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1. 1 2020-09-24T17:03:34+00:00 Anonymous In the Daily News Anonymous 52 plain 2023-11-02T03:18:46+00:00 Anonymous

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• 1 2022-06-16T19:24:46+00:00 Police establish perimeter around Kress' store 84 plain 2023-11-09T06:26:34+00:00 After Inspector Di Martini returned to 125th Street around 7:00 PM, he called for police reinforcements. A New York Evening Journal story celebrated the response as “the most remarkable 'military' feat in the history of the department.” That portrayal was certainly how the police department would have sought to present the deployment. However, the arrival of additional officers appears to have taken longer than the story allowed, and to have been focused on establishing a perimeter around Kress’ store. The piecemeal arrival of reinforcements made that a protracted process. As police struggled to keep crowds away from Kress' store, those clashes served to disperse crowds along the avenues rather than stopping the violence. Unable to prevent windows being broken in businesses on 125th Street, police had to guard damaged stores, limiting the officers who could be deployed on the avenues. Guards appear to have prevented looting; they did not stop additional windows being broken. After crowds broke through on to 125th Street around 10:30 PM, there are only two further incidents in that area during the remaining disorder, an alleged assault on a woman and a shooting, both at the intersection of 125th Street and 7th Avenue. Although other incidents whose timing is unknown may have occurred during that time, the evidence suggests that police perimeter held through that period.
  
  The New York Evening Journal story lauding the police response reported “a small army of 700 police was beating back the rioters” on 125th Street between 8th and 7th Avenues. That number likely reflected the total deployment rather than the force that set up the perimeter around Kress’ store. It was in line with the number Di Martini reported to the police commissioner were in Harlem after midnight and fell between the totals reported by newspapers, with the 1,000 officers mentioned by the Daily Mirror at one extreme, and the 500 officers reported by the Home News and New York Herald Tribune representing the other end of the range. While the officers coming from beyond the local precincts went initially to 125th Street, Lt. Battle later told Langston Hughes that the reserve officers from Harlem's precincts went to their stations, on West 123rd Street and West 135th Street. Some of those officers may have been sent directly to other areas of Harlem, particularly those who arrived later in the evening.
  
  The perimeter established by police extended from 8th to Lenox Avenues, and from 124th to 126th Streets, according to stories in the New York Times, Daily Mirror and Pittsburgh Courier, the only sources that described police deployments. While Inspector Di Martini had summoned the reinforcements, the newspapers credited that deployment to Deputy Chief Inspector McAuliffe, who commanded uniformed police in the borough of Manhattan, and would have taken over from Di Martini when he arrived around 9:00 PM. The department’s emergency trucks attracted the most attention in newspaper stories, presented as the anchors of the police cordon. Six emergency trucks were stationed at the intersection of West 125th Street and 7th Avenue in the strategy reported by the New York Times, Daily Mirror, and Pittsburgh Courier. Emergency trucks were more dispersed according to the New York Herald Tribune; two at West 125th and 7th Avenue, one at West 125th and Lenox Avenue, and one at West 127th and 7th Avenue.
  
  The Emergency Services Division had succeeded the police department’s Riot Battalion in 1925. Each truck had a crew of eight officers and, in addition to rescue equipment, carried a Thompson machine gun, three Winchester rifles, and a Remington shotgun, as well as a tear gas gun, for use against "disorderly crowds." The twenty-two trucks in the department in 1935 were dispersed throughout the city. While the two located closest to 125th Street arrived relatively quickly, additional trucks would have taken significantly longer. Squad #6 was based on East 122nd Street, and had been involved in clearing shoppers from Kress’ store earlier. Squad #5, based on Amsterdam Avenue, arrived around 7:15 PM, according to Patrolman Eppler. The New York Evening Journal identified trucks as coming from Kingsbridge in the Bronx and from Coney Island at the southern end of Brooklyn, the latter apparently arriving later: “It slithered perilously over wet streets but arrived in time for its crew to get into action.” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle identified another squad from Brooklyn, Squad #16 from Herbert Street, as having crashed returning from Harlem, at 1:00 AM (a time when there was still significant disorder). Thompson did not mention the trucks. Neither did trucks appear in any of the published photographs of the disorder. Some of their crew did, identifiable because the rifles they carried — described as “riot guns” in newspapers stories and photograph captions — caused them to stand out from other police. They did not, however, have a machine gun that needed to be “set up,” as the Afro-American reported: each truck instead carried a single hand-held "Tommy gun." Nor were the trucks equipped with enough of those weapons for all the crew to have one. And there are no reports that they used tear gas. Those weapons prompted several newspapers to use martial language in stories about the squads’ activities. The New York Evening Journal story on the police reinforcements described Harlem as a “seething battleground,” and the police as “beating back the rioters in a savage and organized attack.” An emergency truck from the Bronx “leaped off the machine and tore into a crowd of window smashers” (perhaps at Herbert’s jewelry store at 125th Street and 7th Avenue, where another New York Evening Journal story described a similar scene). The Daily Mirror described emergency trucks as "being sent to the battle zone."
  
