• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary menu
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • About Us
  • Contact Us
  • Site Directory
  • Home
  • Alex’s Lounge
  • P.O.U. Health and Fitness
  • POU Comments of the Week
  • P.O.U. Daily Link Sweep
Pragmatic Obots Unite

Pragmatic Obots Unite

Shooting down firebaggers & teabaggers one truth at a time...

Tuesday Open Thread: Black Policy Kings and Queen

June 2, 2015 by pragobots 220 Comments

GOOD MORNING, P.O.U.!

This story needs to be made into a movie! It’s long, but VERY interesting….

 

THE JONES BROTHERS

(Photo: Nathan Thompson/Policy Kings)
L-R: Edward, George, and McKissack Jones (aka Mack)(Photo: Nathan Thompson/Policy Kings)

(An excerpt from “The Legend of Tommy Roe”)

The Jones boys were the sons of a Baptist minister from the South who came to Chicago and died shortly afterwards, leaving a widow and three sons, Edward, George and McKissack. From a $16,000 life insurance policy, the boys’ mother set her sons up in the taxi cab business, one of the few that operated on the South side.

The taxi business boomed and the eldest Jones boy, Edward, a former Club Car Porter for Twentieth Century Limited, drifted into the policy game. He started at the bottom, as a slip runner and, after he had learned the business, persuaded his mother to lend him $15,000 to start his own wheel. She did, and by the late thirties, the Jones brother’s wheel was doing $10,000 to $15,000 a day. It grew because unlike other gamblers in the black neighborhoods, Jones paid off on time and in full. No excuses.

The Jones brothers funneled their cash into legitimate businesses and real estate, enough so that they became the biggest source of ready cash inside the Black belt.

They purchased the huge Ben Franklin department store on 47th Street, which employed 150 people. However, it was little more then a front for the Jones brothers’ policy bank. They also bought an enormous food store at 43rd and Prairie and several large apartment buildings all over the South Side and in the late 1930s they added the Vienna, the Grove, the Garfield and the Alpha to their holdings to go along with their villa in France, where their mother Harriet lived, a summer estate in Peoria and another villa in Mexico, just outside Mexico City, the brothers’ favorite vacation spot.

Then the entire family had chauffeured limos and lived in enormous mansions, Eddie designing and building his own twenty-one-room digs on South Michigan with custom-made French provincial furniture and gold bathroom fixtures. His wife Lydia was a former beauty queen in the Cotton Club Chorus line, who wore satin or mink every day.

They could afford it. Between 1933 and 1938, they had spent a remarkable $2,772,191.10 but paid taxes on about half that amount. But they didn’t spend it all, the money was tucked away in savings accounts, government secured bonds, industrial bonds, commercial real estate and about $1.6 million in various stocks.

The Jones were light skinned, powerful and popular figures inside the Black belt. They were better educated and better mannered then most policy gangsters and cared little, if at all, for the residents of the Black belt except to take their money. They were notorious cheapskates and trusted no one from the Black belt to hold a position inside their operations. As a result, all of their key people were white, and in the end that cost them everything.

Enter Billy Skidmore.

Pages: Page 1 Page 2

Filed Under: African Americans, Economy, History, Open Thread, Race Tagged With: "Nigger Pool", Black Organized Crime, Bronzeville, Chicago, Chicago Black Gangsters, Digit Barons, Edward Jones, George Jones, Harlem, Harlem Gangsters, Illegal Gambling, McKissack Jones, Numbers Racket, Policy Game, Policy Kings, Policy Queen, Policy Racket, The Jones Brothers

Primary Sidebar

Recent Comments

Powered by Disqus

Twitter

Tweets by @PragObots

Recent Posts

  • Monday Open Thread: The History of the Gullah People
  • Sunday Open Thread: POU Movie Day – The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
  • Saturday Open Thread: Celebrating High Fashion – Dandyism
  • Friday Open Thread: Celebrating High Fashion – Dandyism
  • Thursday Open Thread: Celebrating High Fashion – Dandyism

Tags

#HTGAWM #TGIT African American History African History Black History Civil Rights Movement Divas Forward Friday Open Thread Funk Grammy Winners Great Bands Hip-Hop How To Get Away With Murder Jazz Kerry Washington Legends Monday Open Thread Motown Records NFL Obama Biden 2012 Olivia Pope Open Thread P.O.U. Sunday Jazz Brunch POU Weekly NFL Picks President Barack H. Obama President Barack Obama President Obama R&B racism Rap Saturday Open Thread Scandal Shondaland Shonda Rhimes slavery Songwriters Soul Sports Sunday Open Thread Thursday Open Thread Tuesday Open Thread Video Viola Davis Wednesday Open Thread

Footer

A-F

  • African American Pundit
  • Afrospear
  • All About Race
  • Angry Black Lady Chronicles
  • AverageBro.com
  • Black Politics on the Web
  • Blacks 4 Barack
  • Blue Wave News
  • Brown Man Thinking Hard
  • Crooks and Liars
  • Democracy Now!
  • Democrats for Progress
  • Eclectablog
  • Extreme Liberal's Blog
  • FactCheck.org
  • Field Negro
  • FiveThirtyEight

G-S

  • GrannyStandingforTruth
  • Hello, Negro
  • Jack & Jill Politics
  • Latino Politico
  • Margaret and Helen
  • Melissa Harris Perry
  • Michelle Obama Watch
  • Mirror On America
  • Momma, here come that woman again!
  • New Black Woman
  • Obama Foodorama
  • Obama for America 2012
  • Positively Barack
  • Raving Black Lunatic
  • Sheryl Kaye's Blog
  • Sojourner's Place
  • Stuff White People Do

T-Z

  • Talking Points Memo
  • The Black Snob Feed
  • The Field
  • The Hill
  • The Mudflats
  • The Obama Diary
  • The only adult in the room
  • The Peoples View
  • The Reid Report
  • The Rude Pundit
  • The Starting Five
  • ThinkProgress
  • This Week in Blackness
  • Tim Wise
  • Uppity Negro Network
  • What About Our Daughters
  • White House Blog
  • Womanist Musings

Copyright © 2025 · Log in