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

Cheryl Greenberg, "The Politics of Disorder: Reexamining Harlem's Riots of 1935 and 1943," Journal of Urban History 18.4 (1992): 406.

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Windows broken (72) A window in the S. H. Kress 5 & 10c store being hit by an object and breaking began the disorder. Objects thrown at the windows of stores, mostly those with white owners, was the most prevalent event in the following hours, with at least 300 businesses damaged. Such attacks were unfamiliar from the racial disorder of previous decades. Business and residential property had been the targets of violence, but that property had been Black-owned and damaged or destroyed by white crowds. However, white businesses in Harlem had been the focus of protests against their failure to hire Black workers in the years immediately prior to the disorder, culminating in a campaign by a coalition of Black organizations in 1934. Those efforts involved boycotts and pickets, not breaking store windows. A competing campaign by the Communist Party did extend to smashing windows in the Empire Cafeteria. The potential for picketing to lead to violence, and specifically to a “race riot,” was one of the justifications given by the judge in the New York State Supreme Court who outlawed the tactic in 1934, effectively ending the boycott campaign for the hiring of Black workers. That sentiment was echoed after the disorder by Black columnist Theophilus Lewis in the New York Amsterdam News, a critic of the boycott movement: "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. The feeling of race antipathy, perhaps not intended by the leaders of the boycott, has remained pent up in the community waiting for a spark to set it off." The turn to breaking windows as a final resort was captured by Gill Horton, a Black former cabaret owner quoted by Joseph Mitchell in the New York World-Telegram after the disorder. "I didn’t throw no rocks," he reportedly said. "I broke my last window when I was going on 10. Of course, if I was pushed a little I might let loose a few bottles and brickbats, but nobody pushed me yet.” Many others in Harlem clearly had been pushed. When James Hughes, a twenty-four-year-old Black shoe repairer returning home, found himself in a crowd at 8th Avenue and West 125th Street, he heard people saying, "Let's break windows," he later testified in court.

Historians Cheryl Greenberg and Larry Greene have argued that decision had the opposite effect to what the judge intended, shutting off an outlet for discontent and protest, and leaving Harlem’s residents with fewer alternatives to violence. The events in front of Kress’ store before someone threw the object that broke one of its windows replicated and recapitulated those tensions. Three men had been protesting the store employees’ treatment of Lino Rivera by walking in front of the store with banners — picketing. Police officers arrested the group, shutting down those means of protest. On this occasion, unlike earlier protests, members of the crowd attacked the store.

The objects thrown at store windows were most often described as rocks or stones, and less often as bricks — the objects recovered from the windows of Herbert’s Blue Diamond jewelry store displayed by a clerk for a Daily News photographer the day after the disorder. All those objects could be found around Harlem. An employee of the Blackbird Inn told a reporter for the New York Post that much of that material came from the island that ran down the middle of 7th Avenue, where stones and debris left after the paving of the street had been dumped. Other larger objects found on the street were sometimes used: ashcans and trashcans. (The tailor’s dummy allegedly thrown through Sam Lefkowitz's store window likely came from another damaged store.) In a handful of cases, the missiles were objects more likely brought from home — bottles, clubs, and hammers — or items individuals happened to have with them, such as umbrellas (there was rain on the night of the disorder). At least two windows in looted stores were allegedly kicked in.

While newspaper reports routinely described store windows as “smashed,” the extent of the damage they suffered varied. A single object generally broke and created a hole in a window rather than shattering it entirely, as is evident in a photograph published in the Daily News that shows a white police officer and a white store manager speaking through a hole in an unidentified shoe store. To remove most or all of the glass from a display window took more than one object, which usually meant more than one person, depending obviously on the size of the window. Stores on West 125th Street, particularly the department stores and those that wrapped around the corners of the intersections with 8th, 7th, and Lenox Avenues had far larger windows than the smaller businesses on the avenues themselves. More extensive damage to windows appears to have been associated with looting, and may have occurred when groups or individuals returned to stores with broken windows to take merchandise. A section of Lenox Avenue in a photograph published by the Daily News and an unpublished image by another photographer shows that variety of damage: closest to the camera is a rental agency with a hole in its window, which still contained the ashcan that created it, that does not appear to be looted; to its left are two grocery stores and a cigar store whose windows are almost entirely gone, and whose contents have been taken. The sources do not offer a clear picture of the extent of the damage to the stores identified as having broken windows but not as looted. The reporter for La Prensa who listed thirty-five businesses with broken windows on Lenox Avenue, West 125th Street, and 8th Avenue, ended their list by alluding to an unspecified number of other stores not on the list that suffered relatively little damage compared with those listed. There are no details for just under half of those identified (33 of 69) in the sources; of the remainder, fragmentary information suggests fourteen businesses could have been suffered limited damage.

