Blumstein's department store, 230 West 125th Street, c. 1939-1941.
1 media/nynyma_rec0040_1_01930_0044_thumb.jpg 2024-05-29T15:55:14+00:00 Stephen Robertson a1bf8804093bc01e94a0485d9f3510bb8508e3bf 1 2 Source: DOF: Manhattan 1940s Tax Photos (New York City Municipal Archives). plain 2024-05-29T15:55:32+00:00 nynyma_rec0040_1_01930_0044 20180308 104749+0000 Stephen Robertson a1bf8804093bc01e94a0485d9f3510bb8508e3bfThis page has tags:
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"Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work" campaigns in Harlem
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Many of Harlem’s Black residents felt anger toward the white-owned businesses on 125th Street before the allegations that Lino Rivera had been beaten by staff in Kress’ store. Expressions of that anger that disrupted shoppers and produced disorder on the block of 125th Street from 7th to 8th Avenues had also occurred before March 19. Beginning in 1932, Black organizations had attacked the failure of those businesses to hire Black staff, called for shoppers to boycott them, and taken direct action to promote that campaign by picketing stores. Street speakers spread that message to an audience beyond the members of social and political organizations, fraternal lodges, and churches. The audiences of mostly unemployed residents who gathered in the street corner meetings provided the majority of those who walked the picket lines. Over half of those picketers were women, in part because most of jobs which the protests sought to open to Black workers were as salesgirls. An even larger proportion of the targets of the pickets, those shopping in white-owned businesses, were women — 85% of those entering Blumstein’s on one Saturday, according to New York Age columnist Vere Johns. Picketing was as visible as street meetings and more disruptive than the marches of earlier Black protests. While the elite leaders of the jobs campaign promoted the pickets as a nonviolent protest, disorder and violence attended their presence on 125th Street. Black shoppers complained of being obstructed, annoyed, and on occasion assaulted and having their purchases destroyed. However, the violence around the picket lines did not extend to breaking windows as happened in 1935. Critics of the campaigns, however, warned that clashes involving pickets could trigger greater violence. In 1934, the concern was “a mass white attack on Negroes,” as Theophilus Lewis put it in his New York Amsterdam News column, or “race riots,” in the words of the judge who granted an injunction against the picketing. After the disorder, Lewis described a potential for violence by Black residents: “There was a time, during the peak of the boycott movement, when a slight indiscretion by a policeman, a white salesgirl or a colored shopper who defied the boycott would have started an outburst quite as serious as the recent disorder.” While several businesses hired Black staff, some of those who committed to do so later backed out or laid off at least some of those they hired, and others continued to refuse to do so. Those responses, and the shutdown of picketing by police in October 1934 after the A. S. Beck shoe store obtained a court injunction, meant that much of the anger toward white-owned businesses and willingness to take direct action aroused by the boycott campaign remained unresolved in March 1935.
Critics of the boycott campaign were quick to connect it to the disorder in 1935. Theophilus Lewis, in his column in the New York Amsterdam News, declared “the apostles of that movement were logically the long-distance leaders of the riot.” The economic campaign they initiated “quickly resolved itself into a race issue,” presented by “picket leaders and soapbox orators” in “terms of anti-Semitism and white versus black,” creating a “feeling of race antipathy” that “remained pent up in the community waiting for a spark to set it off.” Leaders of the campaign saw a different connection, holding white storeowners’ refusal to respond to the campaign responsible for the violence, with Rev. Johnson telling the New York Age the disorder was “the explosion of a suppressed people who have been exploited by the business interests of this community,” and Rev. Imes that storeowners were “reaping the harvest they have sown.” In June 1935, the New York Age claimed the persistence of that connection between protests targeting businesses and the disorder. An investigation of a campaign of the Communist-led Joint Committee Against Discriminatory Practices to force Harlem's butchers to lower the price of meat claimed that the spokesmen who approached to storeowners "hinted at a possible repetition of the the outbreak of March 19, last when countless stores in the community were wrecked and a number of persons injured.... Raging with a fury which taxed all efforts of the authorities for almost twelve hours, that incident created a stir which has not yet completely died down and agitators are said to be in the habit of referring to it as a veiled hint when attempting to approach local shopkeepers."
