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Public Hearings - Outbreak (March-April 1935), 19, Subject Files, Box 408, Folder 8 (Roll 194), Records of Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, 1934-1945 (New York City Municipal Archives).
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2020-12-03T17:22:02+00:00
Looting of Black-owned businesses (?)
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2023-12-13T04:02:56+00:00
While five Black-owned businesses are reported to have had their windows broken, there are no reports of any merchandise being taken from Black-owned businesses. Roi Ottley, in his column in the New York Amsterdam News, specified that it was looting, not damage that Black-owned businesses avoided: “The marauders, although without leadership, followed a studied program of exclusively looting white businesses.” He expressed the same assessment in more direct terms a week later: "The amazing discrimination manifested in deliberately choosing only stores owned by white people to loot...certainly indicated the direction the protest took...Years of pent-up emotion and resentment flashed their fangs in bitter opposition to the economic inequality imposed on a normally peaceful people." A story in the Atlanta World also specified that it was "stores belonging to white merchants" that were looted. The Communist Daily Worker persistently claimed that crowds "did not attack shops owned by Negroes, or shops on which the owners had put up the signed [sic], 'Colored Work Here.'" While that claim suited the Communist focus on the solidarity of Black and white workers, only one newspaper explicitly contradicted it. The Norfolk Journal and Guide reported that "Some Negro establishments were among the 200 which lost their plate-glass windows and had the window contents looted." The New York Evening Journal also reported that "All the stores were raided and their fixtures smashed." But once Black-owned businesses identified themselves with signs, "[t]hose owned by Negroes, in most cases, were not broken into. The rioters concentrated on others." Staff and storeowners put up signs in their windows identifying their business as “Colored,” “Black,” and “This Store Owned by Colored,” according to the Afro-American. Seven signs identifying a store named “Winnette’s Dresses” as a “Colored Store” were visible in both a photograph of an arrest taken during the disorder published in the Daily News and a photograph taken the morning after the disorder published in the Afro-American. Most reported looting occurred some time after attacks on store windows, so signs displayed in response to windows being broken would likely have helped to prevent stores from being looted as well as having their windows broken.
The MCCH report was alone in presenting the reverse chronology of when Black-owned business were targeted: "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." The MCCH "Subcommittee which Investigated the Disturbances of March 19th" had been more definitive in its initial report on May 29, 1935: "Nor is it true that stores owned by Negroes were spared. There is no evidence of any program or leadership of the rioters." While the final version of the report seemed to recognize the evidence of Black-owned stores being spared from attack reported in the press, the fading of that distinction over time was not supported by the lack of reported looting of those businesses. Mentions of Black-owned businesses being spared from attack in the Home News, New York Post, and Afro-American focused on windows being broken and did not mention looting.
The number, nature, and location of those Black-owned businesses also contributed to them not being looted. The MCCH business survey identified 5971 businesses in the blocks of Black Harlem (110th Street to 155th Street, from east of Amsterdam Avenue to west of Madison Avenue); black-owned business constituted only 1,690 (28%) of that total. (The survey was undertaken after the disorder, between June and December 1935, by which time there likely had been some changes in Harlem’s business landscape, but few businesses appear to have been forced to close as a result of the disorder.) In categorizing business owners, the MCCH survey used "Spanish" (largely Puerto Rican) and Chinese as well as white and "colored" (and on occasion "Jewish" and "Italian"). As evidence of looting emphasized that "Spanish" and Chinese businesses were not spared from attack, they are grouped with white-owned businesses in this analysis.
