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• 1 2022-06-16T19:02:59+00:00 Police in front of Kress' store 81 plain 2024-06-11T22:27:43+00:00 Although Inspector Di Martini told a MCCH hearing that he saw no “indications of further trouble” when he left 125th Street at 6:00 PM, he did station some officers at Kress’ store — "Sergeant Bauer, two foot policeman, one mounted policeman in the rear to prevent a riot” according to his testimony, or “a Sergeant and four patrolmen” on the 125th Street side and “a mounted patrolman and a foot patrolman” on the 124th Street side according to his report to the police commissioner immediately after the disorder. A patrolman stationed in front of the store told an MCCH hearing that there were 10–15 officers there around 6:15 PM; that total may have included officers on regular assignment on 125th Street. However many police were present, one was Patrolman Shannon, who like Bauer, had been inside the store earlier.
  
  Patrolman Moran, who arrived after Kress' store was closed, described being instructed to “keep the crowd moving in front of the store.” He insisted he did so by requesting them to “move on”; the lawyers who questioned him at a hearing of the MCCH alleged he used force, pushing people and using his nightstick. By around 6:15 PM, Moran said the front of the store was “pretty clear” while a crowd walked up and down on the opposite side of the street. Louise Thompson told the MCCH that there “little knots of people” on the street (although she wrote in New Masses that the crowd in front of the store numbered in the hundreds, that across the street in the thousands). Two men set up a stepladder in front of the store. A Black man named James Parton speaking briefly and then, as Daniel Miller tried to speak to the crowd, a window in the store was broken and Patrolman Shannon arrested Miller. Outnumbered as they were by the crowd, police made the arrest following the practice of focusing on the leaders of crowds. Other officers then cleared the crowds from in front of the store, moving them first across West 125th Street and then towards 7th Avenue. Thompson testified that “police got rough and would not let anyone stop on the street” and wrote “the cops who were becoming ugly in their attempts to break up the increasing throngs of people.” About fifteen minutes later Patrolman Irwin Young, assisted by several other officers, arrested Harry Gordon when he climbed a lamppost to speak to the crowd. They bundled him into a radio car and took him to the 28th Precinct on West 123rd Street. Again, police were trying to control the crowd by arresting men they perceived to be leaders, possibly identifying them as Communists with whom they regularly clashed. They had not arrested Parton, the Black man who introduced both Miller and Gordon. A few minutes later, Patrolman Shannon, Sgt. Bauer, and Patrolman Moran were involved in arresting two white men and a Black man after they refused to stop picketing in front of Kress’ store. Those men carried placards that identified them as members of an organization associated with the Communist Party, which again likely contributed to the decision to arrest them.
  
  After the arrests, police continued to move on people who stopped on the sidewalks around Kress’ store — and perhaps clear some who had gone into the street itself, as the New York Herald Tribune reported the street reopened after being blocked to automobiles and streetcars. By 7:00 PM, the crowds had been pushed to the avenues (some of those on 8th Avenue for a short time moved to attack the rear entrance of Kress’ store, where two police officers were hit by objects thrown by those trying to get into the store). Additional officers who arrived seem to have been key to that success. “15 patrolmen, six mounted police and uniformed men of five radio cars” were on 125th Street by that time according to the New York Evening Journal. Inspector Di Martini also returned, around 7:15 PM.
  
  The Daily News published a photograph of the disorder that showed police officers engaging with crowds. The caption for the image, which captures the largest crowd to appear in a photograph of the disorder, described only the actions of one of the two uniformed patrolmen visible: "The raincoated policeman swings in against the angry crowd as his comrade tries to hold the police line. One colored man is lifting his arm as if to restrain the cop.” The use of force captured here is at odds with Patrolman Moran's insistence that officers simply asked crowds to move. While uniformed patrolmen carried nightsticks as part of their standard equipment, detectives in plainclothes were issued them for riot duty, according to the New York Evening Journal. As well as hitting people with their batons, police officers used the butts of their revolvers and riot guns as clubs. The Times Union directly contradicted Moran's claim police did not use those weapons to move the crowds in front of the store: "Police night sticks swung and soon the mob was dispersed." Only the Daily News reported police fired their guns to move the crowd, describing with unlikely precision that five shots were fired in the air. Inspector Di Martini told a hearing of the MCCH that he heard no gunshots on 125th Street, so if those shots were fired, it was before he arrived around 7:15 PM. The caption makes no mention of where the photograph was taken; the group appears to be on the sidewalk, perhaps near Kress’ store or later near 7th or 8th Avenue. Unmentioned is the horse’s head visible on the right side of image, indicating the presence of a mounted patrolman.
  
