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• 1 2021-11-01T19:56:41+00:00 Windows broken in Black-owned business (8) 65 plain 2023-04-16T02:44:13+00:00 At least eight Black-owned businesses had windows broken during the disorder, 11% (8 of 72) of the businesses reported damaged. That proportion is far below the share of Harlem's businesses that had black owners, 28% (1690 of 5791) in the area from 110th Street to 155th Street, east of Amsterdam Avenue to west of Madison Avenue identified by the MCCH business survey taken after the disorder. The limited scale of that damage fits with stories in the Home News, New York Post, New York Evening Journal and Afro-American , and Inspector Di Martini's "Report on Disorder" for the Police Commissioner, that the windows of Black-owned businesses were generally not broken. Lieutenant Samuel Battle, New York City's most senior Black police officer, asked in the MCCH's first public hearing on March 30, 1935 if the crowds made any distinction between white-owned and Black-owned stores, insisted that Black-owned businesses did have windows broken, but then qualified the extent of such attacks: "In many cases, if they knew it was colored, they passed the shop up." James Hughes, a twenty-four-year-old Black shoe repairer, who was part of the crowd at West 125th and 8th Avenue around 10 PM, also told a Probation officer that those around him were breaking windows "where no colored were employed."
  
  "Fully 30 of the store fronts shattered in Harlem were in Negro establishments," white journalist Edward Flynn claimed in a story in the New York Evening Journal focused on Communist activities in Harlem. In arguing that "the riot [was] conducted on the best Communist lines," the reporter pointed to how "the Negro merchant's property was destroyed as well as that of the white." Three Black-owned businesses close together on 7th Avenue that had windows broken were identified in the story. Battle's Pharmacy on the northwest corner of 7th Avenue and West 128th Street was mentioned together with the Williams drug store, across 7th Avenue on the southeast corner of 128th Street. "Both of these stores were damaged by the rioters although virtually everyone in Harlem knows who operates them." The third store was the Burmand Realty office at 2164 7th Avenue, two buildings north of the pharmacy. Not mentioned in the New York Evening Journal story was the Cozy Shoppe restaurant at 2154 7th Avenue across the street from Williams drug store which had a sign on its window identifying it as Black-owned, and had no windows broken. If the number of Black-owned stores with broken windows did total thirty, that would amount to approximately 10% of those damaged, a little over one third of the proportion of Harlem's businesses that were Black-owned. That disproportionate share of the damage does not suggest indiscriminate attacks on store windows.
  
  A claim of more extensive damage to Black-owned businesses, that "forty windows were broken in the exclusively Negro section [of 8th Avenue] north of 130th Street,” did appear in a story published in the New York Herald Tribune. However, that story misrepresented those blocks of 8th Avenue; the MCCH business survey showed they were still predominantly populated by white-owned businesses. The character of the street did change, but from 92.5% (74 of 80) white-owned businesses from 125th to 130th Streets, to 71% (34 of 48) white-owned businesses from 130th to 135th Streets and 74% (65 of 88) white-owned businesses from 135th to 140th Streets. The one arrest in this area for allegedly breaking windows, of Henry Stewart, involved a white-owned business, a meat market at 2422 8th Avenue, between 130th and 131st Streets. If there were another thirty-nine windows broken in this area almost all were likely also in white-owned businesses. However, that number seems exaggerated, as Inspector Di Martini's "Report on Disorder" estimated only eighty-five broken windows in total north of 130th Street, in the 32nd Precinct that also covered 7th, Lenox and 5th Avenues.
  
  The MCCH Report did also seek to emphasize that damage was done to Black-owned businesses rather than how many were spared damage. It only implicitly recognized that those on the street chose their targets, casting that behavior as present only early in the disorder, giving way to more indiscriminate violence, cast as more important to understanding the events: "While, of course, many motives were responsible for the actions of these crowds, it seems that as they grew more numerous and more active, the personality or racial Identity of the owners of the stores faded out and the property itself became the object of their fury. Stores owned by Negroes were not always spared if they happened to be in the path of those roving crowds, bent upon the destruction and the confiscation of property." Unmentioned in the Report is the countervailing development in which, after the initial attacks on store windows, Black-owned businesses identified themselves with signs. The New York Evening Journal, New York Post and Afro-American reversed the chronology presented by the MCCH Report, locating the damage to Black-owned businesses early in the disorder, until signs appeared identifying "Colored Stores," after which they were no longer attacked. The period of indiscriminate violence posited by the Report was also when looting became widespread, according to newspaper narratives of the disorder and reported events. However, there were no reports of Black-owned stores being looted, and New York Evening Journal and New York Post noted that merchandise had not been taken from them, which they attributed to the signs placed on those businesses.
  
