Ep 1: Atlanta

Novel. Before we begin, a content warning. The following episode contains difficult themes and violence. The Manhattan Courthouse is surrounded.

There were over one thousand people who showed up outside the courtroom. They had snipers on the roofs in Foley Square. They had police officers with riot guns in the hallway.

Inside Courtroom one forty eight, smoke stained shades do all they can to block out the sun and any industrious lucky loose hoping to get a peek inside, and who could blame them.

At the time, it was called the Trial of the Century. It really was national news.

Men in dark suits crowded every available seat.

The entire gallery during the trial was full.

Of press their hats, rest on their knees or turn in their hands. Some fidget, some slouch, others sit ramrod straight. Everyone is focused on the scene in front of them, a man with a carefully groomed mustache walking confidently toward the stand.

He was very aggressive and very ambitious.

That was his personality. Dewey loved being in the spotlight.

Thomas E. Dewey, famed investigator of the crime syndicates, casting a menacing shadow across America.

How do you take this random mayhem of violence and bring it under the law.

Thomas Dewey enters the picture on that platform.

His assistant attorney's shuffle papers. The courtroom leans closer towards the main attraction. The man facing Dewey on the stand he is.

Called sometimes the boss of bosses.

Slender, slightly darker skin tone of Sicilian extraction.

A suit jacket covers tattoos on the defendant's forearms.

All symbols of luck. He took great effort to keep those tattoos out of the public light. At the time, tattoos were not exactly the upstanding citizen kind of thing.

A silk shirt and gold watch mark him as a man with expensive taste. He wipes a handkerchief over his brow and meets the eyes of the courtroom. Everyone can see it. Charles Lucky Luciano, one of the most feared mafia leaders anyone ever knew, is sweating. Maybe he was flustered.

Maybe the government really did put him on edge.

He used to be so sure of himself, but now things don't seem so certain anymore.

Luciano really never stands a chance.

He never should have taken the stand. That was the nail in Lucky's.

Coffin a few blocks from the courthouse, on the fourteenth floor of Manhattan's gothic Woolworth Building, there is an office serviceable tidy inside sits the woman responsible for putting Lucky Luciano on trial, Eunice Hunting Carter, thirty six years old in nineteen thirty six, bright eyes the kind of quietly amused expression that makes you think she's laughing at a joke she can't share. She's New York's first black female prosecutor for the District Attorney's Office in Manhattan. This is

Their lives intersect in a courtroom for one month in nineteen thirty six.

But only two we're given the opportunity to stand out. Lucky and Dewey will go down in history. Eunice was kept from the spotlight. Maybe it's not surprising that in nineteen thirty six a black woman was not given room to share the stage, But nearly ninety years later, Eunice

Unice Carter was the spark that started the.

Fire, a black woman who took on one of the country's most notorious mobsters. I want more people to hear what she did, even more than her achievements. I want to understand who she was.

It's not even just that not everyone remembers Unis, but that people don't even believe she could have existed.

She was really active in the Harlem Renaissance.

Eunis ran for office. People thought she was going to win.

She didn't back down in an argument.

This is a straight shooter who will say something and mean it. But I think she was guarded.

I did wonder if she felt stifled. All around us today, from school rooms to halls of legislation, Black American history is being erased. Remembering Eunice Hunting Carter feels more urgent than ever. But is that even possible when so many years of erasure and forgetting lie in our way. I want to find out to try to put Eunice Hunting Carter back in the spotlight.

And I'm going to ask first Missus Eunice Carter to tell us some of the things that she has on our mind.

This is awesome, Well, Missus Roosevelt, I have to agree, and our association agrees with what doctor Malack just said. We are concerned more though, with the implementation of human rights for all mankind.

I'm Nicole Perkins and from the teams at iHeartRadio and Novel, this is the Godmother Episode one, Atlanta, nineteen twenty four replica by Eunice ROBERTA.

