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

Prof. G. M. James, "The Probable Causes of the Recent Harlem Riot," New York Age, April 13, 1935, 6.

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White men arrested for looting (2) Two white men are among those arrested for looting, the others being forty-seven Black men, three Black women, and eight men of unknown race. An additional six white men are among those arrested, including Leo Smith, for allegedly breaking store windows.

One of the men resided in Black Harlem, which was very rare by 1935. Jean Jacquelin’s address was recorded as 222 West 128th Street, in the area north of West 125th Street and east of 8th Avenue where Black residents made up well over 90% of the population. He was arrested at West 128th Street and 8th Avenue, just west of his home, at the very end of the disorder, early the next morning, likely based on the clothing in his possession. That clothing, later identified as coming from tailor’s east of his home, provided enough evidence for a charge of larceny, a misdemeanor as it had a value less than $100. But the judges in the Court of Special Sessions dismissed the charges. That outcome, and Jacquelin’s arrest well after crowds had left the streets, mean there is no clear evidence he actually participated in the disorder.

Louis Tonick, the second white man arrested for looting, lived outside Harlem, in the Bronx. There is no information on why he was in the neighborhood. Only eighteen years of age, Tonick was unlikely to have been working. He could have been simply passing through to or from his home or have been drawn to the neighborhood by reports of the disorder. There is also no information on where he was arrested. Although listed among those charged with burglary in the press, the charge against Tonick in police and legal records was robbery. However, the Magistrate, after holding Tonick in custody for two weeks, dismissed those charges. That outcome suggests the prosecutor lacked evidence he had participated in robbery or looting. With no information on when Tonick was arrested, he may have been in the crowds on the streets during the disorder. At least four of the other six white men arrested during the disorder also had the charges against them dismissed.

Accounts of the events of the disorder similarly lack clear evidence of the participation of white men. While the MCCH report made no mention of white men other than the protesters in front of Kress’ store, both white and Black newspapers did include whites among their general descriptions of the crowds on the streets of Harlem. However, the statements in the Black press appear to be based on the arrest of the four men in front of Kress’ store at the very beginning of the disorder rather than any wider presence or participation. Under the subtitle “Some Rioters White,” the Afro-American asserted that “there were no strict opposing camps racially. Some of the most vicious rioters were white men who egged the crowd on and who handed out the leaflets and carried picket signs.” Prof. G M James, in a column in the New York Age offering an assessment of the disorder, reported that “I am informed by eye witnesses that (1) the riot was precipitated by both white and colored assailants alike.” Other Black newspapers that included white people in the crowds were less explicit about their role. The Norfolk Journal and Guide reported “About 4000 colored men and women and their white sympathizers took the law into their own hands when they heard that 'a small Negro boy' had been brutally or fatally beaten by a manger of a five and ten cent store for stealing either candy or a penknife valued at five cents.” The Atlanta World was even less explicit: “Whites joined their Negro fellow citizens as the story of the fatal beating of the youth by the store clerks gained more magnitude.”

White men are more explicitly presented as part of violent crowds in several white newspapers. While identifying some of those men as the alleged Communists on which Black newspapers focused, the New York Evening Journal reported an additional group: “There were many whites among the rioters also, police said. Some are known to be Communist agitators, others were pictured as hoodlums, joining the mob only for the loot that they could accumulate throughout the mad night.” “Hoodlums” also appeared in the Daily News, which less explicitly identified them as white men: “Looting of stores was the objective of hundreds of hoodlums who swarmed into the district from Manhattan and the Bronx after news of the riot spread.” The newspaper’s readers would have been aware that the Black population was concentrated in Harlem, making those who came from outside the neighborhood members of other racial groups. (The editor of the New York Amsterdam News did also use “hoodlum” to describe crowd members, but not in his paper. He told a Daily News reporter that “irresponsible persons and hoodlums took advantage of the situation,” a statement that does not appear to refer to white men.) A similar emphasis on white looters appears in the New York Times, but its story labeled those men “agitators,” collapsing together the two groups identified by the New York Evening Journal: “Roving bands of Negroes, with here and there a sprinkling of white agitators, stoned windows, set fire to several stores and began looting.” The same New York Times story also used "hoodlum" without reference to race, as the Daily News had: “While the police seemed certain that they had enough men in the district to put down any new uprising of the hoodlum element that looted stores and broke more than 200 shop windows during the riot...” A wider range of commentators would point to hoodlums to explain the racial disorder in Harlem in 1943, using the term to distance participants in the disorder from the broader Black population.

