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Harlem in Disorder: A Spatial History of How Racial Violence Changed in 1935

4:30 PM to 5:00 PM

In response to the call from the store manager, Sergeant Bauer arrived at the Kress store just after 4:30 PM. With police officers telling people that Rivera had been released unharmed failing to convince them to leave the store, Bauer told the manager, Jackson Smith, that he did not know what else to do. The two men were concerned not to “excite” the crowds in the store, which they feared would “start a riot.”

On 125th Street, two or three groups of people stood outside the store, agitated enough to attract the attention of passersby. Among those who stopped to ask “what the excitement was about” was Louise Thompson, a Black Communist organizer, civil rights activist, and journalist with many friends among the authors and artists of the Harlem Renaissance. Told that “something was going on in the store and that a boy was beaten,” she went inside to investigate, likely not the only person drawn into the Kress store by rumors circulating on the street. She found two or three groups of women in the front of the store. Approaching a crying woman whom she knew, Thompson asked what had happened, and was again told that a boy had been beaten. She moved on to the largest group, standing around the candy counter where Donahue had brought Rivera around two hours earlier. From them Thompson heard that a “little colored boy,” “10 or 12 years old,” had been beaten, and that they were not leaving the store until he was produced. While white salesgirls stood behind some of the counters, Thompson could see no police or managers at the front of the store

In the rear of the store, Smith decided he had to close the store early. He went back upstairs to the offices and called the West 123rd Street police station for the second time, pleading that they send enough officers to allow him “close the doors without causing trouble.” At that time there were likely about eight officers in the store, and about one hundred people, mostly Black women. Three more radio cars and an emergency truck were dispatched. The eight officers on an emergency truck served as the police riot squad and were equipped with a Thompson machine gun, three Winchester rifles, and a Remington shotgun, as well as a tear gas gun. Radio cars, which carried two officers each, were an additional means by which police could rapidly respond. When the fourteen officers arrived, they went directly to the rear of the store, not stopping by Thompson and her group.

Not long after, a woman screamed in the rear of the store. Thompson and other women in the front rushed in that direction to investigate. They found that police had started to move people toward the front entrance and out of the store, as the closing bell was sounded. Women told to move responded by asking what had happened to the boy; police now refused to answer their questions and instead told them it was none of their business. That unresponsiveness further angered many in the crowd. As police began pushing the women and men back towards the entrance, pots and pans were knocked off counters. A police detective arrested Margaret Mitchell, an eighteen-year-old Black woman, for “throwing pans on [the] floor.” The noise as the tinware hit the ground triggered a rush for the exit by many of those in the store. In the confusion, Clara Crowder, a twenty-year-old white clerk, fainted while assisting another store employee, likely behind one of the store counters. While that incident went unnoticed by Thompson and the other women being pushed out of the store, someone in the store called an ambulance for Crowder.

Thompson was in the last group of women pushed out of the store on to 125th Street by police. The women around her continued to appeal for information about Rivera, worried that he was injured and dying in the basement. On the street they joined a crowd that had been swelled by those pushed out of the store and by increasing numbers of people drawn to the entrance by the concerns and rumors being shared along the street. As they had been in the pickets and boycotts of the preceding year, Black women were at the forefront of these protests.
 

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