A landmark of African American popular culture, the Attucks Theatre is one of the country’s few remaining theaters to have been financed, designed, and built exclusively by Blacks. Located in Huntersville, Norfolk’s historic, though largely rebuilt, Black neighborhood, the theater was erected in 1919 after the designs of Harvey N. Johnson, one of the state’s few African American architects practicing at the time. The theater is named for Crispus Attucks, a Black man killed in the Boston Massacre of 1770, who thereby becoming one of the first casualties of the American Revolution. The theater retains its original fire curtain, painted with a scene of Attucks’s death by Lee Lash Studios of New York. During its heyday, many of New York’s leading Black roadshows played here. The Attucks Theatre was purchased for preservation by the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority and in the mid-1990s restored for use as a performing arts theater.
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Abbreviations:
VLR: Virginia Landmarks Register
NPS: National Park Service
NRHP: National Register of Historic Places
NHL: National Historic Landmark
Programs
DHR has secured permanent legal protection for over 700 historic places - including 15,000 acres of battlefield lands
DHR has erected 2,532 highway markers in every county and city across Virginia
DHR has registered more than 3,317 individual resources and 613 historic districts
DHR has engaged over 450 students in 3 highway marker contests
DHR has stimulated more than $4.2 billion dollars in private investments related to historic tax credit incentives, revitalizing communities of all sizes throughout Virginia