“Fighting and Cutting and Shooting,and Carrying On”: Saloons,Dives,and the Black “Tough” in Manhattan’s Tenderloin,1890-1917

While having a drink in a predominantly white saloon on a summer evening in 1899 black saloon patron Jesse Witt overheard another patron declare “every nigger in Georgia ought to be lynched.” “Then and there and with all the vigor he had,” the New York Times reported, Witt “endeavored to annihilate such portion of the white race as happened to be present.” Finding himself outnumbered he left the saloon only to return shortly with a razor. “Breaking into the barroom like an angry bull, he began to slash right and left,” as drinkers fled in fear, the Times continued. Before he left, Witt managed to injure a number of patrons, including one man he cut across the torso and another whose fingers he nearly severed. However, while fleeing the scene he was cornered by a mob and badly beaten before police intervened. In police custody Witt showed no remorse for his actions but reportedly only “expressed regret that the men he had injured would not die.” ¹

Similar eruptions of interracial violence recurrently appeared in New York City tabloids in the early twentieth century and delineated divisions between black and white spaces of leisure in popular imagination. Newspaper stories effectively conveyed the specter of racial conflict, the portent of miscegenation, and the expectation of black moral contamination of white men and women, particularly in communities such as Manhattan’s interracial Tenderloin district. Whether or not this story is entirely accurate, the newspaper depiction of Witt’s attempt to “defend his race” illustrates a popular portrayal of the black “tough.” A minority of black men did engage in violence for defensive or offensive reasons, but media accounts and reports from progressives, police officials, and white residents exaggerated the dangers they posed in interracial leisure spaces. White citizens and civic reformers often worried the growth of the city’s black population presaged a larger racial clash. As a result, ordinances, policing tactics, formal and informal surveillance, and the violent enforcement of de facto racial boundaries all fashioned invisible divisions across the urban terrain. However, drinking dens, poolrooms, brothels, bars, vaudeville theaters, and cabarets were not easy to keep segregated. Despite rollicking battles and persistent racial antagonism in some instances, white and black New Yorkers often spent their free time together, shared watering holes, and forged economic, material, and sexual relationships in commercial spaces of leisure. ²

These interracial trysts continued to the great chagrin of reform-minded New Yorkers. In his 1906 memoir, former Police Commissioner William McAdoo outlined the character of “the Tenderloin type negro” who he saw as the cornerstone of the city’s vice districts. “In the male species this is the over-dressed, flashy-bejewelled [sic] loafer, gambler . . . generally carrying, in addition to the indispensable revolver, a razor,” he quipped. “When in pursuit of plunder, or out for revenge . . . they use both weapons with deadly effect.” McAdoo envisioned these men as chronically unemployed and living off of prostitution, gambling, and robbery in and around the city’s drinking dens and saloons. When the afternoon sun lit the dingy streets of the black Tenderloin “they can be seen sunning themselves in front of their favorite saloons and gambling-houses, like snakes coming out of their holes,” he wrote. According to McAdoo, from their “holes” in dreary dives, nightclubs, and illegal taprooms, they ruined life for honest black residents, robbed white patrons, and preyed upon the virtue of white women. Regarding the need to maintain racial separation, the commissioner condemned what he considered to be fearlessness in the face of white authority. “They are impudent and arrogant in their manner,” he grumbled, “and will block the sidewalks until white women have to go around to get past them.” McAdoo’s comments reflected popular perception at the time and expressed awareness of a factual contestation of urban space between white and black citizens. Although state legislation trended toward integration in the 1890s, de facto segregation increased as a result of public fear of interracial contact in cities such as New York. Early twentieth-century progressive reform organizations, such as the Society for the Prevention of Crime and the Committee of Fourteen, espoused broad-minded ideas to improve the lives of the working class and poor of all ethnicities and races. Nonetheless, this often took the form of campaigns to eliminate interracial amusements in what they considered immoral circumstances. At the height of the committee’s activity its leaders attempted to police racially mixed establishments more notably than exclusively black or white saloons. As an example, Baron Wilkins’s Café, a “black and tan” bar known as a meeting place for black men and white women, remained under constant surveillance by the committee while other primarily black establishments went uninvestigated. Although the committee attributed this oversight to insufficient numbers of black investigators, their focus on racial intermixing exposed bias against integration and prompted scrutiny that alienated black saloon patrons and forced the creation of exclusively black bars. ³

