Woman slain in queer love brawl” african american wome

1. “Woman Slain in Queer Love Brawl”: African American
Women, Same-Sex Desire, and
Violence in the Urban North, 1920–1929
Author(s): Cookie Woolner
Source: The Journal of African American History, Vol. 100, No.
3, Gendering the Carceral
State: African American Women, History, and the Criminal
Justice System (Summer
2015), pp. 406-427
Published by: Association for the Study of African American
Life and History
Stable URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5323/jafriamerhist.100.3.0406
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406
“WOMAN SLAIN IN
QUEER LOVE BRAWL”:
AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN,
SAME-SEX DESIRE, AND VIOLENCE
IN THE URBAN NORTH, 1920–1929
Cookie Woolner
The New York Age, one of the leading African American
newspapers, pub-
lished a front-page article in November 1926 with the graphic
headline, “Women

3. Rivals for Affection of Another Woman Battle with Knives, and
One Has Head
Almost Severed From Body.” The lengthy opening sentence
proclaimed the fol-
lowing:
Crazed with gin and a wild and unnatural infatuation for another
woman, Reba Stobtoff, in
whose Manhattan apartment her friends and acquaintances had
gathered for a Saturday night
rent party, grabbed a keen-edged bread knife and with one fell
swoop, severed the jugular vein
in the throat of Louise Wright after a fierce quarrel in which
Reba had accused Louise of show-
ing too much interest in a woman named Clara, known to
underworld dwellers as “Big Ben,”
the name coming from her unusual size and from her inclination
to ape the masculine in dress
and manner, and particularly in her attention to other women.1
The article also revealed that, “when the police arrived, only
women were present,
and it is said that no men had attended the affair.”2 Readers
came across such
depictions of female same-sex desire in the 1920s, which served
to conflate the
emerging concept of “lesbianism” with violence, aggression,
vice, and pathologi-
cal behavior. The newspaper accounts not only informed
northern urban readers
about the networks of women in their midst who loved women,
but also depicted
them as “unnatural” and immoral.
The area where this murder occurred, Columbus Hill, also
known as San Juan

4. Hill before the First World War, had rapidly become the largest
black neighbor-
hood in Manhattan at the dawn of the 20th century.3 However,
by the 1920s prac-
tically every major African American institution had moved
uptown to Harlem,
and areas such as Columbus Hill had become, according to
historian Gilbert
Osofsky, “rundown backwash communities” inhabited by poor
and working-class
African Americans who “desired to live in Harlem but could not
afford to pay the
high rents charged there.”4 Overcrowded apartments and police
neglect also
Cookie Woolner is a Mellon Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in
Social Justice and Women, Gender, and Sexuality
at Kalamazoo College in Kalamazoo, MI.
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African American Women, Same-Sex Desire, and Violence in
the Urban North 407
Headline from the New York Age, 27 November 1926.
contributed to the neighborhood’s decline.5 Given these
conditions, a murder at a
women’s only gathering in Columbus Hill was not unique, aside
from its “queer”
aspect, as similar articles about men who attacked or killed
women (and vice

5. versa) out of jealousy were regular features in both the black
and white press dur-
ing this era.6 The site of the incident—a rent party in Columbus
Hill—suggests
that some of the participants were recent southern migrants as
the neighborhood
was one of three locales in Manhattan where black southerners
tended to settle in
the early 20th century.7
These participants in the early Great Migration came to the
urban North and
were exposed to the culture of the “rent party.”8 The New York
Age ran an editori-
al on this 1926 murder the week after it occurred, which began,
“the rent party has
become a recognized means of meeting the demands of
extortionate landlords in
Harlem, as well as in other sections, since the era of high rents
set in and became
a permanent condition.”9 In the era of Prohibition, the rent
party was a way to raise
funds to help pay the rent by providing an evening of food,
drinks, and entertain-
ment. This allowed survival in a world of low-wage jobs and
overpriced housing
that made upward mobility difficult for recent southern
migrants, the “new set-
tlers” in the urban North.10 African American newspapers such
as the New York
Age were often started and run by college-educated African
Americans who were
generally not new arrivals to the North, or “old settlers” whose
families had lived
above the Mason-Dixon line for generations. For the more
established and afflu-