Efforts to damage stores may also have extended to destroying merchandise by throwing it into the street, on a night when it rained. The Afro-American most directly reported that practice, in which “the goods was dragged in the wet sidewalk and destroyed.” The New York Times and Atlanta World reported goods taken out of windows and “strewn” and “scattered” on the sidewalk without mention of the intention. So too did Betty Willcox, who told a New York Evening Journal that on West 125th Street, "I saw that the windows of all the stores around there had been shattered and the goods thrown all over the place." Merchandise on the street, however, could also have been a byproduct of looting rather than attacks on businesses, thrown or carried out of stores so they could be taken — as seemed to be the case in a photograph of a damaged grocery store published in the New York Evening Journal. Some of those arrested during the disorder denied "breaking the store windows" and instead insisted "that they had picked the articles up from the street after others had thrown them out of the stores," according to a story in the New York Sun (which dismissed those claims as an effort to avoid responsibility).

When objects broke windows, glass went flying, hitting individuals on at least five occasions. All those reported injuries came after 1:00 AM, so during the period when most of the reported looting took place, and in the areas where that looting was concentrated, on Lenox Avenue from 127th Street to 130th Street and on 7th Avenue and 116th Street. Evidence about the circumstances of those injuries is fragmentary, brief details in lists and hospital records rather than discussions in stories. One record explicitly linked the injuries to windows being broken in stores. In the 32nd Police Precinct book of aided cases, Herbert Holderman was listed as “cut by flying glass when some unknown persons broke windows of stores.” "Flying glass” and “falling glass” were the reported causes of the four other injuries. That glass could have come from smashed windows in cars and buses driving on Harlem's streets, which also had objects thrown at them, although such attacks were reported only on 7th Avenue. Those injuries could also have been the result of throwing objects at windows or climbing or reaching into broken windows to take merchandise. However, crowds of bystanders were on Harlem's streets throughout the disorder, on sidewalks close enough to stores to be hit by glass when someone broke store windows. One storeowner, Herman Young, was also injured by glass from a window broken by a stone.

The seventy-two businesses identified in the sources as having broken windows, and the additional sixty stores looted as well as damaged, amount to around 30% of the total number estimated to have had windows broken. Newspaper stories offered a range of initial assessments of the damage. By noon on March 20, the New York Plate Glass Service Bureau, “whose member companies do 98 per cent of the glass insurance business in the city,” told a reporter for the New York Post that 110 clients had reported broken glass, a fraction of the expected total damage. Other newspapers published totals for the number of windows broken, not stores effected: “at least 130 costly plate gas windows,” according to the New York American; 200 plate-glass store windows according to the New York Times, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Chicago Defender, and Norfolk Journal and Guide; and “more than 250 windows” according to the New York Herald Tribune, 300 windows in the Afro-American, and “more than 1,000 panes of glass” in the New York Post. Inspector Di Martini offered an "approximate number of windows broken" that totaled 624 in his "Report on Disorder" to the police commissioner on March 20, with the disclaimer that the "extent of property damage cannot be estimated at this time." A later survey of forty-seven insurance companies by the National Bureau of Casualty and Surety Underwriters, reported by the New York Times and Pittsburgh Courier, combined the two counts, reporting claims for 697 plate glass windows in 300 businesses, amounting to two-thirds of the broken windows. With the uninsured glass included, the total damage would have been just over 1,000 windows in around 450 businesses.

