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

Cheryl Greenberg, Or Does It Explode? Black Harlem in the Great Depression (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 132-136.

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"Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work" campaigns in Harlem Many of Harlem’s Black residents felt anger toward the white-owned businesses on 125th Street before the allegations that Lino Rivera had been beaten by staff in Kress’ store. Expressions of that anger that disrupted shoppers and produced disorder on the block of 125th Street from 7th to 8th Avenues had also occurred before March 19. Beginning in 1932, Black organizations had attacked the failure of those businesses to hire Black staff, called for shoppers to boycott them, and taken direct action to promote that campaign by picketing stores. Street speakers spread that message to an audience beyond the members of social and political organizations, fraternal lodges, and churches. The audiences of mostly unemployed residents who gathered in the street corner meetings provided the majority of those who walked the picket lines. Over half of those picketers were women, in part because most of jobs which the protests sought to open to Black workers were as salesgirls. An even larger proportion of the targets of the pickets, those shopping in white-owned businesses, were women — 85% of those entering Blumstein’s on one Saturday, according to New York Age columnist Vere Johns. Picketing was as visible as street meetings and more disruptive than the marches of earlier Black protests. While the elite leaders of the jobs campaign promoted the pickets as a nonviolent protest, disorder and violence attended their presence on 125th Street. Black shoppers complained of being obstructed, annoyed, and on occasion assaulted and having their purchases destroyed. However, the violence around the picket lines did not extend to breaking windows as happened in 1935. Critics of the campaigns, however, warned that clashes involving pickets could trigger greater violence. In 1934, the concern was “a mass white attack on Negroes,” as Theophilus Lewis put it in his New York Amsterdam News column, or “race riots,” in the words of the judge who granted an injunction against the picketing. After the disorder, Lewis described a potential for violence by Black residents: “There was a time, during the peak of the boycott movement, when a slight indiscretion by a policeman, a white salesgirl or a colored shopper who defied the boycott would have started an outburst quite as serious as the recent disorder.” While several businesses hired Black staff, some of those who committed to do so later backed out or laid off at least some of those they hired, and others continued to refuse to do so. Those responses, and the shutdown of picketing by police in October 1934 after the A. S. Beck shoe store obtained a court injunction, meant that much of the anger toward white-owned businesses and willingness to take direct action aroused by the boycott campaign remained unresolved in March 1935.

Critics of the boycott campaign were quick to connect it to the disorder in 1935. Theophilus Lewis, in his column in the New York Amsterdam News, declared “the apostles of that movement were logically the long-distance leaders of the riot.” The economic campaign they initiated “quickly resolved itself into a race issue,” presented by “picket leaders and soapbox orators” in “terms of anti-Semitism and white versus black,” creating a “feeling of race antipathy” that “remained pent up in the community waiting for a spark to set it off.” Leaders of the campaign saw a different connection, holding white storeowners’ refusal to respond to the campaign responsible for the violence, with Rev. Johnson telling the New York Age the disorder was “the explosion of a suppressed people who have been exploited by the business interests of this community,” and Rev. Imes that storeowners were “reaping the harvest they have sown.” In June 1935, the New York Age claimed the persistence of that connection between protests targeting businesses and the disorder. An investigation of a campaign of the Communist-led Joint Committee Against Discriminatory Practices to force Harlem's butchers to lower the price of meat claimed that the spokesmen who approached to storeowners "hinted at a possible repetition of the the outbreak of March 19, last when countless stores in the community were wrecked and a number of persons injured.... Raging with a fury which taxed all efforts of the authorities for almost twelve hours, that incident created a stir which has not yet completely died down and agitators are said to be in the habit of referring to it as a veiled hint when attempting to approach local shopkeepers."