At least one-third of Black-owned businesses did not offer the food, drink, or clothing that appear to have been the primary targets of looting. Beauty parlors and barbers were the most common Black-owned businesses; the 230 beauty parlors and 143 barbers made up more than one in every five (22%) of those businesses. (Lieutenant Samuel Battle did insist in his testimony to a public hearing of the MCCH that beauty parlors had been subject to attack, but there was no evidence to support that claim.) The offices of physicians, dentists, and lawyers represented another 10% (177 of 1,690) of Black-owned businesses, including ninety-eight doctor's offices, fifty-eight dentist's offices, and twenty-one lawyer's offices. Beauty parlors were an overwhelmingly Black-owned enterprise (89.15%, 230 of 258); in the other groups, Black practitioners represented slightly more than half of the total — 56.3% (143 of 254) of barbers, 55.06% (98 of 178) of physicians, 54.21% (58 of 107) of dentists, and 53.86% (21 of 39) of lawyers — and well above the overall Black-owned share of Harlem's businesses (28%, 1690 of 5971). By contrast, the types of businesses most often looted were less likely to have Black owners than that overall distribution of ownership, with one exception, tailors: Black owners operated 13.96% of grocery stores (67 of 480); 27.75% of restaurants (101 of 364); 5.88% of liquor stores (2 of 34); 9.94% of clothing stores (17 of 171);14.63% of hat stores (6 of 41); 24.55% of shoe repair stores (41 of 167); 1.39% of shoe stores (1 of 72); 19.53% of laundries and cleaners (91 of 466); and 35.79% of tailors (107 of 299).
In addition to not containing the items looted during the disorder, many of those Black professional offices were located above street level, so removed from the disorder. Similarly, a proportion of the beauty parlors operated in apartments also located above street level. In all, between 125th and 135th streets, on 7th Avenue, fourteen of the one hundred Black-owned business (compared to 6 of 181 other businesses), and on Lenox Avenue, eleven of fifty-five Black-owned businesses (compared to 3 of 112 other businesses) were off the street and away from the disorder.
Moreover, a portion of those businesses were located on cross-streets rather than the avenues which ran north-south through Harlem on which attacks on stores and looting took place. Excluding West 116th, 125th, 135th, and 145th Streets (which as both transport arteries and sites for businesses were akin to avenues), 767 of 1,920 side street businesses were Black owned (40%, compared to 28% of the total businesses). They made up 45% of all Black-owned businesses (767 of 1,690), compared to 27% of businesses owned by other racial groups (1,153 of 4,281).
The blocks of the avenues on which looting was reported in particular had few Black-owned businesses. Most looting occurred on Lenox Avenue between 125th and 135th Streets, blocks which had fewer Black-owned businesses – 23% (55 of 236) - than those blocks on 7th Avenue to the west – 47% (100 of 212). (Those numbers somewhat exaggerate the possible targets of looting as almost one third of those businesses on 7th Avenue (32 of 100) and 27% (15 of 55) of those on Lenox Avenue were beauty shops or barbers). While a very high proportion of the businesses on 8th and 5th Avenues were also white-owned, there were far fewer businesses on those avenues between 125th and 135th Streets than on 7th and Lenox Avenues: only an average of 13.8 each block on 8th Avenue and 10.375 on each block of 5th Avenue (which had several blocks without any businesses); compared to 20.2 on each block on 7th Avenue and 22.7 on each block on Lenox Avenue. White residents predominatied west of 8th Avenue and east of 5th Avenue, particularly south of 125th Street, while 7th and Lenox Avenues were in the midst of the Black population.
Less looting was reported south of West 125th Street as far as West 115th Street, where it was concentrated on 7th Avenue rather than Lenox Avenue. On both avenues there was a smaller proportion of Black-owned businesses than between West 125th and West 135th Streets — 12.4%, 18 of 145 on Lenox Avenue and approximately 34%, 48 of 141, on 7th Avenue (one side of the street is missing from the survey for several blocks). What focused attention on 7th Avenue in these blocks was its greater number of businesses, on all the blocks down to West 115th Street, whereas Lenox Avenue had few businesses between 123rd and 120th Streets. Reported looting on Lenox Avenue clustered in blocks that had the highest proportion of white businesses, those closest to the retail centers of 125th Street and 116th Street. South of 125th Street, 5th Avenue was interrupted by Mount Morris Park from 124th to 120th Streets, resulting in a similarly small number of businesses as north of 125th Street. 8th Avenue south of 125th Street was lined with businesses to the same extent as 7th Avenue, none of which were Black owned (0 of 184), but around those blocks there were diminishing numbers of Black residents.
