The Dark Mirror is a forgettable film.
The psychological horror centres on a woman accused of murdering her doctor boyfriend.
But wait!
She has an evil twin she didn’t know about!
A twin expert, which is a thing in this movie, is brought in to determine which one is good, and which one is an evil murderer.
Honestly, if you want to see a good twin-evil twin story, watch The Thing and I in The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror VII from 1996.
Regardless, The Dark Mirror was released on Oct. 18, 1946. It grossed $2.75 million at the box office to mixed reviews, and it picked up an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay.
And… the film also did something else.
It changed Canadian history when.
a young woman sat down at the Roseland Film Theatre in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia on Nov 8, 1946, to watch The Dark Mirror while her car was being repaired.
She never saw the end of it.
She was thrown out.
Her crime?
Sitting in a place meant for whites.
I’m Craig Baird, this is Canadian History Ehx and today I share the powerful story of the woman who now graces our $10 bill…
This is the life of…Viola Desmond!
February is Black History Month and over the next four weeks, I am sharing important stories of Black Canadians to celebrate. And before I continue, this episode may contain dated language. It is being used as examples of how people spoke at the time and does not reflect current views.
We’re starting off with Viola Desmond who was born on July 6, 6, 1914 in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Her father James was a barber and prominent member of the Black community while her mother Gwendolyn was white.
The couple worked hard to raise their ten children while facing backlash from the white community.
Them inter racial marriage wasn’t accepted by them, but they were welcomed in the Black community.
The family lived a quiet and happy existence in Halifax until, one day when it was nearly shattered.
On Dec. 6, 1917, Viola was three, and she was sitting at the kitchen table in her high chair with her back to the window,
She was having breakfast with her siblings.
Her father was taking care of them, while their mother was on a train heading to a family funeral with the oldest and youngest sons.
Without warning, a massive blast wave hit the home sending Viola’s sister Emily to the floor.
A few moments later, over 100 kilometres away, the train Viola’s mother and brothers were on was also rocked by a shock and stopped.
Viola’s father James raced from the bathroom and found her sitting in her high chair with the window blinds resting on her head.
Her eyes were closed, and her fists were clenched.
The blinds protected her from the shattered glass that was blown into the house. She only had a small scratch.
Viola and her family had just survived the Halifax Explosion. As you might remember it was the largest man- made explosion in human history at the time.
While nearly 2,000 people died on that day, the Desmond family was lucky and only suffered minor injuries.
Things went back to normal for the Desmonds.
Viola grew up, made friends and generally lived a good life.
And while she experienced racism, as did most Black residents of Nova Scotia, it was a different kind of racism.
Unlike in various states in the United States, Canada was never officially segregated.
Our segregation was more hidden, and informal and enforced by the white community.
Nova Scotia Lt. Governor Maryann Francis, the first Black Nova Scotian to serve in that post, said,
“The racism in the United States was truly in your face. In Canada, the racism was very polite – sort of undercover.”
This undercover racism was seen repeatedly across the country.
In 1936, a Black man named Fred Christie attempted to buy a beer at a tavern next to the Montreal Forum. He was denied service and told quote:
“coloured people are not served here.”
His case went all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada who ruled that the tavern had acted within the law, and if the man was humiliated it was only because he was so persistent in demanding service.
Viola ran into similar discrimination throughout her life.
One of the few jobs available to Black women was teaching.
She briefly taught at two schools that were racially-segregated.
Her father had worked hard for the family, and he instilled that work ethic in Viola.
She was not content to be a teacher. She wanted to be her own boss.
She eventually applied to beauty schools in Nova Scotia.
She wasn’t accepted because of her race.
She had to travel to Montreal to attend Field Beauty School then acquired further training in Atlantic City and New York City, before returning to Nova Scotia.
In Halifax, she opened Vi’s Studio of Beauty Culture. Her business quickly became a success as Black women went to Viola to have their makeup and hair done weekly.
With growing success, Viola decided to give others the opportunity she didn’t have.
So, she opened the Desmond School of Beauty Culture.
Her school quickly grew as students came from as far away as Quebec. Each year, 15 women graduated from her school.
