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Black women arrested for looting (3)
The presence of Black women in the crowds on Harlem’s streets was recorded in most accounts of the disorder, but they are only rarely mentioned as participants in attacks on stores or looting. The Daily News, New York Evening Journal, New York Times, and Norfolk Journal and Guide all included women and men in their general descriptions of the crowds. (The Daily News highlighted their presence among those who broke windows in a headline, “Women Join Mob of 4,000 In Battering Stores,” without mentioning women breaking windows in the story itself.) Other papers such as the New York American, Home News, New York Sun, New York World-Telegram, and the Black newspapers the Afro-American and Chicago Defender included women only in the initial crowds inside and outside Kress’ store. Their presence at the outbreak of violence distinguishes the disorder in Harlem from those that followed in subsequent decades, in which Marilynn Johnson argues women became involved after men had initiated the violence. Women's early involvement in Harlem resulted from the disorder beginning in a store, at a time when only women were present to witness what happened to Lino Rivera. (Women are not mentioned in stories about the events of the disorder published in the New York Herald Tribune, New York Post, or New York Age.)
Women were specifically reported as participants in looting in only four newspapers. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle's general description of the disorder included "looting stores" among other activities of "Bands of men and women, in some cases joined by whites." When the Daily Mirror’s narrative reached the time when “Looters began to clean out the goods on display in the stores whose windows had been broken,” it noted “Both men and women were doing the looting.” In the Black press, the Atlanta World broadly included women in crowds that looted in a similar manner: “the members of the mob needed little provocation to start on the rampage. Using whatever weapons that were to hand, men, women and children in the mob broke hundreds of plate glass windows in stores belonging to white merchants, scattered and stole merchandise and destroyed fixtures.” Rather than a general presence among looters, women appeared just in a crowd looting Herbert's Blue Diamond Jewelry store in the New York Evening Journal: “The emergency squad police swept into the mob with riot guns, drove the yelling, threatening men and women from their loot and then guarded the store until armored trucks could remove the valuables.” However, other sources indicated that Herbert’s was not looted, but only had its windows broken, by the crowds that had gathered early in the disorder across the street around Kress’s store — crowds that multiple sources record included women. (The New York Evening Journal story also presented women as participating in an attack on a white man, B.Z. Kondoul, and in efforts to prevent firefighters from extinguishing a fire in a store on Lenox Avenue.)
Rather than participants, women were presented as instigators by Roi Ottley in his column in the New York Amsterdam News: “LENOX AVENUE was the scene of much of the disorder during that riotous fracas...From every shattered window rioters would emerge laden down with spoils...Women stood on the fringes of the mobs and dictated their choice to their men folk, who willingly obliged by bringing forth the desired article.” (Ottley also cast women as inciting the disorder more generally, also from greater distance, in an earlier column: “Women hanging out of windows screamed applause to the reign of terror...and prodded their men-folk on with screeching invectives.”) Those images are somewhat at odds with the agency displayed by the women shopping in Kress' store and may reflect Ottley's attitudes to women as much as their behavior during the disorder.
While these stories, and the photographs that accompanied them, indicated that women were part of the crowds on March 19, it remains unclear whether those women did not participate in looting or did and were not recorded by reporters or arrested by police focused on men they likely considered more threatening. From a broader perspective more removed from the events of the disorder, the MCCH appears to have concluded that women did participate, noting in its report: "Even some grown-up men and women who had probably never committed a criminal act before, but bad suffered years of privations, seized the opportunity to express their resentment against discrimination in employment and the exclusive rights of property." However, this section of the report was part of an effort to frame looting as less violent and threatening than it appeared in the initial newspaper stories. While noting that "it seems indisputable that the criminal element took advantage of the disorders," the previous sentence argued, "it seems equally true that many youngsters who could not be classed as criminals joined the looting crowds in a spirit of pure adventure." An earlier discussion of crowds in the disorder made a similar claim, that "Some of the destruction was carried on in a playful spirit. Even the looting, which has furnished many an amusing tale, was sometimes done in the spirit of children taking preserves from a closet to which they have accidentally found the key." Including women as participants in "playful" behavior did not run counter to gender roles and stereotypes in the way that their participation in violence did. The only other place women appeared in the MCCH report's discussion of the events of the disorder was as shoppers in Kress' store.
By the time disorder broke out again in Harlem in 1943, when the police recorded attacks on businesses and looting systematically in a way that they had not been in 1935, the press associated looting with Black women, a representation that would intensify in subsequent decades. Harold Orlans' contemporary study of newspaper stories about the 1943 racial disorder and Laurie Leach's more recent analysis both note the attention given to Black women. Photographs of women participating in attacks on stores and being arrested for looting appeared on the front pages of both of Harlem's Black newspapers, the New York Amsterdam News and the New York Age, when they first reported the disorder in 1943. One striking image on the front page of the New York Amsterdam News a week later, which also appeared in Life magazine, could be seen as in line with the reading of women's behavior as playful advanced in 1935. Historian Sara Blair described the image as featuring "an attractive young woman [who] smiles openly at the camera, part of a group of style-conscious women balancing boxes of hosiery and other consumer goods (one shopping bag is emblazoned with the logo “Modesse”) as they are escorted by police." She explains the woman's unselfconscious engagement with the camera as reflecting a participation in a social spectacle, a performative response to being photographed, that marked the new visual culture emerging in this period. The figure of the Black woman looter would take a more threatening form in white reporting and photography of the 1967 riots, as "greedy" and "criminal and culpable," as Kevin Mumford insightfully unpacked in his study of Newark in 1967.
