Years before storied careers on Broadway and in Hollywood, before the accolades and awards, LaTanya Richardson Jackson and Samuel L. Jackson were young Spelman and Morehouse College students getting their footing in the industry and in the world.
On Thursday evening, they were back in the building where their love for acting and each other began for the unveiling of the LaTanya Richardson Jackson and Samuel L. Jackson Performing Arts Center in the John D. Rockefeller Fine Arts Building.
“It’s the place where, well, I started,” Jackson told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The center was named in their honor after they donated $5 million in 2021, which helped spearhead the building’s long-needed renovation. The two helped bring in another $12.3 million from friends like “Star Wars” creator George Lucas and his wife, prominent investor Mellody Hobson, to fund the repairs. Spelman contributed an additional $3 million, according to the college’s facilities director Art Frazier.
Jackson said it was meaningful to be able “to impact a place the way it impacted me. To help other young people come in there and learn the fundamentals of theater, the mechanics ... to interpret a story, to inhabit a character, to find a way to do it, and to have people that instruct you and give you the tools that allow you to go out into the world and be the best that you can be.”
The Rockefeller Fine Arts Building opened in 1964 and was Spelman’s first dedicated space for the arts, according to Frazier. Spelman had plans to renovate it going back as early as 1984 but had never been able to do so, he said.
It hurt Richardson Jackson to see it fall more and more into disrepair.
“That building is so much a part of me,” she told the AJC.
It had asbestos, a “hodgepodge” of air conditioning systems, a lack of handicap accessibility as well as an outdated theater, dressing rooms and bathrooms, according to Frazier. It also housed studio arts as well as performing arts, leading to storage constraints.
A few years ago, then-Spelman President Mary Schmidt Campbell approached Richardson Jackson with a plan to renovate the building and the funding the school would need to make it happen. Richardson Jackson took that plan to Jackson, and they made the seed donation that would underpin the renovation.
Now, Frazier said the building has no asbestos, new plumbing, completely redone bathrooms, dressing rooms, air conditioning, expanded storage and a renovated proscenium theater with handicap accessible seating, upgraded acoustics and lighting. The center’s black box theater was also renovated.
The building now only houses the Spelman glee club and theater department. The rest of the arts will be housed at the school’s new 84,000-square-foot Center for Innovation and the Arts, which opens next spring. Spelman is widely known for its arts curriculum.
The renovated fine arts building lobby is now an airy, two-story glass structure that used to be floors of offices and classrooms. Students, faculty and visitors are greeted with a massive mural of photos of Richardson Jackson and Jackson’s careers as well as archival pictures of the former Morehouse Spelman Players, the theater troupe the two were a part of.
Along the bottom of the mural are 850 names of the contributors and people who took part in Spelman’s theater department going back to the 1920s, pulled from old playbills and other documents, according to the mural artist Quintin Jackson.
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
Morehouse alumnus and filmmaker Spike Lee, former Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin and famed playwright and Spelman alumnus Pearl Cleage were some of the stars who attended the mural’s unveiling Thursday evening.
While Lee was a college student, he saw Richardson Jackson and Jackson in theater at the Atlanta University Center and around the city, and he gravitated toward them.
“I was seeing the great work they were doing. I said to myself, ‘Lord, if I ever get to make movies, these are people that I’d (want to work with),’” Lee told the AJC. He went on to cast them in films like “Malcolm X,” “Do the Right Thing,” and “Jungle Fever.”
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
The couple isn’t done with their support. Next spring they intend to host a gala aimed at raising $10 million to endow the drama department, Richardson Jackson said.
What continues to drive them, she said, is their “desire to be of service in giving back to a community that gave so much to us.”
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