Along with her studio and school, Viola also sold her own branded beauty products for Black women throughout Nova Scotia.
With all her hard work, Viola seemed to find success around every corner.
She was happily married; her business was thriving, and Viola was happy.
Until destiny got in the way.
Like the flap of a butterfly’s wings producing a hurricane halfway across the world, the things that really change the world are the tiny.
You just don’t know it at the time…
In the Vocation of Man, Johann Fichte said,
“You could not remove a single grain of sand from its place without thereby changing something throughout all parts of the immeasurable whole.”
On Nov. 8, 1946, Viola Desmond was that grain of sand.
The day started normal enough. She left her Halifax home and for to Sydney, Nova Scotia on a business trip.
It was a four-hour journey she had made countless times along nearly the entire breadth of the province.
The Atlantic Ocean to one side and rolling hills to the other would be her companions to her destination.
About halfway into her drive, her Dodge sedan began to make an odd noise.
Something was wrong, and with hours to go she had no choice but to limp the vehicle into a mechanic in New Glasgow.
Viola dropped off her car as the mechanic told her the repair would take a few hours.
With time to kill, she remembered seeing a movie theatre on her drive in.
Viola worked a lot, now she had time to kill, and a movie was a welcome respite.
It wasn’t hard to find the theatre. The Roseland Theatre featured a large neon rose on the top of the marquee that shone like a beacon.
The large brick building didn’t look like much from the outside, but it was a large theatre that featured a balcony.
That balcony had a nefarious use.
It was meant to separate Black customers from whites.
But It didn’t start out that way.
A few years earlier in 1941, local white customers complained about Black customers sitting with them in the theatre.
To satisfy the white customers, the theatre decided segregation was the answer.
White customers got floor seats.
Black customers… the balcony.
It was common knowledge among those in New Glasgow that the Roseland Theatre, along with several other businesses were segregated.
Viola, however, was unaware when she purchased tickets for the 7 p.m. show.
Viola was nearsighted and wanted to sit closer to the screen so she could see the movie.
She asked for a floor seat, and Peggy Melanson at the front desk gave her a ticket for the balcony.
Her balcony ticket cost 30 cents, with a two-cent tax, while the floor seat cost 40 cents with a three-cent tax.
Remember that because it’s an important detail.
Viola didn’t notice the change in seating assignment and gave her ticket to usher Prima Davis.
She started to walk to what she thought was a floor seat when Davis stopped her and told her that her ticket was for the balcony.
She thought nothing of it, and simply believed a mistake had been made. She said,
“The cashier must have made a mistake. I asked for a downstairs ticket. I will have this exchanged.”
When she returned to the Melanson and asked for a floor seat, Melanson said,
“I’m sorry but I’m not permitted to sell downstairs tickets to you people.”
That’s when Viola realized there had been no mistake.
The seller may have thought that was the end of it, but she didn’t know Viola.
Viola saw how white Halifax residents treated her parents for their interracial marriage.
She knew of the segregation and racism her husband Jack had experienced his whole life.
She was not going to be forced to sit in a balcony seat because of her race, unable to see the movie she had paid for.
She walked back to the floor seat and sat down.
She said later,
“As the downstairs auditorium was just partially filled with people, I could see no reason for her refusal, so I went inside and sat down.”
The theatre manager Henry MacNeil walked in and told her she had to sit on the balcony because the ticket was cheaper than the floor seats.
Viola told him she would pay the difference.
MacNeil told her he had the right to refuse admission to any objectionable person.
She replied that she had not been refused admission because she was holding a ticket in her hand.
MacNeil had two choices.
He could have accepted that Viola just wanted to watch a movie and shouldn’t be denied a place to sit simply because of the colour of her skin.
Or he could be on the wrong side of history.
I’ll let you guess what he chose to do because.
a few minutes after his conversation with Viola, a police officer arrived to drag her out of the theatre.
As she was pulled out, she was injured.
In her affidavit she said,
“The policeman grasped my shoulders, and the manager grabbed my legs, injuring my knee and hip. They carried me bodily from the theatre, out into the street.”
