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“Drug-Mad Negroes”: African Americans, Drug Use, and the Law in Progressive Era New York City

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 November 2021

Douglas Flowe Open the ORCID record for Douglas Flowe [Opens in a new window]
Douglas Flowe*
Affiliation:
Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: dflowe@wustl.edu
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Abstract

This study tracks the evolution of racist ideas pertaining to Black drug addiction and crime and the growth of a real interracial drug subculture, both of which had a part in forging New York’s drug policies in the early twentieth century. Well-worn racial tropes about drug use, cultivated in the imaginations of white commentators and pseudoscientists, railroaded African American suspects and contributed to the creation of the early apparatuses of the war on drugs. As observers increasingly connected the specter of cocaine “delirium” to common anxieties about Black crime and miscegenation, they in turn viewed white cocaine use as a solvable shortcoming in need of treatment rather than imprisonment. As such, New York City’s early civic responses to cocaine were shaped as Southern racial discourse collided with the developing panics of the Progressive Era that rallied around the increasing mobility of Black Americans in an effort to manage interracial contact through legislation.

Keywords

migrationAfrican AmericansNew York Citydrugscrime
Type
Article
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 20 , Issue 4 , October 2021 , pp. 503 - 522
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (SHGAPE)

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References

Notes

1 The title “Drug-Mad Negroes” comes from the following source: “10 Die in Orgy of Drug-Mad Negroes,” New-York Tribune, Sept. 29, 1913.

2 Trial Transcripts of the County of New York, Court of General Sessions 1883–1927, Case #1828, roll 231, 26–28.

3 Trial Transcripts of the County of New York, Case #1828, 40.

4 Great work has been done on the subject of the “nadir” period of the early twentieth century. See Rayford W. Logan, The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877–1901 (New York: Dial Press, 1954), 11.

5 A number of works have emphasized the presence of Jim Crow in the North, including Davison M. Douglas, Jim Crow Moves North: The Battle Over Northern School Segregation, 1865–1954 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Richard Archer, Jim Crow North: The Struggle for Equal Rights in Antebellum New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); Brian Purnell, Jeanne Theoharris, and Komozi Woodward, The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North: Segregation and Struggle Outside of the South (New York: New York University Press, 2019).

6 Spillane, Joseph, “The Making of an Underground Market: Drug Selling in Chicago, 1900–1940,” Journal of Social History 32 (Autumn 1998): 27–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For more on the “market approach” to drugs as a sociological and historical subject, see Vincenzo Ruggerio and Nigel South, Eurodrugs: Drug Use, Markets, and Trafficking in Europe (London: Routledge, 1995).

7 Provine, Doris Marie, Unequal Under Law: Race in the War on Drugs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 63 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Provine, Unequal Under Law, 63. See works such as Spillane, “The Making of an Underground Market”; David Musto, The American Diseases: Origins of Narcotic Control (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); and Lisa McGirr, The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2015).

9 Wallace, Mike, Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898–1919 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 808 Google Scholar.

10 Bederman, Gail, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 171CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 197–98; Roosevelt’s comments about racial conflict quoted in Bederman, 197.

11 For information on how Chinese opium use was stigmatized and seen as a contagion passed from the Chinese to whites, see Courtwright, Dark Paradise. Jacob Riis, in his expose of New York’s poverty and underworld, How the Other Half Lives, illustrated the common fear of what many considered the mysterious lifestyles of Chinese immigrants that made opium seem exotic and dangerous. In Manhattan’s Chinatown he noted “[s]tealth and secretiveness are as much part of the Chinaman as the cat-like tread of his felt shoes. His business, as his domestic life, shuns the light, less because there is anything to conceal than because that is the way of the man.” In dark dens of Chinatown’s cellars in which one would find the “pungent odor of burning opium,” Riis wrote, one might find a “fellow” lying in bed smoking, “indifferent to all else but his pipe and his own enjoyment.” “The Chinaman spokes opium as Caucasians smoke tobacco, and apparently with little worse effect upon himself. But woe unto the white victim upon which his pitiless drug gets its grip!” Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1890), 94–95.

