Imagining an archive of civil rights activism

Gabrielle Moser
15 hours ago
7 min read

A grainy black and white photograph shows a 32-year-old Black woman, Viola Desmond, standing in line to purchase a ticket in the lobby of the Roseland Theatre, a cinema in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. It is November 8th, 1946, and Desmond’s hair is perfectly coiffed, a fur stole is draped over her shoulders to ward off the Atlantic autumn air, and a small handbag is tucked into the crook of an elbow. There is confusion at the ticket booth: Desmond requests admission to the orchestra level, but when she attempts to take a seat on the lower level, the white usher stops her and tells her she holds a ticket for the balcony and must sit upstairs. Thinking there has been a mistake, Desmond returns to the cashier and again requests a downstairs ticket, offering to pay the 10-cent difference in cost. She has poor distance vision, she explains, and needs to sit nearer to the screen in order to see. The white cashier tells her, “I’m not permitted to sell downstairs tickets to you people.” The photograph cannot capture these verbal exchanges but registers them nonetheless.

The next image is so dimly lit, the figures are nearly obscured, but we can just make out Desmond’s profile in the back of the orchestra, where she has turned in her seat to respond to the theatre manager standing in the aisle. He demands that she leave, threatening to call the police. In her affidavit, Desmond would recount that the manager loudly confronted her, explaining the back of her ticket confirmed the theatre’s right to “refuse admission to any objectionable person.” She, in return, politely asked if he could acquire a downstairs ticket for her, at which point he became angry and threatened to have her thrown out. An exterior view of the cinema, taken from the sidewalk a few moments later, shows Desmond being carried out of the building towards a taxi waiting at the curb. Starkly lit by the camera’s glaring flash, Desmond’s shoulders are tightly grasped by a police officer while Henry MacNeil, the white theatre manager, carries her feet. A shoe is missing, as is her handbag. In an image taken an hour later, Desmond is in a county jail cell, awaiting arraignment the following day. Her shoe has been retrieved, as has her purse, and she sits bolt upright on a cot: a single bare bulb casts shadows on the cinderblock wall behind her. Two more photographs, taken days later in the bleak light of a physician’s exam room, document bruises on Desmond’s shoulders and ankles.

These images constitute an important part of the archive of early civil rights activism in Canada, but they do not exist.

They are instead “untaken photographs,” a category of images introduced by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay that do not visualize the spectacular moments of regime-made disasters and therefore “tend to evade the archival filter, or to deceive it.” But these untaken images can be imagined through their traces: the photographs taken just before, just after, or at the periphery of events.

The photograph of Desmond that does exist and has most often accompanied stories of her act of civil disobedience and her subsequent arrest and trial, is a studio portrait of her taken six years earlier. In it, Desmond gazes seriously but serenely into the camera, her hair immaculately styled. A heart-shaped pendant at her neck and her darkly pigmented lips suggest the visit to the photo studio was a special occasion, or perhaps its inverse: that Desmond was perennially presentable, using every public appearance as an opportunity to promote her salon on Gottingen Street in Halifax, and the Desmond School of Beauty Culture, which drew students from across Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Quebec each year.

It is one of these studio portraits that took on a very different public function when it appeared on the cover of the first illustrated issue of The Clarion newspaper — the first illustrated, Black-owned newspaper in Nova Scotia — in December 1946. Beneath Desmond’s studio portrait, under the title “Takes Action,” the text, authored by editor Carrie M. Best, tells readers a now–familiar story: that Desmond was arrested and fined 20 Canadian dollars plus 6 Canadian dollars in court costs (which is about 260 USD today), for “defrauding the Federal Government of one cent.” Under the guise of a puritanical Canadian law requiring the owners of theatres to charge patrons one cent for every ten they spent on entertainment, the Roseland Theatre manager informed the police that she had committed tax evasion by sitting in a floor level seat while holding a ticket for the balcony, a space that was, as Desmond discovered, implicitly segregated for “coloured people.” No mention of race, nor of segregation, was made in the charges nor in any of the subsequent court proceedings. The Clarion’s coverage of Desmond’s arrest ends with her biography, outlining her education and family members, and includes an appeal to readers to donate to her legal defence fund through the Nova Scotia Association for the Advancement of Coloured People.

