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TA-NEHISI COATES

IN 2017, JOURNALIST, BLOGGER, and fiction writer Ta-Nehisi Coates won a
MacArthur Foundation “genius” award. The MacArthur committee cited his abil-
ity to bring “personal reflection and historical scholarship to bear on America’s
most contested issues.” The citation singles out the qualities that make Coates’s
work so powerful: his ability to combine personal stories with historical, eco-
nomic, and sociological research (often based on statistics and graphs) in a way
that grabs at the hearts and minds of readers.

He learned this skill in his first paid gig at The Washington City Paper, whose
freewheeling style was more to his taste than school. But he learned his love for
research in the library. As he writes in his bestselling book of essays Between the
World and Me, “The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library
was open, unending, free”:

I needed more books. At Howard University, one of the greatest col-
lections of books could be found in the Moorland-Spingarn Research
Center …. Moorland held archives, papers, collections, and virtually any
book ever written by or about black people. For the most significant
portion of my time at The Mecca, I followed a simple ritual. I would
walk into the Moorland reading room and fill out three call slips for
three different works. I would take a seat at one of these long tables. I
would draw out my pen and one of my black-and-white composition
books. I would open the books and read, while filling my composition
books with notes on my reading, new vocabulary words, and sentences
of my own invention. I would arrive in the morning and request, three.
call slips at a time, the works of every writer I had heard spoken of in
classrooms or out on the Yard.

This diligent research is a habit that Coates maintains and one he explicitly hopes
to inspire in others. His longer articles are often followed up by a slew of posts or
articles about the scholarship he read in preparation; his blog is, as often as not,
an annotated exhortation to readers to look up and read his sources. Coates
equates “hard” scholarship with the ability to deal with “hard” truths. “I have,”
he writes, “great respect and love for people who dig through the archives, who
do the calculations, who do the case-studies, and perform the field research.”

“The Fiist White President” by Ta-Nehisi Coates, first published in THE ATLANTIC, copyright© 2017 Ta-Nehisi
Coates. Used by permission of publisher.

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TA-NEHISI COATES 25

The reading reprinted here, “The First White President,” first appeared in
The Atlantic in October 2017, eleven months after Donald Trump’s election. In

, it, Coates argues that the victory should be seen as a retreat from the historic
achievement of Barack Obama, the United States’s first black president. But
Coates also insists that Trump and his supporters are far from unique or unprec-
edented. Instead, they represent a tradition of “political whiteness” reaching back
to our Republic’s earliest moments. Crude, bullying, and impetuous, Trump is
quite capable of branding all Mexicans as “rapists” or denigrating Third World
countries as “shit holes.” But Coates warns that we should not allow Trump’s
Twitter feeds to di;tract us from the deeply entrenched system that has enabled
his rise.

Not everyone admires “The First White President.” The libel’al journalist
George Packer acknowledges the power of the article but expresses reservations:

There’s a lot to admire in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new essay. It’s one of
those pieces that grabs you with its first paragraph and never lets go ….
At its heart is the undeniable truth that racism remains fundamental in
American politics.

To Packer’s way of thinking, Coates oversimplifies a more complicated reality:

At the heart of American politics there is racism. But it’s not alone–
there’s also greed, and broken communities, and partisan hatred, and
ignorance. Any writer who wants to understand American politics has
to find a way into the minds of Trump voters. Any progressive politi-
cian who wants to gain power has to find common interests with some
of them, without waiting for the day of reckoning first to scourge white
Americans of their original sin. This effort is one of the essential tasks of
politics.

The “original sin” Packer references here is slavery, legally abolished in 1865 by
the Thirteenth Amendment. But laws are one thing; culture quite another.
Coates argues that we have to change the culture first. Packer counters that this
task will take too long. But both agree about one thing: the shadow of this “sin”
hangs over us all.

REFERENCES

“Macarthur Fellows/Meet the Class of2015.” Ta-Nehisi Coates. 28 September 2015
http:/ /rwinonajohnson. weebly .com/uploads/ 4/5/3/2/ 45322833/ta-nahesis-

Ta-Nahasi Coates. Between the World and Me. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015. 46.

George Packer, “George Packer Responds to Ta-Nahasi Coates.” The Atlantic: Notes,
First Drqfis, Conversations, Stories in Progress. 15 September 2017.

The First White President

It is insufficient to state the obvious of Donald Trump: that he is a white
man who would not be president were it not for this fact. With one immediate
exception, Trump’s predecessors made their way to high office through the passive
power of whiteness-that bloody heirloom which cannot ensure mastery of all
events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them. Land theft and human plun-
der cleared the grounds for Trump’s fo_refathers and barred others from it. Once
upon the field, these men became soldiers, statesmen, and scholars; held court in
Paris; presided at Princeton; advanced into the Wilderness and then into the White
House. Their individual triumphs made this exclusive party seem above America’s
founding sins, and it was forgotten that the former was in fact bound to the latter
that all their victories had transpired on cleared grounds. No such elegant detach~
ment can be attributed to Donald Trump-a president who, more than any other,
has made the awful inheritance explicit.

His political career began in advocacy ofbirtherism, that modern recasting of
the old American precept that black people are not fit to be citizens of the coun-
try they built. But long before birtherism, Trump had made his worldview clear.
He fought to keep blacks out of his buildings, according to the U.S. government;
called for the death penalty for the eventually exonerated Central Park Five; and
railed against “lazy” black employees. “Black guys counting my money! I hate
it,” Trump was once quoted as saying. “The only kind of people I want count-
ing my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.” After his cabal of
conspiracy theorists forced Barack Obama to present his birth certificate, Trump
deman~e~ t~e president’s college grades ( offering $5 million in exchange for
them), ms1stmg that Obama was not intelligent enough to have gone to an Ivy
League school, and that his acclaimed memoir, Dreams From My Father, had been
ghostwritten by a white man, Bill Ayers.

It is often said that Trump has no real ideology, which is not true-his ide-
?logy is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power. Trump
maugurated his campaign by casting himself as the defender of white maidenhood
against Mexican “rapists;’ only to be later alleged by multiple accusers, and by his
own proud words, to be a sexual violator himself White supremacy has always had
a perverse sexual tint. Trump’s rise was shepherded by Steve Bannon, a man who
mocks his white male critics as “cucks.” The word, derived from cuckold, is specifi-
cally meant to debase by fear and fantasy-the target is so weak that he would
submit to the humiliation of having his white wife lie with black men. That the
slur cuck casts white men as victims aligns with the dicta of whiteness, which seek
to alchemize one’s profligate sins into virtue. So it was with Virginia slaveholders
claiming that Britain sought to make slaves of them. So it was with marauding
Klansmen organized against alleged rapes and other outrages. So it was with a
candidate who called for a foreign power to hack his opponent’s email and who

THE FIRST WHITE PRESIDENT 27

now, as president, is claiming to be the victim of”the single greatest witch hunt of
a politician in American history:’

In Trump, white supremacists see one of their own. Only grudgingly did
Trump denounce the Ku Klux Klan and David Duke, one of its former grand
wizards-and after the clashes between white supremacists and counterprotesters
in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August, Duke in turn praised Trump’s contentious
claim that “both sides” were responsible for the violence.

To Trump, whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his
power. In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas ~s forebears carried w~ten~ss
like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowmg amulet open, releasmg its
eldritch energies. The repercussions are striking: Trump is the first president to
have served in no public capacity before ascending to his perch. But more telling,
Trump is also the first president to have publicly affirmed that his daughter is a
“piece of ass:’The mind seizes trying to imagine a black man extolling the virtues
of sexual assault on tape (“When you’re a star, they let you do it”), fending off
multiple accusations of such assaults, immersed in multiple lawsuits for allegedly
fraudulent business dealings, exhorting his followers to violence, and then stroll-
ing into the White House. But that is the point of white supremacy-to ensure
that that which all others achieve with maximal effort, white people (particularly
white men) achieve with minimal qualification. Barack Obama delivered to black
people the hoary message that if they work twice as hard as white people, anything
is possible. But Trump’s counter is persuasive: Work half as hard as black people,
and even more is possible.

For Trump, it almost seems that the fact of Obama, the fact of a black presi-
dent, insulted him personally. The insult intensified when Obama and Seth Meyers
publicly humiliated him at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2011. But
the bloody heirloom ensures the last laugh. Replacing Obama is not enough-
Trump has made the negation ofObama’s legacy the foundation of his own.And
this too is whiteness. “Race is an idea, not a fact,” the historian Nell Irvin Painter
has written, and essential to the construct of a “white race” is the idea of not be-
ing a nigger. Before Barack Obama, niggers could be manufactured out of Sister
Souljahs, Willie Hortons, and Dusky Sallys. But Donald Trump arrived in the wake
of something more potent-an entire nigger presidency with nigger health care,
nigger climate accords, and nigger justice reform, all of which could be targeted
for destruct~on or redemption, thus reifying the idea of being white.Trump truly
is something new-tlf e first president whose entire political existence ~ges ~n
the fact of a black president. And so it will not suffice to say that Trump 1s a white
man like all the others who rose to become president. He must be called by his
rightful honorific-America’s first white president.

The scope of Trump’s commitment to whiteness is matched only by the depth of
popular disbelief in the power of whiteness. We are now being told that support
for Trump’s “Muslim ban,” his scapegoating of immigrants, his defenses of police
brutality are somehow the natural outgrowth of the cultural and economic gap
between Lena Dunliam’s America and Jeff Foxworthy’s. The collective verdict

28 TA-NEHISI COATES

holds that the Democratic Party lost its way when it abandoned everyday eco-
nomic issues like job creation for the softer fare of social justice. The indictment
continues: To their neoliberal economics, Democrats and liberals have married
a condescending elitist affect that sneers at blue-collar culture and mocks the
white man as history’s greatest monster and prime-time television’s biggest doo-
fus. In this rendition, Donald Trump is not the product of white supremacy so
much as the product of a backlash against contempt for white working-class
people.

“We so obviously despise them, we so obviously condescend to them” the
conservative social scientist Charles Murray, who co-wrote The Bell Curve,
recently told The_ New Yorker, speaking of the white working class. “The only slur
you ~an- use at a dinner party and get away with is to call somebody a redneck-that
wont give you any problems in Manhattan.”

. “The utter contempt with which privileged Eastern liberals such as myself
discuss red-state, gun-country; working-class America as ridiculous and morons
and rubes,” charged the celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, “is largely responsible
for the upswell of rage and contempt and desire to pull down the temple that
we’re seeing now.”

That black people, who have lived for centuries under such derision and
condescension, have not yet been driven into the arms of Trump does not
tro~ble the~e theoreticians. After all, in this analysis, Trump’s racism and the
rac~sm ~fhis supporters are incidental to his rise. Indeed, the alleged glee with
which liberals call out Trump’s bigotry is assigned even more power than the
bigo~ itself. C?sten~ibly assaulted by campus protests, battered by arguments
ab~ut mter~ect10nality, and oppressed by new bathroom rights, a blameless
wh~te working class did the only thing any reasonable polity might: elect an
orcish reality-television star who insists on taking his intelligence briefings in
picture-book form.

Asserting that Trump’s rise was primarily powered by cultural resentment
and economic :eversal has b~c~me de rigueur among white pundits and thought
leaders. But evidence for this is, at best, mixed. In a study of preelection polling
data, the Gallup researchers Jonathan Rothwell and Pablo Diego-Rosell found
that “people_living in areas with diminished economic opportunity” were “some-
what more likely to support Trump:’ But the researchers also found that voters in
their study who supported Trump generally had a higher mean household income
~!81,~98) than those who did not ($77,046).Those who approved ofTrump were
less likely to be unemployed and less likely to be employed part-time” than those

who did not. They also tended to be from areas that were very white: “The racial
and ethnic isolation of whites at the zip code level is one of the strongest predic-
tors ofTrump support.”

An analysis of exit polls conducted during the presidential primaries estimated
the median household income ofTrump supporters to be about $72,000. But
even this lower number is almost double the median household income of African
Americans, _and $15,_000 above the ~erican median. Trump’s white support was
not determmed by mcome. According to Edison Research, Trump won whites

THE FIRST WHITE PRESIDENT 29

making less than $50,000 by 20 points, whites makin~ $50,0~0 to $99,999 by 28
points, and whites making $100,000 or more by 14 pomts.This shows ~atTrump
assembled a broad white coalition that ran the gamut from Joe the Dishwasher
to Joe the Plumber to Joe the Banker. So when whi_te pun~ts cast the eleva-
tion ofTrump as the handiwork of an inscrutable white working class, they are
being too modest, declining to claim credit for the~r own_eco~omic class.T1:1mp’s
dominance among whites across class lines is of a piece with his larger domman_ce
across nearly every white demographic. Trump won white women ( +9) and white
men (+31). He won white people with college degrees (+3) and white people
without them (+37). He won whites ages 18-29 (+4), 30-44 (+17), 45-64 (+28),
and 65 and older (+19).Trump won whites in midwestern Illinois (+11), whites
in mid-Atlantic New Jersey (+12), and whites in the Sun Belt’s New Mexico (+5).
In no state that Edison polled did Trump’s white support dip below 40 percent.
Hillary Clinton’s did, in states as disparate as Florida, Utah, Indiana, and Kentucky’.
From the beer track to the wine track, from soccer moms to NASCAR dads, Trump s
performance among whites was dominant. According to Mother ]_ones, bas~d on
preelection polling data, if you tallied the popular vote of only white America to
derive 2016 electoral votes, Trump would have defeated Clinton 389 to 81, with
the remaining 68 votes either a toss-up or unknown.

Part of Trump’s dominance among whites resulted from his running as a
Republican, the party that has long cultivated white voters. !rump’s share of the
white vote was sinlilar to Mitt Romney’s in 2012. But unlike Romney; Trump
secured this support by running against his party’s leadership, against accepted
campaign orthodo;cy., and against all notions of decency. By his sixth month in
office embroiled in scandal after scandal, a Pew Research Center poll found
Trum’p’s approval rating underwater with every single demographic group. Every
demographic group, that is, except one: people who identifie~ as whit~- .

The focus on one subsector ofTrump voters-the white working class-is
puzzling, given the breadth of his white coalition. Indeed, there is a kind of
theater at work in which Trump’s presidency is pawned off as a product of the
white working class as opposed to a product of an entire whiteness that includes
the very authors doing the pawning.The motive is clear: escapism.To accept th~t
the bloody heirloom remains potent even now, some five decades after Martm
Luther King Jr. was gunned down on a Memphis balcony–:–even a~ter a black
president; indeed, strengthened by the fact of that black pr~sident-is, to a~c~pt
that racism remains, as it has since 177 6, at the heart of this country s political
life. The idea of acceptance frustrates the left. The left would much rather have
a discussion about class struggles, which might entice the white working masses,
instead of about the racist struggles that those same masses have historically been
the agents and beneficiaries of. Moreover, to accept that whiteness brought us
Donald Trump is to accept whiteness as an existential danger to the country and
the world. But if the broad and remarkable white support for Donald Trump can
be reduced to the righteous anger of a noble class of smallville fire~ghters ~nd
evangelicals, mocked by Brooklyn hipsters and womanist professors mto voting
against their interests, then the threat of racism and whiteness, the threat of the

30 TA-NEHISI COATES

heirloom, can be dismissed. Consciences can be eased; no deeper existential
reckoning is required.