Historian Cheryl Greenberg drew a similar connection between the boycott and the disorder. She argued that after the collapse of the campaign “Harlemites were left in early 1935 with a strong sense of common grievance and a recognition of the potency of mass action but no organized way of channeling the struggle that had a broad appeal. Yet thousands of Harlemites were now accustomed to mass meetings, to listening to street corner orators define problems and offer solutions, and to breaking the law.” However, the targets of the disorder do not so neatly fit the boycott campaign as Greenberg argues: “The attack was directed against only white property and confined to those areas, both topical and geographic, that were the focus of the failed jobs campaign — 125th Street's white-owned businesses,” she asserts. “The riot did not, for example, attack white police officers or white passersby, or vandalize government offices.” To the contrary, the evidence collected in this study shows that white businesses on the avenues many blocks north and south of 125th Street suffered damage and looting, smaller businesses quite different from those on 125th Street as well as small branches of chain stores. Additionally, there were alleged assaults on white passersby, and to a lesser extent, white police officers. If the disorder began in the footprint of the boycott movement, it overflowed those boundaries and became an expression of the broad “racial antipathy” described by Theophilus Lewis rather than concern with racial discrimination. In that sense, the disorder echoed the attacks on whites of street corner speakers such as Sufi Abdul Hamid and Black nationalists, not the political agenda of the elite leaders of the boycott movement. The more detailed picture of the events of the disorder in 1935 provided in this study is much more like the disorder in 1943 than Greenberg portrayed it, smaller in scale rather than different in character.
Pickets first appeared in front of stores on West 125th Street in March 1932. Members of the Negro Industrial and Clerical Alliance (NICA) picketed Weisbecker’s meat and vegetable market at 268 West 125th Street, when the New York Amsterdam News described them carrying signs that read “This store is unfair to colored labor” and “Do not spend your money where you cannot work," and later, in June, Woolworth's at 210 West 125th Street, according to a story in the New York Amsterdam News. Sufi Abdul Hamid founded the organization when he arrived in Harlem from Chicago, bringing with him experience using picketing to pressure white businesses to hire Black workers gained in campaigns in that city. Harlem, however, did not initially prove as receptive to such direct action. Black organizations would not give him a platform, and Black newspapers generally ignored his campaign, leaving Hamid to make his case on Harlem’s street corners, in competition with Garveyites and the Communist Party. He set himself apart from other street speakers with his elaborate costume — described by New York Age journalist Lou Layne as a “knee length, gold-braided green cape, black whipcord breeches, green shirt and black tie, Sam Browne belt and black riding boots, all topped by a gold-tasseled blue turban.” Hamid was also likely prominent among the street speakers who “viciously attack the white business man in Harlem” about which a letter to the New York Age complained in 1932 and gave “listeners an earful of what the white man is doing and what the black man must do,” according to another complaint sent to the New York Amsterdam News. When Hamid turned to direct action on 125th Street in 1932, New York police proved an obstacle. NICA picketers were arrested on at least two occasions, in March and in June, charged with disorderly conduct and disrupting traffic. Magistrates gave them suspended sentences to discourage further picketing.
After the second set of arrests, which included Hamid and thirteen others and came after four months of futile protest, according to historians August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, the NICA abandoned its campaign. In reporting the picketing only in relation to those arrests, the New York Amsterdam News offered indirect criticism of Hamid’s approach that reflected the lack of support he received from other Black organizations in Harlem. Richard Nugent attributed the end of the campaign to Hamid’s dispute with the Tiger Division of the UNIA, in a biography written for the Federal Writers Project later in the 1930s. Hamid had unsuccessfully tried to recruit the Tiger Division to the boycott campaign, according to statements by its leader, St. William Grant, reported in both the New York Age and New York Amsterdam News. That disagreement spilled over into clashes between adjacent street corner meetings of the two groups in August, resulting in police banning them speaking on Harlem’s streets, and later sending them to corners further apart. A subsequent alleged attack on the UNIA headquarters by the NICA on August 30, 1932, saw Hamid and five others arrested, which the New York Amsterdam News reported with a banner headline. Communist Party speakers seeking space and attention on Harlem’s street corners had also clashed with Grant and other Garveyite groups. These clashes spoke to the incipient violence that accompanied the crowds on Harlem's streets in the 1930s.
In 1933, Hamid apparently relocated his meetings and pickets from 125th Street to the smaller white businesses around 135th Street, the center of the Black neighborhood. There is no mention of this activity in the Black press; the only evidence comes from Claude McKay’s study of the neighborhood, published in 1940. (Historians Meier and Rudwick discuss a campaign that summer across the river in Brooklyn that was the subject of a series of stories in the New York Age, but it had elite leadership and veterans organizing the picket line, so was perhaps more palatable to the newspaper’s editors than Hamid). The white businesses in what McKay described as “middle Harlem” were different from the large department and chain stores on 125th Street. Small businesses, grocers, druggists, and the like, they were usually operated by families and few staff. Hamid’s critics did not think those stores were appropriate targets. “(Certain ignoramuses) descend on a two-by-four shop where a man and his wife eke out a miserable existence and demand that he either take on help which he cannot pay for or else send his wife home and replace her with a colored person—such a measure only tends to ruin business,” New York Age columnist Vere Johns complained, without naming Hamid. However, according to McKay, Hamid had a “modicum of success in the small stores,” as “for the first time some establishments employed Negro grocery clerks, in 1933.”
