Viola Desmond Was A Badass...

.....and more people should know her story.

Long Road to Justice - The Viola Desmond Story (Full Documentary)

February is Black History Month in Canada so it seems like a good time to blog some black history.

You've probably seen Viola Desmond's face on Canada's new $10.00 bill, but how much do you really know about the first Canadian born woman to appear alone on one of our bank notes? Turns out she's a total badass hero of Canada's civil rights movement. In honour of Black History month, here are...

True Facts About Viola Desmond, Badass:

She was a hair stylist and a successful businesswoman.

Viola was born in 1914. Her father was a barber and her mother was white. Given how unusual this would have been in 1914, it seems likely that Viola's parents were also badasses. Growing up in Nova Scotia, Viola noticed the lack of beauty products and services that catered to the needs of black women's hair, so she decided to pursue a career as a hair stylist. However, the beauty school in Halifax refused to accept black students, so she was forced to leave Nova Scotia to get her education in Montreal and New York instead. When she returned, she opened up her own beauty school so other black women in Nova Scotia wouldn't be forced to leave the province the way she had. Opening the first beauty school for black women in Nova Scotia sometime in the 1930s seems like a pretty badass accomplishment in its own right, but that's not all she did. She also operated a joint hair salon and barbershop with her husband, as well as selling her own line of cosmetics, called Vi's Beauty Products.

Viola's story happened more than 70 years ago, but sadly, it is still a struggle today for black women to find cosmetic products that properly meet their needs. Read more about this here.

She just wanted to go to the movies.

Like many of the most badass activists, Viola Desmond did not set out to change the course of history, but rather had activism forced on her through a basic need for justice.

On November 8, 1946, she was doing sales calls to beauty shops to encourage them to buy & sell her products when her car broke down in the town of New Glasgow. The repair shop told her they'd need a day to fix her car, which forced her to spend the night. Rather than sitting alone in her hotel room, Desmond decided to go see the movie The Dark Mirror at the Roseland Theatre.

She wasn't aware the theatre had a policy of segregating its patrons, with floor seats being reserved for white folks only (black folks had to sit upstairs in the balcony). The theatre did not have a sign posted, and Desmond was short sighted, so she wanted a floor seat to be able to view the movie properly. She purchased a ticket and settled into a floor seat to enjoy the show.

But the theatre staff had other plans. An usher came to advise Viola that she was sitting in the wrong area and that her ticket was for a seat in the balcony. When she offered to buy a floor seat, she was told "I’m not permitted to sell downstairs tickets to you people.” Shortly afterwards, the manager came to speak with her. It was then that Viola did something that many say sparked the civil rights movement in Canada -- she refused to get up.

Viola Desmond's Heritage Minute

She got manhandled by the cops.

When she realized she was being forced into a worse seat because she was black, she refused to get up and move as requested by the theatre manager. So he called the cops on her, and they physically picked her up and dragged her from the theatre. She injured her hip and knee and lost her hand bag and one of her shoes as they literally tossed her out. The police locked her up for the evening and she sat in jail for 12 hours.

In addition to being a badass, Viola Desmond was also clearly a woman of class and style. She was only about 4 and a half feet tall weighing around a hundred pounds. Just picture in your mind for a moment the image of a couple of white cops picking up this well dressed, well mannered young black women and then forcibly dragging her from the theatre. This was not the show the audience had come to see.

She was convicted of tax evasion for defrauding the provincial government of one penny. Yes seriously.

The local magistrate didn't waste any time. Viola was not informed of any of her legal rights, such as the right to an attorney, and was tried and convicted the very next morning. This part of Viola's story does a good job of showing just how insidious racism really is. There were no laws that made it a crime for a black person to sit in a designated whites only area, as Canada did not have "Jim Crow" laws enforcing segregation. Instead, the law went after her for failing to pay the full amusement tax on the cost of a floor seat ticket. She had purchased a balcony ticket and paid the amusement tax on this price, but floor seats where more expensive. When Viola insisted on sitting in a floor seat when having purchased a balcony ticket, the Province of Nova Scotia had lost out on all of ONE PENNY in tax. She was convicted of tax evasion, ordered to pay a $20.00 fine and $6.00 in "costs" to the theatre manager, who had brought the case against her.

On their surface, laws against tax evasion are not racially motivated, but in Viola Desmond's case, they were used to uphold and enforce white supremacy. To me, this is what is so important to take away from Viola's story -- white supremacy and racism are structural, built right into the foundations of our most powerful and important governing institutions. Canadians often take pride in the fact our country never had "Jim Crow" laws, but Viola's story shows such laws weren't necessary. The white government and legal system found other ways of keeping black folks in line, like nailing them for one cent tax evasion instead.

The Supreme Court of Nova Scotia upheld her conviction.

Sadly, Viola did not get justice during her lifetime. When she returned home from what must have been a traumatic stay in New Glasgow, she told her friends and family what had happened to her. Her husband encouraged her to let it go, but her pastor told her to fight the unjust conviction.

She got a lawyer who appealed her case on the basis that she'd been wrongfully convicted, and not on the basis she'd faced unjust racial discrimination. He took the case all the way to the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia, where she ultimately lost. Despite being well aware of what the racist implications were, the justices ignored the racial aspects of the case and ruled only on procedural grounds.

She chose to leave Nova Scotia, and then Canada.

Viola's case was covered in the news and drew unwanted attention. Some people labeled her a troublemaker, and some members of the black community accused her of trying to pass as white by sneaking into a floor seat, because her mother was white. The whole experience must have been very disheartening. After the trial, she closed her business and moved to Montreal, and then later to New York where she died at the age of 50 in 1965.

She was the first person to receive a post-humous free pardon in Canada.

It took 64 years before her case was overturned and the government of Nova Scotia finally apologized for what they did to her.

It's important to understand the difference between a free pardon and a regular pardon. A regular pardon is an act of mercy, but implies the convicted is guilty. A free pardon is different in that it fundamentally acknowledges the government was wrong and the conviction was unjust.

She is often compared to Rosa Parks, but there are important differences in the two stories.

Viola's case happened nine years before Rosa Parks famously sat down on that bus. Rosa was a passionate civil rights activist who knew exactly what she was doing when she got on the bus. By contrast, Viola was a pioneering entrepreneur whose case occurred spontaneously because her car broke down. She really did just want to watch a movie.

The struggle against white supremacy and racism in Canada is far from over.

It's important to recognize Viola's story is an example of structural white supremacy. Every level of the law conspired to protect and uphold the Roseland Theatre's racist segregation policy.

Also, we'd be doing a disservice to Viola's badass legacy if we presented her story without acknowledging the struggle she was part of is still ongoing today, more than seven decades later. Click here, here and here for some pretty clear examples that Canada, sadly, is still a pretty racist country in many ways (that last link is about a recent tweet from Canada's former Foreign Affairs Minister clearly implying that wearing blackface should be socially acceptable. Heavy sigh). If you'd like to learn more about your own white privilege, and what you can do to unlearn your own racist thinking and habits, click here.

Thanks for reading.

Got feedback on this blog? Did I get anything wrong? Send me a message using the form below and let me know!

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Sources and further reading:

Viola Desmond's Fight For Change is not History -- The Walrus

A Viola Desmond Primer -- The Globe and Mail

Viola Desmond -- Wikipedia

The Historical Construction of Racial Identity and Implications for Reconciliation -- University of Ottawa

VIOLA DAVIS DESMOND (1914-1965) -- BLACKPAST

Dear white people, wake up: Canada is racist -- The Conversation