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

[Photograph] "The Spark That Set Off the Rioting," New York American, March 21, 1935

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Picketing in front of Kress' store Around 6.45 PM, three men arrived at the sidewalk of West 125th Street in front of Kress’ store carrying placards and began walking back and forth, picketing the store. A photograph published in the Daily News of the front of the store taken on March 21 shows the area the men would have walked, a wide sidewalk which would have allowed other people to still move past the store or gather in front of it.

About thirty minutes earlier a window in the store had been broken as Daniel Miller had tried to speak from a ladder on the same stretch of sidewalk, after which he been arrested by Patrolman Timothy Shannon. The three men who walked the picket line were nineteen-year-old Sam Jameson and nineteen-year-old Murray Samuels, both unemployed white men, and Claudio Viabolo, a thirty-nine-year-old Black man. "We were picketing in front of the store. I heard that a child had been killed inside. I thought it ought to be called to the attention of the public, about the child being killed," an unnamed Black man, presumably Viabolo, explained when questioned the next day during a police line-up of those arrested reported in the New York Sun. However the signs the men carried referred to a beating not a killing, reading “Kress Brutally Beats and Seriously Injures Negro Child and Negro Women. Negro and White Don’t Buy Here” and “Kress Brutally Beats Negro Child."

Jackson Smith, the manager of Kress’s store, summoned to the front door earlier when James Parton had set up the stepladder that Miller climbed to speak, told a public hearing of the MCCH that he was still there when the three men began to picket. Louise Thompson testified in an earlier public hearing that she encountered the pickets on her return to the front of the store after being pushed east by police after the arrest of Miller, and witnessing the arrest of Harry Gordon about 300 feet from the store. Patrolman Timothy Moran, who had been stationed across West 125th Street from the store when the window was broken and Miller arrested, told a public hearing that “three other men with placards draped over their shoulders” arrived a few minutes after those events, and began walking up and down in front of the store.

The police officers stationed at the store had been instructed to “keep the crowd moving in from of the store, Moran testified. They were likely standing in a similar location to those in the above photograph of Kress' store on March 21. An officer “told or asked [the men] to stop marching in front of Kress’” and when they did not leave “after about five minutes," police arrested them for unlawful assembly. Sgt Bauer testified he was involved in the arrest, as again was Patrolman Shannon, who had arrested Miller and was recorded as the arresting officer. “The police took the placards and pushed the people carrying them into the vestibule,” Jackson Smith told a public hearing. By 7:00 PM, crowds around Kress’s store had been pushed to 8th and 7th avenues.

A second version of the placard that read “Kress Brutally Beats Negro Child,” photographed for the Daily News in an image available at Getty Images, had “Young Liberators” added at the bottom. That organization, which had ties to the Communist party, had led a successful boycott campaign in 1934 to force the Empire Cafeteria to employ Black workers. The appeal not to shop at Kress’s store on one sign evoked that campaign and the more extensive boycott campaign undertaken by a coalition of Black organizations that had made pickets in front of stores on West 125th Street a familiar sight in 1934. More broadly, the Young Liberators were “a group of young people who are struggling for Negro rights,” Joe Taylor, the organization's president, told a public hearing of the MCCH, with about 140 black and white members. A Black man came to their nearby office, at 262 Lenox Ave near 126th Street, about 5 PM, and said “Did you know that a Negro boy had been beaten nearly to death in the Kress store?” Taylor did not, and went to investigate, arriving after Kress’ store was closed. He then went to the police station on West 123rd Street before returning to West 124th Street. Later Taylor went to an address he heard was the home of Lino Rivera, but could find out nothing. Back at the office, other members of the Young Liberators produced a leaflet that was distributed on West 125th starting around 7.30 PM. Headed “Child Brutally Beaten. Woman Attacked By Boss and Cops = Child near Death,” the final line urged people to “Join the Picket Line.” That reference to a picket line provided further evidence that the men arrested for picketing came from the Young Liberators. The first public hearing of the MCCH devoted time to establishing who had produced that leaflet and when it was distributed. Since the leaflets did not appear on the streets before 7.30 PM, the MCCH Final Report concluded that the actions of the Young Liberators “were not responsible for the disorders and attacks on property which were already in full swing.”

