In 1984, Brooklyn civil court judge John Phillips bought and renamed the Regent Theater. He had produced an interracial romance filmHands Across Two Continents and couldn't convince theaters to screen it, so he bought two theaters in Brooklyn to have the movie played. He renamed the Regent Theater the Slave Theater because, according to the website Brownstoner, he wanted to "remind everyone in the community, including himself, where they came from. He didn’t particularly care that many in that community were offended by the name, either". In response to a series of violent hate crimes in Queens later in the 1980s, Judge Phillips opened the theater as a space for the localBlack community and civil rights work; Al Sharpton started holding weekly rallies at the theater, which he cites as a reason for increased civil rights organizing in Brooklyn at the time. For example, the Slave Theater was a gathering point for marches following the acquittal of John Vento and Keith Mondello for the murder of Yusef Hawkins in August of 1989. Judge Phillips was declared mentally unfit due to dementia in 2001 and died in 2008 due to neglect in a Brooklyn nursing home. For years, a series of guardians and estate lawyers had stolen most of Phillips's investments. Because he died without a will, the Slave Theater was left without funds to support itself and in unclear legal status. In the confusion, the theater fell into disrepair and was ordered vacated by the city of New York in 2012 after its patio collapsed during a party, injuring four people. A local group, the New Brooklyn Theatre began a Kickstarter fundraising campaign to try and buy the theater when it was put up for auction in 2012. The Slave Theater's manager and friend of Judge Phillips, Clarence Hardy, and his son Omar also claimed ownership of the property at the time. Clarence had been living in the building for years, at the behest of Judge Phillips. The Hardy family claimed that Judge Phillips had granted them ownership of the theater in 1999. A New York Surrogate's Court judge ruled that Judge Phillips had transferred the property to the Hardys when he was of unsound mind, and therefore granted ownership of 1215 Fulton Street to Phillips's nephew and executor Rev. Samuel L. Boykin of Akron, Ohio. Boykin characterized the Hardys, and a church that had been renting the upper floors of the theater, as squatters and planned to have them evicted from the site in 2012. Then, Boykin sold the theater to the Fulton Halsey Development Group in August 2013 for $2.1 million, before an appeal by the Hardys was completed. In his continued attempts to save the theater, Clarence Hardy protested the proposed demolition of the theater by standing on top of its roof and threatening to jump unless the theater was saved. Other anti-gentrification activists also opposed the theater's destruction by organizing community protests. Nonetheless, in December of 2016, the lot's new owner Industrie Capital Partners demolished Slave Theater with plans to create a mixed-use development. In 2019, a London firm called The Collective bought 1215 Fulton Street and several surrounding lots for $32.5 million dollars. The Collective stated that they are developing a plan for memorializing the history of the Slave Theater in the resulting mixed-use development.
Architecture
Exterior
The main exterior alteration made by Judge Phillips was the installation of the Slave Theater's iconic black-and-white marquee.
Interior
Judge Phillips had community artists paint murals all over the interior walls of the theater of heroes from Black history, like Toussaint Louverture, Marcus Garvey, and Malcolm X, as well as one of Bruce Lee.