6. ent African American residents, the sexual deportment of the
growing population
of new settlers was of great concern, mainly because it clashed
so strikingly with
notions of “respectability” designed to support demands for
equal citizenship
rights in the era of defacto and dejure segregation.11 Among the
new settlers’ so-
called deviant behaviors, suspected sexual relationships
between women violated
social and cultural norms, at least based on the vivid and
sensational accounts in
the New York Age and other newspapers. Historian Kim T.
Gallon found that
through such articles, African American newspapers “defined
public questions and
shaped public dialogue on a variety of sexual issues,” and
together with their read-
ers “created a public sphere for discussions about sexuality.”12
While scholars have examined the black and white queer
subcultures that
emerged in the urban North by the 1920s, there has been much
less examination
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408 The Journal of African American History
of the specific experiences of African American women who
loved women.13
While many women in the black entertainment industry, from

7. Blues singers to
chorus girls, engaged in same-sex relationships, there is less
information on the
experiences of ordinary working class women who loved women
and their recep-
tion by other African Americans in the urban North.14 Much of
the literature on
these emerging sexual subcultures has focused on interracial
relationships and
commercial spaces, yet African American women who loved
women primarily
socialized in residential spaces, which makes their experiences
more difficult to
document.15 Queer black women’s desire to socialize privately
during an era when
sexuality was increasingly becoming a public matter was also
reflected in contem-
porary black women’s literature. While literary critic Deborah
McDowell has sug-
gested that Harlem Renaissance texts such as Nella Larsen’s
Passing (1929) con-
tained queer subplots, black female authors took pains to hide
any “dangerous”
descriptions of female desire within larger plots involving
marriage or racial
issues.16 This secrecy is understandable, given the emphasis on
the regulation of
heterosexual women’s behavior in general and African
American women’s rela-
tionships to an increasingly exploitative and sexualized
consumer culture.17 While
successful female entertainers such as Gladys Bentley, Ma
Rainey, and Bessie
Smith were able to broach the subject of same-sex desire on
stage and in song,
most queer women sought to hide their sexuality from their

8. neighbors and family
members.18
Therefore, due to the difficulty of finding first-hand accounts of
queer black
women’s experiences in this era, this essay uses newspaper
accounts of acts of
overt violence between women in order to make visible their
social networks in
1920s Chicago and New York City. These representations of
African American
“lady lovers” offer insight into both the everyday lives of
working-class African
American women and demonstrate how the concept of female
same-sex desire
was portrayed in the black press.19 The occasional act of
jealous violence between
women gave old settler journalists a platform from which to
sound off against
changing gender and sexual norms in urban black communities.
While these jour-
nalists were openly critical of these women and their “deviant
desires,” document-
ing acts of violence between women, the black press actually
revealed that “lady
lovers” were in other ways no different than their neighbors.
This is not to suggest
that violence was typical of southern migrants, but that queer
and heterosexual
women faced the same difficulties finding work, laboring long
hours for little pay,
confronting the psychic toll of defacto segregation, navigating
overcrowded
neighborhoods and housing, paying exorbitant rents, and the
intoxicating effects
of “bootleg liquor” during Prohibition.20

9. While this essay focuses on the everyday experiences of lady
lovers, it also
surveys the discourse in the black press about these women by
examining
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African American Women, Same-Sex Desire, and Violence in
the Urban North 409
accounts of four alleged attacks and acts of homicide by African
American women
who loved women in the 1920s. I say “alleged” because, while
two of these cases
could be traced through official records from the criminal
justice system, the other
two could not. In the available criminal records, none
specifically mention same-
sex love as a motivation for the murders.21 While it is not
possible to verify the
sexuality of all the women identified, the journalists’ use of
same-sex desire as a
cause or an element in these violent encounters reveals the
increasing visibility of
lesbianism in northern black communities in the 1920s. While
these cases were
rare, they were sensationalized in black newspapers using
moralistic language,
and these articles narrating violent acts between women were
sometimes reprint-
ed in newspapers across the country. These narratives suggest

10. the dangers that
could befall African American women who made a home and a
life together, as
well as the ongoing attempts to regulate the sexual comportment
of African
American women through this discourse.
THE GREAT MIGRATION AND THE POLICING OF
BLACK FEMALE SEXUALITY
Between 1910 and 1920, over one-and-a-half million African
Americans left
rural southern areas for the cities of the South, the North and
the West.22 Chicago’s
African American population grew from about 44,000 to over
109,000 during this
decade, and New York City’s African American population
grew from over 92,000
to over 152,000.23 These and other northern cities offered the
possibility of free-
dom and equal citizenship rights for southern black migrants
who had been
exploited and disenfranchised by “southern Redemption” and
sought to escape the
oppression of Jim Crow laws, lynching, and mob violence.
However, many
women who came north soon became disillusioned by the
combination of
exploitatively high rents in the segregated sections of the cities
and limited work
opportunities beyond domestic service. And female migrants
were not necessarily
welcomed by the established white or middle-class black
residents. As literary
critic Hazel Carby noted, “[T]he migrating black woman could
be variously situ-

