February is Black History Month. As part of his research with the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling (COHDS), Concordia professor Steven High and his students have been collecting tales from Montreal’s Black community.
The room was filled with voices
Last term, 20 students from Concordia’s Department of History were invited by Union United, the oldest Black church in Canada, to conduct oral history interviews.
Located in Little Burgundy, the church has been the beating heart of Montreal’s English-speaking Black community since it opened in 1907.
The students interviewed long-time members in the basement of the church. For two hours, the room was filled with voices. Let me introduce you to two of them.
'I just had to dance'
Charles Griffiths was born in 1933 in Saint-Henri. He was baptized at Union United and went to Sunday school in the very room where he was being interviewed in 2017.
Griffiths started to tap dance at church at age 12. It was a secret, as his father did not approve. However, his father — a railway porter — also worked out of town for 16 days a month. “That’s when I danced,” Griffiths said, smiling.
Otherwise, he had to climb “down from the second storey, on a pipe built for gas piping, find my tap shoes in a shed, go dance. I had to climb back up the pipe into my bedroom to go to sleep…. I just had to dance.”