The Madame Walker Theatre Center, housed in the historic Madame C.J. Walker Building, has long symbolized the spirit of creativity and community pride in the city of Indianapolis. Named after America’s first “self-made” female millionaire—Madam C.J. Walker—the site represents the achievements, art forms, culture and history of African-American people.

Madam Walker began the development of the Walker Building and Theatre prior to her death in 1919. The project was subsequently completed by her daughter, A’Lelia Walker, and opened to the public December 26, 1927.

The Walker Building, located in the Indiana Avenue corridor, was the center of entertainment, business and pride for the city’s African-American community from the 1920s to the 1950s. During the mid-50s, the building and its surrounding neighborhood began a gradual decline.

By the late 1970s, the Walker Building stood nearly abandoned (Walker Manufacturing Company remained housed in the building) and faced certain demolition. However, a group of committed African-American citizens recognized the structure’s rich history and dedicated themselves to preserving the building. After becoming incorporated as the Madame Walker Building Urban Life Center in 1979, the group purchased the ailing building from the Walker Manufacturing Company and began planning for its restoration.

In 1982 the organization’s articles of incorporation were amended to reflect the nonprofit’s new legal name Madame Walker Urban Life Center. The organization was committed to reestablishing the facility as a steward for cultural expression and economic enterprise. Because the site was seen as the heart of a downtown neighborhood that had to be revitalized, the community worked hard to make that dream a reality.

In 1983 the first phase of the restoration, which housed offices and the Grand Casino Ballroom, was completed. A $2.5 million capital campaign raised funds to restore the famous 944-seat (now 935) Walker Theatre. The influence of African art forms in the vision of Madam Walker and her daughter for the design concept is apparent throughout the theatre.

In 1988 the city of Indianapolis celebrated the gala opening of the fully restored Madame C.J. Walker Building. The site is now a national historic landmark and is registered on both the state and national registers of historic places.

In 1996 the Madame Walker Urban Life Center began doing business as (d.b.a.) the Madame Walker Theatre Center to more fully reflect the organization’s vision and mission. Two office structures along Indiana Avenue—Walker Plaza, built in 1989 and 500 place, completed in 1992—as two partners essential to the continued growth of the Madame Walker Theatre Center. As a result of these two ventures, the historic Walker Building once again stands as an economic anchor for the historic Indiana Avenue Cultural District.

Through the vibrancy of dramatic dance, the smooth, cool sounds of jazz and the evocative spirit of the theatre; the Walker Building builds bridges between artists and patrons.

“To All Races, This Place Is Dedicated”—A History of the Madam Walker Theatre Center

by A’Lelia Bundles

Reprinted from Who’s Who in Black Indianapolis (2007 edition)

Step inside the historic Madam Walker Theatre and savor the vibe: eight decades of African American entertainers singing, acting and hoofing their way across the stage. Gaze upon the African facial features of the comedy-tragedy masks that accent the walls and sense the souls of black folk who have entered before you.

First-time visitors say they are awed by the notion that Madam C. J. Walker—a black woman born four years after the Emancipation Proclamation—could have envisioned such an elegant venue. Actor Obba Babatundé told Madam Walker Theatre Center president Cynthia Bates that he felt “a cosmic vapor” descend upon him as he walked down the theater aisle. Actress and author Victoria Rowell was so moved that she said a prayer and knelt to touch the stage. “As we celebrate our 80th anniversary, we have confidence that the Walker Center adds tremendous value to the cultural landscape of Indianapolis,” says Bates. “By featuring the highest quality African American culture and entertainment, we help make Indianapolis a more attractive destination for tourists and residents.”

From tap dancer Savion Glover and jazz pianist Ramsey Lewis to lyric-spinto soprano Paula Dione Ingram and the Indianapolis Children’s Choir, the MWTC is the city’s premier venue for African American performance arts. As the anchor for the Indiana Avenue Cultural District—one of six neighborhoods designated as the city’s cultural hot spots—the MWTC is among the stakeholder organizations engaged in plans to revitalize Indiana Avenue. The hub of a vibrant black entertainment and commercial district from 1910 through the 1950s, the area is ripe for the kind of redevelopment that will celebrate the city’s rich black history.

Madam Walker’s Legacy

The only early 20th century edifice that remains in the 600 block of Indiana Avenue, the Walker Building stands as a testament to Madam Walker’s pioneering efforts as an entrepreneur. Born Sarah Breedlove in Delta, Louisiana in 1867, Walker had become the first self-made American woman millionaire through hair care products sales and real estate investments by the time of her death in 1919. One of only fifteen women inducted into the National Business Hall of Fame at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry, Walker recently was listed among Business Week’s top thirty American entrepreneurs of all time.

