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

How Racial Violence Changed in 1935

Many observers of the events in Harlem on March 19 and 20 quickly realized that the night's violence was different from what had occurred in the past. A number of Harlem’s Black leaders, as well as several white papers such as the New York Post, the Communist Party, and later members of the Mayors Commission on Conditions in Harlem, made sense of what they saw by describing the disorder as “not a race riot” but an “economic riot.” The race riot that they imagined would have predominantly involved clashes between groups of Black and white residents, and more specifically, groups of white men and women coming to Harlem to attack Black residents in response to reports of their violence. By contrast, Black residents made up almost all of those involved in the disorder. The most visible and extensive targets of their violence were businesses that had a secondary place in a race riot. To argue that what had happened was not a race riot was not to deny that it was racial violence. Economic power in Harlem was overwhelmingly in white hands. Discrimination and exploitation on the basis of race produced and flowed from the poor economic situation of Black residents. Nor did Black residents escape violent attack during the disorder. In 1935, that violence came at the hands of police, not white civilians. Although the officers stationed in Harlem included all of the city's approximately 100 Black officers, the police who responded to the disorder were continuing the brutality and discrimination that characterized their behavior toward Black residents and acting to uphold the racial order.

The full picture of the disorder represented a broader challenge to white power than most of Harlem's Black leaders and their white allies wanted to pursue. Consequently, their accounts muted some of its elements. Recognition that crowds had selected white-owned businesses as their targets was qualified by noting that some Black-owned businesses also suffered damage. Assessments of the disorder as involving violence against property not people marginalized or discounted attacks on white pedestrians. The events of the disorder were simplified and summarized in accounts that elaborated the causes of the violence in the form of the poor condition of the housing, schools, health, and employment of Black residents. What resulted was an image of the violence as a somewhat incoherent protest by Black residents against the conditions in Harlem.

Historians' interpretations of racial violence generally acknowledge its multifaceted nature but select one thread to emphasize. In the case of Harlem in 1935, it has been the attacks on white property, novel at that time, but central to racial violence in subsequent decades. That emphasis comes at the cost of simplifying the character of racial violence and obscuring the balance and relationship between different forms of violence. Weaving the violent clashes between Black residents and white men and women and police violence against Black residents back into the picture does not produce an image that is no longer is one of protest or render the protest even less coherent. Rather, the actions of Black residents appear as a broader challenge that extended beyond damaging white economic power to challenging the racial order imposed by police violence that allowed white men and women a privileged presence on Harlem's streets. The variety of violence did not make the protest incoherent so much as wide-ranging.

On the basis of granular data about events created from a variety of types of sources, mapped and analyzed in multiple relationships and at different scales, section three, "On the Streets," presents an interpretation of the disorder during the night of March 19 as a new mix of violence: attacks by Black men and women on white businesses in protest against their refusal to hire Black staff and discrimination and exploitation of Black customers; intermittent attacks by Black residents on white pedestrians in response to the broader racial order that produced the poor housing, health and schooling in Harlem; looting by poor and desperate people seeking food and goods they had been unable to obtain by other means and others and by others taking advantage of the disorder to steal merchandise; and police violence against both Black men and women who participated in the disorder and those who were spectators. Disorder is the appropriate label for the events in 1935 not just because, as Amanda Seligman pointed out, using a term such as riot, uprising, and rebellion when sources show a range of actors pursuing a variety of goals elevates one group above the rest of the community. Disruptions of the racial order were also the form that the protests took.

"In the Courts" and "Under Investigation," sections four and five, trace how the violence of the events came to be distorted, diminished, and marginalized in sources about the "Harlem riot" by telling the story of the legal and government investigations of the disorder and by making transparent the process of interpretation involved in creating data about the events. The alleged offenses of the individuals arrested who appeared in court did not reflect the events of the previous night. The twenty-nine alleged assaults on white men and women resulted in at most seven arrests, with an additional six men arrested for alleged assaults on police. As a result, interracial violence formed a smaller part of the picture of the disorder presented in the legal system. So too did the attacks on stores that had dominated the early evening of the previous day. The bulk of those arrested, fifty-seven men and three women, had allegedly been looting, with the result that the theft of property that characterized the final hours of the disorder overshadowed its other elements. The nature of the legal process further diminished the violence of the disorder. While the breadth of the violence, across the neighborhood and throughout the night, made the disorder greater than the sum of its parts, the courts fragmented it into the individual alleged acts of those being prosecuted. Isolated from the larger context, the offenses with which police and prosecutors charged individuals were relatively minor and everyday. Those offenses became even less serious as they moved through the legal process, with the charges made by police reduced by prosecutors, magistrates and the men serving on the grand jury, and numbers of those arrested discharged. At the same, the grand jury kept police violence during the disorder out of the courts, twice declining to indict Patrolman John McInerney for fatally shooting Lloyd Hobbs. Only later, in cases store owners brought against the city in the civil courts, did legal proceedings reveal some of the scale of the violence against property and of the ineffectiveness of police. Their claims described the total damage done to a business rather than the result of a single attack or theft on which criminal prosecutions focused. However, as only a handful of those cases went to trial, the legal process provided only glimpses of that violence. Nonetheless, the litigation and the city's subsequent actions to ensure such suits could not be brought again, highlighted how the disorder challenged white economic and political power and the racial order that they imposed on Harlem.

While the committee that Mayor La Guardia appointed to investigate the causes of the disorder did appoint a subcommittee to investigate the events of March 19, it concentrated narrowly on the events in and around the Kress store that triggered the disorder. By the time it held its first public hearing, the focus of the subcommittee had been expanded to crime. The subject of its inquiries gradually shifted from the events in the Kress store toward instances of police brutality, only one of which, the fatal shooting of sixteen-year-old Lloyd Hobbs, had occurred during the disorder. Those were the topics to which the subcommittee devoted its report: no information was included about the number of people arrested during the disorder or the outcome of the legal proceedings against them. Nor was any mention made of violence against white men and women or any details provided of the damage to property. Black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier carried the same narrow focus into the final report he wrote for the commission, adding only some general statements about the nature of the disorder across the evening and who participated. Frazier's report would become the source on which subsequent accounts of the disorder relied. "Over Time," section six, shows that the result was descriptions of what happened in 1935 that emphasized the economic and social conditions that caused Harlem's residents to turn to violent protest and only briefly and often inaccurately summarized the events and aggregated the results of the violence.

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