All of the movies were in black and white, like stripes or a chessboard. Elsie Stoneman in Birth of a Nation was white. Her housekeeper was a white woman with her face painted black. The theaters were in black and white: outdoor stairs to the black section and carpet-lined floors to the white section. The velvet ropes of Tallahassee’s all-white and segregated movie theaters cut African Americans off from the best seats in the theater, relegating them to the unkempt balcony section often referred to as the “buzzard’s roost” or “peanut gallery,” if not denying them entry entirely. Before African American civil rights workers in Tallahassee, many of them students and members of the Congress of Racial Equality (known as CORE), picketed Tallahassee’s all-white theaters to protest segregation, another theater was established in town, one meant for the exclusive enjoyment of Tallahassee’s African American community. In all likelihood this theater was fundamentally the same as any of the white theaters in town, showing the same films, selling the same theater snacks, and attracting audiences with similar movie appetites. Like all products of segregation, however, it existed in parallel to its all-white counterparts.
To watch a movie is to undergo disincarnation: your body practically dissolves, your mind is absorbed by a fantasy image bigger than yourself, you melt into a crowd and become no one and everyone all at once. An audience laughs, cries, and gasps as one being in the dark. The phenomenon explains why you get that strange, almost uneasy feeling when the lights turn on after a film has ended, like you’re not supposed to be there. Segregated theaters extinguished that strange magic by forcibly separating their audience in two. The picture on the screen might be a fantasy where anything could happen, but from the balcony section of a theater, the view was noticeably worse—it was clear that even in dreams you could not be free. When the lights went down in a segregated movie theater, the equalizing force of darkness was not enough to make black and white lines disappear.
At Capital Theater, nestled between other black-owned businesses somewhere between West Virginia and West Carolina street on North Macomb, patrons found a different palette: one screen and 200 seats for African American moviegoers. The theater was owned and operated from sometime in the 1910s up until the mid-20th century by Margaret A. Yellowhair, a beloved resident of Frenchtown. Her father, Edward Yellowhair, was of African and indigenous ancestry. He was born in the early 1850s and elected to the Tallahassee City Council in 1883. The Yellowhair Family came to obtain land and influence throughout Frenchtown and local residents knew Ms. Yellowhair as someone “you wanted to work with.”
In the 1930s, a seat at the picture show cost a few coins from your pocket and often included a double feature and a live show. At Capital Theater, a ticket cost you around 10 cents and mandatory participation in the audience’s recital of the national anthem before the start of each show, as some patrons have recollected. The white theaters in town around that time, including the Florida Theatre, the Ritz, and the State Theatre, sold hot popcorn and all sorts of candy at their concessions stands. Kids lined up to glue their mouths shut with sugar-coated jelly Chuckles and licorice gumdrop Crows. I imagine the fare at Frenchtown’s Capital Theater was similar, with vendors roving up and down the aisles hawking Goobers, Raisinets, and Twizzlers while the audience looked up at the glowing faces of Hollywood’s Golden Age.
After Ms. Yellowhair died in 1952, Capital Theater was sold to the white owners of Leon Theater, another location in town that exclusively served African Americans. In an interview conducted by John G. Riley Museum founder Althemese Barnes with Cleo Hall, a resident of Frenchtown at the time, Hall explains his theory of the theater’s demise; the new owners simply wanted to get the theater “out of blacks’ hands” and “let it go” until it was no longer viable. It was eventually sold and converted into a grocery store. Today, nothing remains of the theater or its neighbors along that strip of Frenchtown’s once-booming Business District; an expanded Macomb street and the Renaissance Center, a building of government offices, sit in their stead. Maggie Yellowhair, as a black business owner, was one of the many who refused segregation’s denial of life’s simple pleasures by carving out a place for African Americans in Tallahassee to enjoy the newly-emerging American pastime of going to the movies.
Segregation of classrooms and universities is of a different order than that of soda shops and movie theaters. Separating folks in schools means you can give the two groups entirely different educations—you can give or withhold from them the power of knowledge and critical thinking, you can impart upon them a false truth or a twisted version of history and self. But forcing someone into a different section of a theater, club, roller rink—any kind of space where entertainment is to be enjoyed—is a different kind of denial. It is a form of segregation that, in all its seriousness, is a way of forbidding fun. It is the imagination that one group does not leisure, cannot know anything but toil, does not delight in frivolity—simply that some people don’t deserve their own time. Despite the sadness inherent in its existence, Capital Theater stood as proof that black Tallahasseeans were not going to ask for permission to be happy. Happiness being the least, and best, of human attainments, they would make their own fun.
Works Cited
African American children at the Leon Theater in Tallahassee. 1955. State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory. <https://www.floridamemory.com/items/show/259888>
Demonstration in front of the State Theatre in Tallahassee. 1963. State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory. <https://www.floridamemory.com/items/show/4532>
Front of the Capital Theater – Tallahassee, Florida. 1920 (circa). State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory. <https://www.floridamemory.com/items/show/27273>
“Interview with Alpha Omega Nims · Riley Archives.” n.d. Rileyarchives.org. https://rileyarchives.org/s/museumcollections/item/9332.
“Interview with Cleo Hall · Riley Archives.” n.d. Rileyarchives.org. https://rileyarchives.org/s/museumcollections/item/9335#?c=&m=&s=&cv=.
“Obituaries, 1952-1973 · Riley Archives.” n.d. Rileyarchives.org. https://rileyarchives.org/s/museumcollections/item/9916#?c=&m=&s=&cv=.
“Stately Homes and Pioneering Spirits Historical Marker.” n.d. http://Www.hmdb.org. https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=229809.
Tallahassee-Leon County Planning Department. 2017. Frenchtown Placemaking. Talgov.com. City of Tallahassee. https://www.talgov.com/Uploads/Public/Documents/place/ftpm-plan.pdf.
Illuminations 