Only the New York Daily News, New York Herald Tribune, and Brooklyn Daily Eagle included white men among those committing assaults during the disorder. (The New York Evening Journal, which gave the violence the most attention, presented it as motivated by racial hatred, a framing that did not allow for participation by white men.) In accounts of assault, the Daily News used the labels “bands” and “guerillas” for the crowds involved: “armed bands of colored and white guerillas, swinging crowbars and clubs, roamed through barricaded Harlem from 110th to 145th St., assaulting every person of opposite color to cross their paths, setting fires and smashing shop windows after a night of fighting.” This contradictory image both groups Black and white men together and presents the assaults as interracial, on “every person of opposite color to cross their paths,” as does the almost identical description in the New York Herald Tribune. Those stories make no specific mention of groups of white men, or of attacks by white men on Black residents, nor do any other sources; the phrasing seems to come from slipping into describing the clashes that characterized racial disorder in preceding decades rather than what happened in Harlem. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle resolved that contradiction by essentially having white participants remove themselves from groups that assaulted white men and women: “Bands of men and women, in some case joined by whites and in other cases assaulting any white they met, roared up and down the byways of Harlem, smashing more than 200 windows, looting stores, and fleeing from or fighting police.” These awkwardly phrased descriptions suggest that claims of white participation in assaults came from how reporters sensationalized the disorder, not the information they had, that it was in groups breaking windows and looting stores, and picketing in front of Kress’ store, that white men were seen and that those who police arrested were allegedly among.

Just how many white men were in the crowds on Harlem’s streets is uncertain. The small proportion of those arrested who were white men does not necessarily reflect how many were present; white police officers were likely more inclined to arrest Black men and women in this context, and it seems like few of the Black officers stationed in Harlem made arrests during the disorder. Most newspaper stories do not offer an assessment of the size of the white presence; those that do range from a "sprinkling” in the New York Times to “many” in the New York Evening Journal to “hundreds” (in crowds of several thousand) in the Daily News. James Hubert of the Urban League was alone in claiming that white men made up a majority of the crowds, based on a report from a member of his staff: "A man from my own office who went out into the streets said that fully 75 per cent of the persons causing the trouble were whites," he told a reporter from the New York Herald Tribune. "They got up on soap boxes and agitated and incited the Negroes. I am told that the persons who threw bricks into windows included many whites who rode about in taxicabs.” The details Hubert offered in support of his generalization do not actually put white men in the crowds on the street. As well as following the Black press in focusing on the men who picketed Kress’ store, he locates white participants in vehicles, not crowds. Cars regularly appear as targets of violence in descriptions of the disorder; they are not otherwise reported as sources of violence.

White men in the crowds in Harlem’s streets were not necessarily drawn to the neighborhood by news of the disorder, as the Daily News claimed. Many white-owned businesses on West 125th Street refused, discouraged or discriminated against Black customers, highlighting that the district catered to whites from surrounding neighborhoods, including those in the blocks immediately south and east whose populations changed from predominantly white in 1930 census to predominantly Black in the 1940 census. Other white men came to Black Harlem for nightlife and vice.
Crowds incited by white men (4) The arrests of white men for inciting crowds all occurred in the vicinity of Kress’ store on West 125th Street and involved efforts to speak or picketing. White men protesting in those ways on Harlem’s streets were a familiar sight by 1935. In the 1930s, the Communist Party had an office at 415 Lenox Avenue; affiliated organizations had offices nearby: the International Labor Defense four blocks south at 326 Lenox Avenue, the Young Liberators at 262 Lenox Avenue, and the League of Struggle for Negro Rights and Negro Liberator newspaper at 2162 7th Avenue until just before the disorder, when they moved to 308 West 141st Street. Most of those who worked in those offices and protested in Harlem were white men and women. Although the four men arrested did not identify themselves as Communists, the organizations of which they did admit membership — the Nurses and Hospital League in the case of Daniel Miller, the New York Student League in the case of Harry Gordon, and the Young Liberators in the cases of Sam Jameson and Murray Samuels — were all connected to the Party. The men also fit the profile of those the Party assigned to work in Harlem described to historian Mark Naison: they were “in their teens or early twenties and came either from the two colleges located in the Harlem Section — Columbia and City — or form the immigrant neighborhoods surrounding Black Harlem.” Miller was twenty-four years of age and lived on Morningside Avenue on the boundary of Harlem. Gordon was twenty years of age and lived in the Bronx. Jameson and Samuels were both nineteen years of age, with Jameson living in Washington Heights north of Harlem and Samuels in Brooklyn. The number of Black residents who joined the Party and related organizations did grow slowly, but numbered only a few thousand by the time of the disorder. By 1935, larger numbers did participate in demonstrations led by Communist Party members, particularly those in support of the defense of the Scottsboro boys.

