The Death of J. Ed Green and the Birth of State Street Vaudeville
Segregation and degrading treatment in public places of entertainment necessitated the African American theater movement. In 1901 J. Ed Green wrote the Freeman in support of efforts to convert Chicago’s mainstream Havilin Theater into an exclusively black venue: “The idea has long been a source of exasperation to leaders of colored society in Chicago that they could not secure a box or orchestra seat in any of the theatres no matter what its price may be. This fact has led to the plan of having a colored theatre controlled by colored people and catering only to colored patronage.”1 The Havilin Theater initiative was ultimately unsuccessful; but over the course of the next ten years African American theaters serving an exclusively, or predominantly, black clientele became firmly entrenched, and a new and very different dynamic was set in motion.
Chicago’s African American theater movement had its genesis in the saloon trade on the south end of State Street. In the spring of 1901 the Royal Pavilion, a “first class resort” at 2936 State Street, advertised a “Free Vaudeville Show Every Evening” under musical director Ed Hill and house pianist Ed Hardin. Hill left Chicago for Memphis that spring to join Lew Hall’s Ragtime Opera Company under J. Ed Green. Ragtime specialist Ed Hardin stayed on in Chicago and, according to the authors of They All Played Ragtime, “reached his peak when he played at the old Pekin at Twenty-Seventh and State Streets, around 1903–04, when it was a popular beer garden frequented by parties of white pleasure-seekers as well as Negroes.”2
The Pekin became a model platform for the exhibition of African American dramatic arts, a place of high theatrical aspirations, and a proud monument to African American enterprise owned by a black man, Robert T. Motts. Its influence reverberated throughout the budding African American stage world. Motts started his operation as a beer hall and restaurant; but when he could not get his license renewed, he decided to convert the building into a “music hall garden,” which he publicized in the summer of 1904 as “The Pekin … Temple Of Music … Home Of High Class Vaudeville.”3 On January 10, 1906, a fire damaged the building; Motts remodeled and reopened as a “regularly appointed theatre.”4 On February 17, 1906, he advertised: “The Pekin Theatre—The only first-class and properly equipped theatre in the United States, owned, managed and controlled by colored promoters.”
Motts secured J. Ed Green to produce and direct the new Pekin Stock Company. Leaving Ernest Hogan’s Rufus Rastus Company mid-tour to take up at the Pekin, Green opened on March 31, 1906, with a production of Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles’s The Man from Bam.5 Presenting the Pekin Stock Company in a succession of musical dramas written by himself and others, Green set a standard in the newly emerging black theater world: “The productions at the Pekin have given the little house fame and standing not enjoyed by many larger ones. The audiences, as one would perhaps think, are not made up altogether of Negroes. Chicago is a great big cosmopolitan city, consequently the Pekin never lacks for patronage.”6
During the season of 1907, Motts and Green expanded their theatrical activities. Green advertised: “Plays To Let On Royalty to Amateurs or Professionals—Music accompanying all plays, data how to stage same.”7 The Elysium Theater in New Orleans, a shortlived black-owned enterprise, presented plays leased from Green and performed by its own stock players; and Motts placed a Chicago-based stock company under Green’s management at the Robinson Theater in Cincinnati.8
The Pekin Theater dominated the south end of State Street until the summer of 1908, when several little budget-priced theaters cropped up in direct competition with the old landmark. These “trial” playhouses demonstrated the economic potential of African American vaudeville on State Street, as Freeman columnist “Juli Jones, Jr.” duly noted:
The south end of State Street has a five cent theater war. There are seven houses in that battle.… First on the field was the Lincoln, Malvy’s house. His was only a trial. Business was so good with him that the Monogram cut in. These houses started out with motion pictures and a song occasionally. But things have changed now; each place puts on a regular vaudeville bill, and moving pictures are of little interest.… This five cent theater war has drawn nightly four to five thousand people on State Street.… It seems like “Broadway” in Dahoma. You can meet any of your long lost friends in this grand parade.9
