“Shoeshine Boy” Murder and Protest

On July 29, 1977, the twelve-year-old son of Azorean immigrants Emanuel Jaques, who worked as a shoeshine boy on Yonge Street, was lured by three men into a body rub parlour where he was brutally raped and murdered. This crime was extensively covered in both local and national mainstream media – including by the young Toronto Star reporter Dale Brazão. Torontonians were shocked by it, especially the city’s Portuguese community, which mobilized in large numbers in collective grief and protest.

Jaques’ funeral at St. Agnes Catholic Church on August 4, drew 4,000 mourners. Four days later, about 12,000 people, the majority of them Portuguese immigrants led by the Azorean radio announcer José Rafael, protested at Nathan Phillips Square, demanding that the city “clean up” Yonge Street’s “sin strip.” Some carried signs and effigies calling for the perpetrators to be given the death penalty. While moved by collective grief and anger, many of the protesters also espoused homophobic views, which prompted the LGBTQ community in Toronto to organize in response. The young progressives involved in the newspaper Comunidade reproached their community’s extremism and worried about its negative impact on the general public’s perception of Portuguese immigrants. An editorial in its issue of August 31, 1977, made this point:

“It is our belief… that the majority of those who participated in the demonstration did so out of sympathy for the family of Emanuel Jaques and out of concern for their own children’s safety. We firmly believe that those people were there for these reasons and not because ‘they are people thirsty for blood;’ for revenge or to have capital punishment reinstated in our system… There were however, Portuguese and Canadians alike who were shocked with the strong and violent tone of the demonstration. We had telephone calls from many Canadians, some of them insulting the community and the Portuguese in general, in a very uncivilized manner, and people of the stature of Gordon Sinclair ridiculing the Portuguese who live in Canada because of such a demonstration. To him and other individuals… who had the courage or little sense of insulting us on the telephone, we would like to tell them that Toronto has 80,000 Portuguese-Canadians (and they are legally here…) who are an integral part of the Canadian society, that a large number of them are Canadian citizens with the entire right to have a saying in the destiny of this country, that they all have children who were born here and will die here and nobody can prohibit them from expressing their opinions.”

Place of origin:
Toronto, Ontario

Date: July–August 1977

Archived at:
Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections, York University Libraries

Fonds: F0573
Finding aid here