Archives of Ontario, 2007
Father of Lawrence Hill and his siblings singer-songwriter Dan Hill and the late novelist Karen Hill, Daniel G. Hill III — along with his wife Donna Bender Hill — was a pioneer in the fields of human rights and Black history in Canada. The son and grandson of African-American ministers of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Daniel Hill was born in Independence, Missouri in 1923, and served as a Black soldier in the highly segregated American Army in World War II. After the war, he obtained a degree from Howard University, studied in Norway and moved permanently to Canada one day after his interracial marriage to Donna Bender in Washington DC in 1953. They raised their family in Toronto, where Donna worked for the Toronto Labour Committee for Human Rights and where Daniel obtained his PhD in Sociology at the University of Toronto after completing his groundbreaking PhD thesis Negroes in Toronto: A Sociological Study of a Minority Group (1960). Daniel Hill became the first Director and later the chairperson of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, ran a human rights consulting firm, and later served as the Ombudsman of Ontario. Daniel and Donna, along with friends, co-founded the Ontario Black History Society and Daniel Hill's book The Freedom Seekers: Blacks in Early Canada became the first popular history of African-Canadians.