Viola Desmond is not getting up
Let's talk about Viola Desmond.
Looking up "most famous woman in Canada" yields few and scattered results. Looking up "famous woman in Canada," however, leads you to an excellent assortment that I could do a whole series on. Famous Canadian women! Viola Desmond is definitely one.
Segregation in the United States is often spoken of, but what do we hear about segregation in Canada? Desmond (1914-1965) was at a rural movie theater in Nova Scotia in 1946 when she "caused a stir by refusing to move to a section of the theatre unofficially set aside for black patrons." (x) She was dragged out of the theater and jailed overnight for a one-cent tax difference between the seat she paid for and the seat she used.
The story (according to Wikipedia) is that because this unofficial policy wasn't advertised, she was sold a ticket to the balcony but couldn't see well enough, so she moved to the main floor. She was prosecuted for tax evasion. Of one cent.
Who was Viola Desmond? Awesome, apparently. She went to one of Madam C.J. Walker's beauty schools in New York for beautician training, after which she opened her own hair salon in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She then opened a beauty school and started her own line (Vi's Beauty Products). She was in this town because her car had broken down.
She was prosecuted but won her case. The judge said:
One wonders if the manager of the theatre who laid the complaint was so zealous because of a bona fide belief that there had been an attempt to defraud the province of Nova Scotia of the sum of one cent, or was it a surreptitious endeavour to enforce a Jim Crow rule by misuse of a public statute.
Yes. One wonders.