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

7:30 PM to 8:00 PM



On 125th Street near the Kress store, a reporter for the Afro-American watched around 7:30 PM as “mounted police rode the sidewalk keeping the crowd back.” On the other side of the street, however, where police made no efforts to clear the street, “the crowd was growing thicker.” He listened as “Young men and women talked about mass action, about the beating up of "the poor little boy," about "if this was a white neighborhood and a colored man had hit a white boy, they would have strung him up long ago." Police as well as the Kress store staff were targets of the people on the street; the reporter told a “youth” who stopped to “harangue the police” to “move on.”

The crowds across the street continued to be fed by people on their way to the theaters that lined that side of 125th Street. Among them were Lloyd Hobbs, a sixteen-year-old Black boy and his fifteen-year-old brother Russell, on their way to a show at the Apollo Theater. Leaving their family home at 321 St. Nicholas Avenue only a block and a half from the theater around 7:30 PM, they had passed “groups of people standing on corners and along 125th Street,” far more police officers than usual and “windows in many stores broken.” Unlike Channing Tobias a few hours earlier, that scene did not discourage the brothers from continuing on to the theater. Unfortunately, as Tobias had feared, when they emerged from the theater after midnight, the disorder in Harlem would have grown.

At the opposite end of the block, Charles Romney arrived on the corner of 7th Avenue to find groups of people talking about a boy being murdered by police. Like the Hobbs brothers, he saw “lots of windows smashed” on 125th Street. People had begun to throw objects at previously undamaged windows east of Blumstein’s department store as Romney saw the broken windows from the corner. Even as police reinforcements continued to arrive, including the emergency truck that had originally stopped at 124th Street and 7th Avenue, there is no evidence that officers on 125th Street arrested anyone for breaking windows at this time. They may have arrested some of those on the street; Romney saw police putting people into radio cars at the corner of 7th Avenue. He left when threatened with arrest by one officer, walking to the rear of the Kress store on 124th Street in search of information. While he found an “excited” crowd on the corner of 124th Street and 7th Avenue, a police officer at the store entrance told him to get away from the area. Worried that his wife was about to leave to visit her mother, Romney decided to go to his home to warn her not to go out on the streets.

As Romney was leaving 125th Street, many other people were arriving as rumors spread through Harlem. Carlton Moss, a twenty-six-year-old Black actor and writer, who was initially unconvinced by an actor’s claim that he had seen a riot break out on 125th Street in response to a young Black boy being beaten to death, soon heard other reports of “rising riots” that caused him to abandon a rehearsal and investigate what was happening. Going south on 7th Avenue, he found “throngs of spectators all hastening in the same direction.” On 125th Street, the journalist from the Afro-American watched as “the crowd became bigger until it just overflowed across Seventh and Eighth Avenues. Newcomers were initiated into the mysteries of the Young Liberators and white and colored 'evangelists' in the crowd.” In some cases that information would have come from the leaflets the Young Liberators continued to distribute. The idea that a boy had been killed took hold among those arriving on 125th Street even though the journalist observed that “the same people who were saying, 'They beat him to death' could not have given any further proof than the fact that 'they say so' or 'so they say.'”

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