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• 1 2020-03-11T21:54:28+00:00 Lino Rivera grabbed & Charles Hurley and Steve Urban assaulted 166 plain 2024-02-23T22:14:27+00:00 When Charles Hurley, a floorwalker, and a Kress' store detective confronted Lino Rivera, an unemployed sixteen-year-old Puerto Rican boy, about stealing a pocketknife in Kress’ store, and started pushing him out of the store, the boy bit the hands of Hurley and a white window dresser who came to their aid, Steve Urban. After initially indicating that they wanted Rivera charged with assault, the two men ultimately did not ask police to arrest him. The incident is treated here as an assault as the New York Evening Journal, New York Post, New York American, and Daily News listed the two men among the injured.
  
  As the incident between Rivera and the store staff triggered the disorder, it was widely reported in the press and investigated by the MCCH. This analysis relies on testimony given in MCCH public hearings as that was by far the most complete and detailed evidence. Newspaper narratives varied in detail, consistently reporting only that a boy had been grabbed by store staff for taking merchandise, and later released, but omitting most other details. Several white newspapers also published separate stories based on statements made by Rivera at the West 123rd police station during the disorder or at his home the next day that included additional details of why he was in the store and his encounter with the store staff but not of subsequent events in the store.
  
  Rivera had begun the day by taking the subway to Brooklyn, in pursuit of job as an errand boy, he told reporters for the New York American and New York Herald Tribune. Finding the job already filled, he returned to Harlem. Getting off the subway at West 125th Street, Rivera decided to go to a show or movie at one of the theaters that lined the street, perhaps at the Apollo Theater opposite Kress' store, as a story in the New York Evening Journal claimed. When the show ended, Rivera went into Kress' store, a detail also reported in the New York Sun. He said he did so because he had "nothing to do," according to the New York Post, "just to look around I guess," according to the New York World-Telegram, "to walk through to 124th Street," according to the New York American, and "to take a short cut home," according to the New York Herald Tribune. 
  
  Testifying in a public hearing of the MCCH, Hurley, a twenty-eight-year-old white resident of the Bronx, said he was with the store manager Jackson Smith in an office overlooking the rear of the store when he saw Rivera take a pocketknife from a counter around 2:30 PM. Calling down to the store detective, he pointed out Rivera and then headed to the floor himself. Rivera later admitted to reporters that he did take the knife, after it "caught his eye," according to the New York Post or "attracted" him according to the New York World-Telegram and New York American, or because it "matched a fountain pen set he had," according to the New York Herald Tribune. (The New York Sun mistakenly reported that it was chocolate that Rivera had taken.) When Rivera denied having the knife, Hurley took it from the boy’s pocket. Both Rivera and Hurley testified that the men started to push him out of the store. According to Hurley, near the front door Rivera became scared and started to lash out at them. Rivera reportedly told journalists from the New York World-Telegram, New York Post, and New York Evening Journal that he had told the men he could walk out on his own, and tried to shake free of their hold, "really started fighting" when, as he also testified in a MCCH hearing, Hurley said, "Let's take him down the cellar and beat hell out of him.” Hurley denied making that statement; he told the MCCH hearing that he held Rivera around his shoulders while the store detective tried to calm the boy. As a struggle developed, another store employee, Steve Urban, a thirty-nine-year-old white window dresser, also grabbed hold of Rivera, according to Hurley. Once the group was through the front door and into the store's vestibule, a recessed area of the street surrounded by display windows, the store detective went to get a Crime Prevention Bureau officer. That police agency provided an alternative to having children arrested; its officers instead undertaking investigations of their conditions in order to refer them to social agencies to better prevent “juvenile delinquency.” Kress store staff turned most of the boys they caught shoplifting over to the Crime Prevention Bureau, according to Hurley, and had police arrest only one or two a week.
  