This transfiguration is not novel. It is a return to form. The tightly intertwined
stories of the white working class and blackAmericans go back to the prehistory
of the United States-and the use of one as a cudgel to silence the claims of
the other goes back nearly as far. Like the black working class, the white work-
ing class originated in bondage-the former in the lifelong bondage of slavery,
the latter in the temporary bondage of indenture. In the early 17th century, these
two classes were remarkably, though not totally, free of racist enmity. But by
the 18th century, the country’s master class had begun etching race into law while
phasing out indentured servitude in favor of a more enduring labor solution.
From these and other changes of law and economy, a bargain emerged: The
descendants of indenture would enjoy the full benefits of whiteness, the most
definitional benefit being that they would never sink to the level of the slave. But
if the bargain protected white workers from slavery, it did not protect them from
near-slave wages or backbreaking labor to attain them, and always there lurked a
fear of having their benefits revoked. This early white working class “·expressed
soaring desires to be rid of the age-old inequalities of Europe and of any hint of
slavery,” according to David R. Roediger, a professor of American studies at the
University of Kansas. “They also expressed the rather more pedestrian goal of
simply not being mistaken for slaves, or ‘negers’ or ‘negurs.”‘

Roediger relates the experience, around 1807, of a British investor who made
the mistake of asking a white maid in New England whether her “master” was
home. The maid admonished the investor, not merely for implying that she had a
“master” and thus was a “sarvant” but for his basic ignorance of American hierar-
chy. “None but negers are sarvants,” the maid is reported to have said. In law and
economics and then in custom, a racist distinction not limited to the household
emerged between the “help” (or the “freemen;’ or the white workers) and the
“servants” (the “negers,” the slaves). The former were virtuous and just, worthy
of citizenship, progeny of Jefferson and, later, Jackson. The latter were servile and
parasitic, dim-witted and lazy, the children of African savagery. But the dignity
accorded to white labor was situational, dependent on the scorn heaped upon
black labor-much as the honor accorded a “virtuous lady” was dependent on the
derision directed at a “loose woman:’ And like chivalrous gentlemen who claim to
honor the lady while raping the “whore,” planters and their apologists could claim
to honor white labor while driving the enslaved.
_ And so George Fitzhugh, a prominent 19th-century Southern pro-slavery
mtellectual, could in a single stroke deplore the exploitation of free whites’ labor
while defending the exploitation of enslaved blacks’ labor. Fitzhugh attacked white
capitalists as “cannibals,” feeding off the labor of their fellow whites. The white
workers were” ‘slaves without masters;’ the little fish, who were food for all the
larger.” Fitzhugh inveighed against a “professional man” who’d “amassed a fortune”
by exploiting his fellow whites. But whereas Fitzhugh imagined white workers as
devoured by capital, he imagined black workers as elevated by enslavement. The
slaveholder “provided for them, with almost parental affection”-even when the

THE FIRST WHITE PRESIDENT 31

loafing slave “feigned to be unfit fo~ labor:’ Fitzhugh. proved too ,~xplic~t-going so
far as to argue that white laborers rmght be better off if enslaved. ( If white slavery be
rnorally wrong;’ he wrote, “the Bible cannot be true:’.) Nevertheless, the argument
·that America’s original sin was not deep-seated white supremacy but rather the
exploitation of white la~or by whi~e capit~sts-“w~i~e slavery” -proved durable.
Indeed, the panic of white slavery lives on m our politJ.cs today. Black worke~s s~-
fer because it was and is our lot. But when white workers suffe:r, s~mething ~
nature has gone awry. And so an opioid epidemic among mostly white people_ is
greeted with calls for compassion and treatm~nt, as all ep~demics should be, while

:ack epidemic among mostly black people is greeted with scorn and mandatory
~urns. Sympathetic op-ed columns and articles are devoted to the plight of
working-class whites when their life expectancy plummets to levels that, for blacks,
society has simply accepted as normal. White slave17 is sin. Nil?:ger slave17 is natural.
This dynamic serves a very real purpose: the consistent awarding of grievance and
rnoral high ground to that class of workers which, by the bonds of whiteness, stands

closest to America’s aristocratic class.
This is by design. Speaking in 1848, Senator John C. Calhoun saw slavery as

the explicit foundation for a democratic union among whites, working and not:

With us the two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but
white and black; and all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong
to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.

On the eve of secession,Jefferson Davis, the eventual president of the Confederacy;
pushed the idea further, arguing that such equality between the white working
class and white oligarchs could not exist at all without black slavery:

I say that the lower race of human beings that constitute the substra-
tum of what is termed the slave population of the South, elevates every
white man in our community … It is the presence of a lower caste,
those lower by their mental and physical organization, controlled by
the higher intellect of the white man, that gives this superiority to the
white laborer. Menial services are not there performed by the white
man.We have none of our brethren surik to the degradation ofbeing
menials. That belongs to the lower race-the descendants of Ham.

Southern intellectuals found a shade of agreement with Northern white reformers
who, while not agreeing on slavery, agreed on the nature of the most tragic victim
of emerging capitalism. “I was formerly like yourself, sir, a very warm ad~ocate of
the abolition of slavery;’ the labor reformer George Henry Evans argued m a letter
to the abolitionist Gerrit Smith. “This was before I saw that there was white slavery:’
Evans was a putative ally of Smith and his fellow abolitionists. But still he ass~rted
that “the landless white” was worse off than the enslaved black, who at least en Joyed

“surety of support in sickness and old age:’ ·
Invokers of “white slavery” held that there was nothing unique in the

enslavement of blacks when measured against the enslavement of all workers.
What evil there was in enslavement resulted from its status as a subsidiary of the
broader exploitation better seen among the country’s noble laboring whites. Once

32 TA-NEHISI COATES

the larger problem of white exploitation was solved, the dependent problem of
black exploitation could be confronted or perhaps would fade away. Abolitionists
focused on slavery were dismissed as “substitutionists” who wished to trade one
form of slavery for another. “Ifl am less troubled concerning the Slavery prevalent
in Charleston or New-Orleans,” wrote the reformer Horace Greeley, “it is because
I see so much Slavery in New-York, which appears to claim my first efforts.”

Firsthand reports by white Union soldiers who witnessed actual slavery during
the Civil War rendered the “white slavery” argument ridiculous. But its operating
premises-white labor as noble archetype, and black labor as something else-
lived on. This was a matter of rhetoric, not fact. The noble-white-labor archetype
did not give white workers immunity from capitalism. It could not, in itself, break
monopolies, alleviate white poverty in Appalachia or the South, or bring a decent
wage to immigrant ghettos in the North. But the model for America’s original
identity politics was set. Black lives literally did not matter and could be cast aside
altogether as the price of even incremental gains for the white masses. It was
this juxtaposition that allowed Theodore Bilbo to campaign for the Senate in the
1930s as someone who would “raise the same kind of hell as President Roosevelt”
and later endorse lynching black people to keep them from voting.

The juxtaposition between the valid and even virtuous interests of the “work-
ing class” and the invalid and pathological interests ofblackAmericans was not the
province merely of blatant white supremacists like Bilbo. The acclaimed scholar,
liberal hero, and future senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in his time working for

President Richard Nixon, approvingly quoted Nixon’s formulation of the
white working class: “A new voice” was beginning to make itself felt in the country,
“it is a voice that has been silent too long;’ Nixon claimed, alluding to working-class
whites. “It is a voice of people who have not taken to the streets before, who have
not indulged in violence, who have not broken the law;’

It had been only 18 years since the Cicero riots; eight years since Daisy and
Bill Myers had been run out ofLevittown, Pennsylvania; three years since Martin
Luther KingJr.had been stoned while walking through Chicago’s Marquett~ Park.
But as the myth of the virtuous white working class was made central to American
identity, its sins needed to be rendered invisible. The fact was, working-class whites
had been agents of racist terrorism since at least the draft riots of 1863 · terrorism
could not be neatly separated from the racist animus found in every clas; of whites.
Indeed, in the era oflynching, the daily newspapers often whipped up the fury of
the white masses by invoking the last species of property that all white men held in
common-white women.But to conceal the breadth of white racism these racist
outbursts were often disregarded or treated not as racism but as the ~nfortunate
side effect oflegitimate grievances against capital. By focusing on that sympathetic
laboring class, the sins of whiteness itself were, and are still being, evaded.

When David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, shocked the
country in 1990 by almost winning one of Louisiana’s seats in the U.S. Senate, the
apologists came out once again. They elided the obvious-that Duke had appealed
to the racist instincts of a state whose schools are, at this very moment, still desegre-
gating–and instead decided that something else was afoot. “There is a tremendous
amount of anger and frustration among working-class whites, particularly where there

THE FIRST WHITE PRESIDENT 33

is an economic downturn,” a researcher told the Los Angeles Times. “These people
feel left out; they feel government is not responsive to them:’ By this logic, postwar
America-with its booming economy and low unemployment–should have been
an egalitarian utopia and not the violently segregated c~untry it actually was. .

But this was the past made present. It was not important to the apologists
that a large swath of Louisiana’s white population thought it was a good idea to
send a white supremacist who once fronted a terrorist organization to the nation’s
capital. Nor was it important that blacks in _Louisiana had long felt le~t out.What
was important was. the fraying of an ancient bargain, and the potential degrada-
tion of white workers to the level of”negers:’ “A viable left must find a way to
differentiate itself strongly from such analysis;’ David Roediger, the University of

Kansas professor, has written.
That challenge of differentiation has largely been ignored. Instead, an imag-

ined white working class remains central to our politics and to our cultural under-
standing of those politics, not simply when it comes to addressing broad economic
issues but also when it comes to addressing racism. At its most sympathetic, this
belief holds that most Americans-regardless ofrace-are exploited by an unfet-
tered capitalist economy. The key, then, is to address those broader patterns that
afflict the masses of all races; the people who suffer from those patterns more than
others (blacks, for instance) will benefit disproportionately from that which ben-
efits everyone. “These days, what ails working-class and middle-class blacks and
Latinos is not fundamentally different from what ails their white counterparts;’

Senator Barack Obama wrote in 2006:

Downsizing, outsourcing, automation, wage stagnation, the dismantling
of employer-based health-care and pension plans, and schools that fail to
teach young people the skills they need to compete in a global economy.

Obama allowed that”blacks in particular have been vulnerable to these trends”-but
less because of racism than for reasons of geography and job-sector distribution.This
notion-raceless antiracism-marks the modem left, from the New Democrat Bill
Clinton to the socialist Bernie Sanders. Few national liberal politicians have shown
any recognition that there is something systemic and particular in the relationship
between black people and their country that might require specific policy solutions.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton acknowledged the existence of systemic racism more
explicitly than any of her modern Democratic predecessors. She had to-black
voters remembered too well the previous Clinton administration, as well as her
previous campaign. While her husband’s administration had touted the rising-
tide theory of economic growth, it did so while slashing welfare and getting
“tough on crime,” a phrase that stood for specific policies but also served as
rhetorical bait for white voters. One is tempted to excuse Hillary Clinton from
having to answer for the sins of her husband. But in her 2008 campaign, she
evoked the old dichotomy between white workers and loafing blacks, claiming
to be the representative of”hardworking Americans, white Americans.” By the
end of the 2008 primary campaign against Barack Obama, her advisers were

34 TA-NEHISI COATES

hoping someone would uncover an apocryphal “whitey tape,” in which an
angry Michelle Obama was alleged to have used the slur. During Bill Clinton’s
presidential-reelection campaign in the mid-1990s, Hillary Clinton herself had
endorsed the “super-predator” theory of William]. Bennett,John P.Walters, and
John J. Diiulio Jr. This theory cast “inner-city” children of that era as “almost
completely unmoralized” and the font of”a new generation of street criminals …
the youngest, biggest and baddest generation any society has ever known.”
The “baddest generation” did not become super-predators. But by 2016,
they were young adults, many of whom judged Hillary Clinton’s newfound
consciousness to be lacking.

It’s worth asking why the country has not been treated to a raft of sympa-
thetic portraits of this “forgotten” young black electorate, forsaken by a Washington
bought off by Davos elites and special interests. The unemployment rate for young
blacks (20.6 percent) in July 2016 was double that of young whites (9.9 percent).
And since the late 1970s,WilliamJulius Wilson and other social scientists following
in his wake have noted the disproportionate effect that the decline in manufactur-
ing jobs has had on African American communities. If anyone should be angered
by the devastation wreaked by the financial sector and a government that declined
to prosecute the perpetrators, it is African Americans-the housing crisis was one
of the primary drivers in the past 20 years of the wealth gap between black families
and the rest of the country. But the cultural condescension toward and economic
anxiety of black people is not news. Toiling blacks are in their proper state; toiling
whites raise the specter of white slavery.

Moreover, a narrative oflong-neglected working-class black voters, injured by
globalization and the financial crisis, forsaken by out-of-touch politicians, and right-
fully suspicious of a return of Clintonism, does not serve to cleanse the conscience
of white people for having elected Donald Trump. Only the idea of a long-suffering
white working class can do that. And though much has been written about the
distance between elites and “Real America;’ the existence of a class-transcending,
mutually dependent tribe of white people is evident.

Joe Biden, then the vice president, last year:

“They’re all the people I grew up with … And they’re not racist. They’re
not sexist.”

Bernie Sanders, senator and former candidate for president, last year:

“I come from the white working class, and I am deeply humiliated that
the Democratic Party cannot talk to the people where I came from:’

Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times columnist, in February of this year:

My hometown,Yamhill, Ore., a farming community; is Trump country,
and I have many friends who voted for Trump. I think they’re pro-
foundly wrong, but please don’t dismiss them as hateful bigots.

These claims of origin and fidelity are not merely elite defenses of an aggrieved
class but also a sweeping dismissal of the concerns of those who don’t share kinship
with white men. “You can’t eat equality;’ asserts Joe Biden-a statement worthy of

THE FIRST WHITE PRESIDENT 35

someone unthreatened by the loss of wages brought on by an unwanted pregnancy,
a background-check box at the bottom of a job application, or the deportation of
a breadwinner. Within a week of Sanders lambasting Democrats for not speaking to
“the people” where he “came from;’ he was making an example of a woman who
dreamed of representing the people where she came from. Confronted with a young
woman who hoped to become the second Latina senator in American history, Sand-
ers responded with a parody of the Clinton campaign: “It is not good enough for
someone to say, Tm a woman! Vote for me!’ No, that’s not good enough … One of
the struggles that you’re going to be seeing in the Democratic Party is whether we
go beyond identity politics:’The upshot-attacking one specimen of identity politics
after having invoked another-was unfortunate.

Other Sanders appearances proved even more alarming. On MSNBC, he
attributed Trump’s success, in part, to his willingness to “not be politically
correct.” Sanders admitted that Trump had “said some outrageous and painful
things, but I think people are tired of the same old, same old political rheto-
ric.” Pressed on the definition of political correctness, Sanders gave an answer
Trump surely would have approved of. “What it means is you have a set of
talking points which have been poll-tested and focus-group-tested,” Sanders
explained. “And that’s what you say rather than what’s really going on. And
often, what you are not allowed to say are things which offend very, very

powerful people.”
This definition of political correctness was shocking coming from a politician

of the left. But it matched a broader defense of Trump voters. “Some people think
that the people who voted for Trump are racists and sexists and homophobes and
just deplorable folks,” Sanders said later. “I don’t agree.” This is not exculpatory.
Certainly not every Trump voter is a white supremacist, just as not every white
person in the Jim Crow South was a white supremacist. But every Trump voter
felt it acceptable to hand the fate of the country over to one.

