Samuel H. Stiefel (1897 – 1958) was described in the “Milestones” section of the December 1, 1958 edition of Time Magazine as “[t]he Father of Negro Show Business . . . a bigtime theater operator [who] gave early breaks to such stars as Pearl Bailey, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Cab Calloway” (80).  His story, along with that of Shep Allen, an African American man who worked closely with him, are stories worth telling, as the following brief synopsis indicates.

Sam was an unlikely candidate for the above appellation; he was born to immigrant parents in a 645-acre Norma, New Jersey farming commune founded by forty-three Russian Jewish families that fled the pogroms there following the 1881 assassination of Tsar Alexander II.  His parents arrived in Norma in 1888, after the first wave of settlement, and set about the commune’s business of truck farming, raising fruits and vegetables for the nearby metropolises of New York and Philadelphia.

Eventually, the pull of one of these urban meccas became overpowering; in 1907—when Sam was ten—the Stiefel family moved to the City of Brotherly Love, where his father opened a nickelodeon in a rented horse stable.  By 1913, this fledgling film entrepreneur was able to build one of the first full-sized movie houses in the city, the Popular Theater in then-predominately-Jewish North Philadelphia.  The chain grew expedientially; in 1920, when twenty-three-year-old Sam sold its thirteen theaters to Warner Brothers, it was a shot heard round—if not the world—at least the entertainment industry.  He was on his way.

But not immediately.  Forced to sign a non-compete clause by the movie giant, Sam built instead a for-stage-shows-only venue that became the Pearl Theater on Ridge Avenue in the Strawberry Mansion section of Philadelphia; it opened in 1923 in a community that was a racial melting pot with an increasingly large African American population.  Programming needed to be adjusted accordingly to serve this market.

Page 1 of 3