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• 1 2023-09-04T23:58:02+00:00 Federal Writers' histories (1938, 1939, 1940, 1943) 55 plain 2024-02-03T19:46:25+00:00 The 1935 disorder featured in all the accounts of Black life produced by the writers who worked for the New York City unit of the Federal Writers Project (FWP) in the years immediately following the disorder. The Works Progress Administration's relief program for writers, the FWP aimed to produce guidebooks and other useful publications. They set up forty-nine units, one in each state and one in New York City. The pluralist vision for the guides extended to the inclusion of Black communities and jobs for Black writers, as literary critic J. J. Butts has perceptively analyzed. These accounts presented the disorder as a reaction against racial discrimination in Harlem and focused on the violence against property. The breadth of the protest was limited by the omission of both the attacks on white pedestrians and police violence in all the texts other than an unpublished draft written by a white author.
  
  After much upheaval and debate, a distinctive form was developed for the New York City Guide: a separate volume of essays, including a "Portrait of Harlem"; and a guide book, including a chapter on "Negro Harlem," distinguished from Italian Harlem and Spanish Harlem in a section of the city labeled "The Harlems." Two leading Black authors were responsible for those texts. Claude McKay wrote the original drafts of those essays as the first head of the Negro History Unit; Richard Wright and Arnold De Mille rewrote his drafts into the published forms. "Portrait of Harlem" placed the same emphasis on politics evident in the New York Amsterdam News stories in the years after the disorder. Events in 1935 were mentioned at the end of the discussion of how the neighborhood's "highly sensitive social and political temper" made it the "focal point in the struggle for the liberation of the Negro People." The disorder was placed in the context of boycotts of white-owned businesses on 125th Street for their refusal to employ Black staff, which it erroneously claimed were ongoing at the time and included the Kress store as a target. The boycott campaign had collapsed the previous year, a loss that later historians would argue denied residents a political outlet for the anger expressed in the disorder, and did not restart until months after March 1935. The assessment of the disorder followed the MCCH and located its causes as "the terrible economic conditions prevailing in Harlem," which provided a transition to discussion that described those in detail. However, the two-sentence description of the events in between those claims avoided several of the key dimensions of the violence:

  On March 19 a Negro boy was caught stealing in one of the boycotted stores. Rumors immediately spread throughout Harlem that the boy had been beaten and killed by the white proprietor; large crowds gathered in and near West 125th Street, and in spite of police efforts an orgy of window-smashing and store-looting followed.

  For all of the attention to the diversity within Harlem of the chapter as a whole, the account of the disorder described the boy caught stealing about whom rumors spread as "Negro" rather than Puerto Rican. Missing are the claims that police had been responsible for the rumored fate of the boy, as well as the fatal police shooting of Lloyd Hobbs, and thus the police violence in the neighborhood. Also left opaque was how far the violence reached beyond West 125th Street and the extent to which it targeted white-owned businesses. The start of the disorder on West 125th Street also provided the context for mention of the disorder in the street-level description of the city in the Guide to New York City. A paragraph that began by describing the street as "Harlem's chief business thoroughfare" elaborated a picture that highlighted the tension between the white control and staffing of its businesses and the Black majority of its customers. The disorder is presented as a consequence of that situation: "In 1935 an incident in one of these shops developed into a riot of alarming proportions." The nature of the violence went unremarked.
  
  The Negro History unit worked to produce a study of Black life in New York City in addition to contributions to the guidebook. When McKay left the unit in 1938, oversight of that project passed to journalist Roi Ottley. He had joined the FWP as an editor in 1937, after losing his position at the New York Amsterdam News for his support of the strike there the previous year. The manuscript of the study he edited, eventually entitled The Negro in New York: An Informal Social History, was not published until 1967, with the sponsorship of the Schomberg Collection of the New York Public Library. Ottley had appropriated the material produced by the unit when the FWP was ended and deposited it at the library in 1940. He subsequently used the unit's work for his own benefit. Ottley borrowed heavily from the material to write a book of his own called New World A' Coming. Published in 1943, the book became a bestseller and the basis for a radio show. In writing about the 1935 disorder, however, Ottley also relied on his own experience and anecdotes. The treatment of the disorder in the draft article for the The Negro in New York written by Leo Nemiroff was very different.
  
