Research Paper On Stephanie St. Clair

558 Words2 Pages

The Harlem Renaissance’s Queen of the Criminal Underground Perhaps by her own design, the details of Stephanie St. Clair’s origins are hazy regarding both the year and place of her birth.What can be stated with some measure of certainty is that she was born sometime in the late 19th century, somewhere in the French Caribbean—likely Guadeloupe or Martinique, though she herself liked to claim France. Her parents and siblings are unknown as well as most of her pass up to the point of the age thirteen. But after the age of thirteen her life becomes a bit more clear because she was now in the United States but not completely until 20th century when she showed up in Harlem. She died quietly in Long Island on December 1969 and was buried at the Trinity …show more content…

Clair was known in her community to be a well-educated, well-spoken woman, capable of reading and writing in both French, English and fluent in Spanish as well. She was tall and always fashionably dressed, she was known as Queenie throughout the other boroughs of Manhattan, and in Harlem as Madame St. Clair. However, St. Clair possessed a violent temper and was prone to outbursts of profanity in any one of the several languages she spoke. Within a short time after her arrival in Harlem, she was running a much-feared extortion gang called the Forty Thieves. During the 1920s St. Clair sought to expand her criminal enterprise by investing her ill-gotten gains in the Harlem numbers rackets, an illegal lottery. The move quickly paid off, making both her and her right-hand man—a career criminal named Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson—considerably wealthy.However, the riches and power they gained in the process would soon make them targets as well. By the early 1930s, the arrival of the Great Depression and the end of Prohibition were taking their toll on organized-crime outfits throughout the country. In New York City, Jewish gangster Dutch Schultz’s solution for the loss of his formerly lucrative bootlegging operations was to attempt a takeover of the numbers game in Harlem. But St. Clair and Johnson had no intention of rolling over for Schultz, and a violent war for territory ensued, with more than 40 people killed in the

More about Research Paper On Stephanie St. Clair

Open Document