  Mounted patrolmen, part of the police crowd control force, were reportedly deployed “to ride people off the sidewalk,” Louise Thompson testified. Lt. Battle told Langston Hughes that "an officer on a horse can be more effective than twenty patrolmen on foot," as the horses are "trained to brush a crowd back without stepping on anyone." When a reporter for the Afro-American arrived around 7:30 PM, “mounted police rode the sidewalk [in front of the store] keeping the crowd back.” Charles Romney likewise told a hearing of the MCCH that he saw "men on horseback were on the sidewalk to trample people." The New York Times and Daily News opted to describe the mounted police in more sensational terms as ‘charging’ the crowds. In the New Masses, Thompson presented a similar picture, juxtaposing the mounted officers with women protesting in terms echoing those used by other Communists: “Brigades of mounted police cantered down the street, breaking into a gallop where the crowds were thickest. Horses' hoofs shot sparks as they mounted on the glass-littered pavements. The crowds fighting doggedly, gave way. The women more stubborn even than the men, shouted to their companions, 'What kind of men are you-drag them down off those horses.' The women shook their fists at the police. 'Cossacks! Cossacks!' they shouted here in Harlem on 125th Street.” Years later, interviewed for her autobiography, Thompson identified many of the mounted patrolmen as Black officers and described the women as actually fighting with them. Another Afro-American journalist simply described the mounted police as "somewhat rough" during the early hours of the disorder. Whatever approach they took, it was mounted police that the Afro-American credited with keeping large groups away from Kress and on the avenues.
  
  While police cleared 125th Street of large groups and stopped any more assembling there, they did not — or could not — close it off. Instead, “they patrolled 124th and 125th Streets between Seventh and Eighth Avenues constantly to prevent more groups from assembling,” the New York Herald Tribune reported. Thompson testified that she walked up and down 125th Street after the arrests, but was only able to stop and speak with members of groups on the corner of 8th Avenue. Charles Romney told a hearing of the MCCH that when he arrived on 125th Street around 7:30 PM, walking from Lenox to 7th Avenue, he “noticed a crowd of police with sticks on their hands telling the crowd to go on.” Given the small numbers of police, those patrols did not protect the stores on the block from attack: Thompson testified windows were broken in almost every store between 7:00 PM and 8:00 PM (although she was away from the area from 7:30 PM to 8:00 PM); and Romney likewise testified that at 7:30 PM "there were a lot of windows smashed." The New York Herald Tribune reported the same timeline, that “by 8 p.m. one or more windows in virtually every 125th Street store front in the block had been smashed.” Around that time the situation began to change as additional officers arrived, reinforcements that made it possible for police to set up a perimeter around 125th Street and keep people away from the stores.
  
  As with other events at the beginning of the disorder, the most detailed and consistent evidence is the testimony of individuals present on 125th Street in hearings of the MCCH. Newspaper stories were generally vague and inconsistent about how many police were on the scene at what times and how they responded to the crowds, and tended to exaggerate the size of the crowds and the number of people on the street. It does seem credible that several hundred — and perhaps as many as 2,000–3,000 people — were in the area during this time, although not gathered in a single group. This was a larger number than gathered in any one place later in the disorder, contributing to the different way that police responded.
   
• 1 2020-12-04T16:50:32+00:00 Looting of food and drink (24) 62 plain 2024-02-11T04:22:44+00:00 Business stocking food and drink make up the largest group of those who had goods stolen (24 of 57). There are also photographs of a meat market, a grocery store, and a liquor store that have been looted whose location is unknown, which may be additional looted locations or images of already identified looting. Some of the looting of businesses categorized as selling miscellaneous consumer goods may also have involved taking food and drink. Both stationery stores and drug stores sometimes sold meals and drinks. So too apparently did 5 & 10c stores; among the items Arnold Ford allegedly took from Lash’s store was three packets of tea (but that business is not included as one looted for food and drink, but as one looted for miscellaneous goods, as those items made up the bulk of what was taken). The number of these types of business looted reflected in part that they comprised a large proportion of the stores in Black Harlem, with grocery stores the most frequently found business, and restaurants nearly as numerous. Food and drink being taken also fit the portrayal of the disorder as motivated by economic grievances.
  
  Newspaper accounts of the merchandise taken from businesses featured food and drink alongside clothing. "The large grocery stores were looted," the Afro-American's correspondent reported, "and persons denied relief and discriminated against by the relief bureau authorities seized food for their starving families." The Daily Worker offered a similar picture: “When the shop windows were broken and wares of all sorts displayed, the starving and penniless Negroes in the crowd seized the opportunity to carry off food, clothes, articles of all sorts.” In his "Hectic Harlem" column in the New York Amsterdam News, Roi Ottley highlighted food in his description of looting, writing “As Negroes snatched choice hams from butchers stores…lifted suits from tailor shops…and carried out bags of rice and other edables…the feeling, 'here’s our chance to have some of the things we should have,' was often evidenced.” So too did J. A. Rogers in his "Ruminations" column, also in the New York Amsterdam News, writing "From the ravenous manner in which I saw some of the rioters eating the looted food, it was clear that they hadn't had a decent meal in months." The New York Post, like Ottley, imputed motives while identifying food as a target, describing looting as “the glamorous opportunity of snatching food and coats and liquor and tobacco from behind the broken panes.” Food also featured in Louise Thompson’s memoir of what she saw during the disorder, as “People on the street were tossing up to [people...on the second floor of apartment buildings] groceries – flour – anything they could toss up.” She offered more detail writing in New Masses: "Many grocery stores windows were smashed; hungry Negroes scooped armloads of canned goods, loaves of bread, sacks of flour, vegetables, running to their homes with the food."
  
