Canada’s Rosa Parks
Many have come to regard Viola Desmond as Canada’s Rosa Parks. Although these two remarkable women lived in worlds apart from one another with vastly different backgrounds and life experiences, they shared a similar strength of character and moral compass. When personally affronted by racial injustice, they both defiantly stood their ground by engaging in a spontaneous act of civil disobedience. This chapter discusses Viola Desmond and Rosa Parks’ actions in the context of the practice of racial segregation in Canada and the United States.
The history of racial segregation has been a little-known chapter in our nation’s history, in part because, unlike laws that enforced racial segregation in the United States, the practice was generally not enacted or enforced under law. With the major exception of indigenous people, who faced their own far-reaching forms of discrimination, racial segregation in Canada generally developed unevenly as a matter of local custom and business practices.1 During the 20th century, this pattern of racial discrimination spread to most areas where Blacks came into contact with whites, including hotels, restaurants, theatres, dance halls, skating rinks, parks, swimming pools, beaches, drinking establishments and even cemeteries. In Halifax during the 1940s, Blacks lived in racially mixed neighbourhoods in the North End of the city or in Africville, located on the northeast edge of Halifax on the rim of the Bedford Basin. In the downtown area of Halifax, Blacks were denied service in all major hotels and restaurants. A similar colour barrier developed in other regions of the country with relatively large Black populations.2
Given the extent and persistence of racial segregation and discrimination in Canada, questions arise regarding the degree to which there was acceptance and resistance to these intolerant practices within Black communities. In Dresden, Ontario, for example, the colour barrier was extensive during the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s, and, in many respects, comparable to the southern United States during the era of Jim Crow laws. The pattern of racial segregation and discrimination in Dresden and elsewhere in Canada was generational in nature in that it was the adults who established the rules of prejudice, which they imposed on the younger generation. It was common in Dresden for preschool children of both races to play together and form bonds of friendship. However, once they started school, Black children were subjected to both personal and systemic forms of racism. Virginia Travis, a Black resident of Dresden, remembers her first experience of racism occurred a few weeks after she started Grade 1 when she was told by her teacher she was not allowed to play in the sandbox with her white classmates. As she grew older, Travis and other young Black children were systematically subjected to the local colour barrier and other forms of racial prejudice, which limited contact between races either through segregation or, in the case of restaurants, by denying service to Blacks. This behaviour created two distinct racial communities and although the vast majority of Blacks undoubtedly found the pattern of racial segregation and discrimination morally repugnant, there was initially no sustained resistance to these practices. They became the established norm for race relations in Dresden for most of the 20th century.3
The situation was similar in many small towns across Canada, especially in rural regions of Ontario and Nova Scotia. In describing his teenage years living in Truro, Nova Scotia during the late 1950s, the Black activist and civil rights leader Burnley “Rocky” Jones wrote in his autobiography that racism was a normal part of life. He and his friends came to accept the fact that there was only one barbershop in town that would cut their hair and they weren’t allowed to play a game of pool with their white friends at the local pool hall. When they went to the cinema, they would all have to sit upstairs. At the time, he said, this “didn’t present a problem to me” because “I wanted to sit in the balcony.” Rocky also learned when he was a “coming-of-age” fourteen-year-old boy that he was not allowed to date a white girl, even though they were friends and went to the same school.4
During the first half of the 20th century, legal challenges to racial segregation were infrequent and, in virtually all instances, unsuccessful.5 When Norman Mason, the owner of the Roseland Theatre in New Glasgow, imposed a racially segregated seating arrangement in December 1941, a group of Black female teenagers initially objected. He had them forcefully removed from the theatre. A year later, Carrie M. Best, a Black activist and resident of New Glasgow, tried to mount a legal challenge against the Roseland Theatre, but since there were no statutes prohibiting the practice of racial segregation, she was not able to successfully pursue her case in court.6