Black saloons are ideal focal points for a study of the intersection of crime and manhood. At the turn of the century African American neighborhoods straddling the spine of Manhattan Island from Greenwich Village to Central Park became the basis for clusters of insular black districts within which saloons sprang up. In these spaces, black men participated in collective activities and aspects of cultural consciousness that created community and allowed them to reclaim their bodies from the drudgery of unsatisfying, exploitative, and badly compensated labor. They likewise engaged in pastimes and games, political discourse, economic pursuits, violence, camaraderie, and sexual encounters that affirmed their claim on masculinity. Possibly illegal and informal, many black leisure spaces allowed the formation of habits and a lifestyle hidden from the censorious and possibly hazardous gaze of emissaries of New York’s legal and social structures. As Robin D. G. Kelley indicates in his work on the black working class, exclusively black saloons were spaces where men could leave the albatross of racial politics at the door, “escape from the world of . . . color lines,” and “leave momentarily the individual and collective battles against racism.” In these complex and multifaceted commercial forums, work and pleasure intermingled in ways that were more fulfilling than in normal toil. Men could make money as saloonkeepers, waiters, bartenders, and bouncers, or make ends meet by gambling, committing larceny and robbery, or taking part in an interracial sex trade. As a result, the saloon was more than a space of relaxation and pleasurable consumption of libations and amusement, but simultaneously functioned as an accessible link to the commercial industry, a direct connection to an underground economy, and a format within which to construct masculine identity more freely than in other public spheres. As de facto segregation and bloodshed closed the public spaces of the city to black movement, black men opened saloons themselves, and constructed masculinized homosocial enterprises that provided opportunities for personal reformulation. ⁴ In the process of establishing these spaces men participated in a “discourse of the street,” which included aspects of style, consumption, and cultural representation. Writing about this discourse, Elsa Barkley Brown and Gregg D. Kimball emphasized the usage of city space and the built environment to fulfill the social, economic, and cultural priorities of urban residents. In their work, they interrogated the meaning black Richmonders “gave to the spaces they shared and the rhetoric and ideologies of urban space they developed.” For all urban dwellers, they argued, “[t]he City—its spaces, its forbidden and inviting areas, its pleasures and dangers, even its boundaries—existed in people’s minds as much as on street maps.” Finding themselves marginalized out of other public spaces some African American men may have found a sense of exclusivity in the alleys, backstreets, rathskellers, and uninviting conditions of black quarters. “Rituals and customs which intersect with or exploit part of the built environment illustrate how different groups manipulated public streets in cities for their own use,” writes Timothy J. Gilfoyle in his seminal article on “white cities” and urban space. Just as the violence of white ethnic immigrants and methods of enforcing restrictions by police and progressives created psychological and physical boundaries for African Americans, expectations of violence and popular perceptions of black districts as menacing, wild, and intractable made them seem similarly restricted to whites. ⁵

Saloons served as sites of contestation in terms of gender as well as race. Like their white counterparts, African American men frequently approved of the participation of women for entertainment, companionship, and sometimes paid sexual pleasure. However, they often bristled or reacted violently when wives, daughters, and significant others breached the boundaries of their versions of respectability by drinking, carousing, and joining in late-night revelries. Often hoping to consolidate and control patriarchal relationships with women and exercise some measure of domestic authority, some black men quantified the success of their households by considering the propriety of the behavior of black women. Ella Burns’s employment as a singer in a cabaret caused her husband Jackson Burns enough anger to make him homicidal. Deployed by the navy in 1917 Burns returned two years later to discover his wife interned in a jail hospital being treated for syphilis. Distraught by the knowledge she acquired the disease through sexual contact at the saloon where she performed, Burns attempted to keep her away from her workplace. However, their reunion did not last long. Soon after her recovery Ella pulled out of their relationship and returned to the saloon to sing. Angered by this development, Burns instructed her to quit and pleaded with the proprietor to end her employment because “[he] was capable of taking care of her . . . and didn’t want her in the place.” Believing he had no further recourse, he approached her while she performed and fired one round at her head with a revolver. Although Ella survived the assault, Burns killed a police officer in the ensuing chase and was arrested for murder and assault. ⁶

Burns’s testimony during his murder trial greatly clarifies his motivations for attacking his wife and makes sense of the unexceptional sentiments of other men who committed similar acts of violence against women. While attempting to reassemble his marriage after returning from deployment, he struggled with the insecurity and embarrassment he felt about Ella’s profession as they moved through the spaces of their community as a couple. “Even when we were going to church,” Burns explained in his defense, “she wouldn’t be respected by the people around. She would be called ‘blondy’ and ‘Frenchy,’ and remarks like that were made on the street.” It also disconcerted him that men in their neighborhood felt a sense of propriety over his wife because she sang and collected tips at the saloon. “They would say, ‘you don’t know us on the street now, but you are all very lovely, when you are getting our nickels and dimes around on the floor.” The answer to his troubles, he believed, would be the establishment of a patriarchal household supported primarily by his own earnings and possibly supplemented by Ella’s labor in an appropriate workplace. “I told her she could . . . work anywhere else she wanted to,” Burns explained, “except that place, [someplace] that was a respectable place.” However, Ella’s response highlighted the greater conflict between men and women engaged in the commercial economy of New York City and working to fulfill their own aspirations with the tools the city provided. Rather than leaving her job to preserve her marriage, she sought to retain the autonomy gained while her husband was away and protect the patterns of consumption she came to expect. “She said that she was going to continue in there,” Burns recalled, “because I wouldn’t give her what she wanted.” Beyond the material insufficiency of her husband’s wages she furthermore objected to the limitations of his version of domesticity and respectability. Believing he “wanted her to be sitting around in the house, with a knitting needle, and not go any place,” she chose her own self-sufficiency and enjoyment of commercial leisure over the bonds of marriage. The struggle between Burns and his wife typifies a broader discord between black men and women in the highly masculinized space of saloons. Although black men welcomed women in limited and self-indulgent capacities, an explicit need to maintain those spaces as masculine and protect their sense of domestic authority sometimes generated profound hostility. ⁷

