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“Woman Slain in Queer Love Brawl”: African American Women, Same-Sex Desire, and Violence in the Urban North, 1920–1929 Author(s): Cookie Woolner Source: The Journal of African American History, Vol. 100, No. 3, Gendering the Carceral State: African American Women, History, and the Criminal Justice System (Summer 2015), pp. 406-427 Published by: Association for the Study of African American Life and History Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5323/jafriamerhist.100.3.0406 Accessed: 28-01-2017 15:13 UTC

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406

“WOMAN SLAIN IN QUEER LOVE BRAWL”:

AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN, SAME-SEX DESIRE, AND VIOLENCE

IN THE URBAN NORTH, 1920–1929 Cookie Woolner

The New York Age, one of the leading African American newspapers, pub- lished a front-page article in November 1926 with the graphic headline, “Women Rivals for Affection of Another Woman Battle with Knives, and One Has Head Almost Severed From Body.” The lengthy opening sentence proclaimed the fol- lowing:

Crazed with gin and a wild and unnatural infatuation for another woman, Reba Stobtoff, in whose Manhattan apartment her friends and acquaintances had gathered for a Saturday night rent party, grabbed a keen-edged bread knife and with one fell swoop, severed the jugular vein in the throat of Louise Wright after a fierce quarrel in which Reba had accused Louise of show- ing too much interest in a woman named Clara, known to underworld dwellers as “Big Ben,” the name coming from her unusual size and from her inclination to ape the masculine in dress and manner, and particularly in her attention to other women.1

The article also revealed that, “when the police arrived, only women were present, and it is said that no men had attended the affair.”2 Readers came across such depictions of female same-sex desire in the 1920s, which served to conflate the emerging concept of “lesbianism” with violence, aggression, vice, and pathologi- cal behavior. The newspaper accounts not only informed northern urban readers about the networks of women in their midst who loved women, but also depicted them as “unnatural” and immoral.

The area where this murder occurred, Columbus Hill, also known as San Juan Hill before the First World War, had rapidly become the largest black neighbor- hood in Manhattan at the dawn of the 20th century.3 However, by the 1920s prac- tically every major African American institution had moved uptown to Harlem, and areas such as Columbus Hill had become, according to historian Gilbert Osofsky, “rundown backwash communities” inhabited by poor and working-class African Americans who “desired to live in Harlem but could not afford to pay the high rents charged there.”4 Overcrowded apartments and police neglect also

Cookie Woolner is a Mellon Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in Social Justice and Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Kalamazoo College in Kalamazoo, MI.

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African American Women, Same-Sex Desire, and Violence in the Urban North 407

Headline from the New York Age, 27 November 1926.

contributed to the neighborhood’s decline.5 Given these conditions, a murder at a women’s only gathering in Columbus Hill was not unique, aside from its “queer” aspect, as similar articles about men who attacked or killed women (and vice versa) out of jealousy were regular features in both the black and white press dur- ing this era.6 The site of the incident—a rent party in Columbus Hill—suggests that some of the participants were recent southern migrants as the neighborhood was one of three locales in Manhattan where black southerners tended to settle in the early 20th century.7

These participants in the early Great Migration came to the urban North and were exposed to the culture of the “rent party.”8 The New York Age ran an editori- al on this 1926 murder the week after it occurred, which began, “the rent party has become a recognized means of meeting the demands of extortionate landlords in Harlem, as well as in other sections, since the era of high rents set in and became a permanent condition.”9 In the era of Prohibition, the rent party was a way to raise funds to help pay the rent by providing an evening of food, drinks, and entertain- ment. This allowed survival in a world of low-wage jobs and overpriced housing that made upward mobility difficult for recent southern migrants, the “new set- tlers” in the urban North.10 African American newspapers such as the New York Age were often started and run by college-educated African Americans who were generally not new arrivals to the North, or “old settlers” whose families had lived above the Mason-Dixon line for generations. For the more established and afflu- ent African American residents, the sexual deportment of the growing population of new settlers was of great concern, mainly because it clashed so strikingly with notions of “respectability” designed to support demands for equal citizenship rights in the era of defacto and dejure segregation.11 Among the new settlers’ so- called deviant behaviors, suspected sexual relationships between women violated social and cultural norms, at least based on the vivid and sensational accounts in the New York Age and other newspapers. Historian Kim T. Gallon found that through such articles, African American newspapers “defined public questions and shaped public dialogue on a variety of sexual issues,” and together with their read- ers “created a public sphere for discussions about sexuality.”12

While scholars have examined the black and white queer subcultures that emerged in the urban North by the 1920s, there has been much less examination

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408 The Journal of African American History

of the specific experiences of African American women who loved women.13 While many women in the black entertainment industry, from Blues singers to chorus girls, engaged in same-sex relationships, there is less information on the experiences of ordinary working class women who loved women and their recep- tion by other African Americans in the urban North.14 Much of the literature on these emerging sexual subcultures has focused on interracial relationships and commercial spaces, yet African American women who loved women primarily socialized in residential spaces, which makes their experiences more difficult to document.15 Queer black women’s desire to socialize privately during an era when sexuality was increasingly becoming a public matter was also reflected in contem- porary black women’s literature. While literary critic Deborah McDowell has sug- gested that Harlem Renaissance texts such as Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) con- tained queer subplots, black female authors took pains to hide any “dangerous” descriptions of female desire within larger plots involving marriage or racial issues.16 This secrecy is understandable, given the emphasis on the regulation of heterosexual women’s behavior in general and African American women’s rela- tionships to an increasingly exploitative and sexualized consumer culture.17 While successful female entertainers such as Gladys Bentley, Ma Rainey, and Bessie Smith were able to broach the subject of same-sex desire on stage and in song, most queer women sought to hide their sexuality from their neighbors and family members.18

Therefore, due to the difficulty of finding first-hand accounts of queer black women’s experiences in this era, this essay uses newspaper accounts of acts of overt violence between women in order to make visible their social networks in 1920s Chicago and New York City. These representations of African American “lady lovers” offer insight into both the everyday lives of working-class African American women and demonstrate how the concept of female same-sex desire was portrayed in the black press.19 The occasional act of jealous violence between women gave old settler journalists a platform from which to sound off against changing gender and sexual norms in urban black communities. While these jour- nalists were openly critical of these women and their “deviant desires,” document- ing acts of violence between women, the black press actually revealed that “lady lovers” were in other ways no different than their neighbors. This is not to suggest that violence was typical of southern migrants, but that queer and heterosexual women faced the same difficulties finding work, laboring long hours for little pay, confronting the psychic toll of defacto segregation, navigating overcrowded neighborhoods and housing, paying exorbitant rents, and the intoxicating effects of “bootleg liquor” during Prohibition.20

While this essay focuses on the everyday experiences of lady lovers, it also surveys the discourse in the black press about these women by examining

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African American Women, Same-Sex Desire, and Violence in the Urban North 409

accounts of four alleged attacks and acts of homicide by African American women who loved women in the 1920s. I say “alleged” because, while two of these cases could be traced through official records from the criminal justice system, the other two could not. In the available criminal records, none specifically mention same- sex love as a motivation for the murders.21 While it is not possible to verify the sexuality of all the women identified, the journalists’ use of same-sex desire as a cause or an element in these violent encounters reveals the increasing visibility of lesbianism in northern black communities in the 1920s. While these cases were rare, they were sensationalized in black newspapers using moralistic language, and these articles narrating violent acts between women were sometimes reprint- ed in newspapers across the country. These narratives suggest the dangers that could befall African American women who made a home and a life together, as well as the ongoing attempts to regulate the sexual comportment of African American women through this discourse.

