What You Need To Know About Canadian Civil Rights Activist Viola Desmond
Civil rights activist and businesswoman Viola Desmond became the first Canadian woman to appear on a bank note when she started gracing the front of the $10 bill in 2018. Desmond, who launched Nova Scotia's civil rights movement in the 1940s after refusing to leave a whites-only section in a movie theatre, was chosen from more than 460 eligible candidates by the federal government and Bank of Canada.
Desmond's act of defiance and courage helped change the course of Canadian history. Here's what you need to know about her inspiring legacy.
Desmond was born and raised in Halifax
She taught Black students in the racially-segregated school system there before starting a hairdressing business called Vi’s Studio of Beauty Culture. She later launched an academy for Black beauticians who were barred from whites-only beauty schools in Nova Scotia, before expanding her business to other parts of the province.
She is called the "first lady of civil rights"
Desmond's defiance of Nova Scotia's segregation laws happened nine years before Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama.
Related: How Food Is At The Heart Of African Nova Scotian Culture
Desmond ended up at the movie theatre by chance
Desmond's visit to the segregated Roseland Theatre in New Glasgow, N.S. on Nov. 8, 1946 was totally unplanned. The 32-year-old had been on her way to a business meeting in Sydney, N.S. when her car broke down. While the garage repaired it, Desmond decided to go watch psychological thriller The Dark Mirror to kill time. The rest is history.
After she was arrested, she never removed her white gloves
Police injured Desmond's hip as they dragged her four-foot-11, less than 100-pound frame out of the theatre. They held her in jail overnight but Desmond didn't sleep. Instead she sat upright, still wearing her white gloves, which were a sign of sophistication at time.
Related: I'm A Black Woman, And This Is What Resistance Looks Like To Me
Desmond was fined $20 and sentenced to 30 days in jail
She was also convicted of defrauding the Nova Scotia government for the difference in tax between what white patrons paid on the ground floor (with a better view) and the black patrons in the balcony. The total tax disparity? One cent.
It took the courts 64 years to overturn Desmond's conviction
She never stopped fighting the conviction—even before the provincial Supreme Court (her case lost on a technicality). The pardon came in 2010, long after Desmond died in 1965. She did, however, live to see the province dismantle its segregation laws in 1954—a move activists say might not have happened had Desmond refused to budge from her theatre seat nearly a decade before.
