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

Looting (65)

The disorder resulted in damage to approximately 300 Harlem businesses, many of which also had goods stolen. Such attacks on white businesses distinguished the events in 1935 from collective racial violence earlier in the twentieth-century, although the scale was far smaller than the disorders that would follow. When racial violence broke out in Harlem in 1943, four times as many businesses were targets of violence. The press labeled the theft as looting, a term that distinguished it on the basis of the context of violence and crisis in which it took place. Such theft often involved crowds publicly stealing goods, but those circumstances were not entirely out of the ordinary. Just over one in five (15 of 67) burglaries at other times in 1935 involved smashing street-front doors and windows, to steal goods before police responded, although not crowds of participants.

Although press reports and the MCCH gave prominence to attacks on property in characterizing the disorder as “not a race riot,” they offered only general descriptions of this violence, including fewer detailed incidents than was the case with assaults and none of the quantitative information that would be collected in subsequent racial disorders. However, damaged businesses do figure prominently in press photographs, highlighting that such damage represented a spectacle (one which also drew crowds to Harlem the day after the disorder to view the damage for themselves). Only sixty-five looted businesses are identified in the surviving sources, twenty-seven linked to arrests, with seven stores linked to more than one arrest. An additional forty-six businesses are identified as having their windows damaged, which would have exposed them to theft. There were almost certainly more looted businesses than those identified in the sources. In the cases of eighteen of those charged with looting there is no information on their alleged targets; while some of those stores may be among those identified in other sources, given the limited number of cases where multiple arrests were made for thefts from the same store, most are likely missing from this picture of the looting.

However, newspaper reports and legal records indicate that in the initial hours of the disorder store windows were smashed without efforts to steal their contents. After police dispersed the crowd drawn to Kress’ store and set up a cordon on 125th Street protecting it, another clash at the rear of the store on 124th Street around 7.45PM saw windows broken. Around the same time, crowds smashed windows on 125th Street between 7th and 8th Avenue. Although the police present on this block lacked the numbers to protect the windows, in several cases they responded to damage by taking up positions in front of stores, which appears to have prevented much looting. While many of the large stores were identified as having windows smashed at this time, only the New York Evening Journal reported that thefts also took place. Around 8.45 PM, when police succeeded in pushing the crowds from 125th St on to 7th and 8th Avenues, the smaller businesses on those streets became targets. Windows were broken, and isolated looting reported in the blocks of 7th Avenue immediately north of 125th Street (AM, AA, Hobbs investigation).  The New York Times and Afro-American reported goods were thrown into the street rather than taken, actions more akin to efforts to damage property, to ransack, than a turn to theft, but it is not clear how often that happened. Many of these businesses were still operating and staffed, but that did little to curtail theft. In some businesses staff removed goods from windows and shelves, but most hid or fled crowds and bombardment with rocks and stones. More effective were the Black staff who put signs in their store windows identifying the business as Black-owned, which spared them from attack. Around 10PM, as crowds began to move away from the block of 125th Street containing Kress’ store, where police were concentrated, assaults and attacks on stores spread through Harlem. Further isolated looting occurred on 7th Avenue north of 125th Street, and after 10.30PM, in the area of 116th Street to the south.

Around midnight, reporters from the New York Herald Tribune, Daily Mirror and Afro-American noted a change in the tenor of the disorder reflected in arrests: violence became overshadowed by looting, particularly on Lenox Avenue in the blocks north of 125th Street, lasting until around 2 AM. This turn to looting was helped by both earlier damage to windows that offered access to displays and store interiors and the lesser police presence in this area. By that late hour most undamaged businesses had closed, some with their doors and windows protected by security barriers. However, those additional obstacles did not prevent looting, an indication of growing violence and limited police presence. At least three businesses in this area were also set on fire, having been looted first. Even the return of some businessowners, once they learned of the disorder, did little to prevent looting, with several reporting futile efforts to secure police assistance. The progression from violence and damage to looting also features in the later racial disorders, in Harlem and Detroit in 1943, and in Detroit in 1967. As Sydney Fine argues was the case in Detroit in 1967, that pattern locates looting as a consequence of the violence, not as the defining characteristic of the disorder, and as serving to prolong disorder.