  There is no information on when the eight stores were damaged, so no evidence if they fit the picture provided in the MCCH Report. Five of the Black-owned businesses that were reported damaged do not clearly contradict claims that those on the street directed violence at specific targets (there is no information related to Battle's Pharmacy, Burmand Realty or Gonzales Jeweler). The Manhattan Renting Agency storefront was the office of Everard M. Donald, a twenty-seven-year-old Black real estate broker and owner of a chain of barbers, but also where Hary Pomrinse, a sixty-six-year-old Jewish real estate broker did business. A similar ambiguity surrounded the ownership of the grocery store that had windows broken, a Peace Market operated by followers of Father Divine, a Black religious leader whose theology and claim to be God in a body drew criticism from Harlem's black clergy and leaders. The Peace Food Market name and sign would have identified the store as not being a white-owned business, but Divine's Peace Mission had white members in its Harlem ranks, historian Judith Weisenfeld has shown. That interracialism that may have made the store a target; so too might the controversy Divine provoked within Harlem's Black community.
  
  The nature of the damage done to the other three Black-owned businesses reported to have had windows broken offers another manifestation of how confusion over the ownership of stores, rather than disregard for it, produced attacks on stores. After the front windows of the Williams Drug Store facing 7th Avenue were broken, the owner wrote “Colored Store, Nix Jack” on the side windows on West 127th Street. Those windows were not damaged. Two other businesses that a La Prensa reporter recorded as having damaged windows, a billiard parlor and the Castle Inn saloon on Lenox Avenue south of 125th Street, also put up signs, according to another story in La Prensa. That reporter did not appear to understand the intent of the signs, seeing them as an effort to establish a racial divide in the neighborhood, to segregate Black and white residents, and did not relate them to the damage suffered. However, as the reporters could see the signs as well as broken windows, those stores too had been able to prevent extensive damage by identifying themselves as having Black owners. Other businesses also put up signs, and at least three suffered no damage. The success of that strategy suggests that broken windows in Black-owned businesses resulted from ignorance of who owned them, produced perhaps by residents joining crowds that moved beyond the areas where they lived. Edward Flynn, a white journalist writing for the New York Evening Journal, insisted that "virtually everyone in Harlem knows who operates [Battles Pharmacy and Williams drug store]," which nonetheless had windows broken. While he was certainly right about those who lived nearby or passed by that section of 7th Avenue, it is less clear how widely that knowledge would have been shared by those who lived and spent their time in other areas of the neighborhood and found themselves part of crowds moving up the avenue. Although the MCCH business survey found only six other black-owned drug stores in Harlem, compared to 116 white-owned stores, neither business advertised extensively nor were pharmacies and drug stores unusual enough to make them widely known to the changing population of the neighborhood who largely frequented drug store chains.
• 1 2020-09-30T19:34:09+00:00 James Hughes arrested 58 plain 2023-12-06T21:29:22+00:00 Detective Raymond Gill arrested James Hughes just before 10:00 PM, not far from Kress' store on West 125th Street. The detective claimed he had seen the twenty-four-year-old Black man appear from behind the cars parked on the street, look around, and throw the rock that hit his partner, Detective Henry Roge. Gill frisked the man and found five stones in his pockets; Hughes insisted that the stones were to defend himself and he had not thrown the rock that struck Roge.
  
  Instead, Hughes claimed he had been caught up in the crowd on 8th Avenue as he tried to return to his furnished room on 7th Avenue near 115th Street from 126th Street and 8th Avenue. He’d begun his evening with a trip to a barber’s shop on 7th Avenue before returning home for supper and then heading out again at 9:30pm to go drinking, according to details in the probation officer's preliminary investigation that were not included in the report to the court. When Hughes set out on 8th Avenue for home, and saw the broken glass and stones on the streets and heard people saying “Let’s break windows,” he picked up some rocks for protection. Hughes knew 125th Street well. He worked in Koch’s Department store, a block east of Kress’, as a shoe repairer, a trade he had learned in Atlanta. He told the probation officer who interviewed him that he followed the crowd to 125th Street to prevent them breaking the windows in the store in which he worked; in the preliminary report, the probation officer noted that Hughes said that those around him were breaking windows "where no colored were employed." While several newspapers reported that businesses that employed Black staff were not spared from attack, Koch's department store did not have windows broken.
  
