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

Lino Rivera grabbed & Charles Hurley and Steve Urban assaulted in secondary sources

None of the historical scholarship on the disorder offers a narrative of these events that is entirely in line with the evidence gathered for this study. The unpublished public hearings are a source for only one narrative of these events in the historical scholarship, Cheryl Greenberg’s description. She is also the only historian to cite other unpublished sources, Di Martini’s report and the subcommittee report. For some reason, Greenberg relies on Di Martini’s report to describe only one store employee grabbing Rivera and being bitten, rather than both Hurley and Urban. That report was compiled the day after the disorder, on March 20, without time for the information gathering undertaken by the MCCH. While Greenberg asserted, “The Mayor’s Commission agreed with the police description of the events,” both the subcommittee report and the final report identify Hurley and another employee as grabbing Rivera. Greenberg also asserts that Rivera was released before police arrived, rather than by Donahue, as the MCCH reports describe. Di Martini’s report did not mention Rivera’s release, so the source for that element of Greenberg’s narrative is uncertain.

Other historians rely on the MCCH report. However, those narratives consistently misidentify the store manager, Jackson Smith, as one of those who grabbed Rivera, even though the MCCH report describes Smith only as witnessing the theft, and Hurley and another employee as grabbing the boy. Mark Naison, Lorrin Thomas, and Jonathan Gill portray the manager acting alone, and Naison makes no mention of Rivera biting him or anyone else. The manager acts with an unnamed store guard in Marilynn Johnson’s narrative, replacing Smith with the store detective. There is no mention of Rivera biting either man; they simply turn him over to a police officer. Nicole Watson likewise replaces the store detective with the store manager, who is bitten along with Hurley. Thomas Kessner is the only historian not to mistakenly include the store manager, describing Rivera as grabbed by two employees. Kessner, Greenberg, Johnson, and Watson all mention a woman shouting that the boy was being beaten up. Naison and Thomas more generally refer to a rumor spreading through the crowd, with no mention that women made up the bulk of those in the store. None of these historians mention whether the woman was arrested.

While Naison, Kessner, Johnson, and Thomas follow the MCCH report in describing police releasing Rivera through the back entrance, Gill and Watson offer narratives more at odds with the evidence. Gill echoes Greenberg in describing Rivera as taken to the basement before police arrive (there are no notes in Gill’s book, so it is not clear if he is relying on Greenberg for that detail). Watson offers two possible narratives, that Rivera escaped as Donahue tried to quell the crowd as Time reported, or Donahue released him on Smith’s instructions. While the magazine story was published at a greater distance from the events than newspaper stories, no evidence that Rivera escaped rather than being released was found by the MCCH investigation. To the contrary, testimony in the public hearings and the MCCH’s report are consistent in saying that is not what happened, with Donahue’s decision drawing specific attention at the hearings and in the report as a "mistake.’"Watson’s account is not clear on just how unbalanced the weight of evidence is in regards to those events; she simply posits the description in Time against “other versions.”

Portraying the store manager as involved in grabbing Rivera matters because it obscures the number of staff employed by the store to undertake surveillance and policing, a store detective and a floor walker. (Other large stores on 125th Street employed similar staff; around this time, however, Black store detectives were employed at the nearby McCrory, W. T. Grant, and Blumstein stores, which at least at the McCrory store often defused encounters between white staff and Black customers.) That apparatus contributed to how routine it was to apprehend a boy shoplifting, something that did not warrant the involvement of the manager, but did reflect the kind of treatment Black customers received in white-owned businesses. Portraying store employees as releasing Rivera or the boy as escaping obscures the involvement of police in his custody. Given the level of violence Black residents suffered at the hands of police, a patrolman taking him to the basement would have heightened the concern of those in the store that Rivera would be subject to violence.

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