Kay Livingstone

It was 1951, in Toronto.

One woman would gather friends together. Little by little, those gatherings became something else: a mutual aid association.

That woman was Kay Livingstone.

That year, with other women, she helped found the Canadian Negro Women's Club. It would become the Canadian Negro Women's Association. She was its first president.

Kathleen Jenkins was born in London, Ontario.

Her parents, James and Christina, published a newspaper for the Black community of the region: The Dawn of Tomorrow.

Her father was also an assistant judge in the juvenile court. He died in 1931. Her mother and the children kept the newspaper going.

She studied at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto, and elocution in Ottawa.

During the Second World War, she worked in Ottawa, at the Dominion Bureau of Statistics. There she also launched a radio program: The Kathleen Livingstone Show.

In 1942, she married George Livingstone. The couple settled in Toronto. They raised their five children there.

In Toronto, her voice was heard on several stations, including the CBC. She acted in film and on television. She was called one of Canada's leading Black actresses.

On February 13, 1950, in a Toronto church, Negro History Week was celebrated in Canada for the first time. Kay was one of the speakers.

Her association offered scholarships to Black students. It organized fundraisers, such as the Calypso Carnival.

She was involved elsewhere too: with the United Nations Association, the YWCA, the Canadian Council of Churches, legal aid.

In April 1973, in Toronto, she organized and chaired the first National Congress of Black Women of Canada.

There were about two hundred of them. In 1980, the movement became a national organization, the Congress of Black Women of Canada.

Kay became a consultant to the Privy Council Office in Ottawa. She worked on the place of women and African Canadians in society.

In 1975, International Women's Year, she travelled across the country. She was preparing a national conference of women belonging to a visible minority.

She is credited with inventing those two words: "visible minority."

Marcia Wharton-Zaretsky called the term "radical."

Kay Livingstone did not live to see her conference. On July 25, 1975, she died suddenly, in the middle of the preparations. Her community was in shock.

The Congress of Black Women, for its part, carried on.

In 2011, the Government of Canada recognized her as a Person of National Historic Significance. In 2017, a plaque was placed in a park on Bedford Park Avenue, in Toronto. In 2018, Canada Post issued a stamp in her honour.

Her life echoes Ubuntu without merging with it: one woman alone does not make a movement. It takes friends who gather, and who come back.

It had all begun with gatherings among friends, in Toronto.

Twenty-two years later, there were two hundred of them, from all across the country.