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Black educators including former GCVI principal part of U of G exhibit

U of G's exhibit, Putting Name to Face: Celebrating Black Excellence in Teaching in Guelph, Wellington, Waterloo opens today
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Exhibit organizer Marsha Hinds Myrie and Guelph CVI teacher Natalie Brown-Lahey standing next to a plaque honouring former principal Alfred Mitchell Lafferty.

To learn about Black educators, past and present in the region, an exhibit is coming to local libraries and features a relatively unknown Black principal from Guelph CVI who left a legacy beyond the school.

The University of Guelph has an exhibit called Putting Name to Face: Celebrating Black Excellence in Teaching in Guelph, Wellington, Waterloo. It features 12 Black educators.

In this region, there is a long and significant history of Black contribution to education, said Marsha Hinds Myrie, exhibition organizer, adjunct U of G professor, and former U of G activist-in-residence, in a press release.

The exhibit opens today at the university’s McLaughlin Library. It will run until Feb. 7, then move to the Guelph Public Library’s main branch from Feb. 10 to 14 and lastly it will go to the Westminster Square branch from Feb. 17 to 21.

“I want to make sure that all the names and faces of the people who practice in this space become a part of our history going forward,” said Hinds Myrie.

The exhibit features Alfred Mitchell Lafferty, former principal at Guelph CVI. He is known as Ontario’s first Black principal. 

He was honoured by the school in 2018, nearly 150 years after he became a principal there. GCVI has a plaque with his history and the school’s auditorium is named after him. Although the school has a long history in Guelph and in the rest of the provice Lafferty was only honoured by the school seven years ago. His portrait isn’t displayed alongside the others that depict the principals since the school's founding.

Lafferty left Guelph for Chatham in 1875, where he became the first Canadian-born Black lawyer in Ontario. His legacy fuels Black educators like Natalie Brown-Lahey, GCVI English teacher and chair of the Upper Grand Black Educators Network, who is featured in the exhibit.

“Calling people into this work, to unearth these stories that still need to be told is not just the work of Black people, it is the work of all of us,” said Hinds Myrie. “I believe that my own contributions are the seeds I can plant so that the generations coming after me carry this work further and hopefully create a world that is different than the one I live in.”

It was an intentional choice to make it a travelling exhibition so the information could be more accessible. 

“I see it as a way of moving people back into libraries but more importantly to show that Black people have been in libraries and in positions of knowledge making and knowledge keeping for centuries,” said Hinds Myrie. “It pushes back against some of those stereotypes that feed anti-Black notions in Canada and more broadly.”

The exhibit marks Black History Month and invites people to unlearn the history that left a number of Black Canadians out of the country's narrative.

"This is why Black History Month is still important and why it is important not just to look at history generally, but also the history of specific regions," said Hinds Myrie. "Black History Month events are still filling in enormous gaps."



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