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

Crowd inside Kress 5, 10 & 25c store

After Patrolman Donahue released Lino Rivera and then himself left Kress’ store around 3.30 PM, groups of shoppers remained. They wanted to know what had happened to the boy and to see that he had not been harmed. Over the next two hours the manager and several police officers unsuccessfully tried to reassure them and others who came into the store to investigate what was happening. During that time Clara Crowder, a twenty-year-old white clerk fainted and was attended by an ambulance, and Margaret Mitchell, an eighteen-year-old Black woman was arrested for disorderly conduct. Sometime around 5.00 PM or 5.30 PM, the manager decided to close the store, and police cleared out all those inside.

Events inside Kress 5, 10 & 25c store after Lino Rivera had been grabbed by store staff moved far more slowly than newspaper narratives portrayed. Whereas reporters strung together the specific incidents they identified into a tight sequence, testimony to the MCCH’s public hearings provided additional information that spread those events over almost two hours.

The Black women and a few men who remained in the store did not immediately start shouting, overturning displays, nor was Margaret Mitchell immediately arrested. They gathered in small groups of two or three. A few minutes after Donahue had released Rivera and left the store, Smith, the manager, told a public hearing of the MCCH that he became concerned about their presence and went to the shopfloor to investigate. “Some women were going around saying a boy had been beaten, an ambulance had come and she knew it. I went to two groups trying to explain to them that nothing had happened to cause any excitement.” Having no success, Smith went out to 125th Street, where he found Patrolman Miller, a Black officer who had earlier called for the ambulance to treat Hurley and Urban, who he asked to “come in and see if he could not explain to those people.” The women “didn’t pay much attention” to Miller. By 4:00 PM, “the thing was getting to be worse,” Smith testified. That likely meant both that the number of people inside and outside that store was growing, and that, as Thompson later described happening inside the store, as they waited for proof the boy had not been harmed, “patience began to give way to indignation. Their voices rose.” Smith found additional police on 125th Street. Patrolman Timothy Shannon arrived in the store at 4.00 PM. By 4.20 PM he decided he needed to call for radio cars with additional police officers, who arrived within five minutes. Those officers had no more success than those before convincing the women and men in the store that Rivera had been let go, the message Hurley said they were delivering. Ten minutes later Smith called the station and told them “the thing was beginning to get out of control and to do something.” Sgt Bauer was sent. At some point Shannon claimed that he formed committee of three shoppers, two men and one woman, who he took to the basement to see that Rivera was not there, and then went with “from one crowd to another but they would not listen.” No other witness or source mentioned such a committee, and Shannon could not identify its members.

The situation had not improved after 4:30 PM, when Smith testified the number of people in the store had grown to around 100, and Sgt Bauer told him, “I don’t know what we can do.” We didn’t want to start a riot. We didn’t want to excite them.” Smith decided that he needed to close the store, and called the police station again and “pleaded for enough men to close the doors without causing trouble.” Around the same time Louise Thompson, a Black Communist activist and journalist with many friends among the authors and artists of the Harlem Renaissance, entered the store. She had been shopping at the Woolworth’s store further along 125th Street when she saw groups of people gathered on the sidewalk. Asking around to find out what was going on, a man told her “something was going on in the store and that a boy was beaten,” she testified. Thompson then went into Kress’, which she would describe later in her autobiography as a store “where you have all of these small counters throughout the store,” and found “little clusters of people standing here and there in the store,” with “most of the girls behind the counter were still in their places but not floor-walkers of officials were in evidence,” she wrote in a version of her testimony published in the New Masses. Approaching the largest group, standing by the candy counter, Thompson learned that they believed a boy had been beaten up by store staff, and that they intended to “stand here until they produce him.”