In the four remaining years before the Viola Desmond incident in November of 1946, the Black residents of New Glasgow came to accept that if they wanted to attend a movie at the Roseland Theatre, they would have to sit together in the racially segregated balcony. This became a powerful customary norm at the Roseland Theatre—so powerful, in fact, that following Viola’s unsuccessful legal challenge, some members of the local Black community were angered about all the publicity her case had created. One Black resident told Viola, when she was visiting New Glasgow during her appeal in 1947, that he wished she had kept her mouth shut so things could have stayed the way they were, without all the public attention and notoriety.7
In the context of the culture of racism in Canada during the 1940s, Viola’s refusal to give up her seat at the Roseland Theatre must be seen as a rare moment of courage. Her defiance of enforced conformity to a racist seating regime helped raise public awareness about the widespread practice of racial segregation in Nova Scotia and elsewhere in Canada. Ultimately, her action was a catalyst that led to the enactment of human rights legislation in the province and has made her a lasting national symbol in the fight for equal rights and social justice.8
The Roseland Theatre incident occurred nine years before Rosa Parks’ more famous refusal to give up her seat aboard a racially segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. As singular acts of courage in the face of injustice, these two non-violent protests are historically similar: both were unplanned. Although Parks was a seasoned activist in the struggle for racial equality at the time of her arrest in December of 1955, her defiance of the law-enforcing segregated busses in Montgomery was a spontaneous decision. The driver of the bus, James Fred Blake, had a reputation of being particularly offensive toward Black passengers and he strictly enforced the policy requiring them to enter at the rear and sit at the back of the bus. Parks had encountered Blake twelve years earlier in 1943 when she was nearly thrown off his bus because she boarded the bus from the front along with white passengers. In that incident, Blake tried to push her off the bus when she initially refused to leave and re-enter the bus from the rear. She eventually left on her own volition, but did not re-board the bus.
After that unsettling and humiliating incident, Parks cautiously avoided taking a bus driven by Blake. However, this changed in the early evening of December 1, 1955. Parks had finished her usual day’s work as a seamstress in a downtown Montgomery department store, but because her regular bus stop was overly crowded with early Christmas shoppers, she decided to do some of her own shopping and catch a later bus. She had no idea the notorious Mr. Blake would be operating the signature yellow and olive bus she boarded that evening.9
Upon entering the bus, Parks took her seat next to a Black man and across the aisle from two other Black women. They were seated together in the middle section of the bus, which was available to Blacks because it was not crowded and there were still plenty of seats for whites in the front section. At the third stop, all the empty seats in the white section filled to capacity and a white male passenger was left standing behind the driver’s seat. Blake noticed the situation and ordered the four Black passengers to move to the back of the bus. Black passengers understood they had to give up their seats to white passengers and three of them yielded to Blake’s explicit demand. Parks, on the other hand, made a spontaneous decision not to give up her seat and with an additional gesture of defiance, she slid across to the window seat that had been occupied by the Black gentleman. Not moving from her seat was, for Parks, “the stopping point,” as she later stated. It was the final straw following years of fear, humiliation and injustice.10
In a recent biography, historian Jeanne Theoharis comments that once Parks made her decision not to move to the back of the bus, she felt a sense of quiet resolve to face whatever consequences resulted from her action. As an active member of the Montgomery branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp), Parks was acutely aware of many similar incidents of resistance that had occurred involving several Black women as well as the current strategy of the naacp to use one of these cases as a means of challenging the practice of racial segregation on Montgomery buses. Fresh also on Parks’ mind was the recent acquittal by an all-white jury of the murderers of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old Black boy who was kidnapped and lynched in August, 1955 after allegedly offending a white woman in a local grocery store in the town of Money, Mississippi. This act of brutality was just one more reminder of the level of racial hatred and violence Blacks in the south endured during the era of Jim Crow laws.11
