Edward Crawford and the Black Hand

                Edward Crawford was 15 years old when he was shot and killed the evening of September 6, 1916 while walking home from a store in Birmingham after it closed with the store owner, a clerk and two of his friends. The shocking murder caused a stir in the village of Birmingham, which didn’t have a lot of violent crime. And it rippled out and caused a stir throughout both Oakland County and the whole metro Detroit area due to the store owner’s identity and possible connections to a violent extortion scheme targeting this ethnic community. Just who was Edward Crawford and did the infamous Black Hand kill him?

To access a full episode transcript as well as to access additional material, check out our website.

For questions, concerns, corrections or episode suggestions please reach out to us at museum@bhamgov.org.

Special thanks to the Birmingham Area Cable Board for PEG grant funding that made this podcast possible. Also thanks to past and present staff of the Birmingham Museum, and our amazing volunteers.

Transcript

 Bonus Episode: Edward Crawford and the Black Hand
Welcome back! We took a hiatus while we put up our newest exhibit, which is pretty great, if I do say so myself. We are going to open this season up with a bonus episode about a murder in Birmingham that is connected to a nationwide moral panic in the 1910s. Heads up on this episode, it is about the murder of a child and if that’s something you’d rather not listen to, that’s ok-we’ll catch you next episode. 
Edward Crawford was 15 years old when he was shot and killed the evening of September 6, 1916 while walking home from a store in Birmingham after it closed with the store owner, a clerk and two of his friends. The shocking murder caused a stir in the village of Birmingham, which didn’t have a lot of violent crime. And it rippled out and caused a stir throughout both Oakland County and the whole metro Detroit area due to the store owner’s identity and possible connections to a violent extortion scheme targeting this ethnic community. Just who was Edward Crawford and did the infamous Black Hand kill him?
This is Birmingham Uncovered, a podcast by the Birmingham Museum, where we are exploring the diverse and compelling lives that built Birmingham Michigan into the community that it is today. First, some background on Birmingham: we are a city of approx. 20,000 people over 4.73 square miles, approximately halfway between Detroit and Pontiac in Oakland County. This area was occupied by members of the Three Fires Confederacy of Indigenous People before white settlement in the area started in the late 1810s. Birmingham became a city in 1933 and today is known as a prosperous and multi-faceted community with a thriving cultural scene.
As mentioned in our previous episode on Fenton Watkins, Edward was his nephew by marriage. He was the younger brother of Florence Crawford Watkins, who married Fenton in December of 1916. In her oral history, she mentions that their wedding was quite small and lowkey because her brother had been killed that fall. The interviewer didn’t ask any follow up questions, which I explained was pretty par for the course at the time. In the 1970s, anthropologists and sociologists doing oral histories asked the same questions to every interviewee, so that the answers could be compared and contrasted for research purposes. That’s no longer best practices today but it was at the time of Fenton and Florence’s interview. This left museum staff with a couple of burning questions that we couldn’t get out of our heads, what had happened to Edward?
My colleague, Donna Casaceli, went searching through newspaper archives looking for more information. What we found was fascinating because it gives us a picture of Birmingham, then still a small village, rocked by a crime that wasn’t just localized to the area-or even the United States- but could be traced back to Naples, Italy in the 1700s.  
       Within days after the murder, the Birmingham Eccentric reported that stories were flying around town as to just why the shooting happened. At its most pedestrian, it could have been an attempt to rob the storeowner, Sam Nocorato, who was assumed to be the target. Or, could it have been an act of vengeance by organized crime? On September 7, the day after Crawford was killed, a Detroit Free Press article entitled “Think Black Hand Shot Oakland Lad” reported that the sheriff was stymied by lack of witness testimony and suspected that the storeowner Sam Nocorato was targeted by the Black Hand.
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But before we get to the theories and just what the Black Hand was, let’s back up and talk about Edward Crawford.
Edward was born on April 10, 1901 the youngest of their children. Edward had two older sisters, Florence, born in 1894, and Ethel, who was a child from Lillian’s first marriage who was born in 1884. According to Florence’s oral history, she and Edward were both born on the family farm in Southfield. Edward and Florence had many cousins who lived across the street and nearby.  Today Beverley Road runs through their former farm between 13 and 14 Mile.
