This page was created by Anonymous.
Public Hearings - Outbreak (March-April 1935), 24, Subject Files, Box 408, Folder 8 (Roll 194), Records of Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, 1934-1945 (New York City Municipal Archives).
1 2022-02-22T04:07:28+00:00 Anonymous 1 5 Louise Thompson was a thirty-four-year-old Black Communist organizer, civil rights activist, and journalist, who had briefly been married to writer Wallace Thurman and had many friends among the authors and artists of the Harlem Renaissance. plain 2023-10-26T17:12:54+00:00 AnonymousThis page is referenced by:
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2020-10-01T00:07:06+00:00
Harry Gordon arrested
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2024-01-25T19:59:45+00:00
Around 6:30 PM, Patrolman Irwin Young arrested Harry Gordon, a twenty-year-old white student, on the north sidewalk of West 125th Street near 7th Avenue. Gordon had climbed a lamppost to speak to the crowd that police had pushed east, away from the Kress store; Young pulled him down. The patrolman alleged that Gordon then grabbed his nightstick and hit him with it; Gordon denied doing anything. He told a public hearing of the MCCH that Young and other officers dragged him thirty feet to a police radio car and drove him to the police station on West 123rd Street. Louise Thompson had seen Gordon "get on the mailbox to speak and...dragged down by a policeman," after which "a cop kicked him, another knocked him over the head with his billy and another slapped him in the face and punched him in the ribs." Although Thompson was affiliated with the Communist Party and thus not an entirely objective witness, her account of the police violence was not disputed.
As soon as the radio car reached 7th Avenue, out of sight of the crowd on 125th Street, Gordon told the MCCH hearing that the police officer driving said “Go ahead and hit him" to the officer next to him, and both men “poked him in the ribs and kicked him.” When the car got to the station, Young pushed him up against the wall of the station and clubbed him in the stomach. Police officers continued to beat and kick Gordon when he was put in a cell, taken upstairs for questioning, and fingerprinted. As a result of these attacks, Gordon testified, “I had two black eyes. Had bumps on my head. My shins were bruised.” When he was bailed and released forty-eight hours after being arrested, his lawyer described Gordon’s face as “entirely discolored,” so much so that he took Gordon to his home so his mother would not see his injuries, he told the public hearing. The man identified as Gordon has no visible injuries in photographs taken a few seconds apart published in the Daily News, New York American, and New York Evening Journal that purported to show him and the three other white men police arrested in front of Kress’ store on their way to the Harlem Magistrates Court. However, one of the men was only partly visible, behind the other three, and could be injured. The caption to the Daily News photo suggests otherwise, labeling all the men "unmarked by the race riots."
Gordon was among the group of around ninety-six of those arrested put in a line-up and questioned by detectives in front of reporters downtown at Police Headquarters on the morning of March 20, before being loaded into patrol wagons and taken back uptown to the Harlem and Washington Heights Magistrates Courts. Gordon was brought to the platform together with Daniel Miller and the three Young Liberators arrested at other times protesting in front of Kress' store, a New York Herald Tribune story noted, with police presenting the group as acting and arrested together. However, Gordon's actions overshadowed the larger group in stories about the line-up. While Gordon stood on the "klieg-lit platform," Captain Edward Dillon questioned him about his role in the disorder in an exchange reported in three newspapers. The briefest mention appeared in the Daily Mirror, which reported the details of the setting, but only that "under the grilling conducted by Acting Capt. Edward Dillon" Gordon declared "I am a student at City College of New York" and "refused to answer further questions." The reporter described Gordon's manner as "defiant." Other reporters conveyed a similar judgment in their portrayals of Gordon. The New York Herald Tribune described him as "a tall, lanky youth [who] thrust one hand in his pocket and struck an orator's attitude" during the questioning; the New York Sun described his pose as "Napoleonic." Neither of those stories mention Gordon identifying himself as a student; they instead quoted him as refusing to answer questions until he saw a lawyer. The Daily Mirror concluded that Gordon, in responding as he did, "had practically declared himself the inciter of the night's rioting" and the leader of the four other men arrested at the beginning of the disorder. Gordon himself, testifying at the MCCH hearing, set himself apart, as a passerby who had attempted to urge the crowd to go to the police for information. Inquiries by reporters from the New York Evening Journal found no evidence that Gordon was a City College Student, with the New York Herald Tribune reporting Dean Morton Gottschall did not find him in college records. The New York Evening Journal did confirm that he lived in the Bronx, at 699 Prospect Avenue.
Gordon did not appear in the MCCH transcription of the 28th Precinct blotter, nor did Miller and the two white Young Liberators arrested in front of Kress’ store. Margaret Mitchell, the Black woman arrested inside Kress' store before Miller's arrest and Claudio Viabolo, the Black Young Liberator arrested with two white companions soon after Miller, did appear in the transcription. That discrepancy suggests that the white men were omitted from the transcription, perhaps overlooked because they were somehow less readily identified as participants in the disorder among others arrested for unrelated activities at that time.
Gordon appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, shortly after Daniel Miller and the three Young Liberators with whom police had grouped him. The charge recorded in the Magistrates Court Docket book was assault, which was the charge reported by New York American, New York Evening Journal, New York Times, and New York Herald Tribune. A second list in the New York Evening Journal, a later story in the New York Herald Tribune, and the New York Amsterdam News, Daily Mirror, and New York Sun reported Gordon had been charged with both offenses. The Home News, New York Post, New York World-Telegram, New York Age, and the list published by the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, reported the charge against Gordon as inciting a riot.
The mistaken information about the charge could result from police continuing to group Gordon with the Miller and the three Young Liberators when he appeared in court. The New York American, Home News, New York Herald Tribune, and New York Times all described the men as the "ringleaders" of the disorder, which was likely the term police used, in stories on the court appearances. However, while the Daily News, New York Herald Tribune, and Daily Mirror included all five men in that group, the New York American, Home News, and New York Times omitted Gordon. That difference appears to have resulted from Gordon being arraigned separately from Miller and the other three men. That separation was likely because he was charged with assault, the other men with riot, and the officer listed as arresting Gordon was Patrolman Irwin Young not Patrolman Shannon, the arresting officer recorded in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book for Miller and the three other men.
The Daily Mirror claimed Gordon was heard separately when he indicated that he would produce his own lawyers. While being held, Gordon testified, he had not been not allowed to contact a lawyer or his family and was not fed until he had been in custody for more than twenty-four hours and had been arraigned in the Magistrate's Court. In the courthouse on March 20, Gordon was able to make contact with an ILD lawyer, Isidore Englander. The attorney testified that while he was speaking with Frank Wells, who he had learned had been arrested, he saw Gordon, who he claimed not to know, and spoke with him after his arraignment. Gordon asked him to communicate with Edward Kuntz, another ILD lawyer, whose son Gordon testified was a friend. Kuntz would represent him in subsequent court appearances. After Gordon was taken away, Englander heard him scream, the result, Gordon claimed, of being beaten again by police officer. The attorney made no mention of the visible injuries on Gordon’s face that Gordon and Kuntz described in their testimony.
Magistrate Renaud remanded Gordon to reappear on the March 25, on a bond of $1,000; the magistrate also remanded the other four alleged Communists, but for them set the maximum bail of $2,500. Around forty-eight hours after Gordon’s arrest, at 1 AM, Kuntz told a public hearing that he secured bail for Gordon, who was released from prison.
Gordon returned to court on March 25, at the same time as Daniel Miller and the three Young Liberators, but there his treatment further diverged from them. While Renaud discharged the other four men as the grand jury had already sent them for trial in the Court of Special Sessions, in response to evidence presented by District Attorney Dodge as part of his investigation of the disorder, the magistrate again remanded Gordon, to appear on March 27, with the New York American and Home News reporting that police were planning to submit evidence to the grand jury seeking to have him indicted. (The only other newspaper to report this appearance was the New York World-Telegram.) That effort was unsuccessful. When Gordon appeared again in the Magistrates Court, the ADA reduced the charge against him from felony assault to misdemeanor assault; in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book a clerk struck out Fel[ony] Ass[ault] and wrote "Red[uced] to Simple Assault misd[emeanor]." Kuntz claimed credit for the reduced charge when he questioned Gordon about this legal proceeding in a public hearing of the MCCH. While Gordon testified that the ADA had said he was doing Gordon a “favor” by withdrawing the assault charges, Kuntz drew out that his cross examination of Patrolman Young established that the officer did not go to a doctor or a hospital, so did not suffer injuries justifying a felony charge, or even simple assault. He also testified that a new charge of unlawful assembly, the misdemeanor form of riot, had been made against him at that hearing, information not mentioned in any other sources. Magistrate Renaud transferred Gordon to the Court of Special Sessions for trial on the reduced charge, a decision reported only in the New York Amsterdam News, New York Times, and New York Herald Tribune.
For some reason, the trial did not take place for almost eight months. Sometime in early November the judges convicted Gordon and sentenced him on November 15. Arthur Garfield Hays, who had chaired the MCCH hearing at which Gordon testified, wrote to the Chief Judge of the Court of Special Sessions on November 13 after hearing of the conviction, the only evidence of that outcome. Expressing surprise about the conviction, Hays urged that Gordon be given a suspended sentence as he was "certainly not a criminal and was exercising what he deemed to be his right of free speech." Judge William Walling responded, telling Hays that he "did not have all the facts." As far as the judge was concerned, "There was not the slightest doubt but that Gordon assaulted the officer who was in uniform. Thereafter, of course, the officer hit back and subdued Gordon." That assessment made it unlikely Walling and his colleagues would have imposed the suspended sentence Hays favored. However, what sentence they imposed on Gordon is unknown. -
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2020-02-24T22:38:05+00:00
Two men speak to a crowd & Patrolman Irwin Young assaulted
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2023-12-15T04:23:43+00:00
Harry Gordon, a twenty-year-old white man in his senior year at City College, was walking along West 125th Street between 7th and 8th Avenues about 6:00 PM, he told a public hearing of the MCCH, when he noticed groups of “excited” people “milling around the street.” While Gordon claimed to have been simply passing by, it seems likely he was one of the Communist Party members who came to Kress’ store in response to rumors a boy had been attacked. He did identify himself at the hearing as a member of the New York Students League, a Communist-led organization. Gordon gave his address as 699 Prospect Avenue in the Bronx.