Whatever Hamid did in 1933, he and his organization returned to 125th Street in 1934 to once again picket Woolworth's, beginning around the middle of May, and to speak on the corner of 7th Avenue. The attitude of Harlem’s elite had changed sufficiently for Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. to join the picket line, an appearance publicized in a photograph on the front page of the New York Amsterdam News on May 26. Hamid, however, went unmentioned in the caption, which identified the protest as organized by the NICA. The sign Powell was pictured wearing read “This Store Does Not Employ Negro Industrial Clerical All.,” an appeal to hire members of NICA rather than Black staff. On the same day, the front page of the New York Age contained a story about another boycott campaign, initiated by Rev. John Johnson, after prompting from Effa Manley and a group of women, according to historian Cheryl Greenberg. Inside the paper, the "Carrying the Torch" columnist called out Hamid‘s campaign for seeking jobs for organization’s members rather than the Black community, and Powell for joining the picket rather than organizing his congregation. By the first week of June, the Citizens League for Fairplay (CLFP), organized in response to Johnson’s appeal, began picketing Blumstein’s department store. Evidence of the protests comes from Harlem’s Black newspapers, which took opposing positions on the campaign that skewed their reporting. Fred Moore, the editor of the New York Age, supported the campaign, and the newspaper effectively became its mouthpiece, with regular stories, editorials, and support from columnists, particularly Vere Johns. The New York Amsterdam News, by contrast, opposed the boycott campaign. Editorials and columnists Theophilus Lewis and J.A. Rogers claimed it would cause Black workers in other parts of the city to lose their jobs. It was also likely that, as Vere Johns and the "Carrying the Torch" columnist snidely charged, that having Blumstein as an advertiser contributed to the editorial position of the New York Amsterdam News.
While social and political organizations, fraternal lodges, and churches joined the League, the direct action was organized by a picket committee led by Ira Kemp and James Thornhill of the African Patriotic League, one of the Black Nationalist groups whose leaders spoke on Harlem’s street corners. Society women and members of the African Patriotic League, UNIA, and Abyssinian Baptist Church picketed, the New York Age reported Kemp as telling a League meeting. Most were women; an Honor Roll published by the New York Age included 83 women and 58 men. They carried signs reading “Stay Out of Blumstein” and “Don’t Buy Where You Cannot Work,” which Attorney Richard Carey assured the group “were in accordance to legal requirements and fully protected,” the New York Age reported. As picketers walked back and forth in front of the store, they were not to cause a crowd to gather or “annoy” shoppers entering and leaving the store, Carey warned, so as to avoid arrest. Departures from “orderly, dignified, peaceable” action a New York Age editorial blamed on “radical organizations.” It was Hamid and his supporters joining the pickets that created “disturbances and excitement.” Carrying “meaningless” signs, they caused “trouble” with League pickets and annoyed shoppers, Kemp and Thornhill told a League meeting reported in the New York Age. Despite their criticism of Hamid, the League and New York Age apparently accepted incidents of violence against shoppers which, at least according to the New York Age, did not involve participants in the protest: “One man who purchased a porcelain jar was accosted on leaving the store and had his package taken from him and smashed on the pavement. Another customer with a shopping bag in which there was a newly purchased straw hat was also buffeted about and saw his new straw hat trampled underfoot. It is reported also that a man and woman went inside the store and attempted to drag several ladies out by the hair.” In the same issue, columnist Vere Johns supported a "head-whipping committee," allegedly proposed by a street speaker, as there were “quite a few thick-headed Negroes who would only be convinced of the wisdom of staying out of a store like Blumstein’s by having their heads knocked about.” These stories suggest that violence attended the pickets, even if it was not always expressed. Those details of the picketing receive only passing mention in the analyses of historians, discussed briefly by Cheryl Greenberg, William Muraskin, and Christie Anderson, but not at all by Gary Hunter, Ralph Crowder, and Winston McDowell.