Hunting noonday sun scorched a treeless ribbon of brick red road. A breeze, hot and languid, stirred, fitfully angry, red dust rose in great puffs, only to settle back heavily on all who dared the road. And then impasse for the way ended quite suddenly in according of vehicles, a ford, shining anew rubbed shoulders, with a road mender's pitch cart. They were all there, these and dozens of others, barricading the entrance to a grove of Georgia oaks.

Long before I moved to New York and became a writer, I grew up in Nashville, Tennessee. This was during the eighties and nineties, and when it came time for me to go to college, I knew I wanted to stay in the South. I wanted the familiar, soupy heat, the magnificent magnolia and oak trees. Schools in Atlanta were some of the first I applied to. The city was the

Hundreds, if not thousands, of African Americans migrated from rural areas of the state and elsewhere to Atlanta. They saw it as a place where they could make a life for themselves. That was really the first phase of Atlanta being viewed as a mecca for Black America.

The Huntings are among those drawn to Atlanta. William Alfaez Hunting Senior and Addie Waite Hunting met in Norfolk, Virginia before moving there. William is thirty six Atty twenty four. It's eighteen ninety nine and they've just had a daughter. This was ADDIE's third pregnancy, and a difficult one. They've already lost two babies. They aren't sure this child will survive. For the first few weeks of her life, William and

Auburn Avenue would be come by near twentieth century what Fortune magazine called the richest Negro street in the world, not just in the country, but in the world.

It's close to the white part of town and near Peachtree, the Lively business district. I try to imagine Unice as a child, watching brick buildings go up around her, holding her mother ADDIE's hands as they walk downly paved streets. Units probably sees people from all walks of life, postal workers, seamstresses, accountants, reporters, bakers, tailors, hat makers.

Whatever business that was needed by the black community was provided by black business people who catered to the needs of black residents and also in many cases, catered to the needs of whites.

Off Peachtree, her family can do all their shopping knowing they're supporting black businesses and that the money remains in this community, lifting some families out of poverty.

In the city, the majority of black people lived in poverty, as was the case in much of the South, but you had a strong emerging black middle class and upper middle class, and Atlanta became a magnet that drew these people who wanted to, of course find wealth, but I also wanted to aid in the uplift of the black community.

The house that the Hunting's live in, it's big enough to require a maid, a cook, and a gardener. I'd love to have a maid and a cook right now.

The Hunting family had a very nice home, like twelve to fifteen room home on Houston Street. Houston Street's where you had many prominent African Americans.

I think they liked to have pleasant surroundings. But the most important thing to them was learning about the world. I get the impression that you would be surrounded by books, you'd be surrounded by bookcases.

Unlike literally ninety nine percent of the Black community at that time. Unice's parents have been to college.

Her father, William, was really active in his job, traveling through the South in the United States. He was gone a lot.

William Huntson is the first Black Secretary of the International.

YA, trying to integrate and establish the YMCA for Black People.

And Addie hunting She was a social activist in her own right, one of the founders of the National Association of Colored Women and then eventually one of the founding members of the Council of Negro Women.

Addie writes long articles and gives speeches in front of packed crowds, and her audience hears a message of responsibility, how the first duty of black women is to their homes to focus on their families and children, and their next duty was to uplift the race. But Addie isn't really practicing what she preaches, just like her husband, her career often takes her away from Unice and her home, and as she begins to work with the National Association

She alone, black woman would travel to various cities in which there have been unrest, attacks on the black community, attacks on those who attempted to establish branches of the NAACP.

These trips were dangerous journeys, especially for a black woman. I can only imagine the kind of responses she got from strangers. To me, it speaks to her determination and dedication, her passion to be more than what society expects.

She went to explore, to find out, to gather evidence, to talk to those to encourage individuals in those cities to establish the branches, and she was quite successful of it. She did so without fear.

This makes me think of my own mother, because she sacrificed her own ambitions for our family. She made sure to tell my older sister and I to do more with our lives. As much as she loved us, she wanted us to pursue our dreams. I wonder if Addie had similar talks with unus. Addie seemed to sacrifice her home life for her larger ambitions at such a young age. Did Yunus understand that sacrifice or was she resentful of it.