  Sometime after the store detective left, Rivera bit both Hurley and Urban on the hands and wrist while "trying to get away," he told a public hearing, reportedly explaining to journalists from the New York World-Telegram and New York Post that "I didn't want a licking." The struggle in the vestibule attracted the attention of Patrolman Donahue, who was the nearest of several police officers on West 125th Street at the time (identified in some newspapers as a traffic officer and by Rivera in a MCCH hearing as a mounted patrolman). Donahue took Rivera back into the store, to near the candy counter at the front, to get away from a curious crowd gathering on 125th Street, and sent an officer to get an ambulance to provide treatment for Hurley and Urban. (He told the MCCH hearing that the officer was his partner Keel, or another patrolman named Walton; the call log records the man's name as Miller, who was later identified by the store manager as a Black officer.) The telephone call to Headquarters was logged at 2:30 PM, followed by one from Police Headquarters to Harlem Hospital at 2:35 PM, with the ambulance bringing Dr. Sayet recorded in the hospital records as having arrived at 2:40 PM. Those records provide better evidence of the timing of the incident than Donahue’s testimony that he witnessed the struggle at 2:15 PM. Soon after the ambulance arrived, the manager, Jackson Smith, came to the front of the store, he testified in a public hearing, after being told a crowd had gathered by a staff member. Informed that a Crime Prevention Bureau officer had been called, Smith decided there was “nothing further for him to do,” and he returned to his office. A few minutes later Alfred Eldridge, a Black Crime Prevention Bureau officer, arrived. Usually the store staff would have turned Rivera over to Eldridge, who would have taken Rivera with him. However, on this occasion Hurley and Urban told Eldridge they wanted the boy arrested and charged with assault. Hurley told a public hearing he had gone to the rear of the store before Eldridge arrived, and did not want Rivera arrested, but the officer was clear that he spoke with both Hurley and Urban. The store manager similarly told a later public hearing that “Hurley wants to press charges for biting.” Eldridge could not take Rivera with him if he was arrested: “The job and purpose of our bureau is not to arrest a child," the told the MCCH hearing. He telephoned his superior, and told him that “the 5 & 10 wanted the boy arrested.” In response that officer told him to “let the patrolman take care of it due to the fact that he was first on case.” So after about twenty-five minutes at Kress, around 3:15 PM, Eldridge left the store.
  
  However, Eldridge testified he later found out that soon after he left, “the store officials changed their mind.” Donahue simplified those events in the public hearing, testifying that “The boy was not arrested, but was taken through the basement to 124th Street and sent home.” He did not mention Eldridge or who reversed the decision to arrest Rivera. Hurley’s self-interested statement that he did not want him arrested made Urban responsible. Urban himself was not among those who testified before a MCCH public hearing. It does seem that it was Urban who Donahue said was with him when he released Rivera; the officer referred to him not by name but as “the window dresser.” They took Rivera out the rear rather than on to 125th Street as there was a crowd in front of the store and Donahue “didn’t want to start something,” he told a public hearing. He was clearly anxious enough about the situation in the store to ignore another option that Eldridge had given him, “that in the event that Kress Store did not want to press charges, that the boy could be handed over to us for supervision,” according to the Crime Prevention Bureau officer’s testimony. After releasing Rivera on to 124th Street, Donahue left the store, at around 3:30 PM. Many of the fifty or so mostly Black women shopping in the store observed these events, after their attention had been attracted by the struggle between the two men and Rivera, and the appearance of an ambulance. None of these women testified in a public hearing. A Black man named L. F. Cole told a MCCH public hearing that he saw Rivera being taken to the basement by two men. As they had not seen Rivera leave the store, groups of women concerned to find out what had become of him remained in the store until Smith closed it and police pushed them out sometime around 5:00 PM or 5:30 PM.
  
