Love Story

In 1944 Vivian Keeler, an attractive, vivacious young white woman with deep roots in Nova Scotia, met Billy White, a charismatic member of a prominent Black family, at a Halifax lunch counter. Their mutual attraction turned to friendship, then courtship, a move to Toronto, marriage, and children — but not without obstacles that the bigotry of that time threw in their way. 

Their daughter Sheila White wrote The Letters: Postmark Prejudice in Black and White, a biographical novel that chronicles her parents’ struggles to stay together in the face of an orchestrated letter-writing campaign to keep them apart. 

Canada’s History contributing editor Nelle Oosterom spoke with Sheila White about her book. 

Your father received the Order of Canada in 1970 for his work as a social worker, activist, and musician. He could take a room full of people and have them singing four-part harmony in minutes. How important was music to his work of bringing people together?

I’m telling you, music dispels borders and boundaries faster than anything else. You can’t be in a room singing with people and feeling anything but love and joy. Once you have those two components activated, it’s very hard for hate to survive. 

What would you like people to take away from reading this book?

The core message is that racism can be defeated. We need to explore the shopping basket of techniques at our disposal to make that happen. I would just like to show that all that time ago — in the forties, and fifties, and sixties — there were things being done that were making human relations more palatable for everyone.