Anxious about some of the same aspects of respectability that concerned black men, New York City’s progressive reformers envisioned saloons as spaces where working-class blacks and whites came into sensual and possibly hazardous contact. As one of the most visible and prolific progressive organizations in the city, the Committee of Fourteen worked against the spread of vice and crime in and around various leisure establishments. Founded in 1905, the Committee formed primarily in reaction to efforts by some saloons to bypass state legislation regulating liquor. Passed in 1896, the Raines Law restricted Sunday sales of spirits to restaurants or hotels that served food and thereby criminalized consumption in saloons on the one day many workers had for leisure. In response, saloons converted storage areas into sleeping quarters and served inedible meals consisting mostly of unsavory “Raines Law Sandwiches” in an effort to circumvent the law. The Committee first set out to end these fraudulent business configurations by partnering with brewers to choke the alcohol supply of noncompliant saloonkeepers. Resolved that corrupt police would undermine efforts to control alcohol, the orgnanization orchestrated clandestine probes into saloons, speakeasies, brothels, and bars in search of violations. Investigators took detailed notes of nights spent carousing, drinking, and interacting with sex workers, and frequently stopped just short of committing crimes themselves. Armed with salacious details, Committee leaders informed authorities of unlawful activities and pressured liquor suppliers to pull their products from disreputable places. ⁸

Committee accounts and correspondence illuminate how race figured into condemnation of certain saloons and highlight the methods used to surveil them. With great detail, inspectors alluded to the risk of nonsegregated hangouts and legislators and Committee leadership designated establishments as acceptable or unacceptable based upon their proficiency in maintaining racial divisions. Suspicious of the integration of one place, Congressman William S. Bennet sent a letter to committee leader W. G. Hook in 1910 asking whether “the Young place at 126 West 125th Street [is] all right?” After explaining that “friends and white people” in the vicinity had confirmed it as solidly black, Bennet implied its racial exclusivity would exempt it from investigation. “[I]f it is [exclusive] it would seem to me that there were no chance for trouble at all,” he concluded. In contrast, those establishments that violated de facto segregation edicts received constant analysis. A Special Grand Jury Report of the same year complained of drinking spots such as Café Wilkins where “colored men and white women meet,” and The Little Savoy where “white women [were] brought into colored peoples’ company continually.” These places put women at risk of assault and exploitation, the report warned, and required immediate rectification or closure. ⁹

Sexual moralism of this sort figured prominently into denunciations of multiracial recreation. Investigators, letter writers, and critics in law enforcement and municipal posts condemned black men as pimps, procurers, and sexual abusers of white women and frequently used language that implied forced or coaxed erotic contact. Black committee investigator William F. Pogue conducted multiple investigations in the Tenderloin on one night when he found many clubs and bars catering to diverse clientele and facilitating mixed-race romance. Early in the evening, he observed, “couples in the rear room . . . of both sexes, White [and] Negro” in one saloon and concluded the women “were there for the purpose of soliciting.” At another nearby watering hole he found blacks and whites “indiscriminately mixed” and witnessed two unescorted “white girls” circulating at a number of tables. “The general conditions in this [place] are disgusting and suggestive in the extreme,” he recounted. A subsequent trip to another saloon yielded similar scrutiny. As the place filled up early in the morning Pogue watched “several White women coming in with negro escorts,” and others “sitting at tables with negro men drinking and smoking.” Another investigator gave similarly vivid descriptions of the atmosphere of black and white hangouts. Arriving at one Harlem dive at nearly four o’clock in the morning, he noticed the “[d]ownstairs was crowded, smoke so thick and the air so heavy it was really very foul . . . low ceiling and poor ventilation made it a very poor place.” He also observed a bunch of “white fellows . . . laying all over the colored girls,” and a white girl “with a very dark fellow.” Suggesting that environment had a negative effect on the actions of the women, he commented: “There were also some very bad looking white girls in here. Girls who seemed to be all in, broken down. All the paint and make up they had on their face could not disguise the kind of life they had been living.” ¹⁰

Concerned citizens, business owners, and police supplemented committee investigations with complaints about the changing racial composition of Manhattan’s communities. In a 1910 letter, white Tenderloin resident Jack Ferguson outlined the conditions in the area of his business at Twenty-Ninth Street and Broadway. Outraged by the appearance of “a lot of Prostitutes” patronizing a number of dives “without being molested” by law enforcement, Ferguson condemned the racially mixed nature of the nightly carousing he witnessed. Especially disconcerting, one tavern functioned as “a hangout for all the women that live with niggers as they have niggers upstairs that entertain the white women.” During a dispute with a number of black liquor dealers, Police Commissioner McAdoo echoed Ferguson’s anxieties. In his memoir, he described being condemned by a “delegation of colored saloon-keepers, headed by a lawyer of their own race” who “asserted with great emphasis their legal right to entertain white as well as colored women.” Questioning the legality of forcing segregation in private businesses, they protested the practice of singling out racially mixed black-owned barrooms as targets for arrests, raids, and sanctions. “They asserted their intention to continue to allow white women to go in these places and mix with colored men and women. They also asserted with a good deal of pride that over twenty-five hundred white women were married to colored men here in New York,” McAdoo wrote. Unwavering in his conviction to police these places because of their danger “for a certain class of white women,” he also defended himself against accusations of racism. “They accused me of being prejudiced against the colored race . . . which is quite untrue, I being a much better friend of the honest, decent, respectable colored people . . . than the owners of these brothels.” Nevertheless, he later expressed strong disapproval of white and black intimate contact and equated it with prostitution. “The mixed-race resort, besides running counter to violent racial prejudices and traditions, is an unmitigated and disgusting evil, and the technical arguments as to the legal rights of a licensed resort should not prevent the police in placing it under constant surveillance and in enforcing the law with the greatest vigor. ¹¹

