Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners

Black Women in New York City's Underground Economy

LaShawn Harris

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780252081668, 9780252040207
• eBook ISBN: 9780252098420
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios afroamericanos

During the early twentieth century, a diverse group of African American women carved out unique niches for themselves within New York City's expansive informal economy. LaShawn Harris illuminates the labor patterns and economic activity of three perennials within this kaleidoscope of underground industry: sex work, numbers running for gambling enterprises, and the supernatural consulting business. Mining police and prison records, newspaper accounts, and period literature, Harris teases out answers to essential questions about these women and their working lives. She also offers a surprising revelation, arguing that the burgeoning underground economy served as a catalyst in working-class black women ™s creation of the employment opportunities, occupational identities, and survival strategies that provided them with financial stability and a sense of labor autonomy and mobility. At the same time, urban black women, all striving for economic and social prospects and pleasures, experienced the conspicuous and hidden dangers associated with newfound labor opportunities.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Black Women, Urban Labor, and New York’s Informal Economy
• 2 Madame Queen of Policy: Stephanie St. Clair, Harlem’s Numbers Racket, and Community Advocacy
• 3 Black Women Supernatural Consultants, Numbers Gambling, and Public Outcries against Supernaturalism
• 4 “I Have My Own Room on 139th Street”: Black Women and the Urban Sex Economy
• 5 “‘Decent and God-Fearing Men and Women’ Are Restricted to These Districts”: Community Activism against Urban Vice and Informal Labor
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index