Note: This paper was reviewed by Glenda E. Gilmore, the C. Vann Woodward Professor of History at Yale University.

It was the only paper to receive Professor Gilmores comments during a 2010 Milbauer Seminaran annual visiting scholar program at the University of Florida.

Pistol Packin Mamas: Women and Homicide in New Orleans, 1900 to 1915
November 1913 was unseasonably warm in New Orleans. Louisianans enjoyed clear, sunny days during the first two weeks of the month, as temperatures hovered in the midsixties, dropping only into the low-fifties in the evening.i Yet, even during that warm spell, November 7th, 1913, stood out. The mercury climbed past eighty degrees that day, leaving a warm temperature that persisted as dusk approachedperfect for a Saturday night in the city known to let les bons temps rouler. That steamy Saturday would not, however, be marked by the drunken debauchery that made New Orleans famousat least not for Jake A. Brown. Around 9 oclock Brown had received word that a young woman wanted to see him, but dismissed the message to join the revelry at Murphys Barber Shop on Canal Street. As he exited the establishment at 10:15 PM and approached the intersection of Canal and South Franklin Streets, Brown came face-to-face with Corine Mantley, the woman whom he had earlier ignored. Without saying a word Mantley withdrew a nickelplated revolver from her satchel, closed her eyes, and pumped five shots toward her stunned paramour. Brown staggered about the sidewalk, reeling from four gunshot wounds, as his mistress calmly handed over the gun to authorities. She pointed to Browns body now lying in the gutter and remarked, Well, at least the S-- of a B---- wont take any more of my money.ii In subsequent statements to police Mantley revealed that while she and Brown had been intimate for some time, he had been pawning her jewelry to buy gifts for another woman. Of course, it is impossible to know whether the money or the betrayal actually led this African-American prostitute to dispatch the secretary for the Supreme Lodge of the

Knights of Pythiasan organization, ironically, dedicated to peace and goodwill. But the significance of this case goes well beyond nickel-plated revolvers and ill-fated lovers. Though existing literature on Southern violence often conforms to a dichotomy of perpetual female victimhood and static male aggression, the instance of Corine Mantley suggests that there is another story to be told.iii The purpose of this essay is to explore the relationship between women and homicide in New Orleans, with particular attention to homicide committed by women between 1900 and 1915.iv This essay will argue that social and economic factors created a violent milieu that encouraged some women to become lethal agents rather than passive victims. By examining female aggression that emerged from this environment, it is possible to gain insight into the intersection of race, gender and violence in early-twentiethcentury New Orleans. The primary sources for this essay are the unusually detailed New Orleans Police Department homicide records.v While these documents must be used with caution, interesting trends emerge from the 736 murders recorded by the police from 1910 to 1915 particularly with regard to women.vi Cursory investigation shows that 67 unassisted homicides (9 percent) were committed by women from 1900 to 1915.vii Based on these initial data it would appear that women were not heavily involved in lethal violence. Indeed, the preponderance of male perpetrators easily obscures female aggression in quantitative analysis. But, after careful readings of each report, it becomes clear that women were actually involved in 408 (55 percent) of these 736 killings.viii While women were certainly not as likely to kill or be killed as their male counterparts, records reveal the consistent appearance of womenbe it as perpetrators, victims, witnesses, or catalysts for male-on-male violence.

The records suggest which segment of the female population was killing in New Orleans: working-class black women.ix The data show that white women were significantly less likely to kill, or be killed; black women were, according to Jeffrey Adler, more than 6.5 times more likely to murder than white women.x Similarly, white men had a much higher chance of being killed over a spilt drink than by an angry woman.xi With these data in mind, the next question becomes, why were black men and women in New Orleans more likely to be immersed in kill or be killed scenarios? Further, why did many women choose the former? While white homicide was more dispersed throughout the neighborhoods and avenues of New Orleans, murder committed by African-Americans clustered in particular locales. Streets such as Franklin, Burgundy, Basin, Liberty, and Customhouse, home to large black populations, became synonymous with vice, violence, and the abject poverty of its residents.xii Rather than the wrought-iron balconies and European-inspired architecture that attracted tourists, these areas played host to prostitution cribs, swampy streets, saloons, a paucity of indoor plumbing, and overcrowded shanty housing.xiii The difficulties of living in this environment were only heightened by institutional racism. As historian Daniel Rosenberg explains, substandard health care, higher mortality, inferior education, exclusion from public places, segregated transportation, and, fundamentally disfranchisement, created unequal living conditions for Black Orleanians.xiv Thus, while African Americans were certainly part of New Orleans society, they lived in a world vastly different from middle- and upper-class whites. What resulted from this social isolation and economic marginalization can be described as a distinctive African-American community, or subculture, in New Orleans.xv Demographic information provided by the homicide ledgers indicate that this community was largely homogenous, as its inhabitants were typically impoverished,

