BY: Andrew Chin

“I come from a musical family, and was a singer for eight years. When I started getting tired of the musician’s lifestyle, I wanted to do something that was self-contained. I started off in musical theatre and just happened to be at the right place at the right time.

A lot of people don’t know this, but Canada’s film industry started in Montreal during the mid to late 1970s and they were doing a lot of American-themed films. They were looking for a black actor to give it that American feel and I had very little competition at the time.

So I was rolling up TV and film credits, but at the time most actors were making their living through commercials and advertising companies didn’t want to use visible minorities. It’s against the law now, but casting agents back then had no problem saying that they weren’t hiring minorities.

“The nature of the industry forced me to do activist work early in my career. We started the Montreal Black Performers Society to lobby advertising companies to create fair opportunities for visible minorities and I was blackballed for two years. The government realized what was happening and helped apply pressure. By that time I’d moved to Vancouver to do Airwolf for two years and then moved to Toronto.

“I was asked to be the host of In the Black, which was a talk show, featuring interviews with prominent African-Canadians from all walks of life. At the time, no show like that existed on Canadian TV. I was very happy to be part of that because it had a positive impact on Toronto. There was a void on Canadian TV of positive news from the African-Canadian community. It’s important that we create stories from other communities so we don’t always see the same stories from the same community.”

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