Drawn by Indianapolis’s thriving black business community and its well-connected transportation network, Madam Walker moved her company headquarters to the city in 1910. Quickly involving herself in the local civic, business and religious life, she joined Bethel AME Church, donated $1,000 to the new Senate Avenue YMCA and became a member of the local National Negro Business League chapter.

In 1914, Walker—who enjoyed music and movies in her leisure time—visited the Isis Theatre in downtown Indianapolis. To her surprise, the young white ticket booth operator informed her that admission for “colored people” had increased to 25 cents, though it remained 15 cents for white customers. Refusing to pay the escalated price, Walker returned to her office and instructed her attorney to sue the theater. Legend has it that, on that day, she also vowed to build her own movie house.

Although the Walker Building was completed eight years after her death, Walker had purchased the triangular-shaped lot not long after the Isis Theatre incident. The four-story, block-long flatiron building, located at 617 Indiana Avenue, originally was planned to house the corporate offices and factory of the Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company. But by the time the doors opened in December 1927, it had become much more: a forerunner of today’s shopping malls with a drugstore, a beauty salon, a beauty school, a restaurant, professional offices, a ballroom and a 1500 seat theater.

The 1927 Walker Theatre Grand Opening

Designated a National Historic Landmark in 1991, the MWTC makes Indianapolis one of the few American cities able to claim such grand evidence of its African American cultural history. Chicago’s original Regal Theatre, built in 1928, was razed in 1973. Like the Walker, Washington, D.C.’s Lincoln Theatre, which opened in 1922, has been restored. Harlem’s Apollo, which maintained a whites only policy until 1934, has been a storied venue for black artists for more than seven decades. But the Walker stands alone among those renowned theaters because it was black-owned from the start.

“In the hearts of every colored citizen of Indianapolis, there should begin to stir a great and increasing sense of pride in this magnificent structure going up in our midst,” the Indianapolis Recorder reported in October 1927.

Responding to rumors that whites owned the property, Walker Company attorney and general manager, Freeman B. Ransom, told a reporter, “We own every foot of land, every brick in the building and from the seats in the theatre to the last bit of drapery. And when our critics are dead, we will still own it.”

For the grand opening on December 26, 1927, blue and gold-uniformed Walker Theatre ushers escorted guests to their seats for the 2 p.m. matinee. After a screening of “The Magic Flame”—an Oscar-nominated movie featuring silent film stars Ronald Colman and Vilma Bánky—vaudeville dance team, Lovey and Shorty, thrilled theater-goers with their high-energy, fast-stepping performance.

As the lights came up, the audience was entranced by what it saw: elaborate, terra cotta sculptures of Egyptian sphinxes, brightly painted friezes, decorative 20-foot bamboo spears and life-sized chimpanzee statues posted as sentinels above the stage. No dance hall, no movie theater, no meeting place for African Americans in the city could even come close. Designed by Rubush and Hunter, the local architectural firm that had created some of the city’s most distinctive downtown buildings—including the Circle Theatre, the Columbia Club, the Murat Temple, the Indiana Theatre and the Indiana Roof Ballroom—the Walker Building today remains one of the most notable surviving examples of African-inspired Art Deco.

Ironically, the late 1920s construction boom that added Crispus Attucks High School, the Phyllis Wheatley YWCA and the Walker Building to the cluster of black community buildings like the Senate Avenue YMCA and the Knights of Pythias Hall, was in part a by-product of racist policies that intensified from 1921 to 1928 when the Ku Klux Klan controlled Indianapolis city politics. The black community—hovering at ten per cent of the population and out-maneuvered by an at-large system for selecting political representatives—could not counter the powers that pushed to segregate public facilities. But at least there was some consolation in having the Walker, a place where they could see first-run Hollywood movies without the insult of rear entrances and dirty balconies; where they could enjoy Sunday dinner in the Coffee Pot restaurant; and where they could shop at the Walker Drug Store with its promise that “positively no stale seconds, inferior or refuse merchandise will be used, stocked or sold.”

During that first year, the Walker Theatre featured an array of black entertainers from blues queen Mamie Smith and her Original Jazz Hounds to the famed Whitman Sisters. The Blackbirds, an orchestra led by Reginald DuValle—the local pianist who had taught composer Hoagy Carmichael to play ragtime and jazz—remained a perennial favorite. On Labor Day 1928, an S.R.O. crowd eager to see husband and wife vaudeville team, Butterbeans and Susie, spilled onto Indiana Avenue. “Early before the doors opened, street car after street car unloaded hundreds of patrons at the intersection of the Avenue and North Street,” reported the Indianapolis Recorder.