African-Americans holding menial jobs as laborers, domestics, washerwomen, or warehousemen. These types of environments, as scholars such as Marvin Wolfgang and Elijah Anderson explain, often prompt unique value and belief systems that diverge significantly from the dominant culture and its legal norms.xvi Such social organizations can provide refuge for marginalized populations, yet they can also act as a pressure cookerespecially when the group in question is a minority population. The difficult circumstances of daily life and heightened dissatisfaction resulting from outside influences can create internal violence, as well as the expectation of violent behavior. In such settings, aggression becomes a normative response to certain stimuli, as well as a defining characteristic in the eyes of the dominant group.xvii The homicide records, paired with the tough realities of daily life, suggest that black New Orleanians were living in such a violent environment. This assertion is supported by the autobiography of jazz great Louis Armstrong. Remembering back to the first decade of the twentieth century, Armstrong explained that he grew up in The Battlefield, an area named because the toughest characters in town used to live there, and would shoot and fight so much.xviii As Armstrong recalled, Everyday there were fights. Fights between whores, toughs, and even children. Some house in the district was always being torn down, and plenty of bricks were handy. Whenever two guys got into a quarrel they would run to the nearest rubbish pile and start throwing bricks at each other. Seeing these fights going on all the time, we kids adopted the same method.xix The tendency for men, women, and children to choose violence like brick-throwing, opposed to seeking the police, is a revealing aspect of this milieu.xx In his account of traditions and violence in twentieth-century America, Fox Butterfield argues that high levels of intraracial violence among African Americans reflected their political and legal marginalization.xxi Since they could not fight their true oppressorswhitesthey fought

each other. These ideas hold true for New Orleans African-American community as blacks made up only one-fourth of the total population, yet were responsible for almost half of all murders, and were the victims in fifty-six percent of homicides during the early twentieth century.xxii Butterfield further accounts for inward violence, noting that African Americans considered the law ineffectuala claim that resonates with Donald Blacks discussion of extralegal violence.xxiii As Black explains, individuals who take the law into their own hands often do so because the police are unconcerned, and unlikely to intervene on their behalf. This tendency has important salience when considering the law enforcement in New Orleans and the citys black population. First and foremost, the city police departments notorious relationship with corruption, graft and brutality produced strong anti-police sentiments in all levels of society that historians have traced back to the 1840s.xxiv But for African Americans, the realities of racial oppression only made matters worse. With very few black police officersAfrican Americans held just five percent of all law enforcement jobs whilst constituting thirty-eight percent of all persons arrested in 1900the police were not only less likely to intervene on behalf of black victims, but also more likely to persecute them.xxv As Jazz legend and New Orleans native Sidney Bechet remembered, Youd just never knew which it would be with those policesome of them didnt do nothing to stop what was going on, but others used to beat up the people and break them up.xxvi Black suspects, as a rule, historian William Ivy Hair explains, were more harshly treated by the police and were most apt to be locked up for the vaguest suggestion of any wrongdoing. xxvii These realities make it unsurprising that the homicide records reveal black New Orleanians who were hesitant to cooperate with, or even contact the police.xxviii After interviewing several parties in the immediate vicinity of a 1910 murder, a police officer noted that he could learn nothing leading up to the trouble as no one seemed to know

