Street Poison : The Biography of Iceberg Slim (9780385538381) by Gifford Justin

Author:Gifford, Justin [Gifford, Justin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Digital
Published: 2015-08-04T00:00:00+00:00

It was around 1951 or 1952 that Beck began his travels around America, pimping his way from the Midwest to the Pacific Northwest. He left Milwaukee for a number of probable reasons. His mother and her husband, Ural, sold their house at 101 Vine Street and moved to Los Angeles, and he no longer had a place to stay. Furthermore, with Mattie repeatedly incarcerated at Wisconsin Home for Women, he probably feared that she might tip the police to his location. However, there is an additional explanation for Beck’s movements during the 1950s. This was an era of unprecedented transformation of black neighborhoods, and the pimp culture that he knew was quickly vanishing from the American scene. It was the age of the Second Great Migration, as five million African Americans moved to industrial urban centers between 1940 and 1960. In the late 1940s, the boundaries of the black ghetto began to expand after the Supreme Court ruled, in the landmark 1948 case Shelley v. Kraemer, that restrictive covenants were no longer enforceable (though they were not made illegal). Perceiving an “invasion” of black migrants from the South, white middle- and working-class Americans began moving to rapidly growing suburbs. This “white flight,” coupled with discriminatory lending practices by banks, isolated the growing black population in American inner cities across the country, even as those neighborhoods expanded in size. For instance, in Levittown, New York, the first major American suburb ever built, there was not a single black resident among the original 82,000 settlers. This racial divide between suburbs and inner city was created in every American city with a sizeable black population. Additionally, “slum clearance” policies were enacted by local city planners and backed by the federal government. The vibrant black neighborhoods that had been created during the First Great Migration were written off as slums and bulldozed to make room for segregated housing projects and interstate highways. Starting in the 1950s in Milwaukee, for example, these so-called urban renewal strategies destroyed Walnut Street and large sections of Bronzeville, as 7,500 black dwellings were razed to make room for Interstate Highways 43 and 94.27 The creation of this “second ghetto,” as Chicago historian Arnold Hirsch called it, was one of the most significant structural transformations of the American city in the twentieth century, and it fundamentally altered the character of black urban America.28

Beck fled Milwaukee and moved to Detroit, which at the time was still America’s symbol of industrial might. He didn’t have much money, but his years of experience made him confident that it was a good city in which to start over. “I heard whore-catching was good in Detroit. I took my last ten-dollar bill and caught a Greyhound. Detroit was the promised land for pimps all right. The town was teeming with young fast whores. The local pimps were soft competition.”29 He most likely moved to Detroit’s lower East Side in a neighborhood known as Paradise Valley. Bordered by the Black Bottom community—a neighborhood of old hotels

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