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Black Herman found his place as the self-proclaimed “world’s greatest magician” in Harlem, the African American mecca during the Jazz Age. It was here, at the cosmopolitan center of a dazzling culture industry where all roads to fortune and fame converged, that Herman mass-marketed the act for which he became best known, a combination of stage craft, comedy, vaudeville theater, religious oratory, and mind-reading tricks. His crowning achievement was a headlining show at Marcus Garvey’s four-thousand-seat Liberty Hall in 1923. Herman sold out the hall for a month at a venue that had previously housed rallies of Harlem’s favorite race heroes and pan-African radicals. His shows were hugely appealing to an emerging urban audience, a highly mixed demographic that included blacks, whites, society members and other elites, and men and women of the working classes.