The place of the picketing in the sequence of events outside Kress’ was described most clearly in testimony given in the public hearings of the MCCH. However, those details did not become well known as neither the MCCH Subcommittee nor final reports mentioned the picketing. Those narratives included only the two men arrested for trying to speak in front of the store, Miller and Gordon, who were not named. Newspaper stories truncated and confused the events established in the public hearings, as police told reporters that Jameson, Samuels and Viabolo had arrived and acted together with Miller and Gordon to cause the disorder.

The most common version of that narrative had the group picketing the store before Daniel Miller attempted to speak. The New York Times, New York Sun, New York Evening Journal, New York American and Daily Worker all published stories with that chronology, with different descriptions of who was involved. The New York Times reported "Two white and two Negro pickets paraded back and forth in front of the store, bearing placards of the Young Liberators League with the inscription: “Kress Brutality Beats Negro Child” and “Kress Brutality Beats and Seriously Injures Negro Child.” The New York Sun used similar phrasing: “a group of agitators, two white and two Negroes, arrived in front of the establishment and took up picket posts carrying placards of the Young Liberators League, which shouted in type that "Kress brutally beats and seriously injures Negro child."” The Hearst newspapers, the New York Evening Journal and New York American, identified Samuels, Jameson and Harry Gordon as picketing, and omitted Diabolo or any mention of Black men among those carrying placards. The Daily Worker more vaguely referred to an unspecified number of Young Liberators forming a picket line. The New York Age substituted Gordon for Miller but otherwise followed the same narrative in which “several Communist leaders gathered and began a picket movement before the store,” before Gordon was arrested for “addressing a group” and Samuels and Viabolo arrested for “acting in concert with Gordon.” The arrests of Jameson, and Miller, were reported separately without any details of the circumstances.

The consistent reporting of what was written on the placards likely resulted from police displaying them to reporters as well as photographers, with images published in the New York Evening Journal (and taken by the Daily News). The Daily Mirror did describe a placard that read, "Avenge the death of this little colored boy!" Given that the photographed placards, and the leaflet distributed by the Young Liberators soon after the picket, refer to a beaten boy, that placard is likely an invention that fitted the sensationalized tone of the tabloid's reporting. However, stories in the Home News and New York Age about the men’s appearance in the Harlem Magistrates Court the next day, had them distributing placards not picketing, placards which read "Kress store is resorting to lynching.” Jackson Smith, the manager of Kress’ store, told a public hearing of the MCCH that he saw a placard that read “Kess brutally beats Negro child.” Patrolman Moran’s testimony was less certain: “As I can recall, they referred to a child being beaten in Kress in earlier part of the afternoon.”

Several of the narratives that mistakenly had the three Young Liberators picketing before Miller spoke also included inaccurate accounts of the circumstances of the men’s arrests. The New York American and the New York Evening Journal had Jameson and Samuels, together with Gordon, going to Miller’s aid when Patrolman Shannon arrested him. Viabolo was missing from the New York Evening Journal story and appeared in the New York American’s narrative as a bystander who also obstructed Miller's arrest. The New York Times simply reported that the arrest of Jameson, Samuels and Viabolo came “later,” after Miller spoke. The Daily Worker did not report specific arrests, but rather that “police broke up the picket line, arresting the leaders.”

Mentions of the picketing were vaguer and more fragmentary in the Afro-American, New York Herald Tribune, Daily News and New York Post. The Afro-American reporter who arrived in front of Kress store around 7:14 PM noted that before he “got on the spot, the screaming of the girl and the flying rumors had brought forth four youngsters, three white, with sandwich signs telling of '‘Boy Brutally Beaten.”” “[F]rom somewhere pickets had appeared," the New York Herald Tribune reported, "bearing placards reading: "Kress Brutality Beats Negro Child.” Neither story mentioned the arrest of those picketing, although the New York Herald Tribune story later noted that “Police Seized members of the mob who appeared to be its leaders as they drove it back.” Neither of the other two stories described picketing. The Daily News came closest, reporting “the Young Liberators marched through various streets with red and black smeared placards on which in tremendous letters was the legend: "CHILD BRUTALLY BEATEN: WOMAN ATTACKED BY BOSS AND COPS: CHILD NEAR DEATH." The New York Post, while naming the three men among those arrested, described them only as speaking to the crowd.

