I believe that ignorance should never be a point of pride, and when someone praises something unfamiliar you should make an effort to see what it is, rather than proclaiming you’ve never heard of it before. So it is with a great deal of shame that I must say that I had not actually heard of Viola Desmond until it was announced that she would be appearing on Canadian money.
But while I have the appropriate level of shame about my relative ignorance of what Desmond did and why she was an important woman, I think this does illustrate the value of putting her on money. Giving her the honor is about making people curious, who is this woman and why is she looking back at me from my $10 bill?
To answer, in brief, this woman was a hairdresser from Halifax who ran a successful salon, set up a school for teaching hairdressers and also sold her own beauty products. That’s not why she is on the bill, of course, but it’s the achievement she intentionally worked towards.
She was an accidental hero, however, as tends to be the case whenever you start talking about civil rights. Davis definitely didn’t intend to make any sort of impact when she decided to take in a film at the Roseland Theatre in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. Nobody wants to be an instigator for any social change when they’re trying to get some light entertainment. But she was black, and the theatre only allowed black people to sit in the balcony seats. When she tried to sit in a floor seats for the show, as she had assumed she paid to do, she was told to go to the balcony. When she refused, she was arrested and charged with attempting to evade the entertainment tax. Eventually she was convicted of the crime, but her legal struggles shone a light on the discrimination people were facing in the country.
That’s a really brief version of what happened of course, but it’s also something which I am ashamed to admit I didn’t know about until she was announced to be the first Canadian woman on our money. That’s why it’s a great thing that she’s going to be on there, because it inspires people to look up who she was and what she did.
It’s also good to know because in Canada we tend to have a belief that we were the nice people of the continent. We might learn of someone like Rosa Parks in the United States, but there’s always a feeling that people of this country think segregation was the domain of the Americans. Desmond is a reminder that we had the same problems in this country, and we needed women like her to help us fix them. It’s unfortunate that we need people like Desmond – and still need people like Desmond, make no mistake. But hopefully their struggles are not in vain, and we can fix the problems in our society that people like her have to struggle against.
It’s important to remind people that there are those who are denied even the most basic rights based on who they are. Desmond serves as a reminder, and as someone who fought against it, and that’s why she deserves a place on our money. Hopefully having her there inspires people to look up who she was and her place in Canada’s history.