The progression from damage to looting also reflected time for additional groups to join the crowds of men most prominent in the initial violence. In later racial disorders, women would be much larger presence among those arrested for looting, and in images of theft. However, in 1935, while three women are among the sixty individuals arrested for looting, almost as many women were arrested for other offenses: two for breaking windows and another for inciting a crowd. Several papers reported that white men also joined the looting, but only two are identified in legal records. One of those men was arrested in circumstances that do not put him in the midst of the disorder: Jean Jacquelin, a thirty-three-year-old Canadian driver with a previous arrest for assault with a knife, arrested at 5.40AM, after the crowds had left the streets, in possession of clothing stolen from a tailor down the block from his home. Louis Tunick, the second white man arrested, is not linked to a specific business, and lived outside Harlem.

The stores identified in the sources as having stock stolen represented a cross-section of the small businesses in Harlem focused on needs more than luxuries, and on personal items rather than larger items like furniture. Businesses providing food make up the largest group (22 of 54). Clothing was also a target (17 of 54), while the remaining businesses sold a variety of goods (15 of 54). Missing from this partial list of businesses attacked during the disorder are large stores and several enterprises prominent in the neighborhood: beauty shops, and barbers. There are eighteen individuals charged with looting unidentified businesses. At other times in 1935 the full range of stores were targets of burglaries.

The feature of the looting that drew particular comment in the reports of newspapers and later the MCCH was the extent to which it targeted only white-owned businesses, sparing Black-owned businesses. The press reports allowed that a small number of Black-owned businesses did suffer damage, either before identifying themselves with signs (NYJ, AA), or after crowds got carried away (MCCH). However, none of the instances of looting identified in the sources involved black businesses. At the same time, Harlem’s racial landscape was more complex than these reports recognized. Among the “white-owned” businesses targeted were a number of Hispanic/Puerto Rican businesses around 116th Street, and Chinese laundries scattered throughout the neighborhood.

Police responded to looting very differently than to crowds and attacks on stores, with a greater degree of violence and more arrests. Theft warranted firing at suspects, rather than in the air, as police claimed they did in confronting crowds and assaults. Police pursuing suspected looters shot two of those killed in the disorder, Lloyd Hobbs and James Thompson. Sixty of those arrested were alleged to have been stealing from stores, far more than arrested for any other activity during the disorder (although what prompted the arrest of 30 of the 133 arrested is not known). Officers generally claimed to have seen an individual stealing goods from a business. At least some of those police arrested claimed to have simply been standing with crowds on the street when police approached. In one-third (9 of 27) of the cases where the circumstances are known, the arrest occurred away from the looted store, as police apparently stopped and questioned individuals they encountered carrying goods.

Courts also treated charges of looting more severely than other alleged offenses in the disorder. Magistrates held over half (28 of 50) of those who appeared before them for the grand jury, compared to only one third of those charged with assault. The grand jury did redirect a significant number to the Court of Special Sessions, casting them as involving goods of too little value to warrant treatment as felonies. District attorneys followed the same pattern with those individuals as at other times in 1935, negotiating guilty pleas for lesser offenses with most, so that only two prosecutions for looting went to trial.

As these criminal prosecutions made their way through the legal system, Harlem's white business-owners turned to the civil courts seeking compensation from the city for their losses on the basis of a nineteenth-century municipal law that held a city or county liable if their property was destroyed or injured by a mob or riot. One hundred and six owners brought actions, twenty-five of who were identified in newspaper stories. The first of those suits heard in the Municipal Court was brought by William Feinstein, who owned a liquor store on Lenox Ave. The jury awarded him damages, a verdict which two months later the judge decided to uphold. In the interim, the city also lost a second case in the Municipal Court, for damages to Anna Rosenberg's notion store, which had been set on fire, and seven actions in the Supreme Court, which heard cases for larger damages.

 

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