Methodology

Historians have turned to newspapers to reveal popular discourses, especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when they were the chief source of information within and beyond city limits. From 1849 the New York Associated Press offered editors articles via a telegraph wire service, prompting a boom in daily newspapers. Across the country newspaper readers encountered the same ideas and often the same articles.Footnote ⁸ Editors’ selection of similar material (e.g. Hattie Stump’s death notice) signals a comfort with certain discourses, especially around gender and race.Footnote ⁹ In order to reveal the local spread of discourses, this article employed two for-profit services to search digitized American newspapers: Newspapers.com (owned by Ancestry) and NewspaperArchive.com (owned by Storied).Footnote ¹⁰ Both services provide online search engines that use keywords, place names, newspaper titles and date spans. These services allowed the authors to cast a wide net for reports of drug-related activities and specific people or nicknames and narrow the results by state and year.

In order to isolate a geographic focus within large continuing discussions about drug use, the authors limited their search to newspapers in the USA between 1880 and 1930.Footnote ¹¹ Generally, these articles fell into five categories. First, there were advertisements for patent medicines that marketed products explicitly free of cocaine from the 1890s. Second, there were advertisements for clinics and medications that would rehabilitate cocaine addicts. Third, there were reports and testimonies about the scientific nature of cocaine as an analgesic or stimulant. Fourth, there were a small number of death notices related to wrong medication, overdoses and suicides. Fifth, there were reports of disturbances or crimes caused by cocaine users, arrests that involved suspected cocaine use and events that took place in ‘Cocaine Alley’. The last category comprises the material underpinning this article’s research.

An initial search for the phrase ‘Cocaine Alley’ revealed English-language newspapers that began to use the phrase beginning in 1897 and tapering off around 1930.Footnote ¹² Figure 3 shows the 22 American states with newspapers in the two databases that mentioned ‘Cocaine Alley’ by year. Tennessee and Indiana stand out as having sustained interest within a larger sample of articles mentioning cocaine. More revealing than the absolute number of articles is the short-term interest in ‘Cocaine Alleys’ that the graph reveals. Missouri has the earliest collection of newspapers writing and sharing articles about events there from 1897 to 1902.Footnote ¹³ Tennessee follows with a longer and greater discussion from 1900 to 1911.Footnote ¹⁴ Indiana picks up the discussion chiefly from 1905 to 1916 and trails off between 1917 and 1921.Footnote ¹⁵ Because not all small town newspapers have been digitized or included by the two services used here, this analysis reflects a minimum level of confirmed activity. Some states, including Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, Georgia and North Carolina, show brief discussions lasting a year or two that may reveal more activity as access to digitized newspapers grows.Footnote ¹⁶

Figure 3.

A graph of American newspaper articles referencing ‘Cocaine Alley’ by state, 1897–1930. Figure by the authors.

The phrase ‘Cocaine Alley’ encapsulates the dishevelled, urban quality of areas in which residents were perceived as habitually using intoxicants. Cocaine, morphine, heroin and alcohol all produced reckless, illegal or lacklustre behaviour and appear in discourses about urban zones described as ‘Cocaine Alleys’.Footnote ¹⁷ While the moniker’s origin is unclear, newspaper articles quoted policemen, judges, politicians and concerned citizens using the phrase freely. This evidence suggests that the idea of a ‘Cocaine Alley’ was already in common use colloquially, even if it took longer to appear in newspapers. Often, newspapers connected racialized groups and individuals with a local zone called ‘Cocaine Alley’. Digging into this sample revealed discourses fusing anxieties related to gender, race and migration that appeared in specific states across approximately 30 years.

Race and drug use in mid- to late nineteenth-century America

Following the end of the Reconstruction period (1865–77) American legislators began restricting Black voting and enforcing racial segregation and discrimination. Across America contemporary readers would have been familiar with arguments that minimized the capability of Black people, and especially of Black women. In the nineteenth century pro-slavery writers developed justifications based on scientific racism to keep Black people enslaved as agricultural workers. They claimed that Black people were physiologically inferior to White people and only fit for physical labour and would not prosper in any other work environment. Samuel Cartwright argued that Black people were unable to care for themselves based on his observations of smaller crania. Josiah Nott, a surgeon in the Confederate army and author of Types of Mankind (1854), argued that Black people were intellectually inferior. The theory of stewardship cast White enslavers as Christian intellectuals guiding Black bondsmen towards productive agricultural labour. This model affirmed traditional slave-owning values and employed scientific racism to confine Black labour to Southern farms and plantations in the face of abolitionist campaigns.Footnote ¹⁸ At this time a belief that Black women could be queens depended on a reversal of fortune that, to White readers, required getting high.

From the 1880s racist legal measures thrived, which prevented equal access to suffrage, education and employment. These Jim Crow laws were repealed gradually in the first half of the twentieth century.Footnote ¹⁹ The resulting social, economic and political separation of Black and White Americans has persisted to this day. Underfunding schools that taught Black students, stripping Black adults of the vote and right to hold office and preventing property owners from selling houses or banks from giving mortgages to Black buyers thwarted success and suppressed Black citizens. These systemic barriers contributed to the generational poverty faced by many Black American communities. The facetious depiction of second-class citizens as queens emphasized Black women’s challenges in making a living and achieving middle-class respectability.

Southern newspapers printed short stories that purported to recreate a Black dialect, reinforcing Black communities’ distance from White intellectual, respectable and commercial society. For example, Robert Cooke Bicknell’s short story, ‘The buccaneers of Cocaine Alley’ (1905), presents a racialized conversation between Big Lize and Hat Pin Mary, two fictional Black women in Chattanooga, Tennessee.Footnote ²⁰ Similar figures and dialect appear in an Atlanta, Georgia, cartoon entitled ‘Pen pictures of cocaine fiends’ (1905), which illustrates contemporary White belief in Black weakness and tendency to poverty and addiction. In Figure 4 the Black woman captioned ‘A dream of cocaine joy’ demonstrated the drug-infused absurdity of Black queens and aligned Black people with delusion, crime and the police. Although these examples originated in Southern states, they present stereotypes that would have been familiar to White newspaper readers in Northern Midwestern states.

Figure 4.

‘Pen pictures of cocaine fiends’, The Atlanta Constitution, 15 Jan. 1905. Public domain image. Photograph courtesy of Newspapers.com.

After the American Civil War, pharmacists increasingly dispensed low-cost drugs, like morphine, to ease the pain of amputations, disfigurement and bullet and shrapnel injuries.Footnote ²¹ The invention of the hypodermic syringe in 1859 facilitated morphine delivery in the home as well as the clinic, leading to addiction being called the ‘soldier’s disease’.Footnote ²² Urban reconstruction and the expansion of railway, postal and telegraph routes contributed to an increase in patent medicine manufacturing and newspaper advertising. Newspapers were an important method of attracting customers to patent medicines, which counted morphine and cocaine as central ingredients, and encouraged widespread self-medication.Footnote ²³ Also, from the 1860s to the 1890s, physicians prescribed morphine for infectious diseases, chronic respiratory ailments and gynaecological conditions, resulting in a predominance of female users, who injected the drug at home. Only in the 1870s did the scientific community slowly begin to study drug dependence, with the result that American society became more aware of morphine addiction through newspaper debates and growing numbers of advertisements for sanatorium treatment.Footnote ²⁴ From 1885 to 1895, America entered what Joseph Spillane has called the ‘medical era’, when scientists endorsed cocaine as an exciting substitute for morphine. Ophthalmologist Karl Koller used cocaine to perform eye surgery and surgeon William Halsted confirmed its anaesthetic uses on himself. Neurologist William Hammond recommended cocaine to relieve hay fever and psychiatrist Sigmund Freud believed that it treated morphine addiction.Footnote ²⁵ At this time, cocaine could be purchased at pharmacies without a prescription and at very low prices. In 1887 The Indianapolis News reported that cocaine cost 1.5 cents per grain (64.8 mg).Footnote ²⁶

