Strange Times 103: The White Slavers

Strange Times is a newsletter that explores the weirdest news of 1921, one day at a time. If you like it, forward it to a friend or back me on Patreon. And while you’re at it, why not grab yourself a copy of Westside, my 1921 mystery novel, or preorder the looming sequel, Westside Saints?

Today brings tales of justice absurd, honorable, and utterly absent. Scurry down the fire escape to escape…

April 13, 1921

• Four Tennessee road gang foremen are arrested on charges of holding 75 black men in peonage, compelling them to work without pay in order to make up debts and beating them with a wooden board when they tried to escape.

• Robbers steal $415 from a United Cigar Store on Columbus Avenue after gagging the clerk, shoving him under the counter, and waiting on customers before making their escape.

• The Weather: Fair and warmer today; Thursday, unsettled and cooler; moderate to fresh southwest winds.

Just one question: how big was this lavatory that the cops didn’t blink when twenty-five gamblers were able to enter all at once?

Three detectives attached to the Chief Inspector’s staff had too much faith in human nature early this morning. They and a fourth detective raided an alleged gambling room on the fourth floor of the Circle Hotel, next door to Reisenweber’s, at Fifty-eighth Street and Eighth Avenue. There, they said, they found about thirty-five men and women playing poker with chips cashable at $5 each.

No patrol wagon was available immediately when the patrons of the place were told they were under arrest, so Detective Reynolds marched seven of the prisoners to the West Forty-seventh Street Station. There he charged six of them with disorderly conduct and the seventh, Francis Kay, with keeping and maintaining a gambling establishment.

The three other detectives stayed behind to guard the rest of the prisoners.

One by one the twenty-five or so men and women waiting to be taken to the station house discovered that their hands were too soiled for them to appear properly before a desk Lieutenant. So they asked if they might go out and wash. The detectives assented and the prisoners filed into the lavatory.

Washing seemed to be such a prolongued process that finally the detectives went to look for them. Every last one was gone—down the fire escape.

High drama in Frederick, Md., where Juddge Turner acquits himself better than most judges in these pages do.

FREDERICK, Md., April 12.—An outbreak occurred in the Circuit Court late this afternoon when a jury acquitted Charles Henry Dorsey, a negro, of criminal assault on Miss Delsie Tweedale, of Baltimore. The negro prisoner was struck by a member of the girl’s family; an inkwell, hurled at him, struck the clerk of the court, and Dorsey was saved from mob violence by one of the Judges. He was finally taken to another part of the State.

When Miss Tweedale screamed, “He is guilty,” Marcus Tweedale, her brother, struck Dorsey several times, cutting his cheek. The room was in an uproar. Judge Turner stepped down beside Dorsey and announced that the “law will protect the negro at all hazards.”

I thought this was an interesting piece because its depiction of human trafficking is so close to the way it’s portrayed in the media today, including the fact that those purchasing the kidnapped women are shiftless “aliens,” and not the honorable white residents of Detroit.

DETROIT, April 12.—Charges that a ring of white slavers is selling young girls from Armenia, Palestine and Turkey to wealthy Detroit aliens are under investigation by immigration authorities as the result of revelations made by Mrs. Violent Kalajian, wife of a wealthy Armenian business man.

More than 200 girls between the ages of 14 and 20, imported from the Near East at an average cost of $1,500 each, are now on the way to Detroit to be sold to alien residents, according to Mrs. Kalajian, who asserts that many girls of foreign families in Detroit and Highland Park also are being sold. Some of them are legally married, but many others are being forcibly detained in typical harems.

Girls living in the Orient are sold through their photographs, Mrs. Kalajian told United States Immigration Inspector Short. Relatives in Detroit sell the pictures to members of the ring. Persons desiring to purchase a girl go to the white slavers, make their choice, and order the original of the photograph brought to this city.

“Although the Armenian women of Detroit have been endeavoring to check this hideous traffic,” said Mrs. Kalajian, “we have been overwhelmed by the vast majority of men. Now we are asking officials to aid us.”