One can, to some extent, understand politicians’ embracing a self-serving
identity politics. Candidates for high office, such as Sanders, have to cobble
together a coalition. The white working class is seen, understandably, as a large
cache of potential votes, and capturing these votes requires eliding uncomfort-
able truths. But journalists have no such excuse. Again and again in the past year,
Nicholas Kristof could be found pleading with his fellow liberals not to dismiss his
old comrades in the white working class as bigots-even when their bigotry was
evidenced iIJ. his own reporting.A visit to Tulsa, Oklahoma, finds Kristof wonder-
ing why Trump voters support a president who threatens to cut the programs they
depend on. But the problem, according to Kristof’s interviewees, isn’t Trump’s
attack on benefits so much as an attack on their benefits. “There’s a lot of waste-
ful spending, so cut other places;’ one man tells Kristof. When Kristof pushes his
subjects to identify that wasteful spending, a fascinating target is revealed:”Obarna
phones;’ the products of a fevered conspiracy theory that turned a long-standing
government program into a scheme through which the then-president gave away
free cellphones to undeserving blacks. Kristof doesn’t shift his analysis based on
this comment and, aside from a one-sentence fact-check tucked between paren-
theses, continues on as though it were never said.

36 TA-NEHISI COATES

Observing a Trump supporter in the act of deploying racism does not much
perturb Kristof. -r:hat is because his defenses of the innate goodness of Trump
voters and of the innate goodness of the white working class are in fact defenses
of neither. On _the contrary, the white working class functions rhetorically not as
a real commuruty of people so much as a tool to quiet the demands of those who
want a more inclusive America.

Mark Lilla’s New York Times essay “The End of Identity Liberalism;’ published
n?t long after last year’s election, is perhaps the most profound example of this genre.
Lilla denounces the perversion of liberalism into “a kind of moral panic about racial,
gender and ~exual id:n~ty;’ which distorted liberalism’s message “and prevented it
from be~ommg _a unifying force capable of governing:’ Liberals have turned away
from_ the”: working-class base, he says, and must look to the “pre-identity liberalism”
of Bill_ Cli11:ton and Franklin D. Roosevelt. You would never know from this essay
that Bill Clinton was one of the most skillful identity politicians of his era-flying
home ~o Arkansas to see a black man, the lobotomized Ricky Ray Rector, executed;
upstagmg Jesse Jackson at his own conference; signing the Defense of Marriage Act.
Nor wo~ld you know _that the “pre-identity” liberal champion Roosevelt depended
on the literally lethal identity politics of the white-supremacist “solid South:’ The
name Barack Obama d?es not appear in Lilla’s essay; and he never attempts to grapple,
one way or another, with the fact that it was identity politics-the possibility of the
~st black pre~ident-that brought a record number of black voters to the polls, win-
rung the elect10n for the Democratic Party; and thus enabling the deliverance of the
ancient liberal goal of national health care, “identity politics … is largely expressive, not
persuasive;’ Lilla claims. “Which is why it never wins elections-but can lose them:’
That Trump ran and won on identity politics is beyond Lilla’s powers of conception.
What appeals to the white working class is ennobled.What appeals to black workers,
an~ ~ others outside t1:~ tribe, is dastardly identitarianism. A] politics are identity
politics-except the politics of white people, the politics of the bloody heirloom.

White tribalism haunts even more-nuanced writers. George Packer’s New
Yorker essay “The Unconnected” is a lengthy plea for liberals to focus more on
the white working class, a population that “has succumbed to the ills that used to
be associated with the black urban ‘underclass.”‘ Packer believes that these ills, and
the Democratic Party’s failure to respond to them, explain much ofTrurnp’s rise.
Packer offers no opinion polls to weigh white workers’ views on “elites,” much less
their views ?n racism. He offers no sense of how their views and their relationship
to Trump differ from other workers’ and other whites’.

That is likely because any empirical evaluation of the relationship between
!’ru~p and the white working class would reveal that one adjective in that phrase
:s doing more work than the other. In 2016, Trump enjoyed majority or plural-
ity support among every econ01nic branch of whites. It is true that his strongest
support among whites came from those making $50,000 to $99,999. This would
be so:11ething more than working-class in many nonwhite neighborhoods, but
even if one accepts that branch as the working class, the difference between how
var~ous_ gro~~~ in t1:is inco~e bracket voted is revealing. Sixty-one percent of
whites m this working ~lass supported Trump. Only 24 percent of Hispanics and
11 percent of blacks did. Indeed, the plurality of all voters making less than

THE FIRST WHITE PRESIDENT 37

$100 000 and the majority making less than $50,000 voted for the Democratic
didate. So when Packer laments the fact that “Democrats can no longer really

can hi ,, h .
laim to be the party of working people-not w te ones, anyway, e comm1ts

c kind of category error. The real problem is that Democrats aren’t the party of
:hite people-working or otherwise. White workers are not divided by the fact
oflabor from other white demographics; they are divided from all other laborers

by the fact of their whiteness. .
Packer’s essay was published before the election, and so the vote tally was not

available. But it should not be surprising that a Republican candidate making a
direct appeal to racism would drive up the numbers am?ng _white vot~~s, ~iven
that racism has been a dividing line for the national parties smce the civil-nghts
era. Packer finds inspiration for his thesis in West Virginia-a state that remained
Democratic through the 1990s before turning decisively Republican, at least at the
level of presidential politics. This relatively recent rightward movement evinces, to
Packer, a shift “that couldn’t be attributed just to the politics of race:’This is likely
true-the politics of race are, theinselves, never attributable “just to the politics of
race:’ The history of slavery is also about the growth of international capitalism;
the history of lynching must be seen in light of anxiety over the growing inde-
pendence of women;, the civil-rights movement c~’t be disentangled from_ the
Cold War. Thus, to say that the rise of Donald Trump is about more than race is_ to
make an empty statement, one that is small comfort to the people-black, Muslim,
immigrant-who live under racism’s boot.

The dent of racism is not hard to detect in West Virginia. In the 2008 Dem-
ocratic primary there, 95 percent of the voters were white. Twenty percent of
those-one in five-openly admitted that race was influencing their vote, and
more than 80 percent voted for Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama. Four ye~rs
later, the incumbent Obama lost the primary in 10 counties to Keith Judd, a white
felon incarcerated in a federal prison;Judd racked up more than 40 percent of the
Democratic-primary vote in the state. A simple thought experiment: Can one
imagine a black felon in a federal prison running in a primary against an incum-
bent white president doing so well?

But racism occupies a mostly passive place in Packer’s essay.There’s no attempt
to understand why black and brown workers, victimized by the same new economy
and cosmopolitan elite that Packer lambastes, did not join the Trump revolution.
Like Kristof Packer is gentle with his subjects.When a woman “exploded” and told
Packer, “I w:mt to eat what I want to eat, and for them to tell me I can’t eat French
fries or Coca-Cola-no way;’ he sees this as a rebellion against “the moral superior-
ity of elites:’ In fact, this elite conspiracy dates back to 1894, when th~ government
first began advising Americans on their diets.As recently as 2002, Preside~t George
W Bush launched the HealthierUS initiative, urging Americans to exercise and eat
healthy food. But Packer never allows himself to wonder whether the explosion he
witnessed had anything to do with the fact that siinilar advice now came from the
country’s first black first lady. Packer concludes that Obama was leaving the country
“more divided and angrier than most Americans can remember;’ a statement that
is likely true only because most Americans identify as white. Cer~ainly the ~en
and women forced to live in the wake of the beating of John Lewis, the lynching

38 TA-NEHISI COATES

of Emmett Till, the firebombing of Percy Julian’s home, and the assassinations of
Martin Luther KingJr. and Medgar Evers would disagree.

The triumph of Trump’s campaign ofbigotry presented the problematic spectacle
of an American president succeeding at best in spite of his racism and possibly
because of it. Trump moved racism from the euphemistic and plausibly deniable
to the overt and freely claimed. This presented the country’s thinking class with
a dilemma. Hillary Clinton simply could not be correct when she asserted that
a large group of Americans was endorsing a candidate because of bigotry. The
implications -that systemic bigotry is still central to our politics; that the coun-
try is susceptible to such bigotry; that the salt-of-the-earth Americans whom we
lionize in our culture and politics are not so different from those same Americans
who grin back at us in lynching photos; that Calhoun’s aim of a pan-Caucasian
embrace between workers and capitalists still endures-were just too dark. Left-
ists would have to cope with the failure, yet again, of class unity in the face of
racism. Incorporating all of this into an analysis of America and the path forward
proved too much to ask. Instead, the response has largely been an argument aimed
at emotion-the summoning of the white working class, emblem of America’s
hardscrabble roots, inheritor ofits pioneer spirit, as a shield against the horrific and
empirical evidence of trenchant bigotry.

Packer dismisses the Democratic Party as a coalition of “rising professionals
and diversity.” The dismissal is derived from, of all people, Lawrence Summers,
the former Harvard president and White House economist, who last year labeled
the Democratic Party “a coalition of the cosmopolitan elite and diversity.” The
inference is that the party has forgotten how to speak on hard economic issues
and prefers discussing presumably softer cultural issues such as “diversity.” It’.s
worth unpacking what, precisely, falls under this rubric of “diversity”-resis-
tance to the monstrous incarceration oflegions of black men, resistance to the
destruction of health providers for poor women, resistance to the effort to de-
port parents, resistance to a policing whose sole legitimacy is rooted in brute
force, resistance to a theory of education that preaches “no excuses” to black
and brown children, even as excuses are proffered for mendacious corporate
executives “too big to jail.” That this suite of concerns, taken together, can be
dismissed by both an elite economist like Summers and a brilliant journalist like
Packer as “diversity” simply reveals the safe space they enjoy. Because of their
identity.

When Barack Obama came into office, in 2009, he believed that he could
work with “sensible” conservatives by embracing aspects of their policy as his
own. Instead he found that his very imprimatur made that impossible. Senate
Minority Leader Mitch McConnell announced that the GOP’s primary goal
was not to find common ground but to make Obama a “one-terin president.”
A health-care plan inspired by Romneycare was, when proposed by Obama,
suddenly considered socialist and, not coincidentally, a form of reparations. The
first black president found that he was personally toxic to the GOP base. An
entire political party was organized around the explicit aim of negating one

THE FIRST WHITE PRESIDENT 39

man. It was thought by Obama and some of his allies that this toxicity was
the result of a relentless assault waged by Fox News and right-wing talk radio.
Trump’s genius was to see that it was something more, that it was a hunger for
revanche so strong that a political novice and accused rapist could topple the
leadership of one major party and throttle the heavily favored nominee of the

other.
“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someb9dy and

I wouldn’t lose any voters,” Trump bragged in January 20i6. This statement should
be met with only a modicum of skepticism. Trump has mocked the disabled,
withstood multiple accusations of sexual violence (all of which he has denied), fired
an FBI director, sent his minions to mislead the public about his motives, person-
ally exposed those lies by boldly stating his aim to scuttle an investigation into _his
possible collusion with a foreign power, then bragged about that same obstructJ.on
to representatives of that same foreign power. It is utterly impossible to conjure a
black facsimile of Donald Trump—to imagine Obama, say, implicating an oppo-
nent’s father in the assassination of an American president or comparing his physi-
cal endowment with that of another candidate and then successfully capturing the
presidency. Trump, more than any other politician, understood the valence of the
bloody heirloom and the great power in not being a nigger.

But the power is ultimately suicidal. Trump evinces this, too. In a recent New
Yorker article, a former Russian military officer pointed out that interference in an
election could succeed only where “necessary conditions” and an “existing back-
ground” were present. In America, that “existing background” was a persistent rac-
ism, and the “necessary condition” was a black president. The two related factors
hobbled America’s ability to safeguard its electoral system. As late as July 2016, a
majority of Republican voters doubted that Barack Obama had been born in the
United States, which is to say they did not view him as a legitimate president.
Republican politicians acted accordingly, infamously denying his final Supreme
Court nominee a hearing and then, fatefully, refusing to work with the administra-
tion to defend the country against the Russian attack. Before the election, Obama
found no takers among Republicans for a bipartisan response, and Obama himself,
underestimating Trump and thus underestimating the power of whiteness, believed
the Republican nominee too objectionable to actually win. In this Obama was,
tragically, wrong. And so the most powerful country in the world has handed over
all its affairs-the prosperity of its entire economy; the security of its 300 million
citizens; the. purity of its water, the viability of its air, the safety of its food; the
future of its vast system of education; the soundness of its national highways, airways,
and railways; the apocalyptic potential of its nuclear arsenal-to a carnival barker
who introduced the phrase grab ’em by the pussy into the national lexicon. It is as if
the white tribe united in demonstration to say, “If a black man can be president, then
any white man-no matter how fallen-can be president:’ And in that perverse
way, the democratic dreams of Jefferson and Jackson were ful:filled.

The American tragedy now being wrought is larger than most imagine and
will not end with Trump. In recent times, whiteness as an overt political tactic has
been restrained by a kind of cordiality that held that its overt invocation would
scare off “moderate” whites. This has proved to be only half true at best. Trump’s

40 TA-NEHISI COATES

legacy will be exposing the patina of decency for what it is and revealing just how
much a demagogue can get away with. It does not take much to imagine another
politician, wiser in the ways ofWashington and better schooled in the methodol-
ogy of governance-and now liberated from the pretense of antiracist civility-
doing a much more effective job than Trump.

It has long been an axiom among certain black writers and thinkers that
while whiteness endangers the bodies of black people in the immediate sense,
the larger threat is to white people themselves, the shared country, and even the
whole world.

There is an impulse to blanch at this sort of grandiosity. When W E. B.
Du Bois claims that slavery was “singularly disastrous for modern civilization”
or James Baldwin claims that whites “have brought humanity to the edge of
oblivion: because they think they are white,” the instinct is to cry exaggera-
tion. But there really is no other way to read the presidency of Donald Trump.
The first white president in American history is also the most dangerous presi-
dent-and he is made more dangerous still by the fact that those charged
with analyzing him cannot name his essential nature, because they too are
implicated in it.

QUESTIONS FOR MAKING CONNECTIONS

WITHIN THE READING

1. Coates writes about a contemporary event-the election of Donald
Trump-but he does it in a way many readers might not appreciate.
Responding to the barrage of the President’s lies (more than five a day,
according to the New York Times), many journalists have chosen to put their
energies into countering the lies with facts-objective evidence. But in
“The First White President,” Coates takes a strikingly different approach by
historidzing the present. “Historicizing” means that he provides an historical
or “diachronic” context missing from responses that focus on the contem-
porary moment exclusively. Fighting lies with facts is essential work that
journalists should never abandon, but facts by themselves cannot explain
why some facts escape attention while others crowd out everything else.
Reread Coates’s essay, looking at the moments when he injects history into
the discussion. What effect do these moments have on your experience as a
reader? How do they change the way you understand contemporary events?

2. The most important term in Coates’s essay is, of course, “whiteness.” Underline
or highlight all the places where the word appears. What is “whiteness,”
according to Coates? Does he view it as a biological category or does he see as a
cultural and historical construct? What does it mean to say that whiteness is a
“cultural construct”? In other words, how did it get constructed, by whom and

THE FIRST WHITE PRESIDENT 41

for what purposes? Be sure to consider the relationship between race and class.
In what ways, according to Coates, did the invention of “whiteness” distract
working people of European descent from making common cause with other
working people? How did whiteness help to bolster the distinction between a
“worker” and a “slave”? What are the differences?

On the basis of your reading of the essay, would you define Coates as a 3. .
liberal or a Democrat? Would you define him as a conservative or a.
Republican? To what degree does he fit within any of these ca~ego~es?
What specifically does Coates have to say about lib_erals and :heir attitude~
towards black Americans? Describe the nature of his reservations about Bill
and Hillary Clinton. What seems to be his attitude towar~ liberal r~formers
like Senator Bernie Sanders, the political scientist Mark Lilla or the Journal-
ists Nicholas Kristof and George Packer? Do you think that Coates sees both
parties as complicit in the perpetuation of whiteness? Would h~ see them as
equally complicit or complicit in_ the s~~ wa,:s? Why does whiteness play
such an important role in Amencan political life?

