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 Nzindukiyiman...