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2021-11-01T19:56:41+00:00
Windows broken in Black-owned business (8)
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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. -
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2022-11-11T22:47:08+00:00
Hays' "rough draft" of the subcommittee report
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2023-11-07T04:18:52+00:00
The ”rough draft” Hays wrote shaped the testimony in the public hearings into a narrative. Villard would reorganize that material, create a section devoted to “The Conduct of Police,” and add interpretations and judgements of the events that Hays had described.
Hays' narrative focused on events in the Kress store and on 125th Street and the killing of Lloyd Hobbs, making only passing mention of the rest of the disorder. He began with Hurley and the store detective grabbing Lino Rivera, included Patrolman Donohue and Officer Eldridge becoming involved and police called to the store being unable to convince shoppers no harm had come to Rivera, and ended with the arrest of speakers on 125th Street and the distribution of leaflets by groups affiliated with the Communist Party after the disorder had begun. That narrative followed the testimony the MCCH had heard with only a handful of minor discrepancies. Hays omitted how Hurley's intention to charge Rivera with assault for biting him led to Eldridge leaving and Donohue having to make the decision about how to release the boy. Omitted also was the later arrest of the three picketers. Hays' narrative also mistakenly had the window in the Kress store broken after Daniel Miller was arrested, not as causing the arrest.
Hays followed that narrative with an extended discussion of what happened to Lloyd Hobbs that summarized the accounts offered by Russell Hobbs, the eyewitnesses, and Patrolman McInerney and his partner before offering some assessment of each in turn. The report highlighted that the items Hobbs had allegedly stolen were not seen until McInerney brought them to the DA's office on April 1st; it did not mention the additional week before the patrolman turned them into the property clerk. Hays also pointed out that the police testimony was "wholly out of line with the testimony of many other witnesses and with the character and standing of Lloyd Hobbs."
Events beyond 125th Street received only brief and general mention. “The disturbance spread along 125th Street and in nearby avenues. Windows were broken and in many cases stores were looted. There were many arrests. The police were out in great number. Their effort was to keep crowds from gathering. Radio patrol cars sped from place to place. The police arrested about a dozen men who were charged with larceny, burglary and other crimes.” At the end of the report, Hays returned to those events to dismiss the claim that crowds had focused on stores owned by Jewish merchants. Instead, “such looting as there was was indiscriminate and seemed to have been indulged in chiefly by the hoodlum element.” (Hays characterized the hoodlums as "not the kind of people who would be influenced by such leaflets" as those distributed by Communists but who "may have used the rumors and leaflets as an excuse.") Most of the crowd that Hays put at “only a few thousand people” were “orderly.” He also asserted that “There was no element of a race riot involved in any way shape or manner, a fact which is greatly to the credit of both our colored and white citizens.”
In characterizing the events the disorder spread beyond 125th Street in that way, Hays was following police testimony in the hearings. Only Captain Rothengast used the term hoodlums to describe participants. Both he and Inspector Di Martini claimed the number of participants was small, smaller in fact than Hays reported, a few hundred rather than a few thousand. Di Martini mentioned they included the unemployed. Hays did not identify the participants as mostly young, aged in their late teens and early twenties, as both Rothengast and Di Martini did. It was Di Martini and Sergeant Battle who described the looting as indiscriminate. Both Battle and Rothengast answered in the negative when asked if the events had been a race riot. Just what damage was done during the disorder was not addressed in the draft, leaving the impression that police largely maintained order. Nor was there any mention of assaults, injuries, or deaths. To the contrary, the assertion that the events were not a race riot implied that there had been no violence between Black and white New Yorkers during the disorder.
