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• 1 2022-02-13T21:48:02+00:00 Margaret Mitchell arrested 57 plain 2024-01-28T05:59:21+00:00 Officer Johnson of the 6th Division arrested Margaret Mitchell, an eighteen-year-old Black woman, inside Kress’ 5, 10 and 25c store, sometime around 5:00 PM on March 19. Police alleged that she was “throwing pans on floor and causing crowd to collect,” according to Inspector Di Martini’s report on the disorder. Pots and pans and glasses were knocked off counters and women screamed, after the store was closed and police tried to clear out those inside, Jackson Smith, the store manager, Patrolman Timothy Shannon, and Louise Thompson all testified. Only Thompson described the circumstances that produced that noise, most fully in an article in New Masses. After a woman she could not see screamed, Thompson joined part of the crowd who rushed to where the noise came from, the rear of the store. Police there pushed that crowd back and refused to answer when women asked “if the boy was injured and where he is,” Thompson wrote. 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 left once the noise and struggles with police began, both Thompson and Smith testified. Thompson remained with the woman she described knocking over pots and pans, who was not arrested, but she was clearly not the only person who knocked over merchandise in efforts to remain in the store until they had information about Rivera. Mitchell could also have been the woman whose scream drew Thompson and others to the rear of the store.
  
  Margaret Mitchell appeared in many newspaper stories about what happened in Kress’ store, but almost all truncated the extended standoff between the Black women and store staff and police into a rapid sequence of events, in the process mistaking what Mitchell was alleged to have done and when she was arrested. The Home News reported that Mitchell “attempted to take the Rivera boy from the department store detectives and cried out that the guards were beating the youth.” La Prensa also reported Mitchell trying to intervene. Although the Home News went on to claim that Mitchell was arrested at that time, neither Charles Hurley nor Patrolman Donahue mentioned a woman being part of their struggles with Rivera, and Donahue testified he did not arrest anyone while at Kress’ store. The Afro-American, New York Amsterdam News, New York Evening Journal (and the New York Times on March 24) reported that Mitchell was arrested after she screamed when the boy was being beaten. However, the New York Times, Daily News, New York American, New York Post, New York Herald Tribune, and Daily Worker did not specify when she screamed (or spread rumors in the New York Times story, or was “a leader of the disturbance” in the New York Herald Tribune story) — although the Daily News, New York American, and New York Post did elsewhere in their stories mention an unnamed woman running into street screaming at the time Rivera was grabbed. The New York Sun alone specified that Mitchell’s actions came later: “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.” The next day, in reporting Mitchell’s arraignment in the Harlem Magistrate’s Court, the Home News 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 out that the guards were beating the youth,” the story added that after Rivera had been taken to the basement, she was “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.” Inspector Di Martini's report, while containing few details of events in the store, did distinguish Mitchell from the woman who reacted to Rivera, whose actions he located slightly later than the newspaper stories, "upon the arrival of the ambulance [to treat Hurley and Urban]," when the "unknown female screamed that the boy had been seriously injured or killed and otherwise caused a commotion which attracted a large number of persons." Mitchell's arrest came later, after which "this commotion was soon quieted."
  
  The more specific allegation of “throwing pans on floor and causing crowd to collect” was recorded in the 28th Precinct police blotter as “Disorderly in Kresses 5 & 10c Store.” That language echoed the offense with which the prosecutor charged Mitchell, disorderly conduct. She appeared in lists of those arrested and charged with disorderly conduct in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, the New York Evening Journal, New York American and Daily News. Arraigned in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, Mitchell was found guilty by Magistrate Renaud, who remanded her until March 23 for investigation and sentencing. The Times Union reported that she “denied hysterically she participated in the rioting. She stood up from the witness chair screaming, then collapsed.” No other newspapers included that scene.
  
  Mitchell returned to the court on March 23, telling Magistrate Renaud she was "sorry," according to the Home News and New York World-Telegram. In passing sentence, Renaud commented that “he did not believe the girl acted maliciously,” those two publications and the New York Times and New York Age reported. The sentence reflected that assessment: three days in the Workhouse or a fine of $10. The New York American reported only that outcome, obliquely reporting Renaud's comment by describing her as having "unwittingly started Tuesday's outbreak." A brief mention in the New York Amsterdam News gave the opposite impression by describing Mitchell as having been "found guilty" of "stirring up the mob." The Daily Worker pointed to what its reporter saw as the implications of her sentence, that it "beating of Negro children by Harlem white storekeepers of the police, as frequently has been the case." Mitchell was one of only three people convicted during the disorder who paid a fine. She was also one of only eighteen of those arraigned represented by a lawyer, in her case Sidney Christian, a prominent West Indian attorney.
  