  The other evidence of the presence of emergency trucks placed them in less warlike roles. Newspaper photographs show their crew among the officers who guarded damaged stores. A patrolman with a riot gun stands in front of Herbert’s jewelry store on northeast corner of 125th and 7th Avenue in a photograph published in the Burlington Free Press. Stories in the New York Evening Journal and New York Herald Tribune described police with riot guns guarding the store (the Daily News, New York American, and Home News described the officers simply as patrolmen). Another patrolman with a riot gun was photographed on the corner across 7th Avenue from the jewelry store. The image published in the New York Evening Journal is narrowly focused on the officer, whereas another version of that image published in the Daily Mirror shows a Black man walking past him, and the image published in the Daily News shows several Black men and women walking by on the sidewalk, evidence of the continued presence of people around 125th Street. Two additional patrolmen, one visibly carrying a rifle, stand in front of Sherloff’s jewelry store, just a few buildings north of the intersection, in an AP photograph published in the Los Angeles Times. Taken together, the images suggest that the crew of at least one Emergency Truck guarded stores at the intersection. Captain Rothengast, Patrolman Moran, and Patrolman Eppler told the MCCH that they also guarded other stores on 125th Street, including Kress’ store. A photograph published in the Daily News shows a patrolman talking through a broken window with a man inside a store on 125th Street. Again, Black men and women are visible in the background on the sidewalk in the background, their presence indicating that police had not closed the streets.
  
  The police perimeter appears to have focused on keeping crowds off 125th Street, not individuals and small groups. In addition to those visible in photographs, Captain Rothengast described seeing "groups of people in 125th Street – no more than 250" when he arrived at Kress’ store around 8:30 PM. A story in the Home News also reported that “In an effort to keep traffic moving, police permitted pedestrians to walk through 125th St. The sidewalks on both sides of the street were crowded.” Patrolmen Moran and Eppler testified that at least some of those people approached police guarding Kress' store asking about the boy beaten in the store, encounters also described by a reporter for the Afro-American. Allowing individuals to walk along 125th Street was not incident-free: around 8:30 PM, a white man was allegedly beaten in front of Kress’ store, with police arresting James Smitten for committing the assault. About twenty minutes later, police arrested Frank Wells for breaking a window in the Willow Cafeteria. Just before 10:00 PM, Detective Roge was hit by a rock in front of Kress’ store and another patrolman injured at 124th Street and 7th Avenue. At the same time, Louise Thompson described larger groups being pushed back by police. She told a MCCH hearing she saw "one policeman throw his billy into the crowds while the mounted police were riding them down” at the corner of 125th Street and 7th Avenue between 8:00 PM and 9:00 PM, a scene similar to that captured by a photograph published in the Daily News. There is no evidence of where that photograph was taken, but a second photograph of police dispersing a group of Black men and women, the most widely reproduced photograph of the disorder, was taken at 125th Street and 7th Avenue according to the caption. It shows the island that that divided the north and south lanes on the roadway, which contained trees and were surrounded by the barriers like those visible in the photograph. A group of men and women are scattering in response to a uniformed patrolman moving toward them. One man is bent over; the caption describes him as falling down. He may also have been pushed down or hit by the patrolman; another man obstructs the view of what has happened between the two men. (One version of the caption claimed that the photographer was hit by a rock soon after taking the image, which might explain why the patrolman was trying to move the crowd.)
  