All of these voices and the emerging efforts to close interracial establishments not only forced separation between white and black pleasure-seekers, they also marginalized black saloonkeepers out of areas deemed reputable. Letters written to the Committee by Police Inspector John Daly about the problems of black drinking dives reveal how police and progressives colluded to quarantine black leisure. In one 1916 letter, Daly alerted Committee leadership to the efforts of a “colored man” they had recently prevented from receiving a liquor license to reopen his business somewhere else. Worried about the presence of a black saloon in the new location, Daly requested that the Committee stop him once more. “I hope you will be able to block him at this place also,” Daly wrote. “Tell [him] that Jersey City would be a good place to open,” he insisted. In a subsequent letter, Daly showed far more specificity about the racial root of his concerns and the detriment of gin mills that served African Americans. Referring to three previously shuttered bars he asked the Committee to prevent their reopening in the multiracial San Juan Hill neighborhood, a district that received its name because of a reputation for racial clashes. Closing these places “has made an almost entirely new neighborhood down in that locality . . . Conditions are so much improved, that the good residents there are endeavoring to bring about a change in the name so they will call it Columbus Hill instead.” The area would take “a great step backward,” he suggested, if entertainment for blacks was not restricted. “[N]o matter what kind of agreement they make they cannot exist unless they sell to negro women.” Daly was certain of the intention of any proprietors interested in the properties in question because “[p]rior to their being closed,” they served almost exclusively “a low class of negro women, and men.” ¹²

Wielding the power to restrict, censure, or close black leisure spaces, white organizations such as the Committee of Fourteen partially shaped those establishments. One black Amsterdam News writer complained of the effect of the Committee’s biases on the functioning and profits of black businesses. “[The Committee] does not stop to consider that if colored men are not welcomed in many white cafes that [they] should and will have resorts of their own,” he wrote. However, when black men opened saloons, the Committee often commenced a “microscopic investigation of those places and advocate[d] . . . drastic punishment for any technical violations” while ignoring similar infractions in white saloons, he asserted. Furthermore, Committee edicts against black and white interaction in leisure spaces crippled black bar owners with mixed clientele. Promising to comply with a list of demands and hoping to stave off continuous threats to shutter his business, black saloon proprietor William Banks wrote the organization a letter every year for a decade. Nonetheless, yearly investigations reported violations of their stipulations for racial segregation. Because black barrooms usually sat in the middle of interracial entertainment districts, barring white patrons drastically diminished their earning potential, and most black proprietors walked a dangerous tightrope to please customers and the Committee at the same time. ¹³

In many of his early letters, Banks begged the Committee not to close his business and signed multiple agreements to comply with their wishes. However, their relationship embittered in 1910 when he realized his earnings suffered under the weight of their requirements, and Banks composed a strongly worded four-page letter to the Committee. “This business, as you know, is one that the patrons themselves make or mar,” he argued. “Unless I cater to their wishes I cannot survive.” He also framed his objections to their constant intrusions as a violation of his manhood. “I do not want merely to exist I want to live and if the signing of that agreement is to furnish the former and not the latter then I decline to live up to it. No man, with a particle of manhood, binds himself and remains bound when he finds those bonds are detrimental to his best interests both morally and financially,” he concluded. Although Banks eventually complied out of necessity, his response to Committee surveillance is telling. The probing gaze of reform groups and police made it difficult for black saloonkeepers to operate and cut deeply into their clientele base and profit. Feeling commercially hobbled by the conservative principles of middle-class institutions, black saloons either struggled to survive, found innovative ways to avoid supervision, or made their saloons racially exclusive. ¹⁴

Perhaps because of the difficulties of navigating the evaluation of civic and progressive reformers, and the overhead and licenses that placed one in debt to breweries, many black men opened saloons illegally. Newspapers, Committee investigation records, and oral testimony reflect the presence of a large number of black establishments in the Tenderloin. A Committee-led Special Grand Jury investigation in 1910 reported at least ten black-run saloons between Twenty-Sixth and Fifty-Eighth Streets alone. Yet, the records of the National Negro Business League in New York City officially reported only five in 1909. This discrepancy may divulge the large number of illegitimate and makeshift barrooms, many of which were camouflaged as other legitimate businesses. Although the record shows so few saloons, it reports more than twenty-six restaurants and lunch counters, seventeen hotels and lodging houses, and ten pool and billiard rooms owned by African Americans, all of which may have had unofficial saloon functions. Stephen Crane addressed the large presence of informal and illegal black saloons in the Tenderloin’s “Minettas” district where he interviewed Pops Babcock, the owner of a restaurant that advertised oysters. “If you are of a gambling turn of mind,” Crane proposed, from the appearance “you will probably . . . bet yourself black in the face that there isn’t an oyster within a hundred yards.” Babcock claimed he kept the doors locked at all times to bar “the objectionable people that cause the wardmen’s visits.” But Crane questioned his reasoning, intimating he purposely kept the space enclosed against prying law enforcement officers and investigative reformers. “You could pass there ninety times each day and never know that you were passing a restaurant,” he wrote, implying Babcock sold liquor illegally. ¹⁵

