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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 October 2015
On September 21, 1915, shortly before 10 p.m., a brick crashed through the glass window above the entrance of Philadelphia's Forrest Theatre. Instantly, the streets erupted into a “bloody scene” of the “wildest disorder.” Police charged with batons and revolvers. The crowd, which consisted mostly of black demonstrators, scattered. A few dashed for the building's main entrance. Hundreds more fled up Broad and Walnut Streets, the police at their heels. “Those who could not run fast enough to dodge clubs received them upon their heads.” Two protesters threw milk bottles at the patrolmen pursing them. At the corner of Walnut and Broad, someone hurled a brick at Officer Wallace Striker. On Juniper Street, either a rioter or a police officer fired shots into the air. By night's end, more than a score were injured, several arrested, and the theater defaced. Nineteen-year old Arthur Lunn, a farmer from Worcester County, Maryland, was charged with inciting the riot. Dr. Wesley F. Graham, pastor of Trinity Baptist, sustained “severe injuries.” Lillian Howard, a caterer; William A. Sinclair, the financial secretary of Douglass Hospital; and a thirty-three-year-old laborer named Lee Banks received severe lacerations.
1 New York Age (NYA), Sept. 23, 1915, p. 1.
2 NYA, Sept 23, 1915, p. 1; CD, Sept. 25, 1915, p. 1; Harrisburg Telegraph, Sept. 21, 1915, p. 3; Trenton Evening Times, Sept. 21, 1915, p. 7. Cara Caddoo, Envisioning Freedom: Cinema and the building of Modern Black Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).
3 NYA, Sept 23, 1915, p. 1
4 Ideas throughout this article are drawn from Envisioning Freedom (especially Chapter 6).
5 Thomas Cripps, Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900–1942 (New York, 1993), 41–69; Janet Staiger, Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema (Princeton: Princeton University Press, NJ, 1992), 139–53; Jane Gaines, Fire and Desire: Mixed-Race Movies in the Silent Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 219–57; Melvyn Stokes, D. W. Griffith's “The Birth of a Nation” (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 129–70.
6 Boston Journal, May 4, 1915, p. 4.
7 Boston Sunday Post, April 18, 1915, p. 2; Savannah Tribune, April 24, 1915, p. 1.
8 “There was no drawing of club, but the toes or the heels of persistent loiterers were likely to be stepped on” the Boston Globe reported of the police. Boston Globe, April 18, 1915, p. 1.
9 Chicago Defender (CD), Sept. 25, 1915, p. 1.
10 Philip C. DiMare, Movies in American History: An Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara, CA, 2011), 873; Ellis Paxson Oberholtzer, The Morals of the Movie (Philadelphia: Penn Publishing Company, 1922), 13.
11 CD, Sept. 25, 1915, p. 1.
12 CD, Feb. 12, 1916, p. 1.
13 Caddoo, 160; MPW, April 28, 1917, p. 658; GC, April 14, 1917, p. 1; CG, Jan. 9, 1915, p. 3; CG, Aug 17, 1918, p. 3.
14 Moving Picture World (MPW), Dec. 25, 1915, p. 2408; CD, Dec. 18, 1915, p. 7.
15 Washington Bee (WB), May 8, 1915, p. 6
16 Ibid.
17 Caddoo, 159. Later, middle-class religious leaders such as Wesley F. Graham, who was beaten by police outside the Forrest Theatre, would continue to criticize police violence. In 1918, after police response to anti-black riots in Philadelphia once again brought these issues to a head, he and other ministers formed the Colored Protective Association. Robert Gregg, Sparks from the Anvil of Oppression: Philadelphia's African Methodists and Southern Migrants, 1890–1940 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 63.