12 Courtwright, David, Dark Paradise: A History of Opiate Addiction in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 6 Google Scholar.

13 Acker, Caroline Jean, Creating the American Junkie: Addiction Research in the Classic Era of Narcotic Control (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 2–4Google Scholar.

14 Throughout the 1890s countless physicians and entrepreneurs likewise recommended cocaine for its restorative qualities promising relief and betterment and making it a fashionable aspect of urban popular culture. As in William Martindale, Coca and Cocaine: Their History, Medical and Economic Uses, and Medicinal Preparations (London: H. K. Lewis, 1892), 52–53.

15 Spillane, Joseph F., Cocaine: From Medical Marvel to Modern Menace in the United States, 1884–1920 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 25–26Google Scholar, 67. The medical use of cocaine was also fueled by dramatic increases in the capacity of pharmaceutical companies to produce drugs that made cocaine one of the most widely manufactured products in Europe and America and lowered price, which made mainstream consumption more viable. See Spillane, Cocaine, 44. For a great listing of patent medicines and their possible effects see “United States Most Drug Afflicted of Nations,” The Sun, Feb. 15, 1914.

16 Spillane, Cocaine, 25, and Wallace, Greater Gotham, 643. In an 1892 publication, former examiner of the Pharmaceutical Society William Martindale praised “coca” as a “nervine and muscular tonic, preventing waste of tissue, appeasing hunger and thirst, relieving fatigue, and aiding free respiration.” William Martindale, Coca and Cocaine, 52–53.

17 For example, ads for “Cocarettes” featured a fashionably dressed lady languidly puffing “genuine Bolivian Coca leaf” blended with tobacco. Other products such as Coca Cola, Coca Wine, and a cocaine chewing paste called Coca-Bola, popularized the practice of sniffing, eating, or drinking cocaine and made it easily available and affordable from newsstands and candy shops. Spillane, Cocaine, 75–83, 88.

18 Cohen, Michael M., “Jim Crow’s Drug War: Race, Coca Cola, and the Southern Origins of Drug Prohibition,” Southern Cultures 12 (Fall 2006): 63 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Although whites and Blacks used cocaine in the South at the turn of the century, stories emphasizing Black crime portrayed its increasing popularity as a racially significant issue. Historian David Courtwright suggests this could have been for political and anecdotal reasons. Some leaders may have employed narratives of insane Black bandits and murderers to bolster proposed anti-narcotic legislation, or to argue against alcohol prohibition, which some believed drove African Americans to cocaine use. Courtwright, “The Hidden Epidemic,” 70–71. Drug historian David Musto further argues that with ramped-up and exaggerated stories about defiance and retribution, the constant “anticipation of black rebellion inspired white alarm.” David Musto, The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 7.

19 Information about the legality of cocaine in New Orleans around the turn of the century found in William Ivy Hair, Carnival of Fury: Robert Charles and the New Orleans Race Riot of 1900 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008), 76; “The Cocaine Habit,” Journal of the American Medical Association 34 (June 1900): 1637, and 36 (Feb. 1901): 330; New Orleans Picayune quoted in The Atlanta Constitution, Oct. 11, 1896, 25; and “Use of Cocaine Alarms Police,” The Atlanta Constitution, Dec. 3, 1900.

20 “The Use of Cocaine Among City Negroes,” Atlanta Constitution, Feb. 8, 1907.

21 Gordon Noel Hurtel, “How Human Victims Are Wrecked by the Terrible Cocaine Habit,” The Atlanta Constitution, Jan. 15, 1905.

22 Frederickson, George M., The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1971), 248–49Google Scholar.

23 Edward Huntington Williams, “Negro Cocaine ‘Fiends’ Are a New Southern Menace,” New York Times, Feb. 8, 1914.

24 Cohen, “Jim Crow’s Drug War,” 76.

25 “New York Tenderloin Has New ‘Dope’ Habit,” The Evening Times, Mar. 13, 1905.

