Best known as anti-racism campaigner, Eva Naomi Hodgson was almost singlehandedly responsible for putting race and racism on the national agenda.
Her prolific writings on the subject, beginning with letters to newspaper editors and opinion pieces in the 1960s, spanned nearly 60 years.
Her outspokenness won her admirers and critics in equal measure, from both whites and Blacks.
Appreciation
But as communities and countries continued to grapple with issues of race and racism in the first two decades of the 21st Century, despite the significant progress made since desegregation, there was a greater appreciation of her courage and conviction.
Eva Hodgson was a descendant of families whose roots in Crawl, Hamilton Parish went back more than two centuries. Her forbears were farmers, property owners, educators, entrepreneurs, parliamentarians and activists.
She was related to the Furberts, Hills and Hodgsons of Hamilton Parish. Benjamin Hill (1804-1866), a 19th century shipbuilder and landowner, was the common ancestor of the three families.
Religious
Crawl Gospel Hall, a Brethen church which the Hodgson family helped establish during the early 20th Century, was a major influence and shaped her strong religious convictions. During the 1940s, when she and her sisters Ruth and Damaris were teenagers, they were baptised at My Lord’s Bay, Hamilton Parish.
Hodgson was the second eldest of six children born to Harold Hodgson and Ilene (Furbert) Hodgson. She received her early schooling at home from her aunts, Annie and Emily Hodgson, and completed her primary education at Temperance Hall, before moving on to The Berkeley Institute.
In 1942, her mother died. Ruth (Hodgson) Paynter, the eldest, assumed responsibility for raising her three youngest
siblings, Harold, Grace and two-year-old Arthur (1940-2023), who would become Bermuda’s first Black Rhodes Scholar as well as a Progressive Labour Party MP and Cabinet Minister.
Academic
Harold Hodgson encouraged Eva and her sister Damaris to continue with their education. Eva graduated from Berkeley with a Cambridge School Certificate then attended Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada as a recipient of the prestigious Bermuda Government Scholarship, awarded to academic highfliers.
She received her undergraduate degree in history and English from Queen’s in 1948, and a Diploma in Education from London University a year later. She joined Berkeley Institute’s teaching staff, but in 1956, she returned to the UK to study for an honours degree in geography at London University.
Hodgson was raised in a segregated society, by a family with a “deep concern for social justice.” The years she spent in London heightened her awareness of racial injustice in Bermuda.
She returned to Bermuda in 1959, the same year the Theatre Boycott had abolished segregation in cinemas, restaurants and hotels. But she would later write that “social injustices were deeply entrenched and widespread”.
Newspapers
She rejoined Berkeley’s staff as a geography teacher, and in her down time, she began firing off letters to the editor of the Bermuda Recorder, although all three newspapers, The Royal Gazette, Mid-Ocean News andthe Recorder, would become forums for her opinions and often controversial views.
Hodgson was an active member of the Black teachers union, the Bermuda Union of Teachers (BUT). In 1961, she was elected president. She retained the top post when it merged with the white teacher’s union in 1964 to become the Amalgamated Bermuda Union of Teachers (ABUT).
As a result of her role as ABUT president, she won the Russell Award for contributing to world peace from the World Confederation of the Organization of the Teaching Profession, and attended the organisation’s conference in Kenya.
Published
The ABUT sponsored her seminal book, Second Class Citizens, First Class Men, which focused on the social and political changes that occurred in Bermuda between 1953 and 1963. The book, which she wrote during her summer vacations, was published in 1967.
A second edition was published in 1988. In his foreword to that edition, former statistician, MP and political observer Calvin Smith described “the historic work” as “probably the only organised documentation of what was perhaps the most tumultuous period of Bermuda’s social history.”
Doctorate
In 1967, Hodgson moved to New York to study at Columbia University. She received two master’s degrees at Columbia, before embarking on studies for a Ph.D. in African history and Black American history. In 1978, she was appointed chairperson of the History Department at Essex County College.
