Original subtitles

Some of the most notorious criminals in history

would start their lives of crime here.

But few would rise from real poverty to power,

to take on not only the law, but the entire system

and even the Mafia itself.

A ruthless racketeer...

So, what we got here?

BEAN: and one of the most feared and respected bosses...

(soundless)

BEAN: who became a legend...

in her own lifetime.

Who's next?

BEAN: In the early 1900s, crime was very much a white man's game.

But in her own backyard, the Queen of Harlem didn't just play it,

she ran it.

Bombings, beatings.

Bodies in alleyways.

Harlem bled, but she never bent.

A warlord in pearls.

To her allies, she was a legend.

To her enemies, she was lethal.

Why don't we know her name?

Stephanie St Clair.

(soft folk song)

She is from Guadeloupe, and she was born in the 1890s.

She was the daughter of two working-class people.

Her dad died when she was about ten or 11 years old,

and she was raised by a single mother.

She was relatively well educated for a child growing up

in the French West Indies.

Her mother died at a young age,

meaning that she was left alone at maybe age 12 or 13.

Perhaps that's what pushed her to migrate to the Northern Hemisphere.

BEAN: So much of her early years are shrouded in mystery.

One account has it that after her mother died of TB,

she was forced to become a house girl at a sugar plantation,

but ran away at 13

after having killed the owner's son

who had repeatedly raped her over the years.

Another account has it that she didn't kill him,

but while he was passed out, drunk from rum,

she emptied his pockets, ran to the docks

and jumped on the first boat out, heading anywhere.

Travelling virtually alone on a steamship for weeks

left women or really a young girl open to theft,

open to kidnapping, open to assault.

It would not have been an easy journey,

and without a clear sense of what's waiting on the other side.

All we know for sure is that she arrived in North America in 1911.

(brash brass music)

BEAN: There were few opportunities for immigrants,

much less for a young black woman

from a non-English-speaking island in the Caribbean.

HARRIS: She migrates to New York City to work as a domestic worker.

You are hired to scrub and clean and feed a white family

and also care for their children.

No woman wants to do domestic work just because of, you know,

how abusive that job can be.

Stephanie St Clair hardly talks about that early life.

I think that's purposeful.

BEAN: There are differing accounts of how she made her first entry

into New York's criminal underworld.

One says that she starts dating a drug dealer,

and is working for him, until he gets shot, and she flees.

Another that she shacks up with a man named Duke,

a pimp, who tries to force her into prostitution,

until St Clair buries a fork in his eye...

allegedly.

(cine film whirs)

BEAN: So this is the world where Stephanie St Clair finds herself.

New York is going through one of the biggest changes it's ever known.

A lot of Southern African-Americans

had made the decision to go to the north and specifically New York

for better business opportunities,

but also to escape the racist tensions of the Jim Crow era

in the south.

For a lot of these Black Americans, the journey north ended in Harlem.

HARRIS: Harlem was called the Black Mecca.

African-Americans from various parts of the world

are bringing different customs, traditions,

ways of knowing, ways of life,

and bringing those things to Harlem.

It's difficult to comprehend just how hard life would have been

back then for Stephanie.

We know all too well that Black Americans were being subjected

to appalling racial discrimination.

Slavery is still in living memory

and sadly attitudes hadn't changed all that much.

It was almost impossible for Black people to even open bank accounts

or secure housing.

And even when they were able to, the conditions were so poor,

they were almost unliveable.

We even have evidence of Black folks in the early 1910s

and early 1920s sleeping in shifts.

So, you might all be renting one bed in one room

and, you know, somebody has it for the day shift,

somebody has it for the night shift

and you switch back and forth.

Everybody was piled on top of each other, which made for hard times,

but also a lot of community building.

And then also police brutality is rampant.

FARMER: You would be walking down the street

and you'd be stopped by a police officer.

They would start to search you if you talked back,

if you happen to have anything on you.

You were in for a beating and being put in jail.

BEAN: What's incredible is that even amongst all this hardship

and discrimination, the brutal police repression and segregation,

creativity found a way.

