Ex-Shoeshine Boy Now Legal Luminary
NEW , YORK. In America today a former negro shoeshine boy became a legal luminary .... and two reputed millionairesses went to gaol. The negro was Percy J. Langster, aged 58, of Baldwin, Michigan, who became the first negro county prosecuting attorney in the United States. “I stand as a symbol of tolerance in the community, which negroes and whites are sharing peacefully,” he told reporters. “As prosecutor I shall deal impartially with all races and creeds.” The millionairesses were two sisters, Dorothy and Pearl Bloom, who lived on New York’s fashionable Riverside Drive. They were convicted of rent "gouging” and sentenced to a year’s gaol. The district attorney told the court: “The worst punishment for these two would be to force them to live in one of their own filthy, dilapidated tenements. “They forced poor people to pay bonuses of from 100 dollars to 600 dollars (£3l to £186). They bought old furniture from the Salvation Army in their dead mother’s name and resold it to tenants at high prices.
Permanent link to this item
https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/GISH19490222.2.105
Bibliographic details
Gisborne Herald, Volume LXXVI, Issue 22877, 22 February 1949, Page 7
Word Count
174Ex-Shoeshine Boy Now Legal Luminary Gisborne Herald, Volume LXXVI, Issue 22877, 22 February 1949, Page 7
Using This Item
The Gisborne Herald Company is the copyright owner for the Gisborne Herald. You can reproduce in-copyright material from this newspaper for non-commercial use under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). This newspaper is not available for commercial use without the consent of the Gisborne Herald Company. For advice on reproduction of out-of-copyright material from this newspaper, please refer to the Copyright guide.
Log in