Although at first researchers denied the possibility of dependence, praise for cocaine slowly gave way to concerns about addiction. In 1902 The British Medical Journal ran a brief report on American cocaine addiction. Drawing on reports from the late 1890s, the Journal author identified Black workers loading and unloading steamships in New Orleans as some of the earliest addicts. Cocaine helped these men withstand severe heat, cold or rain and maintain ‘vigour’ for an amazing 70-hour shift.Footnote ²⁷ From dock workers cocaine use spread to Black cotton-pickers on plantations. When labour was scarce and planters demanded longer hours, Black workers required a local cocaine source. The British Medical Journal stated that cocaine replaced whiskey as the cotton-picker’s ration and was stored in ample amounts. The situation created by fewer labourers after Emancipation, employers’ greater demands on the remaining labourers and employers’ use of cocaine to maintain labourers’ vigour amounted to addictive entrapment. The report closed by noting local efforts to prevent further cocaine dependence within the Black community, as well as failing efforts to stop cocaine’s spread beyond New Orleans.Footnote ²⁸

In contrast to this focus on predominantly working-class Black men, in the 1880s and 1890s the typical American drug addict was a middle-class White woman.Footnote ²⁹ Often drug use began with a doctor’s prescription, but this iatrogenic addiction extended drug use far beyond illnesses’ end. David Courtright and others have found that White female morphine addicts (often from Southern states) were the largest addict group in the country, far surpassing Black cocaine addicts.Footnote ³⁰ Southern cities, such as New Orleans, Atlanta, Jacksonville and Houston, had addicted populations that were on average 65 per cent larger than addicted populations in Northern cities.Footnote ³¹ As reporters drew attention to the effects of long-term drug use, clinics and sanatoriums advertised rehabilitation programmes. Starting in the 1890s, the Keeley Institute’s Gold Cure for alcohol, opium and morphine addiction opened clinics across America, while its rival, the Miner Symptomatic Gold Treatment, claimed to overcome alcohol, tobacco, morphine and cocaine addiction.Footnote ³² In 1903, surveys by the American Pharmaceutical Association (APA) found that the majority of addicted users with iatrogenic or patent medicine addictions came from higher socio-economic populations who could afford to visit these clinics.Footnote ³³ This finding aligns with Dr Charles Terry’s clinic records from Florida (1912), which show that of 646 drug addicts seeking rehabilitation, 39 per cent were White women and 20 per cent were Black women, with morphine and cocaine addicts dominating the patient sample (37.6 per cent and 26.7 per cent respectively).Footnote ³⁴

Preventing access to morphine and cocaine was slow and represented local responses to perceived crises. Pennsylvania passed legislation against morphine in 1860. Ohio prohibited smoking opium in 1880. Illinois passed a law against cocaine in 1897. In all this legislation there were loopholes and workarounds that allowed for the production, import and distribution of these drugs.Footnote ³⁵ Nevertheless, public conversations about addictive drugs supported campaigns for food purity and greater information about patent medicine formulae. From 1890, advertisements for headache powders, anti-catarrhs, soothing syrups and other medicines explicitly stated the absence of cocaine and morphine. Gradually, this awareness led to the Pure Food and Drug Act (1906), the first national public health legislation in the USA, which required the inspection of food and drugs and established label and handling standards. In 1912, the Sherley Amendments to the Act clarified that food and drug labels had to bear a statement quantifying the proportion of narcotic substances, including morphine and cocaine, and false therapeutic claims were prohibited.Footnote ³⁶ The public campaigns that led to this legislation drew attention back to local points of access to addictive drugs.

In the early twentieth century, public discussion focused on the role of physicians and pharmacists in providing access to morphine and cocaine via prescriptions or over the counter in drug stores. In particular, pharmacists struggled with the popular expectation that they please all customers, while abiding by new regulations and operating in circumstances of intense commercial competition. Ultimately, state pharmacy associations adopted professionalizing principles and presented their members as privileging health over customer demands.Footnote ³⁷ While physicians argued about the wisdom of drug addiction maintenance and defended their professional judgment, new legislation imposed more extensive record-keeping measures on narcotic dispensers.Footnote ³⁸ Although many states already required narcotics to be dispensed via prescription, in 1914, the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act made this federal law and required all importers, manufacturers, wholesale and retail dealers, physicians, dentists, surgeons and pharmacists handling or dispensing morphine and cocaine to register annually. In 1917, the law was interpreted as prohibiting the provision of opiates to addicts for maintenance of addiction.Footnote ³⁹ The effect of these changes was a decrease in legal access to morphine and cocaine.Footnote ⁴⁰

Race and drug use in twentieth-century America

The Progressive Era’s intense national interest in drugs and their effects combined with post-Civil War social changes to produce racist and gendered stereotypes about growing Black communities in Midwestern cities. After the Emancipation Proclamation and as industrialization increased, Northern cities absorbed millions of European and Asian immigrants and Black migrants. While research has focused on the Great Migration (1910–70), the decades that preceded this period are also important.Footnote ⁴¹ As Figure 5 shows, from 1870 to 1930, there were substantial inflows of Black migrants into several Midwest states. Large numbers of male and female Black migrants sought work in towns and cities, where they noticeably swelled small Black communities. Ohio’s Black population grew by 90 per cent and Indiana’s Black population more than doubled over this period. Illinois and Michigan’s Black populations tripled. While these state populations started out small, such substantial growth was remarkable to predominantly White populations and coincided with anti-Black violence. Jack Blocker has noted that race riots occurred in Evansville, Indiana (1903), Springfield, Ohio (1904 and 1906) and Springfield, Illinois (1908), with lesser attacks in many small towns and cities across these states.Footnote Footnote ⁴³ Newspaper coverage of race riots reinforced these neighbourhoods as centres of violence.

Figure 5.

Black population by percentage of state population, 1870–1930. Figure by the authors.

At the same time migrant flows from Southern states to Northern states (e.g. Tennessee and Kentucky to Illinois, Indiana and Michigan) increased, as Northern industrial cities sought unskilled labour for new factories. Table 1 shows large Midwestern cities that experienced substantial growth in their Black populations through migration in the first decades of the twentieth century. In the 30 years from 1900 to 1930, Chicago’s Black population increased 1,000 per cent. St. Louis’s Black population grew by 600 per cent. Indianapolis’s population grew by more than 300 per cent and Minneapolis’ smaller Black population grew by more than 200 per cent. This transformation contributed to White anxiety about violence, crime and areas with a high proportion of non-White residents, mirroring references to ‘Cocaine Alleys’.

Table 1.