(jazzy organ music)

HARRIS: When we think about Harlem in the 1920s,

we tend to think about the Harlem Renaissance,

that cultural expression where artists, musicians,

actors, painters, sculptors are using art as a vehicle

to really challenge race gender and class discrimination,

racist caricatures, racist silent movies

like the film Birth of a Nation, which comes out in 1910s.

BEAN: So, Harlem is this incredibly vibrant cultural epicentre,

a real phenomenon.

It's around this time that St Clair made her mind up

that she wants more.

But those economic hardships weren't going anywhere.

How is someone like Stephanie supposed to change her lot?

For Harlem's poorer population, there was only really one option

to strike it rich.

The Numbers Game was like a people's lottery

in a time when Black people weren't even allowed bank accounts.

-What you want? -Give me 500, will you?

-You want 500? -309.

78.591.

BEAN: Players would write their lucky three-digit numbers

on slips of paper, and runners would run these slips

and the bets between the gamblers and the bankers.

The winning numbers were chosen from the last three digits

of the daily trading totals of the New York Stock Exchange,

which, crucially, made the game impossible to tamper with or fix.

So the New York Clearing House is a financial institution

handling millions of dollars every day.

Then they publish in the paper,

"Yesterday we handled $57,982,431.91."

And so the 431, those three digits before the decimal point,

that becomes the New York number.

Hitting the number is huge for anybody

that gives you the opportunity to take care of oneself

and one's family.

So if you hit the number, your rent is paid for months.

The numbers game was something everyone could get involved with,

and Stephanie St Clair wanted a piece of that pie.

BEAN: But the question is,

how was it going to change Stephanie St Clair the house cleaner...

into Stephanie St Clair the mob boss?

(jazzy piano)

BEAN: Prohibition in 1920

would change the course of the nation's history.

(blues singing)

BEAN: The entire country would ban the sale and production of alcohol

to try and curb its social ills.

Prohibition lends itself to the creation of Harlem

as a sort of vice district.

The police funnel illegal alcohol activity

into this particular neighbourhood.

The police are willing to allow illegal activity to go on,

provided that they themselves get a cut.

An association emerges between Harlem and vice activity.

That's part of why you would see something as common as

people betting on street corners.

BEAN: The Prohibition racket was controlled by the Mafia,

which meant dealing with legendary mob bosses

like Lucky Luciano, Joe Masseria

and Arnold Rothstein,

the gangster who allegedly rigged the 1919 World Series.

The Black community was cut out of Prohibition entirely,

so they created something of their own.

So who was Stephanie St Clair?

Well, at this point in time, she wasn't really anybody.

But all that was about to change.

The Numbers Game was an illegal game anyone could play.

Which could change your life.

The People's Lottery, of sorts.

Pretty much anybody can start taking bets

as long as they've got either the cash to pay out winners

or the moxie to chance their arm

until they build up a big enough pot.

With no startup costs and few overheads,

it's easier to see why it's so appealing to the working classes.

Eventually these central figures come to be called bankers,

people with a large enough pool of money

that they could pay out multiple wins on a given bet.

It was a way for Black people to enter the banking system,

a way for money to be generated.

The Numbers Game was something that everybody could get involved with,

everyone could play,

and there was the potential of winning.

And Stephanie St Clair wanted a piece of that pie.

In 1922, Stephanie St Clair's fortunes took a dramatic turn.

She managed to accumulate $30,000,

a huge sum for the era

and more than enough to launch her own numbers operation.

Ted Poston, a journalist at the time, did offer one theory.

Stephanie herself was a numbers player.

According to Poston's research, St Clair hit the number

and used her winnings to set up her own policy shop.

HARRIS: It's very unique for a woman and a Black person

to run an illegal operation,

because African-Americans at this particular time

are supposed to be confined to certain stations in life.

She's really stepping out of the boundaries of race.

She's entering a male-dominated space.

No-one is doubting that men, historically outnumber women

in nearly all types of crime.

So people like Stephanie St Clair, who climbed the ranks, were rare.

LLOYD: In the numbers racket,

the collection enforcement were essential in dangerous jobs.

Runners carried large amounts of cash through city streets,

making them prime targets for thieves.

