On December 8, 1929, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People sponsored a concert at the Forrest Theatre on Broadway to benefit its work. Twenty-seven acts were listed in the program: about half of the performers were black, the other half were white. Like the performers, the audience was interracial. At a time when African Americans were relegated to the upper balcony in Broadway theatres, this NAACP event seated blacks and whites side by side. Both on the stage and in the audience, the concert represented a quite radical break with the conventions of the contemporary musical stage.
Coverage of the concert in contemporary media was extremely minimal and the few references to the event in the secondary literature are inaccurate. This paper is based on original research, drawing on over 400 pages of documents relating to the planning of the benefit located in the Papers of the NAACP, a major collection housed at the Library of Congress. The file includes, among other items, the correspondence of NAACP Secretary Walter White with benefit participants George Gershwin, Duke Ellington, Carl Van Vechten and Bill Robinson. The event offers a surprising group portrait of 1920s musical and theatrical culture, a well-documented night when performers and styles normally separated from each other literally shared the same stage. The added dimension of social activism inherent in the integrated audience makes the event a site where questions of musical style, race relations, and cultural and social history intersect in provocative ways.