Historian Cheryl Greenberg drew a similar connection between the boycott and the disorder. She argued that after the collapse of the campaign “Harlemites were left in early 1935 with a strong sense of common grievance and a recognition of the potency of mass action but no organized way of channeling the struggle that had a broad appeal. Yet thousands of Harlemites were now accustomed to mass meetings, to listening to street corner orators define problems and offer solutions, and to breaking the law.” However, the targets of the disorder do not so neatly fit the boycott campaign as Greenberg argues: “The attack was directed against only white property and confined to those areas, both topical and geographic, that were the focus of the failed jobs campaign — 125th Street's white-owned businesses,” she asserts. “The riot did not, for example, attack white police officers or white passersby, or vandalize government offices.” To the contrary, the evidence collected in this study shows that white businesses on the avenues many blocks north and south of 125th Street suffered damage and looting, smaller businesses quite different from those on 125th Street as well as small branches of chain stores. Additionally, there were alleged assaults on white passersby, and to a lesser extent, white police officers. If the disorder began in the footprint of the boycott movement, it overflowed those boundaries and became an expression of the broad “racial antipathy” described by Theophilus Lewis rather than concern with racial discrimination. In that sense, the disorder echoed the attacks on whites of street corner speakers such as Sufi Abdul Hamid and Black nationalists, not the political agenda of the elite leaders of the boycott movement. The more detailed picture of the events of the disorder in 1935 provided in this study is much more like the disorder in 1943 than Greenberg portrayed it, smaller in scale rather than different in character.

Pickets first appeared in front of stores on West 125th Street in March 1932. Members of the Negro Industrial and Clerical Alliance (NICA) picketed Weisbecker’s meat and vegetable market at 268 West 125th Street, when the New York Amsterdam News described them carrying signs that read “This store is unfair to colored labor” and “Do not spend your money where you cannot work," and later, in June, Woolworth's at 210 West 125th Street, according to a story in the New York Amsterdam News. Sufi Abdul Hamid founded the organization when he arrived in Harlem from Chicago, bringing with him experience using picketing to pressure white businesses to hire Black workers gained in campaigns in that city. Harlem, however, did not initially prove as receptive to such direct action. Black organizations would not give him a platform, and Black newspapers generally ignored his campaign, leaving Hamid to make his case on Harlem’s street corners, in competition with Garveyites and the Communist Party. He set himself apart from other street speakers with his elaborate costume — described by New York Age journalist Lou Layne as a “knee length, gold-braided green cape, black whipcord breeches, green shirt and black tie, Sam Browne belt and black riding boots, all topped by a gold-tasseled blue turban.” Hamid was also likely prominent among the street speakers who “viciously attack the white business man in Harlem” about which a letter to the New York Age complained in 1932 and gave “listeners an earful of what the white man is doing and what the black man must do,” according to another complaint sent to the New York Amsterdam News. When Hamid turned to direct action on 125th Street in 1932, New York police proved an obstacle. NICA picketers were arrested on at least two occasions, in March and in June, charged with disorderly conduct and disrupting traffic. Magistrates gave them suspended sentences to discourage further picketing.

After the second set of arrests, which included Hamid and thirteen others and came after four months of futile protest, according to historians August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, the NICA abandoned its campaign. In reporting the picketing only in relation to those arrests, the New York Amsterdam News offered indirect criticism of Hamid’s approach that reflected the lack of support he received from other Black organizations in Harlem. Richard Nugent attributed the end of the campaign to Hamid’s dispute with the Tiger Division of the UNIA, in a biography written for the Federal Writers Project later in the 1930s. Hamid had unsuccessfully tried to recruit the Tiger Division to the boycott campaign, according to statements by its leader, St. William Grant, reported in both the New York Age and New York Amsterdam News. That disagreement spilled over into clashes between adjacent street corner meetings of the two groups in August, resulting in police banning them speaking on Harlem’s streets, and later sending them to corners further apart. A subsequent alleged attack on the UNIA headquarters by the NICA on August 30, 1932, saw Hamid and five others arrested, which the New York Amsterdam News reported with a banner headline. Communist Party speakers seeking space and attention on Harlem’s street corners had also clashed with Grant and other Garveyite groups. These clashes spoke to the incipient violence that accompanied the crowds on Harlem's streets in the 1930s.

In 1933, Hamid apparently relocated his meetings and pickets from 125th Street to the smaller white businesses around 135th Street, the center of the Black neighborhood. There is no mention of this activity in the Black press; the only evidence comes from Claude McKay’s study of the neighborhood, published in 1940. (Historians Meier and Rudwick discuss a campaign that summer across the river in Brooklyn that was the subject of a series of stories in the New York Age, but it had elite leadership and veterans organizing the picket line, so was perhaps more palatable to the newspaper’s editors than Hamid). The white businesses in what McKay described as “middle Harlem” were different from the large department and chain stores on 125th Street. Small businesses, grocers, druggists, and the like, they were usually operated by families and few staff. Hamid’s critics did not think those stores were appropriate targets. “(Certain ignoramuses) descend on a two-by-four shop where a man and his wife eke out a miserable existence and demand that he either take on help which he cannot pay for or else send his wife home and replace her with a colored person—such a measure only tends to ruin business,” New York Age columnist Vere Johns complained, without naming Hamid. However, according to McKay, Hamid had a “modicum of success in the small stores,” as “for the first time some establishments employed Negro grocery clerks, in 1933.”