  The prosecution of Hughes took a somewhat erratic path through the legal system. Hughes appears in lists of the arrested and charged with assault in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the Home News and New York Evening Journal. After he appeared in the Magistrates Court early on March 20, the New York Post and Home News reported he was back in the court two days later, joining Isaac Daniels and Charles Saunders in being discharged as they had already been indicted by the grand jury and then rearrested and held for trial. (The 28th Precinct police blotter recorded only that Hughes had been discharged, not that he had been rearrested.) Hughes subsequently pled guilty to misdemeanor assault on March 28, as was reported in the New York Evening Journal, New York Times, and New York American.
  
  When Hughes appeared for sentencing, the judge allowed him to withdraw the plea as a result of letter from a minister named Haynes received by the mayor’s office and forwarded to the judge. A week later, Hughes was tried and quickly convicted of misdemeanor assault. The prosecutor’s notes on the trial suggest that Gill’s testimony stressed that he was certain of his identification of Hughes as the man who threw the rock. A report in the New York Times mentioned other witnesses, that "several" detectives identified Hughes. Against that evidence Hughes could offer only his denial and a series of character witnesses. In response, the prosecutor argued that Hughes “saw plenty of trouble – went right into it.”
  
  Like all those convicted in the Court of General Sessions, Hughes was then investigated by the court’s Probation Department, which compiled a three-page report detailing his family, education, leisure, religious practice, and residential and employment histories. Based on his steady employment in both Atlanta and New York City, the quality of his living arrangements, and his lack of a criminal record, the probation officer J. T. Sloane determined Hughes' participation in the disorder to be “apparently attributable to the effects of mob psychology upon an ordinarily well-behaved individual of suggestible disposition.” At the sentencing hearing, the judge, perhaps influenced by the Probation Department report, expressed belief that Hughes had thrown the rock at the store window, not Roge, so sentenced him to a term of only three months in the workhouse.
  
  Born in Macon, Georgia, Hughes had only been in the city for fourteen months when arrested. He was 5 feet, 6 inches tall, and weighed 145 pounds when arrested. He told the probation officer J. T. Sloane that he had been raised by a single mother, one of two children she had with a married man, and completed third grade. After Hughes' mother died when he was twelve years old, he went to live with a cousin, a shoemaker, to whom he became apprenticed. The probation officer wrote to another cousin of Hughes in Macon, Fannie Holt, who confirmed those details, and added others that the officer did not include in the report: Both Hughes' father and grandfather were also shoemakers. Hughes moved to Atlanta after his sixteenth birthday, where he found work in the employ of Mr. Maslia, at 399 Moreland Street, making $22 a week by 1933. Sometime that year, he told his employer that he wanted to go north. By February 1934, Hughes was in New York City, working for French Shoe Repairing Company on 118th Street and Lenox Avenue and living nearby in a furnished room at 101 West 117th Street. After six months, Hughes found a better paying job at Koch's Department Store, increasing his wages from $12 a week to $18 a week. A few months later, he moved residences, from 117th Street to another furnished room at 1890 Seventh Avenue, paying $4 a week. His landlady described him as quiet and unobtrusive.
  
  
  
  Hughes admitted to a conviction for gambling in Macon, when he was aged fifteen years, which resulted in a fine. He continued to gamble occasionally in Harlem, otherwise spending his time going to the movies. The report from the Court Psychiatric Clinic concluded Hughes was "an average type of individual," who did not show "any abnormal, aggressive or antisocial traits as far as can be ascertained by the interview." In regards to the disorder, the psychiatrist recorded that Hughes gave "a rather rational explanation of his offense."
• 1 2021-12-22T01:27:20+00:00 Koch Department store windows not broken 44 plain 2023-11-06T18:14:39+00:00 Koch's Department store at 132 West 125th Street "was unmolested" during the disorder, according to Morris Weinstein, the manager, interviewed after the disorder by a reporter for the New York Age. He called that "action of the mob" "one of the finest tributes that could be paid Koch's." For Weinstein, the reason his store had no windows broken or stock taken was that "since we reopened last May we have consistently striven to give not only jobs but positions as well to colored men and women." A "white worker, eye-witness for several hours of the scene along 125th Street and Seventh Avenue" also referred to Koch's store as "not molested," when interviewed in the Daily Worker, similarly explaining that situation as a result of the owners having been "forced to employ Negroes as a result of recent struggles." One Black employee, James Hughes, did tell his probation officer that he was on his way to Koch's store to protect it from the crowds breaking windows when he was arrested for allegedly throwing a stone that hit Detective Henry Roge in front of Kress' store. That claim may have reflected an effort to mitigate his sentence more than a widely shared recognition that the store warranted special treatment. The absence of damage to the store, if not the motive for it, was also indirectly confirmed by the La Prensa reporter who walked along this block of 125th Street recording store with damaged windows, and did not include Koch's Department store in their list. There were significantly fewer damaged stores reported in 125th Street east of 7th Avenue than in the block to the west, but several of those businesses were near Koch's department store: the Busch Kredit jewelry store two buildings east was the only store on the La Prensa reporter's list on that side of the department store; to the west of the store, the Hobbs dress shop at 150 West 125th Street also had windows broken. (The large white-owned Ludwig Baumann furniture store between the dress shop and Koch's store ws not listed as being damaged.)
  