“Juli Jones, Jr.” was the pen name of State Street businessman William Foster. At the end of 1906 and into the spring of 1907, Foster served as the Pekin Theater’s business manager.10 By 1909 he was running his own music store on State Street between Thirtieth and Thirty-First, in the heart of the budding theater district.11 Foster was a keen observer with a vested interest in the State Street theater phenomenon, and his “Juli Jones” columns of 1907–10 are an insider’s frank account of its early development. He seems to have originated State Street’s popular nickname “Dahomian Stroll,” later shortened to “The Stroll,” which first appeared in his column of August 15, 1908: “State Street vaudeville is still raging.… Chicago has begun to look like the Atlantic City of the West. Instead of the ‘board walk’ we have the ‘Dahomian stroll.’ The five-cent theaters are situated direct on the line. The Pekin towers above them all, but none of them are bad.”12
The seasonal influx of thousands of railroad excursionists—African American tourists on budget vacations from the Deep South—is what initially made State Street’s five- and ten-cent theaters economically viable. Further support was provided by the ever-growing population of permanent refugees from the “old country,” black settlers who brought an appetite for southern music, humor, and dance into Chicago’s cultural mix. In August 1907 Foster wrote:
Let your heart be at ease. The first excursion from bam [i.e., Alabama, or, in a broader sense, the South in general] arrived today in three sections; namely (pay attention): First section of twelve coaches filled with those who are to visit friends and return after the Elk’s Convention. Second section of fifteen coaches, packed, plenty of money, going to have a good time and return when money runs short. Third section of forty coaches, standing room only, the original Sons and Daughters of Bam, all with baggage in hand. Come to stick. Brought along two brass bands.13
Indianapolis Freeman, March 9, 1907.
Even the hard Chicago winter of 1908–09 did not kill theater business along the Stroll: “Here in Dahomey, just to think of it, the houses have their regular clienteles.”14 Moreover, booking agencies were prospering on State Street’s growing reputation as a black theater mecca: “The way business has been going on has encouraged business men to get together and make the Stroll one glamorous way. In other words, we are going to buck Atlantic City for popularity the coming season.”15
Caught up in the prevailing atmosphere of “grand reunion and celebration,” Foster proclaimed, “We are the people and we are just bursting this boulevard wide open with joy walks and strolling.”16 The Pekin Theater remained a beacon of achievement in the dramatic arts; however, amid the clamor, the tide of popular support was starting to flow toward the smaller houses:
It’s vaudeville the people want, and they are going to have it, that’s all, for five and ten cents, and would not pay more to hear Caruso or Paderewski on the same bill. The present popular demand for vaudeville has put good colored acts right in the front ranks.…
The ten-cent theater has such a hold on Chicago that capitalists have taken a great interest.17
By the summer of 1908, the Pekin was playing “amalgamated stock and vaudeville and a little bit of everything” in order to remain competitive: “Mr. Green has an unbounded faith in his old love, the Pekin, but the situation at present has him and Mr. Motts looking into open space, without a word to say. It has been unanimously decided that they will have to wait and wonder how long will this craze last.”18
Early in 1909 Motts attempted to rekindle the Pekin Stock Company, retaining J. Ed Green as producer and managing director, and bringing in Marion A. Brooks as “adapter.”19 Brooks had been summoned from St. Louis before the end of 1907 to serve as Green’s assistant at the Pekin.20 In April 1908, however, he reportedly left for Montgomery, Alabama, “to open a theatre fashioned after the Pekin. He has the best wishes of all the Pekinites.”21 Back in Chicago by September, Brooks moved into a management position at the Grand, a recently opened vaudeville house at Thirty-First and State, four blocks up from the Pekin.22 Owned and bankrolled by white men, the Grand was touted as “the finest little theater along the ‘Dahomian Stroll,’ and the second largest.”23
Indianapolis Freeman, November 25, 1911.
