LaShawn Harris’s talk places the Harlem numbers banker Madame Stephanie St. Clair at the center of one of New York’s most popular underground amusements: the numbers game. An examination of St. Clair complicates masculine representations of Harlem’s numbers enterprise and disrupts the view that urban black women did not figure prominently in the city’s gambling racket. LaShawn Harris is an assistant professor of History at Michigan State University.
This program is presented by Intercollegiate Africana Studies.