  Henry Koch opened the store in 1891, the first major business in what had until then been a residential area. In 1930, Henry's son William T. Koch had sold the department store, to A. Schaap and Sons, clothing jobbers, the New York Times reported. While that story quoted Koch as obliquely saying that the closing of the store was "but another token of the changed neighborhood," the New York Age more directly stated that as Black residents moved to the area, he showed them an "antagonistic attitude" and the store "became more and more exclusive, catering to the wealthier white residents," losing "so much trade they were forced out of business." The new owners operated it as "the 125th Street Store," which advertisements in the New York Amsterdam News indicate operated at least in part as a discount store, selling the stock of bankrupt businesses.
  
  Morris Weinstein leased the store in 1934, operating it under the Koch name. Shortly before the renovated store opened on June 14, Weinstein announced "a third of his clerical staff will be colored," the New York Age reported. That decision came just as a new wave of picketing and boycotts targeting white-owned businesses on West 125th Street that did not employ Black staff began. Sufi Abdul Hamid and members of his Negro Industrial and Clerical Alliance had begun picketing the Woolworth's 5c & 10c store a block west at 210 West 125th Street in mid-May, 1934, making their way on to the pages of the New York Amsterdam News when prominent clergyman Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. was photographed after he joined them two weeks later. Hamid's radicalism prompted an alliance of social and political organizations, fraternal lodges and churches to come together in the Citizens League for Fair Play (CLFP), first targeting Blumstein's department store with a boycott and picket campaign. Against that backdrop, the New York Age, a staunch proponent of the CLFP, reported Weinstein's decision to hire Black staff as a result of "admitting the justice of the Negro's demand that employment be given qualified Negroes in Harlem stores where the majority of the trade is colored." West Indian writer and social commentator Claude McKay presented Weinstein as motivated more by self-interest, that "the employment of colored clerks might effect not only better relations between white employers and colored consumers, but also bugger business." McKay added the rumor, "never admitted by either side," that Weinstein struck "a secret agreement that the Negro Industrial and Clerical Alliance should boost [Koch's Department store] among the people of Harlem." The New York Age claimed the role of selecting staff for the organizations it supported. One New York Age story, refuting attacks on the tactics of the CLFP by William H. Davies, identified Miller of the African Patriotic League as "the man chosen to select the Negro personell [sic] of Koch's." That organization took a leading role in organizing the pickets for the CLFP campaign. A week later, Vere Johns, a columnist for the New York Age, claimed Rev. Johnson, the leader of the CLFP, and the African Vanguard, helped choose the staff.
  
  After Blumstein agreed to hire Black staff in August 1934, Weinstein more prominently promoted the Black staff of Koch's store. Where the first advertisements for Weinstein's store somewhat generically announced that it was a "New Store; New Deal, New People; New Policy, The Store With a Heart," an August advertisement more directly addressed how different its staffing was to its neighbors on 125th Street, with a banner that read "We Lead For Fair Play! Let Others Follow! There is No Distinction of Race, Creed or Color at H. C. F. Koch & Co." That same month Weinstein told the New York Amsterdam News that the store had fifty-seven Black sales girls, stock men, porters, and elevator men in a staff of 125 employees, at least four or five times the proportion of Black employees as any other business on 125th Street that spoke to the reporter. Among the more prominent activities Weinstein undertook to further expand his appeal to Black shoppers was a "Three Day Scottsboro Rally" in November 1934, with a percentage of the sales receipts donated to the defense of the Scottsboro Boys.
  