During the spring of 1909, J. Ed Green directed and starred in Pekin productions of Marion Brooks’s “Americanized” adaptations of three European farce comedies.24 The productions were apparently solid enough, but by June it was clear that “The stock company has not been the financial success as in the days of yore.”25 Motts responded by bringing in Sidney Perrin, who had recently made a splash in State Street vaudeville, to collaborate with Green “on a 30-minute musical comedy.… Mr. Perrin will also do comedy in his own skits.”26 Green and Perrin had collaborated on an “operatic farce” in New York City several years earlier; but, within a week of the announcement that Perrin was headed for the Pekin, news broke that Motts had made “a clean shake-up all over the house,” and J. Ed Green had resigned.27
Green immediately set out to establish a theatrical enterprise of his own, in direct competition with Robert T. Motts and other controlling interests on State Street.28 Green had been riding the crest of black entertainment for more than a decade, and he was versed in every aspect of the stage profession except theater ownership. In partnership with Marion Brooks, Green leased the Royal Theater and opened it on July 17, 1909, as the Chester.29
From their headquarters at the little Chester Theater, Green and Brooks outlined an ambitious agenda: “The new concern has a new system, and if carried out, will give the Negro showman the only protection that he has ever had in the West, and every act will get its just dues. The house will be used as a tryout house and acts will be remedied, if necessary, before they are sent out. Acts will be classed and priced according to their ability.… The management will rehearse and dress the show right in their own theater and guarantee a first-class show from a manager to a property man. Messrs. Green and Brooks know every reputable act in the city and they will lend their aid.”30
Operating as the Chester Amusement Company, Green and Brooks got off to an auspicious beginning. By August 1909 they were leasing and managing three small State Street theaters and booking acts for two more theaters in Cincinnati. A large advertisement in the Freeman revealed the audacity of their ambition: “Beginning Of First Colored Vaudeville Circuit.”31
Inspired by Green and Brooks’s new endeavor, a Negro showmen’s benevolent organization called the “William Goats” appeared on the Stroll. The Goats became known for their weekly Friday night “rambles,” midnight vaudeville programs held for the benefit of local performers in need of financial assistance.32 Along with the Chester Amusement Company, the Goats represented a bold new spirit of self determination on State Street.
Indianapolis Freeman, September 4, 1909.
With several theaters under their control, and the scrappy beginnings of an out-of-town circuit in place, Green and Brooks were soon providing work for dozens of black performers, and this put pressure on State Street’s white theater owners and booking agents. In August 1909 William Foster reported that the Grand and the Chester were locked in battle: “It’s a case of capital against theatrical brains. Everybody is waiting for results. What will the answer be?”33
Foster proclaimed that the Chester Amusement Company “can give acts more good time without a layoff than any of the second-class independent booking agents down town. The good colored acts have begun to book through them.”34 This put a particular squeeze on the Grand, which “had a dreadful falling off in business. Then Mr. Green opened a booking agency. This step enabled performers to run their price up on the white managers at the Grand, which they did and are still doing.”35
Green and Brooks were developing a business model that threatened to put entertainers in control of their own fate. Behind the scenes, vested interests plotted to bring them down. According to Foster, “the first battle came off September 4, between the Grand and Brooks and Green.”36 The trouble involved Sidney Perrin, whose presence at the Pekin a few months earlier may have prompted Green’s exit. Shortly thereafter, while appearing in Cincinnati, Perrin signed a written agreement to play Green and Brooks’s Chester Theater upon his return to Chicago. Perrin also booked his partner Goldie Crosby and her sister Odessa Crosby into the Chester: “This act has Dehomey its way. Can play any house along the stroll, no matter what they do, as the public is with them and storm the house every time they appear.”37
At the last minute Perrin cancelled the engagements, explaining that he had been threatened with boycott by mainstream Chicago booking power Frank Q. Doyle if he played the Chester. “Under the above excuse, Green and Brooks released them to find out that all three were engaged to open at the Grand the same week that they were engaged to open at the Chester.”38 When Green and Brooks complained, Perrin agreed to allow the Crosby Sisters to play the Marion, another one of their State Street theaters: “Everything satisfactory. Green and Brooks advertised the act to the limit.”39 But at the last moment, the manager of the Grand refused to allow the sisters to open at the Marion, which prompted William Foster to conclude: “This turn of affairs made Green and Brooks fall guys for fair.”40
