Today, a new bank note goes into circulation—and it's the first to feature a Canadian woman.

Nova Scotia civil-rights pioneer Viola Desmond appears on the $10 bill.

The Halifax hair-salon and beauty-school owner sat in the whites-only area of a New Glasgow movie theatre in 1946. This was nine years before Rosa Parks famously sat in the whites-only area on a bus in Mongtomery, Alabama. bus.

Desmond was arrested, jailed, convicted, and fined for challenging the racial-segregation law of the era.

The new bank note has a vertical orientation and depicts the Canadian Museum of Human Rights. There's also an excerpt from the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

One of Desmond's two surviving sisters, Wanda Robson, was present at the unveiling last year in Halifax with Finance Minister Bill Morneau and Bank of Canada governor Stephen Poloz.

"It's very hard to describe the feeling you get when your own sister, a member of your family, is going to be honoured with a bill, with a Canadian bill," Robson recently told CBC News.

Desmond died in 1965. She received a posthumous pardon in 2010.

The Bank of Canada is also going to have a new subject on the next $5 bill.

"Canada’s first Prime Minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, and first francophone Prime Minister, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, will be honoured on higher value bank notes when they are redesigned," the Bank of Canada stated last year. "These changes mean that former prime ministers William Lyon Mackenzie King and Sir Robert Borden will no longer be portrayed on bank notes."

The reigning monarch will continue to appear on $20 bills.