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

5:30 PM to 6:00 PM

Just after 5:30 PM, Inspector John Di Martini arrived at the Kress store. The officer, in charge of the 6th Division, which included the 28th Precinct that took in 125th Street, he had come to investigate the “disorder” at the store. His appearance signaled police awareness of the how white staff assaulting a Black boy could inflame the tensions between the area’s businesses and its Black residents. Di Martini found the store closed, its entrance guarded by several patrolmen. Going inside, he found only a small number of employees. To find out what had happened, he interviewed Smith, the store manager, and Hurley, the floorwalker who had grabbed Rivera. Satisfied that store staff had not beaten Rivera, he returned to 125th Street. Although he said there were no people at either of the store’s entrances, Di Martini was still concerned enough that something might happen to station several mounted police and uniformed patrolman under the command of a sergeant outside the store on both 125th Street and 124th Street. He instructed those officers to keep people from gathering in front of the store; anyone who stopped, they told to move on. Di Martini then left the area just before 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 NICA 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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