February is Black History Month in Canada so I trundled off to the library to find some good books on the topic. The librarian showed me a new book they had just received for their collection: Viola Desmond Won’t be Budged by Jody Nyasha Warner and Richard Rudnicki (Groundwood Books, 2010) This book tells a little known story of a black woman, Viola Desmond, in 1946 who refused to move out of her seat on the main floor of a movie theatre in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia to the balcony where, as the usher tells her, “your people have to sit.” Viola, however, does not budge. Eventually she is arrested by the police, put in jail over night, and fined twenty dollars for her resistance. Clearly, Viola’s act of defiance was in reaction to racist treatment, but the people of the time somehow could not articulate this second-class treatment of her as such. Viola was jailed and fined, ostensibly, for not paying the higher ticket price for sitting on the main floor, even though she offered to pay the extra one cent in tax required for such a privilege. When the black community of Nova Scotia rallied around Viola to appeal her conviction, the case was thrown out of court on a procedural technicality. The battle was not won; however, the point was made.
When I read this book to my daughter, the moment the theatre usher says to Viola “You people have to sit in the upstairs section,” she sensed something was wrong, but had trouble articulating it. Finally, she said “It’s racism, isn’t it?” stumbling a little over the R-word. She could hardly believe that Viola had to go to jail and be fined twenty dollars (which at the time would have been a significant amount to pay,) for not going upstairs to the balcony. As obvious as the racist treatment was in the situation, the word ‘racism’ somehow just didn’t seem to come up in the text or in the story — it was like the white elephant in the room. Racial segregation, did in fact, exist in Nova Scotia, but no one wanted to acknowledge it in this situation but Viola herself, by refusing to budge. And that was what made her rather singular much like Rosa Parks in the U.S.
This is a story Canadians need to know about themselves. I’m glad to have read it to my daughter whose eyes were opened to the history and experience of black Canadians in Nova Scotia.