Harold Herbert Potter (March 27, 1914 – May 8, 2004) was the first Canadian-born Black sociologist hired by a Canadian post-secondary institution when he was appointed lecturer in Sociology at Sir George Williams College (now part of Concordia University, Montréal, Canada) in 1947.
Alfred and Gertrude were both émigrés from British Guiana (now Guyana) who—despite a Canadian immigration system that sought to deny entry to non-Whites[2]—managed to make their way to Canada in 1907 and 1910 respectively.
[3] By 1919, Alfred was hosting the Montréal chapter of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in the family home and attending conventions in Harlem.
[5] The following year, Potter travelled to Kingston, Jamaica where, adorned in "regal attire", he served as "His Highness the Potentate" for the first international UNIA convention.
[7] In 1936, Alfred vice-chaired the Fred Christie Defence Committee to support a Supreme Court challenge against the Montréal York Tavern for refusing to serve people on the basis of race.
[11] Showing entrepreneurial savvy and a dedication to race solidarity, Gertrude also rented out rooms of the family's modest apartment to Black American tourists who would have been denied accommodation at local hotels.
"Racism and nationalism are man's invention", she wrote, and they are "the product of selfishness and pride, and the excuse for keeping less fortunate people in subjection."
[13] Harold Potter was engaged in public life at an early age, especially within the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) and its Sir George Williams College on Drummond Street.
[18] Potter was editor of the Georgian, the newspaper of Sir George Williams College, in 1938–39, a position that would be held a decade later by novelist Mordecai Richler.
Potter spent the war designing instructional materials for recruits, illustrating educational booklets, and developing psychological reports.
[26] In 1960, SGWC became Sir George Williams University (SGWU) and Potter was charged with hiring and setting up the new Department of Sociology and Anthropology.
In 1969, in what came to be known as the "Sir George Williams affair", an accusation of racism against a professor by students of West Indian heritage sparked a major national controversy over questions of racial discrimination in Canada.
[30] Potter's scholarship was influenced by the Chicago school and its commitment to empirical field work studies of urban communities, contemporary social problems, and occupational groups.
Potter's master's thesis, "The Occupational Adjustments of Montréal Negroes", was supervised by Oswald Hall, one of the many Chicago school alumni who dominated McGill's Department of Sociology well into the 1950s.
[31] For decades, Potter's thesis became the standard sociological text to cite on the limited job opportunities available to Black citizens in early twentieth-century Montréal.
[38] In 1960, Potter predicted that "a colored man might some day become President of the United States just so his country can deal more effectively with the rest of the world.
"[39] Potter, however, also qualified this believe in Black upward mobility, by taking a dim and divisive view of mid-century Caribbean arrivals to Canada, many of whom he deemed "penniless strangers" who were unclean, dressed "outlandishly", and whose lack of "marketable skills" meant they were prey to the "sharks and barracudas of a great central city".
[40] In 1968, Potter was among the public notables who signed an open letter to the prime minister requesting the establishment of diplomatic relations between Canada and the People's Republic of China.