The Regal Theater and Black Culture (review)

In his 1992 book Cultural Hegemony and African American Development, Clovis Semmes employs the work of E. Franklin Frazier and Harold Cruse in order to establish a critical perspective within African-American studies that acknowledges important notions of cultural and social organization as well as the dialectic between culture, politics, and economics within the African-American experience. Semmes’s concept of cultural hegemony, which he defines in Cultural Hegemony as “the systematic negation of one culture by another for the purpose of exploitation and control” (29), serves as the critical lynchpin of the text, and in it he traces the ways in which cultural hegemony has impeded African-American cultural and institutional advancement.

Expanding this concept in his new book The Regal Theater and Black Culture, Semmes redefines cultural hegemony as “the process by which the institutional and historical trajectory of one group calls into dissolution the institutional independence, coherence and viability of another” (11). Suggesting that commercial and residential segregation served as one facet of many structural inequalities that comprised cultural hegemony, Semmes traces its impact on Chicago’s Regal Theater, which was located in the city’s South Side community known as “Bronzeville” or the “Black Belt” and provided live entertainment and films from 1928 until 1968 (the building was ultimately demolished in 1973) (11). In this rich social history, Semmes convincingly demonstrates how cultural hegemony informed the theater’s cultural, economic, and social successes and failures within a matrix of primarily white political and economic interests. Despite the influence of cultural subordination on the theater, he posits that because of the various roles the Regal Theater played within the African-American community, it contributed to the promotion and maintenance of what he calls an “authentic black culture” by way of the African-American expressive culture showcased there throughout its forty-year history (8). Furthermore, he argues that both the performers who met the aesthetic demands and norms of black audiences and the audiences themselves who used their spending power and attendance to influence performances at the Regal maintained this authentic black culture. Using sociological and historical methods, Semmes details the contours of the cultural production at the Regal and proposes that the study reveals the exigencies that changes in the Black Belt’s demographics, the United States economy, and technology brought to bear on the theater’s survival.

To this end, Semmes draws on the archives of the Chicago Defender among other African-American and mainstream newspapers and periodicals and relies upon interviews with people connected to the theater including former employees, performers, and even a few patrons who attended its opening to illustrate both the interracial dialectic of competing interests in the Regal and the significance of the theater within the African-American community.

In addition to the archival material, the book is also informed by a sense of nostalgia and awe for the theater itself, and Semmes readily admits that his study serves as something akin to a memoir of his youth in that he discovered the theater in his childhood when it was in its decline, but he asserts that for him and his peers, the theater “could not have been better” (5). Semmes argues that the Regal, along with the other cultural institutions in the Bronzeville community such as the George Cleveland Hall Library and Cosmopolitan Community Church served him in ways that he would not be able to fully grasp until he reached adulthood. He also credits the community’s residents, including Charlemae Hill Rollins, head of the children’s department at the Hall Library, with providing him with a sense of history about the Bronzeville community. Semmes’s admiration of the theater enhances his readings of its cultural significance and how it navigated the competing ideologies—such as the dispute between its management who wanted to increase the number of films shown in order to cut costs and the patrons who insisted that there be a continued presentation of live performance—that shaped its viability as a cultural institution. In fact, much of...