If Martinicans have made people talk about them through their literary reach, their struggles for freedom and the emancipation of peoples or artistic performances, there are also Martinicans whose actions have been more controversial.
This is the case of a Martinican woman, Stéphanie St. Clair, who led a Harlem gang in the 1920s and 1940s.
Born in Fort-de-France on December 24, 1897, Stéphanie St. Clair was born in Martinique where slavery had been abolished for almost fifty years. At that time, emancipated women could only claim citizenship status on condition of marrying, but her mother was not and therefore never will be a citizen. When the latter died in 1908, she found herself without an official representative. In 1910, she then decided to go to the United States where they were looking for French-speaking servants. She didn't speak English at the time.
She transits through Marseille where she is forced to lie about her age and her place of birth being too young to cross without a representative on the liner Du Virginie without a representative. On her new papers, it is then recorded that she was born in Marseille in 1887, ten years before her birth in Martinique.
Then she arrives in a Harlem that hosted a large number of African Americans and Caribbean people who came to settle in the neighborhood after the extension of the metro line.
Stephanie St. Clair quickly got used to Harlem life. She was described as sophisticated, passionate about fashion and well integrated into the codes of city life. Her presence even made her known as Madame St. Clair all over Harlem. In Manhattan and the rest of the city, she was nicknamed "Queenie".
St. Clair becomes a "political banker" by developing the first number bank located in Harlem. Back in the day, number banks organized a whole lot of illicit activities called rackets which were in fact investments, gambling and lottery games. Since banks did not accept Black clients, it was one of the options they chose to invest their income. This practice, which was illegal, provided a surprising amount of wealth and jobs.
With her sidekicks like Ellsworth "Bumpy" Johnson, she quickly made a fortune in crime in Black New York. With a starting capital of 10,000 dollars, she managed to free up a quarter of a million dollars in one year, then gradually over time, reigns supreme in Harlem in the 1930s.
She was also extremely community oriented. Most of its many newspaper ads have been devoted to educating neighbors about their rights, defending Black suffrage, and denouncing police brutality.
She also spent her money in many community projects. In particular, she created a legal fund to help new francophone immigrants. She made sure that all of her employees were dressed impeccably. She treated the people of Harlem with the utmost courtesy.
Note that Stéphanie St. Clair lived in the same building as several black personalities of the time: CJ Walker, WEB Du Bois or even Thurgood Marshall.
Beginning in 1932, a number of white gangsters who saw their profits decline as a result of the Great Depression and the end of Prohibition turned to the Harlem illegal gambling company to supplement their lost income.
A coalition of out-of-Harlem gangsters led by Dutch Schultz wage a bloody war against St. Clair and his allies to control organized crime in this community. More than 40 people have been killed in gang-related violence, often including the number operator milieu.
Although Dutch Schultz tried to intimidate her by making threatening phone calls, kidnapping and murdering his men, and redeeming some police officers, he was never able to impress her.
Despite the violence suffered by the St. Clair-Johnson clan, they refuse to submit to Schultz and worse, St. Clair decides to defend itself at all costs. When Schultz sends a subordinate to intimidate him, she pushes the subordinate into a closet, locks him up, and calls four huge bodyguards to "take care of him."
His revenge will be terrible. It then attacks and destroys the windows of all the companies that managed Schultz's betting operations. She goes to the police to denounce the activities of the latter which leads them to raid the premises of the latter to arrest 14 employees and seize approximately $2 million. She later bragged about it in the press.
When Schultz was hospitalized in October 1935 after being shot several times in the stomach, she sent him a telegram on his deathbed simply saying "You sowed, you reap also", based on the bible verse: "This which a man sows, he will also reap it." (Galatians 6, verse 7) signed "Madam Queen of Politics."
Her battle against Schultz will take her out of the number bank environment. She puts her bank in the hands of her protégé, the violent "Bumpy" Johnson, and is not shy about publicly disclosing where she is and what she is doing.
With Johnson protecting her, Schultz dead, and his new desire to stay on the right path, St. Clair will use her fame to fight or advocate for Black community causes. She advocates for political reform.
It is this new role that will take her to meet her future husband, Sufi Abdul Hamid, an activist wearing a turban, nicknamed by the press "Black Hitler" for his openly anti-Semitic positions. The latter was leading a campaign to boycott companies that did not employ Black people. He also ran a mosque and claimed to be a descendant of the Egyptian pharaohs.
His marriage, tumultuous from the start, did not last long and a few years after the wedding, in January 1938, Hamid was shot while going to a lawyer. St. Clair is charged with the murder for various reasons including his adultery. Indeed, her husband cheated on her with a fortune teller and used the money she had earned in businesses with his mistress.
Despite firmly denying killing her husband, the all-white jury finds Ms. St. Clair guilty of the crime and sentences her to 2 to 10 years in state prison.
After 3 years in prison, St. Clair will continue his fight for the civil and economic rights of Black Americans while avoiding any criminal enterprise. She was protected by "Bumpy" Johnson until his death of a heart attack in 1968. She died 18 months later, in 1969 in the town of Central Islip, Long Island, New York.
She was buried in Trinity Church Cemetery in lower Manhattan.