Gordon testified that he asked several people on the street what was happening, but he “couldn’t get anything at all from them.” He then saw a Black man, James Parton, set up a ladder in front of Kress' store and briefly speak to the crowd before Daniel Miller stepped up to speak. A window then smashed and police officers immediately seized Miller. Other officers chased Gordon and other people who had been listening to Miller across West 125th Street to the opposite sidewalk and then pushed them away from the store, east toward 7th Avenue. About 300 feet from Kress’ store, Gordon estimated, Parton climbed a lamppost and again spoke to those on the street, saying “that a boy had been killed and that a crowd should gather in protest,” according to Gordon’s testimony. Then he climbed the lamppost, intending, he told a public hearing, “to get a committee from the crowd” “to go to the police to find out if a child was killed.” He was only able to say “Friends” before Patrolman Irwin Young pulled him down from the lamppost. Gordon’s alleged assault on Young came when he “grabbed Patrolman Irwin Young’s nightstick and used it to hit the officer,” according to a story in the New York Times. That story was the only source that mentioned the nature of the assault in reporting Gordon’s second appearance in the Magistrates Court. After arresting Gordon, Young and other officers dragged him to a police radio car and drove him to the police station on West 123rd Street.
Lists of the injured variously described the injuries Young suffered as “cuts on hands,” in the Daily News and New York Evening Journal, “lacerations of right hand” in the New York Herald Tribune, and "bruised on the hand" in the New York American. No version represented a sufficient injury to constitute a felony assault, which was the charge police initially made against Gordon. The New York Herald Tribune reported Young received medical treatment at the scene, but when Gordon’s lawyer cross-examined him in the Harlem Magistrates Court, Young testified that he did not go to a doctor or the hospital, Gordon told the public hearing. Young did not appear in the hospital records, as the other police officers injured around this time did, confirmation of those statements. Moreover, Young was back on the streets by 10:10 PM, when he arrested Leroy Gillard at 200 West 128th Street, allegedly for looting. He was the first police officer allegedly assaulted in the disorder; five others would be assaulted around 125th Street before 10:30 PM, after which time the crowds had moved to other parts of the neighborhood.
Gordon denied he assaulted Young. He was grabbed from behind, he testified in a public hearing of the MCCH, and then “a rain of blows descended on me such that I have never experienced before" against which he could do nothing. Louise Thompson, part of the crowd on 125th Street, offered a more detailed account, although as a member of the Communist Party, she was not an entirely disinterested observer. She described to a public hearing of the MCCH how “a cop kicked him, another knocked him over the head with his billy and another slapped him in the face and punched him in the ribs.” Thompson more clearly stated that Gordon did not assault Young when interviewed earlier by a reporter for the Daily Worker for a story published on the same day she testified in the public hearing: "I was standing a few feet from Harry Gordon when he was arrested. He did not strike any policeman. He did nothing.” In the same story in the Daily Worker, Gordon denied committing assault, implying that Young made the charge to justify his violence: “I did not strike any policeman. He struck me over the head with his club before I even saw him. He said, 'So you'll hit a cop, will you?' as he struck me.”
As was the case with events inside Kress’ store, testimony in the public hearings of the MCCH provided the most detailed evidence of the events outside the store in the early evening of March 19. Louise Thompson testified on March 30 and Harry Gordon on May 4. (Thompson only mentioned the first speaker, Miller, in her article in New Masses.) The MCCH subcommittee report and final report both describe a second person trying to speak in front of Kress who was arrested, without naming that person, but make no mention of his alleged assault on a police officer. More striking, Inspector Di Martini’s report names Gordon without mentioning an alleged assault on one of his officers. That report has no reference to Daniel Miller, presenting Gordon as the only person to speak in front of the store: “At about 7PM, one Harry Gordon, #699 Prospect Avenue arrived in front of Kress’ Store with a number of others carrying placards and made a speech to a group which was attracted and incited a number of colored persons to break windows of the store. He was immediately arrested by Ptl. Young #3203, 32nd Precinct.”
No newspaper stories explicitly reported the narrative in the MCCH hearings and reports, as they truncated events outside the store and presented Gordon, Daniel Miller, and the three Young Liberators who picketed the store as a single group arriving and acting together. Only some described Gordon as speaking, and only three of the initial stories about the disorder describe him as assaulting Young, in different circumstances that were both unlike what was described in the MCCH public hearings. Even later stories about Gordon’s first appearance in the Harlem Magistrates Court do not all mention the assault charge, and several describe him as picketing Kress’ store, not trying to speak to the crowd. When Gordon testified in a public hearing of the MCCH, newspaper stories described him speaking, and being arrested by Young, but omitted the context he provided for those events as coming after Miller had tried to speak and been arrested.
Only some newspapers described Gordon as speaking in front of the store. The New York Age accurately captured the event, if not its context: “Harry Gordon, white Communist, was arrested when Patrolman Young of the 123rd Street police station found him addressing a group. He was taken to the station house charged with inciting a riot.” The New York Post more briefly described Gordon, Miller, and the two other white men as having been arrested for “haranguing crowds, urging them to fight.” The Daily Mirror identified Gordon as a speaker, describing him as “a 'Red' orator,” but with no details of circumstances of his speaking or arrest. The New York World-Telegram included Gordon in a group obliquely described as being arrested for being “Communist agitators.”
Only three of the initial stories about the disorder described Gordon assaulting Young, in different circumstances that were unlike what was described in the MCCH public hearings. Gordon came to Miller’s aid when he was arrested, joined by the three Young Liberators, and battled Patrolman Shannon and two other officers before also being arrested, according to the New York American and New York Evening Journal. That story also mistakenly had Gordon picketing the store. The New York Times relocated the encounter between Gordon and Young to the rear of Kress’ store on West 124th Street. In the struggle between police and a crowd that took place there, the story reported, Young “was cut on the right hand by a rock” thrown by Gordon. That clash occurred around thirty minutes after Gordon was arrested, and involved officers other than Young being injured.
Later stories about Gordon’s first appearance in the Harlem Magistrates Court did not all mention the assault charge, and several described him as picketing Kress’ store, not trying to speak to the crowd. Gordon was described as charged with assault in the New York Sun, in a story about a line-up of those arrested, and in the New York American and New York Amsterdam News, which had him picketing the store. Four other papers did not mention the assault charge: the Daily Mirror described Gordon and the others grouped with him as “curb-stone orators who had deliberately incited the 125th St. mobs;” in the Home News, the charge was inciting a riot, for “making a speech in front of Kress’ store;” in the Daily News it was an unspecified “separate charge” from that made against the other men, which was inciting riot; and in the New York Evening Journal Gordon and three others were charged with “circulating false placards to the effect that a Negro boy had been beaten to death.” Gordon’s subsequent appearances in the Harlem Magistrates courts were generally not reported. Only the New York World-Telegram, Home News, and New York American mentioned his appearance on March 25, with no details of his alleged offense. The New York Times story of Gordon’s appearance on May 27 provided the only details of the assault, that he “grabbed Patrolman Irwin Young’s nightstick and used it to hit the officer.” The New York Herald Tribune story on the same hearing not only made no mention of those details, but omitted the assault entirely and instead made Gordon only indirectly responsible for Young’s injuries: his speech telling the crowd “that a Negro boy had been killed in the store… so excited the neighborhood that Patrolman Irving Young, of the West 123d Street station, and several others were hurt in the ensuing riot.”
Stories about Gordon’s testimony in the MCCH public hearing on May 4 published in the New York Times, New York Age, and Associated Negro Press described him speaking, and being arrested by Young, but omitted the context he provided for those events as coming after Miller had tried to speak and been arrested. The New York American and Afro-American had an even narrower focus, mentioning only that Gordon alleged he had been beaten by police, with no description of the circumstances of his arrest. The only story about Gordon’s allegation published before the hearing was in the Daily Worker on March 30, reflecting his association with the Communist Party. Reporters for the New York Evening Journal had been unable to locate him. When the Daily Worker’s journalist spoke to Gordon, “his left eye [was] still black from the police beating more than a week ago.” However, in a Daily News photograph published on March 20 captioned as showing Gordon and the other men grouped with him by police, none of the men have visible injuries. As there are only three men, the image may be of the Miller and the Young Liberators without Gordon, perhaps around the time he was arraigned separately.
Harry Gordon did not appear in the MCCH's transcription of the 28th Precinct police blotter; Claudio Viabolo, the Black Young Liberator, is the only one of the five speakers and picketers in that record. Gordon appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, shortly after the other white men arrested at the start of the disorder. Magistrate Renaud remanded him to reappear on March 25, and then again on March 27. While Miller and the three Young Liberators that police grouped with Gordon as the instigators of the riot were sent by the grand jury to the Court of Special Sessions, the ADA reduced the charge against Gordon to misdemeanor assault in the Magistrates Court, with his ILD lawyers claiming credit in the public hearing of the MCCH, as they had elicited testimony from Young that he had not needed medical treatment for his injury. Magistrate Renaud then transferred Gordon to the Court of Special Sessions. For some reason, the trial did not take place until November, when the judges convicted him.
