Civil Rights Pioneer Viola Desmond to Grace Canadian $10 Bill

Desmond was a beautician who produced her own line of hair and skin products, opening a beauty school for black women prior to World War II. It is not her career in the beauty industry that made her an icon, however, but her brave refusal to bow to racial segregation at a New Glasgow movie theater in 1946.

Desmond, 32 at the time, went to see a movie at the Roseland Theatre to pass the time while her car was being repaired. Because she is shortsighted, she could not see clearly from the balcony seats where black patrons were told to be seated.

​When the cashier refused to sell Desmond a floor seat, she bought a balcony seat but nevertheless sat in the whites-only section in the floor area. She refused to move after theater staff called police and, as a result, was arrested and spent the night in jail.

At her trial Desmond did not have a lawyer, and was fined $26 for evading the one-cent difference between the two tickets denoting the  different sections of the theater. The case was resonant and evoked protests from Nova Scotia's black community, but neither that nor Desmond's appeal to the provincial Supreme Court led to recognition of racial discrimination in her case.

Desmond was officially pardoned only in 2010, 35 years after her death, by the region's black female lieutenant governor.

Sunday Miller, executive director of the Africville Heritage Trust in Halifax, praised the decision to honor Desmond.

"History, you can't change," Miller said. "But sometimes you have to recognize that the things that were done weren't right, and then you have to try and right them."

Desmond is the first woman of color to get her own Heritage Minute (a short film illustrating an important moment in Canadian history), which was played at a Thursday event announcing the new banknote.