If you were a collector, this meant knocking on doors,

where you might not walk away.

There were no courts to turn to, only street justice.

One of the things that's really interesting

is that it seems like she used other people, particularly men,

to keep her hands clean.

She is meting out punishment, she's putting down and making sure

that you don't defy her,

but she's not doing these acts themselves.

BEAN: One of the most significant people who would work with Stephanie

was Bumpy Johnson.

He would later become the godfather of Harlem,

but right now, he's her toughest enforcer.

We can see here from civil records

that he was born Ellsworth Johnson in Charleston, South Carolina

in October 1905.

He'd eventually become Stephanie's right-hand man.

(doorbell tinkles)

You know not to cross her,

because you hear stories of what happens when you take her money.

You hear stories of what happens

when you try to scam her or fudge the numbers

or not pay up when it's your turn.

And that includes her using her right-hand man, Bumpy,

in order to be an enforcer.

Men didn't work for women, but here you had Stephanie St Clair,

who had men working for her, men answering to her.

Bumpy apparently said Stephanie was one woman he would never cross.

FARMER: Bumpy met out punishment in the form of beatings,

taking people's lives.

LLOYD: Without Stephanie St Clair, there'd be no Bumpy Johnson.

And without Bumpy Johnson,

you wouldn't get legendary gangster Frank Lucas.

And so the Queen of Harlem gave birth to these Demi-gods,

these secular gangster gods.

BEAN: By 1928, Stephanie's reputation

as a woman not to be crossed had spread through New York.

HARRIS: Stephanie St Clair, in the late 1920s, lived at 409 Edgecombe,

which is in Sugar Hill in Harlem.

And this is a neighbourhood and a building

where some of the most prominent Black elite folks lived.

On the one hand, she is respected in her community,

but a lot of people don't think that she's a respectable person

because she was engaged in illicit trade.

She certainly was a lady in a lot of ways,

but she also was a criminal.

LLOYD: Stephanie decided to get her own voice out there,

to let the people of Harlem know who she really was

and for whom she was fighting.

Black newspapers become this sort of venue

for Black people to learn about various things happening

across the country.

And in New York City, The New York Amsterdam News

is a paper that St Clair turns

to kind of air out her grievances about the state of Harlem,

the state of Black New Yorkers, and also about the police.

And her ad is particularly stunning because on this ad

Stephanie St Clair always has an image of herself.

Although very few photos of her survive,

we can see that image was incredibly important to Stephanie.

She never allowed herself to be photographed

without her hair, her makeup, her clothes all perfectly styled.

Stephanie St Clair loves the media.

She's a really flamboyant person.

It's not a mystery who she is. She wants people to know.

She is dressed to the nines. Her hair is done.

She always has a fur coat.

She has on, you know, jewellery.

She's just looking like, you know, a ten.

She liked to be seen.

And seen looking well.

She commanded space, she was a queen.

When she stepped out in Harlem,

every picture that you see of her in the newspaper,

she's dressed from head to toe. She's got fine jewels on,

she's walking slowly to make sure that you know who she is.

It certainly is something that all people who do what she does,

typically engage in, which is this costume.

I think that shows status and power.

And she needed to show that to people to maintain her position.

She wanted to wear nice clothes and she enjoyed that.

It also is very much a part of that uniform,

that sense of power and control.

"I'm in control, take me seriously.

I'm playing the same game that you guys are playing."

So whereas it was mostly men playing that game,

I think her costume was needed to help her have that armour

to step into the arena and do what they were doing

and kind of match them as well.

BEAN: A few miles north of Harlem, in the backstreets of the Bronx,

an ambitious young gangster was casting an envious eye

towards Stephanie's grip on the Harlem numbers racket.

And his name... was Dutch Schultz.

LLOYD: He was described by Edgar Hoover as public enemy number one.

The Mob couldn't even handle him. He was a loose cannon.

BEAN: In time, their rivalry would become one of the fiercest

and bloodiest in New York gangland history.

LLOYD: Stephanie wasn't just fighting for herself.

She was fighting for her whole community.

She was a boss who made a fortune, but gave back.

Gave back to the community.