Change in number of Black residents in select Midwestern American cities, 1900–30, with percentage growth year-on-year in parenthesesFootnote ⁴²

In the early 1900s narcotics users were more likely to be men seeking recreation or escape, yet newspaper writers continued to speculate on gendered and racialized drug use based on arrests.Footnote ⁴⁴ Catherine Carstairs has argued that cocaine’s reputation as the most dangerous drug grew from its perceived association with Black male users. While The British Medical Journal’s reporting showed some Black cocaine use, newspapers overstated the custom, depicted Black men using cocaine as ‘frenzied, manic, homicidal, lascivious, excitable, criminal and immoral’ and presented them as a threat to White men and women.Footnote ⁴⁵ Michael Cohen emphasized how White racial fears amplified the threat posed by the comparatively small fraction of Black drug users.Footnote ⁴⁶ Moving beyond stereotypes to White responses, Jack Blocker’s study of Springfield, Ohio, in the first decade of the twentieth century has shown how interracial sexual relationships that began in amusement sites, and were encouraged by alcohol and narcotics use, could prompt anti-Black violence.Footnote ⁴⁷ Midwestern fears that drug use led to miscegenation originated in the Southern states’ racist and pseudo-scientific rhetoric about uncontrolled Black sexuality and intoxication and travelled north along with migrant flows.Footnote ⁴⁸

As new factories opened in Northern cities and towns, migrant workers travelled from Southern states and rural areas and settled in newly expanded communities.Footnote ⁴⁹ Many single people lived and worked in cities without the familial surveillance experienced by earlier generations. This freedom allowed experimentation with new entertainments. Many pharmacies sold drugs without a prescription, as did some entertainment venues like saloons, pool rooms, dance halls, cabarets, gambling dens, theatres and cigar shops.Footnote ⁵⁰ Public concern about drug addiction grew throughout the 1890s as newspapers printed more reports about the role of drugs in suicide and accidental death, women’s vulnerability to drug addiction and crimes committed by drug users.

With more women becoming wage-earners outside the home and a growing population of Black workers migrating to Northern states, race determined potential employment. Whiteness was required for most public-facing commercial and office posts, although Black men and some women found work in factories.Footnote ⁵¹ Domestic service, hand laundry, sewing and taking in lodgers remained the most common ways that Black women earned money in the Progressive Era, even as industrialization and urban growth created more opportunities for female workers.Footnote ⁵² Hazel Carby has argued that the migration of Black women prompted a panicked response from White society because of the stereotype that Black women in financial need would turn to sex work. At the core of this White response was the characterization of Black female migrants as ‘sexually degenerate and, therefore, socially dangerous’.Footnote ⁵³ While Cynthia Blair has shown the financial advantages as well as the social threat that sex work offered in Progressive Era Chicago, this prejudice was not based on economic realities or wage comparisons.Footnote ⁵⁴ An important part of this belief was based on the residence of Black women in cheap accommodation in areas that were known as vice districts and that hosted sex work and gambling.Footnote ⁵⁵ This characterization clung to Black women in newspaper reports of ‘Cocaine Alley’.

‘Cocaine Alley’

From the modern perspective, newspapers used ‘Cocaine Alley’ as a non-geographic cultural construct highlighting readers’ fears about racialized drug use. From the perspective of Progressive Era newspaper writers, ‘Cocaine Alley’ was a pejorative nickname applied by newspaper staff and police to problematic urban areas.Footnote ⁵⁶ Usually the street or neighbourhood had a high proportion of Black residents, a low average income compared to local majority-White neighbourhoods and was marked by police surveillance or arrests. In 1908 the Vernon County Censor described ‘the black belt’ in Springfield, Illinois, and showed clearly how ‘Cocaine Alley’ fitted into the tight matrix of race, poverty and drug use:

In the early twentieth century, newspaper writers across the Midwest used the phrase ‘the black belt’ to describe areas with a majority of Black residents. While ‘the black belt’ did not always describe an impoverished or violent area, the phrase ‘Cocaine Alley’ usually appeared in reports of urban disturbance or police arrests of Black residents. This connection reveals the early practice of ‘spatial policing’.Footnote ⁵⁸

Historians of Gilded Age and Progressive Era Midwestern sex workers have found that in a period of intense media competition, sensational reporting was popular.Footnote ⁵⁹ Repeated use of phrases like ‘the black belt’ and ‘Cocaine Alley’ underscores the widespread belief among newspaper editors that White readers were interested in sensational reporting about racialized urban drug use. Moreover, the 47 newspapers that reprinted Stump’s death notice were not sharing information about an important or nationally known person. Instead, they entertained White readers with a fictionalized vision of St. Louis that reinforced racist fears about Black women, at a moment when more women than ever before were experiencing drug addiction, migration and work outside the home. Not only did articles about ‘Cocaine Alley’ and its ‘queens’ sell newspapers, but from the late 1890s, they offered a conceptual home for suspected drug users, usually in neighbourhoods portrayed as having predominantly Black addicts.Footnote ⁶⁰

Notably, newspapers that discussed ‘Cocaine Alleys’ were located in cities that had higher Black populations than the state average or considerably higher Black populations than most other cities in the state.Footnote ⁶¹ Articles identifying ‘Cocaine Alleys’ appeared from 1897 in St. Louis, Missouri; from 1899 in Lawrence, Kansas, and Springfield, Illinois; from 1900 in Chattanooga, Tennessee and Evansville, Indiana; from 1905 in Indianapolis, Indiana; and from 1912 in Muncie, Indiana. Table 2 shows the proportionate Black population in ‘Cocaine Alley’ cities from 1880 to 1920. While the size of Black populations varied, each city hosted a persistently larger Black population than the state average.

Table 2.

Black population in select Midwestern cities, 1880–1920 (entire population/Black population)

Notes:

¹ 1880 Census, Volume 1: Statistics of the Population of the United States, 424; 1890 Census, Volume 1: Statistics of the Population of the United States, 554; 1900 Census, Volume 1: Statistics of the Population of the United States, 642; 1910 Census, Volume 1: Statistics of the Population of the United States, 223; 1920 Census, Volume 3: Statistics of the Population of the United States, 974.

² Bigham, ‘Work, residence, and the emergence of the Black ghetto’, 287–8; 1880 Census, Volume 1: Statistics of the Population of the United States, 417.

³ 1880 Census, Volume 1: Statistics of the Population of the United States, 417; 1890 Census, Volume 1: Statistics of the Population of the United States; 1900 Census, Volume 1: Statistics of the Population of the United States, 615; 1910 Census, Volume 1: Statistics of the Population of the United States, 178; 1920 Census, Volume 3: Statistics of the Population of the United States, 308.

⁴ 1880 Census, Volume 1: Statistics of the Population of the United States, 424; 1890 Census, Volume 1: Statistics of the Population of the United States, 531; 1900 Census, Volume 1: Statistics of the Population of the United States, 617; 1910 Census, Volume 2: Population Reports by States…Iowa and Kansas, 223; 1920 Census, Volume 3: Statistics of the Population of the United States, 974.

⁵ Blocker, ‘Black migration’, 288.

⁶ Senechal de la Roche, In Lincoln’s Shadow, 56, 60.

⁷ 1910 Census, Volume 2: Statistics of the Population of the United States, 1065, 1118; 1920 Census, Volume 3: Statistics of the Population of the United States, 560.

Figure 6 maps the Midwestern cities where newspapers identified ‘Cocaine Alleys’. In Lawrence, Kansas, the Exoduster movement initially boosted the Black population to above 23 per cent (1,995 out of 8,510 people) in 1880, which fell to around 14 per cent in 1910 (1,764 out of 12,374 people).Footnote ⁶² Midwestern contemporaries considered this to be a proportionately large Black population. Some smaller industrialized cities experienced a similar bump in their Black populations, as rural and Southern migrants sought factory and domestic work, but they usually comprised a smaller share of the population than in Lawrence.Footnote ⁶³ In Springfield, Ohio, which experienced vice-focused race riots in 1904 and 1906, the Black population was 11.1 per cent in 1900, while the average of all of Ohio’s urban centres was only 3.4 per cent.Footnote ⁶⁴ In Evansville, Indiana, the Black population rose in the years before an attempted lynching, which led to a week-long campaign of anti-Black violence. In 1890, the city’s Black population (5,553 people) made up 10.9 per cent of the urban population, which grew to 12.55 per cent by 1900 (7,405 people). After the 1903 riot, many Black families left the city and the community remained between 6,200 and 6,400 people until 1920.Footnote ⁶⁵ Similarly, Springfield, Illinois, which experienced anti-Black violence in 1908, had a higher Black population compared to other Illinois cities (barring Chicago).Footnote ⁶⁶ Proportionately larger Black populations correlate with discourses about ‘Cocaine Alleys’.

