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

6:30 PM to 7:00 PM

Around 6:30 PM, Harry Gordon took James Parton’s place on a lamppost and started to speak to the people police had moved away from the Kress store. He had said only “Friends” when Patrolman Irwin Young dragged him to the ground, and other police officers hit him with their nightsticks. Young claimed Gordon pulled his nightstick from his grasp and hit him with it. Gordon denied assaulting Young, saying that being pulled down from behind and beaten repeatedly left him unable to do anything. Police officers arrested Gordon and dragged him about thirty feet away into a radio car before any of the crowd on the street could interfere. As the car transported Gordon the short distance to the West 123rd Street police station, he claimed that the two officers in the car poked and kicked him, beatings that continued in the station and during the forty-eight hours he spent in police custody.

After watching Gordon’s arrest, Louise Thompson and others who police had moved toward 7th Avenue returned to the Kress store. There they found three men picketing the store. Their placards identified them as members of the Young Liberators, who had made their way along the south side of 125th Street to the store while police had been moving people on the north side of the street away from store. The organization’s leader, Joe Taylor, was still inside the West 123rd Street police station seeking information on what had happened in the Kress store. The placards, read “Kress Brutally Beats and Seriously Injures Negro Child and Negro Women. Negro and White Don’t Buy Here” and “Kress Brutally Beats Negro Child,” reflecting the reports earlier brought to the Young Liberators’ office. Two of those carrying placards were unemployed white men, named Sam Jameson and Murray Samuels, both nineteen years of age; the third was an older Black man, thirty-nine-year-old Claudio Viabolo.

While pickets in front of white businesses on 125th Street had become a familiar sight in the previous year, those pickets had mostly been Black women, joined by a small number of Black men. The mix of white and Black protesters was typical of the Communist Party pickets seen elsewhere in Harlem as part of labor disputes. Picketers had rarely been arrested before a court injunction handed down on October 31, 1934, usually only if they became involved in struggles with shoppers or staff. Since the injunction restricting picketing to labor disputes, simply walking up and down in front of a business in any other circumstance could result in being arrested.

Police officers in front of the Kress store told the three men to move on, as they had others who had gathered in front of the store. When the men continued to picket a group of police arrested them, including Patrolman Shannon, who had arrested Daniel Miller about thirty minutes earlier, and Sgt. Bauer, who had been inside the store before it closed. Jackson Smith, watching the arrests from inside the store, saw police take the placards and pull the men into the store vestibule, out of sight of most of those on the street. The three men were held there until they could be transported to the West 123rd Street police station.

Meanwhile, police stepped up their efforts to move people on 125th Street away from the Kress store, pushing them toward 8th Avenue. The number of people on the street had also grown by this time, fed by those beginning to make their way to shows in the nearby theaters. Reinforcements had also increased police numbers beyond those stationed at the store by Inspector Di Martini. After he learned that police had made arrests, he had telephoned for additional men. About fifteen patrolmen, six mounted police and uniformed men from five radio cars were on 125th Street by this time. Louise Thompson, who “walked up and down 125th Street” after seeing the picket at the Kress store, saw the “riot squads were out” and mounted police “ride the people off the sidewalk.” Those officers were able to move the groups of people back to the corner of 8th Avenue by 7:00 PM. A glimpse of how they did that is provided by a photograph published in the Daily News. A patrolman in the center of the image is pushing a man back, and swinging his nightstick towards him. To his left is another patrolman walking toward the crowd of men and women. Behind him, next to the photographer is a horse, indicating the presence of a mounted patrolman. Men and women in front of the police are turning and walking in the direction the officers are moving them, while those to the right of the police remain standing, either because they are not obstructing the sidewalk or because police have yet to turn their attention to them.

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