26 “Sailor Murdered Fighting 3 Negroes over Cocaine Sale,” New-York Tribune, Apr. 30, 1921.

27 “Hunt $2 Watch in Murder Case,” New-York Tribune, Aug. 17, 1915.

28 Okolona Messenger quoted in United States Brewers’ Association, Prohibition Makes ‘Drug Fiends’ (New York: U.S.B.A., 1908).

29 Okolona Messenger quoted in United States Brewers’ Association Prohibition Makes ‘Drug Fiends’.

30 “Latest Vice in Drugs,” Washington Post, Mar. 2, 1902.

31 “Boy Made Cocaine User,” New-York Tribune, Sept. 4, 1913; and “Limit for Cocaine Dealer,” New York Times, Sept. 12, 1913.

32 “Cocaine Brought in by Strike Breakers,” New-York Tribune, Dec. 6, 1912.

33 “This Drug-Endangered Nation,” Literary Digest, Mar. 28, 1914, 687.

34 Cohen, “Jim Crow’s Drug War,” 71.

35 Miner, Maude E., Slavery of Prostitution: A Plea for Emancipation (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1916), 2, 84 Google Scholar.

36 George Kneeland saw all types of commercial spaces as a part of larger network of illicit substance delivery systems. “Here they come to make deals for their women, to receive telephone messages from their girls on the street or in vice resorts, to plan ‘line ups” when a ‘young chicken’ is about to be broken into the business, and to buy drugs for their girls and themselves.” George J. Kneeland, and Katharine Bement Davis, Commercialized Prostitution in New York City (Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith, 1969), 28, 62; Charles W. Collins and John Day, “Dope, the New Vice,” Everyday Life 4, Sept. 1909, 4–5.

37 National League for Protection of Colored Women. Night Investigation of Apr. 30, 1910, Committee of Fourteen, box 28, folder 1910–1912.

38 Letter from the Executive Secretary of the Committee of Fourteen to John M. Binzen, Oct. 28, 1914, box 17, folder West 109 St.–137 St., Committee of Fourteen papers.

39 “Police Unearth Cocaine Dives,” New York Times, Sept.14, 1908.

40 “Police Unearth Cocaine Dives,” New York Times.

41 “Cocaine Raiders Get Fried Chicken,” New-York Tribune, Mar. 28, 1914.

42 “Detective Saved from 3-Story Drop,” New York Times, May 4, 1915.

43 William Fason’s shooting happened in Paterson, New Jersey, in the greater metropolitan area of New York City. “Negro Kills 3 in Saloon,” New York Times, Aug. 1, 1909.

44 Cohen, “Jim Crow’s Drug War,” 74.

45 E.H. Williams, “Negro Cocaine ‘Fiends’ Are a New Southern Menace.”

46 The eleven Collier’s articles republished in Samuel Hopkins Adams, The Great American Fraud: Articles on the Nostrum Evil and Quackery (Chicago: Chicago American Medical Association, 1912), 3–4.

47 Provine, Unequal Under Law, 67. The Pure Food and Drug Act was not meant to stop the sale of patent medicines, but the disclosure of ingredients like cocaine that were receiving critical press made the public question the efficacy of popular potions in new ways. Steven R. Belenko and Cassia Spohn, Drugs, Crime, and Justice (Los Angeles: Sage Press, 2015), 94.

48 Cohen, “Jim Crow’s Drug War,” 57, 74.

49 “Anti-Cocaine Bill Passed,” New York Times, Mar. 29, 1907; “Fight Anti-Cocaine Bill,” New York Times, Feb. 21, 1907; “Two Anti-Cocaine Bills Passed,” New-York Tribune, May 8, 1907; and “Father Curry on Sale of Cocaine,” New-York Tribune, Oct. 16, 1907. Although cocaine could still be bought with a prescription the new law forbade the refilling of those prescriptions. “Checks Cocaine Sale,” New-York Tribune, Sept. 1, 1907; also Wallace, Greater Gotham, 645.

