From Protestor to Prime Minister
jaime kirzner-roberts, The McGill Daily - Canadian University Press

As smoke billowed from the windows of Concordia's Hall Building and fire raged inside, Rosie Douglas did everything in his power to keep the several hundred students barricaded inside the ninth floor computer lab from panicking. But as police violently tried to push past the protesting students, and as crowds outside chanted "Burn the niggers, let them die," alarmed students hurled computers and data cards from the windows, causing millions of dollars in damage and leading to scores of arrests.

It was 1969, and the Computer Riot, as it later became known, would become a defining moment in Canadian civil rights history. It was also a defining moment for Douglas - then a radical student activist - who would be imprisoned for two years for his role in the riot, and then deported in shackles.

Thirty-one years later, Douglas is sporting a trim grey suit, surrounded by personal bodyguards and drinking a Perrier. It's clear that a lot has changed. The smoke has cleared at Concordia, and Douglas, after years of work with the international communist elite, is the new prime minister of Dominica, the tiny Caribbean country of his birth.

After extensive searches through my backpack, a thorough pat- down, and a paranoid excavation of my tape recorder, his bodyguards let me sit beside Douglas, but keep their eyes on me.

Douglas, after all, is friends with Cuban president Fidel Castro and Libyan leader Moamar Gaddafi. He has led military missions and African liberation movements, confided in Nelson Mandela, been exiled, jailed and deported. He has received unexpected visits from the FBI and CIA. He has been called a nigger and a hero.

But Douglas doesn't seem to be too concerned by any of this. If anything, he wants to put it all behind him.

"I am very happy to come back to Canada," he says in his deep baritone voice. "The passion and love I have for this country is more than many Canadians have themselves. Canada is one of the warmest countries, one of the most cultured countries, one of the most responsible countries." He is beyond disappointed when the Montreal Canadiens lose, and reminisces about the good old days of Jean Beliveau.

Strange things from a man who spent two years in a Canadian prison for protesting against a racist professor and then suffered a humiliating deportation. But international politics being what they are these days - Castro is broke and Gaddafi's friendship, politically speaking, is more of a liability than an asset - Douglas knows his image needs a makeover. Inheriting a poor island, dependent on banana exports, vulnerable to natural disasters, and with a 20 per cent unemployment rate - Douglas has decided to cut some of his losses and appeal to Canada for aid.

"I am very happy to come back to Canada," he repeats. "I hope that I can pressure the government to assist my own country in terms of assisting with development."

Staying out of trouble
When Rosie (Roosevelt) Douglas came to Canada in 1961, at the age of 18, to study agriculture at Guelph University, he had never read a book written by a black person. He had been raised in a good catholic family - with 15 siblings and at least eight half-siblings -and had little in the way of political or racial consciousness. When Douglas' father, a minister for the Dominican government, took him to the airport en route to Canada, Douglas recalls being told to "stay out of trouble." The irony of his father's advice makes Douglas laugh uproariously.

Throughout his four years at Guelph, Douglas did manage to lay low. But instead of returning to his home country upon his graduation, he angered his family by moving instead to Montreal, and enrolling at McGill, and then at Concordia (then known as Sir George Williams), in order to pursue a degree in political science.

It was the mid-1960s, and the status quo was beginning to crumble. The civil rights movement was exploding in the U.S. and Canada, the anti-Vietnam war movement was threatening to topple the American government, and radicalism swept through university campuses like wildfire. By then, Douglas had read the works of Marx and (black rights advocate Marcus) Garvey. Douglas was also the president of Sir George's Caribbean Students Network, and was involved in a number of other student organizations.

"You have to understand that the atmosphere was very different then than it is today for black Canadians," Douglas explains.

"In the 1960s and you were a black woman in this community, you literally had to work as a domestic and if you were a man you had to work in the trades," he says. "Blacks would come to Canada (from the Caribbean), having gone to university, having held top jobs, and they came to Canada and worked as domestic servants."

Douglas describes some of the humiliations he suffered trying to find a job and an apartment in Montreal. But black Canadians saw this type of discrimination as normal, according to him. "They were used to it. They accepted that," he says.

"But at the time, in the 1960s, we had to build the confidence of black people, and blacks and whites had to come together for the common cause. Because racial oppression and degradation was like a constant, and those of us that came from the Caribbean had some more self-confidence, we were not willing to accept any kind of discrimination."

So when word got out in 1968 that Sir George William's biology professor Perry Anderson was allegedly failing all the black students in his class, Douglas got involved. Douglas, and hundreds of other students from Sir George and McGill, demanded that the university take action. The university formed a committee to look into the allegations, but the administrators chose the committee, and students likened several committee members to 'Alabama sheriffs.' The only two black profs on the committee quickly resigned because they felt that the committee was not impartial.

"When the university refused to act, the board of governors refused to act, the Quebec government refused to act, the federal government refused to act, and the students themselves took action and decided to hold a sit-in in the computer centre," says Douglas. "It was significant that we chose the computer centre, it was the nerve centre of the university during the occupation."