More police officers then arrived and went to the rear of the store, where Smith’s office was located, Thompson wrote. They were the additional officers that the manager had had requested. At this time Smith told a public hearing that he closed the store doors. His testimony was that happened at 5.30 PM, but other evidence suggests that Smith might have been mistaken about the time. Around 5 PM, Clara Crowder, a twenty-year-old white clerk, fainted while “aiding another employee,” according to the records of the ambulance that attended her. That ambulance, the second sent to the store, arrived at 5.05 PM. Thompson testified that she was outside on West 125th Street when she saw it arrive, having been one of the last to leave the closed store. It seems likely that Crowder was behind a counter, and fainted during the struggles between the people in the store and police that began after a woman inside the store screamed and pots, pans and glasses were knocked off displays. Smith testified that damage happened as the door was closed. Thompson also described hearing the closing bell as part of the noise in the store in her article in New Masses.

Jackson Smith and Patrolman Timothy Shannon testified that a woman screamed and knocked merchandise off counters after the store was closed, but only Thompson described the circumstances that produced that noise. She did not see the woman who screamed, but was part of the crowd who rushed to where the noise came from, the rear of the store. Police there pushed those women and men back and refused to answer when women asked “if the boy was injured and where he is,” Thompson wrote in New Masses. The officers also “began to get rough.” A woman with an umbrella retaliated; she either hit an officer, according to Thompson’s testimony, or “knocked over a pile of pots and pans,” according to her article. Many of those in the store rushed to leave once the noise and struggles with police began, both Thompson and Smith testified. It is likely that it was around this time that police in the store arrested Margaret Mitchell, an eighteen-year-old Black woman, although none of those who testified about this period of time in the store mentioned the arrest. Police charged her with “throwing pans on floor and causing crowd to collect,” according to Inspector Di Martini’s report on the disorder. It was only once the store was closed that merchandise was knocked off displays, according to the testimony of those in the store.

A small number of people resisted leaving the store, “refusing to move until they got some information about the boy,” Thompson wrote. Gradually police officers pushed them too out of the store; Thompson was one of the last to leave, about half an hour after she entered. On the street at that time, she testified, were several hundred people, most “in front of the Apollo Theatre,” opposite Kress’ store across 125th Street. By the time Inspector Di Martini, in charge of the four precincts that made up the Sixth Division arrived, at 5.40 PM, to investigate the reports of disorder, the store was closed and only a few employees remained inside. He interviewed Jackson Smith and Charles Hurley, he testified. “After finding out that no assault had been committed and thinking that something might occur, I stationed Sergeant Bauer, two foot policeman, one mounted policeman in the rear to prevent a riot.” Di Martini then spent some time talking to groups of people gathered on West 125th Street, telling them Rivera had not been beaten. As he saw no “indications of further trouble,” the inspector testified that he left around 6.00 PM.

Newspaper narratives truncated the extended standoff between the Black women and men and store staff and police into a rapid sequence of events, eliding the role of Black residents’ distrust of a police force that routinely disregarded their rights and subject them to violence in fueling the disorder. The Am, NYP, NYW-T, DN and DM included none of the events in the store in their narratives of the disorder, jumping from Rivera being grabbed to the crowds outside Kress’ store, stirred by a woman rushing out to the street with the news that Rivera had been beaten, and later by the appearance of the Young Liberators picketing the store. Those in the store, reported to be mostly Black women, began to damage displays immediately after Rivera had been taken to the basement in the narratives published in the HN, NYS, NYT and LaP. The NYT, NYS and Time greatly inflated the size of that crowd, from 50 to 500 customers. The HN reported they “started to wreck the store, pulling dishes off of the counters and, in some instances, tipping over tables on which merchandise was displayed,” the NYT that they “went on the rampage, overturning counters, strewing merchandise on the floor and shouting,” La P that “All the people of color who were in the store at the time began to throw all the articles that were on the tables to the floor and to shout in protest.” The NYS opted for the most sensational language, that they “had been galvanized into a frenzy of sabotage.  Glass in the counters was shattered, tables overturned and merchandise torn and hurled about.” By contrast, the NYEJ, HT and DW (on 3/29) reported crowds jamming the store after rumors about a boy being beaten or killed circulated, demanding he be released (DW had earlier reported, on 3/21, the involvement of a member of the ILD, Reggie Thomas, in leading the women’s protest. He was not mentioned in subsequent stories, and did not testify in the MCCH public hearings, suggesting that he was not in fact present in the store). Patrolman Shannon was identified by the NYT and NYS as one of the police officers who investigated what was happening in the store, and summoned the reinforcements who cleared the store (Time identified him as "an Irish policeman;" NJEJ and Am mention Shannon arresting Miller). The HN, HT, and NYEJ simply had police notified, then appearing and clearing the store.