  One of the Black men killed during the disorder, Andrew Lyons, sustained a fractured skull "during the thick of a melee at 125th street and Seventh avenue," according to the New York Amsterdam News, or a block further west at 125th Street and Lenox Avenue according to the Times Union. Police clubs may have been responsible for those injuries, but the doctors who treated Lyons recorded that had been too groggy to tell his roommate or anyone else how he had been injured. No sources mentioned police firing revolvers or rifles to try to disperse the crowds.
  
  On at least two occasions large crowds appear to have broken through the police perimeter. Louise Thompson told a MCCH hearing that around 9:00 PM a crowd broke through on to 125th Street. The Home News also reported that incident. Store windows were broken, Young's hat store looted, and two white men and a white police detective allegedly assaulted around that time. A second crowd broke through around 10:30 PM, resulting in more windows being broken and a white man allegedly being assaulted, and police arresting four Black men.
  
  Most of the incidents on 125th Street before 10:30 PM did not result in arrests, likely because police were heavily outnumbered by crowds and constrained by the responsibility of guarding stores. Only at Kress’ store it seems were enough officers stationed to make arrests: there arrests were made not just around 10:30 PM but also just before 10:00 PM and at 8:30 PM. There are no arrests among those with known times in the period between the arrest of the picketers in front of Kress’ store at 6:45 PM and arrests on 125th Street between 8:30 PM and 9:00 PM. There are approximately a dozen arrests made at unknown times and places that might have occurred during this time, but it is more likely that police were too outnumbered to make arrests, as Lt. Battle later told Langston Hughes. While an arrest for breaking windows was made just before 9:00 PM, police made no arrests for the assaults and broken windows reported when a crowd broke through soon after.
  
  The police perimeter appears to have held after 10:30 PM. Sometime before then, no later than 10:00 PM, and likely as early as between 8:30 PM and 9:00 PM, groups had moved on from 125th Street to attack businesses on 8th Avenue and 7th Avenue, and later, Lenox Avenue. In response, police began to disperse across Harlem, driving along those streets in radio cars and taking up positions on street corners and guarding damaged stores. Exactly when the first police were sent beyond 125th Street is not clear. The first arrest made away from 125th Street, on West 127th Street between St. Nicholas and 8th Avenues around 9:00 PM, appears to have been made by a patrolman on his way to 125th Street rather than being deployed elsewhere in Harlem. The arrest of Leroy Brown around 9:45 PM on 7th Avenue between 127th and 128th Streets is clearer evidence of a spreading police presence.
  
  With the MCCH giving limited attention to this period of the disorder, witnesses who testified at their hearings did not provide the details they do of the earlier police response. Newspaper reporters and photographers were on 125th Street during this time, so would have seen some of these events and been able to obtain information from police. Inspector Di Martini spoke with a group of reporters, including one from the Afro-American during this time. At the same time, those reporters would have had a limited view. The block was too long for those at one intersection to see the details of what was happening at the other intersection, or even for those at Kress' store to clearly see the nearby intersection with 8th Avenue. At the corner of 125th Street and 7th Avenue the Afro-American's reporter saw only "little knots of people on the corner"; "once he walked on, however, he found high police officials and the first detail of 500 extra policemen rushed to the area" and "a large number of people between Seventh and Eighth Avenues." It is unsurprising then that newspaper stories offer only general and fragmented accounts of this period of the disorder. Information on specific events comes from legal records, which are limited largely to the period around 10:00 PM when police made arrests, and narrowly focused on the actions of a single arresting officer.
   
