They stood up for their rights – by sitting down: Carrie Best and Viola Desmond

They stood up for their rights – by sitting down:   Carrie Best and Viola Desmond

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Carrie Best (1903-2001) was born in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, Canada. She was the daughter of James and Georgina Ashe Prevoe, and married Albert T. Best in 1925. Carrie founded Nova Scotia’s first Black-owned-and-published newspaper, The Clarion, in 1946. She featured a radio programme, The Quiet Corner, which aired from 1952 to 1964. She also wrote as a columnist for The Pictou Advocate newspaper from 1968 to 1975. Best was made a Member of The Order of Canada in 1974, and her image was issued on a Canadian postage stamp in February 2011.

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Carrie Best was in her mid 70s when she published an autobiography entitled That Lonesome Road. For a woman who had a sure sense of her self and of her utmost worth – and who was a person of capital I Integrity – it is interesting to observe that she left out of her autobiographical record – and, indeed, in 2014 the Wikipedia entry for her does the same – an important personal event which matters a great deal to the history of human-rights progress in Canada. The reason for the omission can only be guessed at;  perhaps it was because the events she left undescribed took place in the town of her birth of which she was a good and loyal citizen – and that the personal hurt was very deep indeed. This is only surmise.

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Racial segregation in Canada during the 1940s had no broad national legislation. While a “colour bar” could exist, and did exist, in various towns and cities throughout the country – be it at a restaurant, dance pavilion or swimming pool – yet there was no all-pervasive law. Indeed, sometimes it was practised as a kind of “social convention” or “tradition” – with no legal binding to it.  Yet there were also no statutes in Canadian law that forbade racial segregation.  In New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, racial segregation was sometimes practised, informally, but it was introduced in a different and dramatic way in December of 1941. This may have been a response to the increasing social mobility of Black people; it could’ve been because of the fact that more “Negroes” – and these were locally-born New Glaswegians, as well – were stepping out to see the Picture Show…

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Norman W. Mason was a sometime-mayor of New Glasgow and an impresario who ran the Roseland Theatre from its inception in 1913. In December of 1941 he gave new-seating policy instructions to his Roseland staff: to require that Negroes attending the Roseland’s films sit upstairs at the Balcony level instead of in the main-floor auditorium, known as Downstairs. When Carrie Best heard that several high-school-age Black girls had been forcibly removed from the Roseland for refusing to comply with the new policy, Best herself paid a visit to the Roseland and asked that the staff discontinue their discriminatory practice of dividing patrons by colour. This was a beginning, and it proved fruitless. So she wrote a letter to Mr. Mason, owner and operator of the Roseland Theatre:

“Dear Mr. Mason:

I sincerely trust that this is the last time that I shall be forced to undergo the humiliating and undemocratic treatment that I have been forced to undergo from your employees at the Roseland Theatre.

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It should not be necessary for me to remind them that I am a citizen and taxpayer in the town and as such have the right under British law to sit in any public place I wish to while I enter and exit in a clean, orderly manner.

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I have spent the entire afternoon conducting a personal Gallup poll to see if this rule is the carry-over from the faraway days of slavery or if this is the rule of the Board of Directors and shareholders of the Roseland Theatre Company. Scores of respected citizens were amazed to believe that such Jim Crow tactics are practiced on decent law-abiding citizens and when the time comes have said they will not hesitate to speak against it.

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Today I speak for one family, the Bests, my husband, my son and myself. I will ask, no, I will demand to be given the same rights as the Chinese and other nationalities of the Dominion of Canada and today I speak for my family only. As I am too tired to come to the theatre tonight, I respectfully request you, Sir, to instruct your employees to sell me the ticket I wish when next I come to the theatre or I shall make public every statement made to me by you and your help: of negroes being dirty, smelly, etc., and of you taking it upon yourself to evict high-school girls of irreproachable character from your office. Please get this straight, Mr. Mason. If respectable coloured people are cowardly enough to put up with such treatment they are welcome. I speak today for no family but my own and if you wish a public controversy both pro and con as to whether you have the power of a dictator to decide in a British town who is a citizen and who isn’t, you can have it. If my words are clear and strong I wish you could have heard some of the citizens who do not believe such a thing is possible in times like these. The statement of your employee to me that no coloured person can sit downstairs in the Capitol Theatre in Halifax is a lie of the first order as I have and always do sit there and I am sure the public will be interested to hear all this. I am coming to the theatre Monday.”

Mrs. Best

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Monday, December 29^th, 1941. The film feature was “Here Comes Mr. Jordan” with Robert Montgomery, Evelyn Keyes and Claude Rains. Carrie Best arrived at the Roseland with her son, Calbert. Carrie placed two quarters on the ticket-seller’s counter and asked for two downstairs seats. The ticket-seller, Caroline White, gave Carrie two balcony tickets and ten cents change. (Main floor seats were 25 cents each, balcony seats were 20 cents each.) Carrie Best and her son entered the theatre – the mainfloor i.e. downstairs seating level. Mrs. Best left behind both the tickets and the change at the counter.

