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• 1 2023-09-04T23:57:26+00:00 Anniversaries (1936, 1937) 17 plain 2024-01-12T02:22:49+00:00 While the MCCH failed in its efforts to have its report completed and released before the first anniversary of the disorder, both Harlem’s Black newspapers marked the occasion. The editors of the New York Age and the New York Amsterdam News both wrote feature length articles. While they had similar titles, the two stories had little in common in content and tone. In the New York Age story, entitled "Harlem Riot Took Place One Year Ago Next Thursday," St. Clair Bourne presented a narrative of the events of the disorder that cast most of the participants as criminals. In the New York Amsterdam News story, entitled "One Year Ago," T. R. Poston presented the disorder as a protest and focused on the conditions in Harlem that it exposed and changes that it brought.
  
  St. Clair Bourne's article in the New York Age cast street speakers as having “inspired and incited” the “unruly mob” responsible for the disorder in his initial presentation of the events. When he returned to discuss those events in more detail, however, it was police who “interfered” with those speakers who provoked the first attack on a store window. The violence grew thanks to “idlers” who joined the crowd and took the form of “harassing storekeepers, damaging property and defying the desperate efforts of police to hold them in check.” Protest and targeting of white-owned business appeared only implicitly in that account. Some space for protest at least is created by having the crowds from 125th responsible only for the initial attacks on store windows; the looting of those businesses was undertaken by “brigands following in the wake of the mob.” While “gangs of hoodlums” were identified as responsible for most of the attacks on the avenues, some gangs did target “certain stores whose policies in the past had earned the strong resentment of local residents.” The results of the disorder are presented first as property damage, the death of four unidentified individuals, and “scores” injured and arrested. Police were not identified as responsible for any of the deaths nor injuries, nor was any mention made of the racial identities of the casualties. The story concludes with the MCCH investigation which was credited with obtaining a “mass of information.” It did not, however, result in an improvement in conditions in Harlem: “Most of the facts contained in those reports have since been used over and over again in new complaints against local conditions but, thus far little or nothing has been done about them.”
  
  T. R. Poston saw both more change and more reason for optimism than his counterpart. His story in the New York Amsterdam News did not offer a narrative of the events of the disorder. Instead, he addressed how what happened should be categorized: not as a riot but as an expression of resentment of the “exploitation and discrimination which characterized the daily existence of a large sector of the community’s 204,000 Negro residents.” “Hundreds of usually law-abiding citizens” were responsible for the disorder in Poston’s account, not brigands or hoodlums. What motivated them was protest against white power, summed up by a vignette from the corner of 7th Avenue and 128th Street: a man “seized a brick, aimed it at a large plate glass window and yelled: 'This is for Scottsboro!'” Linking the disorder to the fight to win the release of the men accused of rape in Scottsboro, Alabama associated it with a civil rights campaign that galvanized Black communities in the 1930s. Such a broad and explicit political agenda was not evident in most of the reports of the disorder. The conditions in Harlem found by the MCCH that Poston reported, however, were widely shared grievances. He included not just discrimination by landlords and employers and in schools and city agencies but also “a minor reign of terror by the police” missing from the story in the New York Age. A bigger departure from that story was the claim that the “Harlem consciousness” in the city, state, and country that had been produced by the disorder had brought some improvements in conditions and hope for more. Poston’s optimism was not unguarded. The “lasting effects” remained to be seen.
  
  A year later, only the New York Amsterdam News noted the second anniversary of the disorder with a story headlined, “Harlem’s Riot Two Years Ago Came From Causes Which Still Linger.” The story was shorter and more narrowly framed as well as more muted in its hope for change. Rather than the conditions most often discussed, it focused on aspects of life in the neighborhood that it claimed had been given less attention: juvenile delinquency and crime. Police indifference, ignorance and corruption contributed to those conditions. As a year earlier, the stance of the newspaper was that things had changed for the better in Harlem; however, much more change was needed.
  
  In 1938, while neither newspaper noted the anniversary of the disorder, the New York Amsterdam News did publish a story on the New York State Temporary State Commission on the Urban Population that highlighted how that body shared the newspaper's view of the disorder as a protest and concern with the conditions that provoked it. “This riot was recognized by expert observers as more than a mob action of malicious intent," the Commission reported. "It was considered an incoherent protest by Harlem’s population against a studied neglect of its critical problems.”