For Blake, Park’s refusal to obey his command was as much an inconvenience as an act of defiance. It was an interruption in his normal routine and required him to walk to the middle of the bus to confront Parks. “Are you going to stand up?” he asked Parks. “No,” she replied and then added, “because I got on the bus first and paid the same fare, and I didn’t think it was right for me to have to stand so someone else who got on later could sit down.” “Well, I’m going to have you arrested,” replied Blake. “You may do that,” stated Parks.12
Blake did not try and remove Parks from his bus as he did twelve years earlier. Instead, he was intent on defending the practice of racial segregation and he wanted to punish her, so he took the extra step and had the police arrest her. Blake’s decision proved to be historic because it generated public attention and became an immediate catalyst for the further advancement of the civil rights movement. Parks’ arrest triggered the Montgomery bus boycott, which a year later brought an end to racial segregation on city buses. Leaders of the naacp embraced Rosa Parks’ act of civil disobedience and they regarded it as a turning point. It was, according to Martin Luther King, Jr., a moment in which “the cup of endurance runs over.”13
Viola Desmond, like Rosa Parks, had no prior intention of challenging the practice of racial segregation at the Roseland Theatre in New Glasgow. She was not an activist like Parks, but an ambitious, independent, middle-class Black professional woman who had personally overcome many of the racial barriers that affected Black women in Canada during the first half of the 20th century. As Wanda Robson mentioned in the previous chapter, at the time of the Roseland Theatre incident, Viola had established a thriving beauty culture enterprise. In addition to operating a popular beauty salon, she founded the Desmond School of Beauty Culture. She also created her own line of beauty products, which she marketed throughout the Atlantic region. It was the sale of these beauty products that set her on the road that November day in 1946. She was travelling to eastern Nova Scotia and Cape Breton Island when car problems forced her to stop in New Glasgow. When told that her car would not be ready until the next day, she decided to take in a movie at the Roseland Theatre.14
Like Rosa Parks’ decision nine years later, Viola understood that taking a seat in the “white only” section of the theatre would likely have serious consequences and bring her a great deal of unwanted attention. When theatre manager, Henry MacNeil, approached her and demanded she leave her seat, Viola felt a moral obligation to engage in an even greater act of civil disobedience—she would not be moved under any authority. Her forceful removal from the theatre, dramatically portrayed in several documentary films, vividly illustrates her courageous resistance. As Wanda describes, Viola was dragged out of the theatre by the manger and a police officer and carted off to the local jail where she spent the night until she could be arraigned the next day.
There was no immediate outcry to this appalling event—no theatre boycott or public demonstrations. Here is where the similarities between the Rosa Parks and Viola Desmond incidents begin to diverge. Viola appeared before a local magistrate the next day, alone and without council. She was charged, as Wanda points out, with defrauding the province of one cent in amusement tax. There was no mention in the court proceeding that she had resisted the practice of racial segregation and even later when she pursued and eventually lost her appeal, there was no direct mention in the court proceedings that her case was really about the defense of the practice of racial segregation at the Roseland Theatre. It was only after the four judges of the Nova Scotia Supreme Court ruled against Viola’s court action that Justice William Lorimer Hall, one of the four Supreme Court judges, acknowledged that her case had everything to do about race. “One wonders,” Justice Hall stated, “if the manager of the theatre who laid the complaint was so zealous because of the bona fide belief that an attempt to defraud the Province of Nova Scotia of the sum of one cent, or was it a surreptitious endeavour to enforce Jim Crow rule by misuse of a public statute?”15
The reaction to Viola’s arrest and appeal was mixed. Her husband, Jack, and other family members were upset and angry, but they generally had no desire to engage in legal action that would draw public attention to the family. Jack felt Viola’s case was in “God’s hands” and she should not seek legal recourse. At the time, her sister, Wanda, had no idea of the significance of her sister’s action and was embarrassed Viola had been sent to jail. “I think I, like a lot of other members of the Black community, didn’t want to call attention to myself and to my family.”16
Yet, there was strong support for Viola among the Black leaders of the community and national newspapers covered the story. The Globe & Mail ran a photograph of Viola together with Pearleen Oliver, one of Canada’s pioneer civil rights activists, who supported Viola’s defense.
