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2025 marks 100-year anniversary of discrimination lawsuit leading to Michigan Supreme Court landmark decision

Keith's Theatre
Grand Rapids Public Museum
/
Grand Rapids Public Museum
B.F. Keith's Theatre

Three decades before Rosa Parks refused to sit in the "colored" section of a Montgomery, Alabama bus, a Black Grand Rapids dentist refused to sit in the balcony of the Keith's Theatre.

“The Keith’s Theatre was a major chain throughout the United States.”

In Grand Rapids, the 1,900-seat performance hall was located on Lyon St. NW near Division Avenue.

Randal Maurice Jelks is author of African Americans in the Furniture City: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Grand Rapids.

“Emmett Bolden was an athlete. Went to South High School, same high school that former President Gerald Ford attended, though Bolden was older.”

He graduated from Howard University’s dental school and returned to practice in his hometown. In 1925, Bolden and a Black physician, Eugene Alston, headed to the Keith’s Theatre.

“They bought first-class seats, but they were required to sit in the balcony, and they refused…the Keith’s Theatre was putting them in the balcony simply because they were considered colored, or negro or black.”

“They file suit saying that the Keith’s Theatre violated Michigan’s requirement that you cannot segregate people as in the Jim Crow South.”

“The story wasn’t told in Grand Rapids because the paper willfully decided not to write about the court case because the Keith’s Theatre was one of its larger advertisers.”

“That case, in local court, was won by the Keith’s Theatre. But it was appealed, and appealed and appealed again, all the way to the Michigan Supreme Court where the case was won in 1927.”

Dr. Jelks says that then, and now, Emmet Bolden is a hero for securing Civil Rights protecting people from arbitrary discrimination.

Patrick joined WGVU Public Media in December, 2008 after eight years of investigative reporting at Grand Rapids' WOOD-TV8 and three years at WYTV News Channel 33 in Youngstown, Ohio. As News and Public Affairs Director, Patrick manages our daily radio news operation and public interest television programming. An award-winning reporter, Patrick has won multiple Michigan Associated Press Best Reporter/Anchor awards and is a three-time Academy of Television Arts & Sciences EMMY Award winner with 14 nominations.