Josephine Stiles and Her House of Feature Films: Innovations of a Black Theater Proprietor

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This essay explores the contributions of Josephine Stiles, a Black entrepre neur from Savannah, Georgia, to the history of film exhibition. She owned and operated the Pekin Theatre (1909–29), and I examine how Stiles responded to Jim Crow challenges and the movies' growing popularity by converting her theater into a palace at the same time as the moguls commonly associated with this phenomenon. The story of Stiles and the Pekin not only makes race central to the narrative of the movie palace's origins, but her accomplishments also highlight Black achievement as meaningful, not marginal, to that history.