anything about itdespite the fact that a black man was killed in a public intersection, at 8 PM, on a Saturday evening.xxix Police Captain John B. Cooper explicitly stated his opinion when recording the death of a black housekeeper on a public sidewalk in 1903: there appears to be no witnesses to the affair, a fact he attributed to the usual reliance of the class of people residing in the neighborhood.xxx When police asked George Saunders why he had not reported the murder of his mother in 1914, he replied that he did not know it was necessary to notify the police or the coroner.xxxi The fact that Saunders was unaware of, or uninterested in, police involvement aligns with Louis Armstrongs recollections; as he explained, we did not want the cops to mix up in our quarrels; we could settle them ourselves.xxxii Although Black, Butterfield, Wolfgang, and Ferracuti apply their theories primarily to male-on-male violence, they are relevant to this study in three ways. One, if oppression in larger society made blacks more prone to use violence, the homicide records indicate that these tendencies also extended to women. Arguably, the double factors of racial and gender discrimination would intensify the justifications for violent action. Two, as Butterfield theorized, black women, like black men, directed their aggression against other poor African Americans. With only three instances of interracial or cross-class murder, the black women of New Orleans were not directing their aggression toward the mainstream culture. Finally, the discussion of extralegal violence speaks to the intersection of race and gender. As Black and Butterfield postulate, state institutions did not necessarily serve and protect African Americans in New Orleans. Even if the police department had disregarded the societal order and overlooked their racial prejudices, they were extremely understaffed throughout the early twentieth-century.xxxiii In 1900, the department employed only 193 patrolmen in a city of 300,000roughly one patroller for every 1,500

residents. Overworked and understaffed, police merely contained the areas home to the undesirable element (read: poor minorities), allowing criminals to prey upon one another without intervention.xxxiv African-American women could not rationally expect an outside party to intervene when a lovers quarrel turned violent, or when another woman flew at them in a murderous rage. Indeed, the homicide reports suggest that many women in New Orleans anticipated the possibility of violence in everyday life, and prepared themselves by concealing weapons. It is unlikely that Eva Logan had a fork up her sleeve for altruistic reasons, and it is just as unlikely that Mary Woods was unthinkingly carrying a knifewhich she used to dispatch Eva after being forked above the right eye in 1906.xxxv In 1912 Elizabeth Luckett went armed with a knife to a local restaurant where she killed Bertha Black during an argument over their mutual interest, Will Gordon. On Christmas Day in 1914 Blanche Hullum took from her bosom a sharp pointed potato knife to fight off the unwanted advances of Lunky Euton.xxxvi White servant Lizzie Smith believed it necessary to take a double-action revolver with her to the theater, because if she had to go alone, she would take something to protect herself.xxxvii Whether it was an easily hidden pocket-knife (the instrument used by many women) or a more cumbersome .38 caliber pistol, the threat of physical violence was great enough for some New Orleans women to conceal weaponry, while the conditioned response to violence helped prompt their use. When black women did commit murder in New Orleans, the specific circumstances of each crime were different. However, the justifications, or motives, behind the bulk of these murders largely appear to be a function of the victim. Instances of women killing men, which constitute roughly sixty percent of the homicides committed by women, often took place between romantically-involved African-American men and women, in or around private homes, following domestic quarrels that turned violent. The reports do not make it

easy to identify who started the (usually) domestic arguments, yet the records suggest that these conflicts can be described as crimes of self-defense. To be sure, the term self-defense is not meant to imply that these women were randomly attacked, without provocation. The records reveal that many women, like Belle Monroe in 1911, were cursing and abusing their partners prior to the murder.xxxviii Yet, when both parties had reached the breaking point, and weapons were drawn, the situation literally became a matter of self-protection. From such cases of self-defense emerge a recurring theme of domestic violence. Numerous reports note fisticuffs at the time of the murder, as well as histories of physical abuse between men and women. The murder of Joseph Wheeler suggests the ordinariness of such domestic conflict. As the police report explains, Wheeler and his mistress Ophelia Williams were not strangers to brawling when he began to beat her about the face and neck in 1911. She owned a pistol, but chose not to retrieve it from her dresser during this particular ruckusuntil Wheeler said that he was leaving to get a gun to kill her. At that point, Williams grabbed her .38 caliber Smith and Wesson. The decision not to use the gun until her life was threatened perhaps suggests a tolerance of acceptable violence. But when such violence reached the point of no return, many women chose Williams approach to conflict resolution: she shot him before he could kill her.xxxix Williams acted proactively, but some women were literally fighting for their lives. When Richard Rieko attempted to slit her throat in 1906, Marie Hillman also produced a handgun and shot him.xl Thomas Shield broke down the door to Fannie McGhees bedroom in 1911 with a knife in hand. McGhee later told police that he had plunged at her with the knife, but missed, at which point she wrestled the knife from his grasp, then stabbed it in his chest.xli An ominous large pocket-knife with an open blade was found near the body of Samuel Carey, who was shot by his paramour in 1914, while the knife of Walter Mars was open in his lifeless hand when the police arrested his mistress Anna Briggs in 1910.xlii