  Adam Clayton Powell described what he saw in the form of vignettes rather than a general picture of looting, in the first of three articles published by the New York Post; two of the three scenes involved food: “Witness a man, tall, strong and well built, carrying through the murkiness of the Harlem morning two pieces of the twelve-cents-a-pound salt pork that he had taken from a butcher's broken window. Witness two young lads one of them just finished high schools-furtively sneaking home as the noise of March 19 subsided, lugging two sacks of rice and sugar.” The Daily Worker also published a story by an “Eye Witness” that recounted police violence against a “young Negro boy” arrested with two cans of vegetables in his possession.
  
  Food also featured in stories about the police line-up the morning after the disorder. The New York Herald Tribune and New York Sun noted in general terms that many of those paraded before police and reporters admitted to stealing groceries. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle singled out one Black woman who “still had in her possession five milk bottles.” In addition, two men arrested for looting who appear in a New York Evening Journal photograph are carrying shopping bags labeled as coming from Rex Food Market at 348 Lenox Avenue.
  
  Legal records offer a similar mix of broad and individual pictures of the merchandise taken. Nine business owners selling food and drink are among those identified who sued the city for damages, with losses of $14,000 for George Chronis’ restaurant, $2,068 for Irving Stekin's grocery store, $759.58 for Radio City Meat Market, $745 for Frank Dethomas' candy store, $721 for Manny Zipp's grocery store, $630 for William Feinstein's liquor store, $537 for Alfonso Avitable's Savoy Food Market, $453.90 for Alfonso Principe's saloon, and $146.75 for Michael D’Agostino’s market. Those losses, other than for Chronis, are lower than those claimed by the owners of stores selling clothing and miscellaneous other merchandise. (The nature of eleven of twenty-seven businesses identified in suits against city are unknown, so could include additional stores selling food and drink.) Details of the losses of an additional eight businesses are identified in legal proceedings. The value of the merchandise in those cases is less than the losses of those who sued the city: $200 for Mario Pravia's candy store, $200 for J. P. Bulluroff's grocery store, $167.86 for Sol Weit and Isaac Popiel's grocery store, $100 for Jacob Solomon's grocery store, $50-75 for Sarah Refkin's delicatessen, $10-$12 for the San Antonio Market, and several bottles of liquor from the Mediavilla Liquor store. An indication of what items made up those totals is provided by the details Sol Weit gave to a probation officer: the $167.86 of goods taken from the store he co-owned consisted of “126 pounds of butter, 90 dozen eggs, eight cartons of cigarettes, a ham and other food products, as well as $14 from the cash register.”
  
  The individuals arrested for looting food and drink allegedly only had a small proportion of that merchandise in their possession, as the vignettes offered by Powell and the Daily Worker’s eyewitness suggest. The man charged with looting Weit’s store, Arthur Merritt, allegedly had only "two cans of beans, a can of milk and a can of tuna.” There are only records of what police claimed five of the other ten men arrested for looting businesses selling food and drink had in their possession. Lawrence Humphrey had a fifty-pound bag of rice, Amie Taylor eighteen packets of gum, Louis Cobb two bottles of whiskey, Theodore Hughes two pieces of pork, and Hezekiel Wright four lamps and two jars of food.
• 1 2020-12-04T16:51:58+00:00 Looting of clothing (19) 59 plain 2024-01-28T05:09:32+00:00 Businesses stocking clothing made up one third of those that can be identified as having goods stolen during the disorder (19 of 56). The items in these businesses did not all belong to their owners. Tailors, shoe repair stores, cleaners, and laundries also housed items being repaired belonging to customers, producing losses for Black residents as well as white business owners. The number of these types of business looted reflected in part that they comprised a large proportion of the stores in Black Harlem, with tailors the second most frequently found business after grocery stores, and laundries nearly as numerous. Clothing being taken also fitted the portrayal of the disorder as motivated by economic grievances.
  
  Newspaper accounts of the merchandise taken from businesses featured clothing alongside food and drink. "Men's wear" was a particular target of those who stole from store windows, according to the Afro-American, whose reporter otherwise emphasized destruction over theft, noting "generally the goods were dragged on the wet sidewalk and destroyed." In his "Hectic Harlem" column in the New York Amsterdam News, Roi Ottley included clothing in his description of looting, writing “As Negroes snatched choice hams from butchers stores…lifted suits from tailor shops…and carried out bags of rice and other edibles…the feeling, 'here’s our chance to have some of the things we should have,' was often evidenced.” So too did the Daily Worker: "When the shop windows were broken and wares of all sorts displayed, the starving and penniless Negroes in the crowd seized the opportunity to carry off food, clothes, articles of all sorts." The New York Post also imputed motives while identifying clothing as a target, describing looting as “the glamorous opportunity of snatching food and coats and liquor and tobacco from behind the broken panes.”
  
