Criddle, Baltimore. Baltimore Criddle was created by Harris Dickson and appeared in a number of stories in The Saturday Evening Post from 1913 to at least 1921, beginning with “The Grand Organizer” (Saturday Evening Post, Jan 4, 1913). Baltimore Criddle is a Con Man. He is an African-American swindler who cleverly separates other African-Americans (as stereotypically portrayed as Criddle) from their money. He does so by posing as the Reverend of the True Hope Lodge of Race Pride and accepting donations for various good works.
A couple of things worth mentioning here: to be clear, Baltimore Criddle is a racist stereotype (Harris Dickson, the creator of Criddle, made a career of writing racist stereotypes). That I’m including Criddle among the “heroes” in my pulp book doesn’t mean I endorse the racism of the Criddle stories or think that Criddle is good; I’m a completist, and Criddle was a series character of the genres I was collecting for my book, so in he goes, with me holding my nose while I included him. He’s not the only racist stereotype in my book–but the book wouldn’t be complete and thorough and historically accurate, and I wouldn’t be true to the popular culture of the era, if I ignored the racist stereotypes.
Second, note that the Criddle stories appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, emphatically not a pulp magazine. Unfortunately, the Criddle stories are neither the first racist series to appear in the Post, nor the last; during the pre-WW2 years racist stories of various constructions were a constant in the Post, as they were in the other slick magazines. This is why I have, for a very long time, objected when people talk about the racism of the pulps–because the slicks (and radio and film and comic strips and newspaper fiction and poetry) weren’t any better. To single out the pulps for racism is to, in a way, privilege the pulps as somehow being exceptional or extraordinary in their racism, and that simply wasn’t the cast. Everything was racist back then, and the pulps were no worse than the slicks et al.