Speaking from stepladders, as Miller and Gordon tried to do, and picketing, as Jameson and Samuels did, were favored tactics of Communist activity in Harlem. Party members joined the streetcorner speakers who had been a staple of Harlem life throughout the 1920s, taking to corners “from 137th Street & 7th Avenue, north to 144th Street and Lenox Avenue, south to 110th Street and 5th Avenue," according to historian Mark Naison. When they first appeared, the mostly white Communist Party speakers frequently competed with Black nationalist speakers for locations and attention, especially on the corners of Lenox Avenue from 133rd to 135th Streets, and challenged their calls for race-based action with appeals for unity between Black and white workers. By September, 1934, Roi Ottley bemoaned the predominance of Communist street speakers in his column in the New York Amsterdam News. Communist Party pickets were initially less prominent in Harlem. When Sufi Hamid and his followers began picketing white-owned businesses seeking jobs for Black workers, first on 135th Street and later on 125th Street, the Party remained on the margins, at odds with the race-based appeals, even as the campaign expanded in 1934. When that movement splintered, however, the Party moved to mount a boycott campaign on their terms against the Empire Cafeteria on Lenox Avenue just north of 125th Street, seeking gains for white workers as well as jobs for Black workers. A week and a half of picketing and protest meetings led by Young Liberators, and store windows twice being broken, brought an agreement to hire black staff.

The reaction of police to the white men protesting on 125th Street was typical of the violent repression of Communist Party demonstrations in New York City from when they began in 1928, a repression which was explored by historian Marilynn Johnson. As early as September 1929, the New York Amsterdam News published a letter describing a Black Communist speaker, Richard Moore, and the white Communists who tried to take his place, being pulled from a stepladder by police “without the slightest provocation,” notwithstanding claims of a disruptive demonstration reported in the New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, and New York Amsterdam News. Mayor La Guardia had been trying to change the police approach since his election in 1934, historian Marilynn Johnson shows, requiring more tolerance of protest and a neutral stance in labor disputes. However, Harlem residents had witnessed the limits of that change a year before the disorder. Police who arrived to manage the crowd at a Communist Party meeting protesting the treatment of the Scottsboro boys suddenly drove radio cars on to the sidewalk and into the crowd, and then threw tear gas and bomb canisters. Whatever the mayor prescribed, hostility to Communists remained strong among rank-and-file police. It was that attitude that was on display in the speed with which officers moved against the men in front of Kress’ store, while not arresting James Parton, who introduced the two white men who tried to speak, or Black members of the crowd.

Some other white men and women appear to have been among the crowds around 125th Street. Louise Thompson told a MCCH hearing that she “did not see many white people," who amounted to only "a very few” percentage of the groups around 125th Street. Some of those white men and women may also have been affiliated with the Communist Party. Almost an hour after the arrests of Jameson and Samuels, the last of the four white men arrested, the Young Liberators distributed leaflets on 125th Street, and perhaps in surrounding areas. At least some of those handing out those documents would have had to have been white, given the makeup of the organization. So too would some of those who distributed a second leaflet, printed by the Communist Party an hour or so later.