QUESTIONS FOR WRITING

1. Drawing from the information that Coates provides, explain th~ m~_alof d
“whiteness.” As you develop your explanation, be sure to consider its soe1 an
cultural roles. What kinds of distinctions and divisions does “whiteness” create,
and how do those distinctions and divisions function in our society today? Who
benefits from the persistence of whiteness and who is disadvantaged? Why :iave
so many observers, progressive as well as conservative, attributed Trump’s victory
to working-class resentment instead of a racism that can be found ~ong all
classes, including the wealthiest and best educated? To what degree 1s the system
as a whole dependent on the existence of a racialized “other”?

2. Starting in 2015, the United States ceased t~ b~ classifi~d as a “:full dthemocra1′
by the Economist magazine’s respected Intelligence Urut (EIU). At e top o
the top of the EIU’s list of :full democracies were Norw~y, Icela~d, Sweden,
New Zealand and Denmark, with Ireland and Canada tied for sixth place.

The writers of the report explicitly say that Donald Trump is not t~
blame because he was a symptom, rather than the cause, of the country s
decline. The cause, they conclude, was a loss of trust in government:

By tapping a deep strain of political disaffection with the function-
ing of democracy, Mr. Trump became a beneficiary of the low
esteem in which US voters hold their government, elected repre-
sentatives, and political parties, but he was not responsible for a
problem that has had a long gestation.

42 TA-NEHISI COATES

What role might whiteness play in discrediting our political institutions? To
what degree is whiteness at odds with democracy itself? To what is it
an expression of democracy? Does the problem of whiteness force us to
choose between different definitions of democracy: democracy as equality
and democracy as majority rule?

QUESTIONS FOR MAKING CONNECTIONS

BETWEEN READINGS

1. In “Biographies of Hegemony,” anthropologist Karen Ho describes the
process of socialization that naturalizes inequality-that makes it seem “nat-
ural” and normal. People learn to accept that special privileges rightfully
belong to those endowed with “smartness”:

The “culture of smartness” is central to understanding Wall Street’s
financial agency, how investment bankers are personally and
institutionally empowered to enact their worldviews, export their
practices, and serve as models for far-reaching socioeconomic
change. On Wall Street, “smartness” means much more than indi-
vidual intelligence; it conveys a naturalized and sense of
“impressiveness,” of elite, pinnacle status and expertise which is
used to signify, even prove, investment bankers’ worthiness.

To what does the whiteness described by Coates also support a form
of “hegemony”? Explore the parallels between smartness and whiteness, but
also the ways they might differ. Is smartness also racialized? Does whiteness
rely on competition and merit to justify the advantages it conveys? Does
smartness do the same—or does it only appear to?

2. In his chapter, “Son,” Andrew Solomon introduces readers to two different
kinds of identity:

Because of the transmission of identity from one ie:ene1rao,on to the
next, most children share at least some traits with their parents.
These are vertical identities. Attributes and values are passed down
from parent to child across the generations not only through strands
of DNA but also through shared cultural norms. Ethnicity, for
example, is a vertical identity …. Often, however, someone has an
inherent or acquired trait that is foreign to his or her parents and
must therefore acquire identity from a peer group. This is a hori-
zontal identity …. Being gay is a horizontal identity.

THE FIRST WHITE PRESIDENT 43

To what degree does whiteness qualify as a horizontal identity, and to what
degree is it vertical? To what extei:t do :Whiteness and its correl~te, ~lackness,
complicate Solomon’s account of identity? Generally, people ~ent a
vertical identity whereas they chose a horizontal identity. Is this true of
whiteness? Is it true of blackness?

ALSO BY

SAIDIYA HARTMAN

Lose Your Mother

Scenes of Subjection

WA y-w A R D L I V ES ,
BEAUTIFUL

·E X P E R I M E N TS

Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls,

Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals

SAIDIYA HARTMAN

~
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Title: Wayward lives, beautiful experiments : intimate histories of social upheaval/

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young women-Sexual behavior-History, I Single women-United States-Social
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FOR BERYLE AND VIRGILIO HARTMAN

WHO I MISS EVERY DAY.

FOR HAZEL CARBY,

WHO OPENED THE DOOR.

‘

She was, she knew, in a queer indefinite way, a disturbing factor.

-NELLA LARSEN, Quicksand

A NOTE ON METHOD

At the turn of the twentieth century, young black women were in
open rebellion. They struggled to create autonomous and beautiful
lives, to escape the new forms of servitude awaiting them, and to live
as if they were free. This book recreates the radical imagination and
wayward practices of these young women by describing the world
through their eyes. It is a narrative written from nowhere, from the
nowhere of th_e ghetto and the nowhere of utopia.

Every historian of the multitude, the dispossessed, the subaltern,
and the enslaved is forced to grapple with the power and authority of
the archive and the limits it sets on what can be known, whose per­
spective m�.tters, and who is endowed with the gravity and authority
of historical actor. In writing this account of the wayward, I have
made use of a vast range of archival materials to represent the every­
day experience and restless character of life in the city, I recreate the
voices and use the words of these young women when possible and
inhabit the intimate dimensions of their lives. The aim is• to convey
the sensory experience of the city and to capture the rich landscape
of black social life. To this end, I employ a mode of close narration,
a style which places the voice of narrator and character in insepara­
ble relation, so that tl/.e visio’n, language, and rhythms of the way-

xiv A NOTE ON METHOD

ward shape and arrange the text. The itali�ized phrases and lines are
utterances from the chorus. This story is told from inside the circle.

All the characters and events found in this book are real; none are
invented. What I know about the lives of these young women has
been culled from the journals of rent collectors; surveys and mono­
graphs of sociologists; trial transcripts; slum photographs; reports
of vice investigators, social workers, and parole officers; inter­
views with psychiatrists and psychologists; and prison case files,
all of which represent them as a problem. (Some ,of the names have
been changed to protect confidentiality and as required by the use
of state archives.) I have crafted a counter-narrative liberated from
the judgment and classification that subjected young black women
to surveillance, arrest, punishment, and confinement, and offer an
account that attends to beautiful experiments-to make living an
art-undertaken by those often described as promiscuous, reck­
le�s, wild, and wayward. The endeavor is. to recover the insurgent
ground of these lives; to .exhume open rebellion from the case file, to
untether waywardness, refusal, mutual aid, and free love from their
identification as deviance, criminality, and pathology; to affirm free
motherhood (reproductive choice), intimacy outside the institution
of marriage, and queer and outlaw passions; and to illuminate the
radical imagination and everyday anarchy of ordinary colored girls,
which has not only been overlooked, but is nearly unimaginable.

Wayward Lives elaborates, augments, transposes, and breaks open
archival documents so they might yield a richer picture of the social
upheaval that transformed black social life in the twentieth century.
The goal is to understand and experience the world as these young
women did, to learn from what they know. I prefer to think of this
book as the fugitive text of the way�ard, and it is marked by the
errantry that it describes. In this spirit, I have pressed at the limits
of the case file and the document, speculated about what might have
been, imagined the things whispered i� dark bedrooms, and ampli-

· A NOTE ON METHOD xv

fied moments of withholding, escape and possibility, moments when
the vision and dreams of the wayward seemed possible.

Few, then or now, recognized young black women as sexual mod­
ernists, free lovers, radicals, and anarchists, or realized that the flap­
per was a pal� imitation of the ghetto girl. They have been credited
with nothing: they remain surplus women of no significance, girls
deemed unfit for history and destined to be minor figures. This book
is informed by a different set of values and recognizes the revolution­
ary ideals that animated ordinary lives. It explores the utopian long­
ings and the promise of a future world that resided in waywardness
�nd the refusal to be governed.

The album assembled here is an archive of the exorbitant, a dream
book for existing otherwise. By attending to these lives, a very unex­
pected story of the twentieth century emerges, one that offers an inti­
mate chronicle of black radicalism, an aesthetic al and riotous history
of colored girls and their experiments with freed�m-a revolution
before Gatsby. For the most part, the history and the potentiality of
their life-World has remained unthought because no one could con­
ceive of young black women as social visionaries and innovators in
the world in which these acts took place. The decades between 1890
and 1935 were decisive in determining the course of black futures.
A revolution in a minor key unfolded in the city and young black
women were the vehicle. This upheaval or transformation of black
intimate life was the consequence of economic exclusion, material
deprivation, racial enclosure, and social dispossession; yet it, too,
was fueled by the vision of a future world and what might be.

The wild idea that animates this book is that young black women
were radical thinkers who tirelessly imagined other ways to live and
never failed to consider how the world might be otherwise.

The Anarchy of Colored Girls

Assembled in a Riotous Manner

E
sther Brown did not write a political tract on the refusal to be
governed; or draft a plan for mutual aid· or outline a memoir

. of her sexual adv.entures. A �anifesto of the �ayward-Own
Nothing. Refuse the Given. Live on What You Need and No More. Get

Ready to Be Free-was not found among the items in her case file.
She didn’t pen any song lines: My mama says I’m reckless, My daddy
says I’m wild, I ain’t good looking, but I’m somebody’s angel child. She
didn’t commit to paper her ruminations on freedom: With human
nature caged in a narrow space, whipped daily into submission, how

can we speak of potentialities? The cardboard placards for the tumult
and upheaval she incited might have said: “Don’t mess with me. I
am not afraid to smash things up.” But hers was a struggle without
formal declarations of.policy, slogan, or cr_edo. It required no party
platform or ten-point program. Walking through the streets of New
York, she and Emma Goldman crossed paths but failed to recognize
each other. When Hubert Harrison encountered her in the lobby
of the ·Renaissance Casino after he delivered his lecture on “Mar-

.
‘

riage Versus Free Love” for the Socialist Club, he noticed only that
she had a pretty face and a big ass. Esther never pulled a soapbox
onto the corner of r35th Street and Lenox Avenue to make ,fl speech

230 WAYWARD LIVES, BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS

about autonomy, the global reach of the color line, involuntary ser­
vitude, free motherhood, or the promise of a future world, but she
well understood that the desire to move as she wanted was nothing
short of treason. She knew first-hand that the offense most punished
by the state was trying to live free. To wander through the streets of
Harlem,, to, want better than what she had, and to be propelled by
her whims and desires was to be ungovernable. Her way of living was
nothing short of anarchy.

Had anyone ever found the rough notes for reconstruction jotted
in the marginalia of her grocery list or correlated the numbers cir­
cled most often in her dog-eared dream book with routes of escape
not to be found in McNally’s atlas or seen the love letters written
to her girlfriend about how they would live at the end of the world,
the master philosophers and cardholding radicals, in all likelihood,
would have said that her analysis was insufficient, dismissed her for
f�iling to understand those key passages in the Grundrisse about the
ex-slave’s refusal to work.and emphasized the limits of black femi­
nist politics. They have ceased to be slaves, but not in order to become
wage labourers, she had amen-ed in enthusiastic agreement at all the
wrong places, content with producing only what is strictly necessary for
their own consumption and embraced wholeheartedly indulgence and
idleness as the real luxury good.

What did untested militants and smug ideolog�es know of Truth
. and Tubman? Unlike unruly colored women, they failed to recognize
that experience was capable of opening up new ways, yielding a thou­
sand new forms and improvisations. Could they ever understand the
dreams of another world that didn’t trouble the. distin�tion between
state, law, settler, and master? Or recount the struggle against servi­
tude, captivity, property, and enclosure that began in the barracoon
and continued on the ship, where some fought, some jumped, some
refused to eat. Others set the plantation and the fields on fire, poi-·
soned the master. They had never listened to Lucy Parsons; they
had never read Ida B. Wells. Or envisioned th,e riot as a rally cry

i
f;
i
I,,:;·,
:,{‘

1′!,’
‘

I\’·.

THE ANARCHY OF COLORED GIRLS ASSEMBLED IN A RIOTOUS MANNER 231

and refusal of fungible life. Only a misreading of the key texts of
anarchism· could ever imci.gine a place for wayward colored girls.
No, Kropotkin never described black women’s mutual aid societies
or the chorus in Mutual Aid, although he imagined animal social­
ity in its rich varieties and the forms of cooperation and �utuaHty

232 WAYWARD LIVES, BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS

fol\nd among ants, monkeys, and ruminants. Impossible, recalci-

trant domestics weren’t yet in his view or anyone else’s. So Esther

Brown’s minor history ofinsurrection went unnoted until she was

apprehended by the police. (It would be a decade and a half before

Ella Baker and Marvel Cooke wrote their essay, “The Bronx Slave

Market,” and over two decades before Claudia Jones’s “An End to

the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman.”) The revolt of

black women against “the personal degradation of their work” and

“unjust labor conditions,” expressed itself in militant refusals: msol- ·

diering,’ sullenness, petty pilfering, unreliability, and fast and fruit-

less changes of masters.” Yet it had no chronicler. None responded

to the call to write the great servant-girl noveL

It is not surprising that a Negress would be guilty of conflating
idleness with resistance or exalting the struggle for mere survival or

confusing petty acts for insurrection or imagining that a minor fig-

ure might be cap~ble of some significant shit or mistaking laziness

and inefficiency for a gen~ral strike or recasting theft as a kind of

cheap socialism for too-fast girls and questionable women or esteem-

ing wild ideas as radical thought. At best, the case of Esther Brown

provides another example of the tendency to exaggeration and excess

that is common to the race (and further proof of the fanciful think-

ing that mistakes loafing and shirking for embodied protest and a

flock of black girls at rest for radical assembly). Nobody remembers

the evening she and her friends raised hell on 132nd Street or turned

out Edmond’s Cellar or made such a beautiful noise during the riot

that their screams and shouts were improvised music, so that even

the tone-deaf journalists from the New York Times described the

black noise of disorderly women as a jazz chorus.

Esther Brown hated to work, the conditions of work as much as the

very idea of work. Her reasons for quitting said as much. Housework:

Wages too small. Laundry work: Too hard, ran away. General house-

THE ANARCHY OF COLORED GIRLS ASSEMBLED IN A RIOTOUS MANNER

233

work: Tired of work. Sewing buttons on shirts: Tired of work. Dish-
washer: Tired of work. Housework: Man too cross. Live-in service:
I might as well be a slave.

At age fifteen, when Esther left school, she experienced the vio-

lence endemic to domestic work and tired quickly of the demand to

care for others who didn’t care for you. She ran the streets because

nowhere else in. the world was there anything for her. She stayed in

the streets to escape the suffocation of her mother’s small apartment,

which was packed with lodgers, men who took up too much space

and who were too easy with their hands, men who might molest

a girl, then propose to marry her. She had been going around and

mixing it up for a few years, but only because she liked doing it. She

never went with men only for money. She was no prostitute. After

the disappointment of a short-lived marriage to a ~an who wasn’t

her baby’s father (he had offered to marry her, but she rejected his

‘proposal), sh!:! went to live with her sister and grandmother, and they

helped raise her son. She had several lovers to whom she was bound
by need and want, not by the law.

Esther’s only luxury was idleness, and she was fond of saying to

her friends, “If you get up in the morning and feel tired, go back
to sleep and then go to the theatre at night.” With the support of

her sister and grandmother and help from friends, lovers, dates, and

consorts, she didn’t need to work on a regular basis. She picked up

day work when she was in a pinch and endured a six-week stretch

of “Yes, Missus, I’ll get to it” when coerced by need. So really, she

was doing fine and had nearly perfected the art ~f surviving without

having to scrape and bow .. She hated being a seryant, as did every

general house worker. Service carried the stigma of slavery; white

girls sought to avoid it for the same reason-it was nigger work, the

kind of hard, unskilled work no one else wanted the kind of work ‘ .
that possessed the entire person, not just her labor-time but her life-

time. The servant in the house-the ubiquitous figure of the captive

maternal-was conscripted to be friend, hurse, ,confidan~e, nanny,

234 WAYWARD LIVES, BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS

and bed-warmer. The insult was that she was expected to be grate-

ful, as if ‘cooking and scrubbing w~re the colored woman’s piano

day, as if her sole talents were the ability to “wash and iron until her

fingers bled and burned” and sacrificial devotion. Had her employers

suspected that the better the servant, the more severe the hatred of

th; mistress, Esther would not have been “entrusted to care for their

precious darlings.”

