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Communists in Harlem
Most of those who worked in those offices and protested in Harlem were white men and women. The number of Black residents who joined the Party and related organizations did grow slowly, but numbered only a few thousand by the time of the disorder according to Naison. By 1935, larger numbers did participate in demonstrations led by Party members, particularly those in support of the defense of the Scottsboro boys. After the disorder, the Party would work with Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Rev. William Imes on a boycott of Weisbeckers Market on 125th Street, and with Black nationalists in protests against Mussolini’s attacks on Abyssinia.
Speaking in street meetings as Daniel Miller and Harry Gordon sought to do in front of Kress’ store was the primary strategy employed by the CP in Harlem. Party members joined the street-corner speakers who had been a staple of Harlem life throughout the 1920s, taking to corners “from 137th Street & 7th Avenue, north to 144th Street and Lenox Avenue, south to 110th Street and 5th Avenue," according to Naison. When they first appeared, the mostly white Communist Party speakers frequently competed with Black nationalist speakers for locations and attention, especially on the corners of Lenox Avenue from 133rd to 135th Streets. At the end of June 1930, fights between the groups drew police intervention, during which a Black Communist named Alfred Levy was fatally injured. Fights continued, but Party held off attackers, helped by former Garveyites it recruited, a struggle described by Naison. In 1930, speakers focused on the unemployed and protests against lynching. The ILD campaign to free the Scottsboro boys that began in 1931, Naison showed, moved the Party further into Harlem life, enabling it to supplement street protest with work in churches, fraternal organizations and political clubs. Initial marches and protests were dominated by white Party members, but when new trials in 1933 energized Harlem, and the CP revived its campaign of mass demonstrations, marches and street meetings, Naison found evidence that large numbers of Black residents participated. In a protest parade on April 22, for example, the UNIA, Elks, Masons, and church groups marched alongside the ILD and CP. By September, 1934, Roi Ottley bemoaned the predominance of Communist street speakers in his column in the New York Amsterdam News.
Communist Party pickets like Sam Jameson, Murray Samuels and Claudio Viabolo were initially less prominent in Harlem. When Sufi Abdul Hamid and his followers began picketing white-owned businesses seeking jobs for Black workers in 1932, the Party remained on the margins, at odds with the race-based appeals. In July 1933, Party organizers did invite church and fraternal groups to join an effort to force Harlem chain stores to hire black clerks without displacing white workers be displaced, with the W. T. Grant store on 125th Street as the first target. However, James Ford shutdown that initiative, Naison showed, as likely to antagonize white workers and distract participants from the broader struggles the Party promoted. Instead, the CP unsuccessfully targeted the 5th Avenue Bus Company. When Hamid’s second campaign against Woolworths on 125th Street in 1934 helped spur an alliance of Black organizations to mount a campaign of pickets and calls for boycotts initially targeting the Blumstein’s department store, CP members remained on the margins. Once that alliance splintered, however, the Party moved to mount a boycott campaign on their terms against the Empire Cafeteria on Lenox Avenue just north of 125th Street seeking gains for white workers as well as jobs for Black workers. A week and a half of picketing and protest meetings in 1934 led by the YL, and store windows twice being broken, brought an agreement to hire black staff in September 1934.
The rapid arrests of the five men who appeared on 125th Street was typical of the often violent repression of the party by New York City police, as historian Marilynn Johnson has explored. As early as September 1929, the New York Amsterdam News published a letter describing a Black Communist speaker, Richard Moore, and the white Communists who tried to take his place, being pulled from a stepladder by police “without the slightest provocation,” notwithstanding claims of a disruptive demonstration reported in the New York Times, New York Herald Tribune and New York Amsterdam News. Mayor La Guardia tried to change the police approach after his election in 1934, Johnson shows, requiring more tolerance of protest and a neutral stance in labor disputes. However, Harlem residents had witnessed the limits of that change a year before the disorder. Police who arrived to manage the crowd at a Communist Party meeting protesting the treatment of the Scottsboro Boys on March 17, 1934, suddenly drove radio cars on to the sidewalk and into the crowd, and then threw tear gas and bomb canisters. La Guardia did insist on an investigation, after which Chief Inspector Valentine preferred disciplinary action against six officers. However, the Police Commissioner John Ryan refused to implement any discipline, the New York Amsterdam News reported.
The appearance of ILD lawyers to represent arrested Party members, and their later appearance at the hearings of the MCCH, were consistent with a commitment to representing those involved in Party actions according to Naison. Joseph Tauber, who represented the Party members arrested during the disorder and appeared at hearings of the MCCH, had also defended the two men arrested outside the Empire Cafeteria in 1934, according to a story in the New York Amsterdam News and had appeared in the police investigation of the Scottsboro riot, the New York Amsterdam News reported. The ILD provided bail for those arrested outside the Empire Cafeteria, according to the Daily Worker, as it did for those arrested during the disorder who they represented.
Contents of this tag:
This page references:
- Public Hearings - Outbreak (March-April 1935), 32, Subject Files, Box 408, Folder 8 (Roll 194), Records of Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, 1934-1945 (New York City Municipal Archives).
- Marilynn S. Johnson, Street Justice: A history of police violence in New York City (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004), 149-180.
- "Mass Rally in Harlem Tomorrow to Test Right of Assembly," Daily Worker, September 4, 1934, 3.
- Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem During the Depression (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 37.
- Marilynn S. Johnson, Street Justice: A history of police violence in New York City (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004), 165-180.
- Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem During the Depression (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 57.
- "Harlem Police Face Dismissal Or Suspension For Tear Gas Attack on Scottsboro Meeting," New York Amsterdam News, March 24, 1934, 1.
- "Cops Cleared of Brutality Charges Here," New York Amsterdam News, March 24, 1934, 1.
- Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem During the Depression (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 39-41.
- Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem During the Depression (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 77.
- Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem During the Depression (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 100-101.
- Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem During the Depression (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 134.
- Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem During the Depression (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 81.
- "Hold Six for Cafe Protest," Amsterdam News, September 8, 1934, 1.
- Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem During the Depression (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 42.
- Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem During the Depression (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 135.
- Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem During the Depression (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), xix.
- "Halt Communist Rally," New York Times, September 5, 1935, 19.
- "Nightsticks End Harlem Meeting of Young Reds," New York Herald Tribune, September 5, 1929, 3.
- "Communist Leader Fined For Speech," New York Amsterdam News, September 18, 1929, 3.
- W. A. Domingo, "Police Brutality," New York Amsterdam News, September 11, 1929, 20.
- Roi Ottley, "This Hectic Harlem: Soap-Box Oratory is a Lost Art," New York Amsterdam News, September 15, 1934, 9.