Madame st clair biography meaning

• Stephanie St. Clair, an immigrant from the Caribbean, built a gambling empire in Harlem.
• At the time, the numbers game was one of the few ways Black Americans could invest, as many banks didn't accept Black customers.
• As a poor, Black woman, St. Clair used the resources at her disposal to uplift herself and her community.

Stephanie St. Clair made a name for herself as a racketeer who reigned over a formidable gambling empire in Harlem. Barred from the traditional, white-dominated financial industry, she made a fortune in the underground economy of the numbers racket, earning the nickname the "Queen of Numbers."

The numbers racket — a type of lottery — wasn't just lucrative. To St. Clair, an immigrant from the Caribbean, it was also a way to uplift and support the Black community she had found in her adopted home of Harlem.

She was a fierce advocate for Black rights in New York, and became a local legend for publicly denouncing corrupt police and resisting Mafia control.

"To leave her home country, she had to be a dreamer, a risk-taker," LaShawn Harris, associate professor at Michigan State University and author of "Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners: Black Women in New York City's Underground Economy," told Insider. "St. Clair wanted more for herself, and her community."

An immigrant who refused the status quo

St. Clair was born on Christmas Eve, 1897 in Guadeloupe, a French-governed archipelago in the Caribbean. In 1912, she immigrated to New York, using the long voyage and quarantine period to learn English.

New York in the 1910s was in the thick of the Progressive era's widespread social reform. St. Clair arrived during The Great Migration, when 6 million African Americans migrated to the Northeast and Midwest in search of economic opportunities and equality, away from Jim Crow era segregation in the South.

But r

Caribbean-French mobster and community activist

Stephanie St. Clair (December 24, 1897 in Martinique, French Caribbean – December 1969) was a racketeer who ran numerous enterprises in Harlem, New York in the early 20th century. St. Clair resisted the Mafia's interests for several years after Prohibition ended; she became a local legend for her public denunciations of corrupt police and for resisting Mafia control. She ran a successful numbers game in Harlem and was an activist for the black community. Her nicknames included: Queenie, Madame Queen, Madame St. Clair and Queen of the Policy Rackets.

Early life

Stephanie St. Clair was born of African descent in the West Indies to a single mother, Félicienne, who worked hard to send her daughter to school. According to St. Clair's 1924 Declaration of Intention, she gave Fort-de-France, French West Indies (present-day Martinique, West Indies) as her place of birth.

When St. Clair turned 12, her mother became very ill and St. Clair had to leave school. She managed to save some money and, after the death of her mother, left Martinique for Montreal, likely coming as part of the 1910-1911 Caribbean Domestic Scheme, which brought domestic workers to Quebec.

She immigrated to the United States from Montreal, arriving in New York in 1912. She used the voyage and subsequent quarantine to learn English. In Harlem she fell in love with a small-time crook, Duke, who soon tried to prostitute her but was shot in a fight between gangs. After four months, she decided to start her own business, selling controlled drugs with the help of her new boyfriend, Ed.

After a few months, she had made $30,000 and told Ed she wanted to leave him and start her own business. Ed tried to strangle her and she pushed him away with such force that he cracked his skull against a table and di

Madame Stephanie St. Clair was a Harlem entrepreneur with a head for numbers and a skill for minting cash—even during the Great Depression. But like most African Americans in the early 20 century, she found herself barred from traditional, white-dominated financial businesses like banking or investing. Instead, she made her fortune in the underground economy of the numbers racket. Fearlessly facing down corrupt cops and violent mobsters alike, she became one of the racket’s most successful operators, while channeling her money into legitimate ventures and working to lift up others of her race. 

During the 1920s and ’30s, as millions of African Americans joined the Great Migration from the South to northern and midwestern cities, Harlem became the center of Black America, with a flourishing art, music and literary scene. As this Harlem Renaissance flourished, so did an illegal kind of lottery called the “policy” or the “numbers.” In it, players picked three numbers between 000 and 999, hoping they’d match numbers drawn daily from public sources like the New York Stock Exchange, the Federal Reserve’s end-of-day credit balance and others.

“Numbers gambling enabled many African Americans to supplement low wages and [attain] economic security,” writes LaShawn Harris, a Michigan State University history professor and the author of Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners: Black Women in New York City’s Underground Economy. “Some enjoyed the opportunity of attaining wealth and financial independence. With their winnings, blacks paid bills, bought radios and clothes, and even started their own numbers operations.”

While the policy racket depended on a significant labor force of individuals to collect slips and pay winners, the most important person was the banker, who financed the whole operation. Stephanie St. Clair was one of Harlem’s most powerful bankers of the ’20s and early ’30s.

A Colorful Figure With a Mysterious Past

Little is known about St

Today is the third day of our roundtable on LaShawn Harris’s new book, Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners: Black Women in New York City’s Underground Economy (University of Illinois Press, 2016). On Monday, blogger Keisha N. Blain introduced the book and its authorand yesterday Julie Gallagher provided a general overview of the book.Dr. Harris is an Assistant Professor of History at Michigan State University. Completing her doctoral work at Howard University in 2007, her area of study focuses on twentieth century United States History. Harris has recently published articles in the Journal of African American History, Journal for the Study of Radicalism, and the Journal of Social History. Her first book, Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners, examines the public and private lives of an all-too-often unacknowledged group of African American female working-class laborers in New York City during the first half of the twentieth century.

In today’s post, Shannon King praises Harris’s book for highlighting the stories of “outlaw” black women in Harlem who challenged patriarchy and asserted their personal agency.

Outlaw women are fascinating—not always for their behavior, but because historically women are seen as naturally disruptive and their status is an illegal one from birth if it is not under the rule of men. In much literature a woman’s escape from male rule led to regret, misery, if not complete disaster. In Sula I wanted to explore the consequences of what that escape might be, on not only a conventional black society, but on female friendship. In 1969, in Queens, snatching liberty seemed compelling. Some of us thrived; some of us died. All of us had a taste.

In the foreword of Sula, Toni Morrison, the Pulitzer Prize and American Book Award recipient, interrogates how black and white reviewers assessed her first novel, The Bluest Eye based on the merit of its “politics.” She writes, “if th