J. Mack Johnson's Blog

Black players: The Secret World of Black pimps

Iceberg Slim is probably the best known and also the least known Superpimp of all time.

“Best known” because his autobiography “Pimp: The Story of My Life” was a surprise underground best-seller in the 1960s, when it sold in the millions, especially to a vast audience of black street hustlers. “Least known” because the talented, reclusive writer and self-confessed psychopath found redemption in later life as a doting father — who zealously protected his daughters from the kind of abuse he had routinely dished out to his own whores (ho’s). Repeated jail sentences, the last time in a “steel casket,” cured him of any further hunger for “The Life.”

Iceberg’s self-examination and incisive observations of the underdog ghetto culture that spawned him constitute a saga of American society’s underbelly, particularly during the 1930s and 1940s. His stories, told in accurate street language, influenced rap and hip-hop culture down to our own day. One lame rapper audaciously appropriated his name, and mainstream entertainers like Ice-T and Snoop Dog acknowledge him as the idol of their youthful “gangsta” years.

Now British author and editor Ian Whitaker has taken meticulous pains to track down the “lost” interviews with Iceberg from almost impossible-to-find magazines and newspapers, along with new interviews with those who knew him, including his daughter Misty. Richard Milner, co-author of the anthropological study “Black Players; The Secret World of Black Pimps,” contributes a new reminiscence of his contentious encounter with the King of Tricksters. Whitaker also reprints Milner’s original classic 1969 interview with Iceberg in full.

“The Lost Interviews” is an entertaining, fast-moving, and enlightening read. If you ever wondered about what goes on in the mind and the life of a warped genius who was “totally dedicated to pimping women,” here’s your opportunity to find out.

Iceberg Slim: The Lost Interviews with the Pimp