50 “6 Months for Cocaine Sale,” New York Times, Oct. 15, 1907.

51 “The Growing Menace of the Use of Cocaine,” New York Times, Aug. 2, 1908.

52 Alan A. Block and William J. Chambliss, Organizing Crime (New York: Elsevier, 1982), 51.

53 “An Attempt to Restrict the Cocaine Habit,” The Outlook, June 5, 1909, 300. and “The Drug-Endangered Nation,” Literary Digest, Mar. 28, 1914, 687.

54 Quoted in Acker, Caroline Jean, Creating the American Junkie: Addiction Research in the Classic Era of Narcotic Control (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 13 Google Scholar.

55 Pfennig, Dennis Joseph, “Early Twentieth Century Responses to the Drug Problem,” OAH Magazine of History 6 (Fall 1991): 25 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

56 “Drug Bill Signed by Gov. Glynn,” New-York Tribune, Apr. 17, 1914.

57 Pfennig, “Early Twentieth Century Responses to the Drug Problem,” 26; and “New Cocaine Bill Adds to Penalties,” New York Times, Jan. 17, 1913; also Wallace, Greater Gotham, 645.

58 “Sixty Per Cent of Deadly Criminals the New York City Police Line Up Are Found to Be Victims of Drugs,” Washington Post, Jan. 14, 1914.

59 Charles B. Towns openly declared that federal regulation would make “drug-taking merely as a habit … cease to be.” Charles B. Towns, “The Peril of the Drug Habit and the Need of Restrictive Legislation,” Century Magazine (Aug. 1912): 585–87; Martin I. Wilbert, “Sale and Use of Cocaine,” Public Health Reports 29 (Nov. 1914): 3181.

60 Musto, American Disease, 9–10.

61 Kennedy, Randall, Race, Crime, and the Law (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), 91 Google Scholar.

62 “State Authorities Check Use of Drugs,” New York Age, Apr. 5, 1919.

63 Jonnes, Hep-Cats, Narcs, and Pipe Dreams, 30–31; Courtwright, Dark Paradise, 15.

64 Acker, Creating the American Junkie, 7.

65 Courtwright, Dark Paradise, 11.

66 Acker, Creating the American Junkie, 43–44.

67 Charles E. Terry and Mildred Pellens, The Opium Problem (New York, 1928), 89–91.

68 Acker, Creating the American Junkie, 53–54.

69 Poodle Dog A ‘Coke’ Sign Used by Woman Dealer,” New-York Tribune, Dec. 2, 1912.

70 “Gangs of Gunmen Protect Sellers from Competition,” New-York Tribune, Dec. 2, 1912.

71 “Police Blind to Cocaine Selling,” New-York Tribune, Dec. 2, 1912.

72 Block, Alan A. and Chambliss, William J., Organizing Crime (New York: Elsevier, 1982), 51–52Google Scholar.

73 Jonnes, Hep-Cats, Narcs, and Pipe Dreams, 30–31.

74 Block and Chambliss, Organizing Crime, 51–52.

75 Trial Transcripts of the County of New York, Court of General Sessions 1883–1927, Case #823, Lloyd Sealy Library, 42.

76 Trial Transcripts of the County of New York, 81. Newspapers reported on the verdict of Sabbatini’s trial in “Cocaine Dealer Convicted,” New York Times, May 15, 1908.

77 “Prison and Fine for Cocaine Selling,” New-York Daily Tribune, Dec. 19, 1908.

78 Trial Transcripts of the County of New York, Court of General Sessions 1883–1927, Case #913, Lloyd Sealy Library, 300.