The university decided to cut the students a deal: if the sit-in ended, members of the committee would be re-chosen based on students' and administrators' mutual agreement. The students thought this was fair, and began to leave the occupation, figuring that a solution had been found.

"But it was at three in the morning, when there was some of us left cleaning up the place and so on, that the police arrived," says Douglas. "The students realized that they had been lied to, that they had been betrayed. The police started coming inside and we starting pushing them out of the computer room. By five in the morning, an alarm went off saying that there was fire. All we wanted was justice; we were being double-crossed at this point, so when the police came again, we had most of the students at the front. There were some students outside demonstrating in support of us, but the majority outside were saying 'Burn the niggers, kill the niggers.' And we knew that we couldn't give in to that kind of humiliation, that kind of degradation. We had all gone through that before."

When it was all said and done, the school's computer mainframe was destroyed, there was $2 million in damage, several students were hospitalized, and Douglas, along with other students involved in the riot, were taken to jail. The students denied setting the fire - after all, why would they set fire to a building they themselves were locked in? They blamed police agitators, but the courts didn't buy it. Douglas, Ann Cools (now a Liberal senator), and 95 others were convicted. Douglas got the longest sentence of all - a whopping two years compared to Cools' six months.

Professor Perry Anderson continued to teach at Concordia until 1995. After sixteen months in a Canadian prison, Douglas was deported.

Getting back into politics
When he returned to his native country a Marxist and outspoken activist, Douglas was not welcomed with open arms. When he tried to organize a union drive for the island's agricultural workers, some of whom worked on his father's farm, he was publicly disowned. The conservative government of Patrick John wanted him out.

"The stigma of being violent, of being a communist, of being a terrorist, that stigma stuck on," he says. "When I was walking the streets with my friends, people would say, 'There goes the communist, there goes the terrorist.' But all I was fighting for was to be black and to be a human being, that's all."

Douglas joined the resistance to John's government. In 1978, John was ousted in a coup and replaced by a coalition government that included Douglas and his brother Michael. But when Hurricane David hit Dominica in 1979, the island country was forced to turn to the U.S. for badly needed foreign aid. The aid was contingent upon the dismissal of the leftist faction of the coalition, Douglas believes, and he quickly lost his job.

"I began making contacts. I knew I had to get back into politics," he says. "But by then I was banned from everywhere - from Trinidad, Barbados, Puerto Rico, Bermuda, Canada and the U.S. It was pretty much a general ban."

So Douglas went to Cuba and then Libya, where he worked as an executive member of the Centre to Resist Imperialism, Racism, Backwardness, and Fascism. He also worked actively in the campaign to free Nelson Mandela.

When Douglas returned to Dominica to run for Parliament in 1980, the Libyan government funded his election campaign. He lost, but won in 1985, thanks to more Libyan support. By 1990, Douglas' brother Michael had become the leader of the Labour Party, which formed the official opposition. When Michael died, Rosie took over. Finally, this past January, Rosie was voted the country's new prime minister.

These days, he's not much for answering questions about his time in Libya or the help he received from Gaddafi's government over the years. Working for a military dictatorship is not the kind of thing that goes over well in international circles these days.

When asked about his current relationship with the Libyan government, Douglas' answers are vague.

"When I was elected [in Dominica], I inherited a country in bad shape. I had to immediately begin to build new bridges, give the economy some room to breathe, link up with Scandinavian and European labour groups and labour parties, the Socialist International, and there are a number of progressive men and women who we have been working with," he says.

When discussing whether his friendship with Gaddafi has affected his ability to attract foreign investment and aid, Douglas gets defensive but remains vague.

"In many, many countries of the world, except maybe the United States, Gaddafi is an acceptable person, and his contribution to revolutions in many countries is accepted. I refuse to allow negative comments about Gaddafi to be a factor."

Douglas pauses for a moment, and then adds, "I'm not going to compromise my fundamental principals, even when it would be easier to go into politics and pretend not to be progressive, not to be able to speak out against injustices. I have decided to go forward, because the wind of truth is better than the wind of lies and disgrace."

Passion for Canada
Thirty-one years after Douglas' deportation, it is remarkable that he can pack a hall full of people. But he did just that on September 17, when he spoke at Concordia's Hall Building, the same building where he and his peers made history in 1969. The number of black people in their mid-50s in the audience suggests that Douglas is well-remembered by those who knew him - or knew of him - back then. The number of young people present suggests that his history of resistance strikes a chord with today's youth, who are themselves pushing for change.

"Time has proven that our intentions were honourable," Douglas says. "The contribution that we [members of the civil rights movement] have made is not just for ourselves. It was a self-sacrificial thing, it was a sacrifice that has improved Sir George Williams University, and has affected Canadian history and our society."

Douglas says that the Canadian dream of multiculturalism is a beautiful one. He believes that his actions, more than 31 years ago, helped build this dream, and, in the process, built a foundation for change.

"The principles that were defended were for all of Canada," he says. "By adhering to those principles, we made the county bigger and stronger and more confident."

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