As in the private battles between couples, the types of weapons used also indicate that these self-defense killings were often personal affairs. Virtually all of these homicides were committed with either a knife or a gun, with more crimes of self-defense being kniferelated. Unlike a gun, which can be fired from a distance, murders committed with knives involve close contact, physical exertion and what criminologist Leonard Beeghley describes as a psychological commitment to the crime.xliii Yet such a psychological commitment did not mean these crimes were premeditated. With the exception of a woman seasoning her husbands coffee with Rough on Rats poison in 1907, the women who killed men were usually doing so in the heat of the moment, either as they were being attacked, or when an attack seemed forthcoming.xliv On the other hand, the homicide records suggest that the stakes changed when the altercation involved another woman. Because most black women made a living by taking orders from white employers, their tolerance for slights and disrespect would have been much higher in interracial relations. However, the homicide records suggest that the inclination to tolerate insults decreased with intragroup and intragender conflict. In these cases more was on the line than self-preservation, as women fought each other to protect their reputations, identities, or perhaps to establish boundaries. Examining the specific murder of Rosie Jones helps illustrates this point. In the fall of 1912 Jones was escorted by her beau Edward Doherty to a ball at St. Catherines Hall.xlv Once they arrived, Dohertys behavior began to rouse Rosies suspicion, as he kept stealing away during the evening, spending time with Rosie before disappearing into the crowd again. Unbeknownst to Rosie, Edward had been dividing his time between Rosie and another black woman named Amy Caesar all evening. When Rosie saw Doherty leave the ball with Amy Caesar around 1 AM, she pursued the couple to the corner of Commercial Place and Camp Streets and quickly engaged in a heated argument with

Caesar. Words turned to fisticuffs, which turned to lethal battery when Caesar picked up a stray piece of wood and bludgeoned Rosie above her right eyeprompting death due to lockjaw.xlvi Two women fighting over a man in situations like the Jones-Doherty-Caesar love triangle is the most common type of female-on-female murder in this study.xlvii But the interesting aspect of cases like the Jones murder is that she did not attack Edward Doherty. The homicide records show that poor, black women like Rosie Jones and Amy Caesar were not above attacking a manyet Rosie did not directly target the source of betrayal. This choice suggests that more than jealousy was at stake when the crime involved another womanparticularly, another black woman. Scholars of masculinity and violence have found that working-class men often killed each other over seemingly trivial slights like a scuffed shoe or a refused drink, yet they have argued that responding to such insults with violence reflected a deep-seated need to protect ones boundaries or reputation.xlviii While the frequency and volume is certainly not comparable, the justification for men fighting over a drink and women fighting over a man does appear similar: to lose the battle was to lose status. It appears that women were also unwilling to endure questions regarding their sexual morality. Things quickly turned violent when Alice Lane, after discovering her paramour Arthur Williams chatting with Jeannette Jackson (a cook) outside of her home in 1913, charged Jackson with being a prostitute. A fight broke outLane using a fire poker while Jackson drew a concealed pocket knifeand resulted in Lane being stabbed multiple times. While Jackson certainly fought back to stop being beaten with an iron poker, the price of Lanes suggestion that Jackson was a prostitute was her life.xlix If being called effeminate was the greatest insult between black men, perhaps being labeled a whore or promiscuous was the equivalent for these women.