Figure 6.

A map showing ‘Cocaine Alleys’ in the United States of America, 1880–1930. Map by the authors.

In Midwestern communities, as in other parts of the country, newspapers tracked police activity and thereby seemed to offer a glimpse of local morality inscribed on the streets. Arrest accounts often included geographic locations, along with the name and race of people involved. Thus in readers’ minds the city might be characterized by newspaper reporting, which often emphasized change and disorder. Media sources disseminated cultural constructions, especially about illegal activities.Footnote ⁶⁷ ‘Cocaine Alleys’ are an example of a cultural construction that emerged from linking gender- and race-based critiques to certain communities. ‘Cocaine Alleys’ inferred drug use in areas with documented violence, but rarely tied descriptions to drug arrests, which were fewer in number. Progressive Era journalists in New York prioritized recounting ‘moments of Black cocaine mania’, but exhibited compassion and pity towards White users by emphasizing the ‘medical aspects’ of their arrests.Footnote ⁶⁸ Many White and middle-class reporters tended to excuse drug-use for restorative and therapeutic purposes by members of their own race and class, yet considered it indulgent and dangerous for people of colour and members of the working class.Footnote ⁶⁹ An 1896 report of a White alderman from Jackson, Michigan, who boarded a streetcar, threatened riders and shot out the lamps with a revolver, prompted a compassionate response. The ‘raving maniac’ received immediate ‘assistance’ for cocaine addiction and seems not to have been arrested, named or suffered abuse, unlike many Black people in similar situations.Footnote ⁷⁰ In 1917, policemen in Bluffton, Indiana, apprehended Frank Williams, ‘a negro dope fiend’, who believed that he was killing Germans and dodging German aircraft. Although the newspaper reporter did not identify Williams as having a weapon or actually committing any assault, he was still temporarily imprisoned.Footnote ⁷¹

The result of this double standard was a powerful critique of Black people, especially women, who did not uphold middle-class values related to work, sexuality and intoxicants. Cocaine’s legal accessibility and indoor use made it difficult to portray use of the drug as criminal, but female intoxication or sexual solicitation was widely considered immoral and newsworthy. A syndicated article from 1880 entitled ‘How to Keep out of the Newspaper’, instructed readers:

As newspapers showed, any women linked to public intoxication became targets of suspicion akin to public shaming. This article asserted that ‘what the newspapers say of private individuals is of importance for the public to know’.Footnote ⁷³ Hattie Stump’s expanded death notice shows how newspaper writers channelled the public gaze onto non-conforming women or female bodies. Anchoring them to specific neighbourhoods, like ‘Cocaine Alleys’, publicized the transgressive behaviour and affiliated all residents with the transgression. This did not necessarily succeed in changing the transgression, but it did spread prejudicial ideas about those shamed groups.

Queens of Cocaine Alley

Unpacking the fictionalized Hattie Stump reveals how newspaper reporters made the ‘queen of Cocaine Alley’ embody numerous negative stereotypes about Progressive Era Black female workers. These stereotypes included bodily non-conformity, a lack of honest and productive employment, engagement in sex work, use of recreational intoxicants and violent behaviour. Most readers of Stump’s death notice most likely remembered her size, the embalmer’s need for an extra-large coffin and the offer for her to tour as a circus attraction. These features emphasized a bodily non-conformity that placed Stump far outside contemporary expectations of White beauty and to contemporaries justified the public gaze. While Stump’s death notice referenced her long-term residence in St. Louis and insinuated that her notoriety was based on her physical character, calling her a ‘queen’ suggests that there might have been another reason for local notoriety. None of the death notices indicated her profession or marital status. However, the St. Louis Register of Deaths identified Stump as a sex worker and the 1900 US Federal Census revealed that Stump lived in a row of three brothels.Footnote ⁷⁴ For all its immorality, sex work was a central topic of sensational journalism and justified within discussions of public health and policing. The names of White sex workers often appeared in newspapers, but the names of Black sex workers were less commonly shared. Perhaps sex work added an extra taboo to the already fraught topic of Black female sexuality. Or perhaps it was simply another example of White readers’ expectation of Black women’s degradation. Knowing that Hattie Stump was a sex worker intensifies the bodily aspect of her fame and suggests her enjoyment of unproductive leisure time. Contemporaries erroneously considered sex workers to have an easy life as well as an immoral one.Footnote ⁷⁵

A lack of ‘honest’ employment characterized depictions of other Black Midwestern queens. Three years earlier the St. Louis Post-Dispatch published an exposé about the ‘drug-crazed fiends’ who lived in its ‘Cocaine Alley’. Much of the article profiled Nancy Morris, a poor Black woman, who spent $2 daily on cocaine and preceded Stump as ‘the [Alley’s] acknowledged queen’.Footnote ⁷⁶ The article’s author emphasized Morris’ lack of productivity through the cost of her habit, her dishevelled and distracted depiction, her dependence on others and her extensive drug use:

Notably, this disapproval of Nancy Morris sits alongside praise of the nearest Black men: her partner Henry Peterson, and his son, Patrolman Powers. The article describes Peterson as an impoverished but hardworking paragon.Footnote ⁷⁸ Morris’ partner’s meagre income feeds both her habit and their household. Powers doggedly fulfils his responsibilities as a policeman when he responds to her alarms and returns Morris to her squalid home. Peterson’s only fault is his contentment with the unproductive leisure that Morris’ addiction caused.Footnote ⁷⁹

Depictions of Midwestern ‘Cocaine Alleys’ often placed Black women in neighbourhoods with a history of poverty and illicit activity. Figure 7 presents a 1902 illustration from the Kansas City Star (Missouri) of a ‘House in ‘Cocaine Alley’.’ Examined from what appears to be a saloon’s back alley, the viewer sees a decrepit fence, debris and many glass-less windows. Progressive Era saloons were a common site of violence, the opposite of a respectable woman’s haunt, and sometimes purveyors of cocaine. The lone figure is a Black woman passing before a ‘WASHING’ sign.Footnote ⁸⁰ Not all Black women worked as laundresses, but it was one of the professional stereotypes that clung to them, even as Nannie Helen Burroughs’ National Training School for Women and Girls (established in 1909) sent graduates out to work and W.E.B. DuBois encouraged Black leadership by the ‘Talented Tenth’ (1903).Footnote ⁸¹ The absence of any other figures in the illustration, and the frequency with which Black women were employed as laundresses, leaves the viewer to connect her with the back-alley’s mess and the neighbourhood’s larger social disorder. It is not hard to see Nancy Morris’ single room, ‘dark and unclean’, with wire netting at the window and barbed wire holding the latch as part of this impoverished and disorderly environment.Footnote ⁸²

Figure 7.

‘House in “Cocaine Alley” showing garbage pile in rear of saloon’, The Kansas City Star, 16 Mar. 1902. Public domain image. Photograph courtesy of Newspapers.com.

