Black Lives Matter

A powerful new community theater production, 13 Fires, will bring the story of one of America’s great Black cultural districts to the stage in Boulder this season in celebration of Juneteenth. The play tells the story of Indiana Avenue in Indianapolis—once a thriving Black neighborhood filled with jazz clubs, Black-owned businesses and the pioneering entrepreneur Madam C. J. Walker, and legendary performers such as Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington. 

Then the neighborhood was almost completely wiped out.

13 Fires explores how Indiana Avenue was dismantled during the expansion of Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis, when property acquisitions, eminent domain threats, redlining, and rising taxes forced families out of the homes and communities they had built. Through intimate storytelling and memories of the Avenue’s golden era, the play confronts the human cost of development and displacement.

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