Overtown Lyric Theater

Built in 1913 by Georgia businessman Geder Walker, who owned and operated it, the Lyric Theater became the center of Overtown’s thriving entertainment district, known as “Little Broadway” and the “Harlem of the South.” The Georgian-style building featured classical detailing, a decorative parapet, and Corinthian columns, and by 1915 its 400-seat interior was praised as an exceptionally beautiful and costly playhouse owned by Black people in the South. For almost 50 years, it served as a movie and vaudeville theater and hosted musicals, concerts, dances, films, political rallies, boxing, cantatas, beauty pageants, school plays, and commencements, while welcoming performers and visitors such as the Fisk Jubilee Singers, Mary McLeod Bethune, Ethel Waters, and Marian Anderson. The theater and the nightlife around it came to symbolize the prosperous early 20th-century history of Overtown, one of Miami’s oldest Black neighborhoods, originally called Colored Town. After Walker’s death in 1919, his wife, Henrietta, continued operating the theater until she sold it in 1959 to The United House of Prayer for All People for use as a church. As Overtown’s population reached its height in the late 1950s, the later expansion of Interstates I-95 and I-395 through the neighborhood demolished hundreds of homes and businesses and displaced thousands of residents. The theater then deteriorated until the Black Archives History and Research Foundation of South Florida, Inc., acquired it in 1989 and led its listing on the National Register of Historic Places. Renovated, it reopened in 2000 as the Black Archives Historic Lyric Theater. Founded in 1977 by Dr. Dorothy Jenkins Fields, the Black Archives preserves and reflects on the African American experience in Miami-Dade County, and the site, part of the Overtown Folk Life Village, symbolizes Black economic influence, pride, culture, and a social gathering place for the community.

Miami, Florida · United States