The arrest of women linked to ‘Cocaine Alley’ on charges of associating with people of dubious character, prostitution or keeping a house of ill-repute reinforced the connection between Black women and crime, rather than ‘honest’ employment.Footnote ⁸³ This connection justified their residence in ‘Cocaine Alley’ even if they had no history of drug arrests. In Muncie, Indiana, Grace Shoecraft and Maude Bass were examples of this dynamic. Between 1912 and 1914, Muncie’s newspapers repeatedly linked both Black women to violence, crime and sex work, often locating the events in the city’s ‘Cocaine Alley’. Although Bass was an example of someone with an iatrogenic addiction, she received little sympathy from newspaper writers. In 1912, when Bass’ brother was tried for assaulting her, Shoecraft testified that Maude’s medical morphine addiction originated from treating a broken jaw he had inflicted years earlier.Footnote ⁸⁴ In 1913, Shoecraft and her husband were fined and jailed for assault, battery and intoxication.Footnote ⁸⁵ The same year Bass was charged with stealing $15 from a man in her home, which the court claimed was a brothel.Footnote ⁸⁶ In 1914, on separate occasions, police arrested both women for prostitution.Footnote ⁸⁷ Shoecraft and Bass’ newspaper appearances illustrate a range of behaviours that were illegal and considered immoral by contemporaries, but none of their arrests was for a drug offence.

Although neither Grace Shoecraft nor Maude Bass received the title of ‘Queen of Cocaine Alley’, Muncie’s newspapers portrayed them as ‘old offenders’ whose disruptive activities were central to the area’s character.Footnote ⁸⁸ This reminds readers that contemporaries applied ‘Cocaine Alley’ to neighbourhoods where they perceived a collection of illegal, violent and immoral activities, not just drug use. In this way, these women were similar to other Midwestern queens. From 1900 to 1911, Evansville, Indiana, newspapers bestowed the title of ‘Queen of Cocaine Alley’ on three Black women, beginning with ‘Cocaine Dolly’ Burns.Footnote ⁸⁹ In 1906, the Evansville Press christened Lulu Rose (also called ‘Little Chicago’) the city’s ‘Cocaine Queen’.Footnote ⁹⁰ The article also claimed that she had introduced the cocaine habit to the area. Both Burns and Rose appeared in other newspaper reports detailing violence and hinting at sex work. Several years prior, Rose had been arrested for ‘immorality’, while an article indicated that police arrested Dolly Burns for drunkenness after a jealous admirer beat her with a broom handle.Footnote ⁹¹ Finally, in 1911, the Evansville Journal dubbed Algie Torian ‘Queen of Cocaine Alley’ when she was fined $50 and sentenced to 60 days in Indianapolis’ Woman’s Prison for disturbing the peace.Footnote ⁹² She had previously been arrested for drunkenness, adultery, assault, battery and associating.Footnote ⁹³ The title stuck to Torian, and reappeared three years later when she was the victim of a knife attack.Footnote ⁹⁴ As these examples show, in narratives about ‘Cocaine Alley queens’ violence surrounded Black women, and newspaper writers implicitly reproached these women for perceived immorality even when they were the victims of that violence.

In comparison to what newspaper articles stated about other women in ‘Cocaine Alleys’, Maude Bass was unusual in being identified as having an iatrogenic addiction. Midwestern newspapers were more likely to present Black women as seeking out cocaine, as Nancy Morris did, or profiting from selling drugs to others, as Lulu Rose supposedly did. There was a strong racial theme in identifying the source of recreational cocaine use. In 1900, several years before Rose was accused, the Evansville Courier proclaimed that ‘New Orleans Negroes Made Cocaine Sniffing a Fad Here’.Footnote ⁹⁵ The newspaper quoted a local police officer, Captain Resing, who blamed ‘Cocaine Dolly’ Burns, originally from Louisiana. His account reflects a powerful contemporary fear about the disorderliness of migrating Black women and the effect of their drug use on communities. Resing noted that the drug’s economical and potent character made it popular and led to greater police activity:

While the widespread availability and use of cocaine prior to 1895 makes it unlikely that Burns introduced cocaine to Evansville, this article reaffirmed readers’ expectation that recreational drug use was characteristic of Black women.

By naming women ‘queens’, newspaper writers suggested that otherwise economically and politically marginalized Black women played a powerful role their communities. While Black men using cocaine might be dangerous to themselves and violent towards others, Black women were believed to destroy communities by introducing cocaine. In 1920 a newspaper stated that Muncie’s ‘Cocaine Alley’ had originated 30 years earlier via ‘a ‘coke’ joint on Third Street, operated by a ‘colored woman’.Footnote ⁹⁷ Although the Evansville Courier article emphasized cocaine addicts as coming from across social classes, interviewees repeatedly used Black residents as examples when discussing long-term use, daily intake and physical effects. The article claims that Black residents would hold ‘cocaine socials’ in which ‘five or six [Black people] would club together and buy half an ounce, costing $3 or $3.50. Then they would get together in a room and have a high old time. Sometimes they would go three or four days without food or sleep.’Footnote ⁹⁸ This description emphasizes the recreational aspect of cocaine and the users’ lack of productive occupations. L.C. Bomm, the owner of an eponymous drug company in Evansville, stated that he had ‘never know a person to go insane from its use and have known negroes who have used it for four or five years’.Footnote ⁹⁹ Positioning Black residents alongside such pejorative behaviour prepared newspaper readers for dramatic intervention.

Cocaine’s ability to make users violent cast a long shadow in newspaper depictions. Newspaper writers combined long-lived stereotypes of Black women as undisciplined with myths that cocaine amplified Black strength to produce a narrative that Black female drug users were more violent than their White counterparts.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Unlike White women whose addiction was widespread and remained relatively hidden in the Progressive Era, Midwestern newspapers depicted Black women openly using and searching for drugs. A 1903 article lamenting ‘Cocaine Alley’ in Springfield, Illinois, called both men and women ‘fiends’ – a term used traditionally for men – and described it as ‘a hotbed of crime’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ In 1905 the Chattanooga Daily Times reported that Lizzie Jones, a ‘negro cocaine fiend’, was ‘dragged’ to jail as ‘she screamed the vilest oaths and the most obscene language’. The reporter lamented that ladies were forced to hear ‘the indecent language of the drunken negress’ who was apprehended after driving her neighbours out of their homes and destroying their furniture.Footnote ¹⁰² A week later, Robert Cooke Bicknell published ‘The Buccaneers of Cocaine Alley’, a short story following two Black women on cocaine, who have a ‘mania for destruction’ and end up in police custody.Footnote ¹⁰³ Bicknell’s fictional heroines are similar to Lizzie Jones. His narrative also reflects the emotional and physical highs and lows visualized by ‘Pen Pictures of Cocaine Fiends’, but with added violence. This 1915 cartoon from the Atlanta Journal’s ‘Judge Johnsing’ series echoes the message that Black women on drugs would turn violent (see Figure 8). The cartoon illustrates the activities of a ‘Coke Party’, which most likely resembled Evansville’s ‘cocaine social’. A Black woman throws a brick at a Black man demanding ‘Pass der snow, huh?’ Another Black woman holding a child, brandishes a stick at a Black man under the subtitle ‘Welcome Home’. The cartoon argues that desire for cocaine caused Black women to become violent, even towards their children and partners. This visualization reinforced articles that called women ‘fiends’ and the fictional ‘mania for destruction’ described in Bicknell’s ‘Buccaneers’. These violent depictions also support arguments by Cheryl Hicks and Kali Gross that White society considered Black women workers to be less feminine than White women, and so united them with Black men whose violence and libido White society already feared.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Figure 8.