  Bites are a relatively minor injury, and the hospital record indicates that both men received treatment at the scene and were not taken to the hospital. Hurley did still have a scar when he testified at a MCCH public hearing on April 20. Arthur Garfield Hays, the member of the MCCH chairing the hearing, examined it, announcing that “I should say enough [of a scar] to indicate there was a bite,” adding in response to a question from the audience that he saw four teeth marks.” Only one other individual in the disorder was described as having been bitten, Arthur Block, a Black man. He appeared among lists of the injured in only three publications, with no details provided of the circumstances in which he was assaulted.
  
  The significantly less detailed narratives of what happened between Rivera and the store staff published in newspapers largely reflected what Inspector Di Martini told a journalist working for the Afro-American and others in front of the store around 7:30 PM: "A boy stole some little article here this afternoon. The manager caught him, grabbed him by the arm, and was taking him in the back when a woman screamed. The crowd gathered. The manager did not press charges, and let the boy go home through the back.” (Di Martini’s information at that time came only from interviewing Jackson Smith and Hurley, as both Donahue and Eldridge were off duty and would not learn of the disorder until the next day.) Missing from his narrative was Rivera biting the men, a detail that was also missing from stories in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, New York World-Telegram, New York Evening Journal, and Daily Worker. However, the assault was mentioned in the New York American, Home News, New York Sun, New York Herald Tribune, New York Times, Daily News, New York Post, Atlanta World, New York Age, Philadelphia Tribune, Pittsburgh Courier, La Prensa, and in Time magazine and the New Republic. Only the New York American, Daily News, and New York Herald Tribune included language that gave a particular slant to the assault. The New York American and Daily News describing Rivera as “hysterical” in his response to being grabbed by Hurley and the store detective, while the New York Herald Tribune labelled him pugnacious. The New York Age reported that “someone” had hit Rivera, the New York Herald Tribune and Brooklyn Daily Eagle that Hurley or Urban “slapped him," or “slugged him” according to the Pittsburgh Courier, with the New York Age mistakenly reporting that he was being treated at Harlem Hospital. That story was in a special edition of the New York Age published in the midst of the confusion early in the disorder. Two stories, in the New York American and New York Sun, had Rivera leave the store rather than being released. A story in The New Republic by white journalist Hamilton Basso included dialogue, almost certainly invented, between Rivera and the two men who grabbed him and comments from a crowd around him (Basso also mixed up the sequence of events inside and outside the store after Rivera's release).
  • Lino Rivera grabbed & Charles Hurley and Steve Urban assaulted (Part 2)
  • Lino Rivera grabbed & Charles Hurley and Steve Urban assaulted in secondary sources
• 1 2021-11-29T22:35:16+00:00 Kress 5, 10 & 25c store rear windows broken 76 plain 2024-06-11T22:35:49+00:00 When police officers pushed people away from the front of S. H. Kress' store and off West 125th Street after someone threw objects that broke the store's front windows, some ended up on 8th Avenue and West 124th Street. Around 7:00 PM, a hearse stopped on 124th Street near the rear of the S. H. Kress' store, located about a third of the way along the block to the east, attracting the attention of members of the crowd. A woman saw the vehicle, according to reports in the New York Times, New York Sun, and New York Herald Tribune. She called out "There’s the hearse come to take the boy’s body out of the store,” according to New York Times and New York Sun, and "It's come to get the dead child," according to the New York Herald Tribune. While there were many Black women inside and outside the store, singling out one fit the emphasis in the narratives published by those newspapers on the hysterical nature of the crowds: the New York Herald Tribune described the woman who called out as "excitable;" the New York Times reported that she "shrilled;" while in the New York Sun "her piercing scream lifted itself above the hoarse shouts of the mob," with the result that other people were "Incited." The outcry is more generalized in the New York Evening Journal, in line with its more explicitly racist narrative. That story claimed that "the Negroes were worked up to such a frenzy that they did not realize [the arrival of the hearse] was simply a coincidence. The cry went up 'They've killed him! They've killed him! They're taking him away in a hearse!'" No one arrested during the disorder was identified as being charged with inciting the crowd.
  
