ABSTRACT
187In the late summer of 1943 I volunteered for overseas service in the Canadian Army and was rejected for minor medical reasons but accepted for home service. Rather than risk a posting to guard a munitions dump in the wilds of northern Canada, I decided to return to university several weeks after the beginning of the term to complete my third undergraduate year since students in Canada were exempted from military duty. When I stopped by for the first time at the house occupied by the fraternity to which I belonged, Delta Kappa Epsilon, my friend Victor Long took me aside and informed me proudly that he had succeeded in persuading the active brothers to include among their annual pledged new members a “Negro” from one of the smaller islands in the British West Indies. Because of the war many well-off dark-skinned West Indian families had chosen to send their sons and daughters to Canadian universities instead of to England, usually to Oxford or Cambridge, as had been their previous custom.
