The Attucks Theatre: The Apollo of the South

In nineteen nineteen, on Church Street in the heart of Norfolk's Black business district, a theater opened that was unlike anything the American South had seen. The Attucks Theatre was designed by Harvey Johnson, an African American architect, financed by African American entrepreneurs, and built from the ground up as a showcase of Black economic and cultural ambition. It was named after Crispus Attucks, the free Black man who fell in the Boston Massacre of seventeen seventy, the first casualty of the American Revolution.

From the beginning, people called it the Apollo of the South. The nickname was earned. Duke Ellington played the Attucks. Cab Calloway played the Attucks. Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, and Redd Foxx all performed on its stage. At a moment when Black performers were excluded from white theaters and hotels across Virginia, the Attucks was a world-class venue that answered that exclusion with the only argument that actually matters: a room full of genius.

The theater added to the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen eighty-two, was eventually restored and reopened in two thousand and four as a partnership between the city of Norfolk and the Crispus Attucks Cultural Center. Wynton Marsalis performed at the reopening. Audra McDonald has played there since.

Church Street itself has changed dramatically since nineteen nineteen, reshaped by urban renewal and highway construction that thinned much of what once surrounded the theater. The Attucks stood through all of it. In a neighborhood that lost so much, the theater held the line.