“Breakages were most numerous on 125th street, near Seventh avenue,” according to that survey, but also occurred in an area that extended “from 114th to 143rd streets, between Fifth and Eighth Avenues. Several thousand businesses were located in that area, the MCCH business survey found, so attacks away from 125th Street were clearly less extensive. The "approximate number of windows broken" Inspector Di Martini reported to the police commissioner on March 20 was broken down by precincts, with almost all (86%, 538 of 624) located in the 28th Precinct, south of 130th Street. Newspapers stories consistently identified West 125th Street as the most damaged area, with the New York Age specifying the two blocks from 8th to Lenox Avenues, and the New York Herald Tribune identifying the block between 8th and 7th Avenues, on which Kress’ store was located. Those general descriptions are in line with the events which are reported in the sources, which are concentrated on that block, with fewer on the block between 7th and Lenox Avenues. Those blocks were where the disorder originated, and the largest crowds gathered; where Harlem’s largest stores were located; and where all the businesses were white-owned. Beyond 125th Street, newspaper stories presented different pictures of the extent of the area in which windows were broken. As neither the police department nor the MCCH appear to have collected details of the damage, as would happen after the racial disorder in Harlem in 1943, that variation might reflect the limits of what individual reporters investigated or, in the case of very wide areas, a lack of investigation. Only the Daily News identified an area as extensive as the insurance survey, from 110th to 145th Streets. The New York Evening Journal and New York Herald Tribune only encompassed as far south as 120th Street, and as far north as 138th Street. Two newspapers focused only on 7th Avenue, the Pittsburgh Courier reporting smashed windows from 116th to 140th Streets, and the Daily Mirror only from 120th to 125th Streets. The Black newspaper’s area fits the reported events, and suggests an investigation throughout Harlem; the white newspaper included only a portion of that area, the blocks closest to 125th Street. Eighth Avenue attracted special attention in the New York Herald Tribune, which reported “windows broken in virtually every other store and glass covering the sidewalk” from 124th Street to 130th Street, and less damage in the blocks further north. Lenox Avenue, where the reported events are concentrated, drew particular attention only from the Afro-American, which offered the only specific count, that “In the three blocks from 125th to 128th Street, west side Lenox Avenue, there were twenty-two windows broken.” The Times Union offered the vaguest area, "for blocks around the five and ten cent store two-thirds of shop windows had been smashed." The tendency to draw the boundaries at 120th Street, together with inattention to West 116th Street by both the Black and white press, effectively left Spanish-speaking areas of Harlem out of discussions of the disorder.

The businesses reported with windows broken differed from those reported as targets of looting. (Of the seventy-two stores with broken windows, three are unknown, three were vacant, and five were later looted, leaving sixty-one that are identified.) Clothing stores of various types and businesses involving miscellaneous goods (which included department stores, which sold a variety of goods, including clothing but generally not food) were the largest groups; the food stores that made up the largest group of those looted were the smallest portion of those with broken windows. Those different patterns suggest that those who returned to damaged stores to take merchandise, or turned to looting, focused on what they needed, not on the wider range of stores that had been targets earlier in the disorder.

When objects were thrown at windows beyond Kress' store, their targets were initially other businesses on West 125th Street, where all the stores had white owners. As groups moved away from 125th Street, they continued to focus their attacks on white-owned businesses. Five Black-owned businesses were among those identified as having windows broken, a number far below their presence in the neighborhood. Posting signs that identified a business as Black-owned appears to have stopped attacks and prevented windows from being broken. No Black-owned businesses are among those later looted. In addition to Black businesses, there were two white-owned businesses specifically identified as not being damaged in the disorder. Koch's department store was well-known for having hired Black staff. A group of Black boys reportedly protected the other store.

Arrests for allegedly breaking windows were reported for only 24% (17 of 72) of the businesses that suffered damage, a smaller proportion than for looted stores (as no one was arrested for the first broken window in Kress' store, the store appears among those cases in which no arrests were made even though an arrest was made for allegedly breaking a window after another attack over four hours later). The twenty-six individuals arrested for breaking windows were identified either because they were charged with malicious mischief, an offense involving damage to property, or by details of what police alleged they had done recorded in legal records or reported in the press. For five individuals arrested for breaking windows there is no information about their alleged targets; some of those four men and one woman may have been charged with breaking windows in stores for which there was no reported arrests. Three of those arrested were women, and one a white man, similar numbers as among those arrested for looting, but twice the proportion of those arrested. Police do not appear to have made arrests during the first hours of the disorder, when windows were broken on West 125th Street as they struggled to keep crowds from Kress' store and off the streets. The arrests that were made in that area came around 10:30 PM. Leroy Brown's arrest on 8th Avenue at 9:45 PM was during that early phase of violence. The handful of other arrests where the time is known occurred on 7th Avenue and Lenox Avenue when reported looting intensified, thirty minutes either side of midnight.

Courts treated breaking windows less severely than other activities during the disorder, in large part because the value of damaged windows was only sufficient to make a charge of malicious mischief, a misdemeanor. Most store windows cost less than $100 to repair, well below the $250 required for the crime to be a felony. Only the five men also charged with inciting others to violence were sent to the grand jury, just over a third of the proportion of those arrested for looting, and the grand jury sent all those men to the Court of Special Sessions to be prosecuted for misdemeanors. Similarly, magistrates transferred nine men and one woman directly to the Court of Special Sessions. In the remaining eleven cases the charges were reduced to disorderly conduct, indicating that police did not have evidence those individuals had broken windows. They were likely in the crowds around businesses with broken windows. In those cases, the magistrate discharged Viola Woods and convicted nine men and one woman of disorderly conduct.
"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.