Hays enumerated seven topics raised by the narrative, which he called “a rather cursory statement of facts.” The identity of the boy in the store, which he concluded had been established as Rivera; that the Communist leaflets were false; that those leaflets were distributed too late to cause the disturbance; that Gordon had been mistreated by police after his arrest for trying to speak to the crowd; that Donohue was mistaken in his decision to release the boy out the back of the store, but “we do not feel he is to be condemned for this”; that police were concerned to “suppress any excitement” rather than providing information to the crowd; and that the “repressive treatment” of police had antagonized Harlem residents and contributed to causing the disorder. (He also criticized the ADA who appeared at a public hearing for being unwilling to testify.) The first and last of those topics, the boy's identity and the actions of police, had been introduced in the hearings by questions from the audience and their reaction to testimony rather than being on the MCCH's program. Police officers failing to provide crowds with the information they sought was primarily the testimony of Louise Thompson, the only witness quoted in the report, and L. F. Cole, as was the conclusion that the leaflets appeared after the disorder had begun.
The remainder of the report described incidents of police brutality as examples of the behavior that had antagonized the community, covering the cases of Thomas Aikens, Edward Laurie, and Robert Patterson. The "general condition" that Hays concluded was illustrated by police actions during and around the disorder was the view asserted by the audience at the hearings: "The rights of Negroes are not respected by police, nor is the law generally observed in police dealings with Negroes." The final section offered two recommendations, for a committee and that the district attorney should take action against police officers who allegedly broke the law.
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2023-07-09T00:33:07+00:00
Villard's draft of the subcommittee report
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2023-11-07T04:05:16+00:00
Villard’s report, the product, he told Hays, of “five hours grinding on your report,” reorganized and reframed Hays' draft and added a series of judgements about the events. When he sent it to Hays, he noted he had omitted two topics in the draft: rumors about a woman in the Kress store having her arm broken, which he judged superfluous; and the behavior of ADA Kaminsky in the public hearing, which he judged would be defended as a response to being badgered by the audience. Villard's text began with a statement directed to the mayor that presented five findings about the events of the disorder and a statement about the longer-term issues that led residents to react as they did. He gave prominence to Hays' statements about the disorder not being a race riot nor being caused by Communists, adding that it was instead “spontaneous and unpremeditated” and highlighted the role of police and unemployment and discrimination as causes. Those findings were prefaced with a description of the disorder as far more violent than Hays had described, as involving “the loss of five lives, the injury of many persons and the arrest of still others, together with material damage to shops which ran into large figures.”
The report itself began by largely reproducing Hays' account of events in the store and on 125th Street, sprinkling in judgements of those involved. Women witnesses in the store “grossly exaggerated” what happened. An ambulance was “unfortunately and unnecessarily” called to attend to the staff members whose hands had been bitten. Donohue was “mistaken” in his decision to release Rivera out of the back of the store. Police had “no determined or effective plan” to communicate that the boy had been released. Circulating pamphlets based on rumors as Communist groups did was a “highly censurable” action. Villard combined Hays’ mention of events beyond 125th with his point about Jewish businesses not being targeted, which he made more pointed by highlighting that “stores owned by Negroes” had not been spared (a point that Sergeant Battle had made in a public hearing). He also further marginalized those who participated in the disorder by including among them not just the “criminal or semi-criminal class” but “idle onlookers” drawn from the “many unemployed of all ages standing on the streets.” Villard finished by recounting the evidence that established Rivera was the boy in the store. He did introduce one mistake into the narrative. Where two ambulances were called to the store, one to treat Hurley and Urban while the store was open and a second to treat Clara Crowder after the store closed, Villard had only one, the first, and tried to have it at the store before and after it closed.