  
  
  Whether they saw the hearse as evidence of the fate of the boy arrested in the S. H. Kress store or responded to shouts making that connection, people moved to the rear of the store. Those at the rear of the store may have found further reason to think the boy had come to harm when they found the store lights on and men moving around inside, workmen repairing displays and counters damaged earlier, according to the New York Herald Tribune and New York American. Or members of the crowd moved directly to renew the attack on the store begun on West 125th Street, as reported in the New York Times, New York Evening Journal, and Times Union. Or the crowd gathered at the rear of the store was joined by "a number of colored persons, believed to be inmates of the Salvation Army located on 124th Street, west of 7th Avenue,...[who] began throwing stones," as Inspector Di Martini wrote in a report to the Police Commissioner the next day. (The Salvation Army operated a hostel for homeless men at that location.) One result was that windows in the rear of S. H. Kress' store were broken.
  
  An "L" shaped building that spanned the width of the block between 125th and 124th Streets, S. H. Kress' store had twice as much storefront on West 124th Street as it had facing 125th Street. There were retail counters in the wider rear section of the store, and basement exits out on to West 124th Street (Lino Rivera had been released through one). Windows also faced 124th Street, but no images have been found that show their size and extent. Whatever their extent, more windows in the rear of the store appear to have been broken than in the front. Compared to the "very little loss on the front," a reporter for the Afro-American described "the windows in the rear showed signs of the stone and whiskey bottle barrage." Similarly, the New York Age reported "a plate glass window in the front of the store was smashed, while the back part of the building suffered several broken windows." Without the comparison, the Times Union reported similar damage, "the store's rear windows were smashed," as did the New York Times less precisely, noting "Stones were hurled through windows." With typical exaggeration, both the Home News and New York Herald Tribune claimed all the rear windows were shattered.
  
  Windows were possibly not the only target of objects thrown on West 124th Street. Police officers had been stationed at the store's rear entrance earlier in the evening. Together with officers who followed the crowds from 8th Avenue, police once again tried to clear them from the street. Two mounted patrolmen were part of that group, according to Joe Taylor, the leader of the Young Liberators. Unlike on West 125th Street earlier, objects struck police officers. At least two officers suffered injuries that required an ambulance. Patrolman Michael Kelly was hit on the right leg by a rock and Detective Charles Foley was hit on the shoulder by a stone. Officers trying to push crowds away from the rear of the store could have been hit by objects thrown at the windows, but white newspapers reported in sensational terms that police were the targets. "A barrage of missiles fell on the ranks of police," according to the New York Times, while the New York Herald Tribune described a more dramatic scene in which "Negroes showered [police] with miscellaneous missiles from roofs, hallways and other hiding places." News of the hearse's appearance and renewed police clashes with crowds on the street spread to people gathered on 8th Avenue, and windows in other stores on 125th Street began to be smashed. Despite these attacks, police appear to have cleared the crowd from 124th Street within a few minutes. When Emergency Truck #5 arrived on the block around 7:15 PM, Patrolman Henry Eppler told a MCCH hearing that "everything was quiet," which led to the truck relocating to 125th Street.
  
  Several newspapers made no mention of broken windows in the rear of S. H. Kress' store. A hearse appears in most of those narratives, provoking generalized reactions from the crowds on the street. It served to "fire the crowd" in the Afro-American's narrative, and in stories in the Home News and New York Post, although in the white newspapers crowds see the vehicle on West 124th Street before the speakers try to address the crowd, a different chronology. The New York Sun described the crowd moving directly to attacks on police and stores and looting. The hearse appears in front of the store, not at its rear, in the Daily Mirror. And it is mentioned as appearing in the area without mention of a specific location in the Atlanta World and in an ANP story published in both the Atlanta World and Pittsburgh Courier. Neither broken windows in the rear of Kress' store nor a hearse are features of the narratives in the Daily News and New York World-Telegram, and are likewise missing from Louise Thompson's account (she was on 125th Street when the rear windows were broken).
• 1 2022-07-20T18:16:09+00:00 2:00 PM to 2:30 PM 33 plain 2024-05-28T22:41:44+00:00
  
