African-American organized crime
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Although a minority during the 19th and early 20th centuries, African-American organized crime first began to emerge following large scale migrations of Caribbean and African Americans to major cities of the Northeast and Midwest. In many of these newly established communities and neighborhoods criminal activities such as illegal gambling, speakeasies and bootlegging would be seen in the post-World War I and Prohibition eras. Although the majority of these businesses were operated by African Americans, it is unclear to the extent these operations were run independently of the larger criminal organizations of the time.
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[edit] Prohibition & the Great Depression
During the 1920s and 30s, African American organized crime was centered in New York's Harlem where the numbers racket was largely controlled by "Madam Queen of Policy" Stephanie St. Clair. She would later testify at the Seabury Investigation that during 1923 to 1928 the NYPD continued to arrest her runners despite making payoffs. However, the Harlem numbers rackets were largely operated by independent policy bankers such as St. Clair before its eventual takeover by mobster Dutch Schultz in the late 1930s.
[edit] Post-WWII
In the years following the end of the Second World War, African-American organized crime grew along with the rise of African-American social consciousness and later political and social militancy. Many of the major drug traffickers such as Leroy "Nicky" Barnes and Frank Lucas emerged during the early to mid 1960s, taking advantage of the increasing political strength during the civil rights movement. During this time of social and economic mobility, African-American gangsters were more able to negotiate with outside criminal organizations (previously dependent solely on the political and police protection of New York's Five Families) whose control over the ghettos began to wane.
By the early 1970s, the large narcotics empires created by Barnes and Lucas began expanding beyond Harlem as Lucas sought to ultimately control a large scale drug trafficking operation by gaining control of a network from Indochina directly to the streets of ghettos across the country. Other criminal groups such as Rastafarians began smuggling marijuana and cocaine in cities including New York, Baltimore, Washington, D.C. as well as in New Jersey, California, Florida and Toronto, Canada.
[edit] In popular culture
- Harlem Nights (1989)
- New Jack City (1991)
- Hoodlum (1997)
[edit] Further reading
- Ianni, Francis A.J. Black Mafia: Ethnic Succession in Organized Crime. New York: Simon and Schuster, Inc., 1974.
- Schatzberg, Rufus. Black Organized crime in Harlem, 1920-1930. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1993.
- Schatzberg, Rufus and Kelly, Robert J. African American Organized Crime: A Social History. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997.
[edit] References
- Kelly, Robert J. Encyclopedia of Organized Crime in the United States. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2000. ISBN 0-313-30653-2
