It called itself “the eyes, ears and voice of the community.”

And for 23 years it largely fulfilled that promise.  

Contrast Newspaper wasn’t the first Black newspaper in Canadian history.

That was The Voice of the Fugitive, founded in 1851 by two leading abolitionists, the formerly enslaved Kentucky-born orator and writer Henry Bibb, and his Free Black Rhode Island-born wife Mary Bibb, an educator and institution builder. 

Contrast wasn’t the longest running Black newspaper in Canadian history.

That was The Dawn of Tomorrow, founded in London, Ontario in 1923 by the Georgia-born, James Jenkins — father of the renowned Black Canadian social activist and broadcaster Kay Livingstone. The paper was in circulation for nearly 90 years.  

And while it may have been preceded by The Provincial Freeman, The Atlantic Advocate, The Canadian Observer, The Clarion, The Free Lance and The Canadian Negro, Contrast was arguably the most influential Black newspaper in Canadian history. 

The paper punched above its weight.

It had guts. 

It challenged power.

It was loud.

It was self-assured.

It had swagger. 

It was proudly and unapologetically Black.

No Black Canadian newspaper before or since has had a bigger impact on the political discourse and the media landscape in Canada than Contrast. 

No Black Canadian newspaper has been as engaged with its readership as Contrast was. 

No Black Canadian newspaper has meant more to its community than Contrast did.

Contrast was, in fact, much more than a Black Canadian newspaper. 

It was the Black community’s compass. 

Its conscience. 

Its heartbeat.

Its champion.

Emerging at the tail-end of the Civil Rights Movement and at the height of the Black Power Movement, Contrast was founded by the “sweet talking”and charismatic Alvin “Al” W. Hamilton. 

Al Hamilton was a pipe-smoking, bald-headed, goateed, debonair, maverick Black businessman from Alberta with a colourful past. In the 1950s he’d been a porter on the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) until he allegedly “punched out” someone who’d called him a “nigger.” He lost the job. Hamilton had spent time in prison, but the details as to how he’d got there were always sketchy. Upon his release he seemed to have undergone a transformation and sought to pursue a straighter path. He later served as the managing editor of The West Indian News Observer from 1967 to 1969. 

Hamilton became Contrast’s publisher and indefatigable cheerleader. He was a serial hustler. Every week he chased ads. In Contrast’s early days Hamilton worked alongside his co-founder, a preternaturally wise and dynamic young Jamaica-born woman in her early 20s named Olivia “Babsy” Grange. Grange had a knack for cultivating community connections. Her popular weekly “Pepperpot” column kept readers abreast of community happenings — her younger brother Hamlin (Grange) served as editor of Contrast in the early 1980s. She would eventually return to her native Jamaica and become a prominent politician, currently serving as Jamaica’s Minister of Culture. 

From the late 1960s to the 1990s, Contrast told stories about Black life in Canada that mainstream broadsheets like the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Telegram, and the then rabidly anti-Black Toronto Sun, often ignored or downplayed. The Sun featured a columnist, Mackenzie Porter, who was an unapologetic defender of the white supremacist South African Apartheid regime. In a July 24 1985 column, Porter wrote: “For reasons palpable to every reader of history… the average South African black, clad though he may be in a collar and a tie, still embodies some vestiges of a recent Stone Age past.”

The paper had its offices in a building located at 28 Lennox Street in the Bathurst and Bloor corridor. In the 1970s, the edifice would become a hub of Toronto’s burgeoning Black community where civic leaders like Bromley Armstrong, Al Mercury, Wilson Head and Charles Roach would gather. The West Indian scholars Walter Rodney, author of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, and Horace Campbell, author of Rasta and Resistance: From Marcus Garvey to Walter Rodney both made pilgrimages to Contrast’s headquarters.  

Contrast launched with a bang on February 9, 1969. On its front page was the story of the largest campus protest in Canadian history, the Sir George Williams Affair. For 13 days, beginning on January 29, 1969, about 400 Black, white and brown students peacefully occupied the computer centre in the Henry F. Hall Building on the campus of Sir George Williams University, now Concordia University, in downtown Montreal. They were protesting allegations of blatant anti-Black racial discrimination in the classroom. After a police raid, the centre went up in flames causing two million dollars damage. Many students trying to escape the blaze were brutally beaten by police. As the centre burned, a group of onlookers in the city’s streets could be heard shouting “Let the niggers burn! Let the niggers burn!” The phrase later became the title of a seminal book written about the event. The incident was even debated on the floor of Canada’s House of Commons. In the end, 97 students were arrested, 42 of whom were Black, among them Anne Cools, who just 15 years later would  become Canada’s first Black Senator, and Rosie Douglas. While in police custody the student detainees were separated by race. 

Contrast would chronicle Rosie Douglas’ efforts to remain in Canada following his conviction for mischief as the  state-identified ring leader of the Sir George protests. The  foreign national  served 18 months in jail. Douglas was eventually deported  to his homeland of Dominica in the Eastern Caribbean in 1976. In 2000, he became the island nation’s prime minister. 

In 1971 Contrast marked the two-year anniversary of the Sir George Williams incident in this way:

“Let us therefore brighten the future of our people by continuing with revolutionary conviction and undeterred fortitude to complete the very difficult, selfless task we have undertaken. We must engage ourselves in the struggle… Now.”

Contrast’s attitude reflected the prevailing Black revolutionary zeitgeist of the early 1970s. The paper vigorously covered the campaign to free the Black American activist and academic Angela Davis, who faced murder and conspiracy charges which could have resulted in the death penalty. On June 4 1972, Davis was acquitted of all charges.    

Contrast reported on African Liberation Day marches, and demonstrations protesting police brutality. 