THE GREAT MIGRATION AND THE POLICING OF BLACK FEMALE SEXUALITY

Between 1910 and 1920, over one-and-a-half million African Americans left rural southern areas for the cities of the South, the North and the West.22 Chicago’s African American population grew from about 44,000 to over 109,000 during this decade, and New York City’s African American population grew from over 92,000 to over 152,000.23 These and other northern cities offered the possibility of free- dom and equal citizenship rights for southern black migrants who had been exploited and disenfranchised by “southern Redemption” and sought to escape the oppression of Jim Crow laws, lynching, and mob violence. However, many women who came north soon became disillusioned by the combination of exploitatively high rents in the segregated sections of the cities and limited work opportunities beyond domestic service. And female migrants were not necessarily welcomed by the established white or middle-class black residents. As literary critic Hazel Carby noted, “[T]he migrating black woman could be variously situ- ated as a threat to the progress of the race; as a threat to the establishment of a respectable urban black middle class” and “as a threat to the formation of black masculinity in an urban environment.”24 The newspaper articles about female mur- derers can thus be read as warnings to single women arriving in the city who were deemed a “social problem” requiring intervention by “progressive” reformers. Rumors of their alleged sexual availability, it was feared, would lead to disease, exploitation, and prostitution. While many southern migrants had friends or fam- ily in the North, whom they often first visited before determining whether to move, the majority of African American women who left for the North in the early

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410 The Journal of African American History

20th century were single, divorced, separated, or widowed.25 As African American women could more easily find domestic work in towns and cities and African American men had a better chance of securing agricultural work in rural areas, there was an imbalance in the ratio of males to females in northern cities.26 For example, in 1930 there were 170,738 African American females living in New York City, who made up 2.5 percent of the city’s population. In contrast, that year there were an estimated 156,960 African Americans males living there.27 This “excess” population of women brought further concerns over African American women’s sexuality and homosociality.

Despite the large numbers of African American women in northern cities, the acts of violence described here made up a very small fraction of the murders report- ed in New York City and Chicago in the 1920s, yet they serve as important narra- tives about the growing networks of African American women who loved women. For example, in the first half of 1928, out of thirty-four homicides reported in Harlem, half involved whites only, half involved African Americans, and only one occurred between “women lovers.”28 Similarly, in the entire state of Illinois in 1926, African American men were charged with murdering 50 black men and 16 black women, compared to white men who were charged with murdering 65 white men and 27 white women. African American women were charged with killing 10 black men and 2 black women, compared to white women who were charged with killing 9 white men, but 10 white women.29 At the same time, it was quite rare in the 1920s to come across similar newspaper articles about violence between gay men or white “lady lovers,” which makes these cases involving African American women who loved women a unique topic to explore.30 The dearth of articles in the black press about violent, gay black men at this time was very likely related to black women’s role in reproduction, which made lesbianism more of a social threat than male homosexuality.31 Moreover, female same-sex desire had come to be considered more of a menace at this time, as women’s social and political independence was increas- ing, which had no parallel for gay men.32

JAZZ JOURNALISM IN THE 1920s

The mode of journalism through which African American women who loved women were presented to newspapers’ readership was another crucial aspect of these women’s textual representation in this era. Often referred to as “yellow jour- nalism” and then “jazz journalism,” white and black tabloids in the 1920s special- ized in attracting readers through provocative headlines, suggestive images, and shocking quotes.33 Sensationalism sold newspapers, particularly for the black press where advertising dollars were harder to come by.34 Ads were easier to sell when newspapers had large circulations, and focusing on sex, vice, and violence

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African American Women, Same-Sex Desire, and Violence in the Urban North 411

became the key to larger profits. There were critics of these practices who point- ed to the potential harm coming from “jazz journalism.” Howard University pro- fessor Kelly Miller, writing in the New York Amsterdam News in 1928, declared “murder, sex sins, and theft are never failing sources of popular interest,” but their continued coverage led to African Americans “gradually sinking in the estimation of the white race” since “the white world” learned about African American life through the black press.35 Given that Hearst publications and other non-black tabloids also engaged in sensationalism, there really was little reason to single out the black press for focusing on sex and violence. Nonetheless, Miller conveyed a common view that the onus was on African Americans to put their “best foot for- ward,” given the anti-black prejudices in the larger American society.

Historian Hayward Farrar offers a different take on the cultural work of sen- sationalistic newspaper reporting, arguing that as “crime, love triangles, conjugal instability, and other subjects were pervasive features of urban black life,” the tabloids “made dramatic rituals out of central events in personal and community experience and thereby contributed to a kind of ‘urban folklore.’”36 As stories of violent outbreaks at women’s gatherings became more common in the 1920s black press, such “dramatic rituals” were introduced into the readers’ consciousness. While it was much more common for newspapers to cover violent episodes involving heterosexual couples, violence between women became a contemporary context for the discussion of lesbianism, and this became a “burden of representa- tion” that lady lovers had to bear.37 Indeed, stories of domestic violence between men and women rarely pathologized their subjects, as did articles documenting similar acts exclusively between women.38

While the number of articles on violent lady lovers was small, representations of crime influenced people’s conceptions of their lives and communities quite out of proportion to actual incidences of criminal activity.39 Thus, regardless of the veracity of the stories about violent women-loving-women, they performed a sep- arate function as cultural texts. This is an important point since so many of “the facts” in these newspaper reports could not be verified. Sensationalism employed the discourse of violent crime to address changing cultural practices and sociopo- litical agendas. By linking illicit behavior and criminal justice procedures with a particular emotional response, both personal and communal, these texts served as a way of constructing both shared values and individual identity.40 Thus, the increasing representations of queer black women as violent “colored amazons” when these identities and behaviors were becoming more visible, served to stig- matize these women who were already viewed suspiciously, whether or not they had a criminal past.41 These newspaper stories represented heterosexuality as the correct (non-pathological) form of sexuality by representing lesbianism as inher- ently violent and criminal.