  Clothing also featured in Louise Thompson’s account of what she saw during the disorder, as “In the cleaning stores people were going in, looking over the suits and dresses, deciding which they wanted to take and walking out with them.” A very similar scene was described by Adam Clayton Powell in the New York Post, in the form of a vignette rather than a general picture of looting: "Witness a young man step through the window of Wohlmuth's Tailoring Establishment at 134th and Lenox Avenue dressed on that cold, rainy night in nothing but a blouse, pants and an excuse for shoes. He comes out a moment later wearing a velvet collar Chesterfield and a smile upon his face - first overcoat this winter." Both vignettes presented the looting of clothing in terms akin to shopping, as involving the selection of items rather than a more indiscriminate grabbing what they could from store windows. So too did the vignette Roi Ottley included in his column in the New York Amsterdam News a week after the disorder: "In a wrecked tailor shop a chap was seen meticulously fitting himself out with a new spring coat, discarding his own shabby garment...He complained bitterly because he wouldn't be able to return for alterations." A probation officer offered an explanation of Horace Fowler's actions that similarly cast them in terms of shopping, writing that he "fell in with mob - needed a suit." It was shoes rather than clothing that was selected in the Daily Worker's image: "One Negro in a shoe shop was seen trying on a pair of shoes, oblivious of the tumult around him!" Framing the looting in those terms presented clothing as requiring discrimination in its selection, needing to fit to be useful, to a greater extent than food and drink. To more indiscriminately take clothing would suggest the items were not for personal use, that taking them was not straightforwardly motivated by economic need. Ottley's second column on the disorder in the New York Amsterdam News featured such an anecdote:

  As we were dashing madly around a certain corner to duck the well-aimed and vicious swings of a policeman's nightstick (all Mose looked alike to the cops that night) we were amazed to see one of the Mose brothers loading a taxicab with suits from a looted store.
  The man worked methodically...He painstakingly piled the suits into a bundle and carried them from the gaping store front to the cab...Indifferent to observers, he made two trips, loading the taxi to capacity...For no boss had he worked so conscientiously.
  He was in progress of gathering his third bundle...when, suddenly and without warning, the taxicab back-fired and was off, speeding up the avenue...The noise attracted the attention of the looter...He ran to the street...and discovered, to his utter dismay and chagrin, that the cabbie had made off with the contraband.
  The infuriated rioter immediately ran up the street in pursuit of the speeding vehicle...screaming at the top of his lungs, "Stop, thief!"
  When last seen he was in mad quest of a cop. 

  Thompson and Powell's recollections of the looting of food and drink were framed differently, focused not on the selection of merchandise but on items being taken home and passed to second floor windows. Notwithstanding how newspapers framed the looting of clothing, suits and coats were a staple of Harlem's pawnshops, a portable form of wealth rather than simply a personal necessity.
  
  Stories about the police line-up the morning after the disorder also featured clothing. The New York Herald Tribune listed "clothing" among the items that many of those paraded before police and reporters admitted to stealing, while the New York Sun listed "shirts." However, none of the three men arrested for looting who appear in photographs is obviously carrying clothing.
  
  Legal records offer a similar mix of broad and individual pictures of the merchandise taken. Four business owners selling clothing are among those identified who sued the city for damages, with losses of $14,125 for Harry Piskin's laundry, $1,219.77 for Estelle Cohen's clothing store, $1,273.89 for William Gindin's shoe store, and $980.13 for Anna Rosenberg's notion store. Those damages are significantly higher than those suffered by all but two of the nine owners of stores selling food and drink who also sued the city. (The nature of eleven of twenty-seven businesses identified in suits against the city are unknown, so could include additional stores selling clothing.) Details of the losses of an additional six businesses are identified in legal proceedings. Two of those businesses suffered losses in the range of those involved in suits against the city: $10,000 for Louis Levy's dry goods store; and $2,000 for Morris Towbin's haberdashery. The other four businesses reported fewer items taken: $800 for Morris Sankin's tailor's store; $585.25 for Nicholas Peet's tailor's store; $66.75 for Ralph Sirico's shoe repair store; and "20 suiting lengths of woollens" for Max Greenwald's tailor shop. An indication of what items made up those totals is provided by the details offered by Ralph Sirico and Nicholas Peet. In both cases, the looted goods included items belonging to customers; Sirico's store was near West 119th Street, so likely had mostly white customers, while Peet's store was several blocks north near West 123rd Street, so likely had more Black customers. Siroco told a probation officer he had lost "18 or 20 hats which had been cleaned and blocked by him; about 25 pair of shoes which he had repaired; 5 or 6 pairs of unfinished shoes; one dozen leather soles; two and a half dozen rubber heels and a quantity of polish and shoe laces." Peet told another probation officer his losses consisted of "$452.25 of secondhand suits, coats and pants, and an addition $133 of suits, overcoats, women's coats and dresses belonging to customers."
  
  The ten individuals arrested for looting clothing allegedly only had a small proportion of that merchandise in their possession, as the vignettes offered by Powell, Thompson, and Ottley suggest. Leroy Gillard had two suits, Horace Fowler had a man's suit and a woman's coat, Jean Jacquelin had two women's coats and two pairs of trousers, Daughty Shavos had "wearing apparel" worth $30, Clifford Mitchell had "wearing apparel" worth $25 (sums that suggest two or three suits or coats), Lamter Jackson had a bag of laundry, Edward Larry had eight men's shirts, Charles Saunders and John Vivien each had one pair of shoes, and Julian Rogers had three odd shoes. Also included in this group is James Hayes, as he allegedly looted the Danbury Hat store, although he took not clothing but a baseball bat.
• 1 2022-10-29T16:00:08+00:00 Preparation for the public hearing on March 30 43 plain 2024-02-13T14:15:30+00:00 The MCCH’s investigations in preparation for the public hearing on the events of the disorder are described in the “Report of the Secretary, March 26-March 29, 1935, inclusive," in correspondence in the MCCH files in the records of Mayor La Guardia and in documents in the papers of Arthur Garfield Hays.
  
