Desegregate Lisner Auditorium Pickets: 1946 # 2
Pickets line is shown on October 29, 1946 protesting the opening of Lisner Auditorium by George Washington University as a segregated facility.
Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman, the star of the play “Joan of Lorraine,” said at a press conference the day before the show opened, “If I’d known black people weren’t allowed in, I’d have never set foot in this town.”
Bergman later reported that pro-segregationists waited outside her dressing room and spit on her and called her an “n_____-lover.”
The Washington chapter of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare set up a picket line opening night October 29 demanding that African Americans be admitted. The cast of the production signed a petition denouncing the “deplorable and un-American practice of segregation.” A veterans group and other students at the school joined them in subsequent days.
In response to the outcry against segregation, the university voted to admit African Americans as patrons of university sponsored events in 1947. However, privately- sponsored events at Lisner continued to be segregated until 1954.
For an article on the long struggle to desegregate Washington, D.C. theaters, see washingtonspark.wordpress.com/2013/03/14/dcs-old-jim-crow...
For additional images related to the struggle in Washington D.C. to desegregate theaters, see flic.kr/s/aHsjEkdYcB
Photo by Washington Daily News. Courtesy of the D.C. Public Library Washington Star Collection © Washington Post.
Desegregate Lisner Auditorium Pickets: 1946 # 2
Pickets line is shown on October 29, 1946 protesting the opening of Lisner Auditorium by George Washington University as a segregated facility.
Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman, the star of the play “Joan of Lorraine,” said at a press conference the day before the show opened, “If I’d known black people weren’t allowed in, I’d have never set foot in this town.”
Bergman later reported that pro-segregationists waited outside her dressing room and spit on her and called her an “n_____-lover.”
The Washington chapter of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare set up a picket line opening night October 29 demanding that African Americans be admitted. The cast of the production signed a petition denouncing the “deplorable and un-American practice of segregation.” A veterans group and other students at the school joined them in subsequent days.
In response to the outcry against segregation, the university voted to admit African Americans as patrons of university sponsored events in 1947. However, privately- sponsored events at Lisner continued to be segregated until 1954.
For an article on the long struggle to desegregate Washington, D.C. theaters, see washingtonspark.wordpress.com/2013/03/14/dcs-old-jim-crow...
For additional images related to the struggle in Washington D.C. to desegregate theaters, see flic.kr/s/aHsjEkdYcB
Photo by Washington Daily News. Courtesy of the D.C. Public Library Washington Star Collection © Washington Post.