  Just after 2:00 PM, Lino Rivera, a sixteen-year-old Puerto Rican boy, walked through the front doors of the S. H. Kress 5-10-25c store on West 125th Street. Earlier in the day, around noon, he had taken the subway to Brooklyn, having heard about a job opening for an errand boy. The position had been filled by the time he arrived. It was not the first time he had unsuccessfully visited Brooklyn looking for work. Rivera had stopped attending Textile High School six months earlier to work on a delivery truck, but had to leave that job after a month. His mother, Anna, had a job at a powder-puff factory, but his father had died soon after the family arrived in New York City in 1923. Mother and son shared an apartment with another woman and her child on the 7th floor of 272 Manhattan Avenue. Returning from Brooklyn, Rivera had exited the subway at 125th Street rather than continuing two more stops to his home fourteen blocks further south. He had then gone to a show or movie at one of the theaters that lined the street west of the subway station, the main entertainment and commercial district north of Central Park.
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  Rivera would have been far from alone in coming to 125th Street (as this photograph taken a month later showed). As well as the subway station on Lenox Ave, a bus route on 7th Avenue and an elevated train line on 8th Avenue also stopped at 125th Street, and a street car line ran its length. In the 1930s, the residential districts south as well as north of 125th Street had filled with Black residents, who had become a majority of the district’s customers. As a result, Rivera would have had his choice of theaters, no longer having to avoid several because they admitted only white patrons. To the contrary, theaters had begun to change as their patronage did, with the Apollo opening the previous year with theatrical shows catering to Black audiences as well as movies and a Black staff. That theater may have been Rivera’s choice; it was opposite the Kress store. With nothing to do after the show ended, he wandered into the store to look around; it also offered a shortcut to 124th Street on his way home.
  
  In going into the Kress store, Rivera was visiting another attraction that drew people to 125th Street, the large stores of various kinds that, like the theaters, spanned the entire width of a block. A 5-and-10-cent store, Kress, like the Woolworth’s store to its east, offered cheaper merchandise than the street's department stores, Blumstein, Koch, and McCrory. Small counters displaying different types of merchandise were scattered throughout the store, behind which stood white staff. The lack of Black sales staff in stores on 125th Street, all of which were white-owned, had been the target of boycott campaigns and pickets for the previous three years, although the Kress store had not been one of those singled out. Around fifty other people were in the store when Rivera walked in, almost all of them Black women, a clientele to which the boycott campaign had drawn attention in making the case for hiring Black staff. Rivera made his way through the store to the rear half, which was twice the width of the shopfloor at the front. A pocketknife on a counter caught his attention. He reached out and put it in his jacket pocket without anyone behind the counter seeing what he had done. His action, however, did not go unnoticed. In one of the offices fifteen feet above that section of Kress’ store, Charles Hurley, a twenty-eight-year-old white floorwalker who supervised the sales staff, was watching the counters with the store manager, Jackson Smith, and saw Rivera take the knife. He called out to the store detective, pointed out the boy, and headed downstairs. Catching boys shoplifting was a regular part of the men’s work. Petty theft was one of the responses to unemployment, poverty, and lots of time to fill in that led to boys from Harlem appearing in the Children’s Court, although far less common than violating regulations against shining shoes on the street, selling newspapers after 7:00 PM, hitching on street trolleys, and riding the subway without paying – the last of which Rivera had been arrested for just a week earlier. Without a nickel to pay for a subway trip back to Harlem after another trip to Brooklyn responding to a job ad, he had used tinfoil from a cigarette packet to make a slug to put in the subway turnstile. He later told a magistrate in the Brooklyn Adolescent Court he had used slugs twenty-five times before without being caught. On that day, a railroad police officer saw him. When he took the pocketknife, Rivera was on parole, due back in court the next week.
  