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412 The Journal of African American History

African American women who were convicted of murder of a man or a woman had usually killed lovers or husbands in the heat of passion. Such deaths usually occurred during the course of drunken arguments, physical altercations, momentary explosions of rage or jealousy, or in reaction to domestic violence; few of these attacks were premeditated.42 Sociologist E. Franklin Frazier saw such violence as indicative of the changing urban landscape due to the Great Migration. He believed that “uprooted from the plantation system,” many migrants had been “set adrift in a world without a moral order.” Oftentimes, “in the city where most primary group relations are dissolved we find illegitimacy and sex delinquency. . . .”43 While female same-sex behavior represented a new “sex problem,” it was also considered merely a symptom of the larger issue of “sexual immorality” among recent southern migrants.44

There were comparatively few accounts of jealous violence between African American women, and even less coming from the subjects themselves. Sociologists and historians must be careful not to overstate the violence or pathologize the behav- ior based on so little evidence. Fortunately, historians have documented the experi- ences of African American women in prisons and reformatories in the urban North and offer fruitful approaches to the subject.45 An examination of the statistics on con- victed female offenders should not equate black working-class women with crimi- nality because historically African Americans, male and female, have been targeted by the criminal justice system. Instead, researchers should attempt to capture the complexity and contested nature of class and gender relationships within African American communities. While violent or imprisoned women were not representa- tive of working-class black women in general, their predicaments illustrate the many ways that black women’s behavior was regulated by the family and the state.46 The trope of the violent black woman—“the colored amazon”—has been identified showing how this category served to deny the humanity of African American women and blur distinctions between black female criminals and all African American women. This essay seeks to generate “empathy for the unrespectable,” a task that is necessary when examining narratives that describe the alleged crimes carried out by African American women who loved women.47

LESBIANISM AND VIOLENCE UNBOUND

While lesbianism was becoming an issue of concern among African Americans and whites in the 1920s, white women who loved women were rarely conflated with violence and criminality. This was even the case despite such high profile crimes as the 1892 Alice Mitchell trial in Memphis, Tennessee, that had introduced the idea of “lesbian love murders” to the reading public.48 Mitchell was a white middle-class woman who killed her female lover when she left her for a man, and the incident

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African American Women, Same-Sex Desire, and Violence in the Urban North 413

became a case study for influential European sexologists such as Havelock Ellis and Richard von Krafft-Ebing, and bolstered the idea that lesbianism was pathological, criminal, and immoral.49 In the months after the Mitchell murder, several “copycat” homicides among African American and white women brought lesbianism and its alleged association with violence to the forefront of the public imagination.50

A similar case occurred in Pennsylvania in 1905 between two African American women. Emily Lee shot and killed Stella Weldon, her friend since childhood, when the latter married a man and gave birth to his child. The black newspaper, the Scranton Defender, followed the case and opined unsympathetically, if “Lee pos- sessed those qualities which constitute a perfect womanhood, she would be free and happy today. Virtue, chastity, and good morals she has ignored; therefore her calami- ty.”51 Similar narratives could be found in the 1920s in the black press, but there was one notable difference between turn-of-the-century cases and later incidents: There was no indication in the earlier reports that these women were part of a larger queer network. In other words, these women killed women they desired who had chosen male partners. By the 1920s, however, queer networks had emerged in large cities and violence occasionally erupted within the all-female social circles and women attacked, not their female lovers, but their female competitors.

By the 1920s lesbianism had become more visible in American society, as conceptions of same-sex identities emerged.52 This was rarely viewed as a “pro- gressive” or “liberating” development, and was met with suspicion and concern by conservative commentators who used it to bolster on-going ideological attacks on women’s growing independence in general.53 The increase in consciousness and interest in homosexuality in the 1920s is attributed to several factors aside from the homosocial atmosphere of World War I, particularly for women. As historian John D’Emilio concluded, capitalism played a key role in the formation of queer urban subcultures, as individuals could now survive beyond the confines of fami- ly. Kinfolk no longer formed the primary economic unit, which had been the case prior to the Industrial Revolution.54 While most women had fewer opportunities than men to leave their families and become economically independent, southern black women migrated to northern cities in large numbers.55

While articles in the black press would highlight the rare instances of violence at women’s gatherings, queer black women were much more likely to be victims of violence than its agents.56 Indeed, performer Maud Russell, who engaged in sexual relationships with women, argued that lady lovers offered the “tenderness” that women rarely received from men at that time.57 However, same-sex desire and gender transgression did not support the ideology of respectability, which was a crucial component of racial uplift that placed great emphasis on proper deportment in hopes of achieving equal treatment from whites.58 As historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham argues, “the politics of respectability equated nonconformity with

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414 The Journal of African American History

the cause of racial inequality and injustice.”59 Thus, African American women who loved women did indeed constitute a potent “sex problem” for many in the black middle class who sought to hew to Victorian gender norms in hopes of gain- ing equal citizenship rights.60

THE BLACK PRESS DISCOVERS VIOLENT LADY LOVERS

One early newspaper article discussing violence between African American women and highlighting their atypical identities appeared in The Chicago Defender in 1922. It ran a short front-page story about a “Women Only” party on the Southside that the police broke up on Thanksgiving Day when “the piercing screams of a woman had penetrated the street.” After “Miss Barney Campbell” felt “the knife blade of Miss Verna Scales,” both women were placed under arrest and fined $100 each, along with the four other women present whose names and addresses were also printed in the article.61 The six police officers on hand stated that there were often complaints registered by the neighbors against this house, “as the women who congregated there were those of an unusual type.”62

While this particular gathering was broken up because of violence, past com- plaints against them may have occurred merely because they were deemed odd, or because of their visible gender transgression, public affection, or their predilection for socializing without men. In particular, their women-only Thanksgiving gathering pointed to their “unusualness,” as such holidays were most often celebrated with fam- ily and loved ones, making their homosocial assemblage appear even more suspect. The choice to include the names and addresses of the women in attendance—while a common technique in the press when reporting neighborhood events—was potential- ly damaging to the reputations and livelihoods of the women involved. By casting them as women of an “unusual type,” the reporter distanced them from the larger community, making them appear less sympathetic to the reader. This coverage simu- lated “the community networks of information” that many southern migrants were familiar with back home.63 Printing the names and addresses of suspects multiplied the consequences of their arrests, which served to further regulate behavior.64

While the term “lesbian” was not yet used in the black press to signify same-sex desire for women in 1922, the terminology of “unusual type” highlighted not just the women’s transgressive behavior, but also implied that their whole being was suffused with a form of otherness. Despite the ways this article suggested violence was implic- it in gatherings of women of an “unusual type,” the text also reveals that African American women who loved women had created their own network and were fash- ioning their own subcultures and rituals for major holidays in Chicago by the early 1920s. While prior to the 1920s, African American women’s same-sex relationships tended to appear as exceptional and isolated incidents, a growing “sex problem” was

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African American Women, Same-Sex Desire, and Violence in the Urban North 415

now becoming visible to the public. This was met with concern and hostility by male journalists who were considered “the voice of the black community.”65

In 1928 another murder involving African American women, also in Chicago, pointed to romantic jealousy as the motive. The front-page Chicago Defender headline, “Woman Slain in Queer Love Brawl” ran on the first of December, with the sub-heading, “Bullets Stop Roomer Who Tried to Move.” The article recount- ed the shooting of Mrs. Revonia Kennedy who was a boarder in the Bronzeville home of Pearl Anchrum. In the photo of Kennedy that appeared in the Chicago Defender she appears stylish and respectable, with bobbed hair and jewelry. The caption with the photo stated that Kennedy was shot by a woman with whom she was living, which raises the question: What did it mean for two unrelated, adult women to share a home at this time? The high rents on the Southside and in Harlem led to the creation of various living situations—from the establishment of boarding houses to the taking in of lodgers in one’s home—that straddled the line between public and private space. Guests of the opposite sex were usually not allowed into the bedrooms of boarding houses as a safety measure against board- ers using their rooms for prostitution or other illegal activities.66 However, women boarders could still invite one another over, or live in the same boarding house, and thus cultural norms based on ideas about “respectability” generally over- looked the possibility of a same-sex relationship, creating space for it to flourish.