• 1 2022-05-23T18:34:55+00:00 9:00 PM to 9:30 PM 25 plain 2023-10-24T15:45:29+00:00
  
  Around 9:00 PM, soon after a window was broken in the Willow Cafeteria, Louise Thompson saw a group of people break through the police cordon on the corner of 125th Street and 7th Avenue. She had thought police had established some order at the intersection. Their cordon had prevented groups from going along the street to the Kress store, while officers in front of Herbert’s Blue Diamond Jewelry store on the east side had protected that business from further damage. As a result, Thompson had watched frustrated groups leave the area and move north and south on 7th Avenue. But then “another group broke through the police cordons and swept down to Kress’s once again,” and as Thompson watched, they “broke some windows.” Bricks hit the windows of Young’s Hat Store, the second store west of the corner at 201 West 125th Street. The hat store was in the same building as the Willow Cafeteria on the north side of the street. At least some of the broken windows in the four other stores in that building, the United Cigar store on the corner, the Minks Haberdashery next to it and the Savon Clothes store and General Stationery & Supplies store between the hat store and cafeteria, were likely the result of attacks at this time. Further west, in the building on the other side of the Harlem Opera House, all four businesses — the Conrad Schmidt Music Shop, Adler Shoes, Scheer Clothing, Howard Suits — had windows broken during the disorder, some likely at this time. That may be as far as group who got past police made it along 125th Street before police pushed them back to the corners. Beyond that building were the Empire Savings Bank and Loew's Victoria Theatre. No stores west of the theater suffered significant damage other than those on the corner of 8th Avenue. A clerk in Young’s Hat store reported that its windows were broken “right out,” hit repeatedly until little glass remained. With the glass gone, the merchandise displayed in the window was accessible to people on the street, and some of those hats were taken. There was no other evidence of merchandise being taken at this time, with most groups on the streets then apparently focused on breaking windows, and few store windows yet as damaged as those of the hat store.
  
  Businesses, however, were no longer the only targets of violence. Three white men were also injured around this time near 125th Street, allegedly attacked by groups of Black men. All could have been on 125th Street making their way home, shopping or seeking entertainment, as they lived just west of Harlem, like the white man injured about thirty minutes earlier. Fifty-six-year-old Morris Werner received medical attention for a stab wound that he claimed was the result of being attacked by “by several unknown colored men” near the southwest corner of 125th Street and 7th Avenue. While typical of violence prosecuted as assault at other times in 1935, the injury was one of only two stabbings among the fifty-four assaults that would be reported in the disorder. Louise Thompson, with a group on that corner, did not mention such an assault. Nor did any of the journalists in the area write about it or police arrest anyone for being responsible. Werner may not have been the only white man injured at that intersection around this time. Three of the white journalists gathered there by the police perimeter suffered injuries. Harry Johnson, who worked for the New York American, was reportedly beaten by three Black men, leaving him with injuries to his face that required him to call his editors and ask them to send another reporter to take his place. Everett Breuer, a Daily News photographer, and James Martin, his assistant, were reportedly hit in the face by rocks as they took images of a group of Black men and women in the island in the middle of 7th Avenue. Those forms of violence were typical during the disorder, unlike Werner’s stab wounds. In neither case did police arrest anyone.
  
  At the other end of the block of 125th Street on which the Kress store was located, two additional white men suffered injuries. Maurice Spellman received medical attention for cuts around his right eye that he said were the result of being attacked by several Black men around 9:00 PM at 8th Avenue and 125th Street. Groups of people had gathered there trying to get to the Kress store, but, as with the alleged assault on Werner, no journalist wrote about the attack, nor did police arrest anyone. At the same time a block further west on St. Nicholas Avenue up at 127th Street, Timothy Murphy, a twenty-nine-year-old rock driller on his way home, was knocked to the ground and hit and kicked by a group of Black men. He claimed one of those men said, “You white son-of-a-bitch, take it now,” a phrase that offered little explanation for the violence. While it referenced Murphy’s race, it did not make clear that was why he had been attacked let alone make any connection to rumors about a boy beaten or killed at the Kress store. There were few businesses in the area, so it was not somewhere groups would have come to break store windows. Rumors from 125th Street, however, would have reached residents.
  