‘At Judge Johnsing’s police matinee!’, The Atlanta Journal, 7 Feb. 1915. Public domain image. Photograph courtesy of Newspapers.com.

Together these behaviours – a lack of honest and productive employment, engagement in sex work, use of recreational intoxicants and violence – position ‘Cocaine Alley queens’ as the quintessential examples of urban immorality. This image was a long way from the ‘bourgeois values of thrift, sexual restraint, cleanliness and hard work’ that defined the Progressive Era model of White respectability or the campaign for Black racial uplift.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Another cartoon in the ‘Judge Johnsing’ series visualized this distance by repeating the themes of degradation and the racialization of drug use favoured by Midwestern reporters. These cartoons almost always depicted cocaine users as Black figures. Figure 4, entitled ‘Pen Pictures of Cocaine Fiends’ (1905), presents the four stages of a cocaine episode. The first figure, entitled ‘A Dream of Cocaine Joy’, dances, smiling, in a gown and crown, like a queen. The second figure, representing the first figure sometime later, entitled ‘The After Effects’, sits tearfully on the floor in everyday clothes. The third figure, entitled ‘He Wants Cocaine’, plunges his fist through a pharmacy window. The fourth and final figure, entitled ‘A Begging Fiend’, kneels before a policeman desperate to keep her drug. The accompanying article cites ‘a delusion of grandeur’ as the central effect of cocaine’s first phase.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Contemporary readers surely saw the irony and the danger in a drug that made its victims believe they were in heaven, when they lived in hovels. More importantly, readers also saw cocaine as connected with a single racial group (and mostly women), obscuring a larger number of White users.

Hazel Carby has examined Frances Kellor’s article about Black female migrants, ‘Southern Colored Girls in the North’ (1905), to show how Progressive Era Black women were stereotyped as seeking ‘easy work, lots of money, and good times’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Kellor’s interest in working women, migration and sociology led her to write a series of articles on Black criminality (1901) that fanned fears of moral depravity and racialization of crime and drug use.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ This characterization aligned with how White society envisioned the motivation of women who worked in so-called vice districts where arrests were more common. Within that vision, Cheryl Hicks has noted that young Black women’s attempts at social, economic and sexual independence could be seen as criminalizing Black women.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ To that end, newspapers portrayed Hattie Stump, Nancy Morris and others as indulging unhealthy appetites that separated them from productive and honest women. Newspaper accounts of Black women developed controlling images, to use Patricia Hill Collins’ idea, that over time appeared to readers as natural.Footnote ¹¹⁰ The widespread use of Black men and women in cartoons related to cocaine underlines White readers’ acceptance of these images. Coupled with depictions of violence and drug use, these cartoons ridiculed Black women as queens of impoverished and dangerous spaces whose illusory authority or wealth never extended beyond the district’s weak residents. Only in a place called ‘Cocaine Alley’ could their notorious behaviour position them as queens.

‘Cocaine Alley’ was a social construct

Four deceptions found in reporters’ use of ‘Cocaine Alley’ reveal it to be a social construct. The first deception was criminal. Newspaper accounts of ‘Cocaine Alleys’ did not always involve drug use. Violence and theft frequently resulted from other types of intoxication. In 1899, in Lawrence, Kansas, a raid on a section of ‘Cocaine Alley’ resulted in the confiscation of substantial amounts of alcohol and the arrest of a brothel-keeper, but there was no sign of drugs.Footnote ¹¹¹ The same year a man joined several Black women to drink beer at a ‘Cocaine Alley’ house in Springfield, Illinois. After passing out, he awoke to find that the women had relieved him of $40, his watch and his shoes.Footnote ¹¹² In 1900, two Black men in Chattanooga, Tennessee’s ‘Cocaine Alley’, seriously wounded each other with knives in a jealous argument over a woman.Footnote ¹¹³ As in other articles, violence and arrests characterized ‘Cocaine Alley’, rather than drug use or infractions. To White readers these reports reinforced the link between Blackness and the area’s character.

Both before and after 1914, when the Harrison Act narrowed legal access to cocaine, the Black women that newspapers associated with ‘Cocaine Alleys’ were not usually arrested on drug charges, even if they were known addicts. In 1912 in Muncie, Maude Bass’ morphine dependency led to hallucinations that she was overwhelmed by bedbugs.Footnote ¹¹⁴ However, none of the published arrest reports (even after 1914) ever noted that Maude Bass was under the influence of narcotics. In 1915 and 1916 police arrested her on brothel-related charges and in 1919 a newspaper described her living ‘in the redlight’ when she brought a charge of assault and battery on her daughter’s behalf.Footnote ¹¹⁵ As a Black woman with a history of arrests, newspapers repeatedly located Bass in ‘Cocaine Alley’, an area categorized by illegal and violent activities. While this analysis does not intend to obscure Muncie’s drug users – Bass is proof of this – newspapers projected the socially disparaged activity of drug use onto Black residents even where there was no immediately related evidence.

The second deception was racial and it reveals the effect of the criminal deception. As Black residents became emblems of violence and crime, police and newspapers located the origin of these behaviours in specific Black people. Newspapers printed origin stories for their ‘Cocaine Alleys’, often blaming Black migrants from Southern states, and frequently women, for introducing drug use. As already noted, in Evansville, Dolly Burns, the Black migrant from Louisiana, was identified as the cause of its ‘Cocaine Alley’. Likewise, Muncie newspapers printed two similar origin narratives. In 1920 a newspaper article drew on police reports to establish the origin of Muncie’s Cocaine Alley 30 years earlier in a Third Street ‘coke’ joint’ run by a Black woman.Footnote ¹¹⁶ In 1921 another newspaper reported that it was the activities of Warren Waing, a Black man from Louisville, Kentucky who had arrived 15 years prior, that gave the neighbourhood the name ‘Cocaine Alley’. Waing had run an ‘opium den’ in his home and was charged with liquor and drug infractions.Footnote ¹¹⁷ While these two accounts are contradictory regarding the individual responsible, they align with the deceit that local drug use stemmed from Black outsiders, ignoring the city’s White drug addicts and violence.

Newspapers’ authoritative voice encouraged readers to accept such unsubstantiated projections on the past. Simultaneously, origin stories that racialized illicit behaviour and connected it with drug use moulded contemporary views of Black residents. In 1906 a Springfield, Illinois, article invoked Black drug use to argue against allowing crap games, which contemporaries commonly associated with Black players.Footnote ¹¹⁸ The article argued that the crap shooter contributed to and was associated with ‘the lowest stages of degradation […like others he] comes in contact with the convict, the former convict, the fugitive from justice, the cocaine fiend, the disreputable policeman, etc’.Footnote ¹¹⁹ This article mingled drug use, gambling and criminality, noting that wider respect for the Black population hinged on expelling gamblers.Footnote ¹²⁰ In 1921 a Muncie newspaper reported another murder in ‘Cocaine Alley’ and lamented the frequency of Black male victims there. The reporter acknowledged that most of Muncie’s Black population was law-abiding, but that among them were ‘a small, but dangerous bunch of man killers, gamblers and bootleggers’.Footnote ¹²¹ Using the behaviour of a few people to publicly degrade the majority of Black residents was a blatant deception, but it aligned with ongoing racial profiling in Midwestern newspapers.Footnote ¹²²

The third deception was geographic. The moniker ‘Cocaine Alley’ was used with varied geographic clarity. Drugs’ relative invisibility, especially in comparison to alcohol use in saloons and restaurants, allowed reporters to call any place where Black people acted violently or illegally, a ‘Cocaine Alley’.Footnote ¹²³ In the absence of geographic knowledge, race became a proxy for residence in ‘Cocaine Alley’ and suspicion of drug use. In 1912 in Muncie, a deputy prosecutor told a reporter: ‘There is one locality in Muncie known as cocaine alley. We know that habitues of the drug live there, but we have never been able to make a case against any of them.’Footnote ¹²⁴ The deputy prosecutor offered an example of a Black man who was recently arrested for carrying a concealed weapon. When police searched his home they found whiskey mixed with cocaine. While this was not illegal, the article revealed the contemporary expectation that Black arrestees from a specific part of the city might also be cocaine users.