Cover images from the first illustrated issues of The Clarion newspaper. — Cover images from the first illustrated issues of *The Clarion* newspaper.

The Clarion’s particular approach to using everyday, domestic images like Desmond’s portrait, alongside family photographs, on their cover and in their pages demonstrates an urge to narrate and represent Black racism as an everyday event in the Atlantic region, and the wider national landscape, in the 1940s — a history that the Canadian national imaginary has suppressed to the point of near invisibility.

At the time of The Clarion’s first issue in 1946, for instance, Nova Scotia had the largest Black population of any province in Canada, a concentration originally produced through the transatlantic slave trade, which then intensified through a series of northerly migrations beginning in the 1790s and accelerating in the early 1900s as free Black citizens moved north to avoid the racist policies of the Jim Crow laws in the United States. The growing Black population in Canada confronted equally discriminatory policies and practices, in ways that were far more nefarious. Unlike Jim Crow law in much of the southern United States, which mandated racial segregation, Canadian segregation was not enacted by a set of laws, but was nonetheless completely legal. The federal government hid behind a non-interference policy that allowed individual businesses to decide whom to serve and to whom to refuse service. As a result, much of the country had de facto racial segregation — in housing, schooling, juries, the military, and even cemeteries, as well as restaurants, bars, theatres, and hotels — even as the law purported to protect all subjects of the dominion equally.

It was against this backdrop of quiet, racialized violence that The Clarion deployed family photographs starting with a family photograph of the Prevoe family that appeared on their cover (the first to be illustrated with a photograph) in February 1947. Subsequent issues featured group portraits of the Phyllis Wheatley Business Girls Club of Halifax and the Criterion Club. In each instance, sitters adapted the poses and dress of middle-class culture to present themselves as citizens in the absence of any other recognizable visual lexicon of photographic subjectivity. The family and group portraits featured on The Clarion’s cover were not illustrations of an urgent story of civil rights violations, as was the case with Desmond’s portrait, but were offered without explanation. Obviously, for a community newspaper with limited resources, soliciting family and snapshot photography from readers was an easy solution to the problem of not being able to afford a staff photographer. But there is a reliance on family units and affiliative groups in The Clarion that suggests these images of collectivity also fulfilled a semantic function.

Dominant histories of photography have tended to assume that photojournalism is most appropriate for documenting the loud, iconic events of public history, while family photography tends to be overlooked as banal, subjective, and private; as a mode that, at its worst, works to re-inscribe patriarchal, heterosexist, and middle–class ideologies. I want to suggest, however, that The Clarion presented family photographs alongside stories of racial violence to signal that acts of racial discrimination were as common as the act of taking a snapshot portrait. And, by entering homes alongside international news coverage of post-war destruction and reconstruction, and of US segregation, such as those covered by photojournalists, these community newspapers also framed everyday acts of discrimination as acts of violence. These “quiet” images therefore speak to the quiet nature of racial violence in Canada: a quietness, or “politeness,” to use a national stereotype, that made it difficult to publicly challenge and contest.

I want to conclude by turning briefly to the sudden reappearance of Desmond’s portrait in the Canadian national imaginary, and to ask whether this might present an opportunity for contemporary viewers to do reparative work with her image. Desmond died at a young age, in 1956. It was only through the efforts of her sister that her story entered the national public record. In 2010, she was the first Canadian to be posthumously pardoned by the Nova Scotia Government, in an order signed by the province’s first Black Lieutenant Governor, Mayann Francis. Canada Post then issued a commemorative stamp featuring her in 2012, and in 2018, Desmond became the first Canadian woman to appear on the country’s 10-dollar bill. This very public circulation of Desmond’s private portrait is a mnemonic device for all the untaken photographs of her acts of resistance: an opportunity to see and recognize her experiences of segregation as forms of the pervasive and sometimes unseeable violence that structures Canadian society.

A version of this text previously appeared as an op-ed article in the Toronto Star. (November 15, 2019). This essay is derived in part from an article published in Visual Studies (2021), available online.