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Claude McKay, Harlem: Negro Metropolis (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1940), 192.
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Koch Department store windows not broken
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Koch's Department store at 132 West 125th Street "was unmolested" during the disorder, according to Morris Weinstein, the manager, interviewed after the disorder by a reporter for the New York Age. He called that "action of the mob" "one of the finest tributes that could be paid Koch's." For Weinstein, the reason his store had no windows broken or stock taken was that "since we reopened last May we have consistently striven to give not only jobs but positions as well to colored men and women." A "white worker, eye-witness for several hours of the scene along 125th Street and Seventh Avenue" also referred to Koch's store as "not molested," when interviewed in the Daily Worker, similarly explaining that situation as a result of the owners having been "forced to employ Negroes as a result of recent struggles." One Black employee, James Hughes, did tell his probation officer that he was on his way to Koch's store to protect it from the crowds breaking windows when he was arrested for allegedly throwing a stone that hit Detective Henry Roge in front of Kress' store. That claim may have reflected an effort to mitigate his sentence more than a widely shared recognition that the store warranted special treatment. The absence of damage to the store, if not the motive for it, was also indirectly confirmed by the La Prensa reporter who walked along this block of 125th Street recording store with damaged windows, and did not include Koch's Department store in their list. There were significantly fewer damaged stores reported in 125th Street east of 7th Avenue than in the block to the west, but several of those businesses were near Koch's department store: the Busch Kredit jewelry store two buildings east was the only store on the La Prensa reporter's list on that side of the department store; to the west of the store, the Hobbs dress shop at 150 West 125th Street also had windows broken. (The large white-owned Ludwig Baumann furniture store between the dress shop and Koch's store was not listed as being damaged.)
Henry Koch opened the store in 1891, the first major business in what had until then been a residential area. In 1930, Henry's son William T. Koch had sold the department store, to A. Schaap and Sons, clothing jobbers, the New York Times reported. While that story quoted Koch as obliquely saying that the closing of the store was "but another token of the changed neighborhood," the New York Age more directly stated that as Black residents moved to the area, he showed them an "antagonistic attitude" and the store "became more and more exclusive, catering to the wealthier white residents," losing "so much trade they were forced out of business." The new owners operated it as "the 125th Street Store," which advertisements in the New York Amsterdam News indicate operated at least in part as a discount store, selling the stock of bankrupt businesses.
Morris Weinstein leased the store in 1934, operating it under the Koch name. Shortly before the renovated store opened on June 14, Weinstein announced "a third of his clerical staff will be colored," the New York Age reported. That decision came just as a new wave of picketing and boycotts targeting white-owned businesses on West 125th Street that did not employ Black staff began. Sufi Abdul Hamid and members of his Negro Industrial and Clerical Alliance had begun picketing the Woolworth's 5c & 10c store a block west at 210 West 125th Street in mid-May, 1934, making their way on to the pages of the New York Amsterdam News when prominent clergyman Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. was photographed after he joined them two weeks later. Hamid's radicalism prompted an alliance of social and political organizations, fraternal lodges and churches to come together in the Citizens League for Fair Play (CLFP), first targeting Blumstein's department store with a boycott and picket campaign. Against that backdrop, the New York Age, a staunch proponent of the CLFP, reported Weinstein's decision to hire Black staff as a result of "admitting the justice of the Negro's demand that employment be given qualified Negroes in Harlem stores where the majority of the trade is colored." West Indian writer and social commentator Claude McKay presented Weinstein as motivated more by self-interest, that "the employment of colored clerks might effect not only better relations between white employers and colored consumers, but also bugger business." McKay added the rumor, "never admitted by either side," that Weinstein struck "a secret agreement that the Negro Industrial and Clerical Alliance should boost [Koch's Department store] among the people of Harlem." The New York Age claimed the role of selecting staff for the organizations it supported. One New York Age story, refuting attacks on the tactics of the CLFP by William H. Davies, identified Miller of the African Patriotic League as "the man chosen to select the Negro personell [sic] of Koch's." That organization took a leading role in organizing the pickets for the CLFP campaign. A week later, Vere Johns, a columnist for the New York Age, claimed Rev. Johnson, the leader of the CLFP, and the African Vanguard, helped choose the staff.
After Blumstein agreed to hire Black staff in August 1934, Weinstein more prominently promoted the Black staff of Koch's store. Where the first advertisements for Weinstein's store somewhat generically announced that it was a "New Store; New Deal, New People; New Policy, The Store With a Heart," an August advertisement more directly addressed how different its staffing was to its neighbors on 125th Street, with a banner that read "We Lead For Fair Play! Let Others Follow! There is No Distinction of Race, Creed or Color at H. C. F. Koch & Co." That same month Weinstein told the New York Amsterdam News that the store had fifty-seven Black sales girls, stock men, porters, and elevator men in a staff of 125 employees, at least four or five times the proportion of Black employees as any other business on 125th Street that spoke to the reporter. Among the more prominent activities Weinstein undertook to further expand his appeal to Black shoppers was a "Three Day Scottsboro Rally" in November 1934, with a percentage of the sales receipts donated to the defense of the Scottsboro Boys.
In 1937 Koch's store was sold to Samuel Kanter, who reopened it "redecorated, renovated and modernized" in April 1937 as Kanter's Department Store, a promotional story in New York Amsterdam News reported. He expected "to create more and better jobs for the people in the community," Kanter told the newspaper, going on to say "at the present time, I am in favor of employing at least twenty-five percent Negro help, perhaps more." The store does not appear to have promoted its Black staff to the same extent Weinstein had, as when a new wave of protests began in 1938, a spokesman contacted the New York Amsterdam News "seeking to clarify any mis-apprehension as to the number of Negro employees in their store." The list provided to the newspaper identified nearly thirty Black staff, "most of whom were employed in the same capacities as others." It is Kanter's Department store that was photographed by the Tax Department between 1939 and 1941. -
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Street Speakers in Harlem
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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.