Why should she toil in a kitchen or laundry in order to survive?

Why should she work herself to the bone? She preferred strolling

along Harlem’s wide avenues to staying home and staring at four

walls, and enjoyed losing herself in cabarets and movie houses. The

streets offered .a display of talents and ambitions. An everyday cho-

reography of the possible unfolded in the collective movement, which

was headless and spilling out in all directions, strollers drifted en

masse, like a swarm or the swell of an ocean; it was a long poem of

black hunger and striving. It was the wild ru~h from house service on

the part of all who [could] scramble or run. It was. a manner of walking

that threatened to undo the city, steal back the body, break all the

windows. The people ambling through the block and passing time

on corners and hanging out on front steps were an assembly of the

· wretched and the visionary, the indolent and the dangerous. All the

modalities sing a part in this chorus, and the refrains were of infinite

variety. The rhythm and stride announced the possibilities, even if

most were fleeting and too often unrealized. The map of what might

be was not restricted f o the literal trail of Esther’s footsteps or any-
one else’s, and this unregulated movement encouraged the belief that

something.great could happen despite everything you knew, despite

the ruin and the obstacles. What might be was unforeseen, and

improvisation was the art of reckoning with chance and accident.
I .

Hers was an errant path cut through the heart of Harlem in search

of the open city, l’ouverture, inside the ghetto. Wandering and drift-

ing was bow she engaged the world and how she understood it; this

repertoire of practices composed her knowledge. Her thoughts were

THE ANARCHY OF COLORE.D GIRLS ASSEMBLED IN A RIOTOUS MANNER 235

indistinguishable from the transirnt rush and flight of black folks in

this city-within-the-city. The flow of it carried everyone along, pro-

pelled and encouraged all to keep on moving,

.. As she drifted through the streets, a thous~nd ideas about who she

might be and what she might do rushed’ into her head, but she was

uncertain what to make of them. Her thoughts were inchoate, frag-

mentary, wild. How they might become a blueprint for something

better was unclear. Esther was fiercely intelligent. She had a bright,

alert face and piercing eyes that announced her interest in the world.

This combined with a noticeabl~ pride made the seventeen-year-old

.appear substantial, a force in her own right. Even the white teachers

at the training school, who disliked her and were reluctant to give

a colored girl any undue praise, conceded that she was very smart,

although quick to anger because of too mu~h pride. She insisted on

being treated no differently from the white girls, so they said she had

a bad attitude. The problem was not her capacity; it was her attitude.

The brutality she experienced at the Hudson Training School for

Girls taught her to fight back, to strike out. The teachers told the

authorities that she had enjoyed too much freedom. It had ruined

her and made her into the kind of young woman who would not hes-

itate to smash things up. Freedom in her hands, if not a crime, was an

offense, and a threat to public order and moral decency. Excessive

liberty had ruined her. The social worker concurred, “With no soci~l

considerations to constrain her, she was ungovernable.”

Esther Brown longed for another world. She was hungry f~r more,

for otherwise, for better. She was hungry for beauty. In her case,

the aesthetic wasn’t a realm separate and distinct from the daily

· challenges of survival; rather, the aim was to make an art of sub-

sistence. She did not try to cr~ate a poem or song or painting. What

she created was Esther Brown. That was the offering, the bit of art,

that could not come from any other. She would polish and hone that. She

236 WAYWARD LIVES, BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS

would celebrate that every day something had tried to kill her and failed.
She would make a beautiful life. What is beauty, if not “the intense

sensation of being pulled toward the animating force of life?” Or the

yearning “to bring things into relation … with a kind of urgency as

· though one’s life depended upon it.” Or the love of the black ordi-

nary? Or the capacity to make what we do and how we do it into sus-
tenance and shield? What Negro doesn’t know that a few verses of

song might be capable of stoking the hunger to live, might be the

knowledge of freedom that leads you out of the enclosur~? Brings

you back from the dead or kills you a second time? Who could fail to

understand seeking a way out, inhabiting a loophole of retreat, and

escaping the imposed life as anything else, anything but beautiful?
To the eyes of the world, Esther’s wild thoughts,, her dreams of

an otherwise, an elsewhere, her longing to escape from drudgery

were likely to lead to tumult and upheaval, to open rebellion. She

didn’t need a husband or a daddy or a boss telling her what to do.

But a young woman who flitted from job to job and lover to lover

was considered immoral and likely to become a threat to the social

order, a menace to society. The police detective said as much when

he arrested Esther and her friends.

What the law designated as crime were the forms of life created by

young black women in the city. The modes of intimacy and affil-

iation being fashioned, the refusal to labor, the ordinary forms of

gathering and assembly, the practices of subsistence and making do

were under surveillance and targeted not only by the police but· also

by the sociologists and the reformers who gathered the information

and made the case against them, forging their lives into tragic biog-

raphies of crime and pathology. Subsistenc~-the art of scraping by

and getting over-entailed an ongoing struggle to live in a context in

which deprivation was taken for granted and domestic work or gen-

eral housework defined the only opportunity available to black girls

THE ANARCHY OF COLORED GIRLS ASSEMBLED IN A RIOTOUS MANNER 237

and worrien. The acts of the wayward-the wild thoughts, reckless

dreams, interminable protests, spontaneous strikes, riotous behavior,

nonparticipation, willfulness, and bold-faced refusal-redistributed

the balance of need and want and sought a line of escape from debt

and dui:y in the attempt to create a path elsewhere.

Mere s.urvival .was an achievement in a context so brutal. How

could one enhance life or speak of its potentialities when confined

in the ghetto, when subjected daily to racist assault and insult, and

conscripted to servitude? How can I live?-It was a question Esther
reckoned with·every day. Survival required acts of collaboration and

genius, guessing at the unforeseen. Esther’s imagination was geared

toward the clarification of life-‘1what would sustain material life

and enhance it, something that entailed more than the reproduction

of physical existence.” The mutuality and creativity necessary to sus-

tain living in the context of intermittent wages, controlled depletion,

•-· economic exclusion, coercion, and antiblack violence often bordered

on the extralegal and the criminal. Esther’s beautiful, wayward ·

experiments entailed an “open rebellion” against the world.

She had been working for two· days as a live-in domestic on Long

Island when she decided to return to Harlem to see her baby and

have some fun. It was the summer and Harlem was alive. She visited

her son and grandmother, but stayed at her friend Josephine’s place

because she always had a houseful drinking and carousing. Esther

had planned to return to her job the next day, but one day stretched

into several. People tended to lose track of time atJosephine’s place.

5 West 134th Street had a reputation as a building for lovers’ secret

assignations, house parties, and gambling. The apartment was in

the thick of it, right off Fifth Avenue in the blocks of Harlem sub-

ject to frequent police raids .and tightly packed with crowded tene-

ments, which offered refuge to runaway domestics and recalcitrant

black girls; with as many as eight to ten persons cro~ded iiJ two

238 WAYWARD LIVES, BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS

rooms, they flocked together forming transient communes, pooling

their meager resources and sharing dreams. She was playing cards

when Rebecca arrived with Krause, who said he had a friend he ·

wanted Esther to meet. She didn’t feel like going out, but they kept

pestering her, and Josephine encouraged her to give it a try. Why not

have some fun?

Do you want to have a good time? Brady asked. Rebecca gave him

the once-over. Esther didn’t care one way or the other. A smile and

the promise of some fun was all the encouragement Rebecca needed.

Krause would go anywhere as long as he could get a drink. Rebecca

took Brady’s arm and the others followed, aimless but determined

to have a good time. If a man half-looked at her she would light up.
·Rebecca’s free-floating lust was not directed at any one person. She

liked company as much as Esther, maybe even more. When she was

in school, the teachers often discovered her hiding out in a closet

or hallway, locked in a tight embrace and kissing some boy. She

had been “going a1;ound”.since she was fourteen or fifteen. Others ·

might have called her a “charity girl,” because she acc~pted presents

from her friends. All the girls did. She hardly ever asked for money,

although there was no clear line between desire and nec~ssity. Sex

wasn’t cordoned off from the need to live, eat, have a roof over your

head and clothes for you and your baby; it explained why the names

of lovers and husbands and baby’s fathers were not the same. More

than anything else, Rebecca loved going to moving picture shows

and the theater, and her friends supported such pleasures. Rebecca

had moved in with Josephine after her man Dink caught her at the

picture show with another man. He cut her, but still pleaded his love,

saying if she would do right, then he’d marry her. But she wasn’t one

of those He beats me too, what can I do? Oh my man I love him so kind

of women. Nobody owned her. As quick as she could pack up her

things, she moved out of the rented room where they had been living

for the past six months and walked a few blocks up Madison Avenue

to Josephine’s place.

THE ANARCHY OF COLORED GIRLS ASSEMBLED IN A RIOTOUS MANNER 239

Brady didn’t want to go to Josephine’s place and said anywhere

else would do. A tenement hallway was as good as any lounge. In the

dark passage, Brady snuggled up with Rebecca, while his friend tried

to pair up with Esther. Krause asked Brady for fifty cents to go buy

some liquor. That was when Brady said he was a detective. Krause

took off quick, as if he knew what was coming as soon as the man

opened his mouth. He would have gotten away if Brady hadn’t shot
him in the foot.

At the precinct, Detective Brady charged Krause with white slav-

ery (the.trafficking of women or girls for the purposes of prostitution

. or debauchery) and Esther and Rebecca with violation of the Tene-

ment House Law. They were taken from the precinct to the Women’s

Court at the Jefferson Market Courthouse for arraignment. Because

they were seventeen years old and had no previous offenses, they

were sent to the Empire Friendly Shelter while they awaited trial,

rather than being confined in the prison cells adjoining the Jefferson

courthouse. At the shelter, they cut up, dancing lewdly, cursing at

the other girls,· shouting at the windows to the people passing by,

clowning folks, noting the virtues and defects of strangers, berating

someone if he or $he daredto look offended.

-Who you trying to be all dressed up like Mrs. Astor’s horse?

-Hey you, yeah you, this ain’t Virginia looking like a field
· hand in those clodhoppers.

-Off-brand nigger.

-You could ~uy that one for a quarter.

…:_ Hey baby, you can haul my ashes.

-That dicty bitch thinks she cute.

-What the hell you looking at?-,

-Hey sweet poppa, I could put a hurtin’ on you.

Esther ,was considered the worse of the two. As an unwed mother,

she was deemed an outlaw, a pariah for procreating outside ,marriage

240 WAYWARD LIVES, BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS

and bringing a nameless bastard into the world. Her parents had

set a better example than this. They had been married, but after

her father died, her mother and grandmother were forced to work

as live-in domestics, so she and her sister were sent to the Colored

Orphan’s Asylum for four years .. There were rules and codes regu- .

lating the conditions under which children should be conceived and

she had violated those codes. She had “thrown herself away” and

given birth to. a chance creature. Pregnancy could be made a status

offense. Maternal neglect and improper guardianship were the eas-

iest ways to “catch a case” at the Society for the Prevention of Cru-

elty to Children, and protection was the fast route to the reformatory

and the prison.

A week of observing Esther and Rebecca’s wild conduct was

enough to convince the social worker, an avowed socialist, that the

two young women should be sent away to be rescued from a life in the

streets. They were waiting to appear before the judge when Krause

sent word he was free. The detective failed to appear in court, so the

charges against him were dismissed. Esther and Rebecca wouldn’t

be so lucky. It was hard to call the cursory proceedings and routine

indifference at the Women’s Court a hearing, bec~use the court had

no jury, produced no written re·cord of the events, required no evi-

dence but the police officer’s word, and failed to consider the inten-

tions of the accused, or even to require committing a criminal act.

The likelihood of future criminality, rather than any violation of.the
law, determined their sentence. The magistrate judge barely looked

at the two colored girls before sentencing them to three years at the

reformatory.

Until the night of July 17, 1917, Esther Brown had been lucky and

eluded the police, although all the while she had been under their

gaze. Harlem was swarming with vice investigators and undercover

detectives and do-gooders who were all intent on keeping young

THE ANARCHY OF COLORED GIRLS ASSEMBLED IN A RIOTOUS MANNER 241

black women off the streets, even if it meant arresting every last

· one of them. Being too loud or loitering in the hallway of your build-

ing or on the front stoop was a violation of the law; making a date

with someone you met at the club, or arranging a casual hook up, or

running the streets was prostitution. The mere willingness to have

a good time with a stranger was sufficient evidence of wrongdoing.

The court, like the police, discerned in this exercise of will “a strug-

gle to transform one’s existence,” to stand against or defy the norms

of social order, and anticipated that this non-compliance and disobe-

dience easily yielded to crime. “The history of disobedience,” enacted

. in every gesture and claimed in the way Esther moved through the
world, announced her willingness “to be ruined by standing against

what is instituted as right by law.”

The only way to counter the presumption of criminality and estab-

lish innocence was to give a good account of oneself. Esther failed to

~do this, as did many yourtg women who passed through th,~ court.

They failed to realize that the readiness or inclination to have a good

tiine was evidence enough to find them guilty of prostitution. It didn’t

_matter that Esther _had not solicited Krause or asked for or accepted

any money. She assumed she was innocent, but the Women’s Court

found otherwise. Esther’s inability to give an account th.at would

justify and explain how she lived, or atone for her failures and devi-

ations, ·was among the offenses levied against her. She readily admit-

ted that she hated to work, not bothering to distinguish between the

conditions of work available to her and some ideal of work that she

and none she knew had e~er experienced. She was convicted because

,she was unemployed and “leading the life of a prostitute.” One could

lead the life of a prostitute without actually being one.

With no proof of employment, Esther was indicted for vagrancy

under the Tenement House Law. Vagrancy was an expa~sive and vir-

tually ail-encompassing category; like the manner of walking in Fer-
guson, it was a ubiquitous charge that made it easy for the police to

arrest and prosecute young women with no evidence of crime or act

242 WAYWARD LIVES, BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS

of lawbreaking. In the 19ros and 1920s, vagrancy statutes were used

primarily to target young women for prostitution. To be charged was

to be sentenced because nearly 80 percent of those who appeared

before the magistrate judge were sentenced to serve time; some years

the rate of conviction was as high as 89 percent. It didn’t matter

if it was your first encounter with the law. Vagrancy statutes and

the Tenement House Law made ·young black women vulnerable to

arrest. What mattered was not what you had done, but the prophetic

power of the police to predict the future, and anticipate·the mug shot

in the bright eyes and intelligent face of Esther Brown.

The first vagrancy statute was passed in England in 1394. The

shortage of labor in the aftermath of the Black Death inspired the

law. Its aim was clear: to conscript those who refused to work. The

vagrarn;:y laws of England were adopted in the North American col-

onies and invigorated with. a new force and scope after Emancipation

and the demise of Reconstruction. They replaced the Black Codes,

· which had been deemed unconstitutional. Vagrancy laws resurrected

involuntary servitude in guises amenable to the principles of liberty

and equality.
In ~he south, vagrancy laws became a surrogate for slavery, forc-

ing ex-slaves to remain on the plantation and radically restricting

their movement. In the north, vagrancy statutes were intended to

· compel the labor of the idle, and, more importantly, to control the

propertyless, by denying them the right to subsist and elude the con-

tract. Those without proof of employment were considered likely

to commit or be involved in vice and crime. Vagrancy statutes pro-

vided the legal means to master th~ newly masterless. The origins of

the workhouse and the house of correction can be traced to these

efforts to force the recalcitrant to labor, to manage and regulate the

ex-serf and ex-slave when lordship and bondage assumed a more

indirect form.