  According to the report, two of the four investigators initially assigned to the MCCH started their work investigating the events of the disorder, focusing on the “immediate causes of the disturbances on Tuesday, March 19” and interviewing possible witnesses for the first hearing. That division of resources fit how the MCCH presented its plans in the statement to the press after its first meeting; the investigation of the immediate situation as one part and “a thorough, far-reaching inquiry into the entire problem” as the other. Hays, who took over leadership of the subcommittee investigating the events of the disorder from Toney soon after the first meeting, asked that the investigators “examine such persons as claim to be eyewitnesses to the events of March 19 in order that time at the hearing might not be taken up by people, in actuality, who knew nothing of the events of that night.”
  
  The result of that work was a “list of eyewitnesses” “expected to be at the hearings on March 30” that Carter gave to Hays on March 29. That list is likely the nine typewritten names on a section torn from a page in the Hays Papers. One of those on the list had been among the forty-nine individuals and organizations that Carter reported wrote to the MCCH in its first four days of existence (The New York Times made an unattributed claim that by March 29 more than 80 wanted to testify). Other witnesses were on a list likely provided to Hays by the Communist Party when he met with James Ford. It is not clear how the investigators identified the remaining people.
  
  The first name in the list of nine that were likely the eyewitnesses was Louise Thompson, the sixth person to testify on March 30. Her name was also first on another list of twelve names in the Hays Papers headed “For Mr. Hays,” most of whom were identified as members of the Communist Party or groups affiliated with it. Thompson, however, was not identified as a member of an organization but by the information she had: “testimony to the issuing of the leaflet.” As establishing that the leaflet issued by the Young Liberators had not triggered the disorder was a major concern of the Communist Party, the list highlighting that part of Thompson’s evidence offers further confirmation that it likely came from Ford. Four other women appeared on the list of nine that were likely the eyewitnesses, three listed after Thompson, “Mrs Jackson 350 St Nicholas Ave, Mrs Ida Hengain, Miss Willie Mae Durant, Mrs. Effie Diton” and “Mrs Ida Jackson (Tentative)” at the bottom of the page. None of those women testified on March 30. Those women were likely present in the Kress store at some point on March 19 after Rivera was grabbed by staff, part of a crowd widely reported to be almost entirely made up of women. Only one of those women could be identified. A photograph of Effie Diton, a forty-five-year-old Black woman, appeared in the New York Age in 1935, identifying her as the president of the New York City branch of the National Association of Negro Musicians. Her husband, concert pianist and composer Carl Rossini Diton, had helped found that organization and served as its president in the 1920s. The New York Age had reported their marriage twenty years earlier, when they both worked at Paine College in Georgia. In 1930 they lived at 188 St. Nicholas Avenue, on the corner of 120th Street, close enough to 125th Street for Effie Diton to have shopped at the Kress store. “Mrs Jackson, Mrs Ida Hengain, Mrs. Effie Diton” are also on a handwritten list of “Witnesses who didn’t testify last week” in the Hays Papers. (The hearing on March 30 took the whole day, so Hays likely ran out of time to call those witnesses, although there is no evidence that they were present.) Hays called for those three women by name in the subcommittee’s second public hearing on April 6. None of them were present at that time, and they never testified in a public hearing.
  
  The sixth name on the likely list of eyewitnesses was “Mr Lloyd Hobbs and family.” Sixteen-year-old Lloyd Hobbs had been shot by a police officer during the disorder. The New York Urban League provided the details of the shooting in a letter sent to the MCCH on March 26, which enclosed a statement by Hobbs’ father and asked for "cooperation” and “assistance.” (The statement appears to have been put in a different file in the MCCH records.) The letter is one of several sources that misidentified the boy’s father as also being named Lloyd; his first name was Lawyer. In listing Lloyd Hobbs as a witness, Carter may have meant Lawyer Hobbs or could have assumed that Lloyd would recover from his injury and be able to testify himself. As it happened, neither Lloyd nor Lawyer Hobbs testified on March 30. Instead, it was Lloyd’s younger brother Russell, who had been with him during the disorder and was thus an eyewitness unlike his father, who testified on March 30. Lloyd Hobbs died that evening. Hays would make the investigation of the boy’s shooting a focus of the subcommittee’s next hearing on April 6 and return to it in later hearings on April 20 and May 14.
  
  “Mr Campbell,” the next name on the likely list of eyewitnesses, very likely Fred Campbell, whose statement is in the MCCH files. Although undated, it referred to him coming to the “Office of the Bi-Racial Commission,” a name used only until March 29, when the members voted to adopt the name MCCH. Campbell’s statement recorded he had been sent to the MCCH offices by Delany “as he had some information that he thought might be of value to us regarding the riot on Tuesday night March 19th.” “Mr Campbell" also appeared in the list of five "Witnesses who didn’t testify last week” in the Hays Papers. Hays, however, did not call for him in the second public hearing and he never testified. As his evidence related to events away from the Kress store on which the hearings focused, Hays may have decided his testimony was not relevant.
  
