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Protests at the Empire Cafeteria
Beginning in last few days of August 1934, the Daily Worker reported, Black and white Communists and sympathizers led by the Young Liberators marched on picket lines in front of the Empire Cafeteria during the day, with larger crowds gathering for protest meetings in the evenings. Police acted against those Communist protesters with more violence than they did against the Black boycott campaign. The Empire Cafeteria itself also suffered damage that the targets of that campaign on West 125th Street did not. On August 31, when a crowd the New York Times estimated to be 1,500 people, and the New York Daily News and New York Herald Tribune put at 1,000 people, assembled at 125th Street and Lenox Avenue, a rock was thrown through the restaurant window, shattering the glass, some of which hit twenty-three-year-old Esther Friedman of Brooklyn. (Reports of the protest offered differing descriptions of Friedman and her injuries: while the New York Daily News, New York Times, and New York Herald Tribune did not identify her reason for being in the restaurant, the New York Age described her a diner and the New York Amsterdam News as the restaurant's bookkeeper; the New York Daily News, New York Times, and New York Herald Tribune all reported she had been hit by flying glass, while the later reports in the New York Age and New York Amsterdam News described her as hit by the object thrown through the window; the New York Times and New York Amsterdam News specified that the injury was to her cheek, while the New York Age reported it was to her nose.) Police dispatched six radio cars and an emergency squad truck to the scene, bringing fifty patrolmen, who arrested two men, Milton Herndon, a twenty-four-year-old Black man, and Leo Seligman, a nineteen-year-old white man.
Five days later, the evening before the arrested men appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court, the protest organizers staged a "mass rally" at 125th Street, calling on a range of Communist Party groups to hear speakers that included Herndon, out on bail, according to a story in the Daily Worker. After the large crowd at the protest meeting moved down the street to the restaurant, police again put out a "riot call" that brought forty patrolmen to the restaurant to clear the street. By the time they did, the New York Times reported, the restaurant window, repaired the previous day, was broken, but police made no arrests. The only other evidence of this protest was in the New York Amsterdam News story on the court hearing the next day, which included a brief mention of another mass meeting broken up by police without arrests.
When Seligman and Herndon appeared in court the day after the rally, Seligman was charged with throwing the rock, Herndon with riot, according to stories in the New York Age and New York Amsterdam News. Predictably, the Daily Worker insisted at the time of their arrest that the brick had not been thrown by picketers but by "a provocateur." Although the New York Times and New York Herald Tribune had published stories on the the men's arrest, neither reported their arraignment in court. During the hearing, police arrested an additional man and woman among the crowd of supporters in the courtroom as "participants in the riot," after the restaurant manager identified them the New York Age reported. The magistrate held the men for trial in the Court of Special Sessions. Despite the arrests and police presence, a few days after the court hearings, in September 1934, after a week and half of protests, the owners of the restaurant agreed to hire three Black men and one woman under the "same consideration as white workers in similar positions," the New York Age reported, and to take "no further part in the prosecution of those arrested during the campaign." The Daily Worker celebrated the concessions as a "significant victory" that represented "a smashing refutation of the lies of the Negro reformist leaders that the white workers cannot be won for the struggle for Negro rights."
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This page references:
- Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem During the Depression (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 120.
- "Communist Held for 125th St. Cafeteria Riot," New York Age, September 8, 1934, 2.
- "Police Rout Mob of 1,000 at Picketed Restaurant," New York Herald Tribune, September 1, 1934, 26.
- "Three Seized With Brother of Herndon," Daily Worker, September 3, 1934, 2.
- "1,500 in Harlem Protest," New York Times, September 1, 1934, 16.
- "Hold Six for Cafe Protest," Amsterdam News, September 8, 1934, 1.
- "125th Street Cafeteria Capitulates to Boycott; Agrees to Hire Negroes," New York Age, September 15, 1934, 1.
- "A Significant Victory," Daily Worker, September 11, 1934, 6.
- "1,000 Reds Riot in Harlem, Girl Cut by Glass," New York Daily News, September 1, 1934, 7.