Celebrating three Black trailblazers in the field of law

Firsts are bittersweet: both a proud declaration of hope, of progress, and an accidental conjuring of the void that came before it. Change, it turns out, tends to happen slowly.

And who does it take to change things? For its first Black History Month event, Ryerson University’s Faculty of Law, which concluded its inaugural semester earlier this year, partnered with its Black Law Students’ Association to answer that question. Together, they held a panel honouring  Charles Roach, Lincoln Alexander and Juanita Westmoreland-Traoré – three Black trailblazers whose indelible contributions to the legal system changed Canadian society forever.

The panel made those changes felt by grounding them in the present moment. “It’s important to acknowledge that these three exemplary individuals are in no small way responsible for my being here today to welcome another group of brilliant leaders,” said Donna Young, the inaugural dean of the Faculty of Law, who is of Jamaican and Belizean descent. 

The leaders she introduced were Justices Michael Tulloch, Harry LaForme, Gregory Regis and Lori-Anne Thomas. The four were led in conversation by moderator Charlene Theodore, the first Black president of the Ontario Bar Association, who teased out vignettes from each speaker about how these three giants inspired them to make their own imprints on the legal system.

Tulloch, the first Black judge appointed to the Ontario Court of Appeal, shared that his introduction to the legal profession happened through a reception hosted by Roach, a great civil rights leader who actively rejected the oppression of the British monarchy, advocated for police accountability in the face of sustained killings of unarmed Black men in the 1970s and 1980s, and helped asylum seekers flee persecution to find refuge in Canada. 

For Regis, Alexander – the first Black Canadian to be an MP and Cabinet minister, among other honours – was a paragon of “Caribbean audacity” who, throughout his illustrious career, “oozed a sense of public service,” from his military record to his viceregal service to his governing of the Canadian Unity Council. And Thomas found a north star in Westmoreland-Traoré, who was the first Black dean of any Canadian law school and the first Black judge in Quebec, to name a few of her milestones. “No one breaks a glass ceiling without being cut, and I can only imagine what her Honour, and what my co-panellists, have gone through being the first, or being the only,” she said. 

Indeed, some of Thomas’ co-panellists were intimately familiar with the tribulations that she described. Justice LaForme, the first Indigenous person to sit on any appellate court in Canada, noted the loneliness of being a trailblazer, of getting there first. Traoré, he said, only entered law school a couple of years before he did, and for him the environment was difficult, “alien,” as he described it. “To be a Black woman at that time – I can’t even imagine how courageous she was,” he said. “She was alone.” In fact, Traoré spent a large part of her career trying to improve the conditions of her social world, and made several noteworthy rulings that set crucial precedents in the area of discrimination.

Still, LaForme lamented the slow pace of change. The context in which he worked was one that was marked by this very same loneliness – encircled by white colleagues who did not understand his heritage, the way he thought, or the way he grew up. His salvation, he said, was making a conscious effort to surround himself with other Indigenous people – a community-based survival technique that, unfortunately, is still a necessary practice today.

“If you walk into any law firm, you aren’t going to see a wave of Black faces unless it’s a Black law firm, the same way you’d need to walk into an Indigenous law firm [to find Indigenous people],” he said. “You’re still going to see a sea of white faces, wherever you go. That’s why it’s so important to stay connected … it’ll help you deal with the loneliness.”

Theodore, herself, emphasized the importance for future legal leaders to acknowledge the power of being the first in a space. It isn’t often, for example, that a new law school opens and a program is built from scratch. Toronto’s other two law schools, the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Law and Osgoode Hall Law School, were established in 1887 and 1889 respectively. They’re historical institutions whose low enrolment rates for Black and Indigenous students are mirrored in the 3.2 per cent of lawyers in Ontario who are Black.

“These are institutions that were designed for a specific sector of the Canadian population,” says Theodore. “They weren’t designed for women, or Black Canadians, or Indigenous people. They weren’t designed for anyone from the LGBTQIA+ community, or people from a range of socioeconomic classes.” The consequence of this is a legal system made up of mostly white, heterosexual men setting the agenda for a population whose lived experiences it does not reflect or fully comprehend.

What impresses her about Ryerson’s approach, she says, is both the diversity of the program’s students and the school’s commitment to access, inclusion and equity. Ryerson has the benefit of hindsight and a fresh start, which gives it the power to carve out a new space in the legal community through teachings anchored in an understanding of how the criminal justice system has and continues to disadvantage marginalized communities. 

“Trust me, the students at Ryerson today are still going to be trailblazers. And the reason they are is because there aren’t that many of us out there,” said LaForme. “These young people – they’re still going to be firsts.”

And if Ryerson’s law school keeps its promise, LaForme said, then Black and Indigenous students will find themselves a lot less lonely, and Canada will see a wealth of new leaders gliding into the future on the coattails of the trailblazers who dreamed that moment for them.

To watch the panel in its entirety, visit the Faculty of Law’s website. 

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• Faculty of Law’s first cohort fosters strong community from afar