Photo of Revonia Kennedy from the Chicago Defender, 1 December 1928.

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416 The Journal of African American History

According to the Defender, Revonia Kennedy had announced to Pearl Anchrum that she would be moving out, and in response, Anchrum shot Kennedy in the legs while she “sat on a davenport in the dining room.” Anchrum denied the charge and offered up a third woman, “Mrs. Azelia Leghorn,” as the shooter. Both women were then arrested. After Kennedy died from her wounds, the Defender noted that, “further investigation by the police” had “revealed a strange love affair between the three women.”67 No other information was given and the police were never clear about who was involved in this romantic relationship. However, if indeed Anchrum loved Kennedy and shot her because she was leaving her, this would be the only known case in the decade which reported that the object of affection was killed, instead of a romantic rival. If Anchrum did shoot Kennedy in the legs because she planned to move out of her home, the location of her wounds is telling.

It is also possible that Anchrum was involved with Azelia Leghorn and did not want Kennedy to move in with her. Interestingly, all three of the women involved were married and referenced as “Mrs.” This suggests that the sexual subjectivities emerging in the urban North at this time were even more complex than the bina- ry terms “heterosexual” or “lesbian” could convey: married African American women took part in same-sex relationships despite their legal ties to men. For some African American women in the early 20th century, marriage may have made queer relationships easier to maintain since married women’s female friend- ships were assumed to be platonic. The increased mobility of southern migrants, coupled with the anonymity of urban life and the social spaces opened up by Prohibition, created opportunities for lady lovers to connect. For many women, their relationships with men were no detriment to their same-sex flirtations and liaisons, which led some male critics to further denounce lady lovers as a threat to the black family and “the race.”68

Census information reveals that Revonia Kennedy was born “Revonia Jones” in Franklin County, Tennessee, in 1897. Her father, James Jones, was a day labor- er, and her mother, Nora Jones, raised six children. Both were born at the end of the Civil War and were literate.69 In 1918, at the age of 21, Revonia Jones married Lawrence Kennedy in Chicago.70 No other information about their marriage is available, nor are there extant divorce records, but Kennedy’s death certificate lists her as “single.”71 The certificate also indicated that Kennedy was fatally shot “by her landlady, Pearl Anchrum” during a quarrel. However, Anchrum was eventual- ly acquitted of all charges in the shooting of Revonia Kennedy for reasons not stat- ed. Born Pearl Cornell, she was a Missouri native who had married George Anchrum in Chicago in 1922.72 It is not clear whether she and her husband lived in the same house with Revonia Kennedy at the time of the murder, but by 1930 Anchrum was living with him on the Southside.73

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African American Women, Same-Sex Desire, and Violence in the Urban North 417

The Defender editors defined the incident involving the three women as a “strange love affair.” A police statement, though brief, generated the newspaper headline, “Woman Slain in Queer Love Brawl,” but the word “queer” generally meant “odd” in 1928, though it eventually became a reference to homosexuality. For example, there were two other newspaper stories in 1928 about “queer love triangles” and one referred to a married man who had a female lover on the side, and the other was about a man having an affair with his sister-in-law. Thus, “queer” events included departures from heterosexual monogamy as well as same- sex relationships, particularly among women.

DEBATING FEMALE SAME-SEX DESIRE

Another question raised in the black press at this time concerned how “lady lovers” or “women lovers” came to be: Did such desires have biological or envi- ronmental origins? In February 1929 African American journalist Edgar M. Grey wrote an article on this topic for the Harlem-based Inter-State Tattler, a black entertainment and society newspaper. “Are Women Lovers Harmful?” he asked his readers, noting the publication of a new book that pertained to “the love affairs between two women” without naming the work in question.74 The book’s author, Grey continued, argued that women “addicted to the habit” were “victims of a condition growing out of certain ‘pre-natal’ influences over which they have no control.” Grey added that he has “no quarrel” with the theory.75 He then went on to list other experts who also subscribe to this theory, including Sigmund Freud, Havelock Ellis, and Richard von Krafft-Ebing. While Grey mentioned “perversion among women,” he never used the words “homosexuality” or “lesbianism.” He did not agree with the unnamed author’s belief that “all the cases of known per- version among women” can be attributed to “prenatal circumstances,” as he believed that most “lady lovers developed the habit, either from association with persons who were addicted to the practice, or deliberately in search of a substitute for a man.” The “habit and practices were developed either by imitation, or from a desire to explore some new sexual region in search of a thrill. In many cases, women who have been fooled by men revert to this habit of loving other women, in order to salve their feelings, and get even, as it were, with the . . . man who had wronged them.”76

Grey framed lesbianism as a choice some women make, often as a more sup- portive alternative after negative experiences with men. Thus the notion that les- bianism was a positive choice for women had no similar corollary for gay men, further situating women’s relationships as exercising female agency during a time of changing gender and sexual configurations. Nevertheless, Grey’s argument that it was common for lady lovers to “develop the habit” presented a potential prob-

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418 The Journal of African American History

lem for the African American community by suggesting that the population of deviant women might grow unabated. Grey therefore declared himself ready to expose this “sex problem” and declared that married men must protect their wives and daughters from “this practice,” and oppose “this class of perverts to the bitter end.” After all, he reminded his readers, the “sex function” was “devised by Nature for the purpose of procreation” so that “the race of mankind should live on” and anything that interfered with procreation was “a matter which society should stamp out.”77 At the same time, the 1920s saw an explosion of marriage manuals, which emphasized the importance of fulfilling sex for married hetero- sexual couples.78 This trend of viewing marital sex as about more than just procre- ation, but also mutual pleasure, was at odds with Grey’s emphasis on reproduc- tion. This suggests his specific interest was in propagating “the black race”—a common concern among some black nationalists in the New Negro era.79

Grey then turns to the question of how the practice had affected the local black community:

The most terrible consequences have grown out of women lovers in Harlem. We have seen more than five murders in the year 1928, which grew directly out of this practice between a sin- gle woman and a married woman. Men cannot approve of this practice; women cannot approve of this practice; society cannot approve of this practice.80

Love between women led to murder, according to Grey. No longer was it neces- sary to summon the decades-old Alice Mitchell trial to illustrate this point; Grey suggested that Harlem’s African American community was now a site where such tragedies occurred among “this class of perverts.”81

Grey’s reference to five murders in Harlem was not detailed, but one such case was well documented in the press in 1928. In that year Harlem surpassed the Bowery as the site of the largest number of murders in Manhattan.82 The New York Amsterdam News reported that of the thirty-four homicides occurring in Harlem in the first six months of 1928, half occurred among African Americans and half among whites. Of the former, one took place between two women. The Amsterdam News reported that, “Edna Washington, 25, [was] stabbed to death at 38 West 136th St on June 19th. Alberta Mitchell, said to have been the dead woman’s ‘woman lover,’ was indicted yesterday by the Grand Jury on a charge of homicide following her alleged confession.”83 Although Grey stated that at least five such murders happened in Harlem in 1928 alone, no other similar cases were covered in the black press that year in New York City. Washington’s death can be traced in the New York Municipal Archives, as can the trial of Alberta Mitchell, and notably, there is no mention in any of the official records of love between women—only newspapers mentioned that aspect of the murder.