The paper provided a detailed accounting of high-profile stories like the coroner’s inquest into the August 9,1978 Toronto police shooting death of 24-year-old Black man Andrew “Buddy Evans” by a white constable. 

It captured the Black community’s horror and outrage in the wake of the 1979 fatal Toronto police shooting of Albert Johnson, a 35-year-old father of four and Jamaican immigrant. 

It discussed the way forward for the aspirational and often fractious National Black Coalition of Canada (NBCC), Canada’s version of the NAACP, and the myriad challenges it faced trying to bind a culturally and regionally diverse organization together.  

Contrast’s public affairs columnists like Patrick Hunter, Errol Townshend and John Harewood wrote about the state of federal, provincial and international politics, immigration, multiculturalism and education. Rella Braithwaite, whose ancestors had escaped from U.S. slavery and settled in the Queen’s Bush region of Southwestern Ontario in the 1840s, enlightened the paper’s readers with weekly stories about Black history. The paper discussed  municipal politics in Toronto with articles about the city’s mayors, David Crombie and John Sewell, both known for their socially progressive views.

Contrast documented the career of the trailblazing Jamaican-born Black Canadian politician and feminist Rosemary Brown, who in 1975 came a close second to Ed Broadbent in the race for the leadership of the federal New Democratic Party.

The paper tracked anti-colonial liberation struggles in Guinea Bissau, Mozambique, Angola, Namibia and Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), along with global anti-apartheid protests against the white supremacist National Party government in South Africa. Contrast charted the development of the New Jewel Movement — led by Maurice Bishop, who for a time when living in Toronto had worked at Contrast — that would mount a revolution and overthrow the authoritarian regime of Eric Gairy in 1979. Bishop became Grenada’s prime minister. He was deposed in a coup in October 1983 and summarily executed. 

Contrast featured articles on Black visual artists from across the African diaspora. It shone a spotlight on Black Canadian musicians like Oscar Peterson, Salome Bey, Archie Alleyne, Eric Mercury Tiki Mercury Clarke, and Dan Hill, along with international superstars like Hugh Masekela, Aretha Franklin, Miriam Makeba, Stevie Wonder, Joan Armatrading, Roberta Flack, Chaka Khan, Peter Tosh, and Bob Marley. It introduced the work of literary artists like pioneering dub poets Lillian Allen and Clifton Joseph the queer activist Makeda Silvera -co-founder of Sister Vision Press- and the award-winning poet, filmmaker, essayist, novelist and revolutionary artist Dionne Brand, now  considered a contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Contrast covered sports at the amateur and professional levels. Whether it was highlighting the successes of the world-beating West Indies men’s cricket teams of the 1970s and 1980s, the championship bouts of the Nova Scotian boxer Clyde Gray, the triumphs of Arthur Ashe at Wimbledon and the US Open, the wizardry of Pele, the brilliance of Canadian superstar basketball player Sylvia Sweeney, CFL quarterbacks Warren Moon, Condredge Holloway and Chuck Ealey, New York Yankees slugger Reggie Jackson, the iconic heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali, NBA superstar Julius “Dr. J.” Erving, NFL running back OJ Simpson, and Black Canadian NHL pioneer Mike Marson. The paper also showcased local soccer tournaments like the Contrast Cup, and covered high school basketball and track and field.   

The paper had a remarkable track record of providing talented emerging Black journalists with opportunities they couldn’t get in Canada’s mainstream media. Contrast became a launching pad for some of Canada’s best writers, many of whom would go on to have illustrious careers: Austin Clarke would become one of Canada’s most celebrated novelists, winning the Giller Prize in 2002 for his magnum opus, The Polished Hoe; Harold Hoyte became the founding publisher and editor of Barbados’ leading newspaper The Nation; Cecil Foster would write for The Financial Post, The Globe and Mail and have a second and third career as a novelist and academic; Jojo Chintoh became a beloved reporter for City TV; Hamlin Grange became a reporter for CBC, a diversity consultant and recipient of the  Order of Canada; Royson James worked for The Toronto Star as an acclaimed urban affairs columnist; Lorna Simms, Contrast’s last editor, went on to launch a paper of her own, called Dawn.

The Trinidadian born Arnold Auguste arrived in Canada in 1970 and spent a few years writing for Contrast before leaving and striking out on his own. In 1978, he launched his own weekly Black newspaper, Share. It remains the longest running Black Canadian newspaper still in existence. 

Norman “Otis” Richmond, a prolific and uncompromising radical political and music journalist/broadcaster in mainstream and community media, whose career now spans over 50 years, worked for Contrast for nine years. He influenced generations of aspiring journalists, like me. Cameron Bailey also wrote for Contrast. He became a prominent film critic for CBC and CTV and is currently the CEO of the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF).

Contrast featured the work of talented Black photographers like Jules Elder, Diane Liverpool and Al Peabody who chronicled the many weekly happenings in Black Canadian communities. Their work foregrounded Black joy, beauty and showed the range of the community’s creative expression presented in the form of fashion shows, pageants and carnival celebrations.

Full disclosure, my own parents, John and Hyacinth Harewood were both national columnists for Contrast beginning in the early 1970s. For a time my mom, Hyacinth, was the in-house poet.

Contrast was a paper for all seasons. 

Its legacy can be found in the stories of the people who remember it most fondly. The folks who faithfully read the paper and those who worked there.

Contrast’s legacy manifests itself when Black Canadian journalists, unlike their forebears, are able to enter the newsrooms of mainstream media outlets across Canada and be respected. 

Contrast’s legacy is revealed every day in journalists who exhibit courage, compassion and creativity. 

It is found in the journalists who cover the world with critical, empathetic eyes but who are also committed to changing it.