At this point, Villard departed from Hays' draft to highlight the criticisms of police, at the expense of some of the other issues Hays had identified. A new section was added, entitled “The Conduct of Police.” It began with discussion of the “intensity of the feeling against the police” displayed at the public hearings, which “which was proof positive that there is something seriously wrong in the attitude of the officers toward the people whom they are there to serve and to aid.” Here Villard was referring not simply to testimony but to the interventions of the audience at the hearing, whose jeers, boos, applause, cheers, and heckling literally intensified what was said. Villard then framed the remainder of the report as evidence that substantiated that attitude, as “a simple recital of facts brought out before us that will prove there is solid ground for the bitter resentment of the people of Harlem.” The section began with the behavior of police in the Kress store, followed by the beating of Harry Gordon, and finally the killing of Lloyd Hobbs. Villard added a paragraph to what Hays had written about the boy’s death laying out what made Patrolman McInerney’s actions “inexcusable.” There had been no public disorder at the time, and the officer should have fired in the air before shooting Hobbs and pursued him for longer before firing the gun at all. Several of those points had been made in questions yelled at witnesses by members of the audience at the hearing. The section then moved to the cases of police brutality beyond the disorder Hays had discussed, justifying their investigation as necessary give the “enormous importance” of the question of how police acted and the impact of their behavior on the Harlem community. Concluding that the cases were not exceptional, Villard urged a change in attitude by the police to respect the rights of Harlem residents was urgently needed.
After a set of recommendations that largely followed Hays, combining those at the end of his report with several in the body, Villard concluded by tying the report’s focus on the sources of the resentment of Harlem’s residents to the anxiety about Communists expressed in the interpretations of the disorder he had debunked. “Harlem will be a fertile field for racial propaganda” until “the evils on which they base their arguments” are eliminated.
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2022-02-09T03:39:49+00:00
Gonzales' jewelry store windows broken
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2023-11-29T21:32:24+00:00
Sometime during the disorder, windows were broken in L. S. Gonzales' jewelers and watch repair store at 427 Lenox Avenue. The business was in the same building as two of the stores set on fire during the disorder, Anna Rosenberg's notion store at 429 Lenox Avene and a hardware store at 431 Lenox Avenue. The jeweler was likely damaged between 11:00 PM and midnight when a crowd "created disturbances, hurled various missiles, broke store windows, set fire to some stores, pillaged others, and in general damaged property of various merchants in the locality," according to Justice Shalleck's summary of testimony in the Municipal Court. No one arrested during the disorder was identified as being charged with breaking the store's windows.
Lieutenant Samuel Battle, New York City's most senior Black police officer, mentioned the damage to the jeweler's store when he testified in the MCCH's first public hearing on March 30, 1935. Asked if the crowds made any distinction between white-owned and Black-owned stores, he answered that Gonzales, his jeweler, had his window broken. On the larger question of the attitude of the crowd, Battle first said "there was no distinction." However, when asked "Are you sure there was no distinction made?" he answered "In many cases, if they knew it was colored, they passed the shop up." Battle's testimony is the only report of damage to the store.
Gonzales' store was recorded in the MCCH business survey at 427 Lenox Avenue. Mentions of the store in the New York Age gave the address as 429 Lenox Avenue, a building that had four storefronts. Gonzales had operated the store for sixteen years. A story, accompanied by a photograph of Gonzales, in the New York Age in 1922, just over two years after he opened the business, identified him as a Cuban immigrant. In 1935 he had one regular Black employee. Interviewed by MCCH staff, he said that in the last three or four years, during the Depression, repair work comprised most of his business, with jobs not collected his biggest difficulty. Gonzales summed up Black business as "nothing," a situation that would not improve until Black unemployment was solved. In keeping with that perception, the MCCH staff member recorded that he "Apparently takes a great deal of interest in community welfare and has been closely engaged in recent picketing activities on 125th Street." A story in the New York Amsterdam News identified Gonzales as having served as the president of the Business and Professional Men's Forum in the 1930s, participating in a campaign to promote Black business, and in 1938, joining the newspaper's drive to get Harlem's businesses to hire Black workers. Gonzales appears to have still been in business when the Tax Department photograph was taken, between 1939 and 1941, as a sign identifying 427 Lenox Avenue as a jeweler is visible.