It is a few minutes before ten o'clock, it is dark, it is August, and it is hot. The sounds are of traffic rushing down one of Birmingham, Alabama's major arteries a hundred yards away. The occasional car that squeals around the corner and drives northward flashes past groups of dark figures lounging on rickety wooden chairs transplanted from living rooms to front lawns.
The headlights of a passing car gleam off the white police squad car parked on the left, off the white facade of a church a few doors down.
The scene is a Negro housing project. What is happening is not very dramatic; it is certainly not very unusual. Two white patrolmen have stopped, as they do two or three times a week, in front of one of the low, red-brick buildings that are each nearly a block long.
The policemen will spend anywhere from a few minutes to an hour relaxing in the box-sized living room of a man who neighborhood residents simply call "Winehead." A blind man with a wife and family to support, Winehead sells liquor in his home. His wife buys it at one of the "state stores" supervised by Alabama's beverage control commission. On Sundays or late in the evening, when the state stores are closed, Winehead's business picks up. The profit averages $60 per week -- split 50-50 with the two cops on the three-to-eleven shift.
Bootlegging
Bootlegging is a violation of an assortment of state and local laws, but it is a commonplace that there is a lot of it -- and that a good many policemen profit from it. Any Negro who drinks -- and many who don't -- knows where Bambam, Ratkiller, Shep, or Blue, to name a few of the biggest bootleggers in Birmingham, sell their wares.
In addition to those who simply resell state store liquor, there are countless neighborhood retailers of moonshine liquor including beer-like "home brew" and a local concoction known variously as "white lightning" or "Joe Louis" (the name stems from the punch it packs).
A housewife in the Titusville neighborhood points out four whiskey houses in the block-long alley behind her home. What must be the largest Negro shoe-shine stand in the state does a brisk business in liquor. A factory worker estimates that there are 20 whiskey houses in a 12-block area around his plant. A hippie who works as a part-time mail clerk for an insurance firm prefers four smaller houses near the sprawling University of Alabama Medical Center -- they have juke boxes. But as for reliable estimates of the total number, one Negro professional man who, like the housewife who does her shopping at the corner grocery, buys most of his booze from Bambam, put it this way: "I only know where the three or four I go to are. Don't ask me where any more are. Ask the police. They know."
Penny-ante police corruption is apparently almost as much a fact of life in Birmingham's Negro neighborhoods as bootlegging.
It is surprising that Winehead pays so much for police protection, and that the police are evidently unaware of the far more profitable whiskey house that one Miles operates right across the street. For jealousy among bootleggers and cooperation among police usually guarantee a certain uniformity in the relations between the two groups.
Let some neighbor begin trying to pay the rent by bootlegging, and established members of the trade are sure to notify the police rather than allow the newcomer an unfair business advantage. The two policemen who patrol the area on one shift pass the word to the two on the next shift, and the new bootlegger suddenly has a hefty overhead: each of three shifts.
Protection
The protection fee is more/if the liquor sold is moonshine. Produced in backyard stills to avoid the state's exorbitant whiskey tax, moonshine is occasionally poisoned by the lead piping often used in the stills, but it is cheap. It is the favorite drink of the unemployed or of those, like construction workers, whose employment depends on the vagaries of business cycles and white foremen. For retailers of moonshine, the customer turnover is great, the clientele uproarious, the profit margin low, and the danger ever-present that state agents will move in on whatever still happens at the moment to be supplying whiskey houses in the area.
Sales, of necessity, are geared to the poorest of the poor who can afford nothing better: 25 cents a shot, $1.25 a pint, on credit if need be. Those bootleggers who live in areas where there are at least a few relatively well-heeled customers will have nothing to do with untaxed liquor: the amount of cash involved is far too little and there is too much uncertainty. The police, for whom it is the simplest of errands to run someone in for possession of untaxed liquor, refrain on payment of a staggering $8 per week for each patrolman.
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