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

Claude McKay, Harlem: Negro Metropolis (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1940), 191-192.

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Street Speakers in Harlem Groups on Harlem’s street often came together in crowds of several hundred to listen to street speakers who took to stepladders and soapboxes on many of the corners of Lenox and 7th Avenues north of 125th Street. While speakers had been a feature of Harlem’s streets throughout the 1920s, many of those found on Harlem’s corners in the 1930s came from different groups, focused more on calls for political action, and drew larger crowds.

Beginning during World War I, spring saw speakers appear on Harlem’s streetcorners. Individual political radicals were among the first to take to stepladders and soapboxes, described as an eclectic mix of “Socialists, Nationalists, freelancers and educators” by historian Irma Watkins-Owens. Socialist Hubert Harrison stood out for the breadth of subjects he tackled, described by a writer in the Pittsburgh Courier as drawing crowds of hundreds to discussions of “philosophy, psychology, economics, literature, astronomy or the drama." Marcus Garvey and members of his UNIA were the one group drawing the largest audiences. By the mid-1920s the political speakers were surrounded by those selling goods rather than spreading ideas, “barefoot prophets, musicians, healers and traders,” as Watkins-Owens described them. Stories about street speakers in the Black press reflected Claude McKay’s observation that “the soap-boxes of Harlem were rough men of the people, whom educated Harlemites considered amusing or dangerous, according to the speakers’ choices of subject.” What happened on Harlem’s streets likely lay somewhere between those extremes.

The Garveyites remained a presence on street corners in the 1930s, when political organizations were a larger presence, as the Communist Party (CP), and later Sufi Abdul Hamid and his Negro Industrial and Clerical Alliance (NICA), sought audiences among the growing numbers of unemployed. Responding to the Depression, the tone of street speakers was “more threatening” than in the past in the assessment offered in a feature story in the New York Amsterdam News in 1937. They delivered their appeals in “an incessant flow of language, a little good, a lot more bad, some of it profane and all of it violent,” lamented a New York Age columnist. CP speakers focused on the unemployed, protests against lynching, and the campaign to free the Scottsboro boys, promoting unity between white and Black workers. One result of their appearance bemoaned by New York Amsterdam News columnist Roi Ottley was “that 'capitalist,' 'working classes' and 'class war' have become common household words.” At odds with that message, Garveyites and Hamid advocated for what Ottley and New York Amsterdam News columnist J. A. Rogers labeled “race consciousness” across class lines. Both groups could have been the subject of the complaints that street speakers gave “listeners an earful of what the white man is doing and what the black man must do” in a letter published in the New York Amsterdam News and who “viciously attack the white business man in Harlem” about which a letter to the New York Age complained in 1932. While UNIA speakers typically promoted Black economic activity and race pride, St William Grant was “engaging in talks on the streets of New York and elsewhere in the city, calculated to create disturbance and to provoke the peace of the community,” according to Garvey’s explanation for his expulsion from the organization in 1934. Beginning in 1933, another off-shoot of Garvey’s movement, the African Patriotic League (APL), led by Arthur Reid and Ira Kemp, urged support of Black businesses and joined in calls for white-owned businesses in Harlem to hire Black workers, Reid explained, “to train Negroes in white-owned concerns in order that they might eventually go in business for themselves.”

The campaign for jobs in white-owned businesses was Hamid’s focus, which he brought to Harlem from a successful movement in Chicago. His speeches played on that experience, in Claude McKay’s account, as he taunted audiences “by saying that Chicago’s Negroes were better fighters and more race-conscious.” Hamid initially distinguished himself from the APL by calling for direct action. “He said that the Harlem Negroes were folding their arms, waiting for the white folk to do something, but that white folk could not help them if they did not help themselves,” McKay wrote. “We are only asking the white merchants to give the colored community a fighting chance,” the Sufi cried. “Live and let live. Share the jobs!” He delivered those speeches in a garb whose visual appeal echoed those who sold on street corners: in 1934, New York Age journalist Lou Layne described Hamid 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’s “movement was full of “ginger”,” in McKay’s assessment.