  Arriving on the shop floor, Hurley grabbed Rivera and demanded the pocketknife. When Rivera denied having taken the knife, Hurley took it from his jacket pocket. Telling the boy to leave the store, he pushed him toward the 125th Street entrance, joined by the store detective. Rivera tried to shake off the men walking on either side of him, telling them he could walk out on his own. As they neared the front entrance Hurley said, "Let's take him down the cellar and beat hell out of him.” Scared of being beaten, Rivera began to “really fight,” throwing his arms around. In response, Hurley put his arm around the boy’s shoulders to restrain him, helped by a window dresser, Steve Urban, a thirty-nine-year-old white man, who also put his arms around Rivera. Once out of store, in the vestibule, the store detective left to get an officer from the Crime Prevention Bureau. That police agency provided an alternative to arrests of children, with its officers instead undertaking investigations of their conditions in order to refer them to social agencies to better prevent “juvenile delinquency.” Staff at the Kress store referred most of the boys they caught shoplifting to the Crime Prevention Bureau and had police arrest only one or two a week. A referral meant that Rivera would not face a trip to court after being caught in the store like he had when caught putting a slug in the subway turnstile.
  
  However, at that moment, Rivera, was more worried about a beating from the Kress store staff than what he faced from police and the courts. Continuing to try to get away after the store detective left, Rivera bit Hurley and Urban on the hands with which they had hold of him. Standing on the street outside the Kress store, Patrolman Donahue saw this struggle and came to investigate, as did at least two other police, his partner Patrolman Keel and a Black officer named Miller. That there were that number of officers near the Kress store reflected both how busy 125th Street was, and the additional police stationed there after the picketing of businesses the previous year. Donahue sent Miller to call an ambulance to treat Hurley and Urban and took Rivera and the two men back inside the store, away from a curious crowd that was gathering.
   
• 1 2022-05-23T17:56:54+00:00 4:30 PM to 5:00 PM 16 plain 2024-02-13T03:49:25+00:00 In response to the call from the store manager, Sergeant Bauer arrived at the Kress store just after 4:30 PM. With police officers telling people that Rivera had been released unharmed failing to convince them to leave the store, Bauer told the manager, Jackson Smith, that he did not know what else to do. The two men were concerned not to “excite” the crowds in the store, which they feared would “start a riot.”
  
  On 125th Street, two or three groups of people stood outside the store, agitated enough to attract the attention of passersby. Among those who stopped to ask “what the excitement was about” was Louise Thompson, a Black Communist organizer, civil rights activist, and journalist with many friends among the authors and artists of the Harlem Renaissance. Told that “something was going on in the store and that a boy was beaten,” she went inside to investigate, likely not the only person drawn into the Kress store by rumors circulating on the street. She found two or three groups of women in the front of the store. Approaching a crying woman whom she knew, Thompson asked what had happened, and was again told that a boy had been beaten. She moved on to the largest group, standing around the candy counter where Donahue had brought Rivera around two hours earlier. From them Thompson heard that a “little colored boy,” “10 or 12 years old,” had been beaten, and that they were not leaving the store until he was produced. While white salesgirls stood behind some of the counters, Thompson could see no police or managers at the front of the store
  
  In the rear of the store, Smith decided he had to close the store early. He went back upstairs to the offices and called the West 123rd Street police station for the second time, pleading that they send enough officers to allow him “close the doors without causing trouble.” At that time there were likely about eight officers in the store, and about one hundred people, mostly Black women. Three more radio cars and an emergency truck were dispatched. The eight officers on an emergency truck served as the police riot squad and were equipped with a Thompson machine gun, three Winchester rifles, and a Remington shotgun, as well as a tear gas gun. Radio cars, which carried two officers each, were an additional means by which police could rapidly respond. When the fourteen officers arrived, they went directly to the rear of the store, not stopping by Thompson and her group.
  
