Happy Hump Day POU!
We certainly couldn’t let men have all the fun and sinning now could we? There were black women who made fortunes through various “non respectable” methods in the 19th century as well. Perhaps the most well known and one of the wealthiest was famed New Orleans Madam Lulu White.
Lulu White was one of the most notorious madams who found their fortune and glory in New Orleans’s Storyville district. When prostitution was outlawed everywhere in the city except for Storyville, the entire area was turned into a hotbed for sin, sex, drinking, and any other vice that you can think of.
White alternately claimed to be from Alabama, Cuba, or Jamaica, but she was really born on a farm near Selma, Alabama in 1868. Her fame started to skyrocket in the 1880s when she posed for a series of rather pornographic pictures, banking on her mysterious background to help sell her photos. The first mention of her working in the city’s brothels came in 1888.
In 1894, White opened Mahogany Hall. By then, she had created a persona for herself as the “Diamond Queen” (supposedly the owner of the largest private collection of diamonds and gemstones in the South) and continued exploiting the exotic. She advertised all of her girls as being one-eighth black (referred to as “octoroons”). By doing so, she was absolutely and very vocally going against the enacted and enforced Jim Crow laws.
White had a reputation as running a high-class place, full of mirrored ceilings and walls, dancing girls, and clients drinking champagne. Not surprisingly, she was a target of the law, arrested repeatedly for relatively minor offenses like selling liquor without a license. Storyville came to an end in 1917, and in 1918, White was arrested again for violating the Draft Act by running a brothel too close to a military institution. After three years in jail, she secured a pardon from President Wilson and opened up her business again.
New Orleans Police Department mug shot of Lulu White, 1920
White ran a sumptuous ‘Octoroon Parlour’ within her brothel known as Mahogany Hall. The four-story house reportedly cost $40,000 to build (about $1 million in 2008 dollars).
According to publicity of the time, Mahogany Hall housed 40 women. The official brochure for the house also stated that it had five parlors (one of which was a ‘Mirrored Parlor’) and fifteen bedrooms, each with its own adjoining bathroom.
Famous Storyville photographer E. J. Bellocq‘s surviving photographs of the house attest to its abundance of elegant furnishings, huge chandeliers and potted ferns. The building housed several expensive oil paintings, Tiffany stained glass windows and other works of art.
Pamphlets featured photographs and biographies of each of the ‘Octoroon’ girls. Well known residents of Mahogany Hall included Emma Sears (The Colored Carmencita), Clara Miller, Estelle Russell, Sadie Reed and Sadie Levy. Kid Ross, Tony Jackson, and Jelly Roll Morton were among the pianists who performed for the clients in Mahogany Hall.
Fun facts:
- The film Belle of the Nineties (1934) starring Mae West is said to have been inspired by the exploits of Lulu White (the film’s working title was “The Belle of New Orleans”).
- In the film Pretty Baby (1978), the brothel madam played by Frances Faye wears a red wig and excessive amounts of jewelry, as Lulu White was known to do. The brothel at the center of the film also shares many characteristics with Mahogany Hall, particularly its swirling mahogany staircase.
- The song “Mahogany Hall Stomp” written by Spencer Williams and performed by Louis Armstrong references White’s famous establishment.
- Lulu White and her business neighbors in Storyville were subject to one of New Orleans’ first legal test cases in making a vice district ordinance, for mandatory residential segregation based on gender rather than race. The city rules required any woman who engaged in prostitution to live within specified boundaries, and in the separate but equal era of Plessy v. Ferguson, the courts upheld the city’s right to maintain those boundaries.
Lulu White died in 1931, reportedly at the residence of her friend and associate famed Madam Willie Piazza.