Carver Theatre - Columbia, SC
N 34° 00.621 W 081° 01.275
17S E 498037 N 3763303
An old theater served as a african american newspaper office, and was home to significant developments in the civil rights movement. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Waymark Code: WM9JEB
Location: South Carolina, United States
Date Posted: 08/26/2010
Views: 3
from the historic marker:
The Lighthouse & Informer, long the leading black newspaper in SC, was a weekly published here from 1941 to 1954 by journalist and civil rights advocate John Henry McCray (1910-1997). McCray, who founded the paper "so our people can have a voice and some means of getting along together," published articles covering every aspect of black life and columns and editorials advocating equal rights.
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In 1944, after the SC General Assembly repealed laws regulating primaries and the SC Democratic Party excluded blacks from voting in them, John H McCray helped found the Progressive Democratic Party, the first black Democratic party in the South. He was an editor for other leading black newspapers in the 1950s and 1960s, then spent many years as an administrator at his alma mater, Talladega College. McCray died in Alabama in 1987.
Erected by the Historic Columbia Foundation, The city of Columbia, and the SC Department of Transportation, 2008.
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The Carver Theatre is significant for its association with the history of Columbia’s black community in the early-to-mid-twentieth century. It was built ca. 1941, and was one of only two exclusively African American movie theatres in Columbia. Since the other theatre, the Capitol Theatre, has been demolished, the Carver Theatre is the only extant motion picture theatre where African Americans could freely go to the movies. The Carver Theatre was adjacent to the Waverly community, the pre-eminent African American neighborhood in Columbia. Members of the community have vivid recollections of the Carver Theatre. Not only were movies shown here, but also weekly talent shows, patterned after the famous “Amateur Hour” in Harlem, for young people in the area. The theatre is a two-story brick commercial building, rectangular in shape, with a flat roof and a vertical marquee over the front entrance. The building is of brick construction, laid in five to one common bond, ornamented with stucco only over the front façade. The interior of the building reflects its use as a movie theatre from the early 1940s through 1971. The first floor has been renovated and the original seating removed, but the floor retains its original slant. The balcony contains the original seating and lighting. The mosaic floor and the ticket window in the lobby are original. Listed in the National Register July 17, 2003.
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