Review of Jennifer Mara DeSilve, Griffin Hamilton, and Samantha Kidder, “Cocaine Alley Queens: Gender, Race, and Drug Use in American Midwestern Cities, 1890-1920,”Urban History (2025): 1-34.
By Noa Cruse
When we talk about the media’s power to shape how we see neighborhoods and the people who live in them, we often think about cable news, social media, or viral headlines. But this kind of influence isn’t new at all. A recent article by Jennifer Mara DeSilva, Griffin Hamilton, and Samantha Kidder titled “Cocaine Alley Queens: Gender, Race, and Drug Use in American Midwestern Cities, 1890-1920” and published in the journal Urban History, takes us backto the late nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries to show how newspapers in Midwestern cities helped create powerful, and lasting, stereotypes about race, gender, and drug use.
At the center of the article is the phrase “Cocaine Alley.” Despite how real it sounds; the authors argue that Cocaine Alley was rarely an actual place you could find on a map. Instead, it was a symbolic label created by journalists. It became shorthand for everything newspapers and their readers feared about growing cities, especially the presence of Black residents, working-class women, and so-called “moral disorder.” Rather than reporting on real patterns of drug use, newspapers blended racial anxiety, gender, expectations, and panic about narcotics into sensational stories. These stories said less about drugs themselves and more about social fears during a time of urban change.
One of the most striking examples in the article involves a woman named Hattie Stump. In 1900, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch described her as the “Queen of Cocaine Alley.” The notice focused heavily on her race, her body, and her supposed connection to vice. What’s remarkable is that nearly fifty newspapers across the country reprinted the story. But here’s the key point: there was no solid evidence linking Stump to drug use. What spread instead was an image, a racialized symbol of urban danger. According to the authors, this reveals far more about the racist imagination of newspaper editors than it does about addiction or crime.
The article also explains that Cocaine Alley was used most often to describe neighborhoods with growing black populations, especially in Midwestern cities experiencing migration from the rural South. These areas were changing quickly, and many white residents viewed that change with suspicion and fear. Ironically, national data from the period shows that white women were actually more likely to suffer from narcotic addiction, largely due to medical prescriptions. But those stories weren’t told with the same sensational tone. Instead, Black women were cast as the face of drug panic, becoming what the authors called “Cocaine Alley Queens”, a symbol, not a reality.
For listeners today, especially those living in midwestern cities, this history still matters. It reminds us that ideas about “dangerous” neighborhoods and “deviant” people didn’t appear overnight. They were shaped and repeated by media narratives more than a century ago. The takeaway is simple but powerful: the stories we tell about cities, race, and morality have deep roots. Understanding where those stories come from helps us question how similar narratives continue to influence conversations about poverty, policing, and community today.