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African American Women, Same-Sex Desire, and Violence in the Urban North 419

“WOMAN KILLS WOMAN FOR LOVE OF WOMAN”

The case of Alberta Mitchell and Edna Washington was well covered in the black press not just locally, but also in other Northeast and Midwest cities. However, the initial coverage of the murder did not suggest that same-sex desire played any role in the death. The New York Age first covered the incident, but the reporter was not aware of the same-sex aspect of the case. The headline read, “Woman Stabbed to Death, Man and Woman Held.” The text went on to state, “Mrs. Washington was separated from her husband” and Alberta Mitchell and Beatrice R. Irvin were both arrested and charged with homicide after “quarrelling over the affections of the man,” which resulted in Washington being “stabbed to death with a small dirk.”84 A shorter article on the murder in the The Brooklyn Eagle was the only mention of this murder in the white press. The headline “Negress Stabbed to Death” was followed by two sentences about Washington’s murder and the questioning of Mitchell and “Rae Irvis” (whose name was spelled differently in every article on the incident).85 However, this story was not yet con- troversial enough to warrant front-page coverage, and the story was buried in the back pages of both newspapers.

One week later, on 27 June 1928, a front-page article in the New York Amsterdam News carried the provocative headline, “Woman Kills Woman for Love of Woman.” It announced, “A death struggle between two women for the love of another woman brought into the spotlight recently a condition, the police say, which is all too prevalent in this community.”86 Washington and her confessed killer, Mitchell, were both in their mid-twenties and lived together at the same address on West 136th Street in Harlem. “The object of affection was said to be Beatrice Ray Arvis” who was also in her mid-twenties and living in Harlem. It is not clear whether the roommates were a couple and Washington also desired Arvis, or if the two were friends, but both were involved with, or romantically interested in, Arvis. Given that the police were positive that same-sex desire was a key to the case, it is surprising that the reporter did not provide more details. Since Mitchell also accused Arvis of killing Washington, perhaps Washington desired Arvis, and Mitchell desired Washington. There is not enough information to make it clear whether Mitchell killed her lover or her rival.

The article also notes that their neighbors, “Zena Tate and Emma Barrett, both of 36 West 136th Street, called at the house and learned of the tragedy” and went on to call the police, which suggests that Tate and Barrett may have also been a couple who were part of their social circle. When two detectives arrived, they “found Miss Arvis weeping and moaning” amidst broken windows and “smashed” furniture, while Edna Washington “lay on the bed in a pool of blood.”87 Such vivid and sensationalistic reporting emphasized the violence that lesbianism could por-

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420 The Journal of African American History

tend, thereby serving as a warning to readers. This incident was presented as part of a larger problem: lady lovers were becoming more visible in Harlem, and their deviant desires often led to physical violence. This case became news nationally and the Indianapolis Recorder, for example, ran the story from the New York Amsterdam News in early July with the headline, “Women Love Woman, One Kills Rival.”88 This headline suggested that Mitchell and Washington both desired Arvis, and Mitchell killed Washington, removing her competition. If this was the case, then the murder was similar to most of the 1920s incidents recounted here, in which a woman killed, not her lover, but a rival within a growing network of queer black women.

Several months later the case went to trial, and Alberta Mitchell was found guilty of manslaughter. The New York Amsterdam News declared that Mitchell would serve time for killing her “‘mate’ who proved faithless.” The article dramat- ically declared that this verdict was “the final chapter in the tale of an eternal tri- angle—this time one in which the lovers were women.” “In a jealous rage because of the abnormal attentions paid by Edna Washington . . . to Beatrice Ray Arvis,” the Amsterdam News reported, Mitchell “buried a knife blade in her ‘lover’s’ neck June 19 and left her cold in a pool of blood.”89 The Pittsburg Courier also covered the outcome with the headline, “Woman Gets Manslaughter Verdict in ‘Queer Love’ Case.” The article in the Courier article blared, “Sordid Affair Bared” and “Alberta Mitchell Found Guilty of Slaying Girl of Whom She Was Jealous.” Mitchell was described as “insanely jealous of the attentions paid Beatrice Ray Arvis” by “her friend, Miss Washington.”90 Mitchell was eventually sentenced to four to eight years in Auburn prison in upstate New York for the murder of Washington, while the New York Amsterdam News concluded that the “perverted affection for Edna Washington, 25, who lives with her, is believed to have caused Miss Mitchell to kill her roommate.”91

Most of the newspaper accounts told a different story about who loved whom. Did Mitchell kill Washington because she loved her or because she was jealous of her? Were they roommates or lovers? The domestic sphere, long associated with women, could function as a site for homosocial as well as homosexual behavior, and these incidents reflected the ambiguity over what it meant for two women to share a home. The discrepancies in the various accounts of the Washington mur- der exposed the confusion of reporters and detectives as they came to grips with the newly emerging types of living arrangements and relationships that African American women practiced in northern cities at this time. The differing accounts in the various newspapers of who killed whom and why, reveal the inscrutability of female romantic relationships and male journalists’ inability to understand how such relationships functioned. It is also possible that “queer desire” was not at the heart of some of these cases, and the journalists simply utilized the growing inter-

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African American Women, Same-Sex Desire, and Violence in the Urban North 421

est in lesbianism to attract readers. The editors’ use of terms such as “mate” and “lover” in quotes suggest that journalists did not want to imply that these relation- ships paralleled heterosexual relationships, hence the “perverted affections,” “insanity” and “jealous rage” of these women contributed to violent outcomes. Needless to say, similar stories in the black press about men who killed their female partners, and vice versa, rarely relied on medical terminology to suggest the perpetrators were pathological, yet this epistemological leap was usually made when discussing murders between women.

Through official records such as death certificates and census reports, it is possible to construct more of the details about Edna Washington and Alberta Mitchell. Washington was 24 years old when she died, and while one newspaper article referred to her as separated from her husband, she is listed as “widowed” on her death certificate.92 Both she and Mitchell worked as domestics, which was the most common occupation for African American women at this time.93 According to extant records from the murder trial, Mitchell had only lived at 38 West 136th Street with Edna Washington for five weeks before the murder occurred, while Washington had lived in New York for four years before her death. A 1930 census form finds Alberta Mitchell listed as an inmate at Auburn State Prison for Women in upstate New York, where she worked as a laundress and was also listed as divorced. Mitchell was indeed a southern migrant.94

Since the census information and death certificate reveal that both women were at one point married, this case further demonstrates that African American women who took part in same-sex relationships also had relationships with men. At the same time, the lack of explicit reference in the official reports to the queer aspect of the murder suggests that either it was not acceptable to disclose women’s queer desires in state records, or that the queer angle of the murder was fictional- ized in the black press to support the established trope of the “murderous woman lover.” The lack of documentation of same-sex relationships in the official records corroborates an important point made by Roderick Ferguson: “epistemology is an economy of information privileged and information excluded,” and while “subject formations arise out of this economy,” often “canonical and national formations rarely disclose what they have rejected.”95 Hence, a lack of reference to lesbian- ism in state records should not necessarily mean this was not the case, although it does underscore the difficulty in creating historical narratives about queer women’s lives.