When they were unable to imbed drinking dens in legitimate businesses, some black men sold liquor in apartments and abandoned spaces throughout the city, kept an exclusive clientele, and bribed officers to allow operation. In 1895, the Times reported that “two enterprising colored men bought a keg of beer . . . and proposed to dispense it” in a makeshift speakeasy in a cellar. The two entrepreneurs kept their business secret for quite a while although they enjoyed a large customer base and made significant profits. In conjunction with the brothel and lodging house she kept in her Tenderloin townhouse, black migrant Ida Snow also ran an informal saloon in her basement selling bottles of beer and other drinks to neighbors. In another case, a Committee investigator uncovered an informal drinking den operating out of a black “family liquor store” in Harlem and requested the removal of the product by the brewing company. Surveilling the building for an hour, the agent “observed a few young colored loafers hanging out” who periodically retrieved beer from inside, and he watched the proprietor serve alcohol to tenants in the building through a hole in the wall. Short-lived and unstable, these sorts of establishments allowed black men and women to benefit from a profitable demand for libations and social life, while generally avoiding the probe of white interlopers and inspectors. They also linked to a commercialized leisure industry on their own terms and created more private spaces for black merrymakers. ¹⁶

Conscious of the possibility of exposure through investigation, many legal and illegal establishments denied white patrons and further segregated themselves. Agent David Oppenheim reported rejection at the door of an all-black saloon when the proprietor informed him “we don’t let white men in here unless we know them.” Barred from Barron Wilkins’s popular club, another investigator recalled seeing others turned away. “One white man tried to argue, said he did not mind drinking with Negroes, but the manager said he could not be served.” Yet another inspector canvassing in Brooklyn expressed bewilderment when told “only colored men” could enter a black saloon on a row of drinking places with similar restrictions. One popular place on Myrtle Avenue allowed white customers but forbade them from certain areas. Frustrated by this stonewall, investigator W. H. Rainsford wondered about the conditions in an upstairs section that was seemingly secured by a “[w]ell dressed lot of coons.” Suspecting interracial prostitution, Rainsford watched “a lot of white girls coming down . . . also some niggers.” Denials of white patrons in black liquor rooms reveal black saloonkeepers’ awareness of the likelihood of surveillance and condemnation. However, it also hints at the broader impact that scrutiny had on the segregation of leisure. While white and black New Yorkers sometimes peacefully shared drinking holes and cabarets, oversight meant to keep them separate artificially forced disengagement. ¹⁷

As a result of the underground status of black saloons and the exclusivity created by racial restrictions, drinking spaces regularly served as refuges for illicit activity. As the only businesses open late with gas-lit interiors and inviting spaces deep into the evening, they became enclosed retreats from observation. Late-night recreation and lawlessness of all sorts also happened inside of saloons as the streets of the Tenderloin roiled with nighttime activity. Writing about the function of saloons in the lives of working-class men, historian Perry Duis described taverns and taprooms as important living spaces and breeding places of criminal activity. “Late hours meant that the barroom could become a haven from the dangers of the streets, a place where the injured were taken to await the arrival of the ambulance,” wrote Duis. Duis separated crimes into two broad categories; covert and public. Individuals unattached to the saloon conducted covert crimes such as robbery and narcotic selling, however, public, or overt, lawbreaking involved the sanction of the saloon. Proprietors often participated in or allowed crimes such as late-night liquor violations, Sunday sales of alcohol, illegal gambling, and prostitution to supplement their incomes, and men relied upon the cover of back rooms and shadowy interiors to ply illicit trades. ¹⁸

Economically depressed working-class black men often participated in or initiated covert crimes in saloons and acted as procurers of clients for sex workers. Known as a popular place to meet escorts and a hangout for cocaine and opium addicts, Perry Brown’s saloon reportedly employed a pianist with “several white girls in the street getting money for him.” Likewise, investigators characterized William Banks’s place as a “pimp hang-out” with white and black prostitutes always on hand. Outlining the lifestyles of men presumed to be pimps, one Committee statement described black saloons as traps for white women. “His business is to get acquainted with unemployed women or girls looking for a good time after work hours, or girls poorly paid,” the report stated. After gaining their trust, the pimp would “sell them outright to disorderly houses run by Madames,” or he would install them in one of the Tenderloin’s illegal saloons, “and these men [would] live off their earnings.” Although economically motivated, covert and overt crimes similarly took place in white saloons, underground markets such as sex work performed an ancillary purpose for black men largely restricted in the licit commercial economy. Gambling, pimping, robbery, drug selling, and theft helped them grapple with an economically, socially, and physically hostile city, and put them into some measure of control over their finances when other avenues were blocked. ¹⁹

In the process of creating and preserving leisure and living spaces for themselves, some black men built a brazen and bloody reputation that created imaginary boundaries to the outside world. The denial of white patrons and newsworthy violence made some black communities and drinking spots seem off-limits to many outside observers. Writing about crime in the Tenderloin, Police Commissioner McAdoo called the black men in that part of the city “one of the most troublesome and dangerous characters with which the police have to deal” on a regular basis. “In one case,” he wrote, “one of these desperadoes almost literally cut a man in two with a razor, and in several instances they have inflicted fearful wounds on policemen.” The “resorts” that these men frequented caused him the most anxiety. Citing a “sprinkling of low class white women” found drinking and “fraterniz[ing] with . . . negro men” as most worrisome, McAdoo campaigned to prevent interracial contact. “I took particular pains to have one of the largest of these places closed, [making] it known to them personally that I did not favor the mixing of races.” This, he claimed, was not done out of prejudice but out of fear that race mixing caused conflict. However, McAdoo expressed trepidation about the disposition of black men and described integrated drinking rooms as strikingly threatening. “These mixed-race places . . . are breeding places for crime, and present disgusting exhibitions of the degradation of one race and the worst vices of the other,” he affirmed. ²⁰

