Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners

""A stunning achievement that makes an incisive contribution to African American studies and history, black women's history, and gender and sexuality studies as well as works that explore crime and vice. Harris's powerful book sheds a light on groups rarely studied and it will complicate readers's understanding of terms such as illegal, extralegal, and informal.""--Kali Gross, author of Colored Amazons: Crime, Violence, and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880–1910 ""This book is a well-researched and valuable perspective on black women's labor in New York City's early-twentieth-century informal economy. Such a groundbreaking study provides new insights about the existence, relevance, and diversity within the informal economy through a racialized and gendered lens. An impressive work of original research and analysis in African-American, urban, labor, and gender history.""--Cheryl D. Hicks, author of Talk with You Like a Woman: African American Women, Justice, and Reform in New York, 1890-1935Publication of this book was supported by funding from the Morrill Fund, Department of History, Michigan State University