Transcript: Breaking Ice

Kim Thúy [00:00:02] Imagine a museum of the future … made up entirely of the stories we tell each other. Not the history that is captured in textbooks, but in the voices of the people who lived it. Which stories would resonate with you? Which ones do you think will last? And which will go on to shape how we live our lives, now and in the future?

[00:00:31] Welcome to Artifactuality … a podcast series featuring remarkable stories generously shared with the Canadian Museum of History. I’m your host, Kim Thúy.

[SFX: HOCKEY GAME]

[00:00:47] On this episode of Artifactuality: Breaking Ice.

Percy Paris [00:00:52] For those of us of African descent, we look for heroes that look like us.

Kim Thúy [00:01:00] The sound of hockey is considered by many to be the sound of Canada itself … blades carving the ice, athletes slamming the boards, the cheering crowds…

[00:01:18] And while the NHL is often the first thing that comes to mind when we talk about hockey, it is a league that has been dominated by white men. Willie O’Ree, the NHL’s first Black player, made history when he joined the Boston Bruins. But that didn’t happen until 1958.

[00:01:44] Willie came from a long tradition of Black hockey players in Eastern Canada, the birthplace of the Colored Hockey League of the Maritimes. It was started in 1895, way before the NHL.

[00:02:00] At its height. The CHLM consisted of more than 12 teams, scattered across the maritime provinces, with hundreds of players. Hockey rinks might not have explicitly stated “white players only,” but Black players rarely enjoyed prime ice time, so its seasons were short.

[00:02:26] Nonetheless, the league created its own roster of stars: Henry “Braces” Franklyn, the goalie known for slamming his body down onto the ice to stop a puck; Eddie Martin, credited by some as a pioneer of the slap shot; Herbert W. Allison, Gus Adams, James E. Dixon…the list is long.

[00:02:55] Then there was the legendary Frank Cooke who played for the Amherst Royals. His own story went mostly untold until his granddaughter, Elizabeth Cooke Sumbu, started doing some digging of her own. She’s the former Executive Director of CANSA, the Cumberland African Nova Scotian Association, and founder of COOKE SUMBU Consulting. Elizabeth spoke to the Museum about memories of her grandfather, and about life for Black people in Nova Scotia, then and now.

Elizabeth Cooke Sumbu [00:03:31] My name is Elizabeth Cooke Sumbu, and I’m an eighth-generation African Nova Scotian. My family arrived here on the shores in 1783 with the other enslaved persons. And on the other side, my family came from Prince Edward Island, also arriving as enslaved persons. So there’s quite a history to our family and how we got here. And we’ve been able to trace a lot of that history.

[00:04:01] My grandfather was, I guess, really well known in the community. He loved to dance. He loved to dress up. During the war years, he was in the Second World War. He was a drummer. So we do have pictures of him in front of his trucks and playing his drums in the Army and things like that, plus a portrait picture of him that I had found here in my home years ago. Someone had kind of tucked it away, but we found it. But we don’t have a lot of keepsakes from those days.

Kim Thúy [00:04:33] Even though he was one of the stars of the Colored Hockey League, Frank Cooke was so modest, Elizabeth didn’t know about her grandfather’s achievements on the ice until much later in her life.

Elizabeth Cooke Sumbu [00:04:46] Once the Colored Hockey League was brought to my attention, I reached out to my brother, who had been a hockey player, and he said that our grandfather never really talked about it. We knew that he had played, but to know what position or whether he liked it or didn’t like it, very little was said about that. So, to have heard stories other than the fact that my grandfather was very quick on his feet, very fast and liked to laugh and joke around … other than that, I have no knowledge of his skating abilities or his habits around hockey or what he actually thought about it.

Kim Thúy [00:05:28] It’s important to note that the founders of the Colored Hockey League weren’t athletes or even players. Black Baptist church leaders and Black intellectuals created the league as a way to get more boys to attend Sunday Service. The promise of hockey games after church was irresistible, and the league became so popular it quickly branched out to the rest of the Maritime provinces.

Elizabeth Cooke Sumbu [00:05:57] The league wasn’t just for Nova Scotia. There was a league in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and PEI, and they would do the circuit and play against each other. And we did see newspaper clippings that talked about what a great and exciting game that was at an arena in Moncton, for example, and how entertaining the hockey players were during the intermission, where they would come out and do twirls and act like clowns and do things to entertain the crowd. So that was part of that whole hockey experience. Not only were they all Black, but they were performers.

[00:06:35] So when we think about it today, when I think about it today, to come home and talk about the fact that we were part of the Colored Hockey League of the Maritimes, it was more of an undertone of, you know, racism at its best. Stay quiet in our corner and just make it happen. Because when we look back at the history here in our community, our hockey players were playing on the marshlands and playing on the hill and other flooded areas in town during the winter months. It wasn’t until 1903 that the Colored Hockey League Amherst Royals were allowed to play on an indoor arena, rink. 1903. Can you imagine?