After eight weeks, Blumstein’s agreed to hire thirty-five Black staff on July 26. Hamid’s NICA returned to picketing Blumstein's, complaining it had been ignored during negotiations with the store. Those pickets withdrew after a month, although the NICA continued to picket Woolworth's, three buildings to the east. The League shifted its pickets to Weisbecker’s meat and vegetable market further west on 125th Street, starting on August 24, a move announced with a banner headline in the New York Age. However, by mid-September, the League leadership and the leaders of the Picket Committee were at odds over the women Blumstein had hired, who were all light-skinned, and not drawn from those who picketed, the New York Amsterdam News reported. As Kemp and Thornhill extended their targets on West 125th Street, the League leaders and the New York Age were describing the Picket Committee as “renegades” and attacking the targets and tactics of their pickets. Given the newspaper’s clear opposition to the group, the sudden attention to the disorderly nature of picketing in its stories may not be reliable evidence — but it could equally be reporting what had always been part of this direct action as distorting the activities of the Picket Committee. The New York Amsterdam News was in agreement with New York Age’s attacks on Kemp and Thornhill, although it blamed the CLFP for the Picket Committee’s actions as it had “double-crossed” the group. However they behaved, once the Picket Committee broken away from the League, they appear to have increased the scale of picketing and the disorder it brought to 125th Street.
By September 21st, fifty to sixty picketers appeared daily on 125th Street, making it difficult for customers to enter stores along 125th Street, according to evidence given in the New York Supreme Court cited by historian Christie Anderson. Although a week or so earlier, Kemp had told the New York Amsterdam News that eight clothing and shoe stores spread along the two blocks between Lenox and 8th Avenues had entered into agreements with his group, and hired thirty Black staff, pickets reappeared to pressure them to hire members of his organization. A. S. Beck’s shoe store was among that group, with pickets beginning on September 15, according to the evidence presented in the New York Supreme Court. So too were the La Gene Shop and Nobbes Dress Shop, according to the New York Age and New York Amsterdam News. Those pickets were “Intimidating store-keepers, assaulting shoppers and by a campaign of maliciousness with no regard as to the results of their vicious tactics…demanding complete control of the allotting of jobs to Negroes in the 125th Street stores,” the New York Age reported. The specific incidents reported in the press focused on interactions with shoppers that Carey had warned the CLFP to avoid. Police arrested a picketer named Arnold Brout, for accosting Eleanor Hove in front of the Weisbecker store to stop her shopping inside, so that, “annoyed by his efforts, she crossed the street, where she was slapped by the man,” according to the New York Age. Several weeks later, witnesses told the New York Supreme Court “one of the pickets [at Beck’s shoe store] collided with a prospective customer about to enter the store and threw her down. Disorder followed. Two of the defendants were arrested, tried and found guilty of disorderly conduct.” The New York Age described that case as men “annoying colored customers who attempted to enter the store." The New York Amsterdam News reported the arrests without details, noting only that picketers had distributed leaflets accusing store management of framing the two men. While all those incidents involved woman shoppers, Vere Johns described how male picketers “have a habit of using threatening language to gentlemen and making motions towards their rear pockets with their hands.” Johns also reported two other arrests for disorderly conduct, of Henry Veal, one of the officials of the Picket Committee and another man.
On October 31, New York Supreme Court Judge Samuel Rosenman ended these clashes by granting Beck’s shoe store an injunction against Kemp and Thornhill’s pickets. He decided that the “controversy here is not a labor dispute,” in which picketing was legally protected, but “solely a racial dispute.” Permitting pickets in “a dispute of one race as opposed to another” risked counter protests by white groups, Rosenman argued, and “substantial danger that race riots and race reprisals might result in this and other communities.” As a result of the injunction, on November 3 police arrested two men for picketing Beck’s store, according to stories in New York Age and New York Amsterdam News. Unlike picketers arrested earlier, those men received fines or Workhouse terms rather than suspended sentences, the New York Age reported. The CLFP and its supporters in the New York Age celebrated the injunction, despite its restriction on an effective form of direct action, as it shutdown down the “renegade pickets,” or as New York Age columnist Ebernezer Ray put it, was “the means of exterminating a group of parasites who had brought ill-repute to a reputable movement.”
The efforts of white business organizations, Jewish groups, and police to end Hamid’s direct action enjoyed similar support from the CLFP’s leaders and the New York Age. In October, a white insurance adjuster and member of the Jewish Minutemen of America named Edgar Burman alleged Hamid had made anti-Semitic statements at a meeting on the corner of West 125th Street and 7th Avenue, resulting in police charging Hamid with disorderly conduct. The New York Age reprinted in full the story from the Jewish Day reporting those allegations, and later took on its claim that Hamid had called himself the “Black Hitler.” Magistrate Harris acquitted Hamid, however, unable to resolve the contradictory statements of the white accusers and Hamid’s supporters, the New York Age reported, and frustrated that no police officer had been at the meeting to provide “disinterested” testimony, according to the New York Herald Tribune. Columnist Ebenezer Ray had no such difficulty, questioning the credibility of the defense in the New York Age. Three months later police again arrested Hamid, charging him with preaching atheism and selling books without a permit. On this occasion, a police officer was present at the street meeting to provide evidence, and Fred Moore and senior police officers were on hand as character witnesses to aid the magistrate in sentencing, the New York Age reported. “From the crowded courtroom, from the number of prominent citizens and law officers in hand ready to tell the court what kind of a man the uniformed Mohamed is, it was quite obvious,” a journalist for the Afro-American wrote, “that a trap had been set for the caustic soapbox orator and non-conformist and that the threat of police and certain Harlemites to 'get him yet' was being realized.” Hamid received two concurrent sentences of ten days in the Workhouse.