THE ANARCHY OF COLORED GIRLS ASSEMBLED IN A RIOTOUS MANNER 243

Vagrancy was a status, not a crime. It was not doing, withholding,

nonparticipation, the refusal to be settled or bound by contract to

employer (or husband). Common law defined the vagrant as “some-

one who wandered about witho~t visible means of support.” William

Blackstone in his 1765 Commentaries on the Law of England defined

vagrants as those who “wake on the night and sleep in the day and

· haunt taverns and ale-houses and roust about; and no man knows

from where they came or whither they go.” The statutes targeted

those who maintained excessive notions of freedom and imagined

that liberty included the right not to work. In short, vagrants were

· the deraci~ated-migrants, wanderers, fugitives, displaced persons,

a11:d strangers.

Status offenses were critical to the remaking of a racist order in

the aftermath of Emancipation and they accelerated the growing

disparity between black and white rates of incarceration in north-

ern cities at the beginning of the twentieth century. While the legal

transformation from slavery to freedom is most often narrated as

the shift fr.om status to race, from property to subject, from slave to

Negro, vagrancy statutes make apparent the continuities and entan-

glements between a diverse range of unfree states-from slave to ser-,,
vant, from servant to vagrant, from domestic to prisoner, from idler

to. convict and felon. Involuntary servitude wasn’t one condition-

chattel slavery-nor was it fixed in time and place; rather, it was an

ever-changing mode of exploitation, domination, accumulation (the

severing of will, the theft of capacity, the appropriation of life), and

confinement. Antiblack racisfll fundamentally shaped the develop-

ment of “status criminality.” In turn, status criminality was tethered

ineradicably to blackness.

Esther Brown was confronted with a choice that was no choice at

all: Volunteer for servitude or be commanded by the law. Vagrancy

statutes were implemented and expanded to conscript youf\g colored

2,14 WAYWARD LIVES, BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS

women to domestic work and regulate them in proper households-

most often white homes, or male-headed households, with a proper

he, not merely someone pretending to be a husband or merely outfit-

ted like a man, not lovers passing for sisters or a pretend Mrs. shack-

ing up with a boarder, not households comprised of three women and

a child. For state authorities, black homes were disorderly houses

because they were marked by the taint of promiscuity and illegality.

The domestic was the locus of prostitution and criminality. Is this

man your husband? Where is the father of your child? Why is your

child unattended? Such questions, if not answered properly, might

land you in the workhouse or reformatory. The discretionary power

granted the police in discerning future crime would have an enormous

impact on black social life and the making of a new racial order.

The letter her ex-husband sent didn’t say if the article appeared in
\

the metro column of the,Amsterqam News or the “New York City

Brief” in the Chicago Defender or the City News section 9f the New

York Herald, in which event only a few lines dedicated to the when,

where, and how would have appeared, just the cold, hard facts. It
h

would not have been a showy or sensationalist headline like “Silks

and Lights Blamed for Harlem Girls’ Delinquency” or “Lure for

Finery Lands Girl in Jail” or a lead story of moral crisis and sexual

panic manufactured by vice commissions and urban reformers. If the
details were especially sordid, a column or two might be devoted to’

the particulars of a young woman’s fall.

All her ex-husband said was that “a rush of sadness and disbe-

lief” had washed over him as he tried to figure out how his Esther,

his baby, had come to be involved in such trouble. He encouraged

her to be a good girl and he’ promised to take care of her when she

was released, something he had failed to do in the few months they

lived together as husband and wife in her mother’s home. Now that

it was too late, he was trying to be steady. The letter was posted on

THE ANA.RCHY OF COLORED GIRLS ASSEMBLED IN A RIOTOUS MANNER. 245

•• .. · l Ori ACTlVESE.RVICE.WfTH ,·,·•
Alt’IERICAtt/EXPEOITIONARY fORtt~ …

U.S. Army stationery and it was filled with assurances about his love,

promises about trying to be a better man, and pleading that she try to

do better. You will not live happy, he cautioned, until [your] wild world

end. He hoped she had learned a long lost lesson in the wild world of fun

and pleasure.
\

Esther’s grandmother and sisters didn’t know she had been

arrested until they saw her name in the daily paper. They were in

246 WAYWARD LIVES, BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS

disbelief. It wasn’t true. It couldn’t be. Anyone in Harlem could tell

you that stool pigeons were paid to lie. Everyone knew Krause was

working for the cops. He would sell his own mama for a dollar: Sto-

ries appeared in the newspapers about stool pigeons framing inno-

cent young women and matrons, sometimes to extort money from

them or to be paid directly by the police for their service. Besides, if

anyone was to blame for Esther’s trouble, her grandmother thought,

it was her mother, Rose. She was jealous of the girl, mostly because

of the attention paid to Esther by the men boarding in the rented

rooms of her flat. Rose was living with one of them as her husband,

although the relation, properly speaking, was outside the bounds

of the law.

When Rose heard the news of her daughter’s arrest, it confirmed

what she believed: The girl was headed for trouble. Some time in the

country and not running the streets might steady her, she confided to

the social worker, tipping the hand that would decide her daughter’s

fate. What passed for maternal concern was a long list of complaints

about Esther’s manner of living. Rose told the colored probation

officer, Miss Grace Campbell, that her daughter had “never worked

more than six weeks at a time and usually stayed- in a place only a

couple of weeks.” She just wouldn’t stay put or keep a job. She had

a good husband and she left him. She was young and flighty and did

not want to be tied down to one husband, one man, any man. What

more· was there to say? Esther just wanted to have her own way.

The neighbors told a different story. The mother is the one wh~

needed to be sent away. Everyone ~new Rose Saunders consorted

with one of the men who lodged in her apartment. “What kind of

example is that for a girl? That’s no straight road.”

The letter from Esther’s girlfriend was nothing like her husband’s.

It didn’t plead for her to be a good girl or beg her to leave the wild

world behind or caution her to take the straight road, but reminded

her instead of all the pleasures awaiting her when she received her

free pa~ers, not the least of these being Alice’s love:

THE ANARCHY OF COLORED GIRLS ASSEMBLED IN A RIOTOUS MANNER 247

Dear Little Girl, Just a Jew lines to let you know that everything is o. k. I

suppose you think I was foolish to leave Peekskill but I could not stand the

work. {have not been used to working so hard when I leave Bedford and

why should I do so when I don’t have to, you stay where you are as you

expect to live in New York when you are free . … It will surprise you, I

am going to be married next month, not that I care much [for him] but

/or protection. I went to New York Sunday and seen quite a number of old

friends and heard all the scandal and then some .. .. New York is wide

open, plenty of white stuff & everything you want so cheer up there are

plenty of good tim,es in store /or you. So I must close with the same old love

. wishing you’well.

Within a few weeks of Esther’s release, she and Alice reconnected

with their friend Harriet Powell. They crashed at her place until they

could find a place of their own. Harriet’s mother welcomed both

girls, not caring that one of them was white. They enjoyed a wild

time in the city, making.up for the twenty-Jive months stolen, danc-

. ing until nearly dawn, going to the theatre and the movies, eating at

chop-suey joints, and keeping company with whoever they wanted,

at least until the parole officer found them. “Both w,ere free and nei-

ther good,” Miss Murphy told their employer at the midtown hotel,

making sure that the head housekeeper knew exactly what kind of

girls they were. She began with the word dangerous.

Not quite two centuries after the conspiracy to burn down New

York was hatched at a black-and-tan dive called Hughson’s Tav-

ern, the city’s ruling elite still lived in fear of black assembly and

the threat of revolt. The state was no less intent on preventing the

dangers and consequences posed by Negroes assembled in a riotous

manner. In the eighteenth century, slaves and free blacks who gath-

ered in illegal assemblies were whipped. A 1731 “Law for Regulating

Negroes & Slaves in Night Time” prohibited Negro, Mulatto, or

248 WAYWARD LIVES, BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS

‘Indian slaves older than fourteen years old to be about at night with-

out a lantern or lighted candle so that they could be plainly seen.

No more than three slaves could meet together on penalty of being

whipped not more than forty lashes. For “playing or making any

hooting or disorderly noise” the penalty was twenty lashes. Every

social gathering provided an opportunity for potential conspiracy.

In the twentieth century, the unregulated movement and assem-

bly of black folks remained a matter of public safety. Gatherings

that were too loud or too unruly or too queer-or venues like hotels

and cabarets that welcomed black and white patrons; black-and-tan

dives frequented by Chinese men and white girls or black women

with Italian paramours or women who preferred dancing with each

other-were deemed disorderly, promiscuous, and morally depraved.

These forms of free association and open assembly threatened the .

public good by trangressing the color line and eschewing the dom-

inant mores. The governing elite, targeting this promiscuous soci-

ality, manufactured a moral panic to justify the extravagant use of-

police power.

Wealthy private citizens endowed with the authority of the state

and directing the police, ruled the Committee of Fourteen (the vice

commission comprised of rich New Yorkers and reformers) and ran

the State Board of Charities and State Prison Commission. One

of their central goals, beyond dominating the propertyless, was

to impose racial segregation in the absence of legislative decree at

the state or city level. Segregation was seen as a way to maintain

the health and morality of the social body and police power was

critical to achieving this goal. In the most general terms, police

power endows -the state with the capacity to regulate behavior and

enforce order in the service of the public good. Policing blackness

was deemed essential to ensuring the health of the social body and

minimizing danger. In the eyes of the city’s ruling elite, racial seg-

regation was synonymous with the public good, and the imposition

of the color line a means of controlling crime by funneling prostitu-

THE ANARCHY OF COLORED GIRLS ASSEMBLED IN A RIOTOUS MANNER 249

tion, gambling, drugs, and other vice into black neighborhoods and

containing it there.
In 1912, the Committee of Fourteen refused to grant the Mar-

shall Hotel a liquor license. It was a gathering spot for progressive

intellectuals, artists, and musicians. Paul Laurence Dunbar resided

there. W; E. B. Du Bois and Mary White Ovington and other mem-

bers of .the NAACP gathered there for conversation, for drinks, for

planning to undo the color line. A letter from Du Bois stating that

it was a respectable meeting place and assuring the committee that

there was nothing illegal or unseemly about the interracial encoun-

. ters and m~etings hosted there failed to sway the committee. The

Marshall Hotel was one of the few decent establishments in the city

that welcomed ot tolerated a mixed crowd. Du Bois was not able to

convince the committee that the 1\farshall Hotel was not a haunt

for the degenerate. Interracial intimacy and friendship across the

;olor line, not prostitution; were the issues with which the com-

mittee was most concerned. As the executive secretary, Frederick

Whitten, explained in his reply: The Marshall Hotel encouraged

“the unfortunate mixing of the races which when individuals are of

the ordinary class, always means danger.” When Du Bois objected to

this moral defense of the color line, especially as it violated the civil

rights laws of New York state, the secretary only affirmed the com-

mittee’s position: “If we find that the association of the two races
under certain conditions results in disorderly conditions and their

separation results in discrimination based on rai:;e or color, we must

choose between the horns of the dilemma …. Disorderly is worse than

discrimination.”

The Tenement House Law was the chief legal i1;1.strument for the
surveillance and arrest of young black women as vagrants and

prostitutes. The black interior fell squarely within the scope of the

police. Plainclothes officers and private investigators ~onitored

250 WAYWARD LIVES, BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS

private life and domestic space, giving legal force to the notion

that the black household was the locus of crime, pathology, and

sexual deviance. The Tenement House Act (1901) was crafted by

Progressive reformers, official friends of the Negro, and the sons

and daughters of abolitionists intent on protecting the poor and

lessening the brutal effects of capitalism’ with clean water closets,

hot water, steam heat, and fire escapes. From its inception, the

effort to protect tenement dwellers from decrepit and uninhab-

itable conditions was linked inextricably with eradicating crime

and social vice. The Act took for granted the criminality of the

poor and identified the diseased home as the incubator of crime.

Progressive· intellectuals and reformers believed that social evils

emanated from the slum rather than the structural conditions of

poverty, unemployment, racism1 and capitalism. While the Act was

designed to prevent th~ overcrowding that was the prolific source

of sexual immorality and to improve the housing conditions of the

poor-insufficiency of light and air due to narrow courts or air

shafts, dark hallways with no light or windows, overcrowding of

buildings on lots, fire hazards in design and use, lack of separate

water-closet and washing facilities, overcrowding, and foul cellars

and courts-the benefits and protection provided by the law wen~

overshadowed by the abuse and harassment that accompanied the

police presence inside private homes.

While the Act did little to improve fhe housing of the black poor

(with irregular enfoi:cement of building codes or legal prosecution of

landlords), it did consolidate the meaning of prostitution, and suture

blackness ahd criminality, by placing blaok domestic life under sur-

veillance. The specter of prostitution earlier attributed to the influx

of Jewish immigrants now became a Negro problem. In 1909, the

Tenement House Act was amended and revised into a series of laws

with a particular eye toward eradicating prostitution and with an

understanding of “the vagrant as the chrysalis of every criminal.”

The new law defined the vagrant as:

THE ANARCHY OF COLORED GIRLS ASSEMBLED IN A RIOTOUS MANNER 251

.A woman who knowingly resides in a house of prostitution

or assignation of any description in a tenement house or who

commits prostitution or indecently exposes her person for the

purpose of prostitution or who solicits any man or boy to enter

a.house of prostitution or a room in a ·tenement house for the

purpose of prostitution, shall be deemed a vagrant, and upon

conviction thereof shall be committed to the county jail for a

term not exceeding six months from the date of commitment.

Any young woman residin$ in a tenement who invited a man into

· her home ~isked being charged with prostitution. The Tenement

House Law expanded the provisiol}s of the Criminal Code, making

vagrancy an elastic, indiscriminate, all-encompasing category.

By 1914, “the majority of prostitution charges were executed

through the vagrancy clause of the Tenement Hous_e Law.” Thirty-

six percent of these convictions were of black women. They were

the largest single group prosecuted under this rubric. In the guise of

housing reform, the police were given great latitude in the surveil-

lance and arrest of black women and tenement residents. The bulk

of the arrests were justified less for what had been done than on the

suspicion of who these young women might become.

In 1915, the criminal code_ was amended again to “simplify” or

streamline the evidentiary requirements, making it easier to arrest

and prosecute young women on suspicion of prostitution. To secur~

conviction, all that was required was the officer’s testimony. In the

,earlier statute, an overt act of prostitution was required-solicitation

and the exchange of cash. Now only the willingness to have sex or

engage in “lewdness” or appearing likely to do so was sufficient

for prosecution. Most of the women convicted of prostitution were

deemed vagrants.

. Juinp raids were commonplace. In a “jump raid,” plainclothes offi-

cers, having identified a suspicious person and place, knocked at the

door of a private residence, and when it opened, they forced_ their way

252 WAYWARD LIVES, BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS

across the threshold or they followed behind a woman as she entered

her apartment. It was common to see the doors of rented rooms and

apartments scarred, broken, and hanging off the hinges after the

police officers entered homes by force and without warrants.

In its innual report, the Committee of Fourteen endorsed the

jump raid as a reasonable response to the black presence in the

city. While ordinarily a police raid without a warrant would be a

“dangerous procedure” because it violated basic civil liberties, and

the “unrestricted use of this custom would probably lead to police

oppression,” the Committee found these measures were warranted. ,

By their assessment, the police exercised good judgment in conduct-

ing raids in such manner because “the conditions found to exist in

the resorts ~o raided have fully justified the action taken.” For those

under the surveillance of the police, there was no difference between

“good judgment” and police oppression.