In the narratives of historians Mark Naison, Cheryl Greenberg, Marilynn Johnson, Lorrin Thomas, and Nicole Watson, Gordon and Miller are grouped together as “speakers” pulled down by police. Historian Thomas Kessner named Miller in his narrative as the only speaker in front of the store. None of those historians mention Gordon's alleged assault of Young. They all follow the narrative provided by police that presents the speakers as part of a single group protesting in front of Kress’ store, stepping up to speak to the crowd after picketing of the store had begun. That framing implicitly introduces the idea that the disorder was orchestrated by those men, while offering no details of how the crowds of women and men around them acted to weigh against that evidence. Weight is added to that implication by the failure to fully identify the men involved in the protests. While Greenberg and Thomas do not identify the men, Naison, Kessner, Johnson, and Watson describe them as members of the Young Liberators. None of those historians mention that four of the five, and both the speakers arrested, were white men. Naison did describe the Young Liberators as an interracial group; so too did Watson, however she did not identify the men in front of the store as members of the Young Liberators. Neglecting their race makes those men appear more representative of the crowd than they were, particularly in Greenberg and Watson’s narratives, which do not identify them as Young Liberators. Naison, Kessner, Greenberg, Thomas, Johnson, and Watson all follow the chronology that has the picketing begin before the speakers were arrested. Grouping the men places an organized Communist protest at the center of the outbreak of disorder, and makes the window being broken and the men’s arrest a response to the feeling they built in the crowd. Recognizing that the protests occurred in a less coordinated way highlights that police responded immediately to any sign of protest, not just to a window being broken. They may also have acted so quickly because they recognized the men as Communists; the men’s language and appeals would have given them away. Communist protest in Harlem, and across the city, drew violent responses from police in the months prior to the disorder. Recognition of the fragmented nature of the protests and the identity of those involved directs attention away from those events to the crowds of Black men and women around them. Crowd members gathered in groups, talked amongst themselves, sought answers from police about what had happened to the boy, and responded to police efforts to clear the street. Rather than organized or orchestrated by the Young Liberators, those behaviors appear more spontaneous, in line with the interpretation offered in the MCCH’s final report. -
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2021-03-31T23:51:12+00:00
Picketing in front of Kress' store
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2024-01-29T01:01:55+00:00
Around 6:45 PM, three men arrived at the sidewalk of West 125th Street in front of Kress’ store carrying placards and began walking back and forth, picketing the store. A photograph published in the Daily News of the front of the store taken on March 21 shows the area the men would have walked, a wide sidewalk which would have allowed other people to still move past the store or gather in front of it.
About thirty minutes earlier, a window in the store had been broken as Daniel Miller had tried to speak from a ladder on the same stretch of sidewalk, after which he been arrested by Patrolman Timothy Shannon. The three men who walked the picket line were nineteen-year-old Sam Jameson and nineteen-year-old Murray Samuels, both unemployed white men, and Claudio Viabolo, a thirty-nine-year-old Black man. "We were picketing in front of the store. I heard that a child had been killed inside. I thought it ought to be called to the attention of the public, about the child being killed," an unnamed Black man, presumably Viabolo, explained when questioned the next day during a police line-up of those arrested reported in the New York Sun. However the signs the men carried referred to a beating not a killing, reading “Kress Brutally Beats and Seriously Injures Negro Child and Negro Women. Negro and White Don’t Buy Here” and “Kress Brutally Beats Negro Child."
Jackson Smith, the manager of Kress’ store, summoned to the front door earlier when James Parton had set up the stepladder that Miller climbed to speak, told a public hearing of the MCCH that he was still there when the three men began to picket. Louise Thompson testified in an earlier public hearing that she encountered the picketers on her return to the front of the store after being pushed east by police after the arrest of Miller, and witnessing the arrest of Harry Gordon about 300 feet from the store. Patrolman Timothy Moran, who had been stationed across West 125th Street from the store when the window was broken and Miller arrested, told a public hearing that “three other men with placards draped over their shoulders” arrived a few minutes after those events and began walking up and down in front of the store.
The police officers stationed at the store had been instructed to “keep the crowd moving in from of the store, Moran testified. They were likely standing in a similar location to those in the above photograph of Kress' store on March 21. An officer “told or asked [the men] to stop marching in front of Kress’” and when they did not leave “after about five minutes," police arrested them for unlawful assembly. Sgt. Bauer testified he was involved in the arrest, as again was Patrolman Shannon, who had arrested Miller and was recorded as the arresting officer. “The police took the placards and pushed the people carrying them into the vestibule,” Jackson Smith told a public hearing. By 7:00 PM, crowds around Kress’ store had been pushed to 8th and 7th avenues.
A second version of the placard that read “Kress Brutally Beats Negro Child,” photographed for the Daily News in an image available at Getty Images, had “Young Liberators” added at the bottom. That organization, which had ties to the Communist Party, had led a successful boycott campaign in 1934 to force the Empire Cafeteria to employ Black workers. The appeal not to shop at Kress’ store on one sign evoked that campaign and the more extensive boycott campaign undertaken by a coalition of Black organizations that had made pickets in front of stores on West 125th Street a familiar sight in 1934. More broadly, the Young Liberators were “a group of young people who are struggling for Negro rights,” Joe Taylor, the organization's president, told a public hearing of the MCCH, with about 140 Black and white members. A Black man came to their nearby office, at 262 Lenox Ave near 126th Street, about 5 PM, and said “Did you know that a Negro boy had been beaten nearly to death in the Kress store?” Taylor did not, and went to investigate, arriving after Kress’ store was closed. He then went to the police station on West 123rd Street before returning to West 124th Street. Later Taylor went to an address he heard was the home of Lino Rivera, but could find out nothing. Back at the office, other members of the Young Liberators produced a leaflet that was distributed on West 125th starting around 7:30 PM. Headed “Child Brutally Beaten. Woman Attacked By Boss and Cops = Child near Death,” the final line urged people to “Join the Picket Line.” That reference to a picket line provided further evidence that the men arrested for picketing came from the Young Liberators. The first public hearing of the MCCH devoted time to establishing who had produced that leaflet and when it was distributed. Since the leaflets did not appear on the streets before 7:30 PM, the MCCH Final Report concluded that the actions of the Young Liberators “were not responsible for the disorders and attacks on property which were already in full swing.”
The place of the picketing in the sequence of events outside Kress’ was described most clearly in testimony given in the public hearings of the MCCH. However, those details did not become well known as neither the MCCH subcommittee nor final reports mentioned the picketing. Those narratives included only the two men arrested for trying to speak in front of the store, Miller and Gordon, who were not named. Newspaper stories truncated and confused the events established in the public hearings, as police told reporters that Jameson, Samuels, and Viabolo had arrived and acted together with Miller and Gordon to cause the disorder.
The most common version of that narrative had the group picketing the store before Daniel Miller attempted to speak. The New York Times, New York Sun, New York Evening Journal, New York American, and Daily Worker all published stories with that chronology, with different descriptions of who was involved. The New York Times reported "Two white and two Negro pickets paraded back and forth in front of the store, bearing placards of the Young Liberators League with the inscription: 'Kress Brutality Beats Negro Child' and 'Kress Brutality Beats and Seriously Injures Negro Child.'" The New York Sun used similar phrasing: “a group of agitators, two white and two Negroes, arrived in front of the establishment and took up picket posts carrying placards of the Young Liberators League, which shouted in type that 'Kress brutally beats and seriously injures Negro child.'” The Hearst newspapers, the New York Evening Journal and New York American, identified Samuels, Jameson, and Harry Gordon as picketing, and omitted Viabolo or any mention of Black men among those carrying placards. The Daily Worker more vaguely referred to an unspecified number of Young Liberators forming a picket line. The New York Age substituted Gordon for Miller but otherwise followed the same narrative in which “several Communist leaders gathered and began a picket movement before the store,” before Gordon was arrested for “addressing a group” and Samuels and Viabolo arrested for “acting in concert with Gordon.” The arrests of Jameson, and Miller, were reported separately without any details of the circumstances.
The consistent reporting of what was written on the placards likely resulted from police displaying them to reporters as well as photographers, with images published in the New York Evening Journal (and taken by the Daily News). The Daily Mirror did describe a placard that read, "Avenge the death of this little colored boy!" Given that the photographed placards, and the leaflet distributed by the Young Liberators soon after the picket, refer to a beaten boy, that placard is likely an invention that fit the sensationalized tone of the tabloid's reporting. However, stories in the Home News and New York Age about the men’s appearance in the Harlem Magistrates Court the next day, had them distributing placards, not picketing, placards which read "Kress store is resorting to lynching.” Jackson Smith, the manager of Kress’ store, told a public hearing of the MCCH that he saw a placard that read “Kess brutally beats Negro child.” Patrolman Moran’s testimony was less certain: “As I can recall, they referred to a child being beaten in Kress in the earlier part of the afternoon.”
Several of the narratives that mistakenly had the three Young Liberators picketing before Miller spoke also included inaccurate accounts of the circumstances of the men’s arrests. The New York American and the New York Evening Journal had Jameson and Samuels, together with Gordon, going to Miller’s aid when Patrolman Shannon arrested him. Viabolo was missing from the New York Evening Journal story and appeared in the New York American’s narrative as a bystander who also obstructed Miller's arrest. The New York Times simply reported that the arrest of Jameson, Samuels, and Viabolo came “later,” after Miller spoke. The Daily Worker did not report specific arrests, but rather that “police broke up the picket line, arresting the leaders.”