Although Hamid’s conviction was not the end of his activity in Harlem, as Vere Johns had trumpeted in the New York Age, there were no reports of picketing on 125th Street after the arrests at Beck’s store until the three Young Liberators appeared on March 19. (Picketing and calling for a boycott as response to violence by the staff of white businesses had precedent; Meier and Rudwick found such violence was the focus of protests in southern cities.) The boycott campaigns did contribute to who else was on the street that night. Lt. Battle told a public hearing of the MCCH that additional police officers patrolled the block of West 125th Street from 7th to 8th Avenues as a result of “unusual picketing of some of the stores” in the previous six months.
After the disorder, pickets returned to 125th Street. The groups involved cast their demands in terms of labor disputes to avoid the injunction granted the year before (which applied only to those named in the case, namely Kemp and Thornhill’s group). "More than a dozen pickets, white and colored, have been parading back and forth in front of Weisbecker's Market" since early June, a story New York Age noted, organized by the Joint Committee Against Discriminatory Practices. A Communist-led organization, it enjoyed the support of what Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. described to a MCCH investigator as the "most progressive and active members" of the CLFP. Powell himself numbered among those supporters, as did Rev. William Imes, as both joined the interracial picket, according to Naison. So too did the Elks and the African Patriotic League, according to Greenberg. The Negro Liberator, a publication of the CP’s LSNR reported the protest on June 15 and published a photograph of two male picketers, one Black, one white, on the front page on July 1, 1935. One carried a sign that read, “We Demand 1. Negro Truck Drivers 2. 50% Negro Employees 3. Recognition of Action [Illegible].” "Extra details of police" were assigned to the area, according to the New York Age, as a "precautionary measure." Greenberg notes "police stopped the picket line," citing a clipping of a New York Amsterdam News story from the same date as that New York Age story, June 15 that is not in the newspaper itself. Picketing clearly continued after that date, as the photograph in the Negro Liberator indicates, but it had ended by July 18, when a MCCH investigator reported on a meeting of the Joint Conference discussing alternative actions as the picketing had ceased.
Hamid also returned to 125th Street, to picket the Lerner Shop, having reorganized the NICA as what he claimed was a labor union so entitled to picket. Hamid’s supporters demanded that the store's Black women employees join the NICA, setting up the picket when they refused, according to the affidavits Katherine Harris and Marion Hoyes provided to support the store’s request for an injunction to stop the protest. The pickets went unreported in Harlem’s newspapers until that injunction was granted. Judge Cotillo's decision that the NICA was not a union drew brief mention in stories in the New York Age and New York Amsterdam News. A longer story in the New York Times recounted the argument of the store’s lawyer, who used the disorder to amplify the connection between pickets and racial violence made by Judge Rosenham in granting the injunction the previous year: “To deny the injunction would be to encourage so-called racketeers in the instigation of race prejudice which all too readily, particularly at the present time, may tend to lead to further race riots." Fred Moore again appeared to attack Hamid and support the injunction. For the following several years the only pickets found in Harlem were those of the Communist Party and trade unions in labor disputes. Only in 1938, after the United States Supreme Court recognized that Black workers suffered employment discrimination based solely on their race and could therefore picket on that basis, did the Black organizations that had joined the Citizen’s League turn again to picketing as a strategy, in a campaign ultimately led by Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Jr., described by historian Cheryl Greenberg.
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Around 10:30 PM, Louise Thompson left her friend’s home and returned to the streets, walking along West 118th Street to 7th Avenue and then north back to 125th Street. She would have passed groups coming in the opposite direction from 125th Street and likely others emerging from the surrounding residences to see what was happening and in some cases to join in the violence. Thompson would also have encountered police deploying from 125th Street, including some radio cars on patrol. At this time the number of police in the area would still have been small. When some officers tried to disperse people gathered at 121st Street, they quickly ran into trouble. Details are sparse, but for some reason the officers began shooting. They were only a block south of where Anthony Cados alleged he had been assaulted by Black assailants minutes earlier, so they may have encountered a group of people unwilling to accept being pushed and hit with batons. Or, being outnumbered, the officers may have decided to try to get people to move by firing in the air, a common tactic, and when that did not work, started firing at those on the street. The account of a group of police pushed to defend themselves by a threatening crowd that shot back at them, published in the New York Evening Journal to justify that shooting, drew on the repertoire of sensational tropes that publication employed rather than reports of what happened. Police officers in Harlem did not feel any need for such justifications to shoot at Black New Yorkers. One shot hit Lyman Quarterman, a thirty-four-year-old Black man, in the abdomen. The wound was serious enough for police to release a report that Quarterman had been killed, which multiple newspapers published. In fact, he was alive but would be hospitalized for at least three weeks. This would not have been the only occasion on which police would have discharged their guns as they ranged over Harlem attempting to clear people from the streets. Gunshots joined the sirens of police vehicles and ambulances, the crash of breaking glass and the shouts of groups on the street in announcing the intensification and spread of the disorder.
