Marlene Wagman-Geller

    The British National Anthem begins with the words, “God save our gracious queen, long live our noble queen, long may she reign.” As part of her reign, Queen Elizabeth II dominated Canadian currency; however, while her likeness appeared as a result of sovereignty, in 2018, Viola Desmond appeared for the sisterhood as the first non-royal woman to appear alone on Canada’s $10.00 banknote.

      As with many cherished beliefs, one that does not bear too much scrutiny is Canada’s historic treatment of its black population. The popular misconception is when the Moses of the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman, delivered her passengers to the North they had entered the land of milk and honey. The biography of a woman from its eastern province sadly places this belief into the realm of urban myth.     

       In Twelfth Night,  Shakespeare wrote, “Some men are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them,” the latter the case with Viola, born in 1914 in Halifax, one of fifteen children of James and Gwendolyn Davis. Her mother was a housewife; her father was a barber, one of the few livelihoods available to black men as most white barbers refused to cut African- American hair. The members of the family were descendants of former slaves who settled in the province of Nova Scotia at the close of the American Revolutionary War. During the first half of the 20^th century, because of sexism and racism, most African-Canadian women were housewives or maids. After graduating from Bloomfield High School, Viola bypassed the domestic-worker avenue and set her sights on teaching. Although Canada did not have Jim Crow laws, it did have policies that enforced segregation, couched in terms that masked racist intent. Viola could not attend the provincial college in Truro and could only work at racially segregated schools.  

     Her career focus changed after reading an article about Madam C. J. Walker, an entrepreneur, civil rights advocate, and the first American woman of any race to become a self-made millionaire, a feat she accomplished by catering to black beauty needs. Viola wanted to follow in Walker’s footsteps; barred from schools in Halifax, at age twenty, she received a diploma from Apex College of Beauty Culture and Hairdressing in Atlantic City.

        Before her departure, Viola began dating Jack Desmond, the owner of Jack’s Barber Shop on Gottingen’s (the black district of the city,) commercial strip. Jack travelled by train to visit Viola and, in 1936, a Baptist minister performed their wedding vows. Mrs. Desmond founded the first hairdresser salon for back women in Halifax, sharing commercial space with Jack’s barbershop.  Vi’s Studio of Beauty Culture attracted a clientele that included community activist Carrie M. Best, opera singer Portia White, and one of the first black nurses in Nova Scotia, Gwen Jenkins. In the early 1940s, Viola established the Desmond School of Beauty Culture where she resumed teaching, except this time was for those who wanted to learn about the cosmetic industry. The school had an excellent reputation and attracted women from Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Quebec. The graduates went on to sell Desmond cosmetics.

    In 1945, for business purposes, Viola bought a 1940 Dodge; the purchase was remarkable as most women of her era did not even possess a driver’s license. As fate transpired, the vehicle was to make a huge impact on her life and make her the Canadian Rosa Parks.

      A year later, during a business trip to Sydney, Nova Scotia, her car broke down in New Glasgow and rather than wait at the garage, she decided to see a murder mystery starring Olivia de Havilland, her favorite actress, at the Roseland Theater. She was excited at the prospect because, as a workaholic, she rarely took time out for entertainment. As she was in a new city, she was unaware of its segregation policy restricting black customers to the balcony, Viola requested a ground floor seat, something that was important to her as she was near-sighted. The cashier, without explaining the situation, sold her a ticket for the balcony. Once inside, an usher told her she had to move, and she returned to the cashier and asked to exchange her ticket for a ground-floor seat, explaining she would gladly pay the extra ten cents. In response, the girl explained, “I’m not permitted to sell downstairs tickets to you people.” Livid, Viola returned to her original seat that resulted in the manager, Henry MacNeil, calling the police. When the officer arrived, he grabbed one of Viola’s arms, and the manager took her other; they dragged her out of the theater. Viola resisted arrest, and in the scuffle, she lost her purse, her shoe, and injured her hip. The thirty-two-year-old Ms. Desmond spent twelve hours behind bars where she was never told of her legal right to a lawyer or to seek bail. Throughout the night, she sat with her back ramrod straight, her way of dealing with an upside-down world. She kept her spotless white gloves on; although she was behind bars, she could remain a lady. To add insult to injury, a few local drunks joined her and made obscene sexual comments. The incident was not the only traumatic one she had endured. In 1917, when she was three-years-old, the Imo, a Norwegian supply ship, and the Mont-Blanc, a French cargo ship carrying munitions, collided at the mouth of Halifax Harbor. The resulting explosion caused 2,000 deaths and devastated the city’s North End, home to the city’s black residents. Viola was living on Gottingen Street and was in her high-chair when the blast shook her rental home and shattered the kitchen window, showering her with broken glass. The window blind fell on her, and her father thought she had been killed.