While serving in that position, she was awarded a fellowship grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities to study human rights at Columbia’s Center for the Study of Human Rights. She also worked with the New Jersey Historical Society on an oral history project.
She obtained her doctorate in 1980.
Counsellor
During her years in New York, she taught part-time at Essex County College in New Jersey and other colleges. She was also a contributor to Is Massa Day Dead? Black Moods in the Caribbean, a series of essays by Caribbean writers published in 1974 by Doubleday. Future Nobel literature laureate Derek Walcott wrote the foreword. Hodgson’s essay was entitled “Bermuda and the Search for Blackness”.
Upon her return to Bermuda, Hodgson, who had also obtained a Master’s in educational counselling, became guidance counsellor at Robert Crawford School.
In 1983, she was appointed Co-ordinator of Oral History and Cultural Preservation in the Department of Education, a post she held until 1990.
Over the years, Hodgson argued that she was overlooked for top posts in education, at the Bermuda College in particular, because of her views. Former premier Sir John Swan, who was her political opposite, confirmed this claim when paying tributes to her following her death.
Travelled
Dr. Hodgson travelled widely, beginning with her student days in Canada, when she worked as a cook to finance a trip to the Canadian Rockies.
Her second trip to Africa was made possible by a grant she was awarded during her studies at Columbia. She travelled to Liberia to do field research and also visited several other West African countries.
In 1992, Dr. Hodgson co-founded the National Association of Reconciliation. Its primary purpose, she wrote, was to ensure the issue of race relations remained on the national agenda. Over the years it had forums and presented awards, but “after the first several meetings there were never more than two or three whites present.”
When the ruling United Bermuda Party created the Commission of Unity and Racial Equality during the tenure of Premier Sir John Swan, the NAR was no longer necessary, she wrote. It disbanded following the election of the Progressive Labour Party (PLP) in 1998.
Independence
While she was a supporter of the PLP, the party did not escape her criticism during its 30 years in opposition, and after it became the governing party.
Hodgson was critical of the PLP’s failure, once in power, to create a policy to close the wealth gap between whites and Blacks. While independence was dear to the heart of the PLP founders, she was lukewarm, saying it would not be a panacea for Black advancement. And she argued that party politics had been destructive to the Black community.
She remained a prolific writer well into her 90s. Her other writings include “A Storm in a Teacup—The 1959 Bermuda Theatre Boycott and Its Aftermath” (1989); ”The Joe Mills Story—A Bermuda Labour Legend” (1995); and “The Experience of Racism in Bermuda and in its Wider Context—Reflections of Dr. Eva Hodgson” (2008).
Honours came her way in her final years. She received the Queen’s Certificate and Badge of Honour in 1999, and in 2011, an OBE. In 2018, she was honoured by the Department of Community and Cultural Affairs by being featured in the annual Dr. Kenneth E. Robinson/Cyril Outerbridge Packwood Memorial Lecture, in conversation with journalist Meredith Ebbin. Filmmaker Milton Raposo’s video tribute to Hodgson premiered at the event.
When she died in 2020, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, Premier David Burt led the tributes to her. Sir John Swan said: “She was extremely well educated and grasped the history of Bermuda, and did not hesitate to make her views known. She took on the challenge of trying to convert the country from a racist, obstructionist, intolerant society to one that embraced change.”
She was an honorary member of Citizens for Uprooting Racism in Bermuda (CURB), the anti-racism organisation whose formation in 1998, the same year the NAR disbanded, is arguably her most tangible legacy.
In 2023, CURB presented its inaugural Dr. Eva Naomi Hodgson Social Justice Awards in honour of “a remarkable Bermudian activist whose legacy continues to inspire us all.”
In 2024, the Bermuda Literary Awards’ Non-Fiction Prize, awarded by the Bermuda Government, was renamed the Dr. Eva Hodgson Prize for Non-Fiction.
Editor’s Note: The Bermuda Union of Teachers assumed its original name in 1997.
|