Hair-trigger responses to such insults reflect the reality of prostitution in New Orleans and the African-American community. While there had always been prostitution in this port city, city officials plotted out a legal prostitution district, nicknamed Storyville, in 1897.l It was no mistake, historian Alecia Long argues, that the streets chosen for this notorious, yet sanctioned vice district were inhabited predominantly by African Americans. Storyville was, according to Long, a physical and geographic expression of the growing disdain for blacks on the part of whites.li Long further argues that the creation of Storyville led to confusion over the meaning of women in public. In the increasingly anonymous city, she explains, it was hard to know for sure if someone was engaging in prostitution. As sex for sale took new and sometimes more subtle forms, female behavior and deportment in public became a critical crucible upon which definitions of respectability were forged.lii Since prostitution was a reality in the black community, the women who were not prostitutes might have been overtly concerned with clarifying their sexual identity. If the line between sex for money and sex for love was blurred, it was crucial to firmly establish which category one fell in. Perhaps violence was a way to prove this point. To be sure, honor is a dangerously ambiguous label that is rarely applied to women. However, it is clear that some type of corporeal and psychological boundaries existed for African-American women in New Orleans. With little protection from poverty, political alienation and police indifference, black women could at least assert some measure of control, or protect their reputations with a pistol or knife. In this light, murder could be used as an expression of power for a subset of the population that had very little. Ultimately, by using the police department reports as a guide, this essay has attempted to demonstrate that some women were more familiar with lethal violence than previous histories might suggest. Drawing from historiography as well as theories of criminology and psychology to make sense of the records, I have argued that the particular

environment and value system of black New Orleans helped foster an arena where aggressive behavior was both common and normative. Even further, the homicide records suggest that this tendency to respond to slights with violence was also inculcated by African-American women, who concealed and used weapons with surprising frequency. It has proven more difficult, however, to account for the motivations behind homicide committed by black women in New Orleans. A goal of the larger project is to more conclusively explore the justifications for female aggression, as well as the intersection of race and violence in larger society. More attention must be given to the role of violence in the black communitys social organization, as well as the role of white perceptions. How did black New Orleanians interpret and define situations that ultimately lead to violence? How did black female aggression diverge from (or parallel) black male aggression? If the stakes were both physical and psychological when a black woman killed, how does this impact our understanding of black female sexuality and identity? Is it possible to argue to that black women in New Orleans are fighting to defend something that bears resemblance to Southern honor? In the end, this essay raises more questions than it resolves. But peering into these intimate moments, and using homicideparticularly homicide committed by, or involving womenas a lens, opens new avenues of inquiry. The result is more than a series of interesting and dramatic vignettes; it is a narrative with the potential to elucidate new contours of female agency in the larger narrative of Southern violence.

United States. Department of Agriculture. Weather Bureau, Climatological Service. District No. 8, Lower Mississippi Valley: Report for November 1913 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1914.): 1, 16.
i

New Orleans Police Department, Reports of Homicides, Records of the New Orleans Police department, New Orleans City Archives, New Orleans Public Library, New Orleans, LA, microfilm edition; subsequently cited as Reports. Report of Homicide: Jake A. Brown, 7 Nov. 1913, in Reports.
ii

See: Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, Homicide (New York, NY: De Gruyter, 1988). This influential text uses evolutionary psychology as a framework for understanding homicide, arguing that most murder occurs between young men whose behavior is motivated by a basic, biological need to control the reproductive capacity of their women. This Darwinistic model considers child killing and infanticide, but does not fully address female aggression with victims other than progeny.
iii