11. ated as a threat to the progress of the race; as a threat to the
establishment of a
respectable urban black middle class” and “as a threat to the
formation of black
masculinity in an urban environment.”24 The newspaper articles
about female mur-
derers can thus be read as warnings to single women arriving in
the city who were
deemed a “social problem” requiring intervention by
“progressive” reformers.
Rumors of their alleged sexual availability, it was feared, would
lead to disease,
exploitation, and prostitution. While many southern migrants
had friends or fam-
ily in the North, whom they often first visited before
determining whether to
move, the majority of African American women who left for the
North in the early
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410 The Journal of African American History
20th century were single, divorced, separated, or widowed.25
As African American
women could more easily find domestic work in towns and
cities and African
American men had a better chance of securing agricultural work
in rural areas,
there was an imbalance in the ratio of males to females in
northern cities.26 For
example, in 1930 there were 170,738 African American females

12. living in New
York City, who made up 2.5 percent of the city’s population. In
contrast, that year
there were an estimated 156,960 African Americans males
living there.27 This
“excess” population of women brought further concerns over
African American
women’s sexuality and homosociality.
Despite the large numbers of African American women in
northern cities, the
acts of violence described here made up a very small fraction of
the murders report-
ed in New York City and Chicago in the 1920s, yet they serve
as important narra-
tives about the growing networks of African American women
who loved women.
For example, in the first half of 1928, out of thirty-four
homicides reported in
Harlem, half involved whites only, half involved African
Americans, and only one
occurred between “women lovers.”28 Similarly, in the entire
state of Illinois in 1926,
African American men were charged with murdering 50 black
men and 16 black
women, compared to white men who were charged with
murdering 65 white men
and 27 white women. African American women were charged
with killing 10 black
men and 2 black women, compared to white women who were
charged with killing
9 white men, but 10 white women.29 At the same time, it was
quite rare in the 1920s
to come across similar newspaper articles about violence
between gay men or white
“lady lovers,” which makes these cases involving African

13. American women who
loved women a unique topic to explore.30 The dearth of articles
in the black press
about violent, gay black men at this time was very likely related
to black women’s
role in reproduction, which made lesbianism more of a social
threat than male
homosexuality.31 Moreover, female same-sex desire had come
to be considered more
of a menace at this time, as women’s social and political
independence was increas-
ing, which had no parallel for gay men.32
JAZZ JOURNALISM IN THE 1920s
The mode of journalism through which African American
women who loved
women were presented to newspapers’ readership was another
crucial aspect of
these women’s textual representation in this era. Often referred
to as “yellow jour-
nalism” and then “jazz journalism,” white and black tabloids in
the 1920s special-
ized in attracting readers through provocative headlines,
suggestive images, and
shocking quotes.33 Sensationalism sold newspapers,
particularly for the black
press where advertising dollars were harder to come by.34 Ads
were easier to sell
when newspapers had large circulations, and focusing on sex,
vice, and violence
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14. African American Women, Same-Sex Desire, and Violence in
the Urban North 411
became the key to larger profits. There were critics of these
practices who point-
ed to the potential harm coming from “jazz journalism.” Howard
University pro-
fessor Kelly Miller, writing in the New York Amsterdam News
in 1928, declared
“murder, sex sins, and theft are never failing sources of popular
interest,” but their
continued coverage led to African Americans “gradually sinking
in the estimation
of the white race” since “the white world” learned about
African American life
through the black press.35 Given that Hearst publications and
other non-black
tabloids also engaged in sensationalism, there really was little
reason to single out
the black press for focusing on sex and violence. Nonetheless,
Miller conveyed a
common view that the onus was on African Americans to put
their “best foot for-
ward,” given the anti-black prejudices in the larger American
society.
Historian Hayward Farrar offers a different take on the cultural
work of sen-
sationalistic newspaper reporting, arguing that as “crime, love
triangles, conjugal
instability, and other subjects were pervasive features of urban
black life,” the
tabloids “made dramatic rituals out of central events in personal
and community

