In 1909, in the midst of a widespread nickelodeon boom, James Metcalfe, a cultural writer for Life magazine and newspapers nationwide, wrote rather explicitly about the ways that theater employees worked with police to keep their venues white. He laid out a clear set of instructions that worked to circumvent Black people’s civil rights to sit where they choose: an usher offers to move the Black patrons seated in the orchestra to better seats; upon arriving at these new seats, pre-placed stagehands pick a fight with the Black patrons, creating a disturbance and cause to call the police; offending parties are then removed from the theater and arrested. “The rest, of course,” Metcalfe ominously insisted, “is easy.”1 Throughout the early twentieth century, as police forces became increasingly professionalized the motion picture industry became a cultural staple, and Black migrants and immigrants moved en masse to growing cities, this scene played out time and time again in various forms.
In Manhattan two years later, the manager of the New York Theatre called the police on Mr. and Mrs. Roberts when they refused to leave the orchestra section for the balcony. Despite the fact that their tickets were for exactly where they were seated and the state’s civil rights laws were certainly on their side, the police officer threatened them with arrest if they did not move. In a similar case a few years later in Cincinnati, Ohio, the son of a local pastor was forcibly ejected from a theater by a police officer because the management objected to his presence in the all-white establishment. When the pastor went to the mayor and police to complain about this blatantly obvious form of discrimination, the officer claimed ignorance of the law. He explained that he was simply unaware of what he could not do as an officer. In other cases, like in Philadelphia in 1929 and again in Muncie, Indiana in 1934, Metcalfe’s foil played out exactly as he planned. Patrons insisting on their rights, refusing to move from the purchased seats, were arrested for disorderly conduct right in the theater.