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There are many nice things about living in Canada, so long as you’re white. We’ve got our own racist history that is literally being unearthed more each day. And segregation was absolutely a thing here. Viola Desmond, a Black woman, was arrested in Nova Scotia for sitting in the whites section of a movie theatre. Her husband said let it go. She said fuck that. Fight the power.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: November 8, 1946--
Born in Halifax in 1914, Viola’s father was a barber. She noticed there was little available for Black women regarding their hair and beauty needs. Problem was, Halifax wouldn’t let her attend beautician school because her skin wasn’t an allowable tone. Read: the school was fucking racist.
So she trained in Montreal, Atlantic City, and New York, returning to Halifax and opening a combination barbershop/beauty salon with her husband. She also opened her own beauty school so Black women wouldn’t have to leave town like she did. On November 8, 1946, she was driving to the city of Sydney, also in Nova Scotia, to sell her beauty wares when her car broke down in the town of New Glasgow. The mechanic said it would take a day, so she went to see a movie.
Last night I had a dream about this movie I saw when I was a kid where you became a paying subscriber. Click the green button.
New Glasgow didn’t have official laws regarding segregation, and there were no signs in the theatre to that effect. The theatre sold her a ticket to the balcony section, but her eyesight was poor, so she asked for a floor seat. The ticket seller said, “I’m not permitted to sell downstairs tickets to you people.” Pissed off, she said fuck this and sat in the floor section anyway. With the white people. Heavens to Betsy, me oh my!
Viola was told to move. Sorry, she said. Can’t see from the balcony. I’m staying put. She offered to pay the additional 10 cents for a floor seat, but their reaction was to call the cops to forcibly remove her. Desmond’s hip and knee were injured in the process. She spent the next 12 hours in jail. The crime? Fucking tax evasion. Even though she offered to pay the extra 10 cents, a motherfucking penny of that dime was slated for the province, and she was convicted of depriving the government of a single cent and fined $26.
Her husband wanted her to drop it, but her church had her back, and they fought the charge, helping her hire a lawyer. Alas, the prosecutors were sneaky fucks, and Viola’s charge had no mention of race. They stuck to their “tax evasion” guns, even though she’d offered to pay the additional charge for a floor seat, and she lost the case. But her choice to resist the status quo of “customary” racism in Canada received ample news coverage and was an inspiration to mobilize Halifax’s Black community to activism. In 2010, Viola Desmond was granted a posthumous pardon and apology from the Nova Scotia government. Beginning in 2018, her face adorned the Canadian $10 bill.
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