  Police witnessed the attack on Murphy unlike the other alleged assaults on white men at this time. Patrolman George Conn, in a radio car on its way to 125th Street, saw a group of around ten men gathered around Murphy. Jumping out of the car, Conn drew his pistol and fired a shot in the air to disperse the group as he ran toward them. As the men scattered, he fired a second shot at the group, hitting Paul Boyett, a twenty-year-old Black garage worker, in his right shoulder. Despite the wound, Boyett kept running toward his home, only a few buildings away at 310 West 127th Street. Conn caught up to him in the hallway and arrested Boyett despite his insistence that he was “an innocent onlooker” drawn to the disturbance who had not hit or kicked Murphy. Later, a trial jury did accept Boyett’s explanation and acquitted him. No one else was arrested for the assault on Murphy, who suffered cuts and bruises to his head, face and body, and a broken nose.
  
  Somewhere on 125th Street, another police officer also responded to an assault on a white man around this time. Detective William Boyle attempted to “rescue an unknown white man being assaulted.” That man was likely having bricks and rocks thrown at him, as Boyle was hit in the left ankle. By 9:15 PM, Boyle was in the 28th Precinct station on West 123rd Street. Dr. Sayet, who earlier in the day had treated the Kress store staff bitten by Lino Rivera, arrived in an ambulance from Harlem Hospital at that time to treat Boyle’s cuts and bruises. The detective then remained on duty.
  
  Given that there would have been many more white men and women on the streets around 125th Street at this time than those identified as being assaulted, even as they were far outnumbered by Black residents, the groups who directed violence at white individuals rather than white-owned businesses were a very small portion of those reacting to events at the Kress store. That violence occurred in the midst of the disorder; only those who attacked Timothy Murphy may have sought out someone to assault. The others encountered white men while focused on 125th Street and the Kress store. While at odds with later claims that the disorder was targeted at property, these attacks were in keeping with sentiments Thompson and Moss heard expressed in the crowds trying to get to the Kress store. The white identity of those rumored to have been involved in the boy’s death mattered to at least some of Harlem’s Black residents, directing their anger toward white individuals not only white property. Crucially, unlike the disorders of subsequent decades, that anger would have found targets at a time when significant numbers of white New Yorkers still frequented the businesses around 125th Street as well as worked in them.
  
  While people on the four corners of 8th Avenue and 125th Street had not yet begun to move away and break windows at the time of the alleged attacks on the two white men, at the other end of the block more windows were being broken on 7th Avenue. On the northwest corner of 127th Street, around 9:00 PM, a window was broken in the saloon, next to the grocery store damaged a few minutes earlier. Three more windows were broken in the tailor and cleaning store in the middle of that block that had had a window broken earlier. As was the case earlier, those attacks do not appear to be the actions of a crowd acting together, but of small groups and individuals. They could have been the same people who had thrown objects at windows on this block earlier, or those people could have moved on and been replaced by others coming from or to 125th Street. There was still no evidence that police were in the area to deter or respond to these attacks. The white owners and staff of those businesses were still present; there was no indication that they were targeted by those breaking windows.
  
  Fourteen blocks south of 125th Street, Lino Rivera left his home, where he had been since leaving the Kress store, at 9:00 PM. He had a cup of coffee somewhere relatively close by, where he saw “a lot of trouble around.” Whatever was happening likely involved some of the people that Carlton Moss had described people going south on 7th Avenue from 125th Street beginning around 8:30 PM. However, Rivera did not hear any explanation for the “trouble” that connected it with what had happened to him hours earlier. Perhaps still wary after that experience, he decided to cut short his plans for the evening, and returned home before 9:30 PM.
  
  As Rivera was arriving home, Louise Thompson also decided to leave the streets and go to the home of a friend. For her, however, it was the lack of “trouble” and the diminishing number of people at 125th Street and 7th Avenue that appear to have prompted that decision. Police had cleared 125th Street of those who broke through the cordon half an hour earlier, and groups of people unable to reach the Kress store again began to disperse up and down 7th Avenue. Thompson likely joined those going south on 7th Avenue; when she returned about an hour later, it would be at 7th Avenue and 118th Street.
   
