Members of the community will come together next week to sign a proclamation heralding the significance of the 55th anniversary of the Theatre Boycott.

The document is among a series of initiatives to mark more than five decades of peaceful change and the end of formal segregation in Bermuda.

The proclamation will be signed at City Hall on Monday after a press conference, which begins at 12.30pm.

About 20 organisations from various sectors of the community, including Imagine Bermuda, will sign.

An educational campaign marking the landmark Theatre Boycotts against racial segregation proved enlightening for local students recently.

Activist Glenn Fubler and the group Imagine Bermuda aimed last week’s commemoration at the Island’s young people, encouraging teachers and members of the community to “take the opportunity to remind them that they are an important member of the Bermuda family — the human family”.

Although segregation wasn’t backed by law, it was enforced across Bermuda’s public places, including cinemas.

Then, in June of 1959, the anonymous Progressive Group decided to stage a boycott.

At the time, black patrons were forced to sit downstairs, while white viewers could watch from upstairs galleries.

The Theatre Boycotts quickly gained momentum, and Bermuda General Theatres dropped its policy, reopening its cinemas as desegregated establishments in just two weeks.

For 15-year-old Berkeley Institute student Hydia Riley, the Progressive Group’s carefully cultivated anonymity came as a lesson.

“They wanted to remain anonymous because their families could have been threatened,” she said. “The banks could take away their mortgages.

“They had flyers about this boycott, inviting people to stand up for what they believed should be done, and they went out at night with them. They had to sneak out after 10pm so they would not be seen.”

She said the group’s policy of hiding its members’ names proved a strange contrast with today’s world of social media.

Explained social studies teacher Michelle Morris: “We read articles, had discussions, and compared and contrasted then versus now.

“We talked about how we have benefited from what they did, and how their stance at the time was to remain anonymous.

“These days, everyone wants to be seen. That says a lot about how divided Bermuda was at that time.”

Hydia said she’d learned that segregation was by no means exclusive to theatres, but included “churches, restaurants and hotels”.

“It really started with people coming back from college in America, where society was more desegregated, and coming home and realising they had been living unfairly.”

She added: “Honestly, it upset me. It gets under my skin. I haven’t lived through it, but people I am related to had to go through this unfairness — it upsets me.”

Next Wednesday — July 2 — marks 55 years since Bermudian theatres dropped their policy of segregation.

Imagine Bermuda has called on the public to celebrate the anniversary with a “high five” to young people.