Mentions of the picketing were vaguer and more fragmentary in the Afro-American, New York Herald Tribune, Daily News, and New York Post. The Afro-American reporter who arrived in front of Kress store around 7:14 PM noted that before he “got on the spot, the screaming of the girl and the flying rumors had brought forth four youngsters, three white, with sandwich signs telling of ''Boy Brutally Beaten.'” “[F]rom somewhere pickets had appeared," the New York Herald Tribune reported, "bearing placards reading: 'Kress Brutality Beats Negro Child.' Neither story mentioned the arrest of those picketing, although the New York Herald Tribune story later noted that “Police seized members of the mob who appeared to be its leaders as they drove it back.” Neither of the other two stories described picketing. The Daily News came closest, reporting “the Young Liberators marched through various streets with red and black smeared placards on which in tremendous letters was the legend: 'CHILD BRUTALLY BEATEN: WOMAN ATTACKED BY BOSS AND COPS: CHILD NEAR DEATH.' The New York Post, while naming the three men among those arrested, described them only as speaking to the crowd.
Unlike those initial stories, newspaper stories about proceedings in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20 consistently grouped Viabolo with the four white men arrested in front of Kress’ store. Police presented the five men as a group first in a line-up before they were taken to court, the New York Herald Tribune reported, and then at the courthouse, describing the men as the "ringleaders" of the disorder. When Jameson, Samuels, and Viabolo were arraigned with Miller in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, the charge recorded in the docket book for all of them was riot. Assistant District Attorney Carey requested each man be held for a hearing on March 23, on the maximum bail of $2,500. When the four men returned to court, the charges against them were dismissed as they had already been indicted as a result of District Attorney Dodge's investigation. While the Magistrates Court docket book recorded the deposition of each of the men's cases as "Dism[issed], def[endant] indicted," Dodge announced the day after their indictment that he was instead sending them for trial on misdemeanor charges in the Court of Special Sessions, not felony charges in the Court of General Sessions. The men's trial did not take place until June 20. After hearing evidence that that a crowd had collected in front of Kress' prior to the men arriving, the men's ILD lawyers moved to have the charges dismissed, the New York Amsterdam News and Daily Worker reported. The judges granted that motion and freed the four men.
Claudio Viabolo’s name was spelled in a variety of ways in these sources. Viabolo is used here as it was recorded in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book, and in stories about his appearances in the Harlem Magistrates Court published in the Afro-American, Daily News, New York Post, New York Herald Tribune, Home News, New York Sun, New York Times, New York American, and New York Age. The name was spelled Diabolo in the list of those arrested in the disorder published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and stories in New York World-Telegram and New York Evening Journal. In the edition the New York Age rushed to print on March 23, the name was Bilo. In the Daily Worker on March 21, the name was Viano. Sam Jameson's name was also misspelled, but was not corrected over time as Viabolo's name was. Jameson is used here as it was recorded in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book, and in stories published in New York Evening Journal, New York Times, New York Post, New York Herald Tribune, and stories about court appearances published in the Home News and New York Sun. The name was spelled Jamieson in the Daily News, Atlanta World, Norfolk Journal and Guide, and New York American.
Historians’ descriptions of the protests outside Kress’ store follow the narrative provided by police, treating all those arrested as part of a single group. That framing implicitly introduces the idea that the disorder was orchestrated by those men, while offering no details of how the crowds of women and men around them acted to weigh against that evidence. Weight is added to that implication by the failure to fully identify the men involved in the protests. While Cheryl Greenberg and Lorrin Thomas do not identify the men, Mark Naison, Thomas Kessner, Marilynn Johnson, and Nicole Watson describe them as members of the Young Liberators. None of those historians mentions that four of the five, and both the speakers arrested, were white men. Naison did describe the Young Liberators as an interracial group; so too did Nicole Watson, however she did not identify the men in front of the store as members of the Young Liberators. Neglecting their race makes those men appear more representative of the crowd than they were, particularly in Greenberg and Watson’s narratives, which do not identify them as Young Liberators. Naison, Kessner, Greenberg, Thomas, Johnson, and Watson all follow the chronology that has the picketing begin before the speakers were arrested. Grouping the men places an organized Communist protest at the center of the outbreak of disorder and makes the window being broken and the men’s arrest a response to the feeling they built in the crowd. Recognizing that the protests occurred in a less coordinated way highlights that police responded immediately to any sign of protest, not just to a window being broken. They may also have acted so quickly because they recognized the men as Communists; the men’s language and appeals would have given them away. Communist protest in Harlem, and across the city, drew violent responses from police throughout the early 1930s. Recognition of the fragmented nature of the protests and the identity of those involved directs attention away from those events to the crowds of Black men and women around them. Crowd members gathered in groups, talked among themselves, sought answers from police about what had happened to the boy, and responded to police efforts to clear the street. Rather than organized or orchestrated by the Young Liberators, those behaviors appear more spontaneous, in line with the interpretation offered in the MCCH’s final report.
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2022-02-04T19:41:26+00:00
Daniel Miller arrested
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2024-01-19T02:03:38+00:00
Daniel Miller stepped up on a ladder in front of Kress' store about 6:15 PM and began to speak to a crowd he estimated at 100-200 people. The twenty-four-year-old white man who identified himself as a member of the Nurses and Hospital League had said only "Fellow workers" when someone in the crowd threw an object at the windows of the store, breaking one. Patrolman Timothy Shannon of the 28th Precinct, one of about five officers stationed in front of Kress' store, immediately pulled Miller from the ladder and arrested him. Sergeant Bowe testified in a public hearing of the MCCH that he was a "witness" to that arrest. James Parton, the Black man who had carried the ladder, and an American flag banner, to the front of the store and spoke briefly before Miller, was not arrested. Nor was Parton arrested when he climbed a lamppost on the opposite side of 125th Street and spoke to the crowd. However, Harry Gordon, a white man who followed Parton in climbing up the lamppost to speak, was, like Miller, immediately arrested.
Miller's testimony in a public hearing of the MCCH provided the most detailed description of his arrest. Patrolman Shannon also testified in an earlier public hearing, but he was not questioned about the arrest. Louise Thompson testified that she saw Miller begin to speak and the window broken. She did not see his arrest. Patrolman Moran did. Officers stationed with him in front of the store moved to arrest Miller and disperse the crowd listening to him as soon as the window was broken, he told a hearing of the MCCH. Two Hearst newspapers, the New York American and New York Evening Journal, published stories that described the arrest, but they included details that other sources indicate did not happen: Shannon arresting Miller after he refused an order to move on, with no mention of the widely reported broken window; and two white Young Liberators and Harry Gordon coming to Miller’s aid when he was arrested, and battling Shannon and two other patrolmen before also being arrested. Although the newspapers said their information came from police, these elements that did not happen seem to be a product of the anti-Communist stance and sensational style of the Hearst newspapers.
The lists of those arrested during the disorder published by the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, the New York Evening Journal, the Daily News, the New York American, and the New York Herald Tribune all included Miller among those charged with inciting a riot. However, Miller, and the three other white men arrested in front of Kress' store, are not in the transcript of the 28th Precinct police blotter in the MCCH records. Margaret Mitchell, the Black woman arrested inside Kress' store before Miller's arrest, and Claudio Viabolo, the Black Young Liberator arrested with two white companions soon after Miller, do appear in the transcription. That discrepancy suggests that the white men were omitted from the transcription, perhaps overlooked because they were somehow less readily identified as participants in the disorder among others arrested for unrelated activities at that time.
Miller was among around eighty-nine men and women arrested put in a line-up and questioned by detectives in front of reporters at Police Headquarters downtown on the morning of March 20, before being loaded into patrol wagons and taken back uptown to the Harlem and Washington Heights Magistrates Courts. Police put him on the platform in a group with Gordon and the three Young Liberators, Samuels, Jamison and Viabolo, a New York Herald Tribune story noted; it reported that police described them as all "arrested at a demonstration in front of the Kress store." That grouping was not mentioned in the two other newspaper stories about the line-up, with the Daily Mirror and New York Sun, as well as the New York Herald Tribune focusing on Harry Gordon refusing to answer questions until he saw his lawyer.
The Daily News and New York Evening Journal published photographs taken a few seconds apart that are captioned as showing the four white men arrested outside Kress’ store in the West 123rd Street police station on their way to the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20. Surrounded on three sides by both uniformed police and detectives in plainclothes, three white men are visible, with another white man party visible behind them, all but the first, identified in the caption as Harry Gordon, looking at the ground. Miller was the man on the right of the group, according to the captions. To his right is a Black man, almost certainly Viabolo, as police had grouped him with these men in the line-up earlier that day, and would again in the courthouse. He was not identified in the captions, and, perhaps as a result, cropped out of versions of the photograph published by several regional newspapers. Reflecting its anti-Communist focus, the New York Evening Journal placed the photograph on page one, across the whole width of the page, with a caption labeling the men “young college-bred Communists.” The next page featured photographs of two placards used in the picket, and the leaflets circulated by both the Young Liberators and the Communist Party. The Daily News photograph, taken at almost the same moment, appeared in the center of a two-page spread of photographs of the disorder in the center of the newspaper. The caption did not identify the men as Communists but as inciting the riot, focusing on drawing a contrast between their uninjured appearances and the damage done during the disorder. (Gordon later testified he had been beaten and had injuries to his face; he may be the man whose face was not visible in that photograph notwithstanding the caption.)
Police continued to group Miller with the other four men when they were appeared in Harlem Magistrates Court. In stories on the court appearances, the New York American, Home News, New York Herald Tribune, and New York Times all described the men as the "ringleaders" of the disorder, which was likely the term police used. However, while the Daily News, New York Herald Tribune, New York World-Telegram and Daily Mirror included all five men in that group, the New York American, Home News, and New York Times omitted Gordon. That difference appears to have resulted from Gordon being charged separately from Miller and the other three men. That separation would have resulted from the different arresting officer listed in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book for Gordon, Patrolman Irwin Young, not Patrolman Shannon, the arresting officer recorded for the four other men. The charge recorded for Gordon was also different, assaulting Young, not inciting riot. The Daily News claimed Gordon "was heard separately when he indicated that he would produce his own lawyers."