  Not long after, a woman screamed in the rear of the store. Thompson and other women in the front rushed in that direction to investigate. They found that police had started to move people toward the front entrance and out of the store, as the closing bell was sounded. Women told to move responded by asking what had happened to the boy; police now refused to answer their questions and instead told them it was none of their business. That unresponsiveness further angered many in the crowd. As police began pushing the women and men back towards the entrance, pots and pans were knocked off counters. A police detective arrested Margaret Mitchell, an eighteen-year-old Black woman, for “throwing pans on [the] floor.” The noise as the tinware hit the ground triggered a rush for the exit by many of those in the store. In the confusion, Clara Crowder, a twenty-year-old white clerk, fainted while assisting another store employee, likely behind one of the store counters. While that incident went unnoticed by Thompson and the other women being pushed out of the store, someone in the store called an ambulance for Crowder.
  
  Thompson was in the last group of women pushed out of the store on to 125th Street by police. The women around her continued to appeal for information about Rivera, worried that he was injured and dying in the basement. On the street they joined a crowd that had been swelled by those pushed out of the store and by increasing numbers of people drawn to the entrance by the concerns and rumors being shared along the street. As they had been in the pickets and boycotts of the preceding year, Black women were at the forefront of these protests.
   
• 1 2020-02-25T17:14:21+00:00 2:30 PM to 3:00 PM 14 plain 2024-01-28T19:13:13+00:00 While Patrolman Donahue waited at the front of the store near the candy counter with Rivera and the two injured Kress staff, Officer Miller found a callbox and telephoned Police Headquarters at 2:30 PM. Five minutes later, Harlem Hospital logged a call from Police Headquarters and dispatched an ambulance, which arrived at 2:40 PM. The injuries that Hurley and Urban suffered when Rivera bit them were not serious enough to require they be taken to the hospital, so Dr. Sayet treated them in the store. Hurley did still have scars from four teeth a month later. While a crowd of people who had either seen Rivera or heard about Rivera being taken back into the store remained on the street in front of the store, the group of staff, police, and ambulance crew with the boy drew a small crowd of shoppers to the front of the store itself. The shape of the store meant that most of those shopping inside could not see the entrance. Nonetheless, the size of the group of shoppers who could see Rivera made one staff member concerned enough to tell the store manager. Smith came to investigate; on finding out that a Crime Protection Bureau officer had been called, he decided nothing more needed to be done and returned to his office.
  
  A few minutes later, around 2:45 PM, the store detective and Alfred Eldridge, a Black Crime Prevention Bureau officer, arrived at the store. Passing Officer Miller outside the entrance, they found Dr. Sayet still treating Hurley and Urban. Eldridge, following the Bureau’s procedure, spoke to Rivera to confirm that he had taken the pocketknife as the store staff alleged. He said he had, and also told Eldridge he was on parole for using slugs in the subway. The officer recorded Rivera’s name and address, as Patrolman Donahue had already done. The next step should have been for Eldridge to leave with Rivera. However, Hurley and Urban said that they wanted the boy arrested and charged with assaulting them. Crime Prevention Bureau officers did not make arrests, so to act on that charge Eldridge would have to turn Rivera over to Patrolmen Donahue. He went to the rear of the Kress store and telephoned his lieutenant to report the changed situation. Outside the store, groups of people gathered, sharing what they had seen or heard about store staff struggling with Rivera. Their concern reflected the fact that feelings toward white businesses on 125th Street had been running particularly high since the pickets and boycott campaign the previous year, which had effectively been halted by a New York Supreme Court decision that barred picketing in "racial disputes" because of the “substantial danger that race riots and race reprisals might result in this and other communities.”
   