• 1 2020-03-11T21:25:32+00:00 Everett Breuer and Joseph Martin assaulted 23 plain 2023-11-15T02:19:02+00:00 Everett Breuer, a twenty-eight-year-old white photographer working for the Daily News, was taking images of the crowd at 7th Avenue and 125th Street when a rock hit him in the head. It was likely one of several objects thrown in Breuer’s direction as the office boy carrying his plates, Joseph Martin, was also hit on the face. Breuer’s own publication reported he was “beaten,” not hit by a rock, as did the New York American, but the Daily Mirror, Home News, New York Herald Tribune, and New York Times all reported him being hit by an object. The New York Evening Journal and New York Post reported only the resulting cuts. According to all the publications but the New York Evening Journal, Breuer’s cuts were bad enough to require a trip to the hospital. The stories disagreed on where he received treatment. The New York American, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, New York Times, and Daily Mirror reported it was at Harlem Hospital, the Home News at Sydenham Hospital on Manhattan Avenue and West 124th Street, and the Daily News at the Hospital for the Ruptured and Crippled on 42nd St and Lexington Avenue.
  
  James Martin attracted less attention than Breuer. Other than a mention in the story and an appearance in the list of the injured in the Daily News, Martin appeared only in the list of injured published by the New York Evening Journal. Both sources described him as having cuts on his face, with the latfter recording that an ambulance treated Martin.
  
  The area around 7th Avenue and 125th Street saw a cluster of assaults during the disorder, with six other assaults reported there, including the beating of another reporter, Harry Johnson of the New York American. It was also at this location that Andrew Lyons was killed. All those events occurred despite police being deployed at the intersection.
  
  
  
  A photograph Breuer took immediately before the rock struck him became the most widely reproduced image of the disorder. When it initially appeared in the Daily News, the caption noted “After making this picture, The News photographer was struck down and went to hospital. He suffered lacerations to the scalp.” In later editions that information was omitted, and it did not appear in the caption of the photograph when it was reprinted by other publications. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle list of the injured did report Breuer was "hit by a rock while taking pictures of a riotous group." The scene the photographer captured shows two black men apparently trying to move away from a uniformed police officer; one man has fallen, while the officer is trying to hold the other. Neither they nor the three men and two women in the background look poised to throw anything at the photographer.
   
• 1 2022-03-09T20:45:58+00:00 Crowds incited by Black women (3) 20 plain 2023-10-26T04:12:52+00:00 Women made up a large proportion of those inside Kress’ store when Charles Hurley and Steve Urban grabbed Lino Rivera, and in the crowd inside and outside the store in the hours immediately after. During that time, three woman allegedly incited crowds, but not by calling for action. Two unnamed women, one inside Kress' store and one on 124th Street, shouted that Rivera had been beaten or killed rather than the direct calls to act attributed to men. Knocking pans to the floor, as Margaret Mitchell allegedly did, was a similarly indirect way of causing a crowd to gather, different from the speeches and pickets attributed to men.
  
  The prominent place of women in the events that began the disorder was unusual; men typically initiated outbreaks of violence, joined later by women. In this instance, however, the site was a store in a retail district, realms of shopping and consumption associated with women. However, the women were not presented calling for action, so not cast as leaders in the same way as the men alleged to have incited crowds. Some newspapers amplified that distinction by casting these women in stereotypical terms as not entirely in control of their actions, as “emotional” in the New York Sun, as “frantic” and “excitable” in the New York Herald Tribune, as “hysterical” in the New Republic, as screaming rather than shouting in the New York Evening Journal, New York American, New York Post, and New York Sun, and the New Republic and Newsweek, as having “shrieked” in Time and “shrilled” in the New York Times, their cries as “gossip-mongering” in the New York Herald Tribune.
  
  The women who alerted those around them to Rivera being beaten and the hearse arriving were effectively acting as protectors. Historian Marilynn Johnson has pointed that women's experiences in the racial disorders of the first half of the twentieth century included that role, as well as being victims of violence, and from mid-century, participants in looting. Where Johnson's examples are women acting who tried to protect family or loved ones from white violence, in 1935 Black women sought to protect a boy unrelated to them. Those actions were within societal expectations of women's roles, as Johnson noted, but by extending beyond family, they echoed the extension of women's role in consumption to include the political act of picketing white businesses the previous year.
  
