In the 1920s & 30s, Stephanie St. Clair, a self-made Black woman, ran one of New York City’s many illegal gambling rings, known colloquially as "the numbers." She was successful, rich, beautiful, and tough as nails. She was targeted by police, harassed, and incarcerated. This zine by LaShawn Harris offers a glimpse into the woman who was known in Harlem as Madame Queenie.
"To understand Black life, in the past and today, we need to reclaim the stories of women like Madame Stephanie St. Clair—women who were attacked in their own time and erased in ours precisely because they fought back against a racist system that policed them and tried to destroy them. In this zine, Dr. LaShawn Harris goes a long way toward restoring St. Clair to us, in her courage and her furs." —Mariame Kaba
LaShawn Harris is an associate professor of History at Michigan State University and assistant editor for the Journal of African American History. Her articles have appeared in the Journal of Social History, Journal of Urban History, and the Journal of Women's History. Harris is also the author of the prize-winning Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners: Black Women in New York City’s Underground Economy (University of Illinois Press, 2016). Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners won the Darlene Clark Hine Book Prize (Best Book in African American Women’s and Gender History) from the Organization of American Historians as well as the Philip Taft Book Award (Best Book in American Labor & Working-Class History) from the Labor and Working-Class History Association. The book explores the lives of African American women in New York City’s expansive informal economy by drawing on police and prison records, newspaper accounts, and period literature. More broadly, Dr. Harris’s research engages with women, gender, and sexuality; labor and the working class; urban history; and social and cultural change. She received a Ph.D. in history from Howard University in 2007.