Pioneering Initiatives and Expertise - Dr. Esmeralda M.A. Thornhill

In 1983, Professor Thornhill conceptualized, developed, and taught the first ever university-accredited course on Black Women’s Studies offered in Canada, “Black Women: The Missing Pages from Canadian Women’s Studies” (Simone de Beauvoir Institute, Concordia U, 1983, 1988), along with “Confrontation and Collaboration: Issues in Canadian Women’s Studies” (1988).

She was the first woman of colour appointed to the Quebec Council on the Status of Women, 1981.

She was the first scholar recruited to inaugurate Dalhousie University’s James Robinson Johnston Endowed Chair in Black Canadian Studies, 1996-2002.

She has authored ground-breaking writings which for many years have been employed as core course readings in academic institutions across Canada, notably: Black Women’s Studies in Teaching Related to Women: Help or Hindrance to Universal Sisterhood? 6 Fireweed (1983), The Issue is -Ism (1984, 1989); Focus on Black Women 1:1 Revue femmes et droit / Canadian Journal of Women and Law (1982); Focus on Racism: Legal Perspectives from A Black Experience / Regard sur le racisme : perspectives juridiques a partir d’un vecu noir in Racism… Talking Out 6:1 Revue femmes et droit / Canadian Journal of Women and Law (1995).

In 1996, she became the first African Canadian woman to hold a Tenured Full Professorship of Law in Canada, 1996-2002.

She respectively co-edited and edited unprecedented thematic publications on ‘Race’— Racism …Talking Out (1995) Canadian Journal of Women and Law and Blacks in Canada: Retrospects, Introspects Prospects, 2008, Journal of Black Studies.

She spearheaded impactful Research-Action to Eliminate racism in school textbooks in Quebec (e.g…..CKVL radio-diffused interview) — even as she mobilized and engaged Community Resistance (e.g. Parent Committee of the Quebec Board of Black Educators QBBE); organized public education conferences McGill University(1979); and Universite du Quebec a Montreal (1981); and was in the forefront generating meetings to confont and hold to account both school textbook publishers (Centre educatif et culturel) and Ministers of Education such as Jacques-Yvan Morin, and Dr. Camille Laurin.

In 1989, she appeared as an invited expert witness before the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Prosecution of Donald Marshall Jr. where she gave evidence on the “material reality” of racism, and tabled a recommendation that Canada’s Criminal Code be amended so as to take into consideration, at sentencing, the factor of ‘Race’ as either a mitigating or an aggravating factor. Focus on Racism: Legal Perspectives from A Black Experience / Regard sur le racisme : perspectives juridiques a partir d’un vecu noir in Racism… Talking Out. 6:1 Revue femmes et droit / Canadian Journal of Women and Law (1995).

In 1990, she successfully defended an Afrocentric M.A. Thesis in Spanish Language and Literature: El resplandor de la sombra: Acercamiento a la presencia del personaje negro en el teatro clásico español del Siglo de Oro (Université de Montréal).

She is the visionary responsible for the initiative to bring the annual institutional commemoration of February Black History Month to the Quebec public space.

She was invited by the Department of Russian Studies to help conceptualize, develop and co-teach “Black Identity in Pushkin”, an unprecedented Afrocentric course on the Father of Russian Literature, Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin.

For the course, Dostoevsky and Western Literature, she co-developed and co-taught a MODULE on Dostoevsky and Richard Wright of the Harlem Renaissance.

Invited by the Department of Canadian Studies, she conceptualized, developed and taught for a number of years, the MODULE: Canadian Identity: Exposing a Negative, Completing the Picture.

In 2001 she conceptualized and convened in Halifax the unprecedented African Nova Scotian provincial public forum “An Open Hearing on Racism to Invoke Memory and Confirm Voices of Experience”.

In response to the United Nations’ World Conference Against Racism, she convened in Halifax in 2001 an unprecedented international Symposium, “Racism and the Black World Response”.

In 1998 she penned an Open Letter of Protest to denounce publicly the non-appointment and exclusion of Judge Corrine Sparks from the new unified Family Court of Nova Scotia, despite this Black Woman Judge being at that time the only Nova Scotia Family Court Judge who was not White, her being the most senior sitting female judge in the province and her being the first Black female judge to be appointed in Canada. See Re-thinking and Re-framing RDS: A Black Woman’s Perspective (Abstract) (Author’s Note) – by E.M.A. Thornhill in Michele A. Johnson and Funke Aladejebi Editors, Unsettling the Great White North, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022, pp. 538-581.

A founding member of the Congress of Black Women of Canada, serving as National Secretary, from 1976-1980 she shouldered sole responsibility for the National Secretariat which was mandated to structure the national organization, establish a network of communications, draft a Constitution and convene the fourth national gathering of Black Women from across Canada (Winnipeg 1980).