Essays written by white investigative reporters elucidate the boundaries surrounding black neighborhoods and leisure spaces in the imaginations of some white New Yorkers. Venturing into black districts to report on the lives of poor blacks journalists hunted for engrossing particulars and advertised fearsome exaggerations about those communities. In his study of the tangled streets of the Minettas neighborhood Jacob Riis described it as exclusively black and decidedly inhospitable to white passersby. Although he condemned residential segregation and confinement of African Americans into inadequate housing, Riis criticized interracial communion, particularly in saloons. “Than this commingling of the utterly depraved of both sexes, white and black . . . there can be no greater abomination,” he penned. Describing mixed saloons as the “worst and desperately bad” of venues, he condemned “black and tans” as places of “common debauch.” Primarily troubled by racial violence Riis criticized black “foul cellar dive[s]” that gathered together “all the lawbreakers and all the human wrecks within reach,” into one place. “When a fight breaks out during the dance a dozen razors are handy in as many boot-legs, and there is always a job for the surgeon and the ambulance” afterward, Riis surmised. ²¹

Novelist Stephen Crane wove even more descriptive tales of visits to Greenwich Village’s Minettas district, where the exploits of black “toughs” made it feel forbidden. In his portrayal, the area was a “small and becobbled valley between hills of dingy brick” with saloons and alleyways serving as sanctuaries for black criminals. “At night the street lamps, burning dimly, cause the shadows to be important, and in the gloom one sees groups of quietly conversant negroes with occasionally the gleam of a passing growler . . . Even a policeman in chase of a criminal would probably shy away instead of pursuing him into the [Minettas]. The odds were too great against a lone officer,” Crane claimed. Characters such as “No Toe Charley,” the famous bandit “Black-Cat,” “Old Man Spriggs,” and “Guinea Johnson” made “the Lane shone with sin like a new headlight.” Yet, of the “aggregation of desperadoes,” in the Minettas, “a negro named Bloodthirsty was perhaps the most luminous figure,” Crane wrote. “[L]arge and very hideous” with a “rolling eye that shows white at the wrong time,” and bearing horrible scars crossing his neck and jaw, Bloodthirsty infamously employed “the wide lightening sweep of his razor” to underline tales of past violence and victory. Of the area’s black inhabitants, Crane warned, “the razor habit clung to them with the tenacity of an epidemic, and every night the uneven cobbles felt blood.” With these grisly descriptions, writers such as Crane sketched the contours of the color line in wide strokes around black districts and advised white readers to keep away. “A man in a boiler iron suit,” Crane concluded, “would walk down to City Hall and look at the clock before he would ask the time of day from Bloodthirsty.” ²²

New York City attorney Frank Moss contributed his own overwrought vignettes in 1897 with a three-volume publication on the city’s history. Using phantasmagorical descriptions Moss characterized the black sections of the Tenderloin as dangerous and disembodied from the rest of the city. In the Minettas district “the streets . . . lead everywhere and nowhere,” he explained, adding that the unacquainted traveler would require guidance to make haste through the neighborhood. Moss’s commentary included a nostalgic recollection of the former Arcadian pre-urban character of the area. Ponds, streams, rolling hills, and trout-filled waters had given way to “dilapidated cottages, that for many years [have] been the home of a depraved, quarrelsome and criminal colony of negroes.” In his view, the area was so violent and insular that whites and all outsiders knew very well to avoid it. “The time was when the bloodthirsty character of the Minetta negroes was so well established that the street was practically closed to travel.” As removed and inaccessible as it seemed, Moss argued the Minettas remained connected to a network of black districts in the area. “This colony holds close connection with the larger negro population of Thompson and Sullivan Streets, and joins with them in playing politics.” Nevertheless, its reputation as risky made it racially exclusive and relatively impervious to outsiders, Moss asserted. Whether his assertion was true or not it illuminated a popular impression of black New Yorkers. Some white ethnic enclaves in Central Manhattan had similarly iniquitous reputations, but racial bias made neighborhoods like the Minettas seem even more remote, alien, and harzardous in popular imagination. ²³

Newspaper writers joined the chorus of condemnation of black crime and detailed the goings-on in restaurants, saloons, and cafés on the borders between black and white districts. Integrated spaces of leisure became scenes of interracial quarrels, brawls, and murders, and daily journals overdramatized these instances into cinematic episodes. In one typical article in 1896, the New York Times described a “miniature race war” in a Greenwich Village restaurant. Commenting on the mélange of racial groups in the area of the restaurant, the writer implied that integration provoked violent encounters. “The peculiar civilization that exists in the vicinity . . . is strongly impregnated with a feeling of animosity between its various elements.” Sketching a scene of hysteria and chaos, the article further suggested black residents were to blame. Donning colorful sobriquets such as “Black America,” and “Pete the Pig,” a group of black men reportedly “created havoc” in a restaurant during a New Year’s Day celebration. Frenzied because of some insult or slight, a crowd of more than five-hundred blacks called “their champions” to “exterminate the white trash that was giving them battle with hot fat, pitchers, catsup bottles, and such dishes as could be handily converted into weapons of defense.” After the melee, “[t]he negroes who caused the trouble were escorted through Minetta Lane in triumph by their friends,” the Times reported. This scene, and others like it, consciously mapped out divisions between white and black spaces by impressing upon readers the volatility of interracial proximity. By dramatizing the friction that occurred at racial margins in widely read newspaper articles, the city’s journalists aided in the creation of de facto segregated black districts and reinforced the rationale that leisure spaces should be segregated. ²⁴