The other four white men arrested in the disorder, however, do not appear to have been connected with the Party. Leo Smith, the one white man arrested for breaking windows, was apprehended early in the disorder when white Communist party members were among the crowds, but there is no evidence linking him to the Party. There is no evidence of what the one white man arrested for possession of a weapon, Jose Perez, was doing in Harlem, and he may not have been involved in the disorder at all. The two other white men were arrested for looting, one with stolen clothing in his possession, the other in unknown circumstances. The lack of information about those arrests means they do not offer clear evidence that white men were among the crowds on Harlem's streets after disorder spread beyond 125th Street.

Accounts of the events of the disorder similarly lack clear evidence of the participation of white men. While the MCCH Report made no mention of white men other than the protesters in front of Kress’ store, both white and Black newspapers did include whites among their general descriptions of the crowds on the streets of Harlem. However, the statements in the Black press appear to be based on the arrest of the four men in front of Kress’ store at the very beginning of the disorder rather than any wider presence or participation. Under the subtitle “Some Rioters White,” the Afro-American asserted that “there were no strict opposing camps racially. Some of the most vicious rioters were white men who egged the crowd on and who handed out the leaflets and carried picket signs.” Prof. G M James, in a column in the New York Age offering an assessment of the disorder, reported that “I am informed by eye witnesses that (1) the riot was precipitated by both white and colored assailants alike.” Other Black newspapers that included white people in the crowds were less explicit about their role. The Norfolk Journal and Guide reported “About 4000 colored men and women and their white sympathizers took the law into their own hands when they heard that 'a small Negro boy' had been brutally or fatally beaten by a manger of a five and ten cent store for stealing either candy or a penknife valued at five cents.” The Atlanta World was even less explicit: “Whites joined their Negro fellow citizens as the story of the fatal beating of the youth by the store clerks gained more magnitude.”

The Daily News, New York Herald Tribune, and Brooklyn Daily Eagle explicitly included white men among those breaking windows during the disorder, but only in broad statements. The Daily News described “armed bands of colored and white guerillas, swinging crowbars and clubs, roamed through barricaded Harlem from 110th to 145th St., assaulting every person of opposite color to cross their paths, setting fires and smashing shop windows after a night of fighting.” Almost the same language appeared in the New York Herald Tribune. A similar description in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle added looting and clashes with police: “Bands of men and women, in some case joined by whites and in other cases assaulting any white they met, roared up and down the byways of Harlem, smashing more than 200 windows, looting stores, and fleeing from or fighting police.”

Just how many white men were in the crowds on Harlem’s streets is uncertain. The small proportion of those arrested who were white men does not necessarily reflect how many were present; white police officers were likely more inclined to arrest Black men and women in this context, and it seems like few of the Black officers stationed in Harlem made arrests during the disorder. Most newspaper stories do not offer an assessment of the size of the white presence; those that do range from a "sprinkling” in the New York Times to “many” in the New York Evening Journal to “hundreds” (in crowds of several thousand) in the Daily News. James Hubert of the Urban League was alone in claiming that white men made up a majority of the crowds, based on a report from a (Black?) member of his staff: "A man from my own office who went out into the streets said that fully 75 per cent of the persons causing the trouble were whites," he told a reporter from the New York Herald Tribune. "They got up on soap boxes and agitated and incited the Negroes. I am told that the persons who threw bricks into windows included many whites who rode about in taxicabs.” The details Hubert offered in support of his generalization do not actually put white men in the crowds on the street. As well as following the Black press in focusing on the men who picketed Kress’ store, he locates white participants in vehicles, not crowds. Cars regularly appear as targets of violence in descriptions of the disorder; they are not otherwise reported as sources of violence.

