Viola Desmond

It was November 8, 1946, in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia.

A businesswoman from Halifax was driving to Sydney for a meeting. Her car broke down. The repair would take hours.

Her name was Viola Desmond. She took a room in town, then she went to the movies.

Viola was born in Halifax on July 6, 1914, into a family of eleven children. Her father was a barber. At first she taught, briefly, in schools set apart for Black students.

Then she chose beauty. Few schools accepted Black women. She trained in Montreal, then in Atlantic City and New York.

In Halifax, she opened her salon. Then she founded her own school, to train young Black women. Some students even came from New Brunswick and Quebec.

Her graduates opened salons of their own. There they sold the beauty products Viola had created.

That evening, at the Roseland Theatre, Viola asked for a seat on the main floor. She was given a balcony ticket. The balcony was the section for people who were not white.

She tried to exchange her ticket. The cashier refused. She was not permitted, she said, to sell downstairs tickets "to you people."

Viola sat down on the main floor anyway.

The manager came to see her. She answered that she had been sold a ticket. She was willing to pay the difference.

She stayed in her seat.

The police came. She was dragged out. She was hurt in the hip and the knee, then taken to jail.

She spent the night in a cell. All night long, she sat upright.

The next day, in court, no one mentioned her colour. She was charged with cheating the province out of a tax of a single cent: the difference between the balcony and the main floor.

She had no lawyer. No one had told her she had the right to one. The magistrate fined her $26.

She tried to have the conviction set aside. In January 1947, a judge refused: the deadline to appeal had passed.

But the money raised for her defence was not lost. An association of the province's Black community used it to keep fighting segregation. A journalist, Carrie Best, told the story in her newspaper, The Clarion.

In 1954, segregation ended in the laws of Nova Scotia.

Viola closed her business. She left for Montreal, then for New York. She died there on February 7, 1965.

Her sister, Wanda Robson, did not forget her. Starting in 2003, she fought for justice to be done to Viola.

On April 15, 2010, Nova Scotia granted Viola a free pardon, and the premier apologized. The pardon said something simple: the conviction had been a mistake. Never before in Canada had such a pardon been granted after death.

That day, Wanda said:

Viola had kept her seat. Her school, which trained other women, and her refusal to sit where she was pushed aside say the same thing: everyone has a place among the others. That gesture echoes Ubuntu: no one can be fully themselves while shutting someone out.

On November 19, 2018, a new $10 bill was put into circulation. A vertical bill, the first in the country. And, alone on its face, a Canadian woman: Viola Desmond.

The woman once convicted over a single cent now travels from hand to hand, across the whole country.