The following week the Chester Amusement Company added another State Street house to its concern; but, more significantly, Frank Q. Doyle added the Grand Theater to his agency’s circuit.41 Doyle was already booking the Pekin; now he stood in direct opposition to Green and Brooks. William Foster candidly observed: “Doyle has the advantage of the big houses, but the next problem is in getting colored talent with class enough to make good.… Let us wait and see what the end will be.”42 In October news came that the Gaither Theater in Cincinnati had “severed its connection with the Chester Amusement Co., and hereafter will book through Doyle.”43
Meanwhile, the William Goats booked the Pekin Theater for a midnight ramble on October 8, 1909, only to have their reservation cancelled at the last minute. The damage inflicted by this non-event effectively discouraged future efforts to buck the State Street business establishment. The Goats had rambled in every theater on the Stroll except the Pekin; and every theater had offered the use of its facilities free of charge. On this occasion a committee of Goats met with Robert Motts and rented the Pekin for a token fee of $20.44
At the time of the ramble, Bert Williams was appearing at a white Chicago theater in Mr. Lode of Koal.45 In a major coup, the entire “Lode” company was enticed to attend the ramble, and Bert Williams himself agreed to address the audience. A huge vaudeville program was arranged, and 1,500 tickets were quickly sold. Then, as William Foster related:
The trouble began. The two big theatrical politicians of Dehomey met down town in a third-class booking agent’s office and pulled off the biggest deal known in Dehomey.… At the hour of 7:30 in the evening, during the time the Goats were very busy, the private secretary for the manager of the Pekin Theater walked up to Irvin C. Miller and handed him a note. Enclosed was $20. No writing. They just explained that “The Goats can’t ramble at the Pekin Theater tonight.” That’s all. The amusement committee waited on the master of the Pekin Theater to find out the reason.… Nothing could persuade him to change his last decision.… At length the grand mogul said that he did not like the Goats’ secretary. The committee was dumb struck.46
Foster himself was the Goats’ secretary. He offered to resign his position rather than have the ramble cancelled at that late hour, but Motts would not relent.
The Goats could do nothing, as it was too late to notify the public, who had by this time commenced to flow toward the Pekin. Nothing could stop them.… The manager of the Pekin settled everything, just as the crowd was about to break down the doors, by announcing in a clear voice that under no consideration would the Goats ramble in his house to-night, and rather than disappoint them he had arranged to give them a free show; that they should look up the secretary of the Goats and get their money back.47
According to Foster, this maneuver was orchestrated by “the power behind the throne.” The following week, Foster lamented:
Well, to put things clear to the public, the goats came near taking the real count-out in their little trouble. Yet it showed just who is the ruling power in Dehomey theatrical world, the senior manager of the Grand and not the managers of the Pekin, and he has made the managers of the Pekin “Fall guys.” The manager of the Grand cheerfully turned his house over to the goats for their ramble, and in turn, prevented the managers of the Pekin from allowing the goats to ramble in their house.48
Foster declared the Grand Theater the victor in the Stroll wars. There could be no question who was the loser. Before the end of 1909 Green and Brooks were forced to abandon all of their theater holdings. Just three houses remained on the Stroll: the Pekin, the Grand, and the Monogram, all booked through Frank Q. Doyle. Foster tried to put the best possible face on the whole disappointing affair:
There’s one thing that Green and Brooks did do, and that was to string things in such a way that everybody got work. Their temporary backset cannot be accounted a failure—they simply carried a good thing too far.…
The colored vaudeville actors of Chicago have begun to look around them to see just where they stand. They have put all their dependence in a downtown agent [Doyle], who took a hand in the Goat’s affair. Now, since the Goats have ceased to be so strong, and the little South Side booking agent [Green and Brooks] lost their house, this downtown agent has got busy … to give the colored acts a bump that it will take them a long time to get over.… But … it’s more than the work of a handful of their headed managers to put the colored showman or vaudeville actor out of business, just because the better class of colored acts and actors won’t do as they want them to do, and should these gentlemen take a little peep in back history of the colored showmen and jubilee singers, he will find that they … have had many setbacks, but they keep coming.… Here is one thing that may put everyone at ease—the Negro is on the stage to stay.…
