Black female activist will be on $10 bill
Viola Desmond to be first Canadian woman on Canadian currency
GATINEAU, Que. — It had been some time since Viola Desmond last visited the cinema.
The hairdresser and entrepreneur opted to sit close to the front of the theatre; her poor eyesight made it difficult to see from the balcony, the section where black people were expected to sit in those days.
“She wanted to see a movie,” Wanda Robson, 89, said Thursday as she recalled the historic day in 1946 when her older sister chose to defy the rules and sit in the Nova Scotia theatre’s “whites-only” section.
Given all that followed, Robson said, Desmond would have been honoured to see herself on the $10 bill decided to catch a movie at what turned out to be a racially segregated theatre in New Glasgow, N.S.
“She said, ‘I stretched out and I was just getting comfortable, and I thought, ‘Oh, this is nice, and I won’t worry about anything,’” and then this usher came up and told her she couldn’t sit there,” Robson said in an interview.
Desmond was arrested and fined. Her decision to fight the charges in court inspired later generations of black people in Nova Scotia and the rest of Canada. The Nova Scotia government granted her a posthumous pardon in 2010.
The shortlist of candidates included poet E. Pauline Johnson; Elsie MacGill, who received an electrical engineering degree from the University of Toronto in 1927; Quebec suffragette Idola SaintJean; and 1928 Olympic medallist Fanny Rosenfeld.
There were more than 26,000 submissions from the public, which was later whittled down to 461 eligible nominees who had Canadian citizenship and had been dead for at least 25 years.