Niagara residents overcoming hate with hope and unity
At over six feet tall with a thick bodybuilder frame, the late Fred Bracken cut an imposing figure. Even more so when he was spoiling for a fight.
“I was attending a regional council meeting in 2017 when Mr. Bracken showed up,” recalled Mohamad Al Jumaily. “I saw this guy, he was very loud, and dressed in camo like he was in the military. He was very emotionally and physically charged up. He was trying to get me into a physical fight with him, and that was very shocking to me.”
Jumaily was attending the council meeting to speak out against the racist, anti-LGBTQ comments that a member of regional council had been posting to his personal social media accounts. Bracken, a vocal Trump supporter who had recently been arrested for getting in a fight during a protest where he held a sign reading ‘F--- MEXICO’ while shouting at passersby with a megaphone, was at the meeting to show his support for the same councillor Jumaily was there to speak against.
“I did not allow him this opportunity to get me to fight with him,” recalled Jumaily of his encounter with Bracken while they waited for the council meeting to start. “I went to security; I said look at this guy he is disturbing the peace, and that’s when he [Bracken] started calling me a terrorist.”
It was a shocking slur, but Jumaily said he was equally shocked by what happened next.
“During this verbal harassment, I went to (then regional chair Alan Caslin) and told him that this guy keeps calling me a terrorist,” recalled Jumaily. “I was told by the chairman that nothing could be done because the meeting had not officially started yet.”
The inaction in the face of such a racially charged situation is something that Jumaily said cut just as deep as the original insult of being called a terrorist.
“It was a pathetic excuse. When you look to people who are in positions of power, like the chair of the entire Niagara Region, you would expect them to embody basic aspects of leadership,” said Jumaily. “He failed to deliver on leadership when that situation unfolded right before his eyes.”
While the chair and other members of council stood by and did nothing, Jumaily recalled how much better he felt when someone finally did something.
“Former councillor Paul Grenier was the only one in the council chambers that day to call this what it was,” said Jumaily. “He called it a hate crime.”
Comparatively speaking, hate crime incidents like the one Jumaily faced, are rare in Niagara relative to larger urban areas around Toronto. But according to Marrika Sanders, it’s no less important to show support for anti-racism initiatives in Niagara than it is in big cities.
When George Floyd was murdered earlier this year at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer, it sparked a wave of Black Lives Matters protests across the globe, including in unlikely places, like Fort Erie, where only about one per cent of the population is Black.
“Racism happens here too, and people need to be made aware of it and I wanted those bigger cities and places to know that there are small towns who support them,” said Sanders, who organized a BLM protest in her hometown of Fort Erie.
While motivated that day by the George Floyd incident, Sanders had her own reasons for wanting to support BLM and other anti-racism initiatives in Niagara.
“My cousin experienced police brutality as an adolescent,” recalled Sanders. “My mom and I saw it first hand, it was heartbreaking, but there was nothing we could do because the police are the authority. They smacked her down and pushed her forcefully into the cop car.”
Sanders was 18 years old at the time, and it was the first time she had witnessed racism with her own eyes. She said it shook her confidence in police and the way they interact with people that look like her.
“I don’t put all police officers in the same category, but I do recognize the need for change.”
Gaining the trust and support of racialized communities in Niagara is no small task for police, and according to Saleh Waziruddin from the Niagara Region Anti-Racism Association, it starts with more transparency.
“We can look up all the crimes reported to police in Niagara, except for hate crimes, it’s the only one not there,” said Waziruddin of his group’s ongoing efforts to collect data on hate crimes.
At a time when building relationships with Niagara’s racialized communities is more important than ever, Waziruddin said having an open dialogue about hate crimes is a strong first step.
James Culic is an Ottawa-expat, reporting the news around Niagara’s southern tier. He also writes a weekly opinion column which people seem to love to hate-read. Follow him on Twitter and on Facebook.
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