White men in the crowds in Harlem’s streets were not necessarily drawn to the neighborhood by news of the disorder, as the Daily News claimed. Many white-owned businesses on West 125th Street refused, discouraged or discriminated against Black customers, highlighting that the district catered to whites from surrounding neighborhoods, including those in the blocks immediately south and east whose populations changed from predominantly white in the 1930 census to predominantly Black in the 1940 census. Other white men came to Black Harlem for nightlife and vice.
White men arrested for breaking windows (1) Only one white man, Leo Smith, was among the twenty-six men and women arrested for breaking windows. He was one of only eight white men arrested during the disorder; two of those men were arrested for looting, one for possession of a weapon, and the remaining four men arrested for inciting riot by protesting in front of Kress' store. Two newspaper stories reported that Smith had broken a store window early enough in the disorder to be arraigned in the Night Court. However, the charge against Smith when he appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court was disorderly conduct, not malicious mischief, the charge made against most of those alleged to have broken windows. That charge indicated that police did not have evidence that he had damaged a window. Evidence that Smith had been part of the crowds on the street could have been enough evidence for a charge of disorderly conduct. Magistrate Renaud convicted Smith, and sentenced him to one month in the Workhouse (in contrast to the two white men arrested for looting, who both had the charges against them dismissed, as did at least four of the other six white men arrested in the disorder).

Accounts of the events of the disorder similarly lack clear evidence of the participation of white men. While the MCCH report made no mention of white men other than the protesters in front of Kress’ store, both white and Black newspapers did include whites among their general descriptions of the crowds on the streets of Harlem. However, the statements in the Black press appear to be based on the arrest of the four men in front of Kress’ store at the very beginning of the disorder rather than any wider presence or participation. Under the subtitle “Some Rioters White,” the Afro-American asserted that “there were no strict opposing camps racially. Some of the most vicious rioters were white men who egged the crowd on and who handed out the leaflets and carried picket signs.” Prof. G M James, in a column in the New York Age offering an assessment of the disorder, reported that “I am informed by eye witnesses that the riot was precipitated by both white and colored assailants alike.” Other Black newspapers that included white people in the crowds were less explicit about their role. The Norfolk Journal and Guide reported “About 4000 colored men and women and their white sympathizers took the law into their own hands when they heard that 'a small Negro boy' had been brutally or fatally beaten by a manger of a five and ten cent store for stealing either candy or a penknife valued at five cents.” The Atlanta World was even less explicit: “Whites joined their Negro fellow citizens as the story of the fatal beating of the youth by the store clerks gained more magnitude.”

The Daily News, New York Herald Tribune, and Brooklyn Daily Eagle explicitly included white men among those breaking windows during the disorder, but only in broad statements. The Daily News described “armed bands of colored and white guerillas, swinging crowbars and clubs, roamed through barricaded Harlem from 110th to 145th St., assaulting every person of opposite color to cross their paths, setting fires and smashing shop windows after a night of fighting.” Almost the same language appeared in the New York Herald Tribune. A similar description in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle added looting and clashes with police: “Bands of men and women, in some case joined by whites and in other cases assaulting any white they met, roared up and down the byways of Harlem, smashing more than 200 windows, looting stores, and fleeing from or fighting police.”

Just how many white men were in the crowds on Harlem’s streets is uncertain. The small proportion of those arrested who were white men does not necessarily reflect how many were present; white police officers were likely more inclined to arrest Black men and women in this context, and it seems like few of the Black officers stationed in Harlem made arrests during the disorder. Most newspaper stories do not offer an assessment of the size of the white presence; those that do range from a "sprinkling” in the New York Times to “many” in the New York Evening Journal to “hundreds” (in crowds of several thousand) in the Daily News. James Hubert of the Urban League was alone in claiming that white men made up a majority of the crowds, based on a report from a member of his staff: "A man from my own office who went out into the streets said that fully 75 per cent of the persons causing the trouble were whites," he told a reporter from the New York Herald Tribune. "They got up on soap boxes and agitated and incited the Negroes. I am told that the persons who threw bricks into windows included many whites who rode about in taxicabs.” The details Hubert offered in support of his generalization did not actually put white men in the crowds on the street. As well as following the Black press in focusing on the men who picketed Kress’ store, he located white participants in vehicles, not crowds. Cars regularly appeared as targets of violence in descriptions of the disorder; they are not otherwise reported as sources of violence.

White men in the crowds in Harlem’s streets were not necessarily drawn to the neighborhood by news of the disorder, as the Daily News claimed. Many white-owned businesses on West 125th Street refused, discouraged, or discriminated against Black customers, highlighting that the district catered to whites from surrounding neighborhoods, including those in the blocks immediately south and east whose populations changed from predominantly white in the 1930 census to predominantly Black in the 1940 census. Other white men came to Black Harlem for nightlife and vice.