  Away from the store where Rivera was apprehended, and from 125th Street, no women shouting or leading crowds are mentioned in newspaper stories or arrested by police, with one exception, Roi Ottley's column in the New York Amsterdam News. In one column, Ottley described women as inciting men to looting: “Women stood on the fringes of the mobs and dictated their choice to their men folk, who willingly obliged by bringing forth the desired article.” Ottley also cast women as inciting violence without joining the crowds on the streets in an earlier column: “Women hanging out of windows screamed applause to the reign of terror...and prodded their men-folk on with screeching invectives.” No other source reported such scenes. Writing a column rather than a news story, Ottley’s account was impressionistic rather than specific, making it difficult to link to other evidence. He also casts women in secondary roles, with men acting on their behalf, which may echo attitudes toward women as much as their behavior. Certainly, the women in and around Kress’ store took action themselves. There were also a small number of women among those arrested for activities other than inciting crowds, three for looting and three for breaking windows. There are also three women among those reported as injured/treated for injuries during the disorder
  
  The presence of Black women in the crowds beyond 125th Street indicated by those arrests was recorded in some accounts of the disorder. The Daily News, New York Evening Journal, New York Times, and Norfolk Journal and Guide all included women and men in their general descriptions of the crowds. The Daily News highlighted their presence among those who broke windows in a headline, “Women Join Mob of 4,000 In Battering Stores,” without mentioning women breaking windows in the story itself.
  
  Other papers, however, such as the New York American, Home News, New York Sun, New York World-Telegram, and the Black newspapers the Afro-American and Chicago Defender, included women only in the initial crowds inside and outside Kress’ store. Photographs also captured only the women’s presence on 125th Street, in a crowd facing a patrolman swinging his baton, among a group being scattered by police, and knocked to the ground. Women are not mentioned in stories about the events of the disorder published in the New York Herald Tribune, New York Post, or New York Age.
   
• 1 2022-05-23T17:58:35+00:00 8:00 PM to 8:30 PM 16 plain 2023-10-24T03:03:53+00:00
  
  At 8:00 PM, people crowded both the corners of 8th and 7th Avenues and the sidewalks of 125th Street between them — except in front of the Kress store, where police continued to move on anyone who attempted to stop. When Louise Thompson returned to 125th Street and 8th Avenue at that time she found the situation that the reporter for the Afro-American had watched develop in the preceding half an hour, people on all four corners, not just the side of 8th Avenue closest to the Kress store. Walking along 125th Street to 7th Avenue, she found the four corners of that intersection similarly occupied.
  
  The other change Thompson noticed as she walked to 7th Avenue was that by 8:00 PM “most of the windows [were] broken on 125th Street." Carlton Moss described the same sight when he arrived at 125th Street and 7th Avenue from uptown; store window after store window broken on 125th Street. Broken windows meant holes in the large store windows, not that they had been entirely smashed; only after being hit multiple times would all the glass in the large display windows break and the merchandise inside them be accessible to looters. However, the only damage to the Kress store on 125th Street was the one window broken around 6:15 PM, thanks to the police deployed there to keep crowds from gathering.
  
  Windows being broken along 125th Street were likely part of what Inspector Di Martini was referring to when he said that while standing in front of the Kress store he “noticed the crowds becoming excited” around 8:00 PM. Police had been allowing people to walk along 125th Street, as Thompson had, to keep the crowds moving rather than becoming a “mass demonstration.” With the numbers of people on the sidewalk grown large, and officers numbering in the hundreds arriving on the scene, police began to push people back to 8th and 7th Avenues. Senior police officers explained to reporters that they were establishing a cordon to protect both the Kress store and the other damaged businesses on 125th Street. At 8th Avenue, James Ford, a white Communist Party leader, saw the police “driving the people back to 8th Ave from Kress store.” Arriving around 8:00 PM, he watched mounted police riding on the sidewalk and patrolmen using their clubs, causing “resentment” among the crowd. Ford also heard “crashes of glass” as some of those at that end of 125th Street reacted by breaking more windows, perhaps along 8th Avenue by the corners as well as on 125th Street.
  