Pake Smith and Clark Howell. These were the owners publishers of Atlanta Journal and Atlanta Constitution newspapers, two separate newspapers at that time, and each of those newspapers wrote sensational and largely false stories on a daily basis.

So these two white men are stirring up a lot of racist unrest and flat out lying in order to make white Georgians afraid of the power of the black vote, which across America is still just a few decades old.

African Americans were also granted the right of citizenship. The fourteenth Amendment and the fifteenth Amendment guaranteed voting rights for African American men, and so when African American men were given the right to vote declared citizens, it signaled to them a new day in terms of opportunities.

And that threatened Smith and Howell, especially because when black men did turn out to vote, they were not voting for men like them, men whose families had defended slavery.

African Americans were able to garner a degree of political power.

White democrats like Smith and Howell were afraid of black voting power.

They considered African Americans an economic threat because they felt they were in competition against these black businesses that were doing very well.

At this point. As Atlanta heads into the twentieth century, black businesses are thriving, which is not what the country is used to. There are wealthy black people in places like Tulsa and Charleston, but you have to go looking for them. In Atlanta, segregation is still everywhere, but those black businesses exist side by side, So the growing prosperity of the black community is unavoidable. Why should black people have the same or better lives than the white citizens of Atlanta.

It was during that time that the newspapers began to literally create stories that black men were assaulting white women in an attempt to really fan the flames of racism. The leadership of the white power structure really pulling the strings and manipulating their constituency.

Meanwhile, at the Hunting home, letters arrive from both Addie and William Hunting from their work travels on the road. William revels and news of Unice. How smart she is even as a little girl, but still just seven years old in that summer of nineteen oh six. I wonder if she's picking up on the rising tensions. Does her mother hold her hand tighter when white men come by on the street. Do they have a cold word in case they need to run? Whether or not Yunus understands

Black people were highly aware that something was about to happen.

The black community in Atlanta is now preparing for the worst.

They clandestinely ship in on train's weapons arms guns so they could protect themselves.

It's the evening of September twenty second, nineteen oh six, a week and a half before the Smith Howell election.

A Saturday evening. People were leaving work. People were coming into the downtown area to go to restaurants or the theater. People were going into the city to start work if they had night shifts or whatever.

It may be the end of September, but summer in the South likes to linger, and Atlanta is a bowl of humidity.

The streets were crowded and the street cars were crowded.

It's also time for the latest edition of the evening newspapers to unleash their new fictions.

The Atlanta Evening News on that day had just published an edition that screamed headlines about more texts on white women, newspaper boys out in the street, going extra, extra extra. This was an extra edition of the Atlanta Evening News. It was timed to really spark the animosity that was already building up they knew that there would be a number of people in the streets.

Everybody black and white are crowded together on the street cars, bumping against each other on the sidewalk. It's hot.

These newspaper boys yelling out black men, rapes, white women.

People are irritated.

The street cars were supposed to be segregated. You could imagine at the end of a day, when it's crowded, you got a long day at work, you don't really want to get up and give up your seat to somebody.

People are getting in each other's faces.

The animosity, that sense of urgency had been building.

Up, and then the violence starts on the street. Things get ugly fast.

People said we're gonna kill every black person in sight. Then they say every black person. They used the N word, whether it's a man, whether it's a woman, whether it's a child. They did not care whether that person was just simply trying to get home and get away from the crowd, or that person was taking a stand and said I'm not gonna let anybody intimidate me. They would grab that person, pull them off the street cars, first of all, run them down if they were walking in

Mobs of white men are now roaming around downtown Atlanta.

The mob of terrorists grew to about ten thousand men and boys. They knew exactly where.

To go.

Across the Peachtree Business District. Straining with rush hour, they wreak havoc.

There was a young black man named Frank Smith who was a messenger, and he was trying to get back to wherever his office was in the business district. They grabbed him, they murdered him. They threw one man off the for Side Street bridge onto the railroad track. They pulled people off street cars and beat them, killed them.

It's nightfall now.

