• Age: 13
• Grade: 8

Part of the City of Vancouver's Legacy Book Project

Set in Surrey, BC circa 1960, A Credit to Your Race is a story about innocent love awakening between a fifteen-year-old black porter's son and the white girl next door. The novel is a disturbing and convincing portrayal of how the full weight of racism and bigotry came to bear on a youthful, interracial couple.

A Credit to Your Race was published in 1973 in a press run of only a few hundred copies. We are pleased to be making this "lost" BC novel available to a new audience of readers as part of the City of Vancouver's Legacy Book Project.

Praise for A Credit to Your Race:

"If isolation is a key theme of black B.C. writing, Green's protagonist Billy Robinson is the most fully-drawn expression."(author and social historian Wayde Compton)

"... The story gets its power from Truman Green's simple direct, almost dead-pan delivery of what people said and did, almost as if he were telling you about it at the kitchen table. Billy Robinson's acute awareness of what's wrong, here in the hazy pre-dawn of the Civil Rights movement, is compelling and tangled and credible. We can be sorry for what Billy had to endure, and glad that the Legacy Books Project and Anvil Press have brought back his story." (Geist)

"... the reader sees through [the protagonist] Billy's eyes what it is like to grow up surrounded by massive misinformation about race and miscegenation. Green adds a uniquely small-town Canadian perspective to the topic of interracial romance. Billy's family are the only visible minorities in town, and multiple characters make observations about the large difference between Canada's cultural, political, and juridical environment and the American racial context they glean from television shows and newspaper headlines. (Canadian Literature)

Truman Green graduated from UBC in 1968 with a BA in English literature and American history. Recent publicaton credits include a creative non-fiction story, “Jason Loves Glory,” published in Kiss Machine, and science-related articles in Australia's New Dawn Magazine. Truman lives in Surrey BC.

Truman Green's profile page

A Credit to Your Race

This story of teenage love also tells a larger story of racism and prejudice in Surrey, BC, in 1960 when black people were a small minority. Billy Robinson is seen as a polite and a good student. The vice principal thinks he would make a good teacher and his coach points out there are lots of good black athletes. Billy wants people to see him for himself, not his colour first. He grapples with being called “nigger” and reading about the de-segregation of schools in the US, and the ensuing backlash. In his own neighbourhood, he is occasionally the butt of jokes, but no overt hatred. His white girlfriend’s parents do not want them dating, but when she becomes pregnant, attitudes intensify.

First self-published in 1973, Anvil Press re-released this book last year to coincide with Vancouver’s 125th anniversary.

Caution: Includes references to sex.