Hill Auditorium

An Auditorium “For Everyone”: Hill as a Place for Performance and Protest

Women’s Glee Club Rehearsal Sara Stillman | University of Michigan Library Digital Collections | © 1995 Regents of the University of Michigan | This work is licensed under CC BY 4.0.

Auditoriums are homes for the performing arts, but also serve as civic spaces. At its core, this project asks who Hill Auditorium has been for, who has had the power to define the auditorium’s role, and how the communities that have gathered at Hill shifted over time. It uncovers the demands for justice and inclusion different groups made of the space and how the building itself has elevated or obscured these histories.

Although the remarkable history of classical music performers and groups at Hill is well-known and recognized today, the university originally opened Hill Auditorium in 1913 with the intention to welcome the entire student body at the time. In the century since, Hill Auditorium has been a place for people to debate, agitate, and organize in times of national and international crisis. It has been a site of struggle between student groups and administrators, where students have made demands of the university. Alongside European classical music, Hill has hosted subversive and popular music forms like rock, blues, metal, jazz, and folk alongside regular community events like holiday celebrations and graduations. This project shows that, at Hill, politics, community, culture, and performance intertwined and influenced each other.

Research Questions, Goals, and Outcomes

Over the spring and summer of 2025, a collaborative team of experts, undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, musicians, and university staff began research into the auditorium’s 112-year-long existence. The project traces the auditorium’s earliest origins, asking how the donor who provided funds for its construction was connected to the settler colonial origins of the university, and follows its legacies by examining how the purpose of Hill evolved across the decades. Questions that have emerged from this research include: Who were the workers who helped to build Hill? Who did the labor of maintaining and cleaning the building, supporting backstage operations, and making the venue what it is? What kind of events, performances, and speakers were central to Hill’s documented history, and which performers and speakers of color were represented on its stage? How have students, administrators, faculty, and local community groups supported or challenged the early vision of Hill Auditorium’s purpose as a campus gathering space, and how did those groups change the role Hill played on campus and in the region? How did Hill’s use as a space of campus action shape the university and university policy?

In the future, the team will expand on its archival research by building an archive through community engagement with a series of digital records, publications, events, and workshops with those included and excluded by Hill. The team will explore how a place like Hill can connect people across time, backgrounds, and international borders. By highlighting a more inclusive history throughout the actual building itself, this project will offer a model of what an auditorium can be for its community.

Martin Luther King at edge of stage, Hill Auditorium, 1962 University of Michigan Media Resources Center | University of Michigan Library Digital Collections | © Regents of the University of Michigan | This work is licensed under CC BY 4.0.