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5:30 PM to 6:00 PM
At the corner of 125th Street and 7th Avenue, likely too far east on 125th Street for Di Martini to see as he was leaving, several groups of people were gathered, some likely sharing rumors about what had happened in the Kress store. There were also groups a block south, on the corner of 124th Street and 7th Avenue. Channing Tobias, the fifty-three-year-old Black secretary of the YMCA’s Department of Interracial Affairs, encountered a crowd there on his way to shop on 125th Street. When he asked why they were gathered, he “was told that a boy had been killed in Kress’s store and was secreted in the basement.” Tobias continued to 125th Street, turning away from the Kress store to visit the Davega store on the block to the east. Not long before 6:00 PM, James Parton, a Black Communist, arrived at the corner of 125th Street and 7th Avenue with a stepladder and an American flag banner. He likely had come from the Young Liberators office. As Parton prepared to set up to speak, Daniel Miller, a twenty-four-year-old white member of the Nurses and Hospital League, a Communist affiliated organization, passed on his way home. Parton told Miller there had been “a little trouble” and asked for his help calling for a boycott of the Kress store. The corner was a frequent venue for the street speakers that had been a feature of Harlem life for almost twenty years. Political organizations were an increasingly large presence among those speakers in the 1930s, including mostly white Communist Party members deployed as a central part of a campaign to win over the Black community. In attacking the practices of a white business such as the Kress store, Parton and Miller would have been delivering a message those on the street could have heard from many street speakers, even as each organization promoted a different response. Appealing to Black and white workers to unite, as Parton and Miller planned to do, was the core of the Communist Party message. In contrast, the Garveyites and Sufi Abdul Hamid’s Negro Industrial and Clerical Alliance promoted “race consciousness” across class lines. As it happened, Parton and Miller did not speak on the corner. Told to move to the Kress store by a traffic police officer (or perhaps deciding it would be more effective to speak in front of the location they were targeting), they relocated to the store.
As Parton and Miller walked along 125th Street, Joe Taylor, the Black leader of the Young Liberators, arrived at the West 123rd St. police station and succeeded in getting inside to seek information from police on what had happened in the Kress store.
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- Interview of Channing Tobias by E. Franklin Frazier, August 10, 1935, Harlem Survey: March 19th, Box 131-123, Folder 7, E. Franklin Frazier Papers (Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University).
- Public Hearings - Outbreak (March-April 1935), 30, Subject Files, Box 408, Folder 8 (Roll 194), Records of Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, 1934-1945 (New York City Municipal Archives).
- Public Hearings - Outbreak (March-April 1935), 47, Subject Files, Box 408, Folder 8 (Roll 194), Records of Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, 1934-1945 (New York City Municipal Archives).
- Public Hearings Events of March 19 – May 4, 1935, 61, Subject Files, Box 408, Folder 5 (Roll 194), Records of Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, 1934-1945 (New York City Municipal Archives).