In the 1890s and early 1900s, nearly all births happened at home but a cultural and medical shift was underway as to just who helped the mother during the birth. In the early 1800s, most mothers were attended to by midwives, who were exclusively female. Many midwives learned the trade from their mothers or other female relatives, and usually did not have medical training. But, beginning in the latter 1800s, doctors came on the childbirth scene. On the one hand, many women desired someone with greater medical knowledge looking after them during this dangerous time (and almost all doctors at this time were male) and, on the other, doctors and medical organizations campaigned to move childbirth out of the realm of women and the home and into the world of the medical clinic and modern medicine. Florence doesn’t relate who helped her mother birth her and Edward, but by this period it was likely a doctor instead of a midwife. By the 1940s, less than half of the children born in the United States were born at home, a statistic which continued to decline until fairly recently, as homebirths rise in popularity.
But back to the farm on Southfield. Florence describes life on their farm as a good one for kids-but not necessarily their parents. Their parents had to wear many hats to manage all the animals and crops while Florence and Edward could go ice skating in the winter, ride horses and ponies and play with their cousins and school friends. Their farm Florence describes as “just a regular farm” with several large barns with a few dairy cows, chickens, hogs and vegetables, grain crops and fruit trees. 
We can get an idea of what Edward was like from what Florence says. He had a bicycle, which she also rode. The family attended the local Methodist church and went by horse and buggy until their father got his first car in 1912 or ’13. They had cousins that they would visit and stay with in Lake Orion.
We can surmise that Edward had the same freedoms to play and go to school that Florence describes. Both children attended Erity school, a one room schoolhouse in Southfield. But while the family lived and attended school in Southfield, they were also very familiar with Birmingham and for good reason. At the time, Birmingham served as the local village and commercial center for several miles around. There were no other places to shop for groceries, dry goods, and everyday supplies, for starters. And although Southfield Township and Bloomfield Township seem far apart today, boundaries didn’t mean much back then. The center of the village of Birmingham, at Maple Road and what is today Old Woodward was only 2 miles from the Crawford farm. The family would have also come into town to ship their vegetables, grain and fruit to market in Detroit or Pontiac and the light rail provided a way for the family to go on excursions to destinations like Belle Isle, as Florence mentions in her oral history. 
But stores and the railroad weren’t the only things that brought the family into Birmingham. It also had the best secondary education for miles around. In her oral history, Florence recalled transferring to Hill School in Birmingham when she was 12 years old. It must have been overwhelming at first, going from a one room schoolhouse with 2 dozen or so students total to a large brick school building with over 100 students from 1-12 grade. Edward likely attended Hill School too, but whether he tagged along with her from the start or attended later, we don’t really know. For someone his age, school would have been an important part of his social life in addition to his work on the farm. 
The Eccentric article on Edward’s death mentions that he was in the company of two friends. Perhaps these were friends from school that he was spending the evening with. Maybe he rode his bike into town, or caught a ride from his dad in the family car. 
[break]
So, what was the Black Hand and what would they have allegedly been doing in Birmingham in 1916?
It’s sometimes called the Black Hand Society, not to be confused with the Serbian group of the same name that kicked off World War 1 several years earlier by shooting a certain arch-duke named Franz Ferdinand in 1914. (and I’m very sorry if, like me, the mere mention of that assassination gets the 2004 hit “Take Me Out” by the band Franz Ferdinand stuck in your head). The name “Black Hand” is just a fun name for when you are doing crime and terrorism, I suppose. But anyways, it’s hard to nail down exactly what the Black Hand was and was not because its wasn’t strictly organized or hierarchal group but various shadowy criminal activities were attributed to it around the world in the 1910s. In the United States it became a source of a sort of moral panic and it makes it harder to tell the difference between genuine Black Hand threats and copy cats who were Black Hand wannabes. I’m not an expert in the Black Hand or in organized crime, so I’m gonna keep my comments pretty general here.
So what can be said for the Black Hand? They terrorized first and second generation Italians, mostly in larger cities like New York, Chicago and Detroit, in a widespread extortion scheme with a drawing of a hand, either outlined or colored in black, demanding money or else. They threatened death, kidnappings or property damage. And many of their targets took them seriously and paid up. 
