There is now a Charley Roach Lane in the Canadian city of Toronto, named for the late Belmont-born civil rights activist/attorney/writer/painter and co-founder of the Caribana Festival who died of cancer close to six years ago at the age of 79.
Charles Conliff Mende Roach was involved in numerous campaigns on behalf of Canadian blacks and minorities over the years, and is widely known for his longstanding effort to have a pledge of allegiance to the British monarch removed from the country’s oath of citizenship.
Though he fought hard for the right of others to stay in Canada, he himself never became a citizen of his adopted homeland.
He insisted in a speech to supporters outside the Ontario Supreme Court, where he was having his oath case argued in 2012, that the question of the oath was “part of the struggle against racism and part of the struggle for equality for all groups.”
Roach first entered the country in 1955 as an aspiring priest enrolled to study theology at the University of Saskatchewan. He died in 2012 following a battle with brain cancer and an unfinished case against the Canadian oath.
A July 18 ceremony was hosted by the City of Toronto to give his name to a narrow roadway not far from where once housed Roach, Schwartz & Associates—the law firm out of which sprung the practice he opened in 1968.
From that location, Roach and his associates provided pro bono legal services in support of social justice cases including advocacy on behalf of asylum seekers. Among his notable work in this area was assistance to members of the Black Panther movement in the United States who were fleeing prosecution during the civil rights disturbances there in the 1960s.
Roach’s work in having police abuses, particularly against Canadian minorities, investigated is credited with helping establish the city’s Special Investigations Unit (SIU).
Less than a week after Roach’s death, SIU director Ian Scott wrote to his widow, June Williams-Thorne, saying: “the SIU owes its genesis in no small measure to Mr Roach’s untiring efforts for a system of independent investigation of police use of force.”
Following his death, the Canadian Bar Association also provided Williams-Thorne with a certificate acknowledging her late husband’s role as a founding member of its Immigration Law Section.
Trailblazer for T&T culture in Canada
In the early years, Roach was popular among the Caribbean cultural community when, fresh from law school in the early 1960s, he opened the Little Trinidad Club. Through the doors of the club flowed visiting entertainers such as the Mighty Sparrow and Lord Kitchener, together with steelbands, dance and folk arts troupes and entertainment-hungry West Indians resident in Toronto.
Newspaper ads and clippings from the era record the buzz created by activities hosted at the Little Trinidad Club together with shows and dances at the then popular Calypso and Caribbean Clubs.
Through his involvement in entertainment and the arts, Roach eventually went on to become a member of the board of Toronto’s Caribbean Cultural Committee (CCC)—organisers of the first Caribana festival in 1967.
What many people who easily recognise the public persona of an activist, cultural promoter and public affairs busy bee do not realise, however, is that Roach was himself quite an accomplished painter, poet and musical composer.
Speaking at the street-naming ceremony, Roach’s daughter, Sunset, said music and art and poetry were always nearby. This included her father’s numerous paintings, poems and original music.
Sunset is one of four children born of Roach’s first wife, Hetty, who died in 1999. She was also an attorney who fought alongside him and had travelled with him to Canada 44 years before her passing.
While seriously ill at home, and shortly before his death, Roach posted on his Facebook page: “Well friends, I am still at home resting up after my operation. Thank goodness for June. Part of my recuperation is her music on the grand piano at home. Way things are going, I would never want to get well!”
He never did recover from the cancer and now June, his second wife, herself an accomplished musician, has started work on a book of his art, music and poetry to expose “a different side of the man.”
“He was an absolutely remarkable man,” she told T&T Guardian, “and I am very grateful for my ten and a half years with him.” The two were married in 2001.
Williams-Thorne revealed that while Roach held out to the very end regarding his oath of citizenship, he studiously prepared the documentation in support of her application to become a Canadian citizen and never objected to the fact that she eventually took the oath.
On June’s insistence, the couple travelled back to T&T every year for at least three months where Roach touched bases with the land that delivered to Canada a relentless campaigner for social justice who, in his private moments, had the heart of an artist, musician and poet. The Charley Roach Lane might be easy to walk, but his footsteps are not easily followed.