  The final name on the list is “Mr Irving Kirshaw.” That name is also the final name on the list of “Witnesses who didn’t testify last week” in the Hays Papers. On that list the name is followed by “garage owner” in parenthesis. The garage referred to is likely the one behind the Kress store at which a hearse parked, prompting a crowd to attack the rear of the store. Hays did not call for Kirshaw at the second hearing, and he never testified. Instead, Benjamin Todman, the driver of the hearse, testified at the public hearing on May 4.
  
  In addition to the nine typewritten names, a tenth name was handwritten at the top of the likely list of eyewitnesses, “Cole,” with a check mark, both crossed out. In the Hays Papers is a letter L. F. Cole had written directly to Villard on March 23 saying “I was in Kress’ store when the boy was maltreated by three white clerks” and asking that Villard “invite me to one of your meetings of the Bi-Racial Commission.” Cole testified on March 30, the first eyewitness to give evidence, and again on May 14..
  
  The names of two other men who testified on March 30 appeared with “X” marks next to them on the list "For Mr Hays" likely supplied by the Communist Party, James Taylor, the leader of the Young Liberators and James Ford, the head of the Communist Party in Harlem. Hays told the MCCH at their March 29 meeting that “he had held a conference with Mr. Ford of the Communist Party, and that he and several representatives of his organization would be present at the hearing on Saturday.” A story published in the Daily Worker on March 30 that named several “militant leaders who will demand to be heard” at the public hearing that day fitted the names on the list: Ford, A. W. Berry, Williana Burroughts and “representatives from the Harlem Unemployed Councils, the Harlem International Labor Defense, and the New York District I. L. D.. Of the others named on that list, only one, Frank Wells, likely had information on the events of the disorder. His name was second after Thompson on the list and was likewise annotated with a check mark, with “police brutality” after it. Wells was arrested for allegedly breaking windows on West 125th Street during the disorder. According to a summary in a list of "Cases of Police Brutality, Discrimination and Mistreatment of Negroes in Harlem" later supplied to the MCCH, he was "attacked by police and brutally beaten" while walking down 125th Street," again at the police station and a third time in the police line-up on the morning of March 20. The officer who arrested Wells, Patrolman Eppler, would testify at the second public hearing although not about that arrest, but Wells himself never did. ILD lawyer Edward Kuntz tried to ask Eppler about the claim that police had beaten Wells "on the streets," but had been prevented by the District Attorney's instruction that police officers testifying in the hearings could not reveal any evidence they would give in a pending case. Handwritten notes related to one other name on the list, William Burroughs, suggest that Hays or an investigator interviewed him as a possible eyewitness. The notes indicated that they found he was not: “has only hearsay evidence of police brutality – was not in Harlem on Mar. 19.” (Three of the remaining names on the list have “Ernst” handwritten next to them, likely indicating that their evidence was relevant to housing, the subject of the subcommittee that Ernst led. Two others are identified as part of the International Labor Defense, which had written to the MCCH saying they had information on conditions in Harlem, rather than the events of the disorder. The final name, A. Berry, of the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, has an “X” written next to it, as Taylor and Ford did, but he was not among those who testified in hearings chaired by Hays.
  
  Carter’s Report indicated that the MCCH had been assured that police witnesses would be present at the hearing, likely either by Inspector Di Martini or by Lt. Samuel Battle, the city’s senior Black police officer. The assurance was reported directly after the information that an assignment of police to the hearing had been arranged through Di Martino and an “interview was also held with Police Lieutenant Jesse [sic] Battle.” The police witnesses mentioned are “Inspector of the Sixth Division [Di Martini] and officers in charge of the forces handling the crowds on Tuesday March 19 together with the crime Prevention officer who was called to the Kress store at the time of the youth’s apprehension.” On March 30, Di Martini, Donahue (the Crime Prevention Officer), Captain Rothengast (who took charge of police in front of the Kress store at 8:30 PM) and Battle testified. Additional police officers testified in the second hearing. Hays secured an additional law enforcement witness. He told the MCCH on March 29 that he had contacted the District Attorney’s office and they had agreed to send a representative to the March 30 hearing. ADA Alexander Kaminsky was the third witness to testify.
  
  The final witness who testified was Lino Rivera. There is no mention of arrangements for him to appear at the public hearing in either the MCCH records or the Hays Papers. He was photographed at the hearing with Donahue, who likely brought him and ensured his attendance.
  
  There is evidence that the MCCH had sought additional witnesses. A telegram sent to Carter on March 29 by Dorothy McConnell reported that she “Could not get names of eyewitnesses.” That the telegram went on to suggest Carter “Call on Mrs Imes and Louise Thompson at Hearing” suggests that McConnell had been searching for women who had been in the Kress store on March 19 in addition to those on the eyewitness list. Louise Thompson would later say she tried to get some of the women she had met in the store to testify "but they were scared." The name and address of one woman who had been in the store was known, but she would not testify at a public hearing. According to an undated note from Inspector Di Martini to Hays, Margaret Mitchell, described as “the woman who was arrested in the store at the time the boy was in the store,” “refused” the request of a detective to appear. Hays asked about Mitchell at the first hearing; Lt. Battle testfied that when he called at her home and requested that she be at the public hearing, “she refused to come.” When Hays again asked Battle about her testimony three weeks later, he reiterated that "she absolutely refuses to come to this hearing." As the MCCH did not have subpoena power, they could not compel her attendance. Perhaps because they lacked that power, the MCCH appeared to have relied on police to bring at least some of the witnesses to its public hearings. The list of eyewitnesses in the Hays Papers is headed “Police Department.”
  