If someone needed a hospital bill paid, she would do it.

She wanted to keep the money within Harlem.

GREEN: The public viewed Stephanie St Clair

as a very shrewd woman who had a very nasty temper.

But she also had a nurturing side.

She was a huge champion of her community,

which is shown by the number of people she employed in the business.

She was an activist for Black Advancement.

She educated her community about their rights.

She would speak out about discrimination.

The fact that she was so loyal to her community

meant that this was returned to her.

So, it was a sound strategy that paid dividends to her business.

I think that's largely the reason

that she was able to run such a successful operation

that was, at the height, able to bring in $200,000 a year.

BEAN: $200,000 a year in 1928

would be worth over three million today.

As the money starts rolling in, so too do the corrupt cops,

who all want a cut.

At this particular time, the NYPD is very corrupt.

You have officers who are involved in various vice rackets,

the numbers racket, the paid enforcement racket.

Police officers are involved in the sex trade.

Some officers are known to assault, harass, physically, sexually,

Black New Yorkers especially, you know, African-American women.

Anyone who wanted to be a criminal and had any sense,

was gonna pay off the police so that they could go about their business

in a relatively inconspicuous fashion.

St Clair did this. However, she also spoke out about the police

and especially how much they were harassing her employees and herself.

And so her actions were very closely followed all throughout her reign.

In 1929, she was arrested for possessing policy slips,

which is considered to be a very trumped-up charge.

She does not hide that she is a banker.

She actually testifies that she's a banker.

And she only does that because she wants to expose the police.

So, as early as 1929, she's talking about, “I'm a banker,

but at the same time I was not supposed to be arrested

"because I paid for protection from the NYPD."

She wrote these open letters, saying, "I've paid my ice."

Ice was the kickbacks which you gave to the police.

HARRIS: So, for her, it's exposing herself,

but she's definitely gonna put it on the record

that the NYPD is corrupt.

LLOYD: In 1930, police corruption in New York was so widespread

that President Roosevelt ordered Judge Samuel Seabury

to lead a public investigation.

During that investigation, I proved that corruption existed

in many of the departments of the city government,

and all of those departments were honeycombed

with political appointees.

Stephanie St Clair will go before the Seabury Commission

to testify about vice rackets

and the participation of the NYPD in them.

Due to her testimony, over a dozen police officers,

including a lieutenant, were then suspended from the NYPD.

LLOYD: She was definitely fearless.

She stood up to corrupt NYPD blue.

For anyone, let alone a Black woman at that time,

to literally be pointing out corrupt police officers in court,

naming and shaming them!

In a lifetime of bold moves, that one might have been the boldest.

LLOYD: Although St Clair managed to get the NYPD off her back,

she still had the problem of an ambitious, aggressive gang

from the Bronx trying to muscle in on her turf.

Prohibition is repealed,

leaving bootleggers like Dutch Shultz looking for new ways

to make money.

And what could be more appealing than muscling in

on the lucrative Numbers Game?

GREEN: Dutch Shultz especially was known for making bold moves

to take over the bootlegging game in the Bronx.

He was using those same tactics to take over Numbers Game operations

in Harlem.

BEAN: But Stephanie St Clair said no.

Harlem was about to become a war zone.

New York, 1933.

Prohibition is repealed and America celebrates.

But as the liquor flowed, so too did the blood.

Among the many gangsters Stephanie had to deal with,

none were more vicious, more ruthless

than one of the city's biggest bootleggers,

notorious for torture and murder...

Dutch Shultz.

REPORTER: Shultz was not known for his gentle ways

with the opposition.

He and his mob kept New York City in a constant state

of violence and bloody gun play.

This was the face that struck terror in rival mobsters.

-Real name, Arthur Flegenheimer. -He was born in the Bronx.

Eventually becomes a bootlegger for several crime families

in New York City.

He was so successful at that, that he was known as

the Beer Baron of the Bronx.

And he also made money through paid protection.

Dutch Shultz was a notorious, ruthless mobster,

who made his fortune during Prohibition.

Shultz had made a name for himself by removing obstacles in his way.

And those obstacles were people.

He would torture people, he had people killed.

