Rosemary Brown

Rosemary Brown was living in Calgary when I talked with her, and is a long-time white ally in anti-racism work. She was born in the northeastern United States and spent time in Nigeria (as part of the U.S. Peace Corps), England, and France (including living as an au pair in Paris for a period in that fateful year, 1968) before she moved to Canada. She was active in reform-oriented but relatively conventional student politics in high school and university in the U.S., then as a student in the U.K. was drawn into the orbit of anti-Vietnam War work, anti-apartheid work, and other things. She moved to Toronto in the early 1970s and eventually joined the Canadian Party of Labour, one of the many small marxist formations that thrived in that moment. A little later in the ’70s she moved to Calgary, and has been involved in a variety of organization related in one way or another to opposing racism in that city — the Committee Against Racism, the Committee Against Racism in Education, Arusha, and others.

Material from Brown on the site:

• Transcript excerpt where she talks a little about her involvement while in the U.K. but mostly about her experience with the Canadian Party of Labour.

[Please note that this is not the Rosemary Brown who was a long-time anti-racism and social justice activist in British Columbia and the first Black woman to be an MLA in that province. To learn more about the amazing things that she did, you can go here.]