Theaters

Lawrence movie theaters were segregated during the first half of the twentieth century. Langston Hughes wrote in The Big Sea that he used the money he earned cleaning the lobby and spittoons at a hotel to go to the movies. The only theater open to African Americans at that time was the Bowersock Theatre, where blacks were only allowed to sit in certain areas. In Not Without Laughter, Sandy's Aunt Harriett tells of an embarrassing incident at a movie theater that could have happened in Lawrence.

" ...she had gone with her classmates, on tickets issued by the school, to see an educational film of the under-sea world at the Palace Theatre, on Main Street...each class had had seats allotted to them beforehand; so Harriett sat with her class and had begun to enjoy immensely the strange wonders of the ocean depths when an usher touched her on the shoulder.
  ‘The last three rows on the left are for colored,’ the girl in the uniform said.
  ‘I--But--But I'm with my class,’ Harriett stammered. ‘We're all supposed to sit here.’
  ‘I can't help it,’ insisted the usher, pointing towards the rear of the theatre, while her voice carried everywhere. ‘Them's the house rules. No argument now--you'll have to move.’"

There was a Palace Theatre in the 600 block of Massachusetts Street. In 1915, it was operated by an African American man, but Hughes does not mention that there was a black theater in Lawrence. By 1917 it was gone.