She nearly lost a shoe in the process and a bystander picked up her purse and brought it to her when she dropped it.
Thrown into a taxi, she was taken to jail.
After Viola was put in a cell, Elmo Langille, chief of police, and MacNeil left but returned an hour later with a warrant for her arrest on a trumped-up charge for tax evasion.
She spent the night in a jail cell.
Although she was frightened, she was not about to let anyone see her as anything but composed.
Viola sat for 12 hours, upright and stoic, as those around her slept off drinking binges.
The next day Viola was taken to court.
She couldn’t be charged with violating segregation laws because none existed.
Instead, she was charged with refusing to pay a one cent amusement tax and defrauding the provincial government.
That one cent was the difference in tax between floor and balcony seats.
See…I told you to remember the taxes.
Viola, who was given no legal representation, pleaded not guilty. She said later,
“I was not told by the magistrate that I had the right to have counsel, nor was I told that I had the right to have an adjournment and be bailed.”
She argued she had offered to pay that tax difference, but Henry MacNeil refused to accept her money.
The cashier said she sold Viola a ticket for the balcony, and the usher stated she asked her to move from her floor seat. The offer to pay the difference in the ticket price was not mentioned.
MacNeil said,
“There are no instructions issued either by me or by the Odean Theatres stating that downstairs tickets are not to be sold to coloured persons. However, it is customary for them to sit together in the balcony.”
The judge ruled against Viola.
She was charged $26 in fines. Six dollars of which went to Henry MacNeil.
After Viola returned home, she told her husband Jack about what happened.
He grew up in New Glasgow and was aware of the segregation practices in his hometown. He told her to let it go.
Jack said decades later,
“They told her there were no coloureds allowed downstairs. She didn’t know that. I knew it because I grew up there.”
Jack may have wanted her to drop the issue, but others were not about to let that happen.
The Nova Scotia Association for the Advancement of Coloured People began to raise money to help Viola fight her conviction.
And another person joined the fight.
Someone who had also experienced racism at the Roseland Theatre.
Carrie Best.
Carrie Best deserves her own episode. And one day she will have it.
But for now, she will be part Viola Desmond’s story.
Carrie Best was born in New Glasgow in 1903 and spent her whole life there.
She saw and experienced the racism in the community.
Unlike Viola’s husband, Carrie was not one to let things go.
In December 1941, she heard that several Black high school girls were removed by force from the Roseland Theatre after they tried to sit on the main floor.
To show solidarity with the girls, Best and her son Calbert went to the Roseland Theatre, told the owner he was racist to his face, and then went and sat in the floor seats.
The theatre owner immediately called the police, and both Best and Calbert were charged with disturbing the peace.
The civil lawsuit for racial discrimination against the Roseland theater was thrown out.
Like Viola, she had to pay damages.
The experience inspired Best to create The Clarion in 1946.
It became the first Black-owned and published Nova Scotia newspaper and became integral in the battle against racism for Viola Desmond.
Volume 1 Issue 1 of The Clarion reported on her fight against the Roseland Theatre along with Viola’s photo.
It helped bolster support which was growing.
On the advice of her doctor who treated her injuries, Viola hired a lawyer to sue the Roseland theater for false arrest, false imprisonment and malicious prosecution.
The lawyer would have a similar choice as the theater manager… racism or the right side of history.
Frederick Bissett made the right choice.
Frederick Bissett was a white lawyer and when Viola walked into his office, she saw a 44-year-old man in the prime of his career.
He had grown up in Halifax and attended Dalhousie University before setting up his practice.
By the time he met Viola he had 20 years of experience under his belt.
He would be an excellent choice to represent her.
Viola’s legal fees would be paid for by the Nova Scotia Association for the Advancement of Coloured People.
And because of his experience he chose a different approach.
Rather than argue the case on the basis of racial discrimination, which Bissett believed would fail in Nova Scotia, he chose to appeal on two grounds.
The first was that Viola was denied due process in her arrest, while the second was that the evidence of tax evasion was insufficient.
While he was a great lawyer, the case never made it to trial.
