On the morning of February 11, 1969, thousands of computer punch cards rained down on Mackay Street. From the ninth floor of the Henry F. Hall Building, students flung the physical contents of an entire university's computational work out of broken windows, fluttering onto the grey streets of a Montreal winter. Below, a crowd gathered to watch. Some chanted “Let the n——s burn”. Riot police were already inside.
By the time it was over, 97 people had been arrested, a fire of disputed origin had gutted the computer centre, and the damage totalled nearly $2 million making it the costliest student protest in Canadian history to this day. What had started nine months earlier with six young men asking the simple question—why are our grades lower than our white classmates who copied our work?—had become a reckoning that would reverberate from Montreal to the Caribbean and back.
Quiet beginnings in the spring of 1968
Six Black West Indian students were attending Sir George Williams University, a school known for its open admissions and its night classes, popular among immigrant students who couldn't get into McGill. They filed a formal grievance against Perry Anderson, an assistant professor of biology.
The allegations were documented: Anderson addressed Black students as "mister" while calling white students by their first names. He gave failing grades to Black students whose work was copied word for word by white lab partners, who then received higher marks. He denied accommodations to a student recovering from a car accident that had left him with temporary amnesia.
Rodney John, one of the six complainants, later described the pattern plainly: thirteen students, each with their own story, all pointing in the same direction.
The university's response was to form a committee, then lose the committee's report in the internal mail. When the students returned in September 1968 to demand answers, they were told their complaints had been found baseless. No one could produce the document that said so.
Ten months of teach-ins, rallies, and escalating frustration followed, set against a Montreal that was already electric with political energy. The Black Writers Conference at McGill had drawn more than 2,000 people to hear Stokely Carmichael speak about structural racism. Anti-colonial movements were reshaping the Caribbean, and a generation of students who had come to Canada expecting one thing were finding something else beneath the polite surface.
On January 28, 1969, the student newspaper The Georgian handed its pages over to the Black Students' Association. The resulting edition, later called The Black Georgian, laid out the administration's failures in detail and warned that the university "could very well find itself the centre of an international storm." The next day, the complainants walked out of a hearing they considered illegitimate, and roughly 200 students followed them into the computer centre on the ninth floor.
For two weeks, the occupation held
There was calypso music and political debate and genuine camaraderie. Committees formed to keep the floor clean and the computers undisturbed. Solidarity networks across Montreal kept the occupiers supplied with food, and the faculty lounge on the seventh floor was taken over in sympathy.
Anne Cools, a student from Barbados who would eventually become Canada's first Black senator, was among the leaders. So was Roosevelt "Rosie" Douglas, a charismatic Dominica-born activist then studying at McGill, whose larger-than-life presence made him the face the media fixed on. Kennedy Frederick, one of the original complainants, had become so central to the occupation that the administration would later try to have him charged with kidnapping.
On the evening of February 10th, word came down that a deal had been reached. Students celebrated and many went home to sleep. But by morning, the agreement had collapsed—vetoed, sources suggest, by the faculty association. The roughly 100 students still in the building learned they had been, in the words of one participant, tricked. They barricaded the stairwells, shut off the elevators, and punch cards began to fly out the windows followed by computer tapes, reels, and whatever else could be carried to the broken glass.
Terminez « Le jour où un campus du centre-ville a brûlé et ce qui s'est passé après »
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