. Black tenants were policed more intensely and violently than their

white neighbors, so it is not surprising that as a result of these regular

encounters with the law, the buildings in which they lived contained

more “disorderly houses” and “disorderly persons.” The coordinated

efforts of social reformers and the police had a precipitous effect

on the formation of the black ghetto, since landlords who rented to

black tenants were more likely to be prosecuted for violation of the

Tenement House Law and fined as much as a thousand dollars. This

. contributed to the unwillingness of white landlords to rent to black

folks, and then only the worst and the most wretched housing at the

most exorbitant prices.

A police card illustrates the typical sweep of Harlem tenements,

and the routine arrests. Once police entered a flat, everybody they

encountered was subject to arrest. Billie Holliday was arrested in

one such sweep, where more than a ‘dozen women were arrested

in a five-block radius. The irony was that Holiday’s mother had

boarded her in Florence Johnson’s home to keep her daughter out

of harm’s way and to shield her from the danger of the streets.

THE ANARCHY OF COLORED GIRLS ASSEMBLED IN A RIOTOUS MANNER 253

254 WAYWARD LIVES, BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS

Mother and daughter were both arrested, but they did not disclose

their relation to the police out of fear that it would invite harsher

punishment.

Women were arrested· on the .threshold of their homes and inside

their apartments, while exiting taxicabs, flirting at dance halls,

waiting for their husbands, walking home from the cabaret with

friends, enjoying an intimate act with a lover, being in the wrong

place at the wrong time. In short, anywhere and at any time a young

black woman encountered the police, she was at risk. Billie Holiday

described the 1920s as an awful decade for this reason: “Those were

rotten days. Women like Mom who worked as maids, cleaned office ·

buildings, were picked up on the street on their way home from, work

and charged with prostitution. If they could pay, they got off. If they
couldn’t they went to court, where it was the word of some dirty ·

grafting cop against theirs.”

In 1922, Trixie Smith recorded her first song, “My Mari Rocks Me

with One Steady Roll,” for Black SwaIJ. Records. Its lyrics celebrated

the sexual freedom of the age in explicit detail:

My man rocks me, with one steady roll

There’s no slippin’ when he wants t~ke hold

I looked at the clock, and the clock struck one

I said now, Daddy, ain’t we got fun

Oh, he was rockin’ me, with one steady roll

Smith had accompanied Fletcher Henderso_n at several notable

Harlem venues and recorded with him on Paramount Records, had

performed on Broadway, and was well on her way to becoming one

of the famous classic blues singers, when a police detective entered

her apartment and arrested her, along with her friend Nettie Berry,

a stage performer and film actor. The detective had been watching

THE ANARCHY OF COLORED GIRLS ASSEMBLED IN A RIOTOUS MANNER 255

Smith for several weeks. He had first encountered her in a Harlem

cabaret and then entered her home, accompanied by an acquain-

tance, a paid informant, who assisted him in “meeting women” and

had introduced the two. The undercover agent returned a week later.

On this visit, he asked for a glass of gin and then arrested Trixie Smith

and Nettie Berry. Smith was charged with renting a room for pros-

titution and Berry with being a prostitute. Trixie Smith’s two small

children were home at the time wheri the alleged act was said to have

been committed; in this case it entailed the willingness to entertain

the plainclothes detective and offer him a drink. The two artists were

arraigned in Jefferson Market Court in the early hours of the morning.

The headline of the story, which appeared in the Afro-American a

few weeks later, read: “Race Actresses Said Framed by Gop.” Only

256 WAYWARD LIVES, BEAUTIFUL EXPERIMENTS .

the contracts displayed by their booking agent and community out-
1:age that two distinguished artists could be treated with, such blatant
injustice resulted in the dismissal of the charges against them. They
had been able to produce “witnesses to prove that they were both
working at their professions and bore reputations as being respect­
able members of the community.”

Prostitution was a charge levied to extract information, extort
money, harass and abuse, and establish· the boundaries of what a
black woman could and could not do. The New York Age and the
Amsterdam News warned women about the dangers of corrupt police
officers and stool pigeons, and advised them to avoid encounters with
strangers. Chatting with men on the street or inviting them into your·
homes posed great risks, as did accepting dates with stran’gers. The
threat of punishment wasn’t enough to deter young women from
associating with “bad’ company” or divert them from the errant
p�th, even when the costs were great.

The afterlife of slavery unfolded in a tenement hallway and held
Esther Brown in its grasp. She and her friends did not forget for a
moment that the law was designed to keep them in place, but they
refused to live in its clauses and parentheses. The problem of crime

· was the threat posed by the black presence in the northern city, the
problem of crime was the wild experiment in black freedom, and
the efforts to manage and regulate this crisis provided a means of
reproducing the white-over-black order that defined urban space and
everyday life. With incredible ferocity, state �urveillance and police
power acted to shape and regulate intimate life. State violence, invol­
untary servitude, poverty and confinement defined the world that
Esther Brown wanted to destroy. It made her the sort of girl w�o
would not hesitate to smash things up.

392 NOTES

229

229
229

230

THE ANARCHY OF COLORED GIRLS

ASSEMBLED. IN A RIOTOUS MANNER

somebody’s angel child: Bessie Smith, vocalist, “Reckless Blues” by Fred

Langshaw and Jack Gee, recorded 1925, Columbia 14056D, rn-inch LP.

speak of potentialities: Emma Goldman, “Anarchism: What It Really

Stands For,” in Anarchism and Other Essays, 2nd revised ed. (New York:

Mother Earth Publishing Association, 1910).

Harrison encountered her in the lobby of the Renaissance Casino: On the

life and work of the Harlem radical, see Jeffrey Perry, Hubert Harrison: The

Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918 (New York: Columbia University Press,

2010); and Shelley Streeby, Radical Sensations: World Movements, Violence,

and Visual Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013).

ex-slave’s refusal to work: “The Quashees (the free blacks of Jamaica) con­

tent themselves with producing only what is strictly necessary for their own

qmsumption, and, alongside this ‘use value,’ regard loafing (indulgence and

idleness) as the real luxury good; how they do not care a damn for the sugar

and the fixed capital invested in the plantations, but rather observe the plant­

ers’ impending bankruptcy with an ironic grin of malicious pleasure … ”

Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (1939;

repr. London: Penguin, 2005), 325-27.

NOTES 393

230 real luxury good: Marx, Grundrisse, 325-27.
230 thousand new forms: Rosa Luxemburg, “The Russian Revolution,” in Reform

or Revolution and Other Writings (New York: Dover Books, 2006), 215 .
231 cooperation and mutuality found among ants, monkeys, and ruminants:

Pyotr Kropotkin. Mutual Aid (1902; repr. Boston: Extending Horizons
Books, 1955); Darlene Clark Hine, “Mutual Aid and Beneficial Association,”
in Black Women in America, 3 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press,
2005); Jacqui Malone, “African American Mutual Aid Societies,” Stepping on

. �

the Blues: The Visible Rhythms of African American Dance (Urbana: University
of Illinois, 1996), 167-86; Ron Sakolsky, “Mutual Acquiescence or Mutual
Aid?” The Anarchist Library (November 2012), https://theanarchistlibrary
.org/lib,rary/ron-sakolsky-mutual-acquiescence-or-mutual-aid; Avery Gor­
don, The Hawthorne Archive (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017).

232 “Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman,”: Ella Baker, The Cri­
. sis: A Record of the Darker Races (November 1935); Claudia Jones, 1 ‘An End
to the Neglect of the Pi:oblems •of the Negro Woman!,” Political Affairs 28
(June 1949): 51-67; Carole Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political
Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2007).

232 revolt against … “unjust labor conditions”: Du Bois, “The Servant in the
House,” in Darkwater, 90.

232 jazz chorus: “Girls on ‘Noise’ Strike,” New York Times, January 25, 1920;
“Vocal Hostilities of Bedford Girls Finally Halted,” New York Times, January
27, 1920.

232 the very idea of work: Narrative drawn from. “Information concerning the
Patient,” August 12., 1917; and “Information concerning.the Patient,” Sep­
tember 15, 1917; Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, Inmate case files, Series
14610-77B, Records of the Department of Correctional Services, New York
State Archives, Albany, Bedford Hills Case Files #2507 and #2505. Also see
Elizabeth Ross Haynes, “Negroes in Domestic Service,” Journal of Negro
History 8, no. 4 (October 1923), 396.

233
233
233

then propose to marry her: “See Harlem Elopers are Thrust in Cell,” Afro-
American, June 30, 1928.
bound by need and want: “Stat�ment of the Girl, Work History,” August u,
1917,

Bedford Hills Case File#2507.

Service carried the stigma of slavery: See Sophonisba Breckinridge, “The
Legal Relation of Mistress and Maid, with Some Comment Thereon,” Bul-
letin of Household Research 1, no. 2 (1904): 7-8. Breckinridge understood
the continuities between domestic work and slavery and detailed the fea-

394 NOTES

tures of involuntary servitude produced by the contract between mistress

and maid. “There is as yet no legislation defining hours, and providing for

humane treatment and sanitary conditions” of household workers. “There is

no law forbidding children to work in the kitchen; and in some jurisdictions,

delinquent children are habitually placed in household work by probation

officers. Legislation looking toward betterment of conditions in domestic

service is confined at present, to compelling payment of wage when earned.”

See also Margaret Livingston Chanler, “Domestic Service,” Bulletin of the

Inter-Municipal Committee on Household Research 1, no. 6 (April 1905): 7.

233 captive maternal: Joy James, “Captive Maternal Love: Octavia Butler and

Sci-Fi Family Values,” in Literature and the Development of Feminist Theory,

ed. Robin Truth Goodman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2m5),

185-99. On black female surplus, see Rizvana Bradley, “Reinventing Capac-

ity: Black Femininity’s Lyrical Surplus and the Cinematic Limits of 12 Years

A Slave,” Black Camera 7, no. 1 (Fall 2015): 162-78.

234 colored woman’s piano day: A general houseworker loved her washing so

much that she called Mondays her “piano day.” See Mary White Ovington,

“The Colored Woman in Domestic Service in New York City,” Bulletin 1,

no. 7 (May 1905), IO.

234 sacrificial devotion: R. R. Wright, “Negro Household Workers,” Bulletin

of the Inter-Municipal Committee on Household Research 1, no. 7 (May 1905);

Miller, “Surplus Negro Women.”

234 “care for their precious darlings”: Hutchins Hapgood, An Anarchist Woman

(New York: Duffield, 1909), 40.

234 like a swarm 01· swell of an ocean: Du Bois described the collective action of

the general strike as a swarm or swell. See Black Reconstruction. In the chap-

ter “The General Strike,” he uses the term swarm repeatedly to describe the

movement of the enslaved and the fugitive.

234 long poem of black hu’nger and striving: This line is a riff on de Cei:teau’s
‘ i

long poem of walking. See Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), IOI.

234 the wild rush from house service: Du Bois, “The Servant in the House,” in

Darkwater, 92.

234 All the modalities sing a part: Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 99.

234 The map of what might be: Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small

Axe 12, no. 2 (June 2008): 1_-14; Ula Taylor, “Street Strollers: Grounding the

Theory of Black Women Intellectuals,” Afro-Americans in New York Life and

History 30, no. 2 (July 2006): 153-71; Sarah Cervenak, Wandering: Philo-

NOTES 395

sophical Performances of Racial and Sexual Freedom (Durham, NC: Duke Uni-

versity Press, 2015), 2; and Giuliana Bruno, Streetwalking on A Ruined Map:

Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1993).

234 !’overture: L’overture is another way to think about tumult, upheaval, and the

radical practice of everyday life. It is also a reference to the revolutionary

p~actice of the enslaved.

235 to fight back, to strike out: On discrimination against black girls and seg-

regation at the Hudson Training School, see “Inquiry Board Hits Negro

Segregation,” New York Times, November 20, 1936, 9; and “Hits Race Dis-

crimination,” New York Times, August 7, 1936. See also Weekly Comment,

Chica,go De/ender, June 28, 1919; and “Demand Unabated in Child Welfare,”

New York Times, September 14, 1933. A former superintendent recalled that

when she took over charge of the Hudson Training School, “she made a bon-

fire of the manacles, restraini~g sheets and straitjackets which had been in

use in the institution.”

235 to smash things up: “Notes .of the Staff Meeting,” September 29, 1917, Bed-

ford Hills Case File#2507: “She is the sort of girl who would not hesitate to

smash out”; “the unruly who smash windows and furniture”: State Com-

mission of Prisons, “Investigation and Inquiry into Allegations of Cruelty to

Prisoners in the New York State Reformatory for Women, Bedford Hills,” in

Twenty-Sixth Annual Report of the State Commission of Prisons /or the Year 1920,

March 12, 1921, 93; young women “smashing and yelling,” State Commission

of Prisons, “Investigation and Inquiry into Allegations of Cruelty,” 94. Also

see M. Fleming, “Ungovernability: The Unjustifiable Jurisdiction,” Yale Law

Journal 83, no. 7 (June 1974): 1383-1409.

235 That was the offering: Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha: A Novel (New

York: Harper and Row, 1953; repr. Chicago: Third World Press, 1993), 22.

236 tried to kill her and failed: Lucille Clifton, “Won’t you celebrate with me,”

Collected’Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-20ro (New York: BOA Editions; 2012).

. 236 “to bring things into relation”: Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 30.

236 Subsistence: Karl Marx on forms and modes of life, see German Ideology

(New York: International Publishers, 1970) and Economic and Philosophic

Manuscripts of 1844 (New York: International Publishers, 1964).

237 survival was an achievement: Saidiya Hartman, “Belly of the World,” Souls:

A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 18, no. 1 (January/
March 2016): 166-173.

396 NOTES

237 “reproduction of physical existence”: Roderick Ferguson, “The Erotic

Life of Diaspora: Black Queer Formations in the History of Neoliberalism,”

unpublished talk, Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality,

Columbia University, New York, 2m3.

237 subject to frequent police raids: Stephen Robertson, “Disorderly Houses:

Residences, Privacy, and th~ Surveillance of Sexuality in 192o’s Harlem,”

Journal of the History of Sexuality 2i, ·no. 3 (September 2012): 457. See Carby,

“Policing the Black Body in an Urban Context,” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 4

(Summer 1992): 738-55. •

238 “charity girl”: Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements (Philadelphia: Temple Uni-
versity Press, 1986), no-12.

238 no clear line between desire and necessity: On the survival strategies of

young black women, see Aimee Cox, Shapeshi/ters (Durham, NC: Duke Uni-
versity Press; 2015), 17r.

238 then he’d marry her: This account is based upon “Statement of th~ Girl,”

August ro, 1917, Bedford File#2505.

238 Oh my man I love him so: Billie Holiday, “My Man,” The Billie Holiday So~g-
book (New York: Verse, 1986). ·

240 she had violated those codes: See Ruth Reed, Negro Illegitimacy in New York

(New York: Columbia University Press, 1926), 48, 68.

