‘A giant step forward’
New $10 bill featuring Viola Desmond to enter circulation
Wanda Robson still finds it hard to believe that her big sister is the new face of the $10 bill — and the first Canadian woman to be featured on a regularly circulating banknote.
The sister of the late Nova Scotia civil rights pioneer and businesswoman Viola Desmond, Robson said the move to include a black woman on the bill is a “giant step forward” in continuing Desmond’s work toward equality.
In an interview, she said she has difficulty putting her excitement into words.
“I’m so grateful and I’m happy,” said Robson, who turns 92 next month. “Those are sort of mundane words, but I’m looking for a word that would describe it, and all I can say is what the kids say today: it’s awesome!”
Robson will make the first purchase with the new bill during a ceremony today at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg, where Bank of Canada governor Stephen Poloz and museum president John Young will officially launch the banknote.
For her first purchase, Robson plans to buy a book cowritten by her and Cape Breton University professor Graham Reynolds about Desmond’s life and legacy, and give it to her 12-year-old granddaughter so she can learn more about her great-aunt’s story. Robson said her granddaughter has shown a longtime interest in Desmond, despite being born decades after her death in 1965.
“She said, ‘You know nan, when I get my first 10-dollar bill with aunt Viola on it, I’m going to frame it, and put it on a wall, and never, ever spend it,”’ Robson said.
On Nov. 8, 1946, Desmond was arrested after refusing to leave a whites-only section of the Roseland Theatre in New Glasgow, N.S., in an incident that has since become one of the most high-profile cases of racial discrimination in Canadian history.
It would take 63 years for Nova Scotia to issue Desmond a posthumous apology and pardon.
Robson has spent years educating children and adults alike about how her sister’s case helped shine a light on Canada’s burgeoning civil rights movement.
She said the new bill’s national circulation will lead to even more awareness about Desmond’s story, and the wider issue of racial discrimination in Canada.
“It’s a giant step forward into knowledge about who we are, where we’ve been, and where we’re going,” she said. “There’s still a lot of work to be done, and I really hope that this bill will get not only children but adults to say, ‘who is that?’ And then people will be able to pass on what Viola did and the amazing differences she made.”
Desmond was selected to be on the bill after an open call for nominations and a public opinion survey on the Bank of Canada website.
Behind her portrait, the banknote also shows a map of Halifax’s historic north end, home to one of Canada’s oldest black communities and the area where Desmond grew up.
The map includes the stretch of Gottingen Street, where Desmond opened a salon as part of a business that would eventually expand into her own line of cosmetics and a beauty school, which allowed her to mentor black women from across the country.