In the Harlem Magistrates Court Miller was charged with inciting a riot, as were Jameson, Samuels and Viabolo. When their names were called, two lawyers from the International Labor Defense Fund rose to represent them. The appearance of those attorneys was reported by the New York American, Daily Mirror, Home News, Daily News, New York Herald Tribune, New York Times, New York World-Telegram and Daily Worker but for some reason they were not recorded in the column for the name and address of a defendant's lawyer in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book (a section completed for Harry Gordon). The ILD's affiliation with the Communist Party would have been well-known to readers of those newspapers, but the Daily Mirror explicitly made the connection in its story, stating that the men's "Communistic affiliations were declared" by the identity of their attorneys. The Daily Mirror and Daily Worker named the lawyers as "Miss Yetta M. Aronsky and I[sidore] Englander," while Daily News named only Aronsky, and the New York American, New York Herald Tribune and New York Times reported only "a woman lawyer" who would not give her name to their reporters. (Englander later testified about being present in the court in a public hearing of the MCCH).
Assistant District Attorney Richard E. Carey, the Black attorney Magistrate Renaud had requested prosecute those arrested in the disorder, according to the Daily News, requested the men be held for a hearing on Friday on the maximum bail of $2500. The men's ILD lawyers protested that sum. Other arrested during the disorder charged with felonies had their bail set at $1000, including Harry Gordon. Magistrate Renaud dismissed those protests, and complaints by Aronsky, reported by the Daily News and Daily Worker that the men "had not been fed by police following their arrest."
When Miller returned to the Harlem Magistrates Court with the three Young Liberators, Magistrate Ford dismissed the charges against the group because the grand jury had indicted them in response to evidence presented by District Attorney Dodge as part of his investigation of the disorder. The Magistrates Court docket book records the deposition of the men's cases as "Dism[issed], def[endant] indicted." Stories in the Daily Mirror and New York Amsterdam News also reported they had been indicted by the grand jury. However, while the grand jury did send the men for trial, it was for a misdemeanor, not a felony, so an information that sent them to the Court of Special Sessions, not an indictment that would have sent them to the Court of General Sessions. Other stories included elements of that distinction. The New York American reported that after being discharged the men were "turned over to detectives with bench warrants based on the Grand Jury informations voted last week charging inciting to riot." The New York Herald Tribune also reported "two informations charging five persons with inciting riot" without naming them; so too did the Daily News, which alone specified that an information charged a misdemeanor and that the men were sent for trial in the Court of Special Sessions. The grand jury also sent all the other individuals charged with inciting a riot that appeared before it to the Court of Special Sessions to face trial for misdemeanors. Testifying in a public hearing of the MCCH, Miller said he was charged with unlawful assembly. That crime involving disturbing the peace, not efforts to prevent the enforcement of the law or incite force or violence.
As other prosecutions resulting from the riot made their way through the courts there were no reports mentioning Miller, or Jameson, Samuels and Viabolo. Finally, on June 20, the four men appeared in the Court of Special Sessions — the New York Amsterdam News reported an additional defendant, a "young sympathizer," Dave Mencher, not mentioned in any other sources or in the Daily Worker story, the only other report of this trial located. Only one prosecution witness testified before the court's three judges, Sergeant Bauer of the West 123rd Street station (likely the sergeant who testified at the public hearings that he was involved in the arrest, although his name was recorded as Bowe in the transcript). It is not clear why Patrolman Timothy Shannon, the arresting officer, did not appear as a witness. International Labor Defence lawyers again represented the men, but not the same attorneys as on the day after the disorder. Instead, Joseph Tauber and Edward Kuntz, who played prominent roles in the MCCH public hearings, represented the men. After cross-examining Bauer to establish that a crowd had collected in front of Kress' store prior to the men arriving, the attorneys moved to have the charges of inciting a riot dismissed. The judges agreed, and freed Miller and the three other men.
Miller's home address is recorded in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book as 1280 South Boulevard in the Bronx. That address is also published by the Daily Mirror, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, New York American, New York Times, and New York Age. However, the New York Evening Journal reported that address did not exist. A different address was published in the New York Herald Tribune, Home News, New York American, and New York Amsterdam News: 35 Morningside Avenue, between West 117th and 118th Streets, two blocks west of 8th Avenue. That address fits the information he gave in the MCCH public hearing. All those newspaper stories are reports of Miller's appearance in court, suggesting that the Morningside Avenue address was mentioned at that time even if it was not recorded in the docket book. Miller's organization, the Nurses and Hospital League, had an office downtown at 799 Broadway, identified in the New York Post, New York American, and Daily Worker as raided by police investigating the disorder that was outside Harlem.
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2022-07-14T17:07:00+00:00
10:30 PM to 11:00 PM
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2024-01-09T19:52:47+00:00
Around 10:30 PM, Louise Thompson left her friend’s home and returned to the streets, walking along West 118th Street to 7th Avenue and then north back to 125th Street. She would have passed groups coming in the opposite direction from 125th Street and likely others emerging from the surrounding residences to see what was happening and in some cases to join in the violence. Thompson would also have encountered police deploying from 125th Street, including some radio cars on patrol. At this time the number of police in the area would still have been small. When some officers tried to disperse people gathered at 121st Street, they quickly ran into trouble. Details are sparse, but for some reason the officers began shooting. They were only a block south of where Anthony Cados alleged he had been assaulted by Black assailants minutes earlier, so they may have encountered a group of people unwilling to accept being pushed and hit with batons. Or, being outnumbered, the officers may have decided to try to get people to move by firing in the air, a common tactic, and when that did not work, started firing at those on the street. The account of a group of police pushed to defend themselves by a threatening crowd that shot back at them, published in the New York Evening Journal to justify that shooting, drew on the repertoire of sensational tropes that publication employed rather than reports of what happened. Police officers in Harlem did not feel any need for such justifications to shoot at Black New Yorkers. One shot hit Lyman Quarterman, a thirty-four-year-old Black man, in the abdomen. The wound was serious enough for police to release a report that Quarterman had been killed, which multiple newspapers published. In fact, he was alive but would be hospitalized for at least three weeks. This would not have been the only occasion on which police would have discharged their guns as they ranged over Harlem attempting to clear people from the streets. Gunshots joined the sirens of police vehicles and ambulances, the crash of breaking glass and the shouts of groups on the street in announcing the intensification and spread of the disorder.
While Louise Thompson walked toward 125th Street, groups again broke through the police cordon at the intersection with 7th Avenue. The target for most was the Kress store down the block, but objects were thrown at the windows of other white businesses between the corner and the store. Among the damaged stores were likely Myladys shop, the W. T. Grant department store, McCrory and Woolworths 5 & 10 cent stores, and Chock Full O'Nuts restaurant on the south side of the street, and the Conrad Schmidt Music Shop, Adler Shoes, Scheer Clothing, Howard Suits, Minks Haberdashery, Savon Clothes store, Young's Hat Store, Willow Cafeteria, General Stationery & Supplies store, and United Cigar store on the north side. In front of the W.T. Grant store, an object also struck the head of Thomas Wijstem, a thirty-four-year-old white carpenter, knocking him unconscious. Unlike earlier in the evening, there were now enough police to make arrests in response to those attacks. Douglas Cornelius, a twenty-four-year-old Black man, was arrested for assaulting Wijstem, Claude Jones, a twenty-four-year-old Black musician, for breaking a window at the Blumstein department store, and William Ford, a seventeen-year-old black laborer, for breaking a window at the Kress store. But there were not enough police to apprehend others involved in each of those attacks, let alone prevent the violence. At the Kress store, however, only one window was broken despite a “very large” crowd reportedly gathering. A significant number of police were still stationed there — and it was the headquarters for the senior officers directing the police response. These clashes could also have been when twenty-eight-year-old Andrew Lyons was hit on the head by a police baton, an injury that would eventually kill him.
While the smashing glass made clear that white businesses were the targets of those on 125th Street, the two patrolmen who arrested Jones and Ford both claimed that they had yelled threats against police. They may have been embellishing the charges against the men to make them more compelling to magistrates and judges; certainly no police officers were injured at the time, which would have been expected if they had actually been targeted. It was possible that Wijstem had been mistaken for a police officer. Detectives in plainclothes were now among those on the streets. Police practice in response to riots was to deploy plainclothes officers outside cordons among crowds to identify the individuals creating disorder.
Detective Peter Naton, at least, was outside the police cordon at the intersection of 125th and 7th Avenue at this time. When he saw a crowd of twenty-five to thirty people gathering, he "announced himself as a police officer," necessary since he was not in uniform, and told the group to "move on." John King, a twenty-eight-year-old Black fish and ice dealer, allegedly responded by yelling "I won't move for you this is my Harlem, and we will put that Kress store out of business and punish that man that injured the child." It would hardly have been the first time Naton had heard those sentiments expressed that evening, and they alone would not have justified arresting King. But the detective claimed that King grabbed hold of the billy club in his hand and broke its strap. If King actually did so, it was likely because Naton was hitting him with the club. It was just as likely that the detective arrested King to get him off the street, an option now available to police due to the increased number of officers in the area. The police presence also allowed Naton to quickly process King; the detective would be back at the intersection within half an hour.
