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Inciting crowds (16)
The reported instances of calls for crowds to act were concentrated on West 125th Street and on 7th and Lenox Avenues within two blocks of 125th Street. The one outlier was also one of only two reports not associated with an arrest further north on Lenox Avenue between 131st and 132nd Streets. The alleged events on West 125th Street occurred near the beginning of the disorder, beginning inside Kress’ store, followed by those on 7th Avenue north and south of 125th Street up to 11:15 PM, and then those on Lenox Avenue after midnight. Again, the crowd further north on Lenox Avenue fell outside that pattern, likely appearing on the street sometime between 11:00 PM and midnight.
Most of the alleged calls were to break windows made by men who themselves were breaking windows. John Kennedy Jones allegedly called only "come on," while motioning with his hand. Leon Mauraine and David Smith shouted "Com[e] on gang, here's two more windows, let's break them," Bernard Smith, “We will get this two windows here…You fellows get the others,” and Leroy Brown, “Go right along and get the other windows.” Other alleged cries that did not directly call for windows to be broken fueled crowds who went on to such attacks. The shouts “Down with the whites! Let’s get what we can!” from the crowd further up Lenox Avenue reported by Herbert Cantor were followed by objects being thrown at windows. Similarly, a woman’s cries that a hearse arriving on 124th Street had come to pick up Rivera’s body drew a crowd that broke windows. While Daniel Miller said only a few words before being pulled down from a stepladder, someone threw an object through a window in Kress’ store as he spoke that linked him with window breaking. That association extended to Harry Gordon. He was arrested only a few minutes after Miller while attempting to speak to the crowd police had moved away from the store after the window was broken.
On three occasions, men allegedly called for violence against white police. While fitting the more sensational accounts of violence offered by some white newspapers, those calls were out of place in the context of the attacks on store windows in which they occurred. James Pringle allegedly called out, “Let's go cross the way and scale rocks at the cops, they are coming down our side of the street.” "Kill the cops, the dirty mother-fucking sons-of-bitches,” was the alleged cry of Claude Jones. A patrolman testified that William Ford shouted “Shed white blood, kill the cops, there has been enough black blood shed here now.” Ford and Jones both allegedly broke windows while a police officer alleged that Pringle “led others who smashed windows.”
John King clashed more directly with a police officer. Told to move on from the corner of 125th Street and 7th Avenue, he refused and threatened to “put that Kress store out of business and punish that man that injured the child.” King’s failure to move more than what he said likely led to his arrest. The officer who arrested Sam Jameson, Murray Samuels and Claudio Viabolo explained their arrest was for not following police instructions to move, in their case from the front of Kress’ store where they were picketing.
The three reported instances when Black women allegedly incited crowds came during the events around Kress’ at the beginning of the disorder in the gendered context of shopping and consumption. Two unnamed women, one inside Kress' store and one on 124th Street, shouted that Rivera had been beaten or killed rather than the direct calls to act attributed to men. Knocking pans to the floor, as Margaret Mitchell allegedly did, was a similarly indirect way of causing a crowd to gather different from the speeches and pickets attributed to men. Presented in that way, the women were not cast as leaders in the same way as the men alleged to have incited crowds. Rather, in alerting those around them to Rivera being beaten or killed, they were effectively acting as protectors, an extension of their socially expected role in the family. Away from the store where Rivera was apprehended, and away from 125th Street, no women shouting or leading crowds were mentioned in newspaper stories or arrested by police.
Calls to break windows or attack police did not appear in newspaper stories about the disorder. Three newspaper stories about assaults mentioned shouts from groups. In reporting an alleged assault on the white reporter Harry Johnson, the Daily Mirror described someone in a group of three Black men calling out, “There’s a reporter. Get Him!” That detail is not mentioned in any of the other stories about the alleged assault. The other two incidents were reported only in the New York Evening Journal in sensationalized stories about alleged assaults on white men and women. That newspaper gave more attention to interracial violence than any other publication. One New York Evening Journal journalist, Richard Levitt, reported widespread calls to “Kill the whites.” The story fit the emphasis on violence against white men and women, described in sensational and racist language, that distinguished stories on the disorder in the New York Evening Journal but was the only report that crowds called out that incitement to kill. However, it was more a litany of racist fears and stereotypes than an account of the events of the disorder. Under the page-spanning headline, “Kill the Whites Roar Maddened Harlem Mobs,” the phrase “Kill the Whites” appeared four times as a literary device: separating a description of the sounds of disorder on 7th Avenue from a picture of “outnumbered and out- maneuvered” police; as a “battle-cry” between an account of looting and a description of a crowd attacking a white man who got out of a taxi on 7th Avenue; between a description of crowds attacking traffic and mention of three patrolmen guarding Herbert’s jewelry store; and as the story’s final line. In none of those uses was the call associated with the events being described. Invoking Black violence, or fears of Black violence, was a longstanding racist trope, employed in white narratives about the race riots of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Only two specific cases that included such threats are reported in the newspaper. A call to “Kill him” is attributed to a crowd of Black men and women that the New York Evening Journal described threatening B. Z. Kondoul, a thirty-five-year-old white man. Again, only one story mentioned that detail. So too the alleged assault on Betty Willcox, as she waited in a parked car. It was reported only in a story in the New York Evening Journal which appeared alongside Levitt's article. The Black men she described surrounding the car screamed "White- we'll get you' We'll get all of them around here!"
Rather than shouted incitements and speakers, newspaper reporting on the beginning of the disorder focused on the distribution of leaflets that police said were responsible for crowds gathering and outbreaks of violence. The Young Liberators printed a one-page mimeographed leaflet that charged the management of Kress’ store with beating a boy so severely that he was near death and injuring a woman who came to his aid. While the leaflet called on Black and white workers to protest the attack, the claim that it provoked the actions of crowds in front of Kress’ store depended on when it was distributed. Police told journalists that leaflets were in circulation on 125th Street within an hour or two of Rivera’s apprehension, so by 3:30 PM or 4:30 PM. Witnesses at the scene did not see leaflets until much later, after 7:30 PM, or more than an hour after the first window was broken in Kress’ store. A second leaflet, produced by the Communist Party after the Young Liberators approached them concerned about the growing disorder in Harlem, combined calls for protest with an appeal "For Unity of Negro and White Workers" and to not "let Bosses start any race riots in Harlem." Distributed around 9:00 PM or 10:00 PM, that leaflet arrived on the streets too late to trigger violence, but in time to contribute to rumors about what had happened in Kress' store.