Lulu White - New Orleans
(1868 - August 20, 1931) was a brothel madam, procuress and entrepreneur in New Orleans, Louisiana during the Storyville period.

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New Orleans Police Department mug shot of Lulu White, 1920

Part of Lulu White's charm was that the general public of New Orleans didn't quite know where she was from. Was she from Alabama? Cuba? Jamaica?
White, on different occasions, would lay claim to each, although she was actually born in Alabama in 1868.
She got her start posing for pornographic photos in the 1880s, and in 1894 established her high-end brothel, Mahogany Hall, in Storyville, the only place where prostitution was legal in New Orleans, LA.

Calling herself the "Diamond Queen" for claiming to having the largest private jewelry collection in the South, White exploited the "exotic," proudly touting that all of her prostitutes were one eighth black.
It was her way of rebelling against the Jim Crow laws.

In 1906, she ran into financial difficulties that left her destitute, and moved to California.
She commuted back and forth between California and Louisiana several times over the course of her career and kept a high profile until the demise of Storyville.

Soon after prostitution in Storyville was shut down in 1917, White got into trouble with the law in a serious way: She opened a brothel too close to a military base and consequently served three years of jail time.

Jazz historian Al Rose sought documentation of her death, and believed that she died at the residence of former madam Willie Piazza in 1931.
However, a teller at the National Bank of New Orleans reported that in 1941, White made a withdrawal.
Otherwise, little information about her post-Storyville life remains

After getting pardoned by President Woodrow Wilson, White went right back to what she knew: she opened up another brothel and stayed in business until her death.

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Moving forward pic:
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How I would love to listen to her thoughts on the SESTA/FOSTA law in this day