The Bijou's Separate Entrance and What It Meant

The Bijou Theatre opened on March eighth, nineteen oh nine, and immediately established itself as one of the most sophisticated performance venues in the region. Over the following four decades it hosted the Marx Brothers, Ethel Barrymore, Harry Blackstone Senior, John Philip Sousa, the Ballets Russes, and Dizzy Gillespie. It was the place in Knoxville where a national touring act performed.

Black patrons could attend. They entered through a separate door on Cumberland Avenue, away from the Gay Street main entrance. They climbed stairs to the second balcony and watched from above. The performers on the stage sometimes included Black artists whose names would not have been allowed on the same accommodation register as the white audience below them.

This arrangement, attending but segregated, was considered relatively tolerant by the standards of the Jim Crow South. Many venues in comparable cities admitted no Black patrons at all. The Bijou's separate entrance was the form that inclusion took when exclusion was the norm.

The specific date when the Bijou formally ended segregated seating is not established with precision in the sources reviewed. What is documented is that the theater operated under segregated arrangements for decades, that this continued well into the mid-twentieth century, and that the performers and audience occupied the same air while the architecture enforced a categorical difference between them.

The Bijou was restored and reopened as a performing arts venue. The Cumberland Avenue entrance that Black patrons used does not appear in its promotional materials. The main Gay Street entrance is the entrance now.