Kim Thúy [00:07:23] This was the kind of racism Black people in Nova Scotia dealt with on and off the ice.

Elizabeth Cooke Sumbu [00:07:31] In our particular community we weren’t unique. We had places where we could go and could not go. You didn’t go to the restaurants. If you went to the theatre, there was a section where you usually had to sit. We had our own Black church. Our schools up here were not segregated, they were mixed. All during my parents’ era and prior to that, there were certain areas where you had to live. There were certain areas where you were buried. We have several graveyards here in our community where the Blacks were all buried at the back.

Kim Thúy [00:08:05] And the reverberating effects of racism linger today in Nova Scotia, home to one of Canada’s oldest Black populations.

Elizabeth Cooke Sumbu [00:08:15] Today in the community we live and in the province that we live in, they are working very hard to make changes. We’re starting to understand what “trauma-informed” means in our society when we’re talking about Black people and what we’ve been carrying all these years, and how it’s played out in our lives today and how we’re living.

[00:08:37] You know, I grew up in a home where my family would tell us, “You keep your place,” you know, “don’t say anything rude to the white man. He’s been good to you.” You know, when you grow up like that and you’re polite to people now, but when you reach my age and you look back and you think, like, “what was that all about?” You can teach people to be respectful, but did you have to throw the race card in there? You know … so there’s a lot that we still have to do. Our community is quite divided on where they are.

[00:09:06] But in terms of racism, whether they want to embrace the new movement with Black Lives Matter and unpack your white privilege, they … some of them are still uncertain whether they want to say certain words or not. So we struggle, we’re in a small community and um, you know, we have some Black leaders now which has made a real difference in our community. And it’s not all song and dance, like, we have other abilities. We have doctors, we have lawyers, we have dentists, we have people in this community who have risen above.

[00:09:40] But racism is alive and well in Nova Scotia. We feel we’re distinct here. We came as a certain group of people at a certain time in history. And we’ve had to fight for everything we’ve had. People like to say, well, you know, get over it. It’s like you’re getting an education now. You’ve got this, you’ve got that. Well, we’d love to get over it, but until you can acknowledge the past and accept it, nobody’s saying you have to take the blame or hold the blame. But those are the things that we struggle with in our community to try to move forward. So, we’re making a few inroads and there’s many of us who are working very hard on the front lines and, we shall overcome.

Kim Thúy [00:10:22] By the late 1930s, the league was no more … for many reasons, including the impact of the Depression and the Second World War. Elizabeth’s own grandfather, Frank Cooke, died in a veteran’s hospital in 1967 of tuberculosis, a recurrence of a disease he caught when he served in the First World War. But then came the ’70s, and a new generation of Black hockey players reemerges on the scene.

Percy Paris [00:10:57] I got into sport because it was a natural progression from the time I was born. My father was quite an athlete, so it was only natural for his children — at least the male siblings of the family — to follow in his footsteps.

Kim Thúy [00:11:18] This is Percy Paris. He’s an eighth-generation African Nova Scotian, and a prominent politician and activist. He was part of the first all-Black line in Canadian university hockey back in the ’70s. By then, the CHLM had long disbanded. Black kids were still playing hockey, but not in any kind of organized way. For Percy, the love of the game was ignited by the natural environment around him and family tradition.

Percy Paris [00:11:54] So shortly after learning to walk, our father had us out playing catch and skating on the ponds. And the next step was to put on a pair of skates. Though it was as natural for us, because it was introduced early in our lives, to be to be competitive, to be athletic, and to participate.

[00:12:20] My role model as a kid was and remained my father, who was a gifted athlete in his own right. And not only was he a gifted athlete, but he was a gentleman very well versed in language and was a great speaker, very active politically, very well respected in society, period. So he was my role model and I would say my hero. He made sure that we were all — and always — involved in sport. And back in those days, it was hockey in the winter and baseball in the summer. And even though hockey was an expensive game to play, one of the benefits I had is that I wasn’t the oldest, so I always had some second-hand equipment that was passed down through the ages. And I also had friends that were eager and keen to pass on hockey equipment.

Kim Thúy [00:13:31] The age-old tradition of equipment swaps and hand-me-downs skates has allowed many players to participate in a sport that can sometimes be prohibitively expensive. And back then, Percy and his friends found clever ways to get as much ice time as possible.

Percy Paris [00:13:50] The number one thing that happened in my life when it came to hockey was being a rink rat. So I became a rink rat. My older brother was a rink rat. There were other people in the area that were rink rats. That meant that you could get into the games for nothing. That you could get free ice time, that you could have scrimmages on the ice with the other rink rats. It meant so much that you could collect equipment that people would either leave behind or forget about. So, it opened up a whole new avenue for a lot of us when it came to playing hockey in the minor leagues.

