Carrie Best

It was December 1941, in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia.

At the Roseland Theatre, several Black high school girls had just been forced out of the whites-only section. Carrie Best went to see the owner. She asked him to change the rule. He refused.

A few days later, she came back with her son, Calbert. They sat on the main floor.

The police removed them. They were charged with disturbing the peace. They had to pay a fine.

Carrie Best did not stop there. She filed a lawsuit. The hearing took place on May 12, 1942. She lost, and was ordered to pay the costs.

She had lost. She was not finished.

She was born in New Glasgow on March 4, 1903. Her parents, James and Georgina Prevoe, had little schooling, but they valued education.

She wrote her first poems at four. As a teenager, she was already sending opinion letters to the newspapers.

At the time, no nursing school in Canada accepted African Canadians.

At the end of the First World War, a race riot broke out in New Glasgow. Her mother walked through the crowd to fetch her son.

In 1925, Carrie married Albert Best, a sleeping-car porter. They had a son, Calbert, and also took in foster children.

Then came 1946.

With Calbert, she founded The Clarion. At first it was only a small sheet, a bulletin for New Glasgow's Black community. It was the first newspaper published in Nova Scotia expressly for its Black citizens.

Viola Desmond had been arrested for sitting in the whites-only seats. At the same Roseland Theatre in New Glasgow.

In The Clarion, Carrie Best asked readers to help pay Viola Desmond's costs. Desmond was not pardoned until 2010.

In 1956, the paper became The Negro Citizen and circulated across the country.

Carrie Best also took up the microphone. Starting in 1952, her radio show, The Quiet Corner, aired for twelve years on four Maritime stations. From 1968 to 1975, she wrote a column called "Human Rights" in the Pictou Advocate.

In 1975, she founded the Kay Livingstone Visible Minority Women's Society, which offered scholarships to Black women. In 1977, at 74, she published her autobiography, That Lonesome Road.

She was made a Member of the Order of Canada in 1974, then an Officer in 1979.

Carrie Best died on July 24, 2001, in New Glasgow. She was 98.

Her way of holding a whole community together through words echoes Ubuntu, without merging with it: when one is shown the door, it is everyone's story.

One day in 1941, she had been thrown out of a theatre's main floor. Then she wrote, for decades.