While Louise Thompson walked toward 125th Street, groups again broke through the police cordon at the intersection with 7th Avenue. The target for most was the Kress store down the block, but objects were thrown at the windows of other white businesses between the corner and the store. Among the damaged stores were likely Myladys shop, the W. T. Grant department store, McCrory and Woolworths 5 & 10 cent stores, and Chock Full O'Nuts restaurant on the south side of the street, and the Conrad Schmidt Music Shop, Adler Shoes, Scheer Clothing, Howard Suits, Minks Haberdashery, Savon Clothes store, Young's Hat Store, Willow Cafeteria, General Stationery & Supplies store, and United Cigar store on the north side. In front of the W.T. Grant store, an object also struck the head of Thomas Wijstem, a thirty-four-year-old white carpenter, knocking him unconscious. Unlike earlier in the evening, there were now enough police to make arrests in response to those attacks. Douglas Cornelius, a twenty-four-year-old Black man, was arrested for assaulting Wijstem, Claude Jones, a twenty-four-year-old Black musician, for breaking a window at the Blumstein department store, and William Ford, a seventeen-year-old Black laborer, for breaking a window at the Kress store. But there were not enough police to apprehend others involved in each of those attacks, let alone prevent the violence. At the Kress store, however, only one window was broken despite a “very large” crowd reportedly gathering. A significant number of police were still stationed there — and it was the headquarters for the senior officers directing the police response. These clashes could also have been when twenty-eight-year-old Andrew Lyons was hit on the head by a police baton, an injury that would eventually kill him.
While the smashing glass made clear that white businesses were the targets of those on 125th Street, the two patrolmen who arrested Jones and Ford both claimed that they had yelled threats against police. They may have been embellishing the charges against the men to make them more compelling to magistrates and judges; certainly no police officers were injured at the time, which would have been expected if they had actually been targeted. It was possible that Wijstem had been mistaken for a police officer. Detectives in plainclothes were now among those on the streets. Police practice in response to riots was to deploy plainclothes officers outside cordons among crowds to identify the individuals creating disorder.
At least one detective, Peter Naton, was outside the police cordon at the intersection of 125th and 7th Avenue at this time. When he saw a crowd of twenty-five to thirty people gathering, he "announced himself as a police officer," necessary since he was not in uniform, and told the group to "move on." John King, a twenty-eight-year-old Black fish and ice dealer, allegedly responded by yelling "I won't move for you this is my Harlem, and we will put that Kress store out of business and punish that man that injured the child." It would hardly have been the first time Naton had heard those sentiments expressed that evening, and they alone would not have justified arresting King. But the detective claimed that King grabbed hold of the billy club in his hand and broke its strap. If King actually did so, it was likely because Naton was hitting him with the club. It was just as likely that the detective arrested King to get him off the street, an option now available to police due to the increased number of officers in the area. The police presence also allowed Naton to quickly process King; the detective would be back at the intersection within half an hour.
A bus traveling up 7th Avenue bound for Boston arrived at 125th Street around this time as it encountered large crowds, "men, women and policemen rushing all around" according to the driver, Joseph Dawber. Then he heard gunfire and bullets began to hit the side of the bus. The twenty or so passengers on board ducked down or dropped to the floor. Eleven bullets holes would be found in the bus. While none of those rounds reached inside, a brick thrown at the left rear window did. Joseph Rinaldi, a white wrestler from Brooklyn traveling to a match in New Bedford, was cut on the face and right wrist by the shattered glass. The brick itself landed by Helen Travis and caused her to faint in shock. With no reports of shots fired by the residents on the streets, the bullets had likely come from police guns being fired in efforts to disperse the crowd. Dawber saw officers with revolvers in their hands in the police radio cars that went by the bus as he tried to navigate the large crowd. He followed those cars up 7th Avenue, avoiding people who had spilled from the sidewalk into the street. It took ten minutes for the bus to get through the crowds. The residents it passed by would have been aware that all the buses traveling through Harlem had white drivers and that this intercity bus likely had white passengers. Throwing objects at it was an attack both on white property and white individuals. It was also possible that at least some of the objects that hit the bus were intended for other targets as was the case with the police bullets.