The second ambulance that arrived at the store, to attend Clara Crowder, was mentioned only in the DN. That story somewhat vaguely claimed that the appearance of the ambulance inflamed rumors that Rivera had been killed. The HT also mentioned Crowder was attended by an ambulance, but mistakenly identified it as the same one that had come to attend Hurley and Urban. That ambulance had returned to Harlem Hospital two hours earlier. Similarly, the HN and LaP reported Margaret Mitchell as being arrested in Kress’ store, but identified her as having intervened when Rivera was grabbed. The AA, AN, NYEJ (and NYT on 3/24) reported Mitchell was arrested having run screaming into 125th Street immediately after Rivera had been grabbed. Only the NYSun’s story allowed for Mitchell’s arrest to be later, as the store was being closed: “The woman whose cries that the boy had been murdered, rekindled the vandalism after the police had succeeded in quenching it earlier in the evening, is Margaret Mitchell, 18, of 283 West 150th street. Her cry was taken up and passed to the milling crowd outside the store.” The next day, in reporting Mitchell’s arraignment in the Harlem Magistrate’s Court, the HN combined its description of her trying to intervene when Rivera was grabbed with the later events mentioned in Di Martini’s report. While reiterating that she “attempted to take the Rivera boy from the department store detectives and cried cut that the guards were beating the youth,” the story added that after Rivera had been taken to the basement, she “urging other colored people in the store to demand the release of the boy, started throwing merchandise to the floor and upset many of the counter displays.”

The historians who have described these events have not identified the leading role played by women in protests inside Kress’ store, even as the MCCH report noted that the shoppers in the store were women [section on spontaneous outbreak]. Mark Naison, Thomas Kessner and Marilynn Johnson summarized events in the store, adding details about merchandise being thrown on the floor from newspaper stories to the narrative in the MCCH report. Cheryl Greenberg simply described the crowd as having dispersed, discounting protests in the store. So too did Lorrin Thomas, who attributed that response to the arrest of a woman for “inciting the disturbance,” implicitly making that arrest occur soon after Rivera was released not later when police cleared the store. (No other narratives mention that arrest). Naison identified those involved as "black shoppers," while Kessner identified two black women as crying out, but not who else was in the crowd. The other historians simply referred to crowds. Jonathan Gill and Nicole Watson include no details of events inside the store in their descriptions of the events at the beginning of the disorder. That the shoppers in Kress' store were women is unsurprising given the gendered nature of consumption in the 1930s. However, the role of those women in the early stages of the disorder is more unexpected given historians' attention to men's role in initial outbreaks of violence. As Marilynn Johnson has pointed, women's experiences in the racial disorders of the first half of the twentieth century extended beyond that looting with which they were associated in the 1960s to include not just being victims of violence but also protectors. Where Johnson's examples of women acting in that role were trying to protect family or loved ones from white violence, in 1935 Black women sought to protect a boy unrelated to them. While, as Johnson notes, those actions were within societal expectations of women's roles, they did represent a broader scope, echoing the extension of women's role in consumption to include the political act of picketing white businesses the previous year. In Kress's store, Black women once again stood up to white businessmen.
 

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