See also: Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (Oxford, 1983).Wyatt-Browns seminal discussion of Southern violence does not account for female aggression. Attention to womanhood is limited to the importance of shame, and the role women played in bolstering male honor. The index heading for homicide speaks volumes, as women only appeared as see also: Wives, as victims of abuse. For excellent treatments of violent women outside of South, see Jeffrey Adlers discussion of Chicago homicide, First in Violence, Deepest in Dirt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2006) or Kali N. Gross examination of black women and crime in Philadelphia, Colored Amazons (Durham, NC: Duke, 2006). While the larger project includes detailed discussions of larger New Orleans between 1900 and 1915, page limitations make it necessary to remove those sections from this essay. In short, New Orleans was chosen as a locale based on resource availability, and its high, but not exceptional, murder rate. Thus, this essay does not argue for regional representativeness or singularity; with a murder rate of 22.2 per 100,000 inhabitants, New Orleans ranked high but was never the most murderous city (see: Table I).
iv

With a level of detail unusual in comparable murder records, the New Orleans Police Department documented each homicide with a two-part report. The first section notes demographic information (i.e. age, gender, race, residence, occupation, time, location), which helps to contextualize the homicides both geographically and physically. The second detailed report of each ledger notes not only the specific events of the crime, but also the assumed motivesuggesting psychological impetuses for violence. Recording police officers often included direct quotes from witnesses, victims or the accused. Quotes used in this essay are drawn from this section and are written just as they appear in the detailed report. For an example record, see Appendix I.
v

This essay approaches these documents with caution for three reasons. First and foremost, these documents are only as objective as the police officers who wrote them. Care has been taken to highlight, yet not replicate biases that may have colored homicide reporting. Secondly, certain years are absent from the archived police homicide records. For this time period, records for 1900, 1904 and 1908 are missing. Finally, in addition to the police department, homicide records were also compiled by the Bureau of Vital Statistics and the city coroner. Yet, as historian Tennie Erwin Daugette discovered in the 1930s, no single set of records is accurate. The Bureau of Vital Statistics tallied homicides based on where the victim died, not where they were attacked, meaning that murders taking place outside of, but with victims that died in New Orleans are included. Similarly, the numbers between the coroners office and the police department are not analogous. While future research will cross-reference each data pool to distill homicide totals for each year (and compensate for years missing), this essay temporarily sidesteps the problem by using the police records more qualitatively than quantitatively.
vi

Murder committed by women is defined in this study as unassisted homicide committed by adult women. Cases that inappropriately diverge from this framework are moved to the outlier category.
vii

Female involvement in New Orleans homicide, from 1900 to 1915, as found in the police homicide reports, breaks down in the following manner: 67 murders committed by women (9.1 percent); 105 women killed by men (14.3 percent); 113 cases that list women as witnessesbe it material or lay witnesses (15.4 percent); 115 instances of male-on-male homicide prompted in some form by a woman (15.6 percent) 6 outlier cases that involved women in unusual ways (.8 percent). Outlier cases excluded from major subheadings to avoid distortion: two cases of a woman being killed a man and woman couple, a woman killed in a drunk-driving accident, schoolchildren throwing rocks, and a girl killed with a potato.
viii

Of the sixty-seven women charged with murder, fifty-three were African American (79%), while fourteen were white (21%). See Appendix II.
ix x xi

Adler, Murder in Chicago and New Orleans, 311.

Scholars like Jeffrey Adler and Elliot Gorn have addressed the relationship between white, working-class masculinity and violence, finding a trend of white men killing each other over slights to their reputation or status. The practice of treating, or

the offer to buy another man a drink, was often an impetus for male-on-male violence; to refuse the drink was an insult, and was often followed with aggression. The New Orleans reports reveal similar cases of working-class men killing each other in saloons over treating. White men certainly killed their wives, children and each other in New Orleans, but the paucity of homicides committed by white women suggests that they did not pose the same threat of lethal violence. For excellent treatments of violence and white masculinity see: Jeffrey Adler, First in Violence, Deepest in Dirt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2006), Elliot Gorn, "`Gouge and Bite, Pull Hair and Scratch': The Social Significance of Fighting in the Southern Backcountry," American Historical Review 90 (1985): 38-42, and Gorn, The Manly Art (Ithaca: Cornell, 1986). Long, A Southern Babylon, 14-6; Tennie Erwin Daugette, Homicides in New Orleans. (Unpublished MA: Tulane, 1931), 44-7. See also: Appendix III.
xii

It was not until after World War I that the city of New Orleans found the technology to effectively drain all areas of this swamp-turned-city. As a result, certain streets were perpetually muddy, wet, and home to pools of stagnant water and diseaseinfested insects. See: W.E. Pedrick, New Orleans as it Is: With A Correct Guide To All The Places of Interest (Cleveland, OH: William W. Williams, 1885), Louis Andrew Vyhnanek, Unorganized Crime, (Lafayette, LA: University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1998).
xiii xiv xv

Daniel Rosenberg, New Orleans Dockworkers: Race, Labor and Unionism, 1892-1923 (Albany, NY: NYU Press, 1988), 20.

