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

Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem During the Depression (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 100-101.

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Communists in Harlem The appearance of members of the Communist Party (CP) outside Kress’ store at the beginning of the disorder reflected the party’s presence in Harlem in the 1930s. It focused resources on the neighborhood beginning in 1928 in “efforts to ‘prove itself’ to a skeptical community through protests against racist practices and efforts to ease the impact of Depression conditions," historian Mark Naison argued. In the 1930s, the party had an office at 415 Lenox Avenue; affiliated organizations had offices nearby, the International Labor Defense (ILD) four blocks south at 326 Lenox Avenue; the Young Liberators (YL) at 262 Lenox Avenue; and the League of Struggle for Negro Rights (LSNR) and Negro Liberator newspaper at 2162 7th Avenue until just before the disorder, when they moved to 308 West 141st Street. The LSNR supported "black self-determination," advocating resistance against racist oppression and lynching, according to Naison, and mobilizing Black residents against evictions, discrimination in relief programs and job discrimination. The YL were the "youth wing" of the League, according to Naison. Joe Taylor, the organization's president, told a public hearing of the MCCH, they were “a group of young people who are struggling for Negro rights,” with about 140 Black and white members. The ILD was the party's legal wing, defending individuals arrested in connection with party activities, in conjunction with mass protest.

Most of those who worked in those offices and protested in Harlem were white men and women. The number of Black residents who joined the party and related organizations did grow slowly, but numbered only a few thousand by the time of the disorder, according to Naison. By 1935, larger numbers did participate in demonstrations led by party members, particularly those in support of the defense of the Scottsboro boys. After the disorder, the party would work with Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Rev. William Imes on a boycott of Weisbeckers Market on 125th Street, and with Black nationalists in protests against Mussolini’s attacks on Abyssinia.

Speaking in street meetings as Daniel Miller and Harry Gordon sought to do in front of Kress’ store was the primary strategy employed by the CP in Harlem. Party members joined the street-corner speakers who had been a staple of Harlem life throughout the 1920s, taking to corners “from 137th Street & 7th Avenue, north to 144th Street and Lenox Avenue, south to 110th Street and 5th Avenue," according to Naison. When they first appeared, the mostly white Communist Party speakers frequently competed with Black nationalist speakers for locations and attention, especially on the corners of Lenox Avenue from 133rd to 135th Streets. At the end of June 1930, fights between the groups drew police intervention, during which a Black Communist named Alfred Levy was fatally injured. Fights continued, but the party held off attackers, helped by former Garveyites it recruited, a struggle described by Naison. In 1930, speakers focused on the unemployed and protests against lynching. The ILD campaign to free the Scottsboro boys that began in 1931, Naison showed, moved the party further into Harlem life, enabling it to supplement street protest with work in churches, fraternal organizations, and political clubs. Initial marches and protests were dominated by white party members, but when new trials in 1933 energized Harlem and the CP revived its campaign of mass demonstrations, marches, and street meetings, Naison found evidence that large numbers of Black residents participated. In a protest parade on April 22, for example, the UNIA, Elks, Masons, and church groups marched alongside the ILD and CP. By September, 1934, Roi Ottley bemoaned the predominance of Communist street speakers in his column in the New York Amsterdam News.

Communist Party picketers like Sam Jameson, Murray Samuels, and Claudio Viabolo were initially less prominent in Harlem. When Sufi Abdul Hamid and his followers began picketing white-owned businesses seeking jobs for Black workers in 1932, the party remained on the margins, at odds with the race-based appeals. In July 1933, party organizers did invite church and fraternal groups to join an effort to force Harlem chain stores to hire Black clerks without displacing white workers, with the W. T. Grant store on 125th Street as the first target. However, James Ford shut down that initiative, Naison showed, as likely to antagonize white workers and distract participants from the broader struggles the party promoted. Instead, the CP unsuccessfully targeted the 5th Avenue Bus Company. When Hamid’s second campaign against Woolworth's on 125th Street in 1934 helped spur an alliance of Black organizations to mount a campaign of pickets and calls for boycotts initially targeting the Blumstein’s department store, CP members remained on the margins. Once that alliance splintered, however, the party moved to mount a boycott campaign on their terms against the Empire Cafeteria on Lenox Avenue just north of 125th Street seeking gains for white workers as well as jobs for Black workers. A week and a half of picketing and protest meetings in 1934 led by the YL, and store windows twice being broken, brought an agreement to hire Black staff in September 1934.

The rapid arrests of the five men who appeared on 125th Street was typical of the often violent repression of the party by New York City police, as historian Marilynn Johnson has explored. As early as September 1929, the New York Amsterdam News published a letter describing a Black Communist speaker, Richard Moore, and the white Communists who tried to take his place, being pulled from a stepladder by police “without the slightest provocation,” notwithstanding claims of a disruptive demonstration reported in the New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, and New York Amsterdam News. Mayor La Guardia tried to change the police approach after his election in 1934, Johnson shows, requiring more tolerance of protest and a neutral stance in labor disputes. However, Harlem residents had witnessed the limits of that change a year before the disorder. Police who arrived to manage the crowd at a Communist Party meeting protesting the treatment of the Scottsboro boys on March 17, 1934, suddenly drove radio cars on to the sidewalk and into the crowd, and then threw tear gas and bomb canisters. La Guardia did insist on an investigation, after which Chief Inspector Valentine preferred disciplinary action against six officers. However, Police Commissioner John Ryan refused to implement any discipline, the New York Amsterdam News reported.

The appearance of ILD lawyers to represent arrested party members, and their later appearance at the hearings of the MCCH, were consistent with a commitment to representing those involved in party actions, according to Naison. Joseph Tauber, who represented the party members arrested during the disorder and appeared at hearings of the MCCH, had also defended the two men arrested outside the Empire Cafeteria in 1934, according to a story in the New York Amsterdam News and had appeared in the police investigation of the Scottsboro riot, the New York Amsterdam News reported. The ILD provided bail for those arrested outside the Empire Cafeteria, according to the Daily Worker, as it did for those arrested during the disorder who they represented.
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