CONCLUSION

These articles in the black press reveal that the discourse on African American lady lovers and their emerging networks in northern cities primarily depicted these

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422 The Journal of African American History

women as violent, jealous, and criminal. These narratives could be used to stigma- tize southern migrants as unruly and immoral during the Great Migration, while warning the larger community about the increasing visibility and prevalence of this “condition.” What these various newspaper articles do not reveal is the actual voic- es of the women involved. The articles do not describe how the women identified themselves or their relationships, nor do they offer many details about the women’s lives outside of the acts of violence that made them newsworthy. Nonetheless, we can learn certain information about these women. By the 1920s they gathered and celebrated together in their leisure time in New York and Chicago. Women lived together as friends, roommates, and lovers in Harlem and Bronzeville apartments and boarding houses. However, African American women who loved women no longer did so in isolation, but had formed social networks with others who also shared their desires. Women were more likely at this time to commit a violent act against a competitor or rival than against their own lover, rather than to attack a woman who had left them for a man. The growing networks of African American women who loved women increased the likelihood of intimate partner violence, which is indeed problematic regardless of the sex of the persons involved. Moreover, these articles show that black male journalists, the primary authors of these texts, were troubled by the growing queer presence in urban black communities, despite the reality that such behaviors and identities were increasing in the larger society as well. These journalists sought to advance notions of heterosexual normativity while drawing their readers’ attention to the increase in “deviant sexualities.”

At the same time, aside from their use of medical and moralizing language to pathologize their subjects, these articles were often no different from those detailing murders and violent crimes among working-class people in general. Despite their dif- fering objects of desire, these women shared many other experiences with their fel- low migrants, black or white. However, the lack of similar articles about gay black men or white women and violence situates these subjects uniquely, suggesting that queer black women embodied a specific threat and thus black male journalists por- trayed lady lovers as violent and out of control. The voyeuristic and sensational nar- ratives presented the subject of lesbianism to titillate readers. These newspaper arti- cles offer an important window into how such women were represented in the black press.96 By depicting African American women who loved women as violent and criminal, it carried out the cultural work of separating these subjects from the realm of the respectable and moral. Female same-sex relationships were literally and rhetor- ically construed as violent. African American male journalists viewed lesbianism as a new “sex problem” that affected African American families and communities.

Yet, when read against the grain, it becomes clear that the Great Migration produced a critical mass that allowed the formation of social networks among women who loved women. Although some of these women were married to men,

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African American Women, Same-Sex Desire, and Violence in the Urban North 423

these articles suggest the fluidity of African American women’s sexuality, which further complicates both the heterosexual/homosexual binary, and categories of respectability and immorality. While male journalists sought to highlight the dan- gers that this behavior could cause African American women and the larger com- munity, lady lovers were now being identified in these large cities, which led to growing alarms about their increasing visibility.

NOTES

The author would like to thank Rhonda Y. Williams and the members of the History Department at Case Western Reserve University for the opportunity to work on this essay while serving as an African American Studies Postdoctoral Fellow, 2014–15. I am also grateful for the feedback and comments from Kevin J. Mumford, James W. Cook, Regina Morantz-Sanchez, V. P. Franklin, Cheryl D. Hicks, Kali N. Gross, and the members of the University of Michigan American History Workshop and cultural history writing group.

1“Woman Rivals for Affection of Another Woman Battle with Knives, and One Has Head Almost Severed from Body,” The New York Age, 27 November 1926, 1. 2Ibid. 3Seth M. Scheiner, Negro Mecca: A History of the Negro in New York City, 1865–1920 (New York, 1965), 19. 4Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto: Negro New York 1890–1930 (New York, 1963), 112–113, 120. 5Marcy S. Sacks, Before Harlem: The Black Experience in New York City Before World War I (Philadelphia, PA, 2006), 80. 6While I have discovered in my research that the term “queer” did not come into wide usage until the 1930s to sig- nify same-sex desire, I use this descriptor as an umbrella term to contain a wide range of historical identities, behav- iors, and descriptors that generally refer to non-reproductive sex and relationships between women. As Jafari S. Allen has recently noted, while the term “queer” might be problematic, “no term, even those that may seem self-evidently local, indigenous, or autochthonous, is perfectly stable or synchronous with dynamic self-identification on the ground.” See Jafari S. Allen, “Black/Queer/Diaspora at the Current Conjuncture,” GLQ 18: 2–3 (2012): 222. 7The Tenderloin, San Juan Hill/Columbus Hill, and Harlem were the three neighborhoods where the majority of southern migrants settled between 1900 and 1920. See Osofsky, Harlem, 34. 8Secondary sources examining the importance of the Great Migration include James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago, IL, 1989); Carole Marks, Farewell—We’re Good and Gone: The Great Black Migration (Bloomington, IN, 1989); Farah Jasmine Griffin, “Who Set You Flowin’?”: The African-American Migration Narrative (New York, 1995); Kimberly L. Phillips, Alabama North: African-American Migrants, Community, and Working-Class Activism in Cleveland, 1915–1945 (Urbana, IL, 1999); Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA, 2003); Davarian Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, The Great Migration, and Black Urban Life (Chapel Hill, NC, 2007); Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York, 2010). On the history of the rent party, see Ira De A. Reid, “Mrs. Bailey Pays the Rent,” in Ebony and Topaz; A Collectanea, ed. Charles S. Johnson (New York, 1927), 144. 9“A Rent Party Tragedy,” The New York Age, 11 December 1926, 4. 10On “old settlers and new settlers,” see Grossman, Land of Hope, 8; and Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes, 9. 11On the politics of respectability, see Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA, 1993). 12Kim T. Gallon, “Between Respectability and Modernity: Black Newspapers and Sexuality, 1925–1940,” Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2009, 8–9. 13Eric Garber, “A Spectacle in Color: The Lesbian and Gay Subculture of Jazz Age Harlem,” in Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay & Lesbian Past, ed. Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey (New York, 1989), 318–331; Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth Century America (New York, 1991); George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York, 1994); Kevin Mumford, Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in