A bus traveling up 7th Avenue bound for Boston arrived at 125th Street around this time as it encountered large crowds, "men, women and policemen rushing all around" according to the driver, Joseph Dawber. Then he heard gunfire and bullets began to hit the side of the bus. The twenty or so passengers on board ducked down or dropped to the floor. Eleven bullets holes would be found in the bus, While none of those rounds reached inside, a brick thrown at the left rear window did. Joseph Rinaldi, a white wrestler from Brooklyn traveling to a match in New Bedford, was cut on the face and right wrist by the shattered glass. The brick landing by Helen Travis caused her to faint in shock. With no reports of shots fired by the residents on the streets, the bullets had likely come from police guns being fired in efforts to disperse the crowd. Dawber saw police with revolvers in their hands in the several police radio cars that went by the bus as he tried to navigate the large crowd. He followed those cars up 7th Avenue, avoiding people who had spilled from the sidewalk into the street. It took ten minutes for the bus to get through the crowds. Those residents would have been aware that all the buses traveling through Harlem had white drivers and that this intercity bus likely had white passengers. Throwing objects at it was an attack both on white property and white individuals. It was also possible that at least some of the objects that hit the bus were intended for other targets as was the case with the police bullets.
The Boston-bound bus passed groups on 7th Avenue north of the intersection who continued to break windows in stores and some who had begun to take items from those window displays. Looting did not appear to yet be widespread, perhaps because staff remained in at least some stores. The manager of the Harlem Grill on the corner of 127th Street reported two more windows broken around this time, so he at least was still present. Just over $450 of stock would be taken from the saloon, but that seems to have occurred later as the manager mentioned it separately. The window of the auto supply store, abandoned by Eisenberg and his staff around 9:00 PM, by contrast, had been cleared of merchandise by 11:00 PM, when Howard Malloy walked by on his way to 128th Street. The unidentified businesses owned by Abe Mohr and Joseph Cohen on the east side of 7th Avenue between 126th and 127th Street could also have been looted around this time.
To the west, on 8th Avenue, both crowds and police arrived at least as far south as 122nd Street. There were not yet reports of looting there; instead attacks on white men and store windows continued. Max Newman, a thirty-six-year-old white man, closing his grocer’s store at 2274 8th Avenue for the night, allegedly encountered a group of Black men. He claimed they beat him around the head, leaving him with cuts and bruises on his forehead. An ambulance called to the scene treated Newman's injuries, but there were evidently no police nearby to respond to the attack.
Officers were on the opposite side of 8th Avenue around the same time, however, when an ashcan was thrown through the window of the Lokos clothing store at 2275 8th Avenue. Ashcans could be found on the street, like the rocks and bricks most often thrown at windows, but obviously were larger and did more damage to a window. Several patrolmen must have been driving by or had arrived as two men were arrested in front of the store, with others likely getting away. One of those arrested, William Norris, a twenty-two-year-old Black man, lived on 122nd Street a block east of the store, so may have initially come to the corner to see what was happening. Charles Wright, the other person arrested, a Black man of the same age as Norris, was homeless. While there would be only one more reported event on 8th Avenue south of 125th Street during the disorder, the area may not have been quiet. All the lack of reports means for certain is that the attention of police and journalists was focused elsewhere. But residents too might have been drawn to other parts of Harlem, where there were larger businesses and a greater Black population.
On the other side of 125th Street, crowds on 8th Avenue appear to have continued to break windows. By this time, those on the street, like those on 7th Avenue, would have been a mix of groups coming from 125th Street and residents drawn by the rumors and the noise. It was likely around this time that Rose Murrell, a nineteen-year-old Black woman, allegedly threw a stone that broke a window in a grocery store at 2366 8th Avenue on the intersection with 127th Street. She lived nearby, in the block of 126th Street between 8th and 7th Avenues, so could have either come to the street to see what was happening or have gone earlier to 125th Street in response to hearing rumors about events in the Kress store and been among those coming up 8th Avenue. The business was just over a block north of the stores whose windows were likely broken in the previous half an hour. Patrolmen were now on 8th Avenue, some likely in radio cars patrolling the street. Officer Libman, from the 32nd Precinct based to the north on 135th Street, arrested Murrell. A single arrest from the crowd of people likely around the store was a sign that few police were close enough to respond to the breaking glass. Libman, however, would be involved in the arrest of three other people in this area, so may have been stationed there. At least one of those arrests was also for breaking windows, but as the business was located several blocks further north between 130th and 131st Streets, it likely did not occur until the violence had spread further. While businesses in the surrounding blocks of 8th Avenue would be looted, there was no evidence that merchandise was taken before the widespread turn to looting nearer midnight.
For the first time, people began to move east on 125th Street toward Lenox Avenue, some breaking windows in the white-owned businesses as they went. The Regal Shoe Store on the southeast corner of 7th Avenue was undamaged when the assistant manager closed the business at 10:00 PM (having remained open throughout the clashes between crowds on the street and police on the other side of 7th Avenue). Windows were broken sometime soon after. So likely were windows in the Sylvia Dress shop in the next building, in the Hobbs Dress shop located a building further east, and in the Busch Kredit jewelry store in the middle of the block. The branch of the Liggitt's pharmacy on the southeast corner of 125th Street and Lenox Avenue may also have had windows broken at this time as all those facing north, on West 125th Street were smashed. That was the extent of the damage reported, suggesting that this block did not suffer the sustained attacks on businesses seen a block to the west. To the contrary, some stores suffered no damage at all, notably the Koch department store, despite its wide expanse of display windows. In contrast to its counterparts on the block to the west, that store had hired black staff in response to the campaigns of the previous year. The manager attributed his store being undamaged to that decision and called that "action of the mob" "one of the finest tributes that could be paid Koch's." The limited damage could also have been the result of fewer people passing along the street during the disorder. The violence that would soon break out on Lenox Avenue appeared to be the work of people coming out on to that street from the surrounding residences more often than groups coming from around the Kress store.
However, the first business on Lenox Avenue reported to be attacked, Toby’s Men’s shop on the northwest corner of 125th Street, likely was targeted by groups coming from 7th Avenue. It was still open around 10:30 PM when eight Black men burst in and started threatening the owner, Morris Towbin and a clerk named Cy Bear, knocking over fixtures and stealing clothing. The two staff retreated into the basement. Very few of those involved in the disorder went as far as directly confronting staff and robbing them. The men who did so likely were more accustomed to breaking the law than most of those on the streets at the time. The man later arrested with merchandise from the store in his possession, a twenty-six-year-old Black laborer named Edward Larry, did have multiple convictions for pickpocketing and theft, which set him apart from most of those taken into custody. However, the extensive damage and large loss of merchandise that the store suffered could not have been the work of the group who burst in alone. The intersection of 125th Street and Lenox Avenue would later be the site of several assaults and attacks on other businesses. Some of those who came to the area also targeted Toby’s Men’s shop as all of its display windows were broken and most of their contents removed. Towbin, however, was not present for those attacks and looting. After the group that burst into the store left, he emerged from the basement and headed to the 28th Precinct on West 123rd Street to report the robbery. Although he would be there for at least the next two and a half hours, Towbin was as unsuccessful as most of his counterparts in securing help from the police.
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2022-05-23T17:58:54+00:00
8:30 PM to 9:00 PM
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2024-01-11T21:05:39+00:00
As people in the groups around the northeast corner of 125th St and 7th Avenue began to throw rocks at the windows of the Herbert’s Blue Diamond Jewelry store, store staff rushed to remove the merchandise from the window displays. Businesses on 125th Street remained opened until late in the evening, so there were staff in all the stores whose windows were being broken. Some of those staff may also have cleared the window displays in their store; they almost certainly did what the Herbert’s jewelry staff did after emptying the windows -- gathered in the rear of the store, away from the objects coming through the windows. Outside, nearby police moved to disperse the people around the store, another clash in which twenty-eight-year-old Andrew Lyons may have been hit on the head by a police baton, an injury that would eventually be fatal. Several patrolmen armed with rifles, which identified them as crew from emergency trucks, took up positions in front of the broken windows. They remained there, guarding the store, throughout the disorder, protection that few businesses received. Newspaper photographers recorded the presence of those officers and the damage to the store’s windows. Large holes could be seen behind a patrolman in one image, and an equally large section of smashed glass in the other photographed window, indications that multiple objects had hit the store. However, only some of business’s extensive expanse of display windows suffered such damage before police intervened, and no merchandise was taken. As a result, Bernard Newman, the store manager, was one of the very few Harlem business owners “deeply impressed with the police” handling of the disorder.
As police moved to protect Herbert’s jewelry store, at the opposite end of the block in front of the Kress store, Patrolman Gross arrested James Smitten, a twenty-six-year-old Black man, for allegedly assaulting a twenty-four-year-old white mail clerk named William Kitlitz. There were no details of the alleged violence other than the men’s injuries, bruises on Kitlitz’s face and cuts on Smitten’s scalp — although Smitten’s injuries might have come after his arrest, at the hands of police. As one report of Kitlitz’s injury described him as “beaten on head,” Smitten may have hit him — or he may have been hit by the rocks being thrown at store windows at this time. Both men lived within a few blocks of 125th Street, Smitten on 123rd Street to the south and Kitlitz on St Nicholas Avenue to the west, close enough for them to have heard rumors about a boy being beaten or killed, or to have been shopping or going to a theater. While white men and women like Kitlitz who visited 125th Street had not been targets of the complaints of the groups gathered on the street in the preceding hours, they were implicated in the broadening anger that Louise Thompson and Carlton Moss had recently begun to hear from some of those on 7th Avenue. If Smitten did assault Kitlitz, he may have been acting on calls like the one heard by Moss, to “Run dem white folks outa Harlem." However, with no record of the outcome of his arrest, there is no basis for assessing the validity of the charges against Smitten. After Patrolman Gross arrested Smitten, he took him the short distance to the police station on West 123rd Street and called for an ambulance from Harlem Hospital, which arrived at 8:45 PM, to treat his injuries.
