The Roxy Theatre opened its doors sometime in the early 1950s and played host to movies and shows for nearly a decade. At that time, the theater was just one of many thriving businesses in the part of town known as the Tybee community. Students in the Fall 2015 Civic & Community class were able to track down some former Roxy patrons about what it was like to see a show there. These stories were originally published here.
Alice Bailey, who went on to be involved in the Macon music scene as a DJ, was a young teen when the Roxy was in its heyday. She didn’t live in the Tybee community where the Roxy operated but knows a lot of the area’s history.
“Every kind of business you needed was in Tybee, run by black people. There were dance halls, grocery stores, shoe shops, (a) pressing club,” she said.
Bailey explained that the Roxy was built to provide entertainment to those people living in the Tybee community.
“So I can tell you that it was a very fascinating experience to be in there, because it was built like … a big tube, or like a bullet. It always came to me that way, in my mind, a bullet or this big tube — — and I didn’t like the acoustics in it,” she recalled. “I remember thinking that something was happening with the sound that wasn’t like the Douglass. And it certainly wasn’t like the movies I went to in Philadelphia every summer, when we would go there for to visit my mother’s family … I was looking for plush. It wasn’t that. But then, at that age, plush is different for everybody.”
She recalls her first and only experience with the Roxy Theatre as a teenager, on a first date.
“So, when this young man asked me to go to the movie, my mother identified going to the Roxy,” she recalled. “He wasn’t going to be able to take me all the way downtown. That was a long way, then. She had to take me to the movies, we had to meet him there, and then he could drive me home. She figured I’d be safe, 12–13 blocks in his car. And it was arranged through my father and his grandmother that he would take me to the movies and he’d bring me right back home — directly home. And everybody knew [movie] times then, you know. Movie was over at 7:26? By quarter of 8, you should be on the porch! You know? And that was my only experience with the Roxy. That little date.”
