Hannah Elias: The Black Enchantress Who Was At One Time One of the Richest Black Women in America

Late 19th century blackmail trials revealed unexpected class and gender entanglements, but said nothing about the crossing of racial boundaries. That was to be expected, given that in England there was only a tiny non-white population that in America Jim Crow segregation made interracial relations unlikely. In the 20th century, however, with the mixing of races and sexes in cities came heightened concern over possible confusion of identities. Blackmail stories by the earlier 20th century did more than warn middle-class men that if they sought sexual adventures outside their class they ran the risk of being compromised. In a radical departure from the older script, sensational cases in both the United States and England demonstrated that those who dared to cross racial lines could also find themselves victimized.

In 1904 eighty-four year old John R. Platt charged in a New York court that Hannah Elias, "a negress and courtesan," had extorted from him the enormous sum of $685,385. Platt, the last president of the New York volunteer fire department. He first met his "octoroon girl" in the Tenderloin in 1884 when she was only sixteen. Their paths crossed again in 1896 when he went to a massage parlor (because of rheumatism, he said), and at this point he became "interested in her welfare." He claimed that he believed she was single and set her up in a boardinghouse. She said that she loved him; but, he told the court, she later threatened to tell his married daughters and her Pullman Porter husband of their adulterous affair. As a result Platt felt obliged to give her money, including the lawyer's fee for her divorce.

The press informed the public that what began as a private romance ended in sensational public scandal. Platt had sometimes called himself "Mr. Green" when secretly visiting Elias at her fashionable home on 230 Central Park West. In the fall of 1903 Cornelius Williams, a discarded and insanely jealous "Negro" admirer of Elias, mistakenly murdered an Andrew H. Green, believing him to be Platt. Elias threatened to use the sensational circumstances of the murder, Platt asserted, as yet another weapon with which to extort money from him. He had finally had enough.

Hannah Elias defied Platt's June 3, 1904, civil order for her arrest and barricaded her home. Finally on June 8th the police prevailed upon Platt to swear out a criminal warrant. Thousands watched as four policemen broke into Elias's home and arrested her.

The press gave a detailed account of the appearance of the short, self possessed, elegant woman whose race, it declared, was "obvious" and of her three month old baby, the baby's white nurse, and Kato, the Japanese houseboy.

The publicity of the case meant Elias’s life became more complicated as her wealthy Central Park West white neighbors of three years discovered that she was black rather than their assumption that she was “Cuban” or “East Indian” or that she was an ”Oriental princess exiled temporarily from her own country.”

Elias's position plummeted dramatically, as the New York Times maliciously noted, from Central Park West to the female tier of "Coon Row" in the Tombs Prison, where she was held on $50,000 bail. Kato, "the Jap," insisted to reporters that Platt showered Elias with money but that she never resorted to extortion. Indeed, according to Kato, she had been the victim of white men (including the lawyer who handled her divorce) who threatened to make public her irregular relationship with Platt. Elias took the moral high ground and said that despite Platt's vindictiveness she felt sorry for the octogenarian and saddened by the press's fixation on the color of her skin: "I have all my life made white people my friends and have never had much to do with my own race." At the arraignment Platt clearly under the hectoring pressure of his children to pursue the case appeared confused and embarrassed at having to testify, and in the end stubbornly refused to admit to being "bled." The case against Elias collapsed. When Platt left the courtroom a large crowd jeered and catcalled.

Platt's family were not through with Hannah Elias. They proceeded to file a civil suit against her, which came to court in 1905. Once again huge crowds turned out to hear how Elias had made her way from being a cook earning $3 a week to being the mistress of a man who paid $20,000 to the lawyer who secured her divorce, Elias, represented by former New York state governor Frank S. Black, insisted that she had been Platt's devoted mistress and friend, pointing out that he had even given her his deceased wife's watch and pocketbook. The court again found in Elias's favor, concluding that there was no proof of threats. Moreover, it stated that judges did have the duty of enforcing immoral contracts. John R. Platt admitted to being a fool, getting the very publicity he had paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to avoid.

After the two trials Elias moved to Harlem, where she helped John Nail, a black real estate developer, turn the neighborhood into an enclave for New York's black residents.

Sources: Sexual Blackmail: A Modern History By Professor of History Angus McLaren (Harvard University Press 1st edition 2002); Black Enchantress: an upcoming book, Hannah Elias, Interracial Sex, Murder, and Civil Rights in Jim Crow New York, By Dr. Cheryl Hicks; Black Fortunes: The Story of the Six African Americans who Escaped Slavery and Became Millionaires; Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN) 1903