By Lincoln DePradine
Yearly, tributes are paid to a number of Canadians which have made main contributions to the betterment of life within the nation. Bromley Armstrong is amongst these acknowledged yearly.
The Annual Bromley L. Armstrong Awards had been established in 2005, and are offered by Labour Neighborhood Providers and the Fairness Committee of Toronto & York Area Labour Council (TYRLC).
Organizers have introduced that nominations are actually open for the 2025 awards that had been arrange 19 years in the past to rejoice Armstrong’s legacy and to commemorate his “braveness, dedication and excellent service to the labour and human rights actions in Canada’’.
Armstrong, a Jamaican-Canadian, arrived in Toronto in December 1947 from the Caribbean. He died August 17, 2018, at 92.
He was on the forefront of public campaigns in opposition to discrimination, together with “sit-ins” at eating places in Dresden, Ontario, the place restaurant service was being denied to African-Canadians.
Within the late Nineteen Fifties and early Nineteen Sixties, Armstrong and Ruth Lor Malloy uncovered a systemic coverage during which landlords in Toronto refused renting to African-Canadians and different minorities. Finally, a sequence of anti-discrimination legal guidelines had been handed in Canada.
Armstrong additionally served as an adjudicator with the Ontario Labour Relations Board, and established and revealed a newspaper in Toronto.
He additionally was a part of a delegation that visited Ottawa in 1954 to protest the federal authorities’s restrictive immigration coverage that closed the door to Canada for individuals of African descent and different seen minorities. The delegation was led by the late Barbados-born Donald Moore, who died in 1994 on the age of 102.
Armstrong, whose awards included an honourary physician of legal guidelines diploma from York College, documented his experiences in his memoirs — “Bromley: Tireless Champion for Simply Causes”, revealed in 2000.
In accordance with Labour Neighborhood Providers and TYRLC,the Bromley Armstrong Awards are for “particular person and union excellence’’, and to “acknowledge those that have taken up the mantle in preventing for human rights, Indigenous rights, fairness and inclusion inside our motion”.
There are 4 classes of awards: Particular person Activism; Union Activism; Indigenous Activism (Particular person); and, Indigenous Activism (Union/Collective).
The deadline for the nomination is Friday, February 28.
Additional info on nomination course of, together with eligibility and standards, is accessible by visiting, https://www.labourcommunityservices.ca/bromleygala2025
Organizers of the awards have described Armstrong as “a pivotal determine within the early anti-discrimination campaigns in Ontario”.
He was somebody, they added, who “demonstrated a lifelong dedication to the commerce union motion and the battle in opposition to drawback and discrimination. For greater than six a long time, Armstrong labored for human rights, serving to to generate civic and authorities help for racial equality and advocating for human rights reforms in public coverage”.
The 2025 Bromley Armstrong Awards’ ceremony will likely be held Friday, June 20.
LJI reporter
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