• 1 2022-05-23T18:31:36+00:00 3:00 PM to 3:30 PM 14 plain 2024-01-10T23:49:09+00:00 On a telephone at the rear of the Kress store, Officer Eldridge explained to his lieutenant that the Kress store staff wanted Rivera arrested rather than placed in the supervision of the Crime Prevention Bureau. The lieutenant told him to let Patrolman Donahue take charge of Rivera, as he was the first police officer on the scene. Eldridge proceeded to tell Donahue that if Hurley and Urban changed their mind and decided not to press charges, he could turn Rivera over to the Crime Prevention Bureau. Eldridge then left the store. It was now around 3:15 PM; by then Dr. Sayet had finished treating Hurley and Urban and the ambulance had also left. Eldridge’s departure left Rivera in the hands of a group of white men, a situation that would have increased the concerns for his safety of the Black women watching in the store.
  
  Within minutes of Eldridge leaving, Hurley and Urban did change their minds. No explanation was ever given for why they suddenly decided not to have Rivera arrested. Hurley went to the rear of the store, resuming his work supervising the sales staff, and avoided playing any further part in dealing with Rivera. The store detective had gone earlier, after he brought Eldridge to the store. That left Patrolman Donahue and Urban, the window dresser, with charge of the boy.
  
  Donahue would have had to take Rivera out of the store to turn him over to the Crime Prevention Bureau. However, there were still people gathered outside the store, and Donahue wanted to "prevent excitement.” He evidently feared that those who had witnessed or heard about Hurley and Urban’s struggle with Rivera would object to the boy being in police custody. Harlem’s Black residents had a history of disrupting arrests when they judged police were acting inappropriately as well as taking action against white storeowners and staff who mistreated Black customers. So Donahue decided instead to simply let Rivera go through a rear exit from the store's basement. As the patrolman and Urban took the boy through the store and out a door that led to the basement, they attracted the attention of shoppers throughout the store including L[ouis]. F. Coles, a thirty-year-old Black clerk. One woman called out that they were taking Rivera to the basement to beat him. Cole and several others objected to the boy being taken out of public view.
  
  Once Donahue released Rivera on to 124th Street, he returned through the store to the front entrance on to 125th Street, and left the store around 3:30 PM. Rivera went in the opposite direction, home to 272 Manhattan Avenue. He did not tell his mother what had happened in the Kress store.
  
  
   
• 1 2022-05-23T17:56:38+00:00 3:30 PM to 4:00 PM 13 plain 2024-01-10T23:55:24+00:00 Inside the Kress store, the Black women who had been watching Rivera since staff grabbed him became increasingly concerned as the boy failed to return from the basement. Groups of two or three gathered throughout the store as the women shared the information that a boy had been beaten. Seeing the clusters of shoppers, Smith, the store manager, came down from his office to investigate. When he heard what was being said, he approached two groups “trying to explain to them that nothing had happened.” The women were unconvinced; years of mistreatment and discrimination at the hands of white staff would have made them see the store manager as an untrustworthy source of information.
  
  Smith then went out on to 125th Street seeking help in calming those in the store. He did not have the option of turning to Black staff as did the manager of McCrory’s department store down the block, who several times a day called on the Black store detective to “smooth over little differences” between customers and staff. Outside the store Smith found Officer Miller, the Black patrolman who had been at the entrance since calling an ambulance for Hurley and Urban. Asked by the store manager to try to convince the people that Rivera had been released, Miller spoke to several groups inside the store. The Black women were no more persuaded by what he said than they were by Smith. They had seen or heard that a patrolman had joined with a staff member to take Rivera to the basement, implicating police in what had happened to Rivera. Some knew that Miller had not been in the store at the time Rivera had been taken away so had not himself seen what had been done to the boy. They wanted to see Rivera for themselves.
  
  The Black patrolman left the store just before 4:00 PM, when the police shift changed. Back on 125th Street, the crowd outside was growing and becoming more agitated. Rumors about a boy beaten in the store spread beyond the area around the Kress store, carried by those shopping in the district’s businesses and the crowds of unemployed residents who occupied their time standing on street corners.