Newspapers’ imprecise geographic use of ‘Cocaine Alley’ argues for its racialized and gendered meaning. St. Louis provides an example of geographic inconsistency underpinning the controlling images of Black women in ‘Cocaine Alley’. In 1897, the St Louis Post-Dispatch described ‘Cocaine Alley’ as ‘in the heart of the Fourth Police District. North to South, from Wash street to Franklin avenue, between Seventh and Eighth streets, runs the narrow, dirty byway’.Footnote ¹²⁵ The next year, ‘Cocaine Alley’ had a different location: ‘situated between Tenth and Eleventh streets, and extending from O’Fallon street to Cass avenue’.Footnote ¹²⁶ In 1898, the Post-Dispatch had reported a ‘small riot in Cocaine Alley’ or ‘race war’ near Tenth and O’Fallon streets involving fists, clubs, revolvers and razors that nearly killed three men.Footnote ¹²⁷ Although reports of violence continued to connect Black residents with ‘Cocaine Alley’, as Figure 9 shows, these two areas never overlapped, nor did they include Hattie Stump’s 1900 residence on Poplar Street near the South Levee.

Figure 9.

Map of St. Louis showing locations of ‘Cocaine Alley’ and residences. Orange rectangles indicate approximate locations of ‘Cocaine Alleys’ in 1897 and 1898. The green square indicates the approximate location of the 1898 ‘race war’. The blue rectangle indicates the Howard and Tinsley residences in 1900. The red star indicates the approximate location of Hattie Stump’s residence in 1900. Map by the authors, based on the Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from St. Louis, Missouri, 1903, Sheet 1, Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, Sanborn Maps Collection.

Instead of identifying the intersection where altercations took place, St. Louis’ newspapers used ‘Cocaine Alley’ as a conceptual shorthand linking Black women with violence or disruptive behaviour. In 1900 Mattie and George Howard, a Black couple living in St. Louis’ ‘Cocaine Alley’, were arrested and fined for disturbing the peace.Footnote ¹²⁸ In 1900 a Black woman named Ollie Tinsley threw rocks through the window of a neighbour who objected to her outdoor argument.Footnote ¹²⁹ Coincidentally, the Howards lived next door to Tinsley at 113 and 115 North Third Street. Neither dwelling fell within the bounds of contemporary ‘Cocaine Alley’ descriptions.Footnote ¹³⁰ In 1899 Tinsley was charged with assaulting Hattie St. James. Although both Black women were identified as residents of ‘Cocaine Alley’, St. James lived in East St. Louis, Illinois, across the Mississippi River from Tinsley’s Third Street home.Footnote ¹³¹ Similarly, in 1899 The St. Louis Globe Democrat reported the arrest of Lizzie Smith for allegedly assaulting Tillie Williams and threatening to kill her. While the newspaper described both ‘colored’ women as residents of ‘Cocaine Alley’, the 1900 Census indicates that they both lived in East St. Louis, Illinois.Footnote ¹³² This inconsistency suggests that St. Louis newspapers did not always envision ‘Cocaine Alley’ as a physical place, but instead applied it as a social construct to identify people and behaviours that were problematic. Notably, the economically and politically marginalized residents of the areas called ‘Cocaine Alley’ had little recourse against this charge.Footnote ¹³³

Muncie’s newspapers followed a similar course, situating Black women and illegal activities in ‘Cocaine Alley’ with little reliable geographic information. From 1912 newspapers started referring to an area called ‘Cocaine Alley’ that was already known to Muncie’s police. Articles discussed an indistinct area south of the Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago and St. Louis Railroad line (CCC & SL) in the northwest part of the Southside’s Industry neighbourhood.Footnote ¹³⁴ The first reference appeared in an article entitled ‘“Coke” Joint in Muncie’, which reported the arrest of Russell Bass for hitting his sister Maude with a mailbox. The headline foregrounded drug use while the article detailed the arrest and the rumour of ‘a cocaine joint in the south part of Muncie’.Footnote ¹³⁵ In later years the newspaper’s inelegant juxtaposition became a more concrete localization. In 1913, The Star Press described Maude Bass’ fine for running a brothel as ‘the latest “Cocaine Alley” episode’.Footnote ¹³⁶ While there was no discussion of drug use or sale in this article, the Bass household was repeatedly located in ‘Cocaine Alley’. In January 1915 a lodger at ‘the home of Maude Bass in “Cocaine alley”’ was robbed of $25 along with his shoes and coat.Footnote ¹³⁷ As Figure 10 shows, from 1908 to 1915, Maude resided in several locations south of the CCC & SL line and clustered around Center Street, considered to be the most dangerous and nefarious section of ‘Cocaine Alley’.Footnote ¹³⁸ While ‘Cocaine Alley’ had a more consistent geographic character in Muncie, the connection of Black women with an area characterized by violence and arrests aligned clearly with the practice of St. Louis newspapers.

Figure 10.

Map of Muncie showing Maude Bass’ residences, 1908–15. Map by the authors, based on the Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Muncie, Delaware County, Indiana, 1911, Sheet 1, Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, Sanborn Maps Collection.

The fourth and final deception was social. Underpinning these newspaper reports was a reluctance to acknowledge the systemic barriers and generational poverty that drove Black women to theft, sex work and violence. Instead, the ramshackle character of ‘Cocaine Alleys’ as depicted by Midwestern newspapers reflected a narrative of wilful Black impoverishment. A 1918 article, originally printed in Detroit, Michigan, entitled ‘Why Man Clings to Shanty in Squalid Street’ described ‘a Street’ with two saloons, a shuttered house inhabited by a lone woman and a barbershop with a rear shanty. A blind Black man sells cocaine on the curb, while in the shanty another Black man is drunk, his seven children starve, his wife dies and a policeman is powerless to help them. Although the article did not identify this street as a ‘Cocaine Alley’, its description of selling cocaine and the presence of saloonkeepers, a likely sex worker and a policeman amid Black poverty all point in that direction.Footnote ¹³⁹ The Black man’s refusal to leave the street where he was born, underlines the contemporary belief in the intrinsic and immutable connection between the Black community, poverty and mind-altering substances like cocaine and alcohol.

Paradoxically, at the same time that Midwestern newspapers printed accounts of ‘Cocaine Alleys’ where Black residents were depicted as wilfully unproductive and engaged in illegal activities, Black Americans were on the move. Between the start of the Civil War and the Great Depression, more than 750,000 Black Americans migrated to the Midwestern states of Illinois, Ohio and Indiana.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Seeking greater opportunities to work and raise families, Black Southerners travelled north singly and in family groups. This move should have proven their commitment to contributing to expanding and industrializing communities, but instead it prompted anxiety in the receiving White communities. Hazel Carby has noted that migrating single Black women were considered a particular ‘threat to the progress of the race; as a threat to the establishment of a respectable urban black middle class; as a threat to congenial black and white middle-class relations; and as a threat to the formation of black masculinity in an urban environment’.Footnote ¹⁴¹ These concerns from Black Americans compounded the suspicions of White Americans, who already linked Black migrants to violence and disorder.