In this study, the term subculture is understood as a group within a society having values and behavioral patterns distinctive enough to distinguish it from others within that same society. See: Marvin E. Wolfgang and Franco Ferracuti, Subculture of ViolenceA Socio-Psychological Theory, in Studies in Homicide, ed. Marvin E. Wolfgang (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), Elijah Anderson, Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City (New York: W.W Norton, 1999).
xvi

Marvin Wolfgang and Franco Ferracutis theory of criminal behavior, the subculture of violence, argues that high crime rates in the African-American community are the result of particular cultural and racial values that see violence as the appropriate reaction to threats or dangerous situations. This theory is highly controversial, and has been criticized for implying that African Americans are inherently violent. While this essay has been influenced by the notion within Wolfgang and Ferracutis argument that particular social and environmental factors influence the use and perception of aggression, this essay is also well-aware of the controversy that surrounds the subculture of violence literatureand is chiefly concerned with avoiding the validation of racial stereotypes. Rather than a product of culture, this essay argues that violence in the black community of New Orleans was a social construction. That is, it resulted from the intersection of poverty, institutional racism, and political disfranchisement in this particular geographic area. This essay in no way argues that violent response to certain stimuli was an innate characteristic, or mark of degeneracy. Rather, interpersonal violence and aggression was a behavior, a choice, a survival strategy that sprung from the circumstances of life. For use of the subculture of violence theory in American historiography, see: Clare V. McKanna, Jr.: Homicide, Race and Justice in the American West, 1880-1920 (Tuscon, AZ: University of Arizona, 1997), Jeff Forret, Race Relations at the margins: Slaves and Poor Whites in the Antebellum Southern Countryside (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State Press, 2006). For criticisms of the theory in criminology, see: Cao, Liqun, Anthony Adams, and Vickie J Jensen, A Test of the Black Subculture of Violence Thesis: A Research Note, Criminology 35, no. 2 (1997): 367-379, Shihadeh, Edward S., and Darrell J. Steffensmeier, "Economic Inequality, Family Disruption, and Urban Black Violence: Cities As Units of Stratification and Social Control, Social Forces 73, no. 2 (1994): 729-751.
xvii xviii xix xx

Louis Armstrong, Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans (New York, NY: Prentice Hall, 1954), 7-8. Armstrong, Satchmo, 27.

Armstrongs recollections are supported by numerous homicides involving bricks or brick bats, such as Amy Caesar and Rosie Jones who began to throw brick bats at one and another over a mutual love interest in 1912, or Florence Handcock who picked up a Brick-Bat and without a word of hesitation struck Henry Derbigny who had beat her with a fence picket in 1915. Report of Homicide: Rosie Jefferson, 10 October 1912; Report of Homicide: Henry Derbigny, 14 December 1915, in Reports. Fox Butterfield, All Gods Children: The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence (New York, NY: Knopf, 1995), 5865.
xxi

Adler, Murder in Chicago and New Orleans, 305. Specific statistics: African Americans made up 26.7 percent of the total population, were responsible for 48.4 percent of all murders, and were victims in 56.4 percent of homicides in New Orleans in the early twentieth century.
xxii xxiii xxiv

Donald Black, Crime as Social Control. American Sociological Review 48, no. 1 (1983), 34-45.

See: Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed, 238; Louis Andrew Vyhnanek, The Seamier Side of Life: Criminal Activity in New Orleans During the 1920s, v. Dennis C. Rousey, Policing The Southern City: New Orleans, 1805-1889 (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1996), 194. Specific percentages: African Americans held 5.1 percent of all law enforcement jobs, and constituted 38.1 percent of all persons arrested in 1900.
xxv

xxvi xxvii

Sidney Bechet, Treat It Gentle (New York: Hill and Wang, 1960), 62. Hair, Carnival of Violence, 83.