This assault, this murder, this pillage continued. They dragged bodies of their victims to the base of the statue that still exists on for Syde Street of Henry Grady.

Grady was another white supremacist journalist.

He was revered by white citizens in Atlanta, particularly.

A precursor to Smith and Howell.

He was a symbol of what they were a to achieve in terms of leadership, in terms of dominance of white Atlantas in the city of Atlanta and really Georgia and throughout the South.

In the Atlanta night, the vicious crowd spreads out from downtown towards residential areas of the city.

The terrorists were actually headed to the Auburn Avenue community.

That's Eunice's neighborhood. Her home is right on the border between white and black Atlanta. There the Hunting's wait trapped inside.

They were in their home looking out the window, and mister Hunting, who was ready to defend his family, defend his home against the rioters if necessary.

I wonder where Unice is at this time. Are she and her brother hiding someplace? Does she hear the crowd of angry men? Is she peeping through the shutters? At the last minute, the mob suddenly stops a few houses before her home. The ringleaders declare that homes in this part of town seem too nice for negroes to live in, and so the mob moves on, bringing destruction and violence to someone else's door.

So it moved east to what's called the Fourth War in Atlanta that's populated by working class and poor blacks. This is thousands of attackers moving into that community to essentially destroy homes kill people. The residents repel the angry mob. They were also in their homes, weapons in hand, ready to defend themselves if the mob should get to them.

The terror in Atlanta lasts for another three full days.

Many many more were killed.

Eventually, Georgia's governor calls in the militia and the violence in the center of the city starts to die down.

No one really knows how many African Americans died. The estimate is between fifty to one hundred, and perhaps even more, and in many cases the bodies were spirited away, they disappeared. People did not want their dead to be associated with the riot because even though they were the victims, they feared that there would be consequences.

The fallout of the attacks in Atlanta went well beyond those three days in late September.

Even after the carnage and the murders, you still had the repercussions of the trauma of having experienced.

That Atlanta could rebuild, It could become the place I would excitedly visit as a teenager many years later. But what about the idea of Atlanta. It had become a place that was no longer safe. It's clear Atlanta and its Black community would never be the same.

Most people think about the Great Migration as being a movement of African American men, women, and children from the rural south to the urban north, but you had variations of that. You had what occurred and the aftermath of

More than five thousand black people left the city as a result of the massacre. The Huntings never returned to Atlanta. When I try to understand the impact the events in Atlanta had on seven year old Unis, I think back to a night I experienced in my own childhood when my family home burned to the ground. I was fifteen, so a little older than Unice, and the fire was an accident. But what I remember is not having time to grab clothes for my brother, so he was standing

Lucky Lucciano, arrives in the United States as a young boy from the western coast of Sicily.

Lucky is just ten years old when he comes to Brooklyn. These two sleeping children aren't destined to cross paths just yet. They'll both awake to very different realities before their two paths come together, and soon Lucky's family will be off again, this time just a few miles across the Hudson to Manhattan's Lower East Side.

Lower East Manhattan is crammed with immigrants. At this point in time, it was predominantly Jewish and Italian extraction, all shoved into one tiny area of ten story and more tenements.

If you've seen films like Gangs of New York or Once Upon a Time in America, you can probably picture Lower East Manhattan at this time, overcrowded, noisy, new people appearing daily in a neighborhood becoming known as Little Italy. Lucky's family has come to New York in the midst of what's known as the Great Arrival. Millions more Italian immigrants will relocate to the US, most from the south

The ones already established assimilated New Yorkers Americans at large viewed as a threat. Were these foreigners speaking these foreign languages with different religions. It wasn't an easy climb for those people to come up the ladder.

Black upward mobility in cities like Atlanta was stopped in its tracks because of white fear and jealousy. Many immigrants ran into the same white supremacy in the form of xenophobia. But soon after arriving in Little Italy, Lucky, who at this point is still known as Salvatore Lukanya, which has a nice ring to it, actually shows he's not going to accept that this new reality is all American life can offer him.