Unlike those initial stories, newspaper stories about proceedings in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20 consistently grouped Viabolo with the four white men arrested in front of Kress’ store. Police presented the five men as a group first in a line-up before they were taken to court, the New York Herald Tribune reported, and then at the courthouse, describing them the men as the "ringleaders" of the disorder. When Jameson, Samuels and Diabolo were arraigned with Miller in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, the charge recorded in the docket book for all of them was riot. Assistant District Attorney Carey requested each man be held for a hearing on March 23, on the maximum bail of $2500. When the four men returned to court, the charges against them were dismissed as they had already been indicted as a result of District Attorney Dodge's investigation. While the Magistrates Court docket book recorded the deposition of each of the men's cases as "Dism[issed], def[endant] indicted," Dodge announced the day after their indictment that he was instead sending them for trial on misdemeanor charges in the Court of Special Sessions not felony charges in the Court of General Sessions. The men's trial did not take place until June 20. After hearing evidence that that a crowd had collected in front of Kress' prior to the men arriving, the men's ILD lawyers moved to have the charges dismissed, the New York Amsterdam News and Daily Worker reported. The judges granted that motion, and freed the four men.

Claudio Viabolo’s name was spelled in a variety of ways in these sources. Viabolo is used here as it was recorded in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book, and in stories about his appearances in the Harlem Magistrates Court published in the Afro-American, Daily News, New York Post, New York Herald Tribune, Home News, New York Sun, New York Times; New York American and New York Age. The name was spelled Diabolo in the list of those arrested in the disorder published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and stories in New York World-Telegram and New York Evening Journal. In the edition the New York Age rushed to print on March 23, the name was Bilo. In the Daily Worker on March 21, the name was Viano. Sam Jameson's name was also misspelled, but was not corrected over time as Viabolo's name was. Jameson is used here as it was recorded in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book, and in stories published in New York Evening Journal, New York Times, New York Post, New York Herald Tribune and stores about court appearances published in the Home News and New York Sun. The name was spelled Jamieson in the Daily News, Atlanta World, Norfolk Journal and Guide, and New York American.

Historians’ descriptions of the protests outside Kress’ store follow the narrative provided by police, treating all those arrested as part of a single group. That framing implicitly introduces the idea that the disorder was orchestrated by those men, while offering no details of how the crowds of women and men around them acted to weigh against that evidence. Weight is added to that implication by the failure to fully identify the men involved in the protests. While Cheryl Greenberg and Lorrin Thomas do not identify the men, Mark Naison, Thomas Kessner, Marilynn Johnson and Nicole Watson describe them as members of the Young Liberators. None of those historians mention that four of the five, and both the speakers arrested, were white men. Naison did describe the Young Liberators as an interracial group; so too did Nicole Watson, however she did not identify the men in front of the store as members of the Young Liberators. Neglecting their race makes those men appear more representative of the crowd than they were, particularly in Greenberg and Watson’s narratives, which do not identify they as Young Liberators. Naison, Kessner, Greenberg, Thomas, Johnson and Watson all follow the chronology that has the picketing begin before the speakers were arrested. Grouping the men places an organized Communist protest at the center of the outbreak of disorder, and makes the window being broken and the men’s arrest a response to the feeling they built in the crowd. Recognizing that the protests occurred in a less coordinated way highlights that police responded immediately to any sign of protest, not just to a window being broken. They may also have acted so quickly because they recognized the men as Communists; the men’s language and appeals would have given them away. Communist protest in Harlem, and across the city, drew violent responses from police throughout the early 1930s. Recognition of the fragmented nature of the protests and the identity of those involved directs attention away from those events to the crowds of Black men and women around them. Crowd members gathered in groups, talked among themselves, sought answers from police about what had happened to the boy, and responded to police efforts to clear the street. Rather than organized or orchestrated by the Young Liberators, those behaviors appear more spontaneous, in line with the interpretation offered in the MCCH’s final report.
6:30 PM to 7:00 PM Around 6:30 PM, Harry Gordon took James Parton’s place on a lamppost and started to speak to the people police had moved away from the Kress store. He had said only “Friends” when Patrolman Irwin Young dragged him to the ground, and other police officers hit him with their nightsticks. Young claimed Gordon pulled his nightstick from his grasp and hit him with it. Gordon denied assaulting Young, saying that being pulled down from behind and beaten repeatedly left him unable to do anything. Police officers arrested Gordon and dragged him about thirty feet away into a radio car before any of the crowd on the street could interfere. As the car transported Gordon the short distance to the West 123rd Street police station, he claimed that the two officers in the car poked and kicked him, beatings that continued in the station and during the forty-eight hours he spent in police custody.