  Police had also sought to bring at least one staff member from the Kress store to the hearing on March 30. A handwritten memo from Di Martini dated that day informed the MCCH of Steve Urban, “the man supposed to be treated by an ambulance has worked all night and left the store, present whereabout unknown.” A police officer had evidently called at the store for Urban as the memo attributed that information to “W. F. Woodman ass’t manager Kress Dept Store 256 W 125th St.” Urban never did testify before the MCCH. The other man involved in grabbing Rivera, Charles Hurley, did, on April 6. The MCCH also sought to have the store manager, Jackson Smith, testify; in the hearing on March 30, Di Martini told the MCCH, “I have spoken to Mr Smith, manager, who said that he was busy and he could not get away.”
  
  Finally, Hays requested at the March 29 meeting of the MCCH that “an investigator be sent to Harlem Hospital to secure information relative to victims of the disturbance on March 19th.” It was unlikely that he expected those investigation to produce witnesses for the hearing on March 30. In the second public hearing, on April 6, staff from the hospital gave evidence about the injuries suffered by Lloyd Hobbs and Andrew Lyons, and by two other victims of alleged police brutality.
• 1 2021-11-21T20:18:50+00:00 Laundry window broken 38 plain 2024-06-03T14:21:22+00:00 A laundry at 367 Lenox Avenue had its window broken during the disorder. The Chinese owner had tried to protect his store by emulating Black business owners in putting a sign in his window identifying it as not a white-owned business. Where the signs that appeared on Black-owned stores read "Colored Store," “Colored,” “Black,” and “This Store Owned by Colored,” the Chinese laundryman's sign read "Me Colored Too." It failed to deter one or more people in the crowds on the street from smashing the window. None of those arrested for breaking windows during the disorder were charged with targeting this store.
  
  Together with the damage done to Hispanic-owned businesses on and around West 116th Street, the windows broken in the laundry highlight both that Harlem's business sector was composed of more than just the Black and white owners mentioned in newspaper stories, and that the crowd's targets during the disorder were not limited to businesses owned by whites. While several Hispanic-owned businesses were among those reported damaged or looted during the disorder, this laundry is the only Chinese-owned business mentioned in the sources. However, the information on the Hispanic-owned businesses was found only in La Prensa; no Chinese-language publication that reported on the disorder has been found. Chinese-owned laundries and restaurants were an established and pervasive presence in Harlem. The MCCH business survey taken in the second half of 1935 recorded 209 Chinese-owned businesses (3.5%, 209 of 5971), including 176 laundries and twenty-three restaurants dispersed throughout the area from 110th to 155th Street, from east of Amsterdam Avenue to the west of Madison Avenue.
  
  
  
  None of the four Black-owned businesses recorded as being on this block in the MCCH business survey — a beauty parlor next door and a tailor four buildings north, and a candy store and grocery store across the avenue to the south at 360 Lenox Avenue — are reported to have put signs in their windows, so where the laundry owner got his inspiration from is uncertain. Several white-owned businesses around the laundry reported being looted. Irving Stekin, who owned a grocery store one buildings north of the laundry complained that the crowds in the area were too large for police on the scene to control, according to a report in the New York World-Telegram. His store, at 371 Lenox Avenue, and another he owned at 363 Lenox Avenue, and Michael D'Agostino's business at 361 Lenox Avenue were all looted, as were stores at 372 and 374 Lenox Avenue across the street. The South Harlem Rotisserie at 365 Lenox Avenue, like the laundry, only had windows broken. Attacks on businesses in this area likely began around 11:30 PM.
  
  The laundry and its sign were reported by the Associated Press and in the New York Herald Tribune and Daily News as a vignette separate from the stories they published about the events of the disorder. In this form, it was presented as a joke at the expense of the Chinese laundryman. The New York Herald Tribune's story read:

  The proprietor of a Chinese laundry at 367 Lenox Avenue resorted to a futile trick yesterday to protect his shop from Harlem rioters. His Negro neighbors hung signs bearing the word "Colored" in their store windows on reports that the rioters would not molest places occupied by Negroes. The laundryman hung out a large placard inscribed "Me colored too." Someone promptly smashed his window.

  An additional layer of racist language was added to the story in the Daily News, with the proprietor becoming "the oriental boss ironer," the "futile" trick becoming "wily," and the laundryman hanging out the sign becoming "the clever (or so he thought) laundryman." Louise Thompson also mentioned the sign in her memoir as a joke, "a humorous side" to the disorder in the first transcription and "an ironically humorous incident" in the edited version. Similarly, Langston Hughes mentioned the sign as a "touch of humor" in his biography of Lt. Battle; based on the interview notes, Battle himself did not mention the sign.
  
