Madame Queen: The Philosophy of Refusal in a Fur Coat.

In 1935, a gangster named Dutch Schultz lay dying in a hospital in Newark, New Jersey. He had spent years trying to take over the Harlem numbers empire built by a Black Caribbean immigrant woman named Stephanie St. Clair.She sent him a telegram while he was dying.It read: "As ye sow, so shall ye reap."She did not beg. She did not perform grief. She did not negotiate. She named the truth and let it stand.Her name was Stephanie St. Clair. They called her Madame Queen. And she was the Philosophy of Refusal in a fur coat.In this episode, I take you back to Harlem in the 1920s, not the sanitized, Talented Tenth version you learned in school, but the full picture. The two Harlems that existed simultaneously in the same two square miles. The Harlem of the literary salons and the NAACP meetings and the respectability politics. And the other Harlem, the Harlem of the rent parties and the jook joints and the numbers racket. The Harlem that Zora Neale Hurston was writing about. The Harlem that Madame Queen was running.And I show you how both of those Harlems are alive in Atlanta right now.