After watching Gordon’s arrest, Louise Thompson and others who police had moved toward 7th Avenue returned to the Kress store. There they found three men picketing the store. Their placards identified them as members of the Young Liberators, who had made their way along the south side of 125th Street to the store while police had been moving people on the north side of the street away from store. The organization’s leader, Joe Taylor, was still inside the West 123rd Street police station seeking information on what had happened in the Kress store. The placards, read “Kress Brutally Beats and Seriously Injures Negro Child and Negro Women. Negro and White Don’t Buy Here” and “Kress Brutally Beats Negro Child,” reflecting the reports earlier brought to the Young Liberators’ office. Two of those carrying placards were unemployed white men, named Sam Jameson and Murray Samuels, both nineteen years of age; the third was an older Black man, thirty-nine-year-old Claudio Viabolo.

While pickets in front of white businesses on 125th Street had become a familiar sight in the previous year, those pickets had mostly been Black women, joined by a small number of Black men. The mix of white and Black protesters was typical of the Communist Party pickets seen elsewhere in Harlem as part of labor disputes. Picketers had rarely been arrested before a court injunction handed down on October 31, 1934, usually only if they became involved in struggles with shoppers or staff. Since the injunction restricting picketing to labor disputes, simply walking up and down in front of a business in any other circumstance could result in being arrested.

Police officers in front of the Kress store told the three men to move on, as they had others who had gathered in front of the store. When the men continued to picket a group of police arrested them, including Patrolman Shannon, who had arrested Daniel Miller about thirty minutes earlier, and Sgt. Bauer, who had been inside the store before it closed. Jackson Smith, watching the arrests from inside the store, saw police take the placards and pull the men into the store vestibule, out of sight of most of those on the street. The three men were held there until they could be transported to the West 123rd Street police station.

Meanwhile, police stepped up their efforts to move people on 125th Street away from the Kress store, pushing them toward 8th Avenue. The number of people on the street had also grown by this time, fed by those beginning to make their way to shows in the nearby theaters. Reinforcements had also increased police numbers beyond those stationed at the store by Inspector Di Martini. After he learned that police had made arrests, he had telephoned for additional men. About fifteen patrolmen, six mounted police and uniformed men from five radio cars were on 125th Street by this time. Louise Thompson, who “walked up and down 125th Street” after seeing the picket at the Kress store, saw the “riot squads were out” and mounted police “ride the people off the sidewalk.” Those officers were able to move the groups of people back to the corner of 8th Avenue by 7:00 PM. A glimpse of how they did that is provided by a photograph published in the Daily News. A patrolman in the center of the image is pushing a man back, and swinging his nightstick towards him. To his left is another patrolman walking toward the crowd of men and women. Behind him, next to the photographer is a horse, indicating the presence of a mounted patrolman. Men and women in front of the police are turning and walking in the direction the officers are moving them, while those to the right of the police remain standing, either because they are not obstructing the sidewalk or because police have yet to turn their attention to them.