Soon after Smitten’s arrest, Captain Conrad Rothengast joined the police in front of the Kress store. Telephoned at home by his office, he came straight to Harlem, in plainclothes not his uniform. On 125th Street he found groups of people, around 250 in total, “trying to get close to [the] Kress store.” Speaking to several women, he was told that “a young colored boy had been beaten.” Rothengast told them that “was not so,” but to his frustration they did not accept what he said. “It was impossible to reason with most of them. It was impossible to do anything with them.”
Further east, at 7th Avenue, mounted police and patrolmen continued to move people away from 125th Street. Louise Thompson, part of a group in front of the branch of the Chock Full O'Nuts restaurant chain on the southwest corner, watched as police repeatedly pushed people back from the corner. However, the officers could not move them as far as the entrance to the Hotel Theresa midway down the block of 7th Avenue to the south. Like other businesses on 125th Street, the Chock Full O'Nuts remained open for business at this time – and for some time longer, as Thompson later went into the “Nut Store.” The restaurant, like its neighbors, also had windows broken sometime during the disorder, some perhaps at this time.
Even as police struggled to keep groups of people off the corners of 125th Street, they did prevent any from going along the street to the Kress store. Around 8:45 PM, some groups began instead to move up 7th Avenue to the north, a decision that Thompson attributed to police not allowing them on to 125th Street. Carlton Moss decided to follow one of those groups, about twenty men, women and children, up 7th Avenue, and watched as they broke windows in stores. Unlike on 125th Street, there were Black-owned businesses on 7th Avenue. While the block between 125th and 126th Streets housed only white-owned businesses, in the next block to the north seven of the twenty stores at street level had Black owners. That proportion increased to eleven of twenty stores a block further uptown. Those businesses were not targeted by the groups of Black men and women who focused their attacks on white-owned stores – although Moss did see “some ill-directed missels [sic] crash colored owned shops.” The “resentment” felt by those breaking windows had shifted from the rumored specific incident of violence by the staff of the Kress store against a boy to the white control of Harlem’s businesses, of which the boy’s fate was just the latest consequence.
Many of the stores on 7th Avenue were still open for business, like their competitors on 125th Street. As rocks broke the windows of Jack Sherloff’s small jewelry store midway between 125th and 126th Street, he jumped into the window display and began throwing merchandise back into the store. He was soon hit himself by objects thrown at the windows, or perhaps directly at him, as his clerk, John Wise, watched from inside the store. Eventually Sherloff was injured badly enough that Wise pulled him back inside. While merchandise was taken from the store, that likely did not happen until later given that only windows were being broken in nearby stores at this time. Across the street, almost opposite Sherloff’s store, tailor Max Greenwald had a similar experience, likely around the same time. When bricks starting hitting the windows of his store, he shut off the lights so he was not “such a good target,” and began moving merchandise from the window into the store. Greenwald was able to move “a lot of merchandise” before so much material was being thrown through the windows that he decided it was too dangerous to continue. He then retreated inside the store, avoiding the injuries suffered by Sherloff. A shoe store on this block several buildings closer to 125th Street than Sherloff’s store that had windows broken during the disorder was also likely attacked around this time.
At the same time, windows were being broken in stores two blocks further north, between 127th and 128th Streets. On the west side of the street, where five of the seven businesses were white-owned, both J. P. Bulluroff’s grocery store on the corner of 127th Street and K. Percy’s tailor and cleaning store in the middle of the block had a window broken around 8:45 PM. A few minutes later, as Lewis Eisenberg and three of his staff finished changing the window display and began cleaning up inside his auto equipment business next to Percy’s store, they “heard a terrific crash at the front door” as a window broke and saw an “angry crowd” on the street. Unlike Sherloff and Greenwald and their neighbors on this block, Eisenberg and his staff did not try to protect merchandise or remain in the business. Instead, they left out a rear exit into the backyard. From there, the men made their way to the street and hailed a taxi to get them out of Harlem. As they drove away, Eisenberg saw one window broken in his store. Even without any apparent police presence to deter those throwing rocks at the store windows, there was not a sustained or systematic attack on the stores in this area. Nor were windows targeted repeatedly at this time. Additional windows would be broken in these stores, but not until sometime later. These attacks did not appear to be the actions of a large crowd acting together, but of small groups and individuals. Police still concentrated on 125th Street did not respond to these windows being broken.
At least some Black storeowners and staff reacted differently than their white counterparts to the windows in their businesses being attacked. One of the owners or staff of the Black-owned Cozy Shoppe restaurant in the building next to Percy’ store, on the southwest corner of 128th Street, wrote “Colored Shoppe” on one of the business’s windows. None of the restaurant’s windows were broken during the disorder, even as all the white-owned businesses on that block had windows broken. Across the street, on the southeast corner of 128th Street, the owner of Black-owned Williams Drug Store or his niece, his only staff member, responded the same way, painting “Colored Store, Nix Jack” in each of the two window panes that faced 128th Street. That message likely went up after the front windows of the drug store were broken sometime during the disorder. Only recently opened, the drug store may not have been widely known to be a Black-owned business. The windows on which the sign was painted were not damaged. In Battle's Pharmacy on the northeast corner of 128th Street across 7th Avenue from the Cozy Shoppe, the staff did not follow their neighbors in putting up signs to identify it as Black-owned. It had been open for three years, but it too had windows broken.
Even as some groups left 125th Street and windows were broken on 7th Avenue, individuals did get through the police perimeter to break windows on 125th Street. Around 8:50 PM, a window was broken in the Willow Cafeteria at 207 West 125th Street, at the western end of the building that occupied the northwest corner of 7th Avenue. The presence of Patrolman Eppler, a member of the crew of Emergency Truck #5 stationed in front of the cafeteria at this time, did not protect the business from damage, but he did arrest Frank Wells, a twenty-six-year-old Black man, for breaking the window. Wells lived nearby, on 123rd Street near 7th Avenue, two blocks to the south. He may have been on 125th Street as part of the protests by the Young Liberators and other Communist Party affiliated organizations, as he was later represented by an ILD lawyer. Wells may not have actually broken the cafeteria window but instead have been picked out of a group on the street by Eppler given that the offense with which he was later charged was not breaking windows. -
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2022-05-23T17:58:35+00:00
8:00 PM to 8:30 PM
29
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2024-01-11T20:53:54+00:00
At 8:00 PM, people crowded both the corners of 8th and 7th Avenues and the sidewalks of 125th Street between them — except in front of the Kress store, where police continued to move on anyone who attempted to stop. When Louise Thompson returned to 125th Street and 8th Avenue at that time she found the situation that the reporter for the Afro-American had watched develop in the preceding half an hour, people on all four corners, not just the side of 8th Avenue closest to the Kress store. Walking along 125th Street to 7th Avenue, she found the four corners of that intersection similarly occupied.
The other change Thompson noticed as she walked to 7th Avenue was that by 8:00 PM “most of the windows [were] broken on 125th Street." Carlton Moss described the same sight when he arrived at 125th Street and 7th Avenue from uptown; store window after store window broken on 125th Street. Among the damaged stores were likely Myladys shop, the W. T. Grant department store, and the McCrory and Woolworths 5 & 10 cent stores on the south side of the street, and the Conrad Schmidt Music Shop, Adler Shoes, Scheer Clothing, Howard Suits, Minks Haberdashery, Savon Clothes store, and General Stationery & Supplies store on the north side. Broken windows meant holes in the large store windows, not that they had been entirely smashed; only after being hit multiple times would all the glass in the large display windows break and the merchandise inside them be accessible to looters. That danger is a likely topic of conversation between the patrolman and the store manager photographed on 125th Street, possibly around this time. While much of the glass remained in the display window, there was a hole large enough to allow them to speak. However, the only damage to the Kress store on 125th Street was the one window broken around 6:15 PM, thanks to the police deployed there to keep crowds from gathering.
Windows being broken along 125th Street were likely part of what Inspector Di Martini was referring to when he said that while standing in front of the Kress store he “noticed the crowds becoming excited” around 8:00 PM. Police had been allowing people to walk along 125th Street, as Thompson had, to keep the crowds moving rather than becoming a “mass demonstration.” With the numbers of people on the sidewalk grown large, and officers numbering in the hundreds arriving on the scene, police began to push people back to 8th and 7th Avenues. Senior police officers explained to reporters that they were establishing a cordon to protect both the Kress store and the other damaged businesses on 125th Street. At 8th Avenue, James Ford, a white Communist Party leader, saw the police “driving the people back to 8th Ave from Kress store.” Arriving around 8:00 PM, he watched mounted police riding on the sidewalk and patrolmen using their clubs, causing “resentment” among the crowd. Ford also heard “crashes of glass” as some of those at that end of 125th Street reacted by breaking more windows, including perhaps on 8th Avenue near the corner, where Andy's florist and the vacant storefronts at 2314, 2320, and 2324 8th Avenue, all of which had windows broken.