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Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century (New York, 1997); Chad Heap, Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885–1940 (Chicago, IL, 2008); Shane Vogel, The Scene of Harlem Cabaret: Race, Sexuality, Performance (Chicago IL, 2009); and James F. Wilson, Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies: Performance, Race, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance (Ann Arbor, MI, 2010). 14See Cookie Woolner, “‘The Famous Lady Lovers:’ African American Women and Same-Sex Desire from Reconstruction to World War II,” Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2014, 152–220. 15See Mumford, Interzones; Rochella Thorpe, “‘A House Where Queers Go:’ African-American Lesbian Nightlife in Detroit, 1940–1975,” in Inventing Lesbian Cultures in America, ed. Ellen Lewin (Boston, MA, 1996). 16Deborah McDowell, “‘It’s Not Safe. Not Safe at All’: Sexuality in Nella Larsen’s Passing,” The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, et al. (London, 1993), 616–625. 17Hazel Carby, “Policing the Black Woman’s Body in an Urban Context,” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 4 (1992): 738–755; Cheryl D. Hicks, Talk with You Like a Woman: African American Women, Justice, and Reform in New York City (Chapel Hill, NC, 2010); Erin D. Chapman, Prove It On Me: New Negroes, Sex, and Popular Culture in the 1920s (New York, 2012). 18Sandra R. Lieb, Mother of the Blues: A Study of Ma Rainey (Amherst, MA, 1981); Eric Garber, “Gladys Bentley: The Bulldagger Who Sang the Blues,” Out/Look 1:1 (Spring 1988): 52–61; Joan Nestle, “Excerpts from the Oral History of Mabel Hampton,” Signs 18: 4 (Summer 1993): 925–935. 19Throughout this article I use the term “lady lovers” to refer to women who loved women. This expression emerged in the 1920s and was used by African Americans in New York and Chicago at this time, so not only is it historically accurate but it also highlights that it was love that brought these women together, despite the wider cultural focus on their violence and jealousy. Further, while the word “lady” has historically been associated with white middle-class women, the term serves to reclaim the word for African American women. 20On living conditions in Harlem and Bronzeville in the early Great Migration, see James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan (New York, 1930); St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (New York, 1945); Osofsky, Harlem; Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes. 21Despite the lack of “official evidence” of these subjects’ queerness, they are still analyzed here as potential queer subjects. As lesbian historian Martha Vicinus notes, “Lesbian history has always been characterized by a ‘not knowing’ which could be its defining core.” See Martha Vicinus, “Lesbian History: All Theory and No Facts or All Facts and No Theory?” Radical History Review 60 (Fall 1994): 57. 22Phillips, Alabama North, 39–40. 23Ibid; Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot (Chicago, IL, 1922), 80. 24Carby, “Policing the Black Women’s Body,” 741. 25Grossman, Land of Hope, 94; Danielle Taylor Phillips, “Moving with the Women: Tracing Racialization, Migration, and Domestic Workers in the Archive,” Signs 38: 2 (Winter 2013): 382; Phillips, Alabama North, 40. 26Kelly Miller, “Surplus Negro Women,” The Southern Workman 34 (1906): 524. 27Ira Rosenwaike, Population History of New York City (Syracuse, NY, 1972), 189–91. 28“More Homicides in Harlem Than Down on Bowery,” New York Amsterdam News, 18 July 1928, 1. 29“Table 13: Color and Sex of Known Perpetrators,” The Illinois Crime Survey (Chicago, IL, 1929), 624. 30One exception was the infamous case of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, gay white male students at the University of Chicago who kidnapped and killed a boy in 1924. I have only uncovered one similar narrative between two white women in Chicago in 1921 that was briefly noted in The Chicago Evening News. See: “Girl Victims of Queer Love Lie Near Death,” The Chicago Evening News, 28 April 1921, 1. No similar stories con- cerning gay black men have been found, which supports the common trope of effeminate gay men as “sissies” which was popular in the urban black North throughout the 1920s. 31However, I have found one newspaper article documenting domestic violence between men, although it appears that one party may not have identified as male. In 1925, The Chicago Defender ran a front-page story about a “male ‘wife’” who was killed by his male partner in Ohio. While the person known as “Mrs. Florence Reed” was described as a “masquerader,” no other language was used to describe either of the parties as pathological. See “‘Slayer of Male Wife’ Held Without Bond,” The Chicago Defender, 7 February 1925, 1. 32Lisa Duggan, Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity (Durham, NC, 2000), 43; Gallon, “Between Respectability and Modernity,” 151. 33Simon Michael Bessie, Jazz Journalism: The Story of Tabloid Newspapers (New York, 1938).

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African American Women, Same-Sex Desire, and Violence in the Urban North 425 34Gallon, “Between Respectability and Modernity,” 3. 35Kelly Miller, “Black ‘Yellow’ Journalism,” The New York Amsterdam News, 18 July 1928, 16. 36Hayward Farrar, The Baltimore Afro-American, 1892–1950 (Westport, CT, 1998), 187. 37Kobena Mercer, “Black Art and the Burden of Representation,” Third Text 4:10 (1999): 61–78. 38This conclusion was reached based on a sample of fifteen articles published in the 1920s from the ProQuest Black Historical Newspapers database, accessed 9 September 2014 and 10–11 January 2015. Of these fifteen arti- cles, one referred to a woman who allegedly killed her husband as “hysterical with grief,” and another described a man who allegedly killed his wife as “insanely jealous,” but no other pathologizing or moralizing language was included in the articles. 39Joy Wiltenburg, “True Crime: The Origins of Modern Sensationalism,” American Historical Review 109 (December 2004): 1377. 40Ibid., 1377–80. 41Kali Gross, Colored Amazons: Crime, Violence, and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880–1910 (Durham, NC, 2006), 124. 42L. Mara Dodge, Whores and Thieves of the Worst Kind: A Study of Women, Crime, and Prisons, 1835–2000 (DeKalb, IL, 2002), 103. 43E. Franklin Frazier, “Sex Morality Among Negroes,” Religious Education 2 (December/January 1928): 450. 44See “Have We a New Sex Problem Here?” The Chicago Whip, 27 November 1920, 1. While sources document- ing female same-sex desire among African American women in the South prior to the Great Migration are rare, it should not be assumed that southern women did not act on such desires. However, the anonymity provided to recent migrants in the urban North, and the myriad public and private leisure spaces in which same-sex behav- ior was tolerated or welcomed, may have provided more opportunities for women to experiment with such behav- iors and identities than in rural or southern locales at this time. 45See Carby, “Policing the Black Woman’s Body”; Gross, Colored Amazons; Hicks, Talk with You Like a Woman. Other historical works that examine women in relation to race, policing, and violence. include Nicole Hahn Rafter, Partial Justice: Women in State Prisons, 1800–1935 (Boston, MA, 1990); Mary E Odem, Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885–1920 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1995); Dodge, Whores and Thieves. 46Hicks, Talk with You Like a Woman, 3. 47Ibid., ix, 3. 48Christina Simmons, “Companionate Marriage and the Lesbian Threat,” Frontiers 4 (Autumn 1979): 55–59; Lynda Hart, Fatal Women: Lesbian Sexuality and the Mark of Aggression (Princeton, NJ, 1994); Duggan, Sapphic Slashers. 49The Alice Mitchell trial was written about in the works of noted British sexologist Havelock Ellis and Austrian sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing. See Havelock Ellis, Sexual Inversion (London, 1897), 49; and Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis (New York, 1899), 388–391. 50“Instances Multiply,” Memphis Commercial, February 1892, cited in Duggan, Sapphic Slashers, 139–140. 51“Gil Blas’s Final Resume of the Emma Lee Affair,” Scranton Defender, 29 April 1905, cited in Gross, Colored Amazons, 86. 52Simmons, “Companionate Marriage,” 56; George Chauncey, “From Sexual Inversion to Homosexuality: Medicine and the Changing Conceptualization of Female Desire,” Salmagundi 58 (Winter 1983): 106; Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, 62–63; Chauncey, Gay New York, 355. 53Simmons, “Companionate Marriage,” 58; Jennifer Terry, An American Obsession: Science, Medicine and Homosexuality in Modern Society (Chicago, IL, 1999), 125. 54John D’Emilio, “Capitalism and Gay Identity,” in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson (New York, 1983), 104. 55Joanne Meyerowitz, Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880–1930 (Chicago, IL, 1988), 181. 56Many queer black performing women, such as Ethel Waters, Alberta Hunter, and Jackie Mabley, survived rape and sexual abuse in their youth. See Donald Bogle, Heat Wave: The Life and Career of Ethel Waters (New York, 2011), 42; Frank C. Taylor and Gerald Cook, Alberta: A Celebration in Blues (New York, 1987), 20; Clovis E. Semmes, The Regal Theater and Black Culture (New York, 2006), 101. Further, performing women such as Mabel Hampton found men in the entertainment industry predatory and sexually aggressive. See transcription of Mabel Hampton tapes by Joan Nestle, 1999, part 2, 8–9, box 1, The Mabel Hampton Special Collection/Lesbian Herstory Archives/Lesbian Herstory Educational Foundation, Inc.

