Viola Desmond
Encyclopedia : V : VI : VIO : Viola Desmond
Viola Desmond (1914–1965) was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
Viola Desmond was an African-Canadian woman born in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She was an operator of a beauty parlor and beauty college in Halifax. She was considered the Atlantic Canadian version of Rosa Parks. Viola's story was one of the most publicized incidents of racial discrimination in Nova Scotian and Canadian History.
On November 8, 1946, Viola Desmond refused to sit in the balcony designated exclusively for blacks in a New Glasgow theater but, instead, took her seat on the ground floor where only whites were allowed to sit. After being forcibly removed from the theater and arrested, Viola was eventually found guilty of not paying the one-cent difference in tax on the balcony ticket from the main floor theater ticket.
However, the authorities pressed into service an entirely different strategy. Retail sales tax was calculated based on the price of the theatre ticket. Since the theatre would only agree to sell the Black woman a cheaper balcony ticket, but she had insisted upon sitting in the more expensive main floor seat, she was one cent short on tax. For her crime of so-called tax evasion, she was violently removed from the theatre by a white police officer, thrown in jail overnight, tried without counsel, convicted and fined $20 and costs. During the trial, no one admitted that Viola Desmond was Black, and that the theatre maintained a racist seating policy. The trial proceeded as if it related to race-neutral tax evasion. All efforts to have the conviction overturned at higher levels of court failed. The experience of Viola Desmond is only one of the many incidents of racism that profoundly affected the lives of African Canadians throughout the twentieth century.
Sources
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.