The almost-lost story of Jean Lowe and the cost of ignoring our past

E ven just in the pictures, there was something captivating about Jean Lowe. They were black-and-white; shots that had originally run alongside newspaper columns and yearbook entries from the 1930s and ’40s. There was one of Lowe in mid-stride from a 1948 Globe and Mail article, her hands balled in fists, her expression calm, her eyes on the track ahead of her. Another was from her junior year at Toronto’s Eastern High School of Commerce, Lowe standing with her hands clasped behind her alongside two of the school’s other “field day champions.” There were larger group photos, too, shots of entire track-and-field teams posed in skirts and blazers. In all of them, Lowe was the lone Black athlete.

Ornella Nzindukiyimana came across the pictures as a doctoral student at Western University. From her earliest encounters with what was left of Lowe’s story, she knew she wanted to find out everything she could. “I was just interested in why she seemed to be the only one,” says Nzindukiyimana, now a professor of human kinetics at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. “So, I was trying to pinpoint what that means. As Black people, we’ve all been there, being the only one, and what does that mean in the 1940s?”

That question would prove challenging to answer. Black histories are often inadequately archived, and oral accounts of Black lives, families and communities have long been considered less legitimate in academia. Combing archives from the period, Nzindukiyimana pieced together Lowe’s story for her doctoral dissertation, and in the process, basically rediscovered a figure who was once one of Canada’s most decorated amateur athletes.

The almost-lost story of Jean Lowe and the cost of ignoring our past
Source: Healthy Lifestyle