[00:14:35] If somebody tossed away a pair of gloves, the rink rats we had a locker that these gloves would go in and it was a community locker. So anybody that needed a pair of gloves for a hockey game would go in a locker, search for a pair. But you put them back afterwards because it was shared by all the rink rats. And some of the older rink rats would utilize that locker for other kids that they knew needed whatever the case may be.

[00:15:04] There was a locker for skates. People would discard skates because now their sons are too big for them and they needed a bigger size. So instead of throwing them to the dump or in the trash, they would donate them to this community bin. So there were ways to work around it.

[00:15:24] And watching a hockey game, if you were at a senior game and there was a huge competition, if one of the players broke a stick, the competition was who’s going to get that stick first? Because can that stick be repaired and can it be utilized somewhere else? So we had that going for us.

[00:15:45] But also, I can’t eliminate the fact that back in the ’50s and the ’60s, is, we loved Pond Hockey. Pond Hockey was like … you had free range kids. You had all these kids on the pond and sometimes there would only be one puck. And so that’s where you learned the agility, and the stick handling, and you develop skills when you get all of these kids fighting over one puck. We would play “Keep Away.” And sometimes if there were enough kids, we’d have two, two teams and we played against one another. So Pond Hockey had a huge impact on the development of kids’ hockey back then.

Kim Thúy [00:16:31] If Percy and his friends weren’t hanging around rinks or carving up ponds, they were gathering around radios, listening to games, or flipping through magazines for any news of their favourite players.

Percy Paris [00:16:45] We grew up in a household where we looked at Sports Illustrated, we looked at the Hockey News. The Hockey News when I was a kid was the Bible of hockey in Canada. So we would religiously read the Hockey News. But what I would do is I would go through the line scores, who scored the goals and who got penalties, looking for names that I recognized, and the names that I recognized and that resonated with me, were the names of Willie O’Ree, Stan “Chook” Maxwell, Herb Carnegie, the Carnegie Brothers, and Danny McIntyre. So these were players that I would hear about mostly through my dad that were Black athletes that were just excellent hockey players. And as I later found out, great individuals. So that always piqued my interest. And I heard about these great things these individuals were doing on the ice.

[00:17:53] And then on top of all of that, in Nova Scotia, there was a senior hockey league which had just fantastic hockey players, and there were a couple Black hockey players that played in that league. So there was always a desire because as a youth, when you look for heroes, and maybe without knowing it. And for those of us of African descent, we look for heroes that look like us. Who resembles Percy Paris? And it seemed only natural that these individuals I would be attracted to. And then to think that there’s a relationship there that ties us blood-wise.

Kim Thúy [00:18:37] Turns out Percy is distantly related to the late great Stanley “Chook” Maxwell, one of the first Black hockey players out of Nova Scotia to turn pro. He inspired Percy’s own leap into the pros.

Percy Paris [00:18:56] I played minor hockey in Windsor, Nova Scotia, and when I played minor hockey, there wasn’t the huge cost to play that there is today. There was a cost attached to it, but registration was free. And then I went on after Windsor, went to university in Halifax at St Mary’s, and I was fortunate enough to play with the St Mary’s Huskies varsity team. And that’s where Darrell Maxwell, Bob Dawson, and myself formed the first and only all-Black hockey line in intercollegiate history.

Kim Thúy [00:19:36] However, Percy wasn’t handed that spot on the team.

Percy Paris [00:19:40] I’d love to say they recruited me. When I didn’t make the team initially, I didn’t give up. I enrolled with the Junior Varsity Squad and I was playing senior hockey around the Halifax area while going to St Mary’s. And then I got the call to suit up for the Huskies and the call came from a very close friend of mine, somebody that I went to high school with, who was the goaltender on the hockey team. And I remember it well, he came looking for me and first he said, “I’ve been looking for you all day. They want you to suit up. They want you to play with the Huskies.” And I said, I think he was joking and pulling my leg. He said, “no.” He said, “this is serious. Go to the rink, get some equipment, and you’ll be at practices at such and such times.” And I was on the team. So it went from a very low to a high.

Kim Thúy [00:20:40] His joy over making the hockey team, for being part of the first all-Black line, was soon dampened by the abuse he faced for the same achievement: for being first, for being great, and for being Black.

Percy Paris [00:20:59] There’s always been racism in Nova Scotia. When I played minor hockey, racial slurs were commonplace. And that hasn’t changed even today. Even today, individuals of African descent are still subject to abuse on the ice. The atmosphere back in the … we had just gone through the ’60s. We had just entered into the ’70s. We just finished with the huge civil rights unrest in the United States, which had an impact on Canada. So the ’70s, things had calmed down a bit, but there was still that turbulence going on with respect to Black and white. So racism was alive and well. Blacks were at the low end of the economic scale, which meant that the cost of hockey was very prohibitive for the Black hockey players if your parents didn’t have that income coming in that would support you playing minor hockey. It was very detrimental not only just to your development, but to your participation.

