Columbia Center for Oral History Portal > Oral history interview with May Corbin, 1984Biographical NoteMay Corbin was born in 1915 to a Cherokee mother and Black and French father and grew up in an interracial neighborhood in Independence, Missouri. A gifted student and musician, she began singing in a Kansas City jazz club at eighteen and through friends was introduced to morphine, cocaine, and later heroin use. In 1940, she moved to Council Bluffs, Iowa to kick her habit. She married in 1942, and worked at a department store in Omaha, Nebraska until her divorce and return to Independence in 1946. At that point, she resumed using. She worked as a prostitute and a heroin dealer in Kansas City, kicking her habit again in 1950 only to be arrested in 1951 and spending seventeen months in prison in Alderson, West Virginia. After her release from prison she lived briefly in Chicago, resuming her habit. She moved to New York City in 1954. Her next seventeen years were occupied by work as a street prostitute to support her heroin use and numerous arrests and stretches of time in the Women's House of Detention. She entered a methadone program in 1971 and worked jobs at the methadone clinic, as a nurse, and for the fire department until her retirement in 1981. May Corbin was interviewed for the project that led to the book Addicts Who Survived
Scope and ContentsMay Corbin describes her life as a heroin user, drug dealer, and sex trade worker in the Midwest and New York City. The interview tracks her development from a sheltered upbringing in Missouri to a singer in the Kansas City jazz world, where she knew Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Lionel Hampton, and Ray Charles. She describes living a double-life as a hotel maid living with her parents and as a secretive user of morphine, cocaine, and heroin. She discusses family dynamics with her mother and her husband during her marriage (1942-1946) and cycles of kicking her habit and then resuming use. As a heroin dealer in Kansas City from 1946-1950, she describes police corruption, the Pendergast crime syndicate, and her acquaintance with gangster Lucky Luciano, as well as the culture of the women's prison in Alderson, West Virginia where she spent seventeen months in 1952-1953. She descibes her life in New York City beginning in 1954, including life as a street prostitute, experiences with the criminal legal system, time spent in the Women's House of Detention, and her entry into a methadone program in 1971. Other topics covered include the race and class composition of user populations; the logistics and economics of drug sales and prostitution; changes in drug quality and price across different places and times; and shifts in the public culture of drug use and sales
SubjectsAccess ConditionsCopyright by David Courtwright
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