Very early on, he starts getting into trouble. He's kind of a rough kid. He's kind of a moody kid.

Before long, Lucky's spending most of his days out on the bustling streets of the Lower East Side, playing truant from school and looking for action.

Like many of his peers in Lower East Manhattan in the early twentieth century, coming from poverty. Yeah, it's the same old story, but very true. They wanted more.

I picture Lucky and other neighborhood kids dodging the crowds, taking chances.

He begins pickpocketing. He begins extorting younger kids for protection money, stealing kids lunch money.

Deprived of the opportunities available to wider society, they're responsible for their own education.

By the time he's a young teen, he has dropped out of school. Both his parents and the state of New York have sent him to Truancy School, but doesn't work.

While Lucky has been finding his way to Truancy School, Unie, with her college educated parents, has been shown a very different path where education leads to success. First, she's taken away from Brooklyn to live in Germany with Addie and Alfais, while William remains on the road traveling with his career. Eighteen months later, Unics is back and at one of the best schools for black students in New York, and then on again to become one of the first black

He, like many of his peers, changed or altered their names to be more easily pronounced or more Americanized. He went with Luciano, and even still there were people had a difficult time pronouncing it. He finally changed it to Lucky keep it simple.

He learns how to circumvent the rules.

Luciano gets involved with the Five Points gang as a teenager selling drugs.

Lucky did have some jobs. He worked as a hat delivery boy, but he was pinched at age sixteen for delivering a hat box with heroin in it.

This would be Lucky's only arrest for the next two decades, but it's a significant one. With a record, he is now prevented from entering many so called respectable trades. The die has been cast, and soon Lucky ends up under the wing of some of the era's underworld leaders.

He's already been mentored by financer Arnold Rostein for a tutelage in organized crime.

But there's still nothing here to suggest the notorious gangster America will be reading about in newspaper headlines in the coming decades, even less so that he and Unice will somehow connect through the world of vice and crime. With her smith college education and her parents' legacy behind her, she's far from that life. For all her experiences and advantages. By the time America reaches the nineteen twenties, Unice is kind of separated from the realities of average Black American life.

Black Harlem was not wealthy or elite as in other parts of the country. The majority of the black community were imparvished and struggling.

How much of what we know about Eunice's childhood comes from her parents' letters sent to each other and to friends. It's a frustrating distance to observe her from, but by the nineteen twenties, Unice begins writing her own story very carefully, and in doing so, she also changes American history. That chapter of her life too often ends up as a footnote in someone else's story, and frankly, that's a shame. Eunice's life deserves more than a quick skim. That's coming

Heard Marilyn Greenwald. I'm a professor Emerita of journalism at Ohio University, and I'm the author of bi biograph, including one of Eunice Hunt and Carter.

My name is doctor Clarissa Merik Harris, and I am a tenured professor of Africana Studies at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia. I am a native Atlanta and so that sparked curiosity in me the stories that I should know that I don't, and I wanted to learn those stories and share that history.

I am Claire White and I am the director of Education at the Mob Museum in downtown Las Vegas. I grew up in Las Vegas, which kind of gives me a leg up in that regard, although the number of organized crime groups that we've had in our city certainly will never rival a city like New York.

My name is Christian Sipolini and I am an author and a historian with a specialty in the fields of true crime, organized crime, and cartel history.

My name is Leah Carter.

I am Eunice Carter's great granddaughter. Her son Lyle is my dad's father. Unis influenced my grandfather and he influenced my dad, and my dad influenced me, not that I have a grand unified theory of that exactly.

The Godmother is produced by Novel for iHeartRadio. For more from Novel, visit novel Dot Audio. The Godmother is hosted and written by me Nicole Perkins. Our producer is Leona Hamid. Additional production from Ajuajima Broumpong, Ronald Young Junior and Zianna Yusuf. Our editor is Ajua Jima Broumpong. Additional story editing from Max O'Brien and Mitha Lee Raw. Our researcher is Zianna Yusuf. Additional research from Mohammad Ahmad. David Waters is our executive producer.