In November 1908, Elbert W. Smith, a prominent doctor, traveled to Raleigh from Virginia by rail and checked into the Yarborough Hotel on Fayetteville Street. Reportedly already drunk, he wrote himself a prescription for whiskey, couldn’t get it filled, and then went to watch a motion picture show.
Afterward, he hired a driver to take him to Raleigh’s red-light district near East Davie Street; he’d return the next night, stopping in at an underground bar called the Red Light Cafe, where he flashed around his expensive watch and jewelry.
Two days later, Smith’s body was found in the rock quarry in East Raleigh.
Smith’s wasn’t the only murder associated with Raleigh’s de facto red-light district. Located roughly where the present-day Transfer Co. Food Hall stands, bordered by Cabarrus, Davie, and Swain Streets, and Chavis Way, the area enjoyed a heyday from around 1900 through 1930 and flourished during the Prohibition era.
On Thursday, Madison Phillips, a City of Raleigh recreation programs analyst and a historian and archivist with a penchant for genealogy, will give a talk at the City of Raleigh Museum about Raleigh’s extensive historic network of madams and sex workers. Phillips draws on research that she did as an NC State University graduate student, combing through census records, Sanborn fire insurance maps, city directories, and old newspaper clippings that culminated in a paper outlining a plan for a walking tour of the city’s once-thriving, heavily concentrated red-light district.
The walking tour never actually transpired—many of the historic buildings in the district were torn down, and those still standing are now used as family homes—but the research points to a well-defined central area where illegal liquor flowed, johns brawled, and local police tangled with working women whom Phillips describes as “resilient, clever, and forces to be reckoned with.”
“I looked closer at the Sanborn map, at the keys,” Phillips says, “and they actually labeled [the buildings] ‘FB—female brothel.’ So they [the police] knew, they knew, there was no denying what was going on.”
The brothels in the district were numerous, and Phillips found the names of dozens of women who either ran or worked in them, ostensibly as laundresses, seamstresses, or dressmakers. But it wasn’t easy—despite some lengthy rap sheets still in existence, women operating in the city’s criminal underworld changed their names often, moved around, or married into what was considered respectability.
One of Raleigh’s most famous madams was Bertha Brown, who lived in a home at 536 East Davie Street. Brown was known to police for selling liquor, getting into public affrays, and keeping a house of ill repute, Phillips says, especially following the state legislature’s enactment of the Watts Act in 1903 and the Ward Law in 1905 that largely prohibited the manufacturing and sale of liquor.
Brown’s house served as a “blind tiger,” or an illegal bar, but also a brothel. In December 1905, Brown had been run out of East Durham for proffering sex work.
“Durham should now breathe easier” with Brown banished from town, the Durham Sun declared at the time.
Within the next year, Brown was shot, nearly fatally, and in April 1907, her house partially burned down (she was also arrested two days in a row that year for selling whiskey out of her home).
But none of that deterred Brown, and on that fateful November evening in 1908, Dr. Elbert Smith paid a visit to her home—his last known sighting before his murder via a chloroform rag to the face in a botched robbery.
Another famous madam, Louise Price of 534 East Davie Street, is likely Raleigh’s most notorious. At her peak, Price owned 125 houses and controlled a total of 215. She first appears in records in 1916 for illegally possessing too much beer, Phillips says, and would go on to rack up charges related to sex work for decades to come, even winning a pardon from North Carolina governor Thomas Bickett on the hope that she would leave town (she didn’t, and served jail time instead, likely figuring there was too much money to be chased in the Raleigh sex trade).
Then there’s Blanche McCade, a resident of 421 Watson Street, a 1915 home that’s still standing. McCade was constantly in and out of legal trouble. “She is regarded by the police as one of the worst offenders in the underworld,” as a News & Observer story reporting on her jail sentencing described her. McCade died in jail in 1927 and was remembered by the same paper in an obituary for being known and feared “by many a swarthy cop,” a woman who had “a weakness for a strong drink.”
There’s much in these women’s stories and others’ that’s lost to time and history, Phillips notes.
There are few records of Black women working in the sex trade at the time, either because mainstream newspapers, run by white people, didn’t deem them important enough to report on or because Black-run publications didn’t want to hand out public ammunition that could be used for propaganda.
Prosecutions ramped up during the First World War, with a military encampment for soldiers at home on leave located nearby. By the 1930s, the onset of the Great Depression saw much of the activity in the area winding down.
There’s irony, Phillips says, in the police of the so-called Progressive Era “trying to stomp out the underworld [being] actually what brought it up to the surface.”
“They just wanted to figure out a way to wipe it out,” Phillips says. “But the main conclusions I’ve come to [are] that sex work is work, and that you can’t go after the supply without going after the demand …. And for people who don’t agree that sex work is work, [we all] can agree that harm reduction is a good thing.”
Bring your lunch and listen to Phillips’s talk at the City of Raleigh Museum’s Lunch Box Lecture series on Thursday at noon (and on every third Thursday each month). For more information on the series, click here.