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

Dominic Capeci, The Harlem Riot of 1943 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1977), 172.

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In comparison (1990s & beyond) In 1992, Cheryl Greenberg published the first extended historical analysis focused on the 1935 disorder. Titled “The Politics of Disorder," it was an article rather than a book. The scale of her analysis was emblematic of how the events of 1935 have been overshadowed by the larger disorders of the following decades when historians looked at the new form racial violence took after the 1920s. Despite the connections sociologists had drawn between Harlem's disorders in 1935 and 1943 and the outbreaks of the 1960s, historical scholarship tended to distinguish 1935 from the disorder in Harlem eight years later as well as those that followed twenty years later. The distinctive context of the Depression and the smaller scale of the violence provided obvious differences. Not evident with the limited research undertaken for those studies was how the violence in 1935 took the same forms that characterized the later disorders.

Greenberg's influential article tied the nature of disorder even more tightly to the context of the 1930s than descriptions that presented it as a protest against the conditions produced by racial discrimination. A year earlier, Greenberg had published what is still the definitive account of Harlem in the 1930s, Or Does It Explode? Black Harlem in the Great Depression. The disorder begins the book, but Greenberg provides few details and does not return to the events later. Rather than a generalized protest against racial discrimination and the conditions it produced, she argued that the events were “a political act” directly linked to organized campaigns seeking jobs in white-owned business of the previous year. The collapse of those campaigns created a “vacuum” in outlets for the protests to which Harlem's residents had become accustomed, which the disorder filled. Greenberg presented the actions to improve conditions in Harlem in its aftermath as an “example of the link between protest and response.” The details of the violence play little role in that argument. The Young Liberators and the two Communist pamphlets are given a leading role in “inflaming” the crowds on 125th Street. What followed is summarized as the spread of crowds “east and west on 125th Street, breaking store windows and looting from Fifth Avenue to Eighth.”

When Greenberg subsequently elaborated the argument from her book in the article “The Politics of Disorder,” she did so with reference to the details of the violence and in comparison with the events of 1943. To demonstrate the link between the earlier organized protests and the disorder, she argued that "the agenda of the riot, as well as the grievances expressed by the rioters' rhetoric and targets," reflected the positions of the earlier political organizations. In terms of the violence, that fit relied on the claim that not only was only white property targeted but that those attacks were "confined to those areas, both topical and geographic, that were the focus of the failed jobs campaign - 125th Street's white-owned businesses." Neither white police officers nor white passers-by were attacked, Greenberg asserted. She also found the "the rising tension of frustrated expectations and the decline in protest structures coincided" steered residents toward violent political action in 1943. Her evidence of the fit of that violence with the different political agenda of the war years is that "the 1943 riot was not as narrowly focused and covered a much larger geographic area than 125th Street. It saw attacks on white policemen and civilians, unlike 1935, reflecting the concerns of deteriorating race relations."

The distinctive features on which Greenberg's argument relies are not borne out by the details of what happened in 1935 identified in this study. The features whose absence distinguished the events of 1935 from those of 1943 in her account were in fact present in 1935. As a result, what happened on March 19 and 20 did not fit with the political activity of the preceding year as neatly and extensively as she argued. While Black residents targeted their violence at white-owned businesses, that violence extended well beyond the businesses on West 125th Street that had been the focus of the boycotts and pickets seeking jobs. Both white pedestrians and white police officers were attacked by Black residents during the disorder. Despite the shift from the context of the Great Depression to a global war, the racial violence in 1935 and 1943 took the same form. If "the object of attack that night [in 1943] was whites, particularly white power," as Greenberg argued, so too was the target of the violence in 1935. As Dominic Capeci had pointed out in his earlier study of the 1943 disorder, what remained as distinguishing Harlem's first two racial disorders was the greater magnitude of the violence in 1943.

Setting the stage for the outbreak of racial violence in Harlem in 1964 in a book published in 2017, historian Michael Flamm relied on Robert Fogelson's brief discussion, published nearly fifty years earlier, rather than Greenberg's article to present the disorders in 1935 and 1943 as having had "similar roots and outcomes." Fogelson ultimately captured the nature of the 1935 disorder better than Greenberg because he relied more on research beyond the records of the MCCH investigation. Newspapers provided the details of the violence in 1935 that E. Franklin Frazier and the MCCH omitted from their report. No single publication offered a full picture of the disorder, reflecting the diverse, dispersed, and changing character of the events as much as their editorial orientations. Only in combination, and supplemented by legal records, did those sources identify the complex new mix of forms into which racial violence changed in 1935.

The more extensive research for a study such as this, that focuses on the disorder, inevitably complicates the existing narratives and analyses in studies primarily concerned with other topics. Black residents not only attacked and looted white-owned businesses to protest economic discrimination and exploitation: some attacked white pedestrians in a broader revolt against their privileged presence on Harlem's streets. Police responded with violent attacks on Black residents who participated in the violence and those who were spectators. This complex mix of violence produced disorder in Harlem that was unlike the race riots earlier in the twentieth century in its wide-ranging challenge to white economic and political power and the racial order. At the same time, the details of what happened on March 19 more closely align those events with the racial disorders of the following decades than has been recognized. It was in Harlem in 1935 that the character of racial violence in United States first changed to take a new form.