Dutch Shultz, it's estimated that at the height of his success

was bringing in about 20 million dollars a year,

which for that time is a huge, huge sum of money.

So when Prohibition ended, obviously gangsters then

were looking at other ventures to make up for these lost profits,

which were ginormous.

HARRIS: During the early 1930s, we see many white racketeers

whose funds have dried up because Prohibition is over

look for new avenues of income.

The Numbers Game was seen as the welfare clients' Wall Street,

it was called the 'N' word pool.

This is a game that only Blacks play.

This is a game that's not profitable.

But once many of the Black racketeers started getting arrested

and some of their revenue was printed in the newspapers,

white racketeers like Shultz wanted to get into that game.

And many of them started to force people out of the business.

GREEN: Dutch Shultz had power,

and he had the support of people like Jimmy Hines,

who was a Tammany Hall political machine, Democratic boss.

He was a huge, huge threat, and that's why so many people,

rather than try and fight him, just succumbed to his wishes,

whether that be paying him a portion of their business

or handing it over entirely.

HARRIS: And Stephanie St Clair was one of his targets.

And she was like, “No!”

And with that, all hell broke loose.

Harlem was at war.

You can go anywhere in America. But you're not coming into Harlem.

Harlem is ours, Harlem is for Black people.

Stephanie said she'd resist any attempt by Shultz

to breach her borders.

-And she did. -Shultz sent in his soldiers,

armed in forces who used intimidation,

beatings...

bombings and murder

to muscle in on St Clair's territory.

But as well as fighting back with her own network of gangsters,

she was well ahead of her time

when it came to the weaponisation of public opinion.

The beef between those two really on St Clair's part is a public beef.

Both of them make this about saying things about one another

in the newspaper.

St Clair is quick to go to the New York Amsterdam News,

which is a Black newspaper

and talk about Schultz and other white racketeers

coming into Harlem and taking over this game.

And of course, wanting to project a sense of toughness

and wanting to really keep what she's grown. She's like, "No!"

FARMER: Stephanie said, “I'm not afraid of Dutch Shultz

or any other man living, he'll never touch me.

I am sane and smart and fearless.”

LLOYD: She went to the newspapers and wrote articles,

calling on anyone who was buying a ticket, to buy Black.

HARRIS: This is many ways is a form of economic nationalism.

If whites are treating you in particular types of ways,

you should not do business with these people.

So, challenging Shultz in a newspaper

is just one of a variety of ways that St Clair speaks out

against white encroachment.

LLOYD: The rivalry between Dutch and Stephanie would escalate.

Dutch once sent an underling to intimidate her.

St Clair pushed him in a closet

and told her bodyguards to, quote, "Get rid of him."

She dramatically walks through Harlem

and goes to white businesses,

which serve as numbers drops for white racketeers,

and she goes into those businesses, she trashes the place,

and tells the white business owners

to get out of Harlem, you know, this is Black game.

Just really causes a spectacle at some of these stores.

FARMER: Legend has it that at some point

she even had to go into hiding because he had put a hit out on her,

and she retaliated in kind, both in print and on the streets.

She refused to let this man walk over her

and take her business that she'd worked so hard for

and that was so successful for her.

She waged an all-out war.

It's estimated that it was responsible for about 40 murders.

She fed information to the police about Schultz's operations,

and due to this, they were able to infiltrate his house

and seize 12 million dollars of his money

and arrest a lot of his employees.

LLOYD: She went toe to toe.

I know so much of the violence is vilified.

But I think we've got to remember that we're talking gangsters.

You couldn't go to small claims court. This isn't a civil matter.

People had to work out their grievances on the street,

and we're talking millions of dollars.

I think it's great that she stood up to him.

BEAN: But Dutch Shultz was soon get his comeuppance

for defying the Commission,

the governing body of organised crime in New York.

LLOYD: Dutch Shultz was being prosecuted for tax evasion

by District Attorney Thomas Dewey.

Racketeers succeed only so long as they can prey upon

the fear or weakness of disorganised or timid victims.

LLOYD: He asked the Organised Crime Commission if he could kill Dewey,

but they unanimously denied the request

for fear of bringing the full weight of the government

down on all of them.