79 Trial Transcripts of the County of New York, 18, 64.

80 Trial Transcripts of the County of New York.

81 Acker, Creating the American Junkie, 5.

82 Chad Heap, Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 77.

83 Heap, Slumming, 101–2.

84 Acker, Creating the American Junkie, 2.

85 Inmate #3720, Letter from Inmate’s Sister to Superintendent, Apr. 16, 1925, box 7, folder 3, BH.

86 Inmate #3720, Timeline Report, Undated, box 7, folder 3, BH.

87 Inmate #3720, Letter from Inmate to Superintendent, Undated, box 7, folder 3, BH.

88 Inmate #3720, Letter from Church Mission of Help to Superintendent, Nov. 9, 1926, box 7, folder 3, BH.

89 Inmate #3734, Letter to Dr. Amos Baker Superintendent of Bedford Hills Reformatory, Oct. 28, 1924, box 7, folder 16, BH.

90 Inmate #3734, New York State Reformatory for Women Admission Record, Aug. 29, 1924, box 7, folder 16, BH.

91 Inmate #3734, Letter to Dr. Amos Baker Superintendent of Bedford Hills Reformatory, Oct. 8, 1924, box 7, folder 16, BH.

92 Inmate #3734, Letter from Dr. Amos Baker to William McAdoo, Oct. 29, 1924, box 7, folder 16, BH; Inmate #3353, Letter from Dr. Amos Baker to William McAdoo, Apr. 2, 1923, box 4, folder 9, BH.

93 Inmate #3353, New York State Reformatory for Women Admission Record, Jan. 11, 1923, box 4, folder 9, BH.

94 Inmate #2778, Physicians Record, June 3, 1919, box 2, folder 33, BH; and Inmate #2778, Identification Form, June 3, 1919, box 2, folder 33, BH.

95 Inmate #2788, Description of Inmate, Undated, box 2, folder 33, BH.

96 Inmate #2788, Letter from Sister of Inmate to Parole Personnel, Undated, box 2, folder 33, BH; Inmate #2788, Parole Violation Form, Nov. 23, 1920, box 2, folder 33, BH.

97 Inmate #2788, Letter from Bedford Hills to the Superintendent of Prisons, April 13, 1921, box 2, folder 33.

98 LaShawn Harris, “‘Women and Girls in Jeopardy by His False Testimony’: Charles Dancy, Urban Policing, and Black Women in New York City during the 1920s,” Journal of Urban History 44 (May 2018): 456–57.

99 Trial Transcript Case #1828, 23.

100 Trial Transcript Case #1828, 60–62.

101 Trial Transcript Case #1828, 54.

102 Trial Transcript Case #1828, 66.

103 Trial Transcript Case #1828, 67–69.

104 Trial Transcript Case #1828, 48.

105 Cohen, “Jim Crow’s Drug War.”

106 The Annual Report of the Board of Health in Jacksonville for the years 1912–1913 also designated a category of users who combined cocaine and opium. In both 1912 and 1913 white drug users combined opium and cocaine at many times the rate of Black users. Although less frequently, whites also used heroin while African American heroin use is nearly nonexistent. Charles E. Terry, “Habit-Forming Drugs,” in City of Jacksonville, Florida, Annual Report of the Board of Health for the Year 1912, 24–29; Annual Report of the Board of Health for the Year 1913, 55–58, quoted in Courtwright, Dark Paradise, 61; and “The Drug Menace and What It Means to New York,” The Sun, July 27, 1919.

107 Newspaper articles attest to the continued use of cocaine, including “Woods Wants Stricter Drug Laws,” New York Times, Oct. 31, 1917; “Facilities Lacking for Drug Addicts,” New York Times, Nov. 14, 1920.

108 For more on the connection between drug and alcohol prohibition, see Lisa McGirr, The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2016), 250–55; and Provine, Unequal Under Law, 37–62.

109 Reinarman, Craig and Levine, Harry G., Crack in America: Demon Drugs and Social Justice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997)Google Scholar.