This page is referenced by:

• 1 2022-04-05T18:22:45+00:00 Protests at the Empire Cafeteria 9 plain 2024-06-03T13:18:16+00:00 In August and September 1934, Communist Party groups successfully campaigned for the Empire Cafeteria, at 306 Lenox Avenue, between 125th and 126th Streets, to hire Black workers. Two years earlier, when Sufi Abdul Hamid and his followers had begun picketing white-owned businesses seeking jobs for Black workers in 1932, the Communist Party stayed on the margins, its commitment to interracial action and goals at odds with the race-based appeals of the campaign. When Hamid’s second campaign against Woolworths on 125th Street in May 1934 helped spur an alliance of Black organizations, the Citizen's League for Fair Play, to mount a campaign of pickets and calls for boycotts initially targeting Blumstein’s department store, Communist Party members remained on the margins. When the question of who would get the positions at Blumstein's department store that the boycott movement won splintered the Citizen's League, however, the party moved to mount a boycott campaign on their terms, seeking gains for white workers as well as jobs for Black workers. The Empire Cafeteria was a carefully chosen target. Historian Mark Naison found that white workers in the restaurant had already been organized by the party, which worked to have them formulate common demands with the picketers that included hiring Black countermen alongside shorter hours and better conditions. Support from the restaurant's customers was also likely, Naison found, as many came from a home relief bureau on 124th Street that that party had helped unionize.
  
  Beginning in last few days of August 1934, the Daily Worker reported, Black and white Communists and sympathizers led by the Young Liberators marched on picket lines in front of the Empire Cafeteria during the day, with larger crowds gathering for protest meetings in the evenings. Police acted against those Communist protesters with more violence than they did against the Black boycott campaign. The Empire Cafeteria itself also suffered damage that the targets of that campaign on West 125th Street did not. On August 31, when a crowd the New York Times estimated to be 1,500 people, and the New York Daily News and New York Herald Tribune put at 1,000 people, assembled at 125th Street and Lenox Avenue, a rock was thrown through the restaurant window, shattering the glass, some of which hit twenty-three-year-old Esther Friedman of Brooklyn. (Reports of the protest offered differing descriptions of Friedman and her injuries: while the New York Daily News, New York Times, and New York Herald Tribune did not identify her reason for being in the restaurant, the New York Age described her a diner and the New York Amsterdam News as the restaurant's bookkeeper; the New York Daily News, New York Times, and New York Herald Tribune all reported she had been hit by flying glass, while the later reports in the New York Age and New York Amsterdam News described her as hit by the object thrown through the window; the New York Times and New York Amsterdam News specified that the injury was to her cheek, while the New York Age reported it was to her nose.) Police dispatched six radio cars and an emergency squad truck to the scene, bringing fifty patrolmen, who arrested two men, Milton Herndon, a twenty-four-year-old Black man, and Leo Seligman, a nineteen-year-old white man.
  
  Five days later, the evening before the arrested men appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court, the protest organizers staged a "mass rally" at 125th Street, calling on a range of Communist Party groups to hear speakers that included Herndon, out on bail, according to a story in the Daily Worker. After the large crowd at the protest meeting moved down the street to the restaurant, police again put out a "riot call" that brought forty patrolmen to the restaurant to clear the street. By the time they did, the New York Times reported, the restaurant window, repaired the previous day, was broken, but police made no arrests. The only other evidence of this protest was in the New York Amsterdam News story on the court hearing the next day, which included a brief mention of another mass meeting broken up by police without arrests.
  
  When Seligman and Herndon appeared in court the day after the rally, Seligman was charged with throwing the rock, Herndon with riot, according to stories in the New York Age and New York Amsterdam News. Predictably, the Daily Worker insisted at the time of their arrest that the brick had not been thrown by picketers but by "a provocateur." Although the New York Times and New York Herald Tribune had published stories on the the men's arrest, neither reported their arraignment in court. During the hearing, police arrested an additional man and woman among the crowd of supporters in the courtroom as "participants in the riot," after the restaurant manager identified them the New York Age reported. The magistrate held the men for trial in the Court of Special Sessions. Despite the arrests and police presence, a few days after the court hearings, in September 1934, after a week and half of protests, the owners of the restaurant agreed to hire three Black men and one woman under the "same consideration as white workers in similar positions," the New York Age reported, and to take "no further part in the prosecution of those arrested during the campaign." The Daily Worker celebrated the concessions as a "significant victory" that represented "a smashing refutation of the lies of the Negro reformist leaders that the white workers cannot be won for the struggle for Negro rights."