Halifax is named a street in honor of a doctor who fought racial injustice and dedicated his life to aiding those with limited access to healthcare.
The new Cogswell District will include Dr. Alfred Waddell Street, where he lived, worked, and volunteered from the 1930s until his passing in 1953.
“It’s great,” Waddell’s grandson, Dr. Ron Milne, said. “I think it’s overdue that the city and the province should recognize him because of all the work he did in civil rights and advocacy as well as in medicine.”
He added that Winifred Milne, now 98, Waddell’s daughter and Milne’s mother, is equally happy with the news.
Born in Trinidad and Tobago in 1896, Waddell relocated to Halifax to attend Dalhousie University, where he graduated in 1933 as one of the first Black physicians.
Paying tribute to a Hero:
The roadway bearing his name will be located off of Brunswick roadway, which is currently Proctor Street.
Waddell started his first practice at what is now the Black Educators Association a few blocks away.
According to 73-year-old Ron Milne, “I think this is a fitting way to honor him.” “He had a significant impact. He is a hero without a name.
Waddell is recognized as one of the few doctors in his era to make house calls to traditionally Black neighborhoods like the Prestons, Africville, and Beechville, according to Milne, who was three years old when his grandfather passed away.
He also assisted in immunizing residents of those regions during the 1930s polio outbreak. To get there, he had to borrow cars for all of this.
Because they were impoverished and unable to pay for services, they didn’t have cars in the beginning. “They gave him eggs and chickens as payment,” Milne remarked.
Perhaps Waddell’s most well-known role was treating Viola Desmond after she was arrested for refusing to leave a theater’s whites-only area in New Glasgow, North Scotland, in 1946.
“He was very upset about what had happened to her,” added Milne. “He helped her by writing several letters to the provincial government and the federal government, trying to get her conviction overturned.”
After one of his boys was asked to leave the Halifax Common swimming pool in the 1930s, Waddell also played a key role in desegregating the facility.
Waddell worked as a doctor and also wrote for two Black newspapers he helped start and finance, the Clarion and the Negro Citizen.
Source: CBC News (Nova Scotia, Halifax)
