half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. Along the way, I would like to introduce readers, Black and white, to some remarkable women and men that I have had the privilege of knowing and often fighting alongside over the past many decades. These Black Canadians are important for our people to know because they are part of our inspiring legacy in this country. They are important for white people to know because they worked, often in opposition to governments and enforcement bodies, to make Canada a better, more just country. This is an opportunity for you to get to know them, and for the white reader to better get to know Black Canada.

This, I believe, is essential if we are truly to build a harmonious society together. You’ll notice, though, that I do not say “get to know each other.” Because the fact is, we Black Canadians already know white Canada very well. We have to. We know you the same way that the hare knows the lion, from following its every move. And for the same reason. Because in certain circumstances, you can be dangerous to us. My hope is that when you, the white reader, let yourself know us in a more profound way, you will become a little more human and a little less the lion in your dealings with us.

So I welcome all of you, Black and white and all my brothers and sisters of other races, to accompany me on my journey into our collective past. My story is largely a Canadian one because it is in Canada where I built a life, first as a student, then as a high school teacher, and finally as a businessman and media owner and activist. But it begins in a little village in Hanover Parish in Jamaica at a time when Britannia still ruled the waves and most of our small blue planet.

FROM CHAPTER NINE: BUILDING A FAMILY, BUILDING A BUSINESS

While our home life was busy with Nicole and the twins, things were also moving fast on the business front. With the additional time at my disposal after I left teaching, I was able to quickly expand the Tyndall Nursing Home from eighteen to thirty-six beds; with the twenty beds in the Donview home, I now had a total of fifty-six beds to operate, all while running the two rooming houses.

The big change for me came in 1972, when the provincial government brought in a whole slew of regulations for nursing homes that determined everything from the amount of floor space required for every bed to the number of wash basins, along with specific requirements for lighting, ventilation, and heating, as well as detailed new safety regulations. The measures were grandfathered in up to April 27, 1972, so I could have continued to operate my small, rudimentary homes, but the thinking behind the regulations — to improve the lives of nursing home patients — made sense, and I decided to try to consolidate and upgrade. I bought up three licences for a total of thirty-two beds from smaller operations and developed a plan for a new state-of-the-art facility.

This would require major capital — from a business point of view, a leap into the unknown, something I have been willing to do throughout my life. Since this was Canada in the 1970s, I would also have to do my business dealings through a white front man. With most delicate transactions, I generally worked with my friend and accountant and overall financial advisor, Irwin Siderson. Just as Jack Horsley had done in my house search, Irwin would make initial arrangements with white lenders and potential business partners.

For the new facility, I purchased an acre and a half of land in Mississauga at 1060 Eglinton Avenue, southwest of the airport. The lot had a tricky entrance because Little Etobicoke Creek ran through it. Another acre was for sale next door, and my plan was to buy this adjoining acre, give myself an easement to easily enter the original 1.5 acres, and then sell it at a profit. We successfully completed that deal and built our three-story facility as planned, with extra provisions such as additional kitchen and dining spaces as well as an additional elevator shaft roughed in to make it possible to add a fourth floor later. We then discovered that our finances were in order, and we did not have to sell the extra acre; we eventually built a fifty-seven-bed retirement home on the additional land. Gradually, we put together a continuum of care, a kind of seniors’ village, and five years later we added the fourth floor to give us another forty-nine beds for a total of 151.

This was not, of course, a simple matter. From the beginning, the terrain was littered with financial and political land mines. Even the purchase of the additional licences was controversial because, at the time, licences were not supposed to be transferred between counties. One of my new licences came from Mississauga, but the other two came from Etobicoke and Bolton, and this flared onto the front pages of the newspapers when it was discovered that the Bolton transfer was from within Premier Davis’s own riding. As soon as we weathered that storm, I submerged myself in the maze of new regulations that had to be met to construct the facility to the complex new code. This also meant cutting through the red tape to get approval for every element, and Irwin and I were often caught up in the sticky web of regulations. I can remember numerous times when we seemed to have been completely blocked from reaching the goal. But I couldn’t afford to fail. I had sold off the rooming houses for investment capital; when we were stymied by the wall of bureaucracy, we had no choice but to back up and take another run at it — find a way through, or make one — and continue on.

One of the most unpalatable obstacles during this period was the kind of taunting racism I received from banks. It began with the $1.3-million mortgage I negotiated through my broker, Ernie Nock, to build the new facility. In the financial plan, I needed $300,000 in bridge financing to complete the package and it seemed like a done deal. I went to my bank, which I had been dealing with for twelve years, and I was stunned to find the door slammed in my face. I went to meet with Ernie, who had arranged the $1.3-million deal, to give him the bad news. Ernie said, flatly, that there was no business reason for the bank to turn down the bridge financing. We both knew what he meant. They were simply not going to lend money to a Black man. Ernie asked me for the name of the loans officer who had refused me, but he didn’t go to see him. He went instead to the bank manager and told him that the decision of the loans officer made no business sense, and, if it wasn’t reversed, his mortgage company would stop dealing with the bank in any future projects. In reviewing the financial application, the bank manager suddenly decided that it was a good business proposal and approved it over the head of his loans officer.

A few years later, when I discovered that it made sense to purchase a laboratory because we were spending so much on laboratory fees at the nursing home, I ran into more of the same from another bank. The laboratory deal was actually fairly complicated, involving the consolidation of two existing labs, Standard Medical Diagnostics and Ed Bec Paramedical, with my purchasing 51% of the new company. I was about to close the deal with the bank — which recognized that this was a smart move — when the bank manager said to me, “I don’t mind dealing with you. I might not want you to marry my daughter, but I’ll deal with you.”

I had to stop for a moment to take in what he had just said.

“You won’t have to worry about that,” I said, “because it’s obvious your daughter has a lousy pedigree.”

Edition details

• Publisher: ECW Press
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1770413634
• ISBN 13: 9781770413634
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224