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

6:00 PM to 6:30 PM

James Parton and Daniel Miller arrived in front of the Kress store around 6:15 PM. Louise Thompson returned to 125th Street around the same time, making her way from 7th Avenue toward 8th Avenue a little behind the two men. She encountered more people on that block than when she had been pushed out of the Kress store. Small groups talked more excitedly about a range of grievances in addition to the treatment of the boy grabbed in the store: against the agency providing relief for those without work, high rents, prices charged by white businesses and their lack of Black staff. Harry Gordon, a twenty-year-old white student and member of the New York Student League, an organization affiliated with the Communist Party, and two (likely white) companions walking along this block of 125th Street also encountered groups of “excited” people. Unlike Thompson, Gordon claimed he did not know that something had happened in the Kress store. Nor could he get “anything at all” from the groups on the street about the cause of their agitation, likely because he was a white man. He and his companions may have actually have been in the area as part of the Communist Party response to the rumors circulating in Harlem, or, like Channing Tobias, have come for the entertainments of 125th Street at the end of their workday. When Tobias completed his shopping, he came back to 125th Street and 7th Avenue and continued along the street “to go the theatre.” However, he found “the crowd was pretty thick” and “so threatening” that he reconsidered those plans. Although Black residents made up the majority of those who patronized 125th Street in 1935, white men and women from neighborhoods further west and east would have been among the crowds on the street.

Parton and Miller set up their stepladder and banner in front of the Kress store. While street speakers typically set up on the corners on 7th Avenue and Lenox Avenue, speaking elsewhere on the street as Parton and Miller did was not uncommon even if it offered less space for an audience. Communist Party speakers set up in front of the offices of affiliated organizations and had spoken in front of the Empire Cafeteria during their boycott campaign the previous year. Inside the Kress store, the ladder being placed in front of the store caused one of the four staff who remained to call the manager, Jackson Smith, to the front to see what was happening.

Parton climbed the ladder and spoke first. Few in the small groups around the Kress store stopped talking to listen to him, making it difficult to hear his brief appeal for Blacks and whites to come together against the trouble in the store. He then introduced Miller, who climbed the stepladder and started to speak. The white man had spoken only a few words when someone in the crowd threw an object at the Kress store windows, breaking one. Such attacks had not occurred during the campaigns targeting white businesses on 125th Street the previous year; however, windows in the Empire Cafeteria had been broken during the protests organized by the Communist Party. Both Black and white men and women were on street around Miller when he spoke, including Louise Thompson and Harry Gordon.

The sound of breaking glass brought an immediate reaction from the police in front of the store entrance. Patrolman Shannon pulled Miller down from the stepladder and arrested him. Other patrolmen cleared the sidewalk as the people around Miller scattered. Channing Tobias watched from that side of the street as “a policemen came up on the sidewalk on his horse and attempted to charge through the crowd.” Seeing the crowd come back after the officer went by, Tobias “decided it was going to be some real trouble,” and left for home. Police officers followed some of the scattering crowd, including Louise Thompson and Harry Gordon, across 125th Street, pushing groups east away from the Kress store and towards 7th Avenue. About 300 feet further down the block, Parton climbed a lamppost and again spoke to the crowd, saying “that a boy had been killed and that a crowd should gather in protest.”

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