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Erskine Cumming, the Roseland’s assistant manager, was standing in the lobby in front of the entrance to the downstairs seating area. He asked the Bests for their tickets and Carrie Best replied that she had left the money and the tickets back at the counter. Mr. Cumming followed in behind them when they entered the auditorium, while explaining to them that “all coloured people must sit upstairs.” Mrs. Best’s response was: “I am inside now. Put me out.” Mr. Cumming returned to the box office, retrieved the money that Carrie Best had left there, came back inside and gave it to her – then asked her to leave. She refused, claiming that she was “a British subject with as much right to be here as anyone else.” Upon the third time that Mr. Cumming asked Mrs. Best to leave he put the 50 cents into her purse and then told her that she was seated in the downstairs area without a ticket – and that if she would not leave he would call the police. Carrie Best and her son Calbert stood their ground – by remaining seated.

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A short time later, New Glasgow police officer George S. Wright arrived at the Roseland and asked the Bests to leave. When Carrie Best refused to do so, the town’s Chief of Police, Elmo Langille, was summoned. Chief Langille ordered the Bests to leave – and they refused to vacate their seats. At which point Officer Wright placed his hands under Carrie Best’s arms and raised her from her seat. When Wright had done this, Mrs. Best said to him: “That’s all I wanted you to do – put your hands on me. I will fix you for this.” And then, accompanied by Calbert, she walked out of the Roseland Theatre.

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The above re-counting – from Constance Backhouse’s 1998 essay (published in Atlantis, Vol.22.2): “I was unable to identify with Topsy”: Carrie M. Best’s struggle against racial segregation in Nova Scotia, 1942 – gives a plain account of events (taken from both court documents and from first-person interviews).

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Best v. Mason and Roseland Theatre, 1942, was a very brief court case. Judge Robert Henry Graham of the Nova Scotia Supreme Court presided over the trial in May of 1942. After the plaintiff’s case had been presented – the plaintiff being Carrie Best who was “a Negress”, “a British subject”, and “a married woman” – and after the defence’s evidence called upon, Judge Graham, in charging the jury, made his views known. Though theatres advertise their services generally to the public, yet the management had the right to exclude anyone from the theatre – and that theatres therefore were no different from private dwellings. Graham advised the jury thus: “The ordinary citizen [has] the right to exclude anyone from their homes unless a contract [has] been entered into.” (Quotation from the Advocate Newspaper, 21 May, 1942.) In his closing advice to the jury Graham urged them to disregard any other questions raised by the litigation – these were “irrelevant”. The jury did as it was told, Judge Graham dismissed Carrie Best’s suit, and she was ordered to pay $156.07 to the defendant, Norman Mason of the Roseland Theatre.

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After her legal defeat, Best embarked upon a career in journalism, editing the newspapers The Clarion and The New Negro Citizen.  Being a journalist she described (in her 1977 autobiography) as being “very satisfying”, “a release from frustration and disappointment”, and “a prescription for impatience”.

Viola Desmond

In November of 1946, a Black hairdresser and salon owner from Halifax, Viola Desmond (1914-1965), received similar treatment to Carrie Best when she was forcibly removed from the same Roseland Theatre for seating herself in the main-floor auditorium. In court, Desmond was found guilty of not paying the one-cent difference in tax between a balcony ticket and a main-floor ticket. There were subsequent trials during which the Nova Scotia government insisted upon arguing that Desmond’s was a case of tax evasion pure and simple. Retail sales tax was calculated based on the price of the theatre ticket. Since the theatre would only agree to sell the Black woman a cheaper balcony ticket, but she had insisted upon sitting in the more expensive main floor seat, she was therefore one cent short on tax. For her crime of so-called tax evasion, she was removed from the theatre, stayed in jail overnight, tried without counsel, convicted and fined. Most interestingly: during the trial, no-one admitted that Viola Desmond was Black, and that the Roseland Theatre maintained a racist seating policy. The trial was steered as one of tax evasion and efforts to have Desmond’s conviction overturned at higher levels of court failed.

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So – why all these details? – and why put the town of New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, under the microscope three quarters of a century later? First, because Carrie Best was principled and brave, and because Viola Desmond had guts. Second, because specific examples from specific places make History real. New Glasgow was just one of many towns and cities nation-wide where such incidents occurred – a number of them lost to the historical legal record because they never acquired further shape in a court document; such incidents were borne and buried.

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Constance Backhouse, in the closing remarks of her essay about Carrie Best, is worth quoting in full: “The awards and honours bestowed on Carrie Best [in later life] are matters of public record. That her lawsuit seeking redress for racial segregation – unsuccessful though it may have been – has not equally been noted is one indication of how deeply the past history of racism in Canada remains buried. Until recently [the 1990s], Canadian historians and lawyers have largely neglected to pursue research into issues of race, racism and struggles to resist discrimination. This failure calls out for further scrutiny. Why have momentous cases such as this not been discovered and analyzed before? Answers are complex and may include: the prevailing mythology that Canada has a rather benevolent record on racial discrimination; the artificially ‘race-neutral’ categories of much legal and historical doctrine; etc. These and other barriers to the recovery of Canada’s racial history must be scaled – and soon.”

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Editor’s Note:

We have posted this “one-town” examination of Canadian racial segregation – and of the lives of Carrie Best and Viola Desmond – to coincide with the birth date – February 4^th, 1913 – of Rosa Parks.

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