  Leo Nemiroff's draft text displayed a disproportionate concern with defending the role of Communists in the disorder that betrayed his political leanings. The article provided a narrative of the treatment of Lino Rivera in the Kress store that relied on the MCCH final report. Nemiroff did not, however, include any discussion of the role of Black women and subsequent events in the store, focusing instead on the gathering crowd on the street. By the time the store closed, he described that crowd as numbering 3,000, far in excess of the estimates in most sources. He went on to describe the arrest of the Young Liberators and their allegations of beatings at the hands of police. The leaflets distributed by the organization were not only mentioned but their contents detailed to show that they had not incited violence but instead called on "Harlem citizens to avoid provocation and physical violence." Spreading and intensifying violence was traced to "tremendous anger against the police," a stark contrast with the inattention to the role of police in the earlier FWP publications. Putting the aggregated damage done by the disorder as at 200 stores with damaged windows and total damages of $300,000, thirty people hospitalized, over a hundred more injured that did not require hospitalization, and 113 arrested, the article identified and named three Black men who were killed: Andrew Lyons, August Miller, and Lloyd Hobbs. After a brief statement of the MCCH's explanation of the disorder as a "a spontaneous demonstration of the people having its roots in decades of economic misery and social discrimination endured by the Negro people of New York," the remainder of the article described in detail the MCCH's conclusions about police violence and its role in the disorder. The only other draft article related to the disorder was a short piece by Carlton Moss on the MCCH that focused on its hearings. Entitled "Peoples Court," the article sympathetically portrayed the audience participation. The longest section was devoted to an anecdote about the testimony of a Black witness to the shooting of Lloyd Hobbs (which cannot be matched with any section of the transcript of the MCCH hearings).
  
  The edited version of the article in The Negro in New York framed Nemiroff's narrative by introducing the disorder as a "long-expected explosion" in response to the "sickness, poverty and death" that Harlem residents faced. In rejecting the characterization of the "outburst" as a race riot, the opening highlighted the violence of Black residents in a way that earlier versions of that disclaimer had not: "White New York was almost panic-stricken as a nightmare of Negro revolt appeared to be a reality." Having invoked that specter, the discussion made no mention of the attacks on whites that did take place. In describing the events of the disorder it omitted details of the identities of the Young Liberators, their treatment by police and any mention of the leaflets. The portrayal of the crowd's behavior beyond 125th Street was altered. The opening sentence summarized the violence as "destroying the property of white merchants," an emphasis echoed in the description of looting as specifically targeting "stores owned by whites." Three anecdotes were also added to the description of the violence that reflected Ottley's editorial input, one of which he would claim in his own book: the "Me colored too" sign posted by the Chinese laundryman; women standing on the street in Lenox Avenue shouting their choice of articles to men looting stores; and a man who took a new coat from a tailor's store complaining that he would not be able to get it altered. While the aggregated summary was retained, the names of the three men killed were not. Like Wight and De Mille, Ottley left police violence out of his account. Rather than Nemiroff 's summary of the MCCH's charges against the police, the edited version contained a section on responses in the white press for which no draft survived in the FWP records. That discussion spent some time dismissing claims that Communists were responsible for the disorder before focusing on the explanations offered by Harlem's Black leaders: the disorder was a protest against the discrimination Harlem's black residents faced. Moss' article on the MCCH hearings followed, put in the context of the MCCH's work and without the account of audience reactions to the southern accent of the Kress store manager.
  
  The disorder appeared in Ottley's book New World A' Coming as the opening of the chapter titled "The Slum-Shocked." It employed a frame for the disorder different from the edited version that presented it as "a sequel to resentments nurtured by agitation" and the result of "smoldering resentments against racial discrimination and poverty." The account of the events echoed the discussion of the disorder in the FWP book, with the addition of more flamboyant language and another of Ottley's experiences: "I saw patrol cars driven onto the sidewalks to disperse the rioters." One existing anecdote about the youth taking a new coat was shifted into the first person so it was identified as Ottley's experience. Where in the Negro in New York a discussion of competing explanations of the disorder followed, Ottley added mention of an increased police presence that continued in Harlem and the explanation for the disorder offered by the MCCH: "resentment against racial discrimination and poverty in the midst of plenty." He then transitioned to a discussion of broader conditions in Harlem: "What at first was thought to be the natural ebullience of a volatile population was in fact a manifestation of profound social unrest." While police violence continued to be missing from Ottley's account of the disorder, he did address it later in this chapter as a feature of Black life.