Although the manner of the arrest, court proceedings and public reaction to Viola and Rosa Parks’ actions of civil disobedience were different, there are striking historical parallels between these two incidents. Both women lived through the events of World War II, which played a pivotal role in the struggle for racial equality in both the United States and Canada. Their particular acts of protest were by no means isolated incidents, but were part of an emerging post-war awareness regarding the need to address past injustices and the persistence of racial discrimination on both sides of the border. The reaction to Rosa Parks’ protest and arrest in 1955 was the culmination of more than a decade-long effort of the naacp’s to raise public awareness and to effect political change. During the 1940s, this effort focused mainly on overcoming the barriers to Black voter registration. Although less dramatic than the events of the 1950s, the naacp’s voter registration campaign must be seen as a formative phase of the civil rights movement. At the time of the Roseland Theatre incident in 1946, Parks was working to register Black voters and had already gained the reputation of being an effective grassroots organizer in the Montgomery naacp. A year later, she was elected to the state executive committee of the naacp and shortly thereafter, she was elected secretary of the state conference.17
In this broader historical context, the war helped advance the civil rights movement by highlighting the contradiction between the fight to end intolerance and injustice in Europe and the continuation of similar injustices in America. Parks’ brother, Sylvester, returned after serving in the war and found that although he had risked his life in the fight against Nazi Germany, he was unable to register to vote in his home state and he had great difficulty finding employment.18
In Montgomery, the contradiction between wartime military service and racial discrimination at home was reinforced on a daily basis because there were two air force bases in the city. Black personnel travelled on city buses on their way to and from the bases and they were frequent targets of verbal abuse or physical violence. There were a number of high-profile cases during and after the war when Black military personnel refused to give up their seats in “white only” sections of buses. Several of these incidents resulted in these passengers being shot either by armed bus drivers or Montgomery police. Parks herself worked at Maxwell Air Base during this period and she was acutely aware of these acts of resistance. “White people,” she said, “didn’t want Black veterans to wear their uniforms” because it gave them a status of equality that whites in the south were not willing to accept.19
World War II also had a similar influence in providing a stimulus to the struggle for racial equality in Canada. Although, unlike the United States where the civil rights movement was fought on both a state and national level, there were no national Black civil rights organizations in Canada. The fight to end racial discrimination took root in a piecemeal manner on the provincial level. In Ontario, Hugh Burnett, a returning Black World War II veteran, was refused service in a café in his hometown of Dresden, Ontario because of the colour of his skin. This led him to join with other Black members of his community to create the National Unity Association (nua) in 1948. Burnett and the nua eventually joined forces with other human rights activists and lobbied the provincial government to enact legislation to help end the practice of racial discrimination.20 Reverend William Oliver, who was Canada’s only Black army chaplain during World War II, had a similar experience when he and a group of other prominent Black men were refused service in a restaurant in downtown Halifax. The incident prompted his wife, Pearleen, to begin a campaign to raise public awareness about the persistence of racial discrimination in Nova Scotia and Canada during the post-war era. In an address to the Rotary Club of Halifax in 1944, she said it was wrong that “while Canada’s sons are fighting this war to bring an end to racial oppression, [we] are keeping alive this evil in our land.” This contradiction extended to the war effort at home and Pearleen cited several examples, including the racial discrimination directed toward Black women who wanted to become nurses but were not allowed to train and practice nursing in Canada. She took up their cause in the early 1940s and in 1948 her efforts proved successful when the first two Black women graduated from the nursing program at the Halifax Children’s Hospital.21
Viola, like Rosa Parks, gave inspiration and direction to the struggle for racial equality and she has become a symbol of courage for the entire nation. By standing up against injustice and complacency in the face of the widely accepted practice of racial segregation, Viola helped create public awareness and solidarity among the Black community, which eventually led to positive and lasting changes. In reflecting on the incident at the Roseland Theatre and Viola Desmond’s legacy on Nova Scotia’s Black community, Reverend Oliver stated: “Neither before or since has there been such an aggressive effort to obtain rights…. The people arose as one and with one voice. This positive stance enhances the prestige of the Negro community throughout the province [and] it is my conviction that much of the positive action that has taken place stemmed from this.22