  At the intersection with 7th Avenue, police were making similar attempts to keep groups of people from 125th Street. Among the small groups Louise Thompson encountered, “there were people who were infuriated,” about rumors that a boy was dead, which some compared to lynching, but also about conditions on 125th Street, that the stores “didn’t employ negroes” and charged high prices for inferior goods. She also saw “a few people” with copies of the leaflet distributed by the Young Liberators. Carlton Moss too heard rumors about a boy being killed from people at 125th Street and 7th Avenue, as well as cries to “Run dem white folks outa Harlem” — leading him to put two white friends who were with him, a man and a woman, into a taxi so they could leave Harlem. When Charles Romney returned from warning his wife to stay off the streets, he found the crowd growing, and patrolmen and mounted police on the sidewalk trying to move them. On the southwest corner, Thompson encountered Black patrolmen among the officers “pushing the people back,” and “saw one patrolman throw his billy [club] into the crowds while the mounted police were riding them down.” With police batons swinging, this could have been when Andrew Lyons, a thirty-seven-year-old Black man, received the head injury which would later kill him. Like Ford, Thompson and Moss also heard breaking glass; Thompson “occasionally…heard a few rocks breaking windows,” whereas Moss heard lots of crashing glass. He also heard someone claiming, “We got Childs — Bastards don’t ‘llow Niggahs in dare, we got ‘em,” referring to the white-owned restaurant at 272 West 125th Street, on the opposite end of the block near 8th Avenue. Louise Thompson attributed the windows being broken in stores to resentment at police tactics and the refusal to allow people to gather and seek information at the Kress store.
  
  The crews of the emergency trucks, the police riot squad, were deployed at the intersection with 7th Avenue, likely indicating that there were more people and more windows being broken there than at 8th Avenue. With at least two trucks, and perhaps as many as six in the area, there would have been ten or more patrolmen armed with rifles, shotguns, or Thompson machine guns (tommy guns) among the police. Many of the Black residents coming to 125th Street in response to the rumors spreading through Harlem would have come via 7th Avenue as it was the major traffic route through Harlem, carrying two lanes of traffic in each direction, separated by an island planted with trees. The homes in the blocks surrounding 7th Avenue, especially north of 125th Street, were occupied almost exclusively by Black residents. By contrast, 8th Avenue was a narrower street, with only one lane of traffic each way, an elevated railroad track running above the middle of the street, and fewer Black residents to its west, thanks to St. Nicholas Park and the presence of white neighborhoods. (There was a stop on the elevated train line at 8th Avenue and 125th that would have brought people — whereas the subway stop was a block east of 7th Avenue, at Lenox Avenue.)
  
  The islands in the center of 7th Avenue contributed to how many people could gather at the intersection with 125th Street, providing a place for some of those an Afro-American reporter observed “overflowing” the corners to go. One such group appeared in a widely reprinted image taken by a Daily News photographer. The concrete barriers on either side of the island are visible in the photograph, as is a tree, and a caption identified the location as 125th Street and 7th Avenue. A patrolman is moving toward the Black men and women in the island, indicating that police efforts to move people away from 125th Street extended to the island. A rock hit the white photographer, twenty-eight-year-old Everett Breuer, in the head after he took the image, so the officer may have been responding to objects being thrown at nearby businesses. One man close to the patrolman is bent over; the caption described him as falling down. He may also have been pushed down or hit by the patrolman; another man obstructs the view of what has happened between the patrolman and the man. Two women are among the four other people in the image; women continued to be the significant presence among those responding to rumors about what had happened in the Kress store that they had been from the moment Rivera had been grabbed.
  
  Groups of people were also on the corners of 125th Street on the eastern side of 7th Avenue by this time. Around 8:30 PM, some of those people began throwing rocks at windows of stores on the eastern side of 7th Avenue, the first reported attacks on businesses beyond the block containing the Kress store. Herbert’s Blue Diamond Jewelry store on the northeast corner of 7th Avenue seems to have been the initial target. As Carlton Moss watched, people threw rocks at the white-owned store’s windows.