Despite their sensationalism and bias, these portrayals also held some truth. Although the majority of black New Yorkers lived within the law, for those interested in profiting from informal economic endeavors, black communities provided some measure of cover, and saloons often acted as public spaces where illicit goods, services, and currency circulated. However, the reputation of black neighborhoods such as the Minettas district affected blacks as well as whites and impacted their ability to feel safe in their own neighborhoods. Arriving in the Tenderloin in 1908, Adam Clayton Powell took exception to the crime and vice in his immediate vicinity, calling it “the most notorious red-light district in New York City.” Living with “prostitutes . . . over me and all around me,” Powell worked with police to close the brothels near his church and received forceful resistance from his neighbors. While walking with his son, Powell wrote, “[o]ne of the women had filled a paper flour bag with waste from the human body and . . . aimed it at our heads.” Troubled by the same issues, many editorialists in the black-run New York Age chastised the behavior of black residents, particularly that of recent migrants. “We are constantly mortified by the conduct of young Negroes,” one article explained. “[T]hey block the sidewalks, impede traffic and by their unseemly conduct cause much needless trouble.” Another writer linked the presence of sex workers with the vulnerability of “respectable” citizens in black sections of the city. “Street-walking women and the animals that live upon their dirty money and boldly loaf in the path of good people, must go,” the author declared. Similarly concerned about safety, Bettie Watts claimed she relocated from Minetta Lane to escape neighbors who “drank beer, played music, danced, and caroused” excessively. “[T]he crowd in the yard was so rough that I couldn’t stay there,” Watts concluded. Samuel Pittman likewise worried about run-ins with black gangs on Minetta Lane and traveled longer routes on streets he deemed safer to avoid the area on his way home. Pittman also admitted to frequently carrying a revolver when he was “around that neighborhood and . . . had a little money on me.” Crime in black communities did not only affect the white imagination of black districts, but also very realistically impacted the lives of black residents of all classes as they went about their lives. Despite the one-sided racially biased nature of media depictions and investigative reports, they likely reflected real concerns about safety in the black Tenderloin and indicated the presence of lawlessness in black and white popular thought. ²⁵

The life and death of Wesley “Gold Tooth Tacks” Maxwell clarifies how some men may have created and employed the image of themselves as “toughs” in the streets and leisure spaces of the Tenderloin. During the trial for his murder witnesses described Maxwell as a heartless prizefighter who brutalized and intimidated people in the community, and they recalled a number of violent acts in the court proceedings for the defense. Responding officers described him as a “very stocky built” and “good physical man” with a reputation as a “cop fighter.” Allen Caldwell, another witness, claimed Maxwell terrified everyone in the neighborhood by making his physical prowess known and boasting of violent exploits. He was a “regular bully,” Caldwell explained, and proud of the fact that he could fight anyone and “lick him.” Maxwell also “[t]alked with a good deal of swagger and bravado” about how hard he could “hit a man and kill him and so on.” According to Caldwell, he was especially disagreeable on the day he died. He was drunk and “acting fierce” all day, “bulldozing everybody” and keeping the “whole crowd terrorized” in a popular saloon. Testifying for the defense, hotel owner Herbert Cannon corroborated Caldwell’s portrayal of Maxwell as an antagonist who “always had one or two girls on the block for him” and habitually carried a pistol. Questioned about Maxwell’s reputation, Cannon admitted everyone was afraid of him and did their best to avoid him as he constantly showed off his revolver. “He always had a bad reputation ever since I knew him . . . [for] fighting and cutting and shooting, and carrying on,” Caldwell recalled. Witnesses remembered many times when Maxwell stripped patrons of their cash and assaulted others in public. His notoriety was partly due to stories of bold confrontations with whites, but he also bragged about previous convictions for assaults, stabbings, and robberies on both sides of the racial boundaries that crisscrossed New York City. ²⁶

On the day he died Maxwell had a fateful run-in with Clinton Branch in the saloon. Although they were formerly friends and roommates, Branch endured countless abuses, thefts, and threats throughout the years and claimed he shot Maxwell in self-defense. “I was afraid of him,” he explained in court. “I always used to let him take my money and use it,” but “I knew he was a bad man [and] a bully . . . everyone who knows him will tell you that.” On the night in question, Maxwell snatched a one-dollar bill from Branch during a card game and remarked, “I just like to make myself a bad fellow,” according to witnesses. Maxwell further humiliated him by searching his pockets for money and calling him “vile names” in front of other patrons. Although embarrassed, Branch complied because, “[Maxwell] liked to have his way in everything, and would get [mad] at anybody who didn’t let him have it.” After leaving the saloon to avoid more trouble, Branch ran into Maxwell on the street later on. Facing more threats during this encounter Branch shot him in the heart and turned himself in to police. ²⁷