But Shultz put the hit out on Dewey regardless.

Here was the loose cannon of Dutch, doing what he wanted again.

So the Commission hired Murder Inc

to take Shultz out.

Murder Inc, or the Syndicate, was an organised crime group

that acted as the enforcement arm of the Commission,

led by Charles Lucky Luciano...

Meyer Lansky...

and Bugsy Siegel.

Incredibly, they were responsible for between 400 and 1,000

contract killings in that period alone.

BEAN: It's 10:15pm on October 23rd, 1935.

Dutch Shultz is in the restroom of one of his favourite restaurants,

the Palace Chop House in Newark, New Jersey.

Two gunmen - Charles Workmen and Mendy Weiss -

burst through the door and opened fire.

LLOYD: The Commission took no chances. They needed Dutch dead.

The gunmen intentionally used rusty bullets

to increase the chances of sepsis and infection

in case the gunshots themselves were not fatal.

Wanting to have the final word,

Stephanie immediately sends a telegram to her enemy

on his deathbed, signed "Madam Queen of Policy."

It read, "As you sow, so shall you reap."

HARRIS: This is Galatians 6:7.

"All the evil that you have sown and placed upon myself and others,

you're reaping that now."

I think when Stephanie sent the telegram,

it shows really that she's going back to her true values.

This is someone who is always fighting for the underdog.

This is someone who has that strong moral sense

of what is right and what is wrong.

And she's just reminding that person of his wrongdoing

as her final word to him

so that he is reminded of really where he's going to go

after the moment he takes his last breath.

LLOYD: "As you sow, so shall you reap."

It's poetic justice.

BEAN: And with no more battles left to fight,

Stephanie St Clair got out the game,

passing her empire on to her trusted enforcer Bumpy Johnson.

And you might think her story ended there,

but she would soon cross paths with a man known on the streets

as Black Hitler.

And this time, things would get personal.

It's 1935 and Stephanie St Clair's main rival, Dutch Shultz,

is six feet under.

With the turf wars over, Stephanie steps back from the Numbers Game,

ready to enjoy her fortune and live a quiet life.

But her peace wouldn't last long.

She would fall straight into the arms of Sufi Abdul Hamid,

a man the press would later call Black Hitler.

Sufi Hamed, whose real name is Eugene Brown,

and Eugene Brown was a Chicago political activist

who migrates to New York City.

He was a religious leader and a union leader

and he had a preference for Nazi-style military dress.

And also he was very anti-Semitic.

And thus he earned the nickname Black Hitler.

Like St Clair, he was trying to advocate

for Black advancement.

So he organised a lot of boycotts of white shops,

a lot of white Jewish shops.

He was a very flamboyant and a very controversial figure.

HARRIS: His persona is very larger than life.

This is someone who preaches from the corner of 135th and Lennox Ave,

with black riding boots, you know, colourful pants,

a white shirt, a really long cape,

a really big turban. He has a really massive beard.

This would be a person that you would stop and actually listen to.

Just not based upon necessarily what he's saying,

but just based upon the way he looks.

LLOYD: They were a power couple.

They were a power couple stomping around Harlem.

I think this is really good for her mythology and her brand.

Here was someone else speaking out as vociferously as she did.

But it seems like Sufi was only with her for the money.

And whilst he may have been flamboyant and eye-catching,

his antisemitism was toxic

and stirred up ill-feeling and tensions

with nearby Jewish districts.

The marriage lasts for about two to three years.

There's an alleged affair between Stephanie St Clair's friend,

Dorothy Matthews, who is a famous Harlem occult leader.

So, Stephanie St Clair wants to confront him.

She waited for him when he was going to meet his lawyer one day,

stood in the hallway, and shot him three times.

The first shot, he's hit in the mouth,

cracks a tooth. The second shot goes through his coat jacket.

And the third shot goes over his head.

In the trial, St Clair said he had been treating her very poorly,

and that he'd been having the affair.

But that also, her handling the gun, which she claimed was his,

was only meant to scare him rather than actually meant to shoot him.