15. experience and thereby contributed to a kind of ‘urban
folklore.’”36 As stories of
violent outbreaks at women’s gatherings became more common
in the 1920s black
press, such “dramatic rituals” were introduced into the readers’
consciousness.
While it was much more common for newspapers to cover
violent episodes
involving heterosexual couples, violence between women
became a contemporary
context for the discussion of lesbianism, and this became a
“burden of representa-
tion” that lady lovers had to bear.37 Indeed, stories of domestic
violence between
men and women rarely pathologized their subjects, as did
articles documenting
similar acts exclusively between women.38
While the number of articles on violent lady lovers was small,
representations
of crime influenced people’s conceptions of their lives and
communities quite out
of proportion to actual incidences of criminal activity.39 Thus,
regardless of the
veracity of the stories about violent women-loving-women, they
performed a sep-
arate function as cultural texts. This is an important point since
so many of “the
facts” in these newspaper reports could not be verified.
Sensationalism employed
the discourse of violent crime to address changing cultural
practices and sociopo-
litical agendas. By linking illicit behavior and criminal justice
procedures with a
particular emotional response, both personal and communal,
these texts served as

16. a way of constructing both shared values and individual
identity.40 Thus, the
increasing representations of queer black women as violent
“colored amazons”
when these identities and behaviors were becoming more
visible, served to stig-
matize these women who were already viewed suspiciously,
whether or not they
had a criminal past.41 These newspaper stories represented
heterosexuality as the
correct (non-pathological) form of sexuality by representing
lesbianism as inher-
ently violent and criminal.
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412 The Journal of African American History
African American women who were convicted of murder of a
man or a woman
had usually killed lovers or husbands in the heat of passion.
Such deaths usually
occurred during the course of drunken arguments, physical
altercations, momentary
explosions of rage or jealousy, or in reaction to domestic
violence; few of these
attacks were premeditated.42 Sociologist E. Franklin Frazier
saw such violence as
indicative of the changing urban landscape due to the Great
Migration. He believed
that “uprooted from the plantation system,” many migrants had
been “set adrift in a

17. world without a moral order.” Oftentimes, “in the city where
most primary group
relations are dissolved we find illegitimacy and sex
delinquency. . . .”43 While female
same-sex behavior represented a new “sex problem,” it was also
considered merely
a symptom of the larger issue of “sexual immorality” among
recent southern
migrants.44
There were comparatively few accounts of jealous violence
between African
American women, and even less coming from the subjects
themselves. Sociologists
and historians must be careful not to overstate the violence or
pathologize the behav-
ior based on so little evidence. Fortunately, historians have
documented the experi-
ences of African American women in prisons and reformatories
in the urban North
and offer fruitful approaches to the subject.45 An examination
of the statistics on con-
victed female offenders should not equate black working-class
women with crimi-
nality because historically African Americans, male and female,
have been targeted
by the criminal justice system. Instead, researchers should
attempt to capture the
complexity and contested nature of class and gender
relationships within African
American communities. While violent or imprisoned women
were not representa-
tive of working-class black women in general, their
predicaments illustrate the many
ways that black women’s behavior was regulated by the family
and the state.46 The

18. trope of the violent black woman—“the colored amazon”—has
been identified
showing how this category served to deny the humanity of
African American
women and blur distinctions between black female criminals
and all African
American women. This essay seeks to generate “empathy for the
unrespectable,” a
task that is necessary when examining narratives that describe
the alleged crimes
carried out by African American women who loved women.47
LESBIANISM AND VIOLENCE UNBOUND
While lesbianism was becoming an issue of concern among
African Americans
and whites in the 1920s, white women who loved women were
rarely conflated with
violence and criminality. This was even the case despite such
high profile crimes as
the 1892 Alice Mitchell trial in Memphis, Tennessee, that had
introduced the idea of
“lesbian love murders” to the reading public.48 Mitchell was a
white middle-class
woman who killed her female lover when she left her for a man,
and the incident
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African American Women, Same-Sex Desire, and Violence in
the Urban North 413

