107 p., Stephanie St Clair was born in 1897 on the island of Guadeloupe. In 1923 she created and ran a highly-lucrative policy bank in Harlem. By 1926, the operation earned a quarter of a million dollars To this day, she remains the only black female gangster to run a numbers bank of that size St Clair also contributed generously to the community and advocated for racial uplift. This thesis explores some of the factors that influenced her decision to become an entrepreneur who would create and run her own enterprise; and, paradoxically, become an activist within her community. Also implicit, and therefore a component of the inquiry, was St. Clair's decision to describe herself as a lady when the definition would not have applied to her in that era.
