Sixty-four years is more than a little tardy. But that is how long it took for the province of Nova Scotia to pardon Viola Desmond and apologize to her, posthumously, for her crime of tax evasion, of defrauding the province of the sum of exactly one cent in 1946.
Outrageous as this appears, it is nonetheless true, well documented in several books, including Graham Reynolds’ Viola Desmond’s Canada: A History of Blacks and Racial Segregation in the Promised Land. Still, this shameful chapter has only recently gained national prominence with the announcement of Desmond becoming the first woman to appear on Canada’s 10-dollar bill, starting in 2018.
With this being Black History Month, it is a story that merits repeating, and serves as a cautionary tale for all of us in recognizing how long it sometime takes to travel the road to justice.
In Desmond’s case, she was born in Halifax in 1914, one of 15 siblings. Her parents were active in the black community. Viola became a beautician and a successful businesswoman. Her life changed in November 1946, when she entered a theatre in New Glasgow, N.S., not knowing that it was racially segregated. Because of her poor eyesight, she sat in the downstairs section rather than in the balcony that was reserved for blacks. When she was told to leave, she refused. She was subsequently forcibly removed and kept in jail overnight.
Offered the choice between 30 days in jail or a $20 fine, she chose the latter. An additional fee of $6 was imposed on her for court costs. The one cent charge for tax evasion (the amusement tax) was based on the slightly higher price of the downstairs ticket. She was not informed of her right to legal advice, counsel or bail.
Desmond sought justice in the courts, but to no avail.
She eventually moved to New York City and died in 1965 at the age of 50.
Viola Desmond was Canada’s Rosa Parks, though her act of defiance occurred nine years before Rosa Parks’ refusal to give up her seat in the white section of a bus in Alabama. Both Desmond and Parks are commemorated on postage stamps and are revered for their courageous actions that brought about civil rights reforms. In both cases, recognizing their courage in the face of discrimination took many decades.
Why does justice too often take so long? Is it because citizens of a particular moment in time find it difficult to judge their own time?
They tend to see things through a rear view mirror and not notice certain iniquities until they have left the moment and can look back at them with 20/20 vision. No prophet is judged in his own time. Christ was not a man for His time, but a man for all seasons.
How long will the road be that leads to honouring courageous pro-life figures who are presently dismissed as cranks? When will the time come when such pro-life stalwarts as Jerome Lejeune, Paul Marx, Judie Brown, Jim McFadden and Dr. Jack Willke are accorded their rightful places and receive their appropriate honour? How is it possible to see what is really happening in the present moment without relying on the rear view mirror, when our correct view of things comes too late?
If the wages of sin are death, it behooves us to be able to recognize sin when it is taking place. We need to set aside the political correctness that distracts us from the iniquities that are occurring before our eyes.
It is then that we will discern that being fired for defending traditional marriage, being jailed for standing up for the rights of the unborn, being accused of a hate crime for holding that there are only two sexes, are outrages of the same type that were experienced by Viola Desmond, Rosa Parks and all those unsung heroes who offered the world a broader vision.
It has been said that “all human progress is a result of standing on the shoulders of our predecessors.” The challenge is to know whose shoulders we should stand on.
It is not as important to know who is popular as to know who is right. And the person who is right might well be the kind of being that emerges from some obscure place, like Nazareth, and spends a good deal of his brief mission in life urging a message of love and peace that the world violently rejects.
(Dr. Donald DeMarco is a Senior Fellow of Human Life International and professor emeritus at St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Ont.)