Doctor Who?

On June 8, 2020, the University of Ottawa political scientist François Charbonneau turned on his computer and read a column by Jean-François Nadeau, who often writes about historical issues in Le Devoir. Nadeau told the story of George Cannon, a physician who had experienced racist treatment from the staff when he and his wife stayed at the Château Frontenac in August 1945. It was an incident, Nadeau argued, that confirmed the racism of Quebec society.

Something didn’t feel right about the account for Charbonneau. He found it improbable that the staff on their own initiative could have asked an American guest to leave the dining room. Later he stumbled across a 1948 article by the journalist Miriam Chapin, who referred to the absence of colour prejudice in Quebec. In her telling, when the historic hotel closed its dining room to a Black guest for fear of offending white American ones, the doctor who was the victim of the policy received dozens of calls from Quebec City residents who invited him to their homes. Not quite the same version of events.

This discovery launched Charbonneau on a five-year investigation. Who was Cannon? Who was his wife? How did they come to spend a week at the Château Frontenac? Did he win his case against the hotel? What was the reaction locally and beyond? And what became of the couple? The hunt for answers took Charbonneau to New York, Chicago, and Louisville.

George Cannon was the son of a doctor who grew up among the African American elite. He was determined to follow in his father’s footsteps, but the path proved to be an arduous one. His marks in first-year medicine at Columbia University were falsified, unfairly failing him; his medical studies in Chicago were handicapped by the fact that he was allowed to practise only on Black patients; during his residency in Kentucky, he came down with tuberculosis. After recovering, he moved to Harlem in 1935 and opened an office there two years later, specializing in radiology. Tuberculosis became his primary focus, leading him to say that it was to the Black person in the North what the lynching rope was to the Black person in the South. “His first political engagement, which he would pursue all his life, focused on improving the conditions of the African-American citizens of New York,” Charbonneau writes. “For example, he led a vast study published in May 1945 on the prevalence of tuberculosis in Harlem and produced an important report on the subject.” Cannon was outraged at the fatalism of his community, along with its acceptance of poverty, mortality, and the lack of education. “It seems that we are accustomed to dying,” he wrote mordantly in the New York Age, an African American weekly.

Lillian, his wife, spoke French, and it was her idea that they should book a holiday north of the border. The couple reserved a room for a week at the Château Frontenac, flew to Quebec, and had two pleasant days at the hotel. “I was drinking deep from the cup of enjoyable life,” Cannon wrote in his memoir. But then they were barred from the dining room because some white people had complained.

Cannon decided to hire a lawyer, Édouard Laliberté, who quickly secured an injunction that required the hotel to grant the Cannons access to all of its facilities as the lawsuit proceeded. The two men became friends; Laliberté later visited the Cannons in New York. And ultimately their suit was successful on every point but one: the hotel made a payment to Cannon but refused to acknowledge that racial discrimination had been a factor in his experience.

When the court proceedings were reported in Quebec City newspapers, the reaction was instantaneous. The Cannons were stopped on the street, given free tours by cab drivers, and invited to dinner. Within weeks, Time magazine wrote about the occasion, noting the public response and citing an anonymous waiter who had whispered to the couple, “I’m damn glad you won!” (The hotel tracked down and fired the source.)

In his memoir, which is not with his papers archived at the New York Public Library and which Charbonneau had trouble locating, Cannon described the warmth and congeniality extended to himself and Lillian by Québécois. A month after their visit, three papers published his thanks, in French. “The French population of Quebec wanted to let us know that we were welcome in their city, and that racial prejudice did not come from them, but from foreigners,” it read. “These letters, phone calls, individual visits, invitations to visit the interesting spots in the city, the meals to which we were invited, the friendly words from merchants, cab drivers, teachers, lawyers, doctors, were all comforting.” The Cannons were grateful. “When we arrived in Quebec, we knew nobody. When we return in the fall for the end of the legal procedure, we feel that we will be among old friends.”

L’affaire Cannon is partly a narrative of something that happened decades ago and partly an essay on the dangers and pitfalls of political correctness. It’s also an account of the adventure of historical research: Charbonneau finally found a copy of Cannon’s memoir and confirmed its version of the episode in other records; delved into the nature of segregation and prejudice in that period; and spoke to Lillian Cannon’s niece, the former model Jane Hoffman Davenport. It is a striking example of the challenge and excitement of scholarship.

But there is one contemporary institution that comes out poorly: Library and Archives Canada. Although ownership of the Château Frontenac has changed and the current management was prepared to see potentially embarrassing information come to light, LAC refused to release the documentation that Charbonneau sought — and his access-to-information request revealed pages of correspondence discussing how to withhold it. “At the point of publishing this book,” he writes, bristling with indignation, “a whole piece of the story it is telling remains hidden in a warehouse in Renfrew, a hundred kilometres from Ottawa, either to protect the rights of a client that no longer exists in a story that is over seventy-five years old, or, but this is just a hypothesis, to protect the rear end of a handful of bureaucrats. For you to judge.”

Even with that piece missing, Charbonneau has produced a fascinating record of a moment that has been misconstrued and misinterpreted and can now be better understood.