On their first day in school in 1951, Valerie Jerome and her siblings were pelted with rocks by the other school children in their North Vancouver neighbourhood because they were Black. When they returned to school a week later with their father, they were surrounded by the same mob, but this time, a freckled redhead called Annabelle stood by the siblings.
“When people ask me how they can fight racism, I always tell them to be like Annabelle - to stand by others and recognize their dignity,” said Jerome, a retired track and field sprinter, educator and political activist, who presented her memoir Races, the trials & triumphs of Canada’s fastest family at a recent event hosted by the Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education (KPE), in partnership with Innis College.
Jerome was only 15 years old when she set the Canadian women’s record in the 100 metres in 1959. She competed at the 1959 Pan American Games, the 1960 Olympic Games and the 1966 Commonwealth Games. Her brother Harry set seven world records in the 1960s, including the 100-yard dash, earning him the title of the world’s fastest man. Their grandfather, John “Army” Howard, was Canada’s first Black Olympian, running in Stockholm in 1912. But while racing came easy to the family, racism was more difficult to outpace.
Talking to Bruce Kidd, a professor emeritus at KPE and teammate of her brother Harry on Team Canada, Jerome revealed the family had to fight racism from their community, the press, their country, and even inside their family home.
“Our home was not a happy home,” she said. Her mother Elsie, born out of a marriage between Howard, a Black man, and a white woman he married while stationed in Britain during World War 1, could never get over her mother abandoning her and her siblings after she got remarried to a white man who wanted nothing to do with his wife’s half Black children from her first marriage. Jerome’s father Harry Vincent Jerome provided calm stability, but his job as a porter for Canadian National Railways often took him away from home for days on end. For some relief, the siblings got involved in sport.
“Harry dragged me out to track and I just loved the feeling of running,” said Jerome. “The workouts were just as important.
"I loved the people in the club and the coach. Movement was freeing and I wasn’t tied up in knots.”
While Jerome loved the feeling of freedom that racing provided, her brother Harry was motivated to compete, fueled by the difficulties he shouldered. When forced to pull out of races due to injuries, he was unfairly accused by the media of being a quitter. Kidd was among the athletes and journalists who supported him.
Hurt but undeterred, Harry would prove his detractors wrong by storming back into races and winning more medals, including a bronze medal in the 100 m race at the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo and gold medals at the 1966 Commonwealth Games and the 1967 Pan American Games.
“Be tough” was his catchphrase, recalled Jerome.
When he died of a brain aneurysm in 1982 at the age of 42, Jerome was devastated. She decided to take a year off from her job as a teacher to write a book about her brother – something she had always wanted to do because she felt Canadians didn’t know enough about him.
“The story just poured out of me,” says Jerome, whose memoir tracks Harry’s life through his athletic career and into his work as an advocate for youth sport and education. “Some day, Harry’s records will be broken - all records are - but the legacy he left behind will live on.”
That legacy includes advocating for better financial support, coaching and medical attention for athletes, petitioning the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission for better representation of minorities in broadcasting and lobbying department store chains like Eaton’s and the Hudson’s Bay Company to use non-white models in their advertisements.
Asked by Kidd if she was hopeful about a future without racism and sexism in sport, Jerome answered that sport is a microcosm of society and as long as there is racism and sexism in society, it will persist in sport, too.
“The onus of fixing the problem, however, shouldn’t be on the victims of racism or sexism, everyone has a role to play,” she said. “Get to know the people who are not like you, be more open to one another, you’ll see that we have much more in common than you think and our society will be better for it.
“We celebrate Black History Month in Canada, but school textbooks still don’t include the Black history of this country.
“That’s the great thing about sport. When the flag goes up, you see Harry Jerome, Canadian, not Black-Canadian.”
Professor Gretchen Kerr, dean of KPE, thanked Jerome for sharing the stories of her family’s trials and triumph, adding that conversations like these underscore the importance of advocating for inclusion and the potential of sport to contribute to these efforts.