240 require the commitment of a criminal act: George E. Worthington and

Ruth Topping, Specialized Courts Dealing with Sex Delinquency: A Study of

the Procedure in Chicago,’ Boston, Philadelphia, and New York (New York:

Frederick Hitchcock Publisher, 1925); Christopher Tiedeman, A Treatise on

*e Limitations of Police Power in the United States (St. Louis: F. H. Thomas

Law Book Company, 1886); Saidiya Ha·rtman, Scenes of Subjection, 63, 69,

186-206; Bryan Wagner, Disturbing the Peace (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2009).

i.41 running the streets: In the case of status offenses, it is status and not conduct

that determines whether an act is a transgression of the law. See Cynthia Godsoe,

“Contempt, Status, and the Crimihalization of Non-Conforming Girls,” Car-

dozo Law Review 35, no. 3 (February 2014): ro91-n6; “Ungovernability: The

Unjustifiable Jurisdiction,” Yale Law Journal 83, no. 7 (June 1974): 1383-409.
241 “a struggle to transform one’s existence”: Willfulness is a struggle to exist

or to transform an existence. See Ahmed, “Willfulness as a Style of Pblitics,”

in Willful Subjects, 133.

241 “The history of disobedience”: Ahmed, Willful Subjects, 137.

241 “Leading the life of a prostitute”: See George J. Kneeland, Commercial-

NOTES 397

ized Prostitution in New York City (New York: Century Co., 1913). Of the 647

cases examined in the study of the Bedford Hills Reformatory, Katherine

Bement Davis writes: “not all of them were convicted for prostitution but all

were leading the lives of prostitutes” in “A Study of Prostitutes Committed

from New York City to the State Reformatory at Bedford Hills,” appendix

to Kneeland, Commercialized Prostitution in New York City, 190.

241 ·the manner of walking: Civil Rights Division, United States Department of

Civil Rights Division and Theodore M.
1
Shaw, The Ferguson Report, Depart-

ment of Justice Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department (New York: New

Press, June 2015).

242 target young women for prostitution: By 1917, vagrancy statutes and Ten-

eme~t House Laws were the primary vehicles for arresting and indicting

young women as prostitutes.

242 rate of conviction: Worthington and Topping, Specialized Courts Dealing

with Sex Delinquency, 217-18, 245, 274, 276, 287, 397-403, 418-19; Fred-

‘erick Whitin, “The Women’s Night Court in New York City,” Annals of the

American Academy of Political and Social Science 52 (March 1914): 183.

242 predict the future: .The anticipation of future criminality was at the heart of

anti-vagrancy statutes and the overwriting of blackness as criminality.

242 refused to work: Girls between fourteen and twenty-one, but sometimes·as

young as twelve, were sentenced to reformatories for being in a house with

a bad reputation or suspected of prostitution, or having friends or neighbors

who were thieves or prostitutes, or associating with lowlifes and criminals,

or being promiscuous. See Hicks, Talk to You Like A Woman, 184.

243 “without visible means of support”: William J Chambliss, “A Sociological

Analysis of the Law of Vagrancy,” Social Problems 12, no. l (Summer 1964):

66-77,

243 “no man knows from where they came”: Tiedeman, Treatise on the Limita-

tions of Police Power, n8.

243 from idler to convict and felon: Tiedeman, Treatise on the Limitations of

Police Power, 117.

244 “Silks and Lights: “Silks and Lights Blamed for Harlem Girls’ Delinquency,”

Baltimore Afro-American, May 19, 1928; “Lure for Finery Lands Girl in Jail,”

New York Amsterdam News, August 14, 1926.

245 the wild world of fun and pleasure: See letter from husband to Esther Brown,

Bedford Hills Case File#2507.

246 paid direc~ly by the police: “Frame-up and Blackmail,” New York Age, Jan-

uary 7, 1928; “Be Careful Girls,” Amsterdam News, May 14, 1920.

398 NOTES

246 “That’s no straight road”: Mrs. Scott, an elderly woman who took care of

Esther’s son, blamed what happened to Esther on her mother and told the

caseworker that Rose Saunders “consorted with one of the men who lodged

in her apartment.”

247 old love wishing you well: Letter in Bedford Hills Case File #2507.

247 assembled in a riotous manner: The governor of New York, Lord Cornford

(who was Queen Anne’s cousin), issued a scathing proclamation to “take

all methods for the seizing and apprehending of all such Negroes found to

be assembled and if any of them refuse to submit then fire upon them, kill

or destroy them, if they otherwise cannot be taken …. Several Negroes in

Kings County have assembled themselves in a riotous manner, which if not

prevented may prove of ill consequence.” As a precaution against conspir-

acy, the assembly of slaves was severely restricted. When not engaged in

their master’s service, no more than three slaves could meet together on a

penalty of being whipped not more than forty lashes. No more than twelve

slaves, in addition to the coffin bearers and gravediggers, could assemble at

any funeral on pain of public whipping. Another prohibited the gathering of

slaves after nightfall. See Roi Ottley and William J. Weatherby (eds.), The

Negro in New York: An Informal Social History, 1626-1940 (New York: New

York Public Library, 1967), 22. Slave codes in colonial New York targeted

black assembly. See Edwin Olson. “The Slave Code in Colonial New York,”

journal of Negro History, 29, no. 2 (April. 1944): 147-65;,Ira Berlin and Les-

lie Harris, Slavery in New York (New York: New York Historical Society,

2005). ~ee Simone Browne, Dark Matters (Durham, NC: Duke University

Press, 2015).

248 whipped not more than 40 lashes: See Colonial Laws of New York, i, 520,.

cited in Olson, “The Slave Code in.Colonial New York.” See also Berlin and

Harris, Slavery in New York.

248 Board of Charities: On the role of philanthropy and charity in produc-

ing a racialized order see Alice O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge: Social Sci-

ence, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History (Princeton,·

NJ: Princeton University Press, 20.01); Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and the

Moral Order in America, 1820-1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Unive’rsity

Press, 1992); Ralph Luker, Social Gospel in Black and White: American Racial

Reform, 1885-1912 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991);

David Rothman, Conscience and Convenience: the Asylum and its Alternatives

in Progressive America (Boston: Little Brown, 1980); Michael McGerr, A

Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America

NOTES 399

(New York: Free Press, 2003); Richard Hoftstadter, Age of Reform (New

York: Vintage Books, 1955). Robert Allen, .Reluctant Reformers: Racism and

Social Reform Movements (Washington, DC: Howard University Press,

. 1974).

249 “Disorderly is worse than discrimination”: Frederick Whittin to Du Bois,

ro October 1912, box II (Du Bois 19rr,-1912) folder, W. E. B. Du Bois Corre-

spondence. Frederick Whittin to Du Bois, 10 October 1912, box 2 (General

Correspondence) folder, W. E. B. Du Bois Correspondence 1912 October

rr-20. For a study of the committee’s work in New York City, see Jennifer

Fronc, New York Undercover: Private Surveillance in the Progressive Era (Chi-

cago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

249 vagrants and prostitutes: See William Fryer, Tenement House Law of the City

of Ne,; York (New York: The Record and Guide, 1901); Robert de Forest and

Lawrence Veiller (eds.), The Tenement House Problem (London: Macmillan,

1903); and The Tenement House Law of the State of New York and Chap-

ter XIXa of the Greater New York Charter (New York: Tenement House

Department, 1912),

250 incubator of crime: The law also established guidelines for the· improve-

ment of extant houses and the building of new tenements; however, rein-

forcement of the law proved difficult. Many social reformers believed that

social problems were determined by poor environmental conditions, so that

i~proving housing conditions would improve the morality and life chances

of the poor by transforming the ecology of the slum. “The Tenement Law

of the City of New York” Section 141, “Vagrnncy”; William John Fryer,

ed., The Tenement House Law of the City of New York (New York: Clinton W.

Sweet, 1901).

250 overcrowding that was the prolific source of sexual immorality: Commit-

tee of Fifteen, The Social Evil: With Special Reference to Conditions Existing in

the City of New York (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1902), 173-174.

250 consolidate the meaning of prostitution: See Mumford, fnterzones; Prone,

New York Undercover; Timothy Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitu-

tion, and the Commercialization of Sex I790-1920 (New York: W.W. Norton,

1992); and Jessica R. Pliley, Policing Sex Districts: The Mann Act and the Mak-

ing of the FBI (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Waterman,

Prostitution and Its Repression in New York City, 39.

250 “the vagrant as the chrysalis of every criminal”: Tiedeman, Treatise on the

Limitations of Police Power, 117.

251 “vagrancy clause of the Tenement House Law”: 1,099 persons were

400 NOTES

arrested for this violation. Committee of Fourteen, Committee of Fourteen

Annual Report 1914 (New York, 1914).

251 Thirty-six percent of these convictions were of black women: Commit-

tee of Fourteen, Committee of Fourteen Annual Report 1914, 32-33; Val Marie

Johnson, “Defining Social Evil: Moral Citizenship and Governance in New

York City, 1890-1920″ (PhD diss., The New School for Social Research,

New York, New York, 2002), 396-397, fn. 121. The Tenement House Com-
mittee and the Committee of Fourteen targeted landlords whose primary

tenants were African Americans. In 1910, black women comprised 1.9 per-

cent of the city population, 8 percent of those charged with prostitution, and

7.6 percent of those charged with disorderly conduct. In 1914, the vast major-

ity of women charged with prostitution was through the vagrancy clause of

the Tenement House Law. Although African American women comprised

little more than 2 percent of the population of the city, they were 36 per-

cent of those arrested for violation of the Tenement House Law. Foreign-

born women were 24 percent of those arrested, although they were 40.8

percent of the city. Because of the segregated labor market, black women

were frequently employed in sex venues, but in non-sex-work as housekeeep-

ers, maids and washerwomen. By 1928, there were four times more Negro

women than white women in court. By 1930, there was a dramatic increase

in rates of arrest. Three Negro women were arrested for every two white

women,. even where there was one Negro woman to eight white women liv-

ing in New York City. The “policing relation” had everything to do with this

disparity. See Sophia Robison, An Inquiry into the Present Functioning of the

Women’s Court in Relation to the Problem of Prostitution in New York City (Wel-

fare Council of New York, Research Bureau, May 1935),

251 arrest of black women and tenement residents: “There has been an

increase, as compared with 1913-1914, of cases from tenements on the East

Side and in Harlem, while decreases.were noticed in the central part of the

city, which includes the … Tenderloin. This latter decrease, as well as the

increase in the Harlem district,·is probably explained by the movement of

the negroes from one section to the other.” Kneeland, Commercialized Pros-

titution in New York City, 165; also see Committee of Fourteen, New York City

Annual Report, 1915-1916, pp. 32, 42, 55, 58.

251 willingness to have sex or engage in “lewdness”: Criminal Code, Section

887, defined the vagrant as follows: “Any person (a) who offers to commit

prostitution; or (b) who offers or offers to secure a female person for the

purpose of prostitution, or for any other lewd or indecent act; or (c) who

NOTES 401

loiters in or near any thoroughfare or public or private place for the purpose

of inducing, enticing, or procuring another to commit lewdness, fornication,

unlawful sexual intercourse or any other indecent act; or (d) who in any

manner induces, entices or procures a person who is in any thoroughfare

or pµblic or private place to commit any such acts is a vagrant.” In 1921, the

definition was again expanded in People v. Breitung, although the first item

was unchanged since the fourteenth century: “A person wh~ not having vis-

ible means to maintain herself, lives without e~ployment.”

N.Y. PEN. LAW§ 240.20: NY Code-Section 240.20: Disorderly con-

duct:-A person is guilty of disorderly conduct when, with intent to cause

public inconvenience, annoyance or alarm, or recklessly creating a risk

th~reof: I. (S)He engages in fighting or in violent, tumultuous or threat-

‘ ening behavior; or 2. (S)He makes unreasonable noise; or 3. In a public

place, (s)he uses abusive or obscene language, or makes an obscene ges-

ture; or 4. Without lawful authority, (s)he disturbs any lawful assembly or

meeting of persons; or 5. (S)He obstructs vehicular or pedestrian traffic;

or 6. (S)He congregates with other persons in a public place and refuses

to comply with a lawful order of the police to disperse; or 7. (S)He creates

a hazardous or physically offensive condition by any act which serves no

legitimate purpose.

Disorderly _House, Penal Law, Section n46: A person or person who

keeps a house of ill-fame or assignation of any description, or a house or

place for persons to visit for unlawful sexual intercourse, or for any lewd,

, obscene or indecent purpose, or disorderly house, or a house commonly

known as a stale beer dive, or any place of public resort by which the

peace, comfort, or decency of a neighborhood is habitually disturbed, or

who requests, advises or procures any female to become an inmate of any

such house or place, or who as agent or owner, lets a building or any por-

tion, knowing that it is intended to be used for any person specified in this

section, or who permits a building or portion of a building to be so used,

is guilty of a misdemeanor. This section shall be construed to apply to any

part or parts of a house used for the purposes herein specified,

Disorderly Person. Code of Criminal Procedure, Sections 899, 9n.

4• Keeps of bawdy houses or houses for the resort of prostitution,

drunkards, tipplers, gamesters, habitual criminals, or other disorderly

persons, (Disorderly persons overlap with the meaning of the vagrant.)

Section 9n Court may also commit [her] to prison; nature and dura~

402 NQTES

tion of imprisonment. The court may also in its discretion, order a person
. convicted as a disorderly person, to be kept in the county jail, or in the
City of New York, in the city prison or penitentiary of that city, for a term
not exceeding six months of hard labor.

Public Nuisance, Penal Law, Sections 1530 and 1532:
Section 1530: A public nuisance is a crime against the order and econ­

omy of the State and consists in unlawfully doing an act, or omitting to
perform a duty, which act or omission:

1) Annoys, injures or endangers the comfort, repose, health or safety of
any considerable number of persons; or,

2) Offends public decency; or
3) (Actually Point 4) In any way renders a considerable number of persons

insecure in life1 or the use of property.

Section 1532. Maintaining a nµisante. A person who commits or main­
tains a public nuisance, the punishment for which is not specially pre­
scribed, or who willfully omits or refuses to perform any legal duty relating
to the removal of such a public nuisance, is guilty of misdemeanor.

252 by force and without warrants: See Grace Campbell, “Tragedy of Colored
Girl in Court,” New York Age, April 25, 1925; “Women Offenders and the
Day Court,” New York Age, April 18, 1925. See Campbell quoted in “Harlem
Love Girls Get 25 cents, Whites $5,” A/ro-American,January 29, 1938.

252 police raid without a warrant: Committee of Fourteen, Annual Repor_t of the
Committee of Fourteen 1915-1916.

254 being in the wrong place at the wrong time: Pat James and many other
women were·arrested for prostitution in taxicabs. She left a club at 1:30 a.m.
Two men entered the cab after she did. She started screaming and fighting
with them, fearing that they would rob her, but instead she was arrested for
prostitution. Bedford Hills Case File#3489; Nancy Lacewell was arrested in
a hallway. The officers first charged her with robbery and then changed the
charge to prostitution. Bedford Hills Case File#3501. Henrietta Dawson was
arrested for prostitution after agreeing to a date with a man she had met at
a Harlem club. Her mixed-race child convinced the court that she had been
living the life of a prostitute, Bedf�rd Hills Case File#3499,

254 “it was the word of some dirty grafting cop against theirs”: Billie Holiday,
Lady Sings the Blues (1956; repr. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006), 27.

NOTES 403

254 rockin’ me, with one steady roll: Trixie Smith, 1922, “My Man Rocks Me
(With One Steady Roll),” Black Swan Records, 14127-B .

256 “respectable members of the com_munity”: “Race Actresses Said Framed
by Cop.” Baltimore Afro-American. December 26, 1925, 5.

256 to live in its clauses and pare”ntheses: Anne Winters, “MacDougal Street, Old
Law Tenement,” The Displaced of Capital (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2004).

256 the �roblem of crime was the threat posed: See Christopher Muller,
“Northern Migration and the Rise of Racial Disparity in American Incarcer­
ation,” American Journal of Sociology n8, no. 2 (September 2012), 281-326;
Muhammed, Condemnation of Blackness; Brya1;1 Wagner, Disturbing the Peace;
and Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow (New York: The New Press,
2012),