19. became a case study for influential European sexologists such
as Havelock Ellis and
Richard von Krafft-Ebing, and bolstered the idea that
lesbianism was pathological,
criminal, and immoral.49 In the months after the Mitchell
murder, several “copycat”
homicides among African American and white women brought
lesbianism and its
alleged association with violence to the forefront of the public
imagination.50
A similar case occurred in Pennsylvania in 1905 between two
African American
women. Emily Lee shot and killed Stella Weldon, her friend
since childhood, when
the latter married a man and gave birth to his child. The black
newspaper, the
Scranton Defender, followed the case and opined
unsympathetically, if “Lee pos-
sessed those qualities which constitute a perfect womanhood,
she would be free and
happy today. Virtue, chastity, and good morals she has ignored;
therefore her calami-
ty.”51 Similar narratives could be found in the 1920s in the
black press, but there was
one notable difference between turn-of-the-century cases and
later incidents: There
was no indication in the earlier reports that these women were
part of a larger queer
network. In other words, these women killed women they
desired who had chosen
male partners. By the 1920s, however, queer networks had
emerged in large cities
and violence occasionally erupted within the all-female social
circles and women
attacked, not their female lovers, but their female competitors.

20. By the 1920s lesbianism had become more visible in American
society, as
conceptions of same-sex identities emerged.52 This was rarely
viewed as a “pro-
gressive” or “liberating” development, and was met with
suspicion and concern by
conservative commentators who used it to bolster on-going
ideological attacks on
women’s growing independence in general.53 The increase in
consciousness and
interest in homosexuality in the 1920s is attributed to several
factors aside from
the homosocial atmosphere of World War I, particularly for
women. As historian
John D’Emilio concluded, capitalism played a key role in the
formation of queer
urban subcultures, as individuals could now survive beyond the
confines of fami-
ly. Kinfolk no longer formed the primary economic unit, which
had been the case
prior to the Industrial Revolution.54 While most women had
fewer opportunities
than men to leave their families and become economically
independent, southern
black women migrated to northern cities in large numbers.55
While articles in the black press would highlight the rare
instances of violence
at women’s gatherings, queer black women were much more
likely to be victims
of violence than its agents.56 Indeed, performer Maud Russell,
who engaged in
sexual relationships with women, argued that lady lovers
offered the “tenderness”
that women rarely received from men at that time.57 However,

21. same-sex desire and
gender transgression did not support the ideology of
respectability, which was a
crucial component of racial uplift that placed great emphasis on
proper deportment
in hopes of achieving equal treatment from whites.58 As
historian Evelyn Brooks
Higginbotham argues, “the politics of respectability equated
nonconformity with
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414 The Journal of African American History
the cause of racial inequality and injustice.”59 Thus, African
American women
who loved women did indeed constitute a potent “sex problem”
for many in the
black middle class who sought to hew to Victorian gender
norms in hopes of gain-
ing equal citizenship rights.60
THE BLACK PRESS DISCOVERS VIOLENT LADY LOVERS
One early newspaper article discussing violence between
African American
women and highlighting their atypical identities appeared in
The Chicago
Defender in 1922. It ran a short front-page story about a
“Women Only” party on
the Southside that the police broke up on Thanksgiving Day
when “the piercing

22. screams of a woman had penetrated the street.” After “Miss
Barney Campbell” felt
“the knife blade of Miss Verna Scales,” both women were
placed under arrest and
fined $100 each, along with the four other women present
whose names and
addresses were also printed in the article.61 The six police
officers on hand stated
that there were often complaints registered by the neighbors
against this house, “as
the women who congregated there were those of an unusual
type.”62
While this particular gathering was broken up because of
violence, past com-
plaints against them may have occurred merely because they
were deemed odd, or
because of their visible gender transgression, public affection,
or their predilection for
socializing without men. In particular, their women-only
Thanksgiving gathering
pointed to their “unusualness,” as such holidays were most
often celebrated with fam-
ily and loved ones, making their homosocial assemblage appear
even more suspect.
The choice to include the names and addresses of the women in
attendance—while a
common technique in the press when reporting neighborhood
events—was potential-
ly damaging to the reputations and livelihoods of the women
involved. By casting
them as women of an “unusual type,” the reporter distanced
them from the larger
community, making them appear less sympathetic to the reader.
This coverage simu-
lated “the community networks of information” that many

23. southern migrants were
familiar with back home.63 Printing the names and addresses of
suspects multiplied
the consequences of their arrests, which served to further
regulate behavior.64
While the term “lesbian” was not yet used in the black press to
signify same-sex
desire for women in 1922, the terminology of “unusual type”
highlighted not just the
women’s transgressive behavior, but also implied that their
whole being was suffused
with a form of otherness. Despite the ways this article suggested
violence was implic-
it in gatherings of women of an …