The increasingly large audiences for Hamid’s street meetings provoked a reaction from Harlem’s white and Black leaders. In October 1934, allegations that Hamid’s speeches were anti-Semitic filled the press. A white insurance adjuster and member of the Jewish Minutemen of America named Edgar Burman claimed that 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,” signaling the support of Harlem’s establishment Black leaders for the attack on the street speaker. 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. 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, editor of the New York Age, and senior police officers were on hand as character witnesses to aid the Magistrate in sentencing, the New York Age reported. Hamid received two concurrent sentences of ten days in the Workhouse. “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.” Claude McKay agreed. “The nation was treated to a fantastically exaggerated idea of the growth of an organized Nazi and anti-Semitic movement among Negroes.” His assessment that Hamid did attack Jewish storeowners but only alongside Italians and Greeks, as one of the groups of whites who did business in Harlem, seems to better describe what happened at the street meetings than the label “Black Hitler.” As a result of the sensational stories as much as Hamid’s street meetings, many white businessmen shared the fears that butcher John Guimarro expressed to a MCCH investigator that “a serious race war is going to break out in Harlem soon, due to Sufi and the Communists."

Street meetings saw some violence in the 1930s. Competition between groups occasionally crossed from violent language to acts of violence as the Garveyites sought to hold on to their favored locations in the blocks around 135th Street and Lenox Avenue, drawing police. St. William Grant’s Tiger Division of the UNIA was at the center of the most publicized violence. In 1930, Grant’s group clashed with Communist speakers, resulting in police intervention which led to the death of a Black party member named Alfred Levy, clashes described by historian Mark Naison. In August 1932 it was Hamid’s NICA with whom Grant fought. Clashes between adjacent street corner meetings resulted in police banning both from speaking on Harlem’s streets, and later sending them to corners further apart, the New York Age and New York Amsterdam News both reported. A subsequent alleged attack on the UNIA headquarters by the NICA, on August 30, 1932, saw Hamid and five others arrested according to the New York Amsterdam News. By 1934, more speakers set up south of 135th Street, in the blocks around 125th Street where the boycott campaign’s pickets were located, and where a variety of organizations affiliated with the CP had offices.

Street meetings involving the CP and its affiliated groups in Harlem were regularly subject to police violence, as they were throughout the city in the 1930s, sometimes provoked by Communists. The first major incidents in 1930, which saw Levy and another man killed, occurred at events that involved few Black residents, as the CP had yet to engage the community. The violent repression of a meeting protesting the treatment of the Scottsboro boys in 1934, which included significant numbers of Black participants and featured Ada Wright, the mother of one of the boys, was reported more extensively in the Black press. Police in radio cars broke up the crowd, as happened during the disorder; they also used tear gas and smoke bombs, which there were no reports were used during the disorder.

Even as some journalists drew connections between the disorder on March 19 and street speakers, the CP, APL, and NICA continued to speak on Harlem’s street corners after the disorder. The CP now joined the Black organizations in attacking white businessmen for not employing Black staff, as it responded to the popularity of those campaigns by leading a protest against Weisbecker’s Market. A new cause also animated the APL and the CP: the Italian attack on Ethiopia. As they had in regards to the jobs campaign, the two groups diverged in their responses. The CP promoted a boycott of Italian goods but not of Italian businessmen, as a MCCH investigator heard a party speaker tell a crowd of about 450 on the corner of Lenox Avenue and 133rd Street in July. Reid and Kemp, however, not sharing the party's concern with the unity of Black and white workers, promoted boycotts of Italian businesses. On October 3rd, participants in a street meeting in front of 170 Lenox Avenue tried to stop Black shoppers from entering the Italian-owned vegetable and meat markets at that address, resulting in a large police detail being sent in to break up the crowd. Further protests by the Harlem Labor Union, Reid and Kemp’s new organization, followed in 1936, where the violence extended to breaking windows in Italian businesses, and police attacks on spectators.