King-Lincoln Bronzeville and the Lincoln Theatre
Near Columbus, Ohio
By nineteen hundred, Columbus's Black population had grown to more than twenty-two thousand people, most of them living on the near east side, in a neighborhood that would come to be called King-Lincoln Bronzeville. The name came later. The neighborhood came from migration, from the Great Migration of Black Americans out of the South into northern industrial cities, and from the tight geography of a city where redlining made the near east side effectively the only place Black families could own homes and build businesses.
Mount Vernon Avenue and East Long Street were the commercial spine. By the nineteen thirties and forties there were Black-owned banks, newspapers, barbershops, funeral homes, restaurants, law offices, and entertainment venues. Al Jackson, a local entrepreneur, hired architect Carl Anderson to design a performing arts venue at seven sixty-nine East Long Street. The Lincoln Theatre opened on November twenty-sixth, nineteen twenty-eight, in an Egyptian Revival style that was fashionable in the decade after Tutankhamun's tomb had been opened. It seated five hundred eighty-two and presented jazz, vaudeville, and later films.
Interstate Seventy-One was built through the near east side in the nineteen sixties. It did not touch every building, but it cut Mount Vernon Avenue off from downtown, severed the commercial corridor from the foot traffic it depended on, and contributed to the neighborhood's economic collapse in the following decades. Elijah Pierce's barbershop on Long Street was one of the things that held on. Aminah Robinson grew up just east of the highway's path.
The Lincoln Theatre was restored and reopened in two thousand nine. The King Arts Complex next door carries the neighborhood's cultural history. Mount Vernon Avenue has seen some recovery. The highway is still there.
