The Pachyderms’ Revenge

Edward H. Peeples

In many ways Richmond was a wonderful place for me to grow up. It had so many marvelous idiosyncratic
people, landmarks and occasions, memories of which I cherish today. Among the events which are especially
indelible are some which took place at the venerable and grand old city auditorium and theater which for most
of its existence was known as “The Mosque”. The Mosque was built in 1926 by the Shriners as their Acca
Temple Shrine and sold to the City of Richmond in 1940 when it became the city’s largest indoor entertainment
facility. It is easily recognized by its two towering minarets which can be seen rising high above the trees in
Monroe Park from almost any approach. In recent years its name was changed to the Landmark Theater after a
good number of Richmond Muslims complained that calling this building, used for secular purposes, a
“mosque” was a disrespectful misappropriation of the solemn and true name of their house of worship.

But since for most of my life, I knew it only as “the Mosque”, the habit is not easily broken. So I beg for
indulgence in my reference to it by its old name even if it is now in bad taste for I have never been able to get
very far away from the Mosque.

I attended events there as a young child, and as a teenager I went to dances in the ball room downstairs,
graduated from college there, and attended perhaps hundreds of events there as an adult and with my children.
I even produced two stage shows at the Mosque in 1983 in conjunction with “Good News!”, a celebration
drawing attention to the people and the activities in our community which held out hope for improving race and
other intergroup relations and which I had organized under the aegis of the Richmond City Commission on
Human Relations.

The list of illustrious performers and speakers which have appeared at the Mosque during my lifetime is long
and impressive. The stage has been the site of countless performances of music, dance, drama, comedy,
political speeches and rallies, civil rights gatherings, and even sporting events. The first time I saw the Harlem
Globetrotters, they were playing basketball against their perennial victims, the Washington Generals, on the
Mosque stage. They dazzled us each and every year with their hoop antics, entertaining us even as members of
their own race in the audience were roped off into a tiny segregated section high up in a corner of the second
balcony, a place which everyone knew as the worst seats in the house.

But of course, if an event was presumed by the authorities to be only of interest to blacks, then they could sit
anywhere in the auditorium they wished. Sometimes a few whites might even attend these predominately black
attractions and they usually had the freedom to choose their seats as well. So the cultural assumption was that
segregation was only necessary at white dominated events because in the hierarchy of the races, the presence
of whites in the audience at a black program was thought by whites to somehow bestow an “honor” on the
blacks there.

Few people of either race, if asked, would have admitted that they literally believed all of this malarkey, but
they were all nevertheless expected by law and custom to behave as if they did. But why would everyone, at
least on the surface, comply with such absurd restrictions? The main reason was that sufficient numbers of the
dogmatic zealots and the violent prone white supremacist minority were always present and looking over our
shoulders. And sometimes these were even “peace officers”.

Moreover, if an act of racial discrimination was ever thought by a white individual to involve a moral wrong,
the concern could always be easily dismissed by the belief that the much greater transgression would be to
choose to do something about it.

To those who struggled in the war against racial discrimination and segregation who attended events at the
Mosque in those days, there must have been one program which stood out as the most memorable thing to ever

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happen on that stage. That was on July 2, 1939 at the closing session of the 30th Annual National Conference of
the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Were I to have been the adult
then which I became by age 20, I would have been there for sure. But I was only four years old and knew
nothing yet of the world that lay ahead of me.

Had I been there, I would have seen Marian Anderson, the world renown contralto, and Eleanor Roosevelt, the
First Lady and social conscience of the nation at that time before an audience of 5,000 people. And had I not
been able to get inside the auditorium that day, I, as part of a massive overflow crowd, would still have heard
the proceedings on loudspeakers outside the Mosque on Laurel Street.

Mrs. Roosevelt was there to award Ms. Anderson the coveted NAACP’s annual Springarn Medal in
recognition of her vast accomplishments in music and the monumental example she had set for blacks
everywhere.

This honor was to cap a sequence of events earlier in the year beginning when the DAR, the Daughters of the
American Revolution, refused, because of the color of her skin, to allow Ms. Anderson to perform on Easter
Sunday at Constitution Hall in Washington, DC. Eleanor Roosevelt so detested the act that she resigned her
membership in the DAR and had the concert moved to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial before an admiring
racially integrated crowd of more than 70,000.

Ms. Anderson, who as an artist for most of her career was publically apolitical. In 1951 she came back to
Richmond to perform at the Mosque, agreeing in effect to the traditional segregation of her audience where
whites were provided with the favored seats. But this time, Dr. J. M. Tinsley, President of the Virginia state
NAACP, lead a black boycott of the concert because of the uncompromising segregation policy of the Mosque
management, although this time they had promised that the “best seats” were to be open to black patrons.
However, under this unusual plan, the overall segregated arrangement would still prevail. Dr. Tinsley’s
campaign proved successful. Blacks didn’t show and the “best seats” were conspicuously vacant while whites
filled the remainder of the auditorium. This scene must have dislodged the indifference in Marian Anderson.
For following this appearance, her last in Richmond, her future performance contracts always stipulated that
racially segregated seating would not be tolerated.

But as I look back on all the times I personally attended events at the Mosque, I am persuaded that no act left
more to be remembered than the elephants in the Barnum and Bailey Circus which appeared on that stage in the
1940s. I can still see the spectacle - a immense train of prodigious pachyderms marching out from stage right
in front of some 5,000 delighted children and their parents. And then at the very moment the ringmaster began
to announce their first stunt, all the elephants, like a squadron of World War II bombers - in perfect unison -
began to unload a succession of massive vegetative blockbusters. Plop, splat, plop, splat - one colossal dung
bomb after another hit the stage floor.

Luckily, there was a quick-stepping little man with a large coal shovel who upon this cue raced out right
behind the elephants, scooping up a load in a swift single sweep with his shovel, and without pausing or
missing a step, hastily disappeared behind the curtain on the left. As the elephants continued to empty their
bomb bays, he would race back on stage from the right, scoop up another load, and then once again scurry out
of sight -- a chore which at first was reassuring to the audience. However, it soon became obvious that these
very large animals were big eaters and gave no sign of slowing their bombardment of the Mosque stage.

Apprehension began to build, as it was becoming increasingly clear to everyone - the little man with the big
shovel was quickly losing ground. It was now beginning to occur to many in the audience that the accumulation
of dung may begin to make its way across the stage, into the orchestra pit, and from there spread across the

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auditorium like so much odoriferous lava. At this point, the audience was beginning to panic and coming from
out of the rear of the hall a shrill young voice bellowed, "Head for the hills, the shovel's broken!" With that,
pandemonium struck and thousands scrambled over each other in their flight to the exits and out onto Laurel
Street.

Perhaps I exaggerate a wee bit about the egression scene, but I am confident that there were other children
there who would today testify to the frightening state of bedlam which I so vividly remember that day.
Needless to add, future performances of the circus came to be held at Parker Field, the baseball park.

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