Despite this likely sequence of events, newspaper articles depicted Branch as a coldhearted killer. “There was a fatal shooting of the Wild West sort . . . in the middle of the afternoon, and the sidewalks, as well as the roadway, were filled with men, women and children,” the Times reported. In the press account, Branch became the aggressor who killed unemotionally. “Without much parley [Branch] walked up to him, put the muzzle of his revolver against Maxwell’s breast, and fired.” Still holding the gun when police arrived, he shouted, “What are you butting in for?” and threatened the officer, the Times recounted. The article continued with a description of Branch relishing his outlaw persona as police paraded him to the Tenderloin precinct. Along the pathway, “colored men and women stood . . . gaping at the prisoner . . . who, with his brown derby tipped back on his head . . . seemingly enjoy[ed] the notoriety which his crime had brought him. He beamed on the crowds as he passed, and smiled at the audible comments on the shooting.” Likely because of the perception that Branch was a “tough,” a jury rejected his claim of self-defense and convicted him of manslaughter. ²⁸

In their assumptions about the story, journalists betrayed racial partiality about black crime and violence, and prejudice about the nature of Tenderloin communities as vicious and unsalvageable. However, the likely more accurate narrative of Wesley Maxwell’s life and death related during the trial against Branch raises questions about how crime figured into the lives and identities of some black men and reveals the sort of trepidation their actions may have engendered. Elsa Barkley Brown and Gregg Kimball addressed this sort of spatial division in Richmond. “The City—its spaces, its forbidden and inviting areas, its pleasures and dangers, even its boundaries—existed in people’s minds as much as on street maps.” Although there were no physical barriers stopping white and black spatial movement across the landscape of Manhattan, African American men engaged in contests with men from various other ethnic groups. Overwhelmed by police violence and hemmed in by progressive reforms, discriminating landlords, and de facto segregation, some back men employed assorted tactics to define their spaces. Just as violence initiated by whites created psychological and physical boundaries for African Americans, black men sometimes reciprocated through self-defense, withdrawal from intergreated establishments, and emphasizing popularized perceptions of black districts as menacing, wild, and intractable. In saloons, most black men found legal and illegal sources of income and places for recreation in an alternative public space they felt welcomed in. Nevertheless, the saloon also served as a pivot point for the lifestyles of men like Maxwell who engaged in violent acts meant to bolster their reputations and elicit monetary rewards. ²⁹

While the true meanings of Jesse Witt’s and Wesley Maxwell’s actions may not be discernable, it is clear they both lashed out for similar reasons. Although Witt attacked white saloon patrons for racist remarks and Maxwell terrorized black saloon patrons for personal gain, both used violence to control public space and similarly risked their lives to enforce unspoken edicts about race and manhood. They both also very consciously contributed to the formation of invisible barriers in the minds of other citizens and forged a sense of exclusivity in black communities while deliberately wishing to reinforce and emphasize their own racial or masculine identities. The “Tenderloin type negro” or “black tough” gained a heroic reputation for fearlessness in the face of white sovereignty by responding to public racial violence with violence and disrupting the rules of racial decorum like Witt did. They thereby had a part in altering the psychological landscape for whites in ways that policing, surveillance, and mob violence did for African Americans. However, the actions of men like Maxwell simultaneously impacted the physical safety and imaginations of black New Yorkers in similar ways.

Considering the lives these men, the spectrum of the issues they faced in public spaces, and the possible benefits of black leisure establishments, we can see the saloon as a complex debated site endowed with implications for black manhood. Recovering the cultural, communal, social, and commercial discourse inside the black community about masculinity and its relationship to illegal acts and leisure is a crucial aspect of understanding the lives of black working-class men in New York City overall. By appraising the capacity of counterauthoritarian lifestyles to construct identity and form resistance, it is possible to retrieve and reproduce the ways in which criminality bolstered concepts of virility. We can also begin to discern the possible purpose of crime in managing profound personal, familial, and collective imperatives, in seeking a sense of self-governance in legally restricted spaces, and in seizing financial, patriarchal, and masculine control over one’s life and family. Looking closely at their lives and examining their fears and aspirations as they played out in illegal acts, or other behaviors later criminalized by progressive and civic reformers, it is intuitive to fasten their urgent everyday and long-term needs to their choices. Growing into a significant portion of the city’s population in the early twentieth century, black men felt increasingly hemmed in by restrictions placed on their mental and physical maps of the built environment and found themselves in constant tension with the regulatory bondage of bourgeois societal conventions. At this junction between black freedom and the heavy limitations produced by white disapproval and legal authority, notions of black manhood struggled to thrive. Although Wesley Maxwell menaced the people in his community, he also represented the existential frustration and dissatisfaction some black men experienced when largely excluded from many aspects of New York’s commercial economy, and his behavior illuminates the tactics some men chose to give themselves an advantage.

The setting of Maxwell’s last day is also important. As the center of public life for many black men, saloons rivaled fraternal clubs, churches, and workplaces as the most important spaces for the formation and maintenance of identity. Instances of defiant violence in black and mixed-race saloons existed within a kaleidoscope of responses to the pervasive restrictions of life in New York City. Facing the challenges of fast-shifting terrains, quickly changing standards of morality and legality, and a barrage of edicts meant to reshape their priorities to fit white middle-class ethics, black men often found themselves at odds with the law and hindered by regulations. The deprivation caused by joblessness and isolation further deepened the need to find alternative means of expressing and maintaining a steady sense of one’s manhood and autonomy. Although black saloons did not remove these threats and permanently solve the problems of unemployment, for many, they became the backdrop in a theater of masculine codes of behavior, and constantly contested spaces within which black men had a relative advantage and a chance to define themselves and their ideas of manliness.