Whatever Hamid did in 1933, he and his organization returned to 125th Street in 1934 to once again picket Woolworth's, beginning around the middle of May, and to speak on the corner of 7th Avenue. The attitude of Harlem’s elite had changed sufficiently for Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. to join the picket line, an appearance publicized in a photograph on the front page of the New York Amsterdam News on May 26. Hamid, however, went unmentioned in the caption, which identified the protest as organized by the NICA. The sign Powell was pictured wearing read “This Store Does Not Employ Negro Industrial Clerical All.,” an appeal to hire members of NICA rather than Black staff. On the same day, the front page of the New York Age contained a story about another boycott campaign, initiated by Rev. John Johnson, after prompting from Effa Manley and a group of women, according to historian Cheryl Greenberg. Inside the paper, the "Carrying the Torch" columnist called out Hamid‘s campaign for seeking jobs for organization’s members rather than the Black community, and Powell for joining the picket rather than organizing his congregation. By the first week of June, the Citizens League for Fairplay (CLFP), organized in response to Johnson’s appeal, began picketing Blumstein’s department store. Evidence of the protests comes from Harlem’s Black newspapers, which took opposing positions on the campaign that skewed their reporting. Fred Moore, the editor of the New York Age, supported the campaign, and the newspaper effectively became its mouthpiece, with regular stories, editorials, and support from columnists, particularly Vere Johns. The New York Amsterdam News, by contrast, opposed the boycott campaign. Editorials and columnists Theophilus Lewis and J.A. Rogers claimed it would cause Black workers in other parts of the city to lose their jobs. It was also likely that, as Vere Johns and the "Carrying the Torch" columnist snidely charged, that having Blumstein as an advertiser contributed to the editorial position of the New York Amsterdam News.

While social and political organizations, fraternal lodges, and churches joined the League, the direct action was organized by a picket committee led by Ira Kemp and James Thornhill of the African Patriotic League, one of the Black Nationalist groups whose leaders spoke on Harlem’s street corners. Society women and members of the African Patriotic League, UNIA, and Abyssinian Baptist Church picketed, the New York Age reported Kemp as telling a League meeting. Most were women; an Honor Roll published by the New York Age included 83 women and 58 men. They carried signs reading “Stay Out of Blumstein” and “Don’t Buy Where You Cannot Work,” which Attorney Richard Carey assured the group “were in accordance to legal requirements and fully protected,” the New York Age reported. As picketers walked back and forth in front of the store, they were not to cause a crowd to gather or “annoy” shoppers entering and leaving the store, Carey warned, so as to avoid arrest. Departures from “orderly, dignified, peaceable” action a New York Age editorial blamed on “radical organizations.” It was Hamid and his supporters joining the pickets that created “disturbances and excitement.” Carrying “meaningless” signs, they caused “trouble” with League pickets and annoyed shoppers, Kemp and Thornhill told a League meeting reported in the New York Age. Despite their criticism of Hamid, the League and New York Age apparently accepted incidents of violence against shoppers which, at least according to the New York Age, did not involve participants in the protest: “One man who purchased a porcelain jar was accosted on leaving the store and had his package taken from him and smashed on the pavement. Another customer with a shopping bag in which there was a newly purchased straw hat was also buffeted about and saw his new straw hat trampled underfoot. It is reported also that a man and woman went inside the store and attempted to drag several ladies out by the hair.” In the same issue, columnist Vere Johns supported a "head-whipping committee," allegedly proposed by a street speaker, as there were “quite a few thick-headed Negroes who would only be convinced of the wisdom of staying out of a store like Blumstein’s by having their heads knocked about.” These stories suggest that violence attended the pickets, even if it was not always expressed. Those details of the picketing receive only passing mention in the analyses of historians, discussed briefly by Cheryl Greenberg, William Muraskin, and Christie Anderson, but not at all by Gary Hunter, Ralph Crowder, and Winston McDowell.

