This tag was created by Anonymous.
2:00 PM to 2:30 PM
In going into the Kress store, Rivera was visiting another attraction that drew people to 125th Street, the large stores of various kinds that, like the theaters, spanned the entire width of a block. A 5-and-10 cent store, Kress, like the Woolworth’s store to its east, offered cheaper merchandise than the department stores, Blumstein, Koch and McCrory. Small counters displaying different types of merchandise were scattered throughout the store, behind which stood white staff. The lack of Black sales staff in stores on 125th Street, all of which were white-owned, had been the target of boycott campaigns and pickets for the previous three years, although the Kress store had not been one of those singled out. Around fifty other people were in the store when Rivera walked in, almost all of them Black women, a clientele to which the boycott campaign had drawn attention in making the case for hiring Black staff. Rivera made his way through the store to the rear half, which was twice the width of the shopfloor at the front. A pocketknife on a counter caught his attention. He reached out and put it in his jacket pocket without anyone behind the counter seeing what he had done. His action, however, did not go unnoticed. In one of the offices fifteen feet above that section of Kress’ store, Charles Hurley, a twenty-eight-year-old white floorwalker who supervised the sales staff watching the counters with the store manager, Jackson Smith, saw Rivera take the knife. He called out to the store detective, pointed out the boy, and headed downstairs. Catching boys shoplifting was a regular part of the men’s work. Petty theft was one of the responses to unemployment, poverty, and lots of time to fill in that resulted in boys in Harlem appearing in the Children’s Court, although far less common than violating regulations against shining shoes on the street and selling newspapers after 7:00 PM and hitching on street trolleys and riding the subway without paying – the last of which Rivera had been arrested for just a week earlier. Without a nickel to pay for a subway trip back to Harlem after another trip to Brooklyn responding to a job ad, he had used tinfoil from a cigarette packet to make a slug to put in the subway turnstile. He later told a Magistrate in the Brooklyn Adolescent Court he had used slugs 25 times before without being caught. On that day, a railroad police officer saw him. When he took the pocketknife, Rivera was on parole, due back in court the next week.
Arriving on the shopfloor, Hurley grabbed Rivera, and demanded the pocketknife. When Rivera denied having taken the knife, Hurley took it from his jacket pocket. Telling the boy to leave the store, he pushed him toward the 125th Street entrance, joined by the store detective. Rivera tried to shake off the men walking on either side of him, telling them he could walk out on his own. As they neared the front entrance Hurley said, "Let's take him down the cellar and beat hell out of him.” Scared of being beaten, Rivera began to “really fight,” throwing his arms around. In response, Hurley put his arm around the boy’s shoulders to restrain him, helped by a window dresser, Steve Urban, a thirty-nine-year-old white man, who also put his arms around Rivera. Once out of store, in the vestibule, the store detective left to get an officer from the Crime Prevention Bureau. That police agency provided an alternative to arrests of children, with its officers instead undertaking investigations of their conditions in order to refer them to social agencies to better prevent “juvenile delinquency.” Staff at the Kress store referred most of the boys they caught shoplifting to the Crime Prevention Bureau, and had police arrest only one or two a week. A referral meant that Rivera would not face a trip to court after being caught in the store like he had when caught putting a slug in the subway turnstile.
However, at that moment, Rivera, was more worried about a beating from the Kress store staff than what he faced from police and the courts. Continuing to try to get away after the store detective left, Rivera bit Hurley and Urban on the hands with which they had hold of him. Standing on the street outside the Kress store, Patrolman Donohue saw this struggle, and came to investigate, as did at least two other police, his partner Patrolman Keel and a Black officer named Miller. That there were that number of officers near the Kress store reflected both how busy 125th Street was, and the additional police stationed there after the picketing of businesses the previous year, Donohue sent Miller to call an ambulance to treat Hurley and Urban and took Rivera and the two men back inside the store, away from a curious crowd that was gathering.
This page has paths:
Contents of this tag:
This page references:
- Kress 5 & 10 cent store, detail from Bromley Real Estate map
- The Negro in Harlem. A Report on Social and Economic Conditions Responsible for the Outbreak of March 19, 1935 (1935), 95-97, Subject Files, Box 167, Folder 8 (Roll 76), Records of Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, 1934-1945 (New York City Municipal Archives)
- Kress store entrance, c. 1939-1941