HARRIS: She's arrested, she's indicted and she's prosecuted

and she's given two to ten years at the Westfield State Farm

in upstate New York.

LLOYD: Stephanie starts her second stint behind bars.

Hamed, who survives the shooting, tries to make a comeback.

But news of the affair did major damage to his messianic image.

BEAN: What a character Hamed was.

He ends up trying to prove to his followers

that he's not leading a life of excess,

and the way he chooses to do that is to publicly fill up the fuel

for his private airplane himself.

He ends up crashing the plane and dying,

cos he hadn't put enough fuel in it.

After Stephanie St Clair comes out of prison

in the early 1940s,

we really don't know a lot about her.

The New York Amsterdam News suggests

that she lived in seclusion and travelled to the Caribbean.

Another ad suggests that Stephanie St Clair was hospitalised

at a mental institution in Central Islip, Long Island.

She also appears in the late '60s

when she would have been about 77,

in a court document where she accuses a van driver

of knocking her down.

She got $2,000, which is the equivalent to $15,000 today.

I think why I like that story

is because she had also bought a house,

but in terms of the records, she wasn't able to keep up payments.

And so it seems like even at 77,

she'd do what it takes to get that money.

HARRIS: When the money is issued to her lawyer,

all of these creditors come after the money.

This is a person who has a rags-to-riches story

and seemingly towards the end of her life has a riches-to-rags story.

Stephanie St Clair is an extraordinary story.

From being a maid to a crime boss to an activist.

Stephanie was someone who really fought to see change happen,

and not only that, but she fought for that at a time

where she would be bearing the brunt of a lot of force against her

to stop her from doing that.

So it wasn't something that she was able to speak really openly about.

She was never one to resist writing an editorial

and placing it in a magazine or in the local newspaper,

where she decried the police ignoring the civil rights

and the legal rights of Black people in the community.

She talked openly and often about the ways in which Black women

endured assault at the hands of the police.

LLOYD: She rallied Black people.

They were talking about what it meant to be Black in America

at a time when Black people were finding their voice.

And not only did she find her voice, she lived her voice.

What started as a desire to grow her own empire

became a way to give back.

A genuine desire to see Black Americans lifted up.

That to me, that says something fascinating

about human nature, about solidarity.

You practice it enough, no matter what the reason,

it becomes who you are.

I think one of the reasons that Stephanie St Clair is not remembered

and ensconced in history the way others are,

is first and foremost because she was a woman.

We often don't preserve the histories and contributions

of women in general at the same rate that we do with men,

and certainly not Black women.

Folks like Stephanie St Clair have been marginalised or excluded

from history books, because there's a tendency to kind of spotlight

and become really preoccupied with those who were doing the striving,

like those who were what we would call a credit to the race.

But within that, more scholars are looking at the complex lives

of working-class, ordinary Black people.

I think there's a tendency now to explore those people

who lived more complicated and more layered lives.

Perhaps the legacy that Stephanie leaves behind

is that despite all of the discrimination,

there's something unyielding in the human spirit,

a refusal to accept the hand you've been dealt.

A part of her legacy is persevering over tough obstacles,

especially when you're kind of born into a world

where you're not supposed to thrive, let alone survive.

Why isn't Stephanie St Clair better known today?

Would she be more widely remembered if she'd been white or a man?

Or is it because she knew when to quit?

We'll never know for sure,

but perhaps we should let HER have the last word.

ST CLAIR: "Many persons have said that they're afraid for me"

and that I should be careful.

I'm not going to be any more careful than I have been.

Please have no fear for me.

I have no fear of anybody.

I'm going to continue to fight until the members of the race

"get their just and legal rights."

She was the OG, the Original Gangster.

Black, Queen, Badass.

♪ LAURYN HILL: So Much Things To Say

♪ Yeah

♪ Yeah, yeah

♪ Yeah, yeah, yeah

♪ Why, why, why, why, why, why

♪ Why, why

♪ They've got so much things to say right now

♪ They've got so much things to say

♪ They've got so much things to say right now

♪ They've got so much things to say

♪ I'll never forget, no way

♪ How they crucified Jesus Christ... ♪

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