We all know the photo. A young girl, all skinny arms and legs, dressed in a crisp back-to-school outfit, walks into her school through a crowd of hostile adults, their faces ugly with anger. The girl is black. The adults are white. The school is newly desegregated. Behind the polite term “discrimination” lies the direct and visceral emotion of hate that this photo captures.

The image is American, and as Canadians we have a tendency to feel smug when we confront it. We shouldn’t.

In Season of Rage biographer John Cooper (author of Rapid Ray: The Story of Ray Lewis) tells the story of Hugh Burnett, a man who wanted to do something very ordinary. He wanted to have a cup of coffee in his hometown café. Burnett was a carpenter, ex-soldier, family man, and well-respected citizen, but he was black, and the café owner, Morley McKay, had never served a black customer and declared that he never would. When was this? Some remote bad old days? No, it was the 1950s. Where did this occur? The American South? No, it happened in the small Ontario town of Dresden.

The heart of Season of Rage is an account of the period from 1943, when Burnett first complained officially about iscrimination in Dresden, to 1956, when McKay was, at long last, found guilty of violating the Fair Accommodation Practices Act, a piece of provincial anti-discrimination legislation enacted two years before. Cooper uses Burnett’s story as the centrepiece of a more wide-ranging history of slavery and the civil rights movement in both Canada and the U.S.

Black history, and the history of other oppressed minorities, has wide appeal for young readers, speaking as it does to their passion for fairness and their desire for heroism. Red Cedar readers in B.C. chose a novel of the Underground Railroad, If I Just Had Two Wings by Virginia Frances Schwartz, as their favourite book last year. Much of the non-fiction material relating to this topic, however, is American. The bibliography of Canadian materials in Cooper’s book is a slim one. Season of Rage is particularly welcome, therefore, in giving children a Canadian perspective on black history in North America.

In format and writing, this account is not particularly innovative. It reads like a long magazine article illustrated with historical photos, many of them portraits. Cooper’s style does the job but can be a bit plodding. What makes the book so valuable is simply the material it has unearthed. This might not be a book that a student would readily choose off the shelf, but in the hands of a good teacher it could be a rich springboard for discussion, a model case for studies in how social change happens.

One of the reasons the account is slow-moving is that change was shockingly slow and complicated. Time after time, African-Canadians went into the café, were not served, and documented their treatment. But this being Canada, federal-provincial jurisdiction issues got in the way of progress. This one change, this one successful conviction, took more than a decade of writing letters, having meetings, tangling with bureaucracy, lobbying politicans, making strategic alliances, dealing with the media, and launching lawsuits.

Who helped in the struggle? Labour groups, Jewish organizations, and national media played their parts. Ontario Premier Leslie Frost manoeuvred some canny politics to convince his colleagues to enact anti-discrimination legislation. Most of all, the formation in 1948 of the National Unity Association, originally composed of Burnett and a handful of others, gave focus to a cluster of injustices.

Who did not help? Notably, the people of Dresden. The mainstream Protestant churches, merchants, municipal politicians, and café regulars all maintained a code of silence. People who were courteous to Burnett on the street, who hired him to do carpentry work, who professed to like him, would not take a stand. Townspeople consistently denied to the media that there was any problem. The lone council member who supported a non-discrimination policy in the granting of local business licenses received a death threat. This is the part of the story that contemporary Canadian children should be hearing about, thinking about, talking about. Today, with the erosion of organized labour and the independent press, who are likely allies in a quest for social justice? Fifty years later, what are the stories? There is much more to be told.

The history of Canadian racism and struggles for racial equality may take place much more behind closed doors than in America. We may not have the iconic images of hatred and heroism. But Cooper does include one newspaper quote that is every bit as visceral in its impact as the photo of that African-American schoolkid. “It’s a feeling I can’t quite explain. Do you know that for three days afterward I get raging mad every time I see a Negro. Maybe it’s like an animal who’s had the smell of blood.” These were the words Morley McKay used to explain to a reporter from Maclean’s magazine how he felt when he was asked to serve black customers in his restaurant.