Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals

by Saidiya Hartman

When Chandler Owen published his essay “The Cabaret as a Useful Social Institution” in the August 1922 issue of The Messenger, the most radical of black periodicals (and one described in a government memo by the architect of the Red Scare, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, as “the most able and the most dangerous of all the Negro publications”), he identified the cabaret as the only democratic institution in the United States. It was the sole institution not defined by Jim Crow and that refused to embrace segregation. No doubt, Owen had in mind young women like Mabel and Mildred and their hunger for a new set of social arrangements. The young socialist charted clearly the connections between the sexual appetite and the movements of the dance floor—and the dance floor itself as a movement against racism and instrument in the reconstruction of American democracy.