The Boston-bound bus passed groups on 7th Avenue north of the intersection who continued to break windows in stores and some who had begun to take items from those window displays. Looting did not appear to yet be widespread, perhaps because staff remained in at least some stores. The manager of the Harlem Grill on the corner of 127th Street reported two more windows broken around this time, so he at least was still present. Just over $450 of stock would be taken from the saloon, but that seems to have occurred later as the manager mentioned it separately. The window of the auto supply store, abandoned by Eisenberg and his staff around 9:00 PM, by contrast, had been cleared of merchandise by 11:00 PM, when Howard Malloy walked by on his way to 128th Street. The unidentified businesses owned by Abe Mohr and Joseph Cohen on the east side of 7th Avenue between 126th and 127th Street could also have been looted around this time.
To the west, on 8th Avenue, both crowds and police arrived at least as far south as 122nd Street. There were not yet reports of looting there; instead attacks on white men and store windows continued. Max Newman, a thirty-six-year-old white man, closing his grocer’s store at 2274 8th Avenue for the night, allegedly encountered a group of Black men. He claimed they beat him around the head, leaving him with cuts and bruises on his forehead. An ambulance called to the scene treated Newman's injuries, but there were evidently no police nearby to respond to the attack.
Officers were on the opposite side of 8th Avenue around the same time, however, when an ashcan was thrown through the window of the Lokos clothing store at 2275 8th Avenue. Ashcans could be found on the street, like the rocks and bricks most often thrown at windows, but obviously were larger and did more damage to a window. Several patrolmen must have been driving by or had arrived as two men were arrested in front of the store, with others likely getting away. One of those arrested, William Norris, a twenty-two-year-old Black man, lived on 122nd Street a block east of the store, so may have initially come to the corner to see what was happening. Charles Wright, the other person arrested, a Black man of the same age as Norris, was homeless. While there would be only one more reported event on 8th Avenue south of 125th Street during the disorder, the area may not have been quiet. All the lack of reports means for certain is that the attention of police and journalists was focused elsewhere. But residents too might have been drawn to other parts of Harlem, where there were larger businesses and a greater Black population.
On the other side of 125th Street, crowds on 8th Avenue appear to have continued to break windows. By this time, those on the street, like those on 7th Avenue, would have been a mix of groups coming from 125th Street and residents drawn by the rumors and the noise. It was likely around this time that Rose Murrell, a nineteen-year-old Black woman, allegedly threw a stone that broke a window in a grocery store at 2366 8th Avenue on the intersection with 127th Street. She lived nearby, in the block of 126th Street between 8th and 7th Avenues, so could have either come to the street to see what was happening or have gone earlier to 125th Street in response to hearing rumors about events in the Kress store and been among those coming up 8th Avenue. The business was just over a block north of the stores whose windows were likely broken in the previous half an hour. Patrolmen were now on 8th Avenue, some likely in radio cars patrolling the street. Officer Libman, from the 32nd Precinct based to the north on 135th Street, arrested Murrell. A single arrest from the crowd of people likely around the store was a sign that few police were close enough to respond to the breaking glass. Libman, however, would be involved in the arrest of three other people in this area, so may have been stationed there. At least one of those arrests was also for breaking windows, but as the business was located several blocks further north between 130th and 131st Streets, it likely did not occur until the violence had spread further. While businesses in the surrounding blocks of 8th Avenue would be looted, there was no evidence that merchandise was taken before the widespread turn to looting nearer midnight.
For the first time, people began to move east on 125th Street toward Lenox Avenue, some breaking windows in the white-owned businesses as they went. The Regal Shoe Store on the southeast corner of 7th Avenue was undamaged when the assistant manager closed the business at 10:00 PM (having remained open throughout the clashes between crowds on the street and police on the other side of 7th Avenue). Windows were broken sometime soon after. So likely were windows in the Sylvia Dress shop in the next building, in the Hobbs Dress shop located a building further east, and in the Busch Kredit jewelry store in the middle of the block. The branch of the Liggitt's pharmacy on the southeast corner of 125th Street and Lenox Avenue may also have had windows broken at this time as all those facing north, on West 125th Street were smashed. That was the extent of the damage reported, suggesting that this block did not suffer the sustained attacks on businesses seen a block to the west. To the contrary, some stores suffered no damage at all, notably the Koch department store, despite its wide expanse of display windows. In contrast to its counterparts on the block to the west, that store had hired black staff in response to the campaigns of the previous year. The manager attributed his store being undamaged to that decision and called that "action of the mob" "one of the finest tributes that could be paid Koch's." The limited damage could also have been the result of fewer people passing along the street during the disorder. The violence that would soon break out on Lenox Avenue appeared to be the work of people coming out on to that street from the surrounding residences more often than groups coming from around the Kress store.
