How a mixed marriage 70 years ago helped change a Toronto family
'We have such a diverse society today because people like my parents put love ahead of all'
When Sheila White thinks about Valentine's Day, she can't help but reflect on the unlikely relationship of her parents, Bill and Vivian, a relationship that's documented in a treasure trove of letters that emerged this past summer, shortly after her mother died.
But these are not love letters.
If anything, they could best be termed "hate letters."
They're also a testament, White says, to how far society has come since the 1940s in the acceptance of mixed marriages.
Vivian Keeler was a stenographer in post-Second World War Halifax, who was introduced in 1946 to Bill White, a social worker whose brother ran a local store that Vivian frequented.
Bill and Vivian met and hit it off immediately, White says, despite the fact that each was already in a steady relationship and — more significantly — that Bill was black and Vivian white.
The courtship blossomed, but times being what they were, it happened largely in secret.
"They met as much as possible and and went out for walks and had a romance," White said. "And then Bill was summoned to Toronto to begin a job and very much wanted Vivian to come with him."
Vivian agreed to move to Toronto to be with him. And that's when the secrecy ended.
That's also when the letters started coming from Vivian's stunned, angry family — a co-ordinated campaign that was aimed at convincing Vivian to leave Bill and return to her family.
From her uncle, John Riseborough, in Nov., 1946:
"I have known some very cultured negro's, but to see them mixing socially with white people, there is always a line drawn & intermarriage with them, only results in misery on both sides ... Viv, I might say again that perhaps you love him, or perhaps you only think you do, I wish I could take you into the n***** section of Boston. It alone would convince you of what only could come of your marriage to a colored person, it will mean the cutting off of yourself from all your relations, & kinfolk, & in later life you will deeply regret it."
And from her mother, Jean, on Mothers Day, 1947, just a month before the couple was married:
"What a Judas you are — betraying your own mother — crucifying me every time you allow that ***** to touch you. Why you permitted his first insidious touch I shall never be able to understand. Don't you realize you are betraying everyone who has ever taken any interest in you?
"You are opening the way for any rude colored fellow to make advances to any white girl which is a crime now as always. If such marriages are not right in principle they are not right for anyone. Such love should be "cut out." It offends!
"Nothing but tragedy could result from such a union. One sees it in the eyes of the children of such marriages. They will ask you "why couldn't we be one thing or the other."
And from a Baptist minister in New Brunswick:
"In consideration of your children, there would be only one step by which you could justify such a marriage. That would be to go to a hospital and have yourself sterilized ahead of time."
But the disapproval wasn't confined to her mother's family, White says.
She reads a sermon written by her paternal grandfather, a black clergyman: "He says he's performed marriages between Chinese people and whites, Japanese and whites, and in every instance this was something nauseating to him."
The same tone — alternating between chastisement, pleading and anger — continues through the letters from Vivian's family, more than two dozen in all.
Once Bill and Vivian married in June of 1947, the chasm between Vivian and her family back east seemed unbridgeable. The couple eventually bought a farmhouse in what is today a bustling Scarborough neighbourhood, a house which remains in the family to this day.
But Vivian's family wanted no contact, a freeze which continued into the late 1940s.
"Relations thawed when my oldest brother was born — her mother sent her some flannel sheets so Vivian could make diapers for the baby," says White. "But they actually don't see each other until my sister was born in 1951, and by the time I was born everything was normal.
"I had no hint that my grandmother at one point thought that I should never be born and was not worthy of an existence."
In the end, Vivian and Bill had five children, all of whom have gone on to prominent positions, she says, in the arts, business and science. Sheila herself has been a political aide to former Toronto Mayor Mel Lastman, a candidate herself, and an adviser to the provincial NDP.
Her father Bill went on to become an Order of Canada recipient, as the first black person to run for federal office, with Tommy Douglas's Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, the forerunner of the NDP. He died suddenly in 1981 at 65.
Vivian never re-married.
"It showed me the power of love," White says of the packet of letters. "If this was not a Black History Month story, it would be a Valentines Day story — how two people of different ethnic persuasions, different skin colours were not bowed or swayed in their devotion to each other, in spite of these very hostile letters from close family members."