[00:22:11] So as time went on and the Blacks began to get more stable, things began to change. But it’s always cheaper. Basketball and hockey clash when it comes to the seasons that they’re played in, so it’s a lot cheaper for sons and daughters to play basketball than it is to play a sport such as hockey. So hockey over the years has built up this racial divide, has built up these systemic barriers that have traditionally kept Blacks from fulfilling their destinations when it came to the game of hockey.

Kim Thúy [00:22:52] Percy’s own destiny on ice was interrupted when he got into a bad car accident while in university — one that meant he used a wheelchair for a time. Though the accident ended his climb up the hockey ladder, it didn’t end his love for the game.

Percy Paris [00:23:11] So what I couldn’t do with my skates now was speed. I now developed better mental skills and better puck-handling skills and being in the right place at the right time. So it was a different game for me, but still enjoyable and still fun. So for years and years and years I played competitive gentlemen’s hockey. I say “gentlemen’s” and I say that somewhat with tongue in cheek. A lot of the games weren’t very gentlemanly. There were still racial slurs being directed my way. And on my team there were other Black hockey players. Sometimes we had as many as three. We were the brunt of racism. So even at that age, racism was still a factor.

[00:24:06] This holy sanctuary called hockey was a white person sport. And if you’re Black, you should be out shooting hoops or doing something more dedicated to your race, to your ethnicity. And so, again, I think it’s because a lot of the players that were doing this because of their privilege in life, their white privilege in life, that “How dare you, as a Black male, come out here and try to play this game called hockey? It belongs to us and don’t try to invade it.”

Kim Thúy [00:24:44] Like Elizabeth Cooke Sumbu, Percy acknowledges that things have improved for Black players, but more needs to be done to combat racism on and off the ice, and to acknowledge the contributions that players of colour have made to the game of hockey at every level.

Percy Paris [00:25:04] There has been some change, but I reiterate there’s too many incidents of racism in sport that still go on today. Whether it be in the National Hockey League, whether it be in the minor pros, whether it be in junior, whether it be in the minor ranks. Too many cases of racism still happen. I think the National Hockey League has an obligation not only just morally, but it’s about correcting the wrongs of history. The National Hockey League should recognize the contributions of the Colored Hockey League. I think the National Hockey League could easily do this within the Hockey Hall of Fame. That’s an easy fix. I think if they started doing that, you would see other organizations do that as well. But I think it should start at the very, very top. And the top is the National Hockey League.

[00:26:03] I remain a fan. I still enjoy sitting down and watching a good game of hockey. I was, for years, a season ticket holder for the local junior team. But again, I see some things in the sport. And as good as these individuals are, I still see room for improvement and how they could be better.

[00:26:27] And what I find in Nova Scotia is when you start talking about racism, people get defensive. And when they get defensive, there’s no more communication because once you’re trying to defend what it is you said, or what it is you did, you’re not listening to the other side. You’re too busy trying to defend your own actions. So we’ve got a ways to go. Have we made some progress? Absolutely. But I wouldn’t want anyone to think that we’ve arrived. Even when you think we’ve arrived, you look and there’s still another step to go.

[SFX: HOCKEY GAME]

Kim Thúy [00:27:12] For players like Frank Cooke and Percy Paris and so many others, hockey is more than a game. It’s about building communities, fostering joy, and nourishing talent. But more needs to be done to break down barriers so the national sport can be enjoyed by anyone who loves hockey and wants to play.

CREDITS:

Kim Thúy [00:27:40] Thanks for listening to Artifactuality, a podcast of the Canadian Museum of History. I am Kim Thúy.

Artifactuality is produced by Makwa Creative and Antica Productions. Tanya Talaga and Jordan Huffman are the Executive Producers at Makwa. Lisa Gabriele is the Producer, Andrea Varsany is the Associate Producer, and Sophie Dummett is the Researcher for Antica. Laura Reghr and Stuart Coxe are Executive Producers at Antica. Mixing and sound design by Alain Derbez.

Jenny Ellison and Robyn Jeffrey of the Canadian Museum of History are the Executive Producers of this podcast.

The interviews with Elizabeth Cooke Sumbu and Percy Paris were conducted by Rhonda C. George.

Daniel Neill, Researcher, Sport and Leisure, is the Museum’s Podcast Coordinator.

Check out historymuseum.ca for more stories, articles and exhibitions from the Museum.

To see photos of Frank Cooke and Percy Paris, check out the links in our show notes.