  In 1937 Koch's store was sold to Samuel Kanter, who reopened it "redecorated, renovated and modernized" in April 1937 as Kanter's Department Store, a promotional story in New York Amsterdam News reported. He expected "to create more and better jobs for the people in the community," Kanter told the newspaper, going on to say "at the present time, I am in favor of employing at least twenty-five percent Negro help, perhaps more." The store does not appear to have promoted its Black staff to the same extent Weinstein had, as when a new wave of protests began in 1938, a spokesman contacted the New York Amsterdam News "seeking to clarify any mis-apprehension as to the number of Negro employees in their store." The list provided to the newspaper identified nearly thirty Black staff, "most of whom were employed in the same capacities as others." It is Kanter's Department store that was photographed by the Tax Department between 1939 and 1941.
• 1 2020-02-25T01:54:44+00:00 Detective Henry Roge assaulted 35 plain 2023-12-15T04:03:33+00:00 Just before 10 PM, police on 125th Street succeeded in dispersing the crowd in front of Kress’ store, moving them across the street and west on to 8th Avenue. Detective Henry Roge of the West 123rd Street Precinct and his partner, Raymond Gill, were among the police standing in front of the store, watching the crowd, backlit by the lighted store. A rock thrown from the crowd then struck Roge in the head, causing deep cuts to his eye and face. Gill claimed he saw a man appear from behind the cars parked on the street, look around, and throw the rock that hit Roge. At that moment there were no other objects being thrown at stores or police, so Gill was certain that it was that rock that hit his partner, and he was able to keep his eyes on the man who threw it. After chasing him through the crowd, he trapped him among the parked cars. Gill frisked the man, twenty-four-year-old James Hughes, and found five stones in his pockets; Hughes insisted the stones were to defend himself, and he had not thrown the rock that struck Roge.
  
  
  
  As Hughes was being arrested, Roge's injuries were bleeding profusely. A call for medical assistance brought Dr. Fabian of the Joint Disease Hospital to attend to the detective. New York Evening Journal photographers captured two images of a uniformed officer helping a bleeding Roge from the scene (the only images of an injured police officer published). One photograph taken at the scene shows Roge and the officer from the side. The officer is in the foreground, supporting Roge, who is leaning forward, his left hand over his eyes and forehead. A store display window is in the background, with what appears to be broken glass in front of it. In a photograph that may have been taken somewhere inside, Roge is in the foreground of the image, with a handkerchief covering his forehead and eyes. Next to him, a white uniformed patrolman has one arm behind Roge's back, guiding him, and is holding the lapel of Roge's jacket with his other hand, in which he has his baton. Over the patrolman's left shoulder is a Black man. The Daily Mirror also published an image of Roge and the uniformed officer, which may have been taken on the street, There are two Black men in the image, one behind the officer and one to right of the detective holding a handkerchief he appears to be offering the officer. This image was not published until April 3, when the newspaper miscaptioned it as showing a white man rather than a police officer, "One of the casualties in the Riot. The man was struck over the eyes with a stick. The policeman holds him until an ambulance arrives. But the victim was only one of many white persons injured in the mad Harlem riot."
  
  According to the record of medical attendances, Roge remained on duty after being attended by the doctor, but other sources reported that his injury required two stitches, which involved Roge being taken to Harlem Hospital. The Probation Department report recorded that Roge was on sick leave for ten days after his injury, making it more likely his injury required him to leave the scene for treatment.
  
  Hughes was tried and convicted of misdemeanor assault. The prosecutor’s notes on the trial suggest that Gill’s testimony stressed that he was certain of his identification of Hughes as the man who threw the rock, against which Hughes offered his denial and a series of character witnesses. In response, the prosecutor argued that Hughes “saw plenty of trouble – went right into it.” At the sentencing hearing, the judge expressed belief that Hughes had thrown the rock at the store window, not Roge, so sentenced him to a term of only three months in the Workhouse.
  
  As with other assaults, the press coverage of this case was fragmented. Roge appeared on the lists of those injured published by white newspapers the New York American (on both March 20 & 21), New York Evening Journal, Home News, Daily News, New York Herald Tribune, and New York Post, and in stories in the Daily Mirror. Hughes appeared in lists of those arrested published in the Black newspapers the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and the white New York Evening Journal. The two were linked in only three stories, in the New York Times, Home News, and Daily Worker. Even when Hughes was tried, producing additional coverage, only two of the five stories mentioned Roge. But that legal process did generate case files in both the DA’s office and the Probation Department, which provided details that are available for only a handful of the events of the disorder.