The Sir George Williams Affair: 1969 Protest and Aftermath

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.

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