Today’s Walker Theatre

Today the Madam Walker Theatre Center is alive with the same kind of anticipation and activity. This November, Savion Glover, who kicked off the 80th anniversary celebration last fall with “Classical Savion”—an electrifying tap performance accompanied by a classical music orchestra—returns for a repeat performance. Recent jazz concerts by saxophonist Kirk Whalum and bassist Wayman Tisdale kindle memories of the days when Dinah Washington, Blanche Calloway and Louis Armstrong took the stage at the Walker and when Indiana Avenue clubs like the Sunset Terrace and Trianon Ballroom helped launch the careers of Indianapolis natives Wes Montgomery, Freddie Hubbard and J. J. Johnson.

Jazz remains a centerpiece of the MWTC’s heritage, but the Walker enthusiastically embraces the full spectrum of African American performance arts from classical, gospel and opera to blues, Broadway and comedy. More than 2,000 Bobby Blue Bland fans brought lawn chairs and blankets to the first annual “Blues and Bar-B-Q Family Festival and Reunion” last July. Headliners for “Praise in the Parking Lot”—an annual sunrise gospel fest co-sponsored with Radio One and Eastern Star Church—have included Grammy Award winners Ann Nesby and Yolanda Adams. With a special mission to nurture young talent, the MWTC recently initiated its first Savion Glover Tap Dance Camp a few weeks after hosting the annual Youth-in-Arts Camp, a program that has provided performing arts training for hundreds of inner-city youth during the last decade.

The Grand Casino Ballroom—the site of hundreds of fraternity dances, sorority galas, debutante balls, Walker Beauty School graduations, wedding receptions and fashion shows through the years—now also hosts monthly signature events, including Jazz on the Avenue, Thank God It’s Friday gospel concerts and the raucous Laughin’ on the Avenue. In keeping with Madam Walker’s interest in entrepreneurship and community service, a three-room conference center designed for business meetings, now occupies the space where Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company employees hand-mixed Glossine and Temple Salve for daily shipments to customers throughout the United States, Africa, Central America and the Caribbean. Today, several non-profit organizations—including MEDIC, Freetown Village and the Indianapolis chapters of the National Coalition of 100 Black Women and the National Bar Association—make their headquarters in offices where black physicians, dentists and attorneys once practiced.

Indiana Avenue Re-born

By 1950, Indiana Avenue—like the main drags of inner city black communities across the nation—had begun a gradual decline. As integration opened previously off-limits housing and schools to African Americans, long time residents and businesses migrated to other parts of town. As the city of Indianapolis targeted the district for interstate construction and rezoned the neighborhood for commercial enterprises and IUPUI’s expansion, others were pushed out.

By the late 1970s, the Walker Building had lost most of its tenants and seemed destined for demolition. But several committed African-Americans, who recognized the structure’s history, dedicated themselves to preserving the building. After becoming incorporated as the Madam Walker Building Urban Life Center in 1979, they arranged for the purchase from the Walker Manufacturing Company.

After extensive restoration and renovation—supported by the Lilly Endowment, U. S. Commerce Department funding and other generous donations—the Walker Theatre reopened in October 1988 with a gala featuring the Jimmy Coe Orchestra, actors Roscoe Lee Brown and Rosalind Cash, entertainers Isaac Hayes and Gregory Hines, and Roots author Alex Haley. In 1996 the name was changed to the Madam Walker Theatre Center to highlight the pivotal role of the theater in African American performing arts history.

Today, as the Madam Walker Theatre Center enters its ninth decade, the staff and board members are moving forward with plans to establish a permanent endowment for the maintenance and preservation of this cherished landmark and to fund a capital campaign designed to facilitate the transformation of the theater from its original vaudeville/movie house configuration into a state-of-the art, 21st century performance venue.

Across the Avenue from IUPUI and its 30,000 students, located near burgeoning medical and life science centers, and less than a mile from the Indiana State Capitol and the city’s convention center and RCA Dome, the Madam Walker Theatre Center is dedicated to presenting the best in African American culture and to sharing those gifts with a multi-cultural audience of nearby residents and visiting tourists.

The words that Walker Company general manager, F. B. Ransom, shared with the audience at the 1927 grand opening still apply: “To those who toil, to those who think . . . to those who love good music, good pictures, high class entertainment amidst magnificent surroundings; to those who believe that our boys and girls are entitled to the best there is. . .to all classes; to all races, this house is dedicated.”

For more information about Madam Walker, visit www.madamcjwalker.com.