Richard Riot - Background

Background

Maurice Richard was the star player for the Montreal Canadiens, and it was common for opponents to provoke him during games. Teams reportedly sent players onto the ice to purposefully annoy him by yelling ethnic slurs, hooking, slashing and holding him as much as possible. Throughout his career, Richard was fined and suspended several times for retaliatory assaults on players and officials, including a $250 fine for slapping a linesman in the face less than three months before the March 13, 1955 incident. Richard was considered the embodiment of French-Canadians and was a hero during a time when they were seen as second-class citizens. He was revered when he fought the "damn English" during games. In his book, The Rocket: A Cultural History of Maurice Richard, Benoît Melançon compares Richard to Major League Baseball's Jackie Robinson by stating that both players represented the possibility for their minority groups to succeed in North America.

During the 1950s, Quebec's industries and natural resources were controlled primarily by English Canadians or Americans. Québécois were the lowest-paid ethnic group in Quebec, which resulted in a sense that control rested with the Anglophone minority. Because of this and other factors, there had been growing discontent in the years before the riot. In early 1954, Richard's teammate, Bernie "Boom Boom" Geoffrion, was suspended in a move seen as anti-Francophone. Following the suspension, Richard, who had a weekly column in the Samedi-Dimanche newspaper, called League president Campbell a "dictator" in print. The league in turn forced Richard to retract his statement and stop writing in the newspaper. In his 1976 biography of Richard, Jean-Marie Pellerin wrote that his humiliation was shared by all Québécois, who were sent running once more by the "English boot". This was reflected in a Montreal newspaper's editorial cartoon (pictured), which portrayed him as an unruly schoolchild made to write lines by Campbell, shown as the teacher; the cartoon had a deeper meaning as an example of the societal hierarchy that existed between English and French Canadians.