However, the first business on Lenox Avenue reported to be attacked, Toby’s Men’s shop on the northwest corner of 125th Street, likely was targeted by groups coming from 7th Avenue. It was still open around 10:30 PM when eight Black men burst in and started threatening the owner, Morris Towbin and a clerk named Cy Bear, knocking over fixtures and stealing clothing. The two staff retreated into the basement. Very few of those involved in the disorder went as far as directly confronting staff and robbing them. The men who did so likely were more accustomed to breaking the law than most of those on the streets at the time. The man later arrested with merchandise from the store in his possession, a twenty-six-year-old Black laborer named Edward Larry, did have multiple convictions for pickpocketing and theft, which set him apart from most of those taken into custody. However, the extensive damage and large loss of merchandise that the store suffered could not have been the work of the group who burst in alone. The intersection of 125th Street and Lenox Avenue would later be the site of several assaults and attacks on other businesses. Some of those who came to the area also targeted Toby’s Men’s shop as all of its display windows were broken and most of their contents removed. Towbin, however, was not present for those attacks and looting. After the group that burst into the store left, he emerged from the basement and headed to the 28th Precinct on West 123rd Street to report the robbery. Although he would be there for at least the next two and a half hours, Towbin was as unsuccessful as most of his counterparts in securing help from the police.
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2021-11-13T19:11:50+00:00
Blumstein department store windows broken
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plain
2024-05-29T15:58:20+00:00
At about 10:30 PM, a brick broke a window of the Blumstein department store at 230 West 125th Street, likely a large display window, as it caused $200 damage. Patrolman Walter MacKenzie told the Harlem Magistrates Court that he saw Claude Jones, a twenty-four-year-old Black musician, throw the brick, and then shout "in a loud voice, 'Kill the cops, the dirty mother-fucking sons of bitches,' causing a large crowd to gather." By that time the large crowds that had been focused on 125th Street had broken into smaller groups, many of which scattered north and south up the avenues, as police established a perimeter around the block between 8th and 7th Avenues. Ten minutes after windows were broken in Blumstein's store, William Ford allegedly threw a rock that broke a window at Kress' store several buildings to to the west and then called on the people on the street to attack police, drawing a large crowd. Around the same time, a white man named Thomas Wijstem was hit by a rock in front of the W. T. Grant store immediately east of Blumstein's, allegedly while being attacked by a group of Black men. Jones lived four blocks south, at 170 West 121st Street, close enough to where the disorder began to have been among those drawn to 125th Street by the noise, crowds, or rumors.
Windows were broken in large numbers of businesses on this block of West 125th Street. Two newspapers reported very extensive damage. "Practically every store window on the block had been shattered by 10 PM," according to the Home News; that damage was both less extensive and took longer in the New York Herald Tribune story: "By midnight one or more windows had been smashed in almost every storefront" on that block between 7th and 8th Avenues (although in another mention of that damage in the story it had been done by 8 PM). Blumstein's department store was one of seven businesses identified as having broken windows by the New York Herald Tribune, New York American, and Daily Mirror. No reason is given in those stories for why that mix of businesses were singled out. They were not just the largest stores, although the W. T. Grant and McCrory's department stores were also included. The United Cigar store spanned several storefronts on the corner on West 125th Street and 7th Avenue, but the other stores, Scheer's clothing store, Young's Hats, Willow Cafeteria, and the Conrad Schmidt music shop identified in the New York American and New York Herald Tribune, did not have similarly large displays. All the stores identified by these newspapers were located between Kress' store at 256 West 125th Street and 7th Avenue, so may have been the damaged stores that reporters could see. The Blumstein department store was also one of the nineteen businesses on this block with broken windows listed by a reporter for La Prensa who walked along West 125th Street on the day after the disorder. That list included businesses west of Kress' store.
Only the New York American included the address of the department store, which was one of the best-known businesses in Harlem. The Blumstein department store was included in the MCCH business survey taken between June and December 1935 and is visible in the Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941.
Claude Jones appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, charged with inciting a riot. Remanded in custody, he was returned to the court a week later, when Magistrate Ford held him on $1,000 bail for the grand jury. On April 12, they sent Jones to the Court of Special Sessions for trial, likely to be tried for the offenses written in a note on the Magistrates Court affidavit, both the misdemeanor forms of inciting a riot and malicious mischief, an offense involving damage to property used in the prosecution of those who allegedly broke windows during the disorder. Convicted by the judges in that court, Jones received a suspended sentence on April 16, according to the 28th Precinct police blotter.