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335 New Negroes at the Beach: At Work and Play outside the Black Metropolis ANDREW W. KAHRL 14 On May 10, 1921, a ship carrying bananas from Jamaica docked at the port of Baltimore. Among its passengers was Austine Scarlett, a young Jamaican man who had stowed away in the ship’s hull. Liberated from his native island’s colonialruled peonage economy and dropped onto the streets of this burgeoning black metropolis, Scarlett steadily—and ruthlessly—built his own underground empire on the profits of the city’s “numbers” trade, rising to become, by the 1940s, one of the city’s most powerful, feared, and despised urban kingpins and a major dealer in real estate in black Baltimore. Eight years after Scarlett arrived in the United States, William L. Adams, a fifteen-year-old sharecropper’s son from the cotton fields of eastern North Carolina, boarded a train bound for Baltimore. Like Scarlett, Adams’s journey from the fields to the streets began on the Baltimore waterfront , where, as a teenager, he worked various odd jobs on the docks, carefully saving what little earnings he could muster and plotting his entry into the city’s thriving numbers trade. Within years, the kid from Carolina had become “Little Willie,” the numbers bookie, nightclub owner, prolific buyer of slum real estate, and invisible ruler over a vast network of businesses in northwest Baltimore. No sooner had Scarlett and Adams conquered the city streets than they cast their eyes toward the country, specifically, the rolling hills and quiet shores of rural Maryland. In 1944, Adams’s syndicate began acquiring real estate on a small peninsula near Annapolis, Maryland, where they constructed rustic summer cabins for themselves and invested heavily in the commercial development of Carr’s Beach, a small, family-owned beach resort that catered to African American groups and families denied access to other spots along the shore. Scarlett, meanwhile, purchased 123 acres of farmland near the sleepy village of Westminster, in Carroll County, Maryland, in 1947, where, along with tending to a working farm consisting of sixty-two milking cows and herds of pigs and hogs, he invested over one hundred thousand dollars toward the construction of a swanky country club for 336 ANDREW W. KAHRL the East Coast’s select set, and where he began making plans to retire from the streets and become a “gentleman farmer.” Both were confident of the lucrative potential of their enterprises and of their ability to attract urban black pleasure seekers to spend their weekends (and their leisure dollars) in rural Maryland. And both numbers kings left behind a trail of paper slips that, until now, historians have neglected to follow. During the 1930s, operators of illegal lotteries made significant investments in black-owned businesses and fledgling institutions that were struggling to weather the Great Depression and circumvent the institutionalized discrimination of lending institutions. As they did, numbers kings became prominent businessmen and celebrated race leaders. By the early 1940s, Baltimore’s major numbers kings had a financial stake in numerous blackowned businesses as well as residential and commercial properties in the city. Their increasingly diverse business portfolios spoke to numbers kings’ dreams of transitioning into legal, and respectable, enterprises. But whereas they had carried these dreams with them on their journey from the country to the city decades earlier, it was not until the postwar years that the profits accumulated from illicit economies began to extend outside the city, as the changing tastes and outlooks of a critical mass of urban black consumers made large-scale investments in rural real estate and commercial enterprises seem profitable, and as federal, state, and local anticrime and anti-vice waves hastened urban kingpins’ efforts to launder their earnings and transition (at least publicly) into “legitimate” trades. The reintegration of “the countryside” (as both place and idea) into our understanding of “the city” in twentieth-century America is long overdue. As the historians Andrew Needham and Allen Dieterich-Ward note, “for most urban historians, even those interested in the development of the suburbs, rural areas remain undifferentiated ‘green spaces’ on the map that are of little importance until they are suddenly transformed into full-fledged members of the metropolis by the arrival of the first subdivision.”1 With rare exceptions, these rural landscapes barely register at all in scholarship on and popular culture representations of the twentieth-century African American experience.2 Instead, the dusty, country roads of rural America usually figure (if at all) as merely...

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