Black History Month 2011: Museum Exhibit Chronicles Apollo Theater's Influential History
To view our videos, you need to
enable JavaScript. Learn how.
install Adobe Flash 9 or above. Install now.
Then come back here and refresh the page.
NY1's salute to Black History Month turns its focus to a traveling exhibition on Harlem's Apollo Theater and its influence on American entertainment, that was organized by the National Museum of African American History and Culture and has come home to New York City. NY1's Rebecca Spitz filed the following report. There are treasures on display at the Museum of the City of New York on the Upper East Side. Behind glass is history that reminds visitors how Harlem's famed Apollo theater helped shape American entertainment.
"There was no other place like it in America," said Museum of the City of New York President Susan Henshaw Jones. "It was the place, in fact, where the crossover took place, where African-American artists no longer appealed only to an African-American audience, but to a much, much broader audience"
The Apollo did not start out that way. It was originally a burlesque house and transformed over the years. It was in fact owned and managed by a white family until the mid-1970s.
"It's one of those anchor institutions that over decades has really helped define culture, helped provide a venue and a platform for creativity and really been in both symbol and substance a place where the hopes and dreams of the members of the community and entertainers can come to life," said Kinshasha Holman Conwill of the Smithsonian Institution.
It was an anchor for performance even as life itself was in transition.
"You did have white performers in blackface, but you also had black performers in blackface," said Conwill. "Because while black face was at one level stereotypical, not so great, in another way it became a mask, not unlike masks worn by artists over the centuries."
Celebrated worldwide, it did not take long for the Apollo to become part of the fabric of the Harlem and a mandatory stop for african american performers.
"You had the Duke Ellingtons, Count Basies, the Billie Holidays, the Sarah Vaughns, the Dinah Washingtons, all of them at some point in time had an appearance on the Apollo stage and pretty much either launched their career or propelled it right along," said author-activist Herb Boyd.
Long before "American Idol," the Apollo had its own "Amateur Night." It was a springboard for future superstars, not unlike the Jackson Five, who won in 1967, with a nine-year-old front man, future pop icon Michael Jackson.
"God bless all the big new stores and the shiny new things, but what is real, what is authentic, what comes out of creativity that cannot be boxed or bottled, that lasts for generations and generations. And that's what the Apollo has," said Conwill.