Gang leaders of the Prohibition era are ususally seen as being White males, mostly Sicilian; which is perhaps why Stephanie St. Clair, the Black female gangster of Harlem, has been largely forgotten. But in her time she was able to rank with some of the most notorious organised crime leaders of New York.
Details of Stephanie St. Clair's early life are obscure: she seems to have been born in 1897 in Guadaloup, a French-speaking island in the West Indies, and to have come to Harlem, the Black district of Manhatten, around 1911. She first became noticed in the Prohibition era after the First World War, when organised crime flourished throughout New York and other cities.
The "Numbers" racket, a kind of illegal lottery, was especially popular in the New York Black community. But even when honestly conducted it was a very dangerous game, involving collecting and distributing money under constant threat from thieves, while the immense profits to be made inevitably attracted both of the men of violence and the deeply corrupt New York police.
By the late 1920s, St. Clair had acquired sufficient money and power to set up her own "policy shop": that is, her own Numbers operation, and emerged as a major force in Harlem. She used Ellsworth "Bumpy" Johnson as her enforcer and right-hand man, and they built up a team that was prepared to take on any challengers on their home turf. She was described as "arrogant, educated, sophisticated, with a fiery temper", and she was also completely without fear; but she knew that more than the threat of violence was needed. She understood the importance of "image", so she always appeared in public dressed in the height of elegance, with expensive furs and jewellery, as she paraded with her bodyguards round the streets of Harlem. She was nicknamed "Madam Stephanie" or even "Queen Stephanie". She also used local newspapers to boost her role as a spokesperson for the Black community, denouncing police corruption and racism. When in 1929 she was arrested, she complained about the unfairness of the proceedings, saying that she had always been careful to pay off the police!
After the ending of Prohibition on 1933, the gangsters looked around for alternative sources of income, and St.Clair's success in Harlem, making around a quarter of a million dollars a year, attracted the attention of Dutch Schultz. "The beer baron of the Bronx", as he was styled, was exceptionally violent even by New York crime standards, and headed a much-feared gang of Jewish gunmen. Schultz had his own Numbers racket, and now tried to muscle in on St. Clair's territory. Soon all-out war erupted on the streets of Harlem, with shootings and firebombings in which over 40 people were killed. Stephanie St. Clair stood her ground. "What kind of man would desert a lady in a fight?" she challenged her friends. She spread the slogan "Buy Black!" in the Harlem press and launched attacks on White-owned stores that traded with Schultz. The war only ended when the leaders of the New York crime combine (Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Lepke Buchalter and others) decided that Schultz was a dangerous loose cannon who must be eliminated. In October 1935 Schultz and his gang were gunned down in a Newark restaurant by two Jewish hitmen. As Schultx lay dying in hospital, St. Clair sent him a telegram reading, "As you sow, so shall you reap." But soon after this, St. Clair handed her operation over to Bumpy Johnson and retired from the rackets.
The rest of her life was less successful. She had a disastrous marriage with Eugene Brown, a flamboyant but unreliable Black activist who called himself "Sufi Abdul Hamid" and was nicknamed "the Black Hitler" for his violent antisemitic rants. After three years of marriage, St. Clair was so enraged by his infidelities that she shot and wounded him, for which she was convicted and imprisoned.
After the war, she lived in obscurity, and was thought to be seriously short of money. She was reunited with Bumpy Johnson, who lived with her until his death in 1968, and she herself died next year, aged 72. So, as with most leading gangsters, Stephanie St. Clair's career at the top was brief, but, unlike most of them, she died peacefully of old age at home.
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Footnote: Most of these details are taken from "The world of Stephanie St. Clair", by Shirley Stewart.
The aged Black madwoman in the film "Come back, Charleston Blue" is loosely based on Stephanie St. Clair after the Second World War
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