Viola Desmond was born in Halifax in 1914. She became a beautician after training in Montreal which she had to do because as a woman of African descent she was not allowed to train in Halifax. She designed a line hair and skin care products for black women. She opened a hair salon and later The Desmond School of Beauty Culture so that black women would not have to travel as far as they previously had to receive proper training. Catering to women from Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Quebec. Students were provided with the skills required to open their own businesses and provide jobs for other black women within their communities. Each year as many as fifteen women graduated from the school, all of whom had been denied admission to whites-only training schools.
In 1946 she went into a theatre in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia to pass time as she waited for her car to get fixed. She bought a ticket which was for the balcony but because she was nearsighted, she decided to sit closer to the screen in the floor section. There were no segregation laws for movie theatres in Nova Scotia at the time but these discriminatory practices were allowed in all Canadian provinces.
Desmond wasn’t aware the floor seats were reserved for whites only but realized it when she asked to move. She refused. The floor seat tickets were more expensive, so when she was made aware she asked to exchange her ticket for a floor seat ticket and to pay the difference.
She was refused, dragged out of the theatre so forcibly that it caused a hip injury. She was then charged with tax evasion and held in jail for 12 hours. She was subsequently found guilty and fined $25.
In 2010 she was the first person in Canada to be granted a free pardon. A free pardon means she was deemed to have never committed the offence for which she was convicted. On March 18, 2018, at a ceremony in Halifax Nova Scotia, the $10 banknote on which she appears was unveiled.
Viola died at the age of 50, in 1965 in New York City.