  The lawyer was likely obtained with the help of Mitchell’s father, Thomas E. Thompson. A West Indian immigrant who had arrived in New York City in 1895, Thompson had been a postal worker for thirty-five years at the time of his daughter’s arrest, and an office holder in the Prince Hall Masons. He and his family were among the earliest Black residents of Harlem, recorded in the 1910 census living in 55 West 137th Street. While not featuring on the social pages as Sidney Christian did, Thompson would have had the resources and the standing in the West Indian community to have known of and involved the lawyer. Mitchell, one of the youngest of Thompson's twelve children, had married in April 1934, and at the time of the disorder lived with her husband, David Mitchell, a handyman in an apartment building, at 287 West 150th Street. That she was in a store twenty-five blocks south of her home indicated the distance from which the businesses on West 125th Street drew their customers.
  
  
  
  As the only person arrested in Kress’ store, and named in newspaper stories about the disorder, Mitchell was one of the few identifiable sources of information about the beginnings of the disorder for the MCCH. However, when Lt. Battle called at her home and requested that she be at the public hearing on March 30, “she refused to come.” Asked again about her testimony three weeks later, Battle reiterated that "she absolutely refuses to come to this hearing."
  
  Margaret Mitchell and her husband still lived in the same apartment when the census enumerator called in 1940. In January 1945, she joined 200 family and friends celebrating her parents' 50th wedding anniversary, photographed alongside her siblings in an image published in the New York Amsterdam News. Her husband David was not part of the celebration; he was a sergeant in the US military serving overseas, as were two of Mitchell’s brothers and four nephews.
• 1 2020-02-26T20:11:40+00:00 Mayor La Guardia establishes an investigation 50 plain 94 2024-02-14T19:21:06+00:00 Bundles of posters measuring two feet by two and a half feet were delivered to the 28th Precinct station on West 123rd Street during the evening of March 20. Over the course of the night, police officers distributed those posters to stores throughout Harlem, instructing staff to display them prominently in windows. At least one store owner taped the poster to his store window; the New York Evening Journal published a photograph of several Black and white men and boys gathered around it on March 21. “In bold type” on each poster was an appeal from Mayor LaGuardia “To the People of New York City,” a statement he had released to the press that morning. Concerned to avoid a renewal of the disorder of the previous night, he urged “the law-abiding element of Harlem to carefully scrutinize any charge, rumor or gossip being made at this time,” as the “few irresponsible individuals” who had instigated that violence with “bold statements…in mimeographed handbills and placards” might attempt to “repeat this spreading of false gossip, of misinformation and distributed misrepresentation in handbills or other printed matter.” To counter those sources, the mayor promised to supply “details of everything that that occurred.” That information would come from City agencies, and from the grand jury that he had instructed District Attorney William Dodge to have investigate the disorder. He announced in addition that he was appointing “a committee of citizens to check all official reports and to make a thorough investigation of the causes of the disorder and a study of necessary plans to prevent a repetition of the spreading of malicious rumors, racial animosities and the inciting of disorder.”
  
  If the role of rumors and the activities of the Communist Party mentioned in the poster spurred the mayor’s decision to investigate the events of the disorder, a concern that the disorder not be seen as a race riot contributed to the emphasis on underlying causes rather than events of the disorders in the scope of the investigation. In a draft version the sentence announcing the committee read, “…and a study of necessary DEFENSIVE plans to prevent a repetition of the spreading of malicious rumors and the instigation of RACIAL disorder,” with the word “racial” crossed out in pencil. In a second draft, “defensive” was also crossed out, “racial animosities” inserted, and “instigation of racial disorder” changed to “inciting of disorder” to produce the final text. The intent of those edits was made clear when a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune queried the mayor about the choice of the phrase “unfortunate occurrence” to describe the disorder asking, "You do not regard the trouble up there as a race riot?" "No," he replied, "you see, we have to be careful. We don't know yet what was the underlying cause of the trouble. We can't say on the basis of what we know that it was fundamentally racial. Certainly an outburst like that which happened Wednesday night doesn't go off unless there was smouldering some underlying feeling. What the causes of that were are what I want the fact-finding committee to find out. It may go back 100 years."
  
  It is unclear what led La Guardia to conclude that the city government releasing information would not be enough to calm Harlem residents or prevent further disorder. The NAACP did send La Guardia a telegram on March 20 calling for “a biracial commission to make an independent investigation of riot in Harlem last night” that examined the “fundamental as well as immediate causes of trouble with right to examine witnesses and all pertinent records.” Although the organization would later issue a press release claiming that suggestion was responsible for the mayor deciding to set up an investigation, he likely was responding to more than that prompt.
  