Well, thanks, the Goats are able to sit up and nibble a little hay; no tin cans for a while. They will wait a while before defying the butcher again.49
At year’s end, State Street scribe Sylvester Russell, whose many antagonists included Green, Brooks, and Foster, put his own slant on the situation:
The “Goats” are young and they have errored by branching out too fast. Their rambles, which started at the little Chester Theater, should have continued there. The moment they branched out Green and Brooks involved themselves into competition by giving benefits at other houses. When the “Goats” were turned down by Manager Motts and ostracized from the Pekin Theater on the night that Bert A. Williams was to address them, their public prestige was weakened.… when they ramble hereafter it must be in a moderate, cautious way.… The best advice that can be offered to the “Goats” is to cultivate cordial relations with all the managers and booking agents, as it would be out of the question for any member of such a young organization to enter into hostilities with any managers, white or colored, without defeat.50
Robert Motts kept the Pekin Theater in operation through the winter of 1909–10 by “running all vaudeville.”51 When Motts died in 1911, Sylvester Russell eulogized him as the “Greatest Napoleon of Theatricals.”52 Motts, his Pekin Theater, and the early achievements of its ill-fated Pekin Stock Company remain iconic in the literature of black theatrical history.53
Following the failure of the Chester Amusement Company, William Foster’s “Juli Jones” column lost its edge and soon disappeared from the Freeman.54 However, Foster remained a positive force on the Stroll. He continued to operate the Foster Music Company, and he put his interest in moving pictures to use in another pioneer race enterprise, the Foster Photo Play Company.55
Marion Brooks rose from the ashes of the Chester Amusement Company debacle and headed south. In the spring of 1910 he arrived at the Airdome Theater in Jacksonville, Florida: “Mr. Brooks came here direct from Chicago to take charge, and it is understood, aside from his connection as amusement director of the Air Dome, he will promote a booking exchange, booking acts from Chicago to Jacksonville and return.… The show offered this past week is said to be the most pleasing of any yet offered in this theater. Forty-five minutes of fun and music taken from J. Ed Green’s three-act musical comedy, ‘Two African Princes.’”56
J. Ed Green never recovered from his smashing defeat. Physically and emotionally exhausted, he was taken to Provident Hospital in a delirious condition and was not seen again on the State Street Stroll until February 7, 1910.57 Green appeared to be on the mend, and was said to be preparing for rest and recuperation in the countryside near Indianapolis, when he died suddenly on February 19, 1910.58 With his death, State Street lost a guiding light. It was roundly agreed that the failure of the Chester Amusement Company was the cause of Green’s undoing.59 It may not be going too far to declare him a martyr to the forlorn hope of self-directed black theatrical entertainment in Chicago.
Funeral services for Green were held in Chicago, and his body was then taken by train to New Albany, Indiana, where a service was conducted by Rev. C. E. Manuel of Second Baptist Church: “Before preaching the sermon Rev. Manuel told of his intimate acquaintance with Mr. Green; how, when he was a young man, he was so helpful to the church by giving musical entertainments, and how often the famous ‘Black Diamond’ quartet, of which Mr. Green was organizer had been heard in churches and among the best people all over the State.”60 Green’s widow Jeanette Murphy Green wrote the Freeman to publicly thank his many “staunch and inseparable friends” for their support.61
There was general agreement that J. Ed Green and Marion Brooks had attempted too much too quickly. By the end of 1910 it had become clear that black vaudeville in Chicago would remain under the domination of white capitalists. The following year an entertainment columnist in the black weekly Chicago Broad Ax was moved to warn: “Mr. Frank Q. Doyle will soon be booking all the Colored houses, and performers playing opposition houses had better stop and think it over.”62 Once issues of control and self-determination were laid to rest, the players’ remaining concerns could be expressed in two words: steady work.
In knocking the wind out of the sails of Chicago’s black theatrical fraternity, Frank Q. Doyle and his cronies may have unintentionally softened up State Street for the upcoming invasion of southern stage artists. Only a few years earlier, J. Ed Green had helped introduce northern production standards in the saloon-theaters and park pavilions of Memphis and Louisville. But, after Butler “String Beans” May descended on the State Street Stroll in May 1911, the tide shifted. String Beans was the first to bring the full force of southern vernacular entertainment to bear in northern vaudeville theaters, inaugurating Chicago’s enduring love affair with the blues.
