Patrick Burke
Patrick Burke is professor and chair of the Department of Music at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of Come In and Hear the Truth: Jazz and Race on 52nd Street (2008) and Tear Down the Walls: White Radicalism and Black Power in 1960s Rock (2021).
By Patrick Burke
Powell Hall
The “Requiem for Mike Brown” protest of 2014 engaged Powell Hall’s history in deep and provocative ways that went beyond the brief disruption of an evening of high culture. The protesters insisted on concern for Black lives in a building that, as the St. Louis Theater, had excluded African Americans. They questioned the troubled relationship between police and Black St. Louisans in a venue whose rebirth as a symphony hall hinged on the promise that police would protect its patrons from the city outside.
