Tag Archives: Canada

On the night of April 4, 1968, as riots raged across Washington following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Winnifred Lee kept a nervous watch over the flower shop her family had recently purchased along the city’s storied U Street corridor.

Lee, a black woman from Montreal who had fallen in love with an American railroad porter and followed him south to build a new life, kept a loaded shotgun in her lap as she waited through the night for violence to abate. Increasingly anxious, she and her husband, William, wrote the words ‘Soul Brother’ on the store’s windows, signalling that the establishment was black-owned in the hope it would ward off rampaging looters.

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