In chapter 3, “Colored Theaters in the Jim Crow City,” of Envisioning Freedom, Cara Caddoo examines the growth of colored theaters and their role in strengthening the black community and belief in collective racial destiny in the early 1900s. Before colored theaters, films for black audiences were shown in churches, halls, and schools. During the Jim Crow era, white theater owners made segregated motion picture theater an industry wide standard. White people were given the coveted floor seats while black Americans were relegated to segregated seats, called the “buzzard’s roost,” in the theaters’ balconies. The segregation put in place by Jim Crow and the increasing demand for motion picture led many black theater professionals to open their own colored theaters. These theaters hosted a variety of performances, from vaudeville to motion pictures. After the first colored theater was built in 1906, its popularity skyrocketed and more than 200 colored theaters opened in the US between 1906 and 1914. The cinema broke away from the spheres defined by tradition and by law as it gave African Americans access to a safe public and commercial space.
Although colored theaters were commercial, public spaces, they garnered support from religious and fraternal organizations. The interconnected development of colored theaters impacted black religious, economic, and social life. One example comes from a worker’s association that planned on raising $400,000 in capital to build a colored theater. Caddoo demonstrates that the demand “for public spaces of leisure had been integrated into a larger vision of black economic and political equality.” Colored theaters began to be associated with black progress, and as such were oftentimes met with violence from police hostility, riotous crowds, or abuse from angry white competitors. Despite these challenges, colored theaters continued to grow and at the same time begin to foster a sense of national black culture and identity.