African Americans in these neighborhoods also went to great lengths to avoid having their names and occupations listed in the city directory or in census reports to remain anonymous to police, bill collectors and other city officials. Hair, Carnival of Violence, 113.
xxviii xxix xxx xxxi xxxii xxxiii xxxiv xxxv xxxvi xxxvii xxxviii xxxix xl xli xlii xliii xliv xlv

Report of Homicide: William Harding, 30 April 1910, in Reports. Report of Homicide: Susan Hyde, 30 Dec. 1903, in Reports. Report of Homicide: Julia Saunders, 17 March 1914, in Reports. Armstrong, Satchmo, 78. Rousey, Policing The Southern City, 198. Long, A Southern Babylon, 78; Vyhnanek, The Seamier Side of Life, 7-16. Report of Homicide: Eva Logan, 10 April 1906, in Reports. Report of Homicide: Will Gordon, 13 May 1912; Report of Homicide: Lunky Euton, 25 December 1914, in Reports. Report of Homicide: Dan Hugh, 14 Oct. 1907, in Reports. Report of Homicide: Henry Maxwell, 19 April 1911, in Reports. Report of Homicide: Joseph Wheeler, 11 Aug. 1911, in Reports.

Report of Homicide: Richard Rieko, 25 Dec. 1906, in Reports. Report of Homicide: Thomas Shield, 7 June 1911, in Reports. Report of Homicide: Walter Mars, 31 May 1910, in Reports. Leonard Beeghley, Homicide: A Sociological Explanation (New York, NY: Rowman &Littlefield Publishers, 2003), 108. Report of Homicide: Mose Moline, 31 Jan. 1907, in Reports.

Besides barrooms and concert saloons, dance halls were also common features in early-twentieth-century New Orleans. In locales that ranged from small shacks to grandiose ballrooms New Orleanians made merry to the lusty, syncopated rhythms of jazz music. See: Al Rose, Storyville, New Orleans: Being an Authentic, Illustrated Account of the Notorious Red-Light District (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1974), 103-7.
xlvi xlvii

Report of Homicide: Rosie Jones, 12 Oct. 1912, in Reports.

The homicide reports document numerous cases of women killing each other over a man. The argument over a mutual interest ended in 1906 when Louisa Williams stabbed fellow prostitute Ella Walter, while Christina Francois killed fellow servant Josephine Marcelin over a man in 1911. Report of Homicide: Josephine Marcelin, 11 Sept. 1911, in Reports. Report of Homicide Ella Walter, 01 Sept. 1906, in Reports. Jeffrey Adler, First in Violence, Deepest in Dirt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2006), Elliot Gorn, "`Gouge and Bite, Pull Hair and Scratch': The Social Significance of Fighting in the Southern Backcountry," American Historical Review 90 (1985): 38-42, and Gorn, The Manly Art (Ithaca: Cornell, 1986).
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Report of Homicide: Alice Lane, 4 Aug. 1913, in Reports.

The red-light district of New Orleans was in operation from 1897 to 1917. The nickname Storyville was a nod to the city official Sidney Story, who was instrumental in drafting the legislation that established the areaalthough many locals referred to the area as simply The District. Pressure from the federal government during World War I (over fears concerning the spread of venereal diseases amongst soldiers) ultimately closed Storyville, despite objections from city officials. The area played host to similar forms of entertainment through the 1920s, yet most of the buildings were razed to construct housing projects in the 1930s. Only a handful of buildings from the Storyville era have survived to the present day. For a fascinating collections of Storyville photographs, see: E.J. Bellocq, Storyville Portraits; Photographs from the New Orleans Red-Light District, Circa 1912 (New York: New York Graphic Society, 1970), and Al Rose, Storyville, New Orleans, Being an Authentic, Illustrated Account of the Notorious Red-Light District (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1974).
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Long, A Southern Babylon, 138. Long, A Southern Babylon, 76.