Some scholars think that the Black Hand has its origins all the way back to the Kingdom of Naples in the 1750s. And yes, you heard that right, the kingdom of Naples. Italy, as the country we know it today, didn’t unify until 1871 as the Kingdom of Italy. Wikipedia has a cool animated map showing the different kingdoms prior to unification, if you like that sort of thing. 
But the Black Hand didn’t make its way to the United States until the 1850s and ‘60s, when large numbers of Italians started immigrating to the US. By 1870, 25,000 Italians called the United States home, many from Northern Italy fleeing from the wars that preceded Italian unification. The next several decades saw millions more Italians come to the US, but these would primarily be from Southern Italy or Sicily.  Before unification, the kingdom of Sicily incorporated much of the southern Peninsula and the island of Sicily. Grinding poverty in rural communities of Southern Italy and Sicily led 4 million Italians to immigrate to the United States between 1880 and 1924. By the 1920s, Italians represented 10% of the nation’s foreign born population. So, you have Northern Italians coming earlier and Southern Italians coming later to the US. And, like most immigrant populations, they gravitated to the larger cities in the east and Midwest.
Once in the United States, the immigrants lived in close proximity to each other. Poorer parts of urban cities were often segregated by race and ethnicity. On the one hand, they were surrounded by folks who spoke their language, understood their customs and where they could find food and goods they were familiar with. But, there were downsides, often this neighborhood based segregation was legally enforced, although immigrants were not actually protected from crime by the authorities.
In 1908, Gaetano D’Amato wrote an article for The North American Review about these communities 
“Conditions are much the same in these colonies all over the country. They are generally located in a poor quarter of the town, which is not policed as well as those where the native American lives. These newcomers, moreover, are timid in their strange surroundings; they are ignorant of the law of the land; few of them can speak English, even if they dared to complain of the outrages perpetuated upon them. And when the humble and respectable Italians do appeal to the police and find that the law cannot, or will not, protect them, they are reduced to a pitiful extremity that has driven scores of potential citizens back to Italy, kept many an industrious resident in actual bondage to the lawbreakers, and in some incidences even forced hitherto honest men to become lawbreakers themselves”. 
I love the word “hitherto”, its fun to say. A couple notes about that quote, by “colonies” D’Amato was referring to the neighborhoods that these immigrants found themselves in and by “native Americans” he means American citizens whose families have been in America for several generations already. 
In 1903, the first major headline in the United States to feature “the Black Hand” was the case of Brooklyn contractor Nicola Cappiello, who received a letter demanding $1,000 or “your house will be dynamited and your family killed”. Wealthy merchants and businessmen were often targets for logical reasons, they were likely to quietly hand over the cash.  Those who didn’t or couldn’t often found children kidnapped, themselves or family members killed and their homes or businesses destroyed. 
In 1908, the year D’Amato published his article, New York City, which appears to have the highest percentage of Black Hand violence, reported 424 Black Hand cases with forty-four bomb explosions. The New York City Police Department only had forty-some members who were Italian and, of those, only four could communicate in the Sicilian dialect. Those Italians who did come forward with information or an extortion letter evidence, then, had a hard time being understood and getting justice from an overwhelmed and apathetic New York Police staff. 
And many never came forward to the police at all, either out of a belief that they wouldn’t get help and feared retribution or because they wanted to avoid furthering negative stereotypes about their community. A prevailing notion, then and now, of immigrants is that are different in some way from the dominant culture (whether it be religion, ethnicity, race, etc) is that these immigrant groups have “divided loyalties”. In the case of the Italian immigrants, many non-Italian Americans believed that their Catholic faith made them more loyal to the Pope over the American government and that they were inherently criminal and liable to start crime waves or take over local governments. It didn’t help that police departments classified every criminal with a darker complexion as “Italian”, as many in the Italian community claimed.
It’s hard to tell just how many “Black Hand societies” there were and just how many letters were sent by copy cats or opportunists, but Black Hand letters could be found in just about every community with a sizable Italian immigrant population. Police in some cities managed to break up rings, but many were still fearful and that fear spread to mainstream American society. Newspapers capitalized on the sensationalism as readers in small cities thrilled to syndicated newspaper reports of the violence, or shuddered reading syndicated stories or crime novels (mostly featuring Anglo-American detectives bringing down the organization). 
