Undated archival handout photo of Viola Desmond

Even when she was imprisoned, Viola Desmond was coiffed and groomed, with white gloves upon her petite hands and an upright posture despite the circumstance.

On Nov. 8, 1946, Ms. Desmond, a black beautician and businesswoman, was jailed after being dragged from a Nova Scotia theatre by two white men because she refused to move from the “whites-only” main floor to the balcony, the designated area for blacks.

For her indignation, Ms. Desmond — today an icon of this country’s civil rights movement and known as Canada’s Rosa Parks — was convicted of an obscure tax offence by a white judge in New Glasgow.

[April 14, 2010], Ms. Desmond, who passed away in 1965 in New York, [was] be pardoned by Nova Scotia Lt.-Gov. Mayann Francis at a ceremony in Halifax, and Canada will be reminded of its egregious errors.

The free pardon recognizes Ms. Desmond’s innocence at the Roseland Theatre that night, and it recognizes the error of the four white Supreme Court judges who turned down her appeal.

But although the pardon is hailed as an overdue gesture, some members of Ms. Desmond’s family say if she were alive today, the former teacher and entrepreneur would want nothing of the sort.

“She would have laughed and said, ‘Pardon me for what? I didn’t do anything wrong,’” said Sharon Oliver, Ms. Desmond’s niece, who says her own elderly mother and two of Ms. Desmond’s other sisters are angered by the pardon.

A fourth sister who lives in Halifax, Wanda Robson, supports the pardon and has worked in recent years to educate schoolchildren about Ms. Desmond’s unwitting role as a civil rights pioneer.

Indeed, most Canadians know little, if anything, about the woman.

“Every year I ask my graduate students, ‘Who has heard of Viola Desmond?’ And only a sprinkling of hands go up,” said Constance Backhouse, a law professor at the University of Ottawa and author of Colour-Coded: A Legal History of Racism in Canada. “Everybody knows about Rosa Parks and the history of racism in the United States, but it seems that nobody wants to own up to the racist history here in Canada.”

Ms. Backhouse, who poured through court documents and interviewed some of Ms. Desmond’s beauty-parlour clients for her book, said she hopes that today’s event will usher a remembrance not only of Ms. Desmond, but also of segregation in this country.

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Source: Republished National Post
Author: Kathryn Blaze Carlson