Erin Lamb
Special Projects Reporter

Courtesy University Archives University officials attend the ground breaking ceremony of Lisner Auditorium in 1940.

Washington, D.C., was a segregated city in 1946, the year GW opened Lisner Auditorium to commercial use. The Broadway-bound play ³Joan of Lorraine,² starring Ingrid Bergman, was to inaugurate the ³largest stage south of New York.² Lisner Auditorium had cost $1.25 million to build, was equipped with ³ultra-modern² lighting and sound equipment and could seat 1,550 people ­ but no black people.

The Board of Trustees, with the support of University President Cloyd Heck Marvin, kept a segregation policy in effect for all gatherings at Lisner Auditorium. Blacks were completely excluded from any events held at the facility. This policy was easy to keep in place during private University events because GW did not accept black students. Bergman, famous as much for her liberal views as for her acting career, immediately made the University¹s policy of segregation a public issue.

Leading up to opening night, Bergman made her distaste of GW¹s policy clear. She told the press, ³Washington was a bad town in which to open a play.² Bergman orchestrated and signed a petition sent to the Lisner Board of Directors by the cast and crew of ³Joan of Lorraine.² It stated, ³The following members of the cast of ŒJoan of Lorraine,¹ having learned that you intend to practice racial discrimination, wish to go on record as protesting what we regard as an undemocratic and un-American practice.² Bergman later said, ³I wouldn¹t have come here if I¹d known in time.² Letters poured into the University, many attacking Bergman as ³tactless and meddlesome² and showing support for the policy of segregation. Opening night was marred by pickets and protests.

GW suffered a further black eye when the American Veterans Committee published pamphlets claiming the University refused to allow the committee to buy out ³Joan of Lorraine² for a benefit performance simply because some of its members were black. The National Symphony Orchestra backed out of two engagements to be held at Lisner later that year.

The Board of Trustees decided in 1947 to admit blacks to performances held in Lisner Auditorium but refused to hold commercial performances that might draw a mixed audience. Lisner was only leased to private groups under the tacit agreement that the groups were already segregated.

The Board of Trustees tried to push the matter under the rug, but Lisner Auditorium¹s inauguration was a mere opening salvo in the campus battle against segregation. In the years to come, battles for desegregation pitted the administration against the students and threatened to tear the campus apart.