First Canadian Woman of Colour Appears on $10 Canadian Bank Note

BY: ALYSSA MAHADEO

A new face graces the $10 Canadian bank note, that of a woman, and not just any woman, but a woman of colour. On Monday, November 19th, $10 banknotes bearing the face of Viola Irene Desmond officially entered circulation, the first time a Canadian woman has been celebrated on the face of her country’s currency.

Viola Irene Desmond (July 6, 1914 – February 7, 1965) was a Canadian Black Nova Scotian businesswoman who challenged racial segregation at a cinema in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, in 1946. Upon her refusal to leave a whites-only area of the Roseland Theatre, she was convicted of a minor tax violation for the one-cent tax difference between the seat she had paid for and the seat she used, which was more expensive. Desmond’s case is one of the most publicized incidents of racial discrimination in Canadian history and helped start the modern civil rights movement in Canada.

In March of this year, Desmond was named a National Historic Person where the new $10 bill was unveiled by Finance Minister Bill Morneau and Bank of Canada governor Stephen Poloz during a ceremony at the Halifax Central Library.

“The Queen is in good company,” Ms. Desmond’s sister Wanda Robson said on Nov 19th in a ceremony at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg, which is featured on the other side of the bill. The 91-year-old was due to make the first purchase with one of the new $10 bills. From Bank of Canada Governor Stephen Poloz, she also received a framed engraving of her sister and two banknotes with special serial numbers. (Reported by the Globe & Mail)

Viola Desmond was a cosmetics pioneer for black women in Atlantic Canada. Following in the entrepreneurial footsteps of her father, a Halifax barber, Ms. Desmond started out in business at a time when very few beauty schools would accept black students. After training in Montreal, Atlantic City, and New York, she founded her own institution, Halifax’s Desmond School of Beauty Culture, selling her own line of hair and skin products across Nova Scotia.

On one business trip on November 8th, 1946, when her car broke down in New Glasgow, Ms. Desmond stopped in at the Roseland Theatre to kill time while her car was at the garage for repair. The Roseland was a segregated theatre and the floor seats were for whites only, while black guests were expected to sit in the balcony. Ms. Desmond was shortsighted and needed to sit closer for a better view. When she tried to purchase a floor seat, she was refused because she was black. Working actively to solve her problem she then bought a balcony seat (which was one cent cheaper) and proceeded to sit in the floor area that was until the theatre staff called the police and she spent 12 hours in jail.

Ms. Desmond was charged and convicted of tax evasion, over a single penny. She did not have a lawyer at trial and she was never informed she was entitled to one. Arguing that Ms. Desmond had evaded the one-cent difference between the balcony and floor ticket prices, a judge fined her $26. Protests from Nova Scotia’s black community and an appeal to the provincial Supreme Court proved fruitless, and Ms. Desmond died in 1965 without any acknowledgement of racial discrimination in her case.

In 2010, Nova Scotia gave her a free pardon and the black lieutenant-governor signed it into law. “Here I am, 64 years later – a black woman giving freedom to another black woman,” Mayann Francis recalled in a 2014 profile about the pardon, which called Ms. Desmond’s case a miscarriage of justice and said she should never have been charged. “I believe she has to know that she is now free.” (Reported by the Globe & Mail)

The newly reimagined purple banknote features a vertical design, different from the standard horizontal notes, and Viola Desmond’s face is gracefully incorporated into the design for all Canadians to see. Another step forward in bringing awareness and changing the conversation around racial discrimination.