Few Midwestern observers vocalized their community’s need for workers. While Muncie newspapers disparaged Black women in ‘Cocaine Alley’, certain Muncie factories employed Black women to make glass insulators, among other things. Figure 11 shows Black female workers from Muncie’s Hemingray Glass Company. Many of these women had migrated from Kentucky, Tennessee and South Carolina, but none seem to have lived in the area called ‘Cocaine Alley’.Footnote ¹⁴² Newspaper messages about unproductive and disorderly women ignored the majority of Black women whose respectable labour filled community needs and supported families. Pejorative constructs like ‘Cocaine Alley’, which categorized people by race and gender, obscured important economic contributions with prejudicial social narratives. This social deception was another barrier added to the Jim Crow laws and daily misogyny that contemporary Black women faced.

Figure 11.

‘Glass workers’ (1915), MSS.254, EF2-130, The Other Side of Middletown Photographs, Ball State University, University Libraries, Archives and Special Collections, Muncie, Indiana. Used with permission.

Comparing coverage of White and Black drug users

Although the newspapers that printed Hattie Stump’s death notice mostly agreed that she was a ‘negress’, their description conflicts with the St. Louis Register of Deaths and other city sources. In contrast to the newspapers’ depiction of a Black woman killed by fatty degeneration of the heart, the Register recorded that Hattie Stump, a 42-year-old White woman, died of pneumonia. Both the 1899 St. Louis city directory and the 1900 US Federal Census identified her as a White woman.Footnote ¹⁴³ While Black women in particular suffered under the public gaze, White women were not immune to scrutiny. The St. Louis Globe-Democrat, one of the few newspapers that neither printed Hattie’s race nor a reference to cocaine, focused keenly on her extraordinary size. ‘Funeral of a Giantess’ described how the undertaker and six other men had to shove Stump’s ‘mammoth coffin’ through the doorway. With no religious service said over the body, ‘Queen Hattie’ was carried on a hearse to the cemetery and followed by ‘a carriage load of women from the neighborhood’.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Although she was dubbed ‘queen’, there was no reference to ‘Cocaine Alley’. For Hattie Stump, residence in ‘Cocaine Alley’ bestowed on her a Black identity.

Occasionally, reporters acknowledged that ‘Cocaine Alleys’ might also be home to White residents. In describing the first-known ‘Cocaine Alley’ in Chattanooga, Tennessee, a reporter dismissed White drug users as low-class and fewer in number among the majority of Black users: ‘this den of vice and filth, extending about four blocks will be found at night anywhere from three to four hundred persons, mostly black, but with a fair sprinkling of whites, all “snuffing” cocaine and lying around in every conceivable state of depravity’.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ White addicts appeared less concerning precisely because they were White, low-class and sparse. This allowed newspaper reporters to characterize cocaine as a Black habit, following the belief that each race gravitated towards a specific intoxicant.Footnote ¹⁴⁶

When newspaper writers did discuss Black and White addicts as residents of Cocaine Alley, they portrayed them very differently. In the 1890s, Midwestern newspapers depicted White women who used narcotics with sympathy or medicalized concern.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ An article entitled ‘The Perils of Cocaine’ described the cocaine addiction of Annie C. Myers, a White woman from Chicago, whose dependence stemmed from a catarrh cure prescription. The newspaper article described Myers as ‘respected, bright, clever, business-like, with plenty of money’ and her downward trajectory as ‘sad’. The article reproduced an interview by a physician who knew Myers, called her a ‘victim’ and blamed her addiction on physicians who prescribed the catarrh cure.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ This narrative was far more detailed and the evaluation more sympathetic than most related to Black women. The articles profiling Lizzie Jones and Nancy Morris did not identify the origin of their drug use, leaving readers to assume that it was recreational.

Newspaper writers’ sympathy for White cocaine users resulted in reporters calling them feeble-minded or suggesting that White women were fragile and not responsible for or capable of resisting addiction and its ‘excesses’. Maggie McDonald, a White woman travelling with her physician uncle to Chicago, was reported to be ‘weak minded and easily influenced by him’. Their cocaine-induced ‘mania’ and ‘many scenes’ brought police to their hotel in several cities, but without charges being filed.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ When a newspaper reported that 14-year-old Susie Martin was sent to the girls’ industrial school in Beloit, Kansas, the writer noted that it was done ‘with a hope of reclaiming her’. The short article ended with a touch of regret, noting that ‘although she is a mere child, she is a cocaine fiend’.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Newspapers described Addie Barrett’s treatment for a 21-year-long addiction as ‘release from bondage’. Like Maude Bass, Barrett was a White female iatrogenic addict whose reliance on drugs began with a diagnosis of neuralgia of the stomach. Unlike Bass, the article called Barrett ‘an estimable elderly lady’ and presented her as a victim, noting that she was unaware of her prescription’s addictive character.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Medical explanations for White women’s addiction conflicted with the punitive experience of Black cocaine users. In 1906 three Black women and three Black men in Evansville, Indiana were fined $3 and $10 each for ‘frequenting the notorious “cocaine alley” in the rear of First and Water Streets’. Although the article described the group as ‘worthless negroes’ who were ‘loafing and carousing’, there was no charge of violence. This contrasts with Ella Gill, a White woman from St. Louis, who attempted to disembowel her husband while using cocaine. The newspaper accounts refrained from commentary on Gill, who also avoided arrest, even though she had cut her husband.Footnote ¹⁵²

In 1900, the American Druggist and Pharmaceutical Record (ADPR), a trade journal, announced the ‘widespread addiction of the colored and vicious white population of the larger cities to cocaine and other narcotic drugs’.Footnote ¹⁵³ Drawing on Chattanooga, Tennessee, as an example of this trend, the anonymous ADPR contributor described one of the first ‘Cocaine Alleys’ as ‘situated in the lower quarters [of the city, it] is a place known to the police’.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ In 1900 cocaine remained largely unregulated so police interacted with narcotics users only when there were complaints of disturbing the peace, violence, vandalism or theft.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ In 1903 a Springfield, Illinois, newspaper was even more explicit. In describing the ‘plague spot known as “cocaine alley”’ an article noted that it ‘is inhabited by a large number of people, both white and black, mostly cocaine or morphine fiends. It is a hot bed of crime and disease.’Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Connecting narcotics use with urban disorder was key to the campaign for restrictive legislation. As Black migrants moved from rural to urban areas seeking work, race underpinned this vision.

Although a few writers worried about addiction among ‘vicious’ Whites, newspapers in the early 1900s kept their focus on Black cocaine users. An Evansville cartoon depicting ‘Cocaine Alley’ presented Black people as seekers or users of drugs, while White people appeared only rarely and usually as policemen or authority figures. Figure 12 presents a Black man asking a White policeman ‘Wha’s Cocaine Alley?’ (1907) in an effort to find his girlfriend Sallie. In contrast to one-sided cartoons, Douglas Flowe has argued for seeing early twentieth-century urban drug scenes as places where Black and White people interacted, using and selling drugs side by side. This community was undermined by the racial bias that sought to save White people and criminalize Black people. Legislation criminalizing narcotics only followed once cocaine’s primary users – perceived to be Black people – were deemed ‘disreputable and dangerous’.Footnote ¹⁵⁷

Figure 12.

‘Troubles of the Main Street policeman’, Evansville Journal, 10 Feb. 1907. Public domain image. Photograph courtesy of Newspapers.com.