After eight weeks, Blumstein’s agreed to hire thirty-five Black staff on July 26. Hamid’s NICA returned to picketing Blumstein's, complaining it had been ignored during negotiations with the store. Those pickets withdrew after a month, although the NICA continued to picket Woolworth's, three buildings to the east. The League shifted its pickets to Weisbecker’s meat and vegetable market further west on 125th Street, starting on August 24, a move announced with a banner headline in the New York Age. However, by mid-September, the League leadership and the leaders of the Picket Committee were at odds over the women Blumstein had hired, who were all light-skinned, and not drawn from those who picketed, the New York Amsterdam News reported. As Kemp and Thornhill extended their targets on West 125th Street, the League leaders and the New York Age were describing the Picket Committee as “renegades” and attacking the targets and tactics of their pickets. Given the newspaper’s clear opposition to the group, the sudden attention to the disorderly nature of picketing in its stories may not be reliable evidence — but it could equally be reporting what had always been part of this direct action as distorting the activities of the Picket Committee. The New York Amsterdam News was in agreement with New York Age’s attacks on Kemp and Thornhill, although it blamed the CLFP for the Picket Committee’s actions as it had “double-crossed” the group. However they behaved, once the Picket Committee broken away from the League, they appear to have increased the scale of picketing and the disorder it brought to 125th Street.

By September 21st, fifty to sixty picketers appeared daily on 125th Street, making it difficult for customers to enter stores along 125th Street, according to evidence given in the New York Supreme Court cited by historian Christie Anderson. Although a week or so earlier, Kemp had told the New York Amsterdam News that eight clothing and shoe stores spread along the two blocks between Lenox and 8th Avenues had entered into agreements with his group, and hired thirty Black staff, pickets reappeared to pressure them to hire members of his organization. A. S. Beck’s shoe store was among that group, with pickets beginning on September 15, according to the evidence presented in the New York Supreme Court. So too were the La Gene Shop and Nobbes Dress Shop, according to the New York Age and New York Amsterdam News. Those pickets were “Intimidating store-keepers, assaulting shoppers and by a campaign of maliciousness with no regard as to the results of their vicious tactics…demanding complete control of the allotting of jobs to Negroes in the 125th Street stores,” the New York Age reported. The specific incidents reported in the press focused on interactions with shoppers that Carey had warned the CLFP to avoid. Police arrested a picketer named Arnold Brout, for accosting Eleanor Hove in front of the Weisbecker store to stop her shopping inside, so that, “annoyed by his efforts, she crossed the street, where she was slapped by the man,” according to the New York Age. Several weeks later, witnesses told the New York Supreme Court “one of the pickets [at Beck’s shoe store] collided with a prospective customer about to enter the store and threw her down. Disorder followed. Two of the defendants were arrested, tried and found guilty of disorderly conduct.” The New York Age described that case as men “annoying colored customers who attempted to enter the store." The New York Amsterdam News reported the arrests without details, noting only that picketers had distributed leaflets accusing store management of framing the two men. While all those incidents involved woman shoppers, Vere Johns described how male picketers “have a habit of using threatening language to gentlemen and making motions towards their rear pockets with their hands.” Johns also reported two other arrests for disorderly conduct, of Henry Veal, one of the officials of the Picket Committee and another man.

On October 31, New York Supreme Court Judge Samuel Rosenman ended these clashes by granting Beck’s shoe store an injunction against Kemp and Thornhill’s pickets. He decided that the “controversy here is not a labor dispute,” in which picketing was legally protected, but “solely a racial dispute.” Permitting pickets in “a dispute of one race as opposed to another” risked counter protests by white groups, Rosenman argued, and “substantial danger that race riots and race reprisals might result in this and other communities.” As a result of the injunction, on November 3 police arrested two men for picketing Beck’s store, according to stories in New York Age and New York Amsterdam News. Unlike picketers arrested earlier, those men received fines or Workhouse terms rather than suspended sentences, the New York Age reported. The CLFP and its supporters in the New York Age celebrated the injunction, despite its restriction on an effective form of direct action, as it shutdown down the “renegade pickets,” or as New York Age columnist Ebernezer Ray put it, was “the means of exterminating a group of parasites who had brought ill-repute to a reputable movement.”

