Research, Repression, and Revolution—On Montreal and the Black Radical Tradition: An Interview with David Austin

I first arrived in Montreal from London, England in 1980 with my brother to join my family. (We had been living with my maternal grandmother in London.) I was almost ten years old and spent two years in Montreal before moving to Toronto. I went to junior high school and high school in Toronto, but Montreal was always a part of my consciousness and we would visit the city on occasion, and I also used to play a lot of basketball so I traveled to Montreal once or twice for basketball tournaments. As a high school student I would frequent a bookstore called Third World Books and Crafts and it was there that I first discovered Walter Rodney's The Groundings with My Brothers. Three chapters in that book were based on presentations delivered by Rodney in Montreal during and after the Congress of Black Writers. So that was my first indication that something unique had happened in Montreal. My older brother Andrew was a college student at the time in Toronto and one day he handed me a book entitled Let the Niggers Burn! The Sir George Williams Affair and its Caribbean Aftermath, edited by Denis Forsythe. At least this is how I remember it, though I may have borrowed the book form a local library in Scarborough, the district of Toronto where I lived. It was in that book that I first learned about the Black-led student protest that rocked Sir George in 1969 and the events that surrounded it, including the Congress of Black Writers. After high school I worked for a year and a half as a security