‘Black people are missing’: Author seeks to capture the Black experience of the Halifax Explosion

HALIFAX, N.S. —

A few flakes of snow hover in the air and the Halifax Explosion monument is quiet.

Afua Cooper cracks open her book — fresh off the press — and reads, almost as if those lost 106 years ago are quietly listening.

“At 8:45 a.m. these ships (Imo and Mont-Blanc) collided in the Narrows of the Halifax Harbour. The munitions heated and at 9:05 exploded, shooting death into the four directions,” she reads. “Boom! Boom! BOOM!”

Her words startle in the quiet as the bells behind her are silent.

“The sound of terror. The sound of death. Armageddon. The angel blowing the trumpet of destruction.”

While she captures the chaos and horror, she said she wanted to do something different with this illustrated book called The Halifax Explosion: 6 December 1917, at 9:05 in the Morning.

“The lore that we learn about the Explosion is the massive explosion and the tsunami in the harbour, but somehow Black people are missing from the experience,” she said.

Four Africville residents were killed that day, along with other African Nova Scotians who lived in the north end. But there are many more layers of the Black experience than that, said Cooper.

“What I want people to know is this layer of the Black experience in the Explosion, for people to know the sacrifice that everyone made. And Dr. Ligoure is sort of like an unsung hero and he wasn’t treated well by the city and for people to know more about him too.”

Dr. Clement Ligoure, whose house at 5812-14 North St. was given municipal heritage status this year, treated patients in his house, which he turned into a hospital.

“He was literally one of the heroes of the Explosion because he worked around the clock saving lives, pulling people from the rubble, he and one of his assistants.”

Racism in action

The purpose of the Halifax Explosion Relief Commission was to distribute millions in disaster relief funding to the thousands left injured and homeless.

“You go to the relief commission and say my house has been totally destroyed, I lost my bed, my animals and my chairs and you give them a figure, maybe $300,” Cooper explained.

“But when many of the Black people went to the Commission and gave a figure, the commission either downgraded the figure or didn’t give them anything,” she said.

Cooper writes:

            She asked for help from the Disaster Relief Commission

            But Old Jim Crow raised his nasty head

Humanizing history

Cooper, who was Halifax’s poet laureate from 2018-2020, wrote a poem in 2019 for the annual ceremony in Fort Needham Memorial Park.

A publisher with Plum Leaf Press heard it and contacted Cooper saying it needed to be a book. Cooper worked with Ontario-based illustrator Rebecca Bender to create the imagery for the book along with historical pictures.

Cooper said the only hard part about writing it was that she had so much research and information to include.

“I didn’t want it to be dry facts, I wanted to humanize it so I brought in the people — Mrs. Rose Hickey, Mrs. Brown, Dr. Ligoure.”

Hickey was a Black woman married to a stevedore working down by the docks that day. He was killed, leaving her to raise their six children with a ruined home. She had to fight hard for a spot in a public-housing building for her family, and when she got in, she had to face racist outrage from the other tenants.

“And Aldora Andrews, an eight-year-old girl from Africville who was killed in the Explosion,” Cooper added. “I would say Rebecca Bender (the illustrator) really beautified the words from me because there’s an image of Aldora Andrews dancing on air … like going into the afterlife I suppose.”

Ceremony and light show

This year, the Downtown Halifax Business Commission is adding a Halifax Explosion element to their light show. Starting today, a show paying homage to Dr. Clement Ligoure, will be projected on the façade of the former Halifax Memorial Library (corner of Spring Garden Road and Grafton Street).

The annual Halifax Explosion Memorial Service will be held today at 9 a.m. at the Bell Tower in the Fort Needham Memorial Park.