  Two other sources mention the laundry and its sign without treating it as a joke, seemingly having missed the context of the information as they also departed from the account in other details and omitted the address of the business. “A Chinese laundryman pasted a placard inscribed 'Me colored, too,' and two Negroes immediately shattered his window,” the New York World-Telegram reported in a story that shifted the events to the night after the disorder. A story in the Black-owned Indianapolis Recorder folded the laundry into its discussion of signs being put up to identify Black-owned businesses, and reported that the sign in the laundry has the same result as those in Black-owned businesses: "His place was not touched." As this is the only source presenting that version of the events, the laundry is treated here as having broken windows.
  
  The laundry appears in the MCCH business survey taken from June to December 1935, and is visible later, between 1939 and 1941, when the Tax Department photograph of the building was taken.
   
• 1 2020-12-03T17:17:51+00:00 Looting with staff or owners present (12) 19 plain 2024-01-28T05:18:37+00:00 When the disorder began in early evening, many stores in Harlem were still open for business, as a number remained open until late evening. As a result, some of the men and women working in those stores were present when they were attacked and looted (most around West 125th Street, where the disorder began, but others further away). Some of those in stores initially tried to move merchandise from display windows to prevent it from being taken. Both Jack Sherloff and Max Greenwald had to give up those efforts in the face of objects being thrown at the windows. More often stones thrown at the store windows kept those inside away from the storefront, driving them to hide in the rear rooms or to flee the building entirely before anyone actually entered the store. Mrs. Salefas fled flying glass from shattered windows to hide in a rear storeroom. Harry Piskin remained while stones were thrown through the windows of his laundry, but left when someone shot a bullet into the store. A white staff member in Chronis’ restaurant hid in the washroom, while two Black workers left the store. Four staff from the Greenfield auto equipment store fled the building into the rear yard after a group of men came through a broken window. Mario Pravia and his wife, Irving Stekin, and clerks in Estelle Cohen’s store and Young’s hat store watched from the store as stones smashed the glass and goods were taken from window displays. Louise Thompson also recounted looking in a grocery store on West 124th Street and 7th Avenue that "was dark, all of the windows were broken and all I could see was a man peeking out from the back." Such accounts highlight that the objects thrown at stores cleared the way for looting not just by providing a means of entering the store but by ensuring there was no one inside to protect the merchandise.
  
  In only two instances were owners and staff apparently directly involved in merchandise being taken, circumstances that amounted to robbery rather than burglary. Morris Towbin alleged that Edward Larry and seven others came into store and threatened him and a clerk with knives as they attacked and looted the store, then forced them into the store basement. A second man, Louis Tonick, one of the ten white men arrested during the disorder, was also charged with robbery, but there is no information regarding the location or details of those events.
  
  Irving Stekin waited two hours before a police car containing two officers arrived in response to his call for help, a detail reported in the New York Sun, New York Post, and New York World-Telegram. When they arrived, he told the city comptroller that "The police didn't do anything. They couldn't do anything. The mob was too big for them," according to a report in the World-Telegram. Others working in stores received no help at all from police. The white worker in Chronis’ restaurant phoned police before hiding; no one responded to his call. Estelle Cohen phoned both the police station and police headquarters after the staff member inside her store called her; she wrote to Mayor La Guardia that their responses was “that all the men were out and that all windows were being smashed." Harry Piskin left his laundry to go in search of police; neither the officer he found on post at a nearby corner nor an officer at the police stationhouse on West 123rd Street would come to the store. (Benjamin Zelvin waited for police to arrive before leaving his store, but those officers clearly did not remain to guard the business as he seemed to have expected as it was looted later in the disorder.)
  
  While almost all the white businessowners in Harlem lived outside the neighborhood, some did return to their closed businesses when they learned of the disorder. Herman Young was one of the few white storeowners who lived in Harlem, above his store; he came downstairs when he heard glass smashing and interrupted a group of men looting his hardware store. His arrival likely prevented that group from taking much merchandise, but Young was hit by a rock and taken to Harlem Hospital (likely leaving his damaged store exposed to looting by others, as his total loss of $500 is far more than the four men could have taken). After a call from a clerk in the store, Estelle Cohen sent someone, likely her sons, to board up the damaged windows of her store. That barrier did not prevent subsequent looting. George Chronis also likely received a call from his staff, but police prevented him from getting to his lunchroom until 1 AM, to find it completely destroyed and a white staff member still hiding. Anthony Avitable also arrived too late to protect his food market, seeing crowds attacking the store as he drove across the 138th Street bridge from the Bronx just after midnight, so went directly to the police station rather than to his business. It still took forty-five minutes for police to arrive at the business. Herbert Canter, who owned a pharmacy at 419 Lenox Avenue, arrived there at 11 PM, earlier than Chronis and Avitable and may have been more successful in protecting his business. He testified in the Municipal Court trial of Anna Rosenberg's suit for damages about what he saw on Lenox Avenue after he arrived, but there is no mention of damage to his store.
  
  Black storeowners had more success than their white counterparts in protecting their stores from attack and looting. Several posted signs in their stores reading “Colored,” “Black,” and “This Store Owned by Colored,” according to the Afro-American, that caused crowds to pass them by. A Chinese storeowner who tried to emulate that tactic apparently did not have the same success, as the New York Herald Tribune reported that after he posted a sign reading “Me colored too,” his store windows were broken. Some of the Black storeowners who wrote signs may have been open for business when the disorder reached them, or could have returned to closed businesses, which they could do more readily than white storeowners as most lived in Harlem (Fred Campbell did not).