Remembering the courage of Viola Desmond
The first time I met Wanda Robson I was inside her house and had just been introduced to her by her son, Jeff. She responded by fixing me with what used to be known as a “gimlet eye.”
There was a tense silence for a few seconds.
Then my friend said, pleadingly, “Mom, John wasn’t here for it.”
I never did find out exactly what “it” was.
But I do recall that she had been away recently, and since Jeff and his brother Gordon were well-known social conveners in our high school years, I imagined some sort of revelry at their house on Henry Street to which I, alas, had not been invited. My memory is that once my innocence was established, the stern expression melted and was replaced with the kind of warmth on display in a YouTube video making the rounds lately It shows Robson opening an envelope and seeing, for the first time, the new $10 bill carrying the image of her sister, the civil rights pioneer Viola Desmond. I imagine you know her story by now. How Desmond, who ran her own beauty salon in Halifax and created a line of beauty products which she sold around the province, was on a business trip to Cape Breton when her car broke down around New Glasgow on Nov. 8, 1946.
How, to kill time while her car was being repaired, she decided to see what was playing at Roseland Theatre. How the young black woman didn’t know that the Roseland’s owners ran their business like it was Mississippi before the civil rights movement: whites on the main floor, blacks up in the balcony.
How Desmond then decided to walk into the downstairs section so that her weak eyes could actually make out the film. The owners called the cops. Desmond spent the night in jail. The next day, since segregation wasn’t officially a Nova Scotia law, she was found guilty of a minor tax violation.
The courts ruled against her when she appealed. But she’s on the $10 bill because Desmond’s brave stand happened nine years before Alabama’s Rosa Parks refused to go to the back of the bus. I didn’t know a thing about any of that during the few years that I spent around her sister’s home.
If I had some sense of her son’s connection to history I was so simple-minded in those days that it may not have even stayed with me.
It stayed with Robson, though, who has done her part to ensure Viola Desmond, and what she did, isn’t forgotten.
She’s written two books, ‘Sister To Courage’ and ‘Viola Desmond’s Canada’, about her sister, their family and the times in which they lived.
In 2009, Robson called the mayor of New Glasgow and asked that town council pass a motion recognizing the incident. When she and the town began discussions about erecting a plaque to memorialize her sister and what had happened, the provincial government got wind of it. A year later Darrell Dexter’s government issued a posthumous apology and pardon for Desmond, who died in 1965. There have been other honours, including a chair in social justice named in Desmond’s honour at Cape Breton University, a Viola Desmond postage stamp and a ferry that carries her name.
Yesterday morning, I walked through the Camp Hill Cemetery where there are two signs noting the graves of dignitaries — Joseph Howe’s and Viola Desmond’s. There are plans for streets named after her in Halifax and Montreal.
As is noted in these pages, the law firm that bought the Roseland Theatre is now asking artists from around the region to submit work inspired by Desmond.
On Thursday the new $10 bill was unveiled. Wanda Robson, who is in her 90s now, will be there.
The last time we spoke I had written something about her sister in these pages. When she read it to her son, who now lives in Vancouver, Jeff said, “Mom that’s my old friend, John.” We had a good chuckle about how she had forgotten all about me. I’m not in the slightest bit miffed.
It’s hard work keeping a legacy alive. One for which, I think, Robson certainly deserves to be honoured.
Cape Breton University, from which she graduated at the age of 76, has already given her an honorary degree. I don’t know: Would the Order of Nova Scotia be out of line?