Footnote to Freedom

One family’s story of racism, redemption, and the long shadow of the Black Construction Battalion.

From an early age, Lance Dixon had heard about his grandfather, George Dixon, who was one of six hundred men that served in the only Black battalion in Canadian history — Nova Scotia’s No. 2 Construction Battalion in 1916. Sadly, much of his knowledge about his grandfather’s involvement in the battalion stopped there. It was undoubtedly difficult for his father, a veteran, to tell the story without reliving the painful racism his own father and he himself endured, and the shame they were taught to feel about being Black bodies in “a white man’s world.”

In A Footnote to Freedom, Dixon grapples with the effects of racism on three generations of his family. Drawing on their collective intergenerational strength, he brings to light the painful irony of the Black battalion’s struggle: that these men had to fight their own country to fight for the freedom of others in a distant land. This is the tale of his grandfather’s redemption.