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- "5 Dying and Scores Wounded as Race Riots in Harlem Subside," Home News, March 20, 1935 [clipping].
- "1 Dead, 7 Shot, 100 Hurt as Harlem Crowds Riot over Boy, 16, and Hearse," New York Herald Tribune, March 20, 1935, 1.
- The Negro in Harlem: A Report on Social and Economic Conditions Responsible for the Outbreak of March 19, 1935 (1935), 10, Subject Files, Box 167, Folder 8 (Roll 76), Records of Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, 1934-1945 (New York City Municipal Archives).
- "Snipers Fire on Police from Harlem Rooftop," Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 20, 1935, 1, 2.
- "Mobs Rove Harlem After Riot; 1 Dead, 100 Hurt in Harlem Riot; Snipers Routed, Mobs Rove Area," New York World-Telegram, March 20, 1935, 1.
- The Negro in Harlem: A Report on Social and Economic Conditions Responsible for the Outbreak of March 19, 1935 (1935), 10-11, Subject Files, Box 167, Folder 8 (Roll 76), Records of Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, 1934-1945 (New York City Municipal Archives)
- G. James Fleming, "700 Officers, 25 Radio Cars Quell Rioters," Norfolk Journal and Guide, March 23, 1935, 1, 2.
- "1 Slain, 20 Injured in Harlem Rioting," New York American, March 20, 1935, 1.
- C. C. Nicolet, "One Dead in Wake of Harlem Riots," New York Post, March 20, 1935 [clipping].
- Harold Orlans, The Harlem Riot: A Study in Mass Frustration (New York: Social Analysis, 1943), 9-11.
- Laurie F. Leach, "Margie Polite, the Riot Starter: Harlem, 1943," Studies in the Literary Imagination, 40.2 (2007): 40-42.
- "Harlem Race Riot: 1 Dead; Cops Fire; Women Join Mob of 4,000 in Battering Stores," Daily News, March 20, 1935, 3.
- "Harlem Mob War. 1 Dies, 50 Hurt, 100 Arrested In Wild Night, Daily Mirror, March 20, 1935, 4.
- "Dodge Begins Investigation of Worst Disorders Here in Years," New York Sun, March 20, 1.
- The Negro in Harlem: A Report on Social and Economic Conditions Responsible for the Outbreak of March 19, 1935 (1935), 7, Subject Files, Box 167, Folder 8 (Roll 76), Records of Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, 1934-1945 (New York City Municipal Archives).
- "Police Shoot Into Rioters; Kill Negro in Harlem Mob. 3,000 Storm Store After Boy Knife Thief, 16, Is Reported Lynched-Several Shot - Many Felled by Stones," New York Times, March 20, 1935, 1.
- [Photograph] "These women are being arrested in the rioting that followed," New York Amsterdam News, August 14, 1943, 1.
- The Negro in Harlem: A Report on Social and Economic Conditions Responsible for the Outbreak of March 19, 1935 (1935), 2, 6, Subject Files, Box 167, Folder 8 (Roll 76), Records of Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, 1934-1945 (New York City Municipal Archives).
- Roi Ottley, "Hectic Harlem," New York Amsterdam News, March 23, 1935, 9.
- Percy Gould, "20,000 Fight Police in Orgy of Looting," New York Evening Journal, March 20, 1935, 1.
- Roi Ottley, "Hectic Harlem," New York Amsterdam News, March 30, 1935, 9.
- "Machine Guns Set Up in New York Streets. False Rumor Causes Death of One, Wounding of 50, and Looting of 300 Stores," Afro-American, March 23, 1935, 1.
- Marilynn S. Johnson, "Gender, Race, and Rumours: Re-Examining the 1943 Race Riots," Gender & History, 10.2 (1998): 254.
- "One Dead, Scores Hurt in N. Y. Riot," Chicago Defender, March 23, 1935, 1.
- "Twelve-Year Old Lad Starts Riot On 125th Street," New York Age, March 23, 1935, 1.
- Sara Blair, Harlem Crossroads: Black Writers and the Photograph in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 3.
- Kevin Mumford, Newark: A History of Race, Rights, and Riots in America (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 152-158.
- [Photograph] "This woman was arrested as a looter," New York Age, August 7, 1943, 1.
- [Photograph] "Women were as guilty as men of breaking in stores to loot," New York Amsterdam News, August 7, 1943, 1.
- "Harlem's Wild Rampage," Life (August 16, 1943): 32.