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426 The Journal of African American History 57Jean-Claude Baker, Josephine Baker: The Hungry Heart (Lanham, MD, 2001), 63–64. 58Kevin Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, NC, 1996), 5. 59Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 203. 60“Have We a New Sex Problem Here?” The Chicago Whip, 27 November 1920, 1; Gaines, Uplifting the Race, 93. 61“‘Unusual Type,’ Say Cops of Women Caught in Raid,” The Chicago Defender, 9 December 1922, 1. 62Ibid. 63Gallon, “Between Respectability and Modernity,” 23. 64Chauncey, Gay New York, 256. George Chauncey also notes that in some cases quick thinking arrestees, such as Harlem Renaissance novelist Wallace Thurman, would give fake names and addresses when confronted with the police over same-sex activities. See Chauncey, Gay New York, 265. 65See, for example, Theodore G. Vincent, ed., Voices of a Black Nation: Political Journalism in the Harlem Renaissance (San Francisco, CA, 1973). 66Meyerowitz, Women Adrift, 112; John A. Jakle and Keith A. Sculle, America’s Main Street Hotels: Transiency and Community in the Early Auto Age (Knoxville, TN, 2009), 112. 67“Woman Slain in Queer Love Brawl,” The Chicago Defender, 1 December 1928, 1. 68See, John Houghton, “The Plight of Our Race in Harlem, Brooklyn and New Jersey,” Negro World, 21 April 1923, 8; Grey, “Are Women Lovers Harmful?” Inter-State Tattler, 15 February 1929, 3; and “Dr. A. C. Powell Scores Pulp Evils,” New York Age, 16 November 1929, 1. 69U.S. Census, 1900, Franklin County, Tennessee, accessed through Ancestry.com. 70Cook County Marriage Index, 1914–1942, accessed through Ancestry.com. 71Illinois, Deaths and Stillbirths Index, 1916–1947, accessed through Ancestry.com. 72Cook County Marriage Index: Years 1914 through 1942. 73“Homicide in Chicago 1870–1930” database, https://homicide.northwestern.edu/database/. 74The book in question was likely British author Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian-themed novel The Well of Loneliness, which was published in the United States in 1928. Cultural productions dealing with lesbianism came into the forefront in this decade, influenced by sexological theories that further contributed to the mainstream knowledge of such behaviors and identities. This novel greatly affected the increasing conversations about women loving women, and its author was charged with promoting immoral material, which led to an obscenity trial. A sympa- thetic portrayal of female same-sex desire, The Well of Loneliness’ short preface was written by sexologist Havelock Ellis, who validated the book’s importance as a social, psychological, and cultural intervention. It is not likely that The Well of Loneliness introduced the American public to the topic of lesbianism in the 1920s, but it certainly increased public knowledge and interest in the subject. “Police Seize Novel By Radclyffe Hall,” The New York Times, 12 January 1929, 3; Esther Newton, “The Mythic Mannish Lesbian: Radclyffe Hall and the New Woman,” Signs 9 (Summer 1984): 559. 75While Radclyffe Hall’s characters were elite British women, the book’s theme nonetheless attracted the inter- est of some in New York’s African American community, as Edward Grey demonstrates. See Grey, “Are Women Lovers Harmful?” 76Ibid. 77Ibid. 78Christina Simmons, “‘Modern Marriage’ for African Americans, 1920–1940,” Canadian Review of American Studies 30, 3 (2000): 274–300; Julian B. Carter, The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 1880–1940 (Durham, NC, 2007), 94. 79Michelle Mitchell, Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004); and Martin Summers, Manliness and Its Discontents: The Black Middle Class and the Transformation of Masculinity, 1900–1930 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004). 80Grey, “Are Women Lovers Harmful?” 81Ibid. 82“More Homicides in Harlem than Down on Bowery,” The New York Amsterdam News, 18 July 1928, 1. 83Ibid. 84“Woman Stabbed to Death, Man and Woman Held,” The New York Age, 23 June 1928, 10. 85“Negress Stabbed to Death,” The Brooklyn Eagle, 20 June 1928, 22.

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African American Women, Same-Sex Desire, and Violence in the Urban North 427 86“Woman Kills Woman for Love of Woman,” The New York Amsterdam News, 27 June 1928, 1. 87Ibid. 88“Women Love Woman, One Kills Rival,” The Indianapolis Recorder, 7 July 1928, 1. 89“Woman Slayer of Female Lover Found Guilty of Manslaughter,” The New York Amsterdam News, 24 October 1928, 1. 90“Woman Gets Manslaughter Verdict in ‘Queer Love’ Case,” The Pittsburg Courier, 3 November1928, 8. 91“Four to Eight Year Sentence for Woman,” The New York Amsterdam News, 14 November 1928, 1. 92Edna Washington’s death certificate #17332, 1928 Deaths Reported in Borough of Manhattan, New York Municipal Archives. 93Ibid; District Attorney file, Alberta Mitchell murder trial, New York Municipal Archives. In 1930, 63 percent of African American women worked in domestic and personal service in the U.S., up from 42 percent in 1910. See U.S. Department of Commerce, The Social and Economic Status of the Black Population in the United States: An Historical View, 1790–1978 (Washington, DC, 1980), 71. 941930 U.S. Census, New York State, Cayuga County, city of Auburn, District 8, accessed through Ancestry.com, 2/6/2013. 95Roderick Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis, MN, 2004), xi. 96Indeed, some articles in the black press discussed the growing prevalence of lady lovers in New York and Chicago without describing them as violent. See, “Have We a New Sex Problem Here?” The Chicago Whip, 27 November 1920; “Dr. A. C. Powell Scores Pulp Evils,” The New York Age, 16 November 1929, 1; and S. T. Whitney, “Watch Your Step!” The New York Amsterdam News, 4 December 1929, 9.

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