Kirby's Augusta - The Lenox Theatre

While many Augusta theaters through the early decades of the 1900s offered seating for black patrons in the back, there was one place where black folks could sit front and center for the latest shows and movies – The Lenox on the 1100 block of Ninth Street.

Today, the spot where thousands of black Augustans shows movies, features and even musical performances featuring Ray Charles, Ethel Waters or Ma Rainey is a vacant lot with of weeds and dirt. But from the 1920s into the 1960s, this was a center of Augusta’s black entertainment.
They say James Brown won his first talent contest there.

It was built in 1920 at a cost of more than $100,000 (more than a million dollars today) by Augusta’s premier architect Lloyd Preacher.
Preacher also designed the Imperial Theater, the Richmond Hotel and even the News Building, home of The Chronicle.
A review published in The Augusta Chronicle on Jan. 9, 1921, described the Lenox as the "finest most beautiful and best equipped theater in this country owned and controlled by the colored people."
It was built thanks to the funding of four black Augustans - physician G.N. Stoney; caterer John P. Waring; postal worker John Norflett; and postal worker-turned-banker William H. Wilborn.




Some might ask today why Augusta’s thriving black community would need its own theater? Well, like many communities at this time in the American South and elsewhere, blacks were segregated from whites in theaters. In Augusta, they could go to the Imperial, but they had to use a side entrance and they had to sit in the balcony, an area so high and far from the stage and screen, it was derisively called “the buzzard’s roost.”


Not so at the Lenox.
Upon opening, patrons stepped through a giant arch into a large lobby with tile floors and mural decorations on the wall.
Entering the theater itself, guests saw more than 570 seats on the orchestra floor and an additional 300 seats in the balcony.
It was heated during the winter by gas-steam radiators and cooled in the summers by a "mighty cyclone fan," according to The Augusta Chronicle archives.

"You've heard of turn-away business?" the son of one of the theater managers recalled years ago. "We had people lined up from the theater's box office to a block down to Gwinnett Street (now Laney-Walker Boulevard)."
It helped that The Lenox was part of several Augusta city blocks on Ninth Street called "the Golden Blocks," where black businesses thrived.


Then something good happened. In the mid-1950s and ‘60s, segregation died.
Then something bad happened. The Lenox and other businesses in the "Golden Blocks" eventually deteriorated as blacks began frequenting white-owned establishments.


The theater was further damaged Jan. 31, 1966, by a fire that caused extensive damage. Although historical documents on the theater are scant During this period, old city directories show that the theater appears to have been renovated and continued operating into the early 1970s.
With the changing times, however, the theater did not make it to the end of the decade.

In 1974, a teenage girl was found stabbed to death in the abandoned theater and four years later, the city ordered the building torn down.

The city had acquired the property in a tax lien case.

In September 1978, the Lenox – like many of Augusta’s very special places -- was demolished.

It lives today like much of Augusta’s past, in old photos and older memories.
That’s where you find so many of our town’s old showplaces – white or black.

Видео Kirby's Augusta - The Lenox Theatre канала Kirbys Augusta