The Regal Theater and Black Culture [Paperback]

Chronicling over forty years of changes in African-American popular culture, the Regal Theatre (1928-1968) was the largest movie-stage-show venue ever constructed for a Black community. Semmes reveals the political, economic and business realities of cultural production and the institutional inequalities that circumscribed Black life.Acknowledgements Introduction The Opening: Separate But Equal The Depression Years: Privilege in the Marketplace and Black Stewardship The End of Monopoly and the End of Swing The Decline of Commercial Segregation and the Transition to Independence Rebirth, Black Ownership, and the Closing of the Palace Retrospect and Lessons Learned Bibliography

This magnificent volume should be indispensable reading for students of African- American and American culture. It provides searching scholarship from which sophisticated students, no less than beginners in the field, are likely to learn much. One cannot help but note that the cultural offerings of Chicago were brilliantly in evidence during the time the national spotlight was for so long focused on New York's Harlem. A landmark achievement. - Sterling Stuckey, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History, University of California at Riverside

In this exhaustively researched, skillfully crafted, study, Clovis E. Semmes has

vividly recreated the forty year life span (1928-1968) of black Chicago's cultural

cornerstone, the Regal Theater. Although the physical Regal Theater is gone

(having met the wrecking ball more than a generation ago), The Regal Theater

and Black Culture admirably insures that this African American urban landmark

will not be forgotten. - Robert E. Weems, Jr., author of Black Business in the Black Metropolis: The Chicago Metropolitan Assurance Company, 1925-1985

Semmes provides a fascinating study of one of America's most important theater inlcÀ