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

5:00 PM to 5:30 PM

Soon after the Kress store was closed, at 5:05 PM, an ambulance arrived. A doctor disembarked and went inside, with police blocking the entrance behind him. Unaware that Clara Crowder, a white sales clerk, had fainted, no one in the group of women with Louise Thompson knew why the ambulance had been called. L. F. Coles, also on the street at that time, unsuccessfully asked several people around him why the ambulance was there, including a police officer who said it was none of their business. About ten minutes later, the doctor returned alone, and the ambulance left. Crowder’s condition did not require her admission to the hospital; instead, she went home, to 473 West 158th Street, well north of Harlem.



Around the same time, rumors about what had happened in the Kress store were being shared almost three blocks away. An unnamed Black man entered the office of the Young Liberators, at 262 Lenox Avenue near the corner of Lenox Avenue and 123rd Street, looking for who was in charge. The organization was one of several groups set up by the Communist Party in the 1930s as part of efforts to establish itself in Harlem. Its offices were the closest of those groups to the Kress store. The Young Liberators had also gained recognition six months earlier for leading a boycott campaign that had won jobs for Black workers at the nearby Empire Cafeteria. The unnamed man spoke to Joe Taylor, the Black leader of the multiracial organization, telling him that “a negro boy had been beaten nearly to death in the Kress store,” and demanded to know what he was going to do about it. Taylor immediately set off to the store to investigate; other Young Liberators likely joined him. The rumored incident represented an opportunity for the Communist Party to continue its efforts to prove itself to the Harlem community by leading protests against racial injustice, but also a threat to the interracial ties among workers they sought to create. On the way, Taylor encountered two Black men who told him that police had injured a Black woman in the Kress store. He sent them on to the Young Liberators office to give that information to “the people upstairs,” who were preparing placards and a leaflet to protest what had happened.

When Taylor arrived on 125th Street, he could not get inside the Kress store. Police officers moved on anyone who stopped in front of the store, so groups had gathered at the intersections with 8th Avenue and 7th Avenue, and across the street, in front of the Apollo Theater. Rumors about what had happened in the store escalated from a beating to a death. A woman came up to a group including Louise Thompson screaming that “the boy was killed.” Somebody had told her that they had seen him carried out of the rear entrance of the Kress store on a stretcher covered by a sheet. As Thompson and her companions walked along 125th Street to 8th Avenue and then back past 7th Avenue to Lenox Avenue, they passed “little knots of people” and heard claims that the boy had died being shared. Seeking information about the rumors, Taylor set off for the West 123rd Street police station, two blocks to the south.
 

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