In the 1910s and ‘20s, the extortion letters began to slow down as authorities and the US Postal Service cracked down and broke up the crime rings. By the 1970s, (coincidentally the same time that Florence and Fenton sat down to give their oral history) the Black Hand extortion ring had all but vanished, largely replaced by what most people call the Mafia (and that’s a whole other story for a whole other day).
Remember that one year that we were all scared of clowns with knives? Or that rash of stories about how sex traffickers were putting cheese on the windshields of cars in Target parking lots? Or the rumors that crop up every decade or so about how various immigrant communities in the United States are eating pets?
These are all examples of how these moral panics about crime can spread like wildfire. The term “moral panic” was coined in 1972 by sociologist and criminologist Stanley Cohen. You have a documented case or two of something that happened in one part of the country that gets a lot of play in the media, perhaps politicians jump in as a way to advance their own agendas or to propose laws to stop the crimes, and then other reports and rumors crop up all over the place until it eventually peters out. These panics seem to arise from nowhere, and seem to reflect uneasiness or fears in the general population that are kind of free-floating anxieties until they galvanize around a perceived threat to the dominant society and morals. Think the Salem Witch Trials or McCarthyism. 
Black Hand crimes were a bit like that, there were documented cases but then there were fears and rumors that popped up all over the country. Folks in small towns around the US who didn’t even have any Italian immigrant population saw the Black Hand everywhere even when it wasn’t there. Even worse, a lot of crimes in and surrounding those immigrant communities were assumed to be Black Hand crimes and weren’t investigated as anything else. 
We see this is the case of Edward Crawford. The initial article in the Eccentric jumps to the conclusion that Nocorato was the intended target because of his Italian origin. This does seem plausible if the crime was premeditated, as he was the owner of the store and might have had some business related enemies or would have made a better burglary target. But, the later articles about the inquest and investigation of the case do make it seem as though law enforcement decided right off the bat that it was Black Hand related. At the inquest, Nocorato and his wife repeatedly stated that they didn’t receive a Black Hand letter and that, contrary to a rumor that had been floating around, none of their family had either.  The inquest had ruled that Edward Crawford had died by a shot from an unknown assassin and that the police were looking into if Nocorato’s recent purchase of a building in Pontiac had made him any enemies. 
From the articles, it appears as though law enforcement zeroed in on Nocorato and the theory that the shooting was premeditated. They didn’t look into if the clerk or any of the three boys in the group may have had or enemies. And the police had no leads as to who the shooter was or even a description of what he or she looked like. Sensationalized articles in the Detroit Free Press right after the incident had the headlines “Birmingham Man Shoots Up Crowd: Foreigner Runs Amuk with Revolver; Wounds Three Men, Then Escapes” and “Think Black Hand Shot Oakland Lad”. All of this helped cement public and police perception that it was the Black Hand and no other lines of investigation were perused.
And maybe it was, I can’t say for sure. Perhaps Nocorato and his family had received threats and didn’t report them out of fear or out of a desire to not make their community look bad. Maybe the shooter was mad at one of the group for an unrelated reason or maybe it was a random act of senseless violence. We might not ever know. 
But what we do know is that Edward Crawford was loved and missed by his friends and family. Sixty years later, Florence continually brought him up in her oral history and she seems to be pointedly doing it. Thanks to her and her persistence in making sure that Edward was not forgotten, we know his story.
And here I get to step into the role of a true crime podcaster for just one second: the murder of Edward Crawford has never been solved. If you have information on his death on September 6, 1916, you can contact the Birmingham Police Department.
But back to my role as history podcaster: Join us next time as we look at the life and work of Ruth Shain, a woman who poured herself into improving Birmingham in order to stave off her seasonal depression and ended up changing Birmingham’s cultural scene forever. 
I’m Caitlin Donnelly and thank you for joining us for this episode of Birmingham Uncovered. To see photos and other documents related to Edward Crawford, his family, and his death, check out our website, the link is in the shownotes. For questions, comments and episode suggestions, feel free to reach us at museum@bhamgov.org. Special thanks to the Birmingham Area Cable Board for PEG grant funding that made this podcast possible. Also thanks to past and present staff of the Birmingham Museum, and our amazing volunteers.