       The charge against Ms. Desmond was tax evasion, trying to defraud the provincial government of one cent; the cost of an amusement tax. In the trial, the theater owner acted as the prosecutor; Viola did not have an attorney. The judge sentenced her to a $26.00 fine and $6.00 court costs or thirty days in jail. Initially, Viola wanted to take the prison sentence to draw attention to her cause, but she reconsidered as she felt her students needed her.  

      To fight the conviction, Viola hired an attorney, Frederick William Bissett, who asked the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia to overturn the lower court’s decision, but the effort proved futile. Rather than arguing that the theater was using a racially neutral tax law to enforce segregation, her attorney tried to get the decision overturned on a technicality. Despite the court’s decision, one of the judges voiced his opinion, “If the manager who laid the complaint was so zealous because of a bona fide belief that there had been an attempt to defraud the province of Nova Scotia of the sum of one cent or was it a surreptitious endeavor to enforce a Jim Crow style rule by misuse of a public statute.” The recent world war had ended Hitler’s reign of Aryan supremacy, but racial intolerance continued in the home country.

     Nevertheless, the little woman had ignited a huge spark, one that helped ignite Canada’s civil rights movement and ushered in Nova Scotia’s legal end to segregation in 1954.  Her refusal to give up her seat occurred nine years before Rosa Parks did the same on a Montgomery, Alabama bus, but while the American became an icon, Desmond became a forgotten footnote.

     Viola suffered personal and professional repercussions for her act of resistance, and her notoriety contributed to the dissolution of her marriage. She shut down her beauty shop, relocated to Montreal, and then to New York City where she worked for a time as a cigarette girl at Small’s Paradise Club in Harlem. Viola died alone from a gastrointestinal hemorrhage in 1965 at the age of fifty. Her interment was in Camp Hill Cemetery, Halifax.

      The feminist-before the term was coined-would have been forgotten had it not been for an act of serendipity. Wanda Robson, who had put her education on hold to raise her children, at age seventy-three enrolled in a course on race relations at University College of Cape Breton in Nova Scotia. When her professor, Graham Reynolds, delivered a lecture regarding the 1946 incident where Viola Desmond first took a seat, and then refused to relinquish it, and held up a picture of the activist, Wanda raised her hand and said that was her sister. The moment provided a life-changing moment for both the teacher, the student, and the country. 

     At age seventy-seven, Wanda received her Bachelor of Arts diploma, and after graduation, she launched a campaign to educate the public about her older sister. She gave numerous media interviews and presentations in schools; as a result, the government of Nova Scotia granted Ms. Desmond a 2010 posthumous pardon. Mayann Francis, the lieutenant governor, signed it into law with the remark, “Here I am, sixty-four years later-a black woman giving freedom to another black woman. I believe she has to know that she is now free.” Because of the renewed interest in the miscarriage of justice, Viola emerged from the shadows and became a national civil rights icon.

      In 2016, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who describes himself as a feminist and whose government requires departments to examine their programs to ensure gender equality, stated Canada would, for the first time, introduce a woman who was not reigning royalty to grace the front of its ten-dollar banknotes. In a break with tradition, the Bank of Canada asked the public for nominations and more than 26,000 suggestions poured in. A panel of experts, from a variety of fields, pared the list to 461 names. 

     Viola Desmond-fifty-three years after her death- was the winning candidate, and her likeness replaced that of Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister. The bill is the first vertical banknote and displays Viola’s image; behind her portrait is a stretch of Gottingen Street, the black community where she had been born and started her beauty salon. Ms. Desmond became the first black person-and the first woman other than a British queen-to appear alone on Canadian currency. One of the wonderful aspects of the new currency is it honors a Canadian heroine, and it lifts a curtain on the country’s unsavory past, something that should not be swept under a historic carpet.

      The ninety-year-old Wanda was present at the bill’s unveiling at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, and she stated, “It’s unbelievable to think that my sister-a black woman-is on the $10 bill. The Queen is in good company.” Other tributes showered on Ms. Desmond was a commemorative stamp and a Google Doodle on what would have been her 104^th birthday.

      The name of the movie that made Viola a historic first can serve as a microcosm of her era: The Dark Mirror.