  As police distributed the posters displaying the mayor’s appeal, 7.5 miles to the south at City Hall La Guardia announced the names of the eleven individuals he had appointed to that committee. The press release provided a broader charge for them than his earlier statement: “the investigation of social and economic conditions in west Harlem,” “the ascertainment of the causes of the disturbances which occurred on the night of March 19,” and “recommendations for the betterment of conditions and the prevention of a repetition of disorder and violence.” La Guardia did give more attention to the events of the disorder when he later explained his approach to journalists. “The checking of violence through adequate policing and the arrest of ringleaders,” was one of the two lines along which he said the situation in Harlem had to be approached, alongside “the amelioration of condition which gave rise to the suppressed feeling of hostility by the Negro population which was let loose on Tuesday night.” However, that framing suggested that investigation of the events of the disorder was largely in the hands of the grand jury investigation that the mayor had asked District Attorney Dodge to undertake. La Guardia seemed to confirm that later when confronted by a reporter from the Daily Worker who claimed that Dodge’s investigation was at odds with the work he had assigned the Committee, insisting in response that “these are two separate and distinct functions.” However, the mayor did not follow the district attorney in rushing to blame Communists for the disorder. The printed statement did not mention the Young Liberators or Communists by name. When a journalist asked La Guardia about that omission, “He would not say whether he agreed with the police that the instigators were Communists.” That reticence did not stop publications at opposite ends of the political spectrum, the anti-Communist Hearst newspaper the New York Evening Journal and the Communist Daily Worker, from reporting that the statement did hold Communists responsible for the disorder even if it did not mention them by name.
• 1 2023-03-14T20:07:41+00:00 In Harlem court on March 23 (6) 44 plain 2024-01-26T21:28:22+00:00 All the city's major newspapers reported the hearings in the Harlem Court even as they involved just five men and one woman arrested in the disorder being sentenced on the minor charge of disorderly conduct. Only the New York Evening Journal story referred to conditions at the court, that "special squadrons of police stood guard outside." Given that previous stories in other newspapers had mentioned similar deployments, their failure to do so on this occasion likely indicates that additional police were not actually present. The New York Evening Journal was also alone in directly drawing attention to what the charges and outcomes reported in the stories indicated, that those sentenced were "minor offenders in the outbreak."
  
  The woman, Margaret Mitchell, was mentioned in all those stories. Those stories continued to confuse her with a woman on 125th Street who screamed that Rivera had been killed some time after Mitchell’s arrest. They presented Mitchell's actions as having started the disorder, a claim that publications presented in different ways. The New York American reported Mitchell "started" the disorder, the Afro-American and New York Times that she "provoked" it (a claim they attributed to police), the Daily News that she "precipitated" it, the New York Evening Journal that she "set-off" the disorder, the New York Herald Tribune that she was "the spark which fired the riot," a claim attributed to police, and the Home News and New York Amsterdam News that she "stirred up the mob." More qualified claims were presented in the New York World-Telegram, that she only "helped stir Harlem mobs to rioting," and the New York Age, that she "precipitated" the disorder, but that the reaction to her outcry was "magnified to riot proportions by Communist literature." The New York Post opted for a more specific framing that more clearly captured the scope of Mitchell's responsibility, that she was "instrumental in starting the rumor that led to the riots." The Daily Worker did not ascribe any responsibility to Mitchell, describing her only as having "raised the outcry." The headlines to stories in the in the Home News and New York World-Telegram described Mitchell as the "cause" of the disorder (notwithstanding the more qualified statement in the later story itself), and "Blamed for Riot" in the New York Times. Mitchell shared the description in newspaper headlines of having caused the riot with Lino Rivera.
  
  Only the New York Herald Tribune, New York World-Telegram, and Home News reported that Mitchell told Renaud that she was "sorry." Whatever her role, Magistrate Renaud determined it was not "malicious" or intended to have the consequences it did. That statement appeared in only the New York Times, New York World-Telegram, Home News, and New York Age, and implicitly in the New York American, which did not mention Renaud, but described Mitchell as having "unwittingly" started the disorder. By contrast, the New York Herald Tribune reported that Reanud "lectured Miss Mitchell on keeping the peace." No story mentioned her lawyer, who likely would have had some role in promoting Renaud's assessment. The magistrate's judgement was reflected in the light sentence he imposed, reported as a choice between a $10 fine and three days in the Workhouse in the New York Times, New York Evening Journal, Daily Worker, New York Age, and Afro-American and simply as a fine in the Daily News, New York American, New York World-Telegram, Home News, New York Post, New York Herald Tribune, and New York Amsterdam News. However, Mitchell's sentence proved to be more punitive than those given to most of the others arrested for inciting crowds: six of the seven received suspended sentences, the other a month in the Workhouse.
  
  Four of the five men sentenced at the same time were reported as charged with breaking windows, rather than the actual offense, disorderly conduct, in the Daily News, New York Times, Home News, New York World-Telegram, New York Age, and Afro-American, while the offense was reported in the New York Herald Tribune, New York Post, New York Evening Journal, and New York American. Unlike Leo Smith, James Bright, and Arthur Bennett, there was no other evidence that John Hawkins had broken windows. Initially charged with riot, in the analysis he has been classified with those inciting riot. The Home News, New York American, New York World-Telegram, New York Post, and New York Evening Journal did not name the men. While the Daily News, New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, New York World-Telegram, and Home News, and the New York Age and Afro-American, identified a white man, Leo Smith, among that group, his presence went unmentioned in the New York Post, New York Evening Journal, and New York American. In the later two Hearst newspapers, that silence fitted their emphasis on white men and women as victims of violence during the disorder. The men were not mentioned at all in the New York Amsterdam News. The fifth man, Rivers Wright, had been charged with assault. None of the stories mentioned a charge in his case, only his conviction of disorderly assault and lesser sentence, ten days in the Workhouse compared to thirty days for the other men.