Today, due process, the presumption of innocence, is a major part of the judicial process.
It is the principle that the government must respect all legal rights a person has under the law.
Pulling someone out of a theatre without charges and throwing them in jail is not due process.
Unfortunately, back in the 1940s, it was still a relatively new concept, and it didn’t hold up in court. So, his first argument was thrown out.
Bisset’s argument about tax evasion evidence being insufficient also failed to make an impact as the court ruled there was a difference in the ticket cost between seats.
Later, the Canadian Bar Review stated that Bissett should have argued that the courts had no right to enforce racial segregation.
This would have forced a decision on the legitimacy of that argument, which could have ruled in Viola’s favour.
In one last ditch effort, Bissett applied to the Supreme Court to have the criminal conviction put aside.
On Jan. 20, 1947, Court Justice Maynard Brown Archibald ruled against Viola.
He stated the decision of the original magistrate should have been appealed to a county court.
Justice William Lorimer Hall added that if that appeal had been done, quote:
“there might have been opportunity to right the wrong done this unfortunate woman. One wonders if the manager of the theatre, so overzealous because of a bonafide belief that there had been an attempt to defraud the Province of Nova Scotia the sum of once cent or was it surreptitious endeavour to enforce a Jim Crow rule by misuse of a public statute.”
Unfortunately, the 10-day deadline for filing an appeal in the county court had long since passed by this point.
There was nothing that could be done.
When the appeal failed, Bissett refused to bill Viola for his services. This allowed the money to go to the Nova Scotia Association for the Advancement of Coloured People to help others in the province.
Viola Desmond lost the battle, but she would win the war.
After Viola’s court case, The Clarion and the NSAACP mobilized to bring change to end the treatment of Black Nova Scotians as second-class citizens.
In July 1947, two months after Viola’s case was heard, Macleans ran an article asking if Canada was truly a free country.
It cited her unfair treatment, along with the jailing of strike leaders like Madeleine Parent in Quebec and the wartime internment of Japanese-Canadians.
Slowly, public opinion began to swing.
In 1954, segregation legally ended in Nova Scotia, although the last segregated school wouldn’t close until 1983. For context, I was just about to start day care that year. That is how recent that was.
In 1963, the Human Rights Act was passed in the province.
Four years later, the Human Rights Commission was established to investigate complaints about racial discrimination.
Sadly, despite her part in ending segregation in Nova Scotia, the last years of Viola’s life were difficult.
After the Rosedale incident and the subsequent court cases, the marriage between Viola and Jack began to fall apart.
The two eventually divorced.
A few years later, Viola closed her business and moved to Montreal where she enrolled in business college.
While on a trip to New York on Feb. 7, 1965, Viola Desmond died from gastrointestinal bleeding at only 50 years old.
The Halifax Chronicle Herald, in her obituary, said nothing about the Roseland Theatre incident, and didn’t mention her part in the fight for equal rights.
That recognition would come way later.
[TRANSITION]
For years, Canadians knew the story of Rosa Parks, but few knew the name Viola Desmond.
That began to change thanks to Viola’s sister, Wanda Robson.
When she was 73, she enrolled in a course on race relations at University College of Cape Breton.
The instructor was Graham Reynolds and one day he began covering Viola Desmond’s experience.
Robson spoke up and shared that he was talking about her sister.
Realizing that the story of Viola Desmond had sat in the shadows for too long, Robson and Reynolds began to tell her story.
In 2010, Sister to Courage, written by Robson, was published.
That got the ball rolling.
On April 15, 2010, Nova Scotia Lt. Governor Mayann Francis officially pardoned Viola Desmond.
Then honours for Viola poured in.
First a stamp in 2012 and then a Heritage Minute four years later.
Viola earned a star on Canada’s Walk of Fame in 2017, followed by a Google Doodle on July 6, 2018.
But perhaps the greatest honour came on Nov. 19, 2018, when the new $10 banknote featuring Viola Desmond was released.
The next time you pull a $10 bill out of your wallet to buy your morning coffee, look at the woman staring back at you from the banknote.
Her life, and Canada’s future, changed when her car broke down and she chose to see a movie.
