By Dr. Chris Harris, a.k.a Wasun
When I reflect on the life of my comrade and elder, Dudley Laws, two words come to mind: professional revolutionary. One of the reasons I have become so dedicated to the revolutionary struggle to transform Canadian society is because I worked so closely with Dudley from 2000-2009.
In the tradition of Marcus Garvey, Harriet Tubman, and Malcolm X, Dudley was an extraordinary figure, a monumental historical personality of Black working-class origin. Dudley was a Black Garveyite leader who dedicated his life to the struggle for the liberation of all African people in the Pan-African world.
As a Jamaican emigrant to London, England in the 1950s, Dudley was an anti-racist fighting white supremacist groups, such as the Teddy Boys, in the streets. The Teddy Boys were a fascist gang responsible for the 1958 Notting Hill Race Riots against Caribbean immigrants to “keep Britain White”.
As an immigrant to Canada in 1965, he became a leader of the Universal Negro Improvement Association in Toronto during the Canadian Black Power movement. In the late 1970s and 1980s, Dudley will forever be remembered as the man who single-handedly took on the Metropolitan Toronto Police force in solidarity with hundreds of African-Canadians and our allies in other oppressed communities. Thanks to Dudley’s leadership of the struggle against police brutality in Toronto, there was a significant decline in the number of police shootings and murders of civilians in the 1990s.
Despite the recent escalation of the police murder of civilians, particularly Black working-class youth in the past five years, new youth-led organizations, inspired by Dudley’s example, have emerged to challenge police brutality in Toronto, including Justice4Alwy, BASICS, and Toronto InPDUM (International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement).
Dudley’s contribution in the struggle for African-Canadian liberation was in part his recognition that the struggle must continue through the youth. That is why he dedicated the last decade of his life to mentoring Black Action Defense Committee (BADC) youth activists such as myself, so we could carry the struggle forward.
From 2008-2009, Dudley implemented a weekly discussion group at the BADC office called “Intellectual Discussions” to help facilitate the “Battle of Ideas” necessary to cultivate vanguard leaders who could continue the anti-racist work he dedicated his life to.
I remember how during Intellectual discussions we would argue over the legitimacy of U.S. President Barrack Obama. Dudley maintained a more bourgeois Black-Nationalist political outlook throughout his life, so he ended up supporting the election of Obama. Whereas, I was against Obama, a pro-imperialist leader in a Black face, as I knew he would help facilitate the further oppression of Black and oppressed people.
After a visit to see Dudley in the hospital on Saturday, March 19, a few days before his passing, one of the final words he said on his deathbed to a fellow comrade was “Libya”. The concern he expressed for the bombing of Libya leads me to speculate that Dudley Laws, in his final days, came down against that black spokesman for American imperialism, Obama.
Even if, from time to time, Dudley found himself on the side of bourgeois nationalist politics, it’s Dudley’s life and practice that we gotta take inspiration from. Dudley Laws was an exemplar, and like I said at the beginning of this obituary, a “professional revolutionary”. Dudley spent his entire life fighting and struggling against police brutality, keeping BADC going when many others had moved on to pursue their careers. For that, he lived a life of deep economic hardship. Dudley’s unrelenting commitment to the liberation of working-class African people, and not just the upliftment of a miniscule black middle-class, is what makes him an exemplar, a figure to be emulated.
On behalf of all my revolutionary comrades in Toronto, I can certainly say your revolutionary spirit is alive in all of us. Building on your contributions, Dudley, we will continue to advance the struggle against the Canadian imperialist ruling class in the 21st century.
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