The efforts of white business organizations, Jewish groups, and police to end Hamid’s direct action enjoyed similar support from the CLFP’s leaders and the New York Age. In October, a white insurance adjuster and member of the Jewish Minutemen of America named Edgar Burman alleged Hamid had made anti-Semitic statements at a meeting on the corner of West 125th Street and 7th Avenue, resulting in police charging Hamid with disorderly conduct. The New York Age reprinted in full the story from the Jewish Day reporting those allegations, and later took on its claim that Hamid had called himself the “Black Hitler.” Magistrate Harris acquitted Hamid, however, unable to resolve the contradictory statements of the white accusers and Hamid’s supporters, the New York Age reported, and frustrated that no police officer had been at the meeting to provide “disinterested” testimony, according to the New York Herald Tribune. Columnist Ebenezer Ray had no such difficulty, questioning the credibility of the defense in the New York Age. Three months later police again arrested Hamid, charging him with preaching atheism and selling books without a permit. On this occasion, a police officer was present at the street meeting to provide evidence, and Fred Moore and senior police officers were on hand as character witnesses to aid the magistrate in sentencing, the New York Age reported. “From the crowded courtroom, from the number of prominent citizens and law officers in hand ready to tell the court what kind of a man the uniformed Mohamed is, it was quite obvious,” a journalist for the Afro-American wrote, “that a trap had been set for the caustic soapbox orator and non-conformist and that the threat of police and certain Harlemites to 'get him yet' was being realized.” Hamid received two concurrent sentences of ten days in the Workhouse.

Although Hamid’s conviction was not the end of his activity in Harlem, as Vere Johns had trumpeted in the New York Age, there were no reports of picketing on 125th Street after the arrests at Beck’s store until the three Young Liberators appeared on March 19. (Picketing and calling for a boycott as response to violence by the staff of white businesses had precedent; Meier and Rudwick found such violence was the focus of protests in southern cities.) The boycott campaigns did contribute to who else was on the street that night. Lt. Battle told a public hearing of the MCCH that additional police officers patrolled the block of West 125th Street from 7th to 8th Avenues as a result of “unusual picketing of some of the stores” in the previous six months.

After the disorder, pickets returned to 125th Street. The groups involved cast their demands in terms of labor disputes to avoid the injunction granted the year before (which applied only to those named in the case, namely Kemp and Thornhill’s group). "More than a dozen pickets, white and colored, have been parading back and forth in front of Weisbecker's Market" since early June, a story New York Age noted, organized by the Joint Committee Against Discriminatory Practices. A Communist-led organization, it enjoyed the support of what Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. described to a MCCH investigator as the "most progressive and active members" of the CLFP. Powell himself numbered among those supporters, as did Rev. William Imes, as both joined the interracial picket, according to Naison. So too did the Elks and the African Patriotic League, according to Greenberg. The Negro Liberator, a publication of the CP’s LSNR reported the protest on June 15 and published a photograph of two male picketers, one Black, one white, on the front page on July 1, 1935. One carried a sign that read, “We Demand 1. Negro Truck Drivers 2. 50% Negro Employees 3. Recognition of Action [Illegible].” "Extra details of police" were assigned to the area, according to the New York Age, as a "precautionary measure." Greenberg notes "police stopped the picket line," citing a clipping of a New York Amsterdam News story from the same date as that New York Age story, June 15 that is not in the newspaper itself. Picketing clearly continued after that date, as the photograph in the Negro Liberator indicates, but it had ended by July 18, when a MCCH investigator reported on a meeting of the Joint Conference discussing alternative actions as the picketing had ceased.

Hamid also returned to 125th Street, to picket the Lerner Shop, having reorganized the NICA as what he claimed was a labor union so entitled to picket. Hamid’s supporters demanded that the store's Black women employees join the NICA, setting up the picket when they refused, according to the affidavits Katherine Harris and Marion Hoyes provided to support the store’s request for an injunction to stop the protest. The pickets went unreported in Harlem’s newspapers until that injunction was granted. Judge Cotillo's decision that the NICA was not a union drew brief mention in stories in the New York Age and New York Amsterdam News. A longer story in the New York Times recounted the argument of the store’s lawyer, who used the disorder to amplify the connection between pickets and racial violence made by Judge Rosenham in granting the injunction the previous year: “To deny the injunction would be to encourage so-called racketeers in the instigation of race prejudice which all too readily, particularly at the present time, may tend to lead to further race riots." Fred Moore again appeared to attack Hamid and support the injunction. For the following several years the only pickets found in Harlem were those of the Communist Party and trade unions in labor disputes. Only in 1938, after the United States Supreme Court recognized that Black workers suffered employment discrimination based solely on their race and could therefore picket on that basis, did the Black organizations that had joined the Citizen’s League turn again to picketing as a strategy, in a campaign ultimately led by Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Jr., described by historian Cheryl Greenberg.