At the intersection with 7th Avenue, police were making similar attempts to keep groups of people from 125th Street. Among the small groups Louise Thompson encountered, “there were people who were infuriated,” about rumors that a boy was dead, which some compared to lynching, but also about conditions on 125th Street, that the stores “didn’t employ negroes” and charged high prices for inferior goods. She also saw “a few people” with copies of the leaflet distributed by the Young Liberators. Carlton Moss too heard rumors about a boy being killed from people at 125th Street and 7th Avenue, as well as cries to “Run dem white folks outa Harlem” — leading him to put two white friends who were with him, a man and a woman, into a taxi so they could leave Harlem. When Charles Romney returned from warning his wife to stay off the streets, he found the crowd growing, and patrolmen and mounted police on the sidewalk trying to move them. On the southwest corner, Thompson encountered Black patrolmen among the officers “pushing the people back,” and “saw one patrolman throw his billy [club] into the crowds while the mounted police were riding them down.” With police batons swinging, this could have been when Andrew Lyons, a thirty-seven-year-old Black man, received the head injury which would later kill him. Like Ford, Thompson and Moss also heard breaking glass; Thompson “occasionally…heard a few rocks breaking windows,” whereas Moss heard lots of crashing glass. He also heard someone claiming, “We got Childs — Bastards don’t ‘llow Niggahs in dare, we got ‘em,” referring to the white-owned restaurant at 272 West 125th Street, on the opposite end of the block near 8th Avenue. Louise Thompson attributed the windows being broken in stores to resentment at police tactics and the refusal to allow people to gather and seek information at the Kress store.
The crews of the emergency trucks, the police riot squad, were deployed at the intersection with 7th Avenue, likely indicating that there were more people and more windows being broken there than at 8th Avenue. With at least two trucks, and perhaps as many as six in the area, there would have been ten or more patrolmen armed with rifles, shotguns, or Thompson machine guns (tommy guns) among the police. Many of the Black residents coming to 125th Street in response to the rumors spreading through Harlem would have come via 7th Avenue as it was the major traffic route through Harlem, carrying two lanes of traffic in each direction, separated by an island planted with trees. The homes in the blocks surrounding 7th Avenue, especially north of 125th Street, were occupied almost exclusively by Black residents. By contrast, 8th Avenue was a narrower street, with only one lane of traffic each way, an elevated railroad track running above the middle of the street, and fewer Black residents to its west, thanks to St. Nicholas Park and the presence of white neighborhoods. (There was a stop on the elevated train line at 8th Avenue and 125th that would have brought people — whereas the subway stop was a block east of 7th Avenue, at Lenox Avenue.)
The islands in the center of 7th Avenue contributed to how many people could gather at the intersection with 125th Street, providing a place for some of those an Afro-American reporter observed “overflowing” the corners to go. One such group appeared in a widely reprinted image taken by a Daily News photographer. The concrete barriers on either side of the island are visible in the photograph, as is a tree, and a caption identified the location as 125th Street and 7th Avenue. A patrolman is moving toward the Black men and women in the island, indicating that police efforts to move people away from 125th Street extended to the island. A rock hit the white photographer, twenty-eight-year-old Everett Breuer, in the head after he took the image, so the officer may have been responding to objects being thrown at nearby businesses. One man close to the patrolman is bent over; the caption described him as falling down. He may also have been pushed down or hit by the patrolman; another man obstructs the view of what has happened between the patrolman and the man. Two women are among the four other people in the image; women continued to be the significant presence among those responding to rumors about what had happened in the Kress store that they had been from the moment Rivera had been grabbed.
Groups of people were also on the corners of 125th Street on the eastern side of 7th Avenue by this time. Around 8:30 PM, some of those people began throwing rocks at windows of stores on the eastern side of 7th Avenue, the first reported attacks on businesses beyond the block containing the Kress store. Herbert’s Blue Diamond Jewelry store on the northeast corner of 7th Avenue seems to have been the initial target. As Carlton Moss watched, people threw rocks at the white-owned store’s windows. -
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2022-05-23T17:58:09+00:00
7:00 PM to 7:30 PM
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2024-01-11T20:12:15+00:00
Just after 7:00 PM, a woman on 8th Avenue cried out that a hearse had pulled up at the rear entrance of the Kress store on 124th Street to get the body of the dead boy. Thanks to police clearing the sidewalk in front of the store, there were groups of people on 8th Avenue to hear her call. Some responded by moving to the rear of the store. They may have been joined by residents of a Salvation Army hostel for homeless men located opposite the store. Several police officers had been stationed at the rear entrance earlier by Inspector Di Martini; additional officers followed the crowd from 8th Avenue. Stones were soon being thrown, breaking windows in the Kress store and hitting at least two police officers, Patrolman Michael Kelly, assigned to a radio car, and Detective Charles Foley. Whether the officers were targeted or caught between the crowd and store windows is unclear. Police did not arrest anyone for throwing the stones. Two mounted policemen were moving the crowd away from the rear of the store when Joe Taylor, the Black leader of the Young Liberators, arrived at 124th Street, on his way to 125th Street, having been “put out” of the West 123rd St police station together with others seeking information.
By 7:15 PM, there were no longer groups of people on 124th Street at the rear of the store; the crew of an emergency truck that arrived at 8th Avenue and 124th Street at that time as part of the reinforcements called by Inspector Di Martini found that “everything was quiet.” An ambulance from Harlem Hospital arrived at the same time to treat Patrolman Kelly. His injury was serious enough that he was taken to the hospital for an x-ray. Joe Taylor also left 124th Street around that time, moved on by police he said were shooting their guns in the air. He had heard a rumor that the boy who had been beaten lived at 410 Manhattan Avenue, so headed south to investigate.
Around the same time, 7:15 PM, Inspector Di Martini returned to 125th Street. He found that there too “everything was calm.” There were no people in front of the Kress store, small groups gathered elsewhere on the street, but no “mass demonstration.” Di Martini thought that, as “the people of this part of the city of N. Y. have been very friendly with me,” “they would take my word that no child had been injured.” However, although he “spoke to all of the groups on 125th Street until [he] was hoarse,” they were not convinced.
As Di Martini was futilely speaking with groups gathered around the Kress store, Louise Thompson walked from 7th Avenue to 8th Avenue. With police not permitting people to stand in front of the Kress store, she found “numerous people who were on the corner” and spent “a length of time” talking with them. There were white men and women among the groups Thompson encountered, but “not very many.” More Black residents joined Thompson on 125th Street as rumors spread further through the neighborhood. Charles Romney, a Black West Indian activist involved in a range of political organizations, who was returning home from the YMCA on 135th Street, had noticed crowds on West 117th Street running uptown around 7:00 PM. When he asked “what it was all about,” he was told “that a boy in Kress store was murdered.” Romney followed them “to go to 125th Street to see if I could get any information."
Additional members of the Young Liberators had also arrived on 125th Street. At 7:15 PM, a Black reporter for the Afro-American encountered “some white youngsters [who] were passing out handbills” at the corner of 7th Avenue, a leaflet based on the information brought to their office. The mimeographed page had handwritten text at the top that read, “Child Brutally Beaten. Woman attacked by Boss and Cops = Child near DEATH.” The remaining typewritten text read:ONE HOUR AGO A TWELVE-YEAR-OLD NEGRO BOY WAS BRUTALLY BEATEN BY THE MANAGEMENT OF KRESS FIVE-AND-TEN-CENT STORE.
THE BOY IS NEAR DEATH
HE WAS MERCILESSLY BEATEN BECAUSE THEY THOUGHT HE HAD ‘STOLEN’ A FIVE CENT KNIFE.
A NEGRO WOMAN WHO SPRANG TO THE DEFENSE OF THE BOY HAD HER ARMS BROKEN BY THESE THUGS AND WAS THEN ARRESTED.
WORKERS, NEGROES AND WHITE, PROTEST AGAINST THIS LYNCH ATTACK ON INNOCENT NEGRO PEOPLE. DEMAND THE RELEASE OF THE BOY AND WOMAN.
DEMAND THE IMMEDIATE ARREST OF THE MANAGER RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS LYNCH ATTACK.
DON'T BUY AT KRESS'S. STOP POLICE BRUTALITY IN NEGRO HARLEM.
JOIN THE PICKET LINE
While small groups of people were also gathered on the corner of 7th Avenue and 125th Street, as they were at the other end of the block, the Afro-American reporter found “all was quiet.” However, as he walked along the block toward the Kress store, he found a different situation, “a large number of people between Seventh and Eighth Avenues” and Inspector Di Martini and numerous police. He joined a group asking Di Martini what had happened in the store. A boy caught shoplifting had been let go, but rumors were being spread that he had been beaten or killed, the inspector told them. He also showed them the store window that had been broken. But he would not let reporters into the store or answer their question, "Well, where is the boy?”
When Louise Thompson walked in the opposite direction to the reporter, from 8th Avenue to 7th Avenue, just before 7:30 PM, she saw windows broken in businesses on the same side of 125th Street as the Kress store. As yet, that damage had not spread the length of the block. Channing Tobias, who returned to 125th Street around the time Thompson left, found no windows broken yet east of Blumstein’s store, about halfway between the Kress store and that corner. The scene had “quieted down” from the threatening crowds Tobias had encountered an hour or so earlier. Likely that lack of activity was why Thompson decided now was the time to go to her home, a ten-minute walk from 125th Street, to “tell my people what had happened.”
At 7:30 PM an ambulance arrived in front of Blumstein’s department store on 125th Street, several buildings east of the Kress store. Police had called it to treat Detective Foley, who had an injured shoulder after being hit earlier by a stone thrown by someone in the crowd that attacked the rear of the Kress store. By that time at least some of the police officers who had dispersed that crowd had returned to 125th Street. -
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2022-05-23T17:57:54+00:00
6:30 PM to 7:00 PM
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2024-01-11T19:50:23+00:00
Around 6:30 PM, Harry Gordon took James Parton’s place on a lamppost and started to speak to the people police had moved away from the Kress store. He had said only “Friends” when Patrolman Irwin Young dragged him to the ground and other police officers hit him with their nightsticks. Young claimed Gordon pulled his nightstick from his grasp and hit him with it. Gordon denied assaulting Young, saying that being pulled down from behind and beaten repeatedly left him unable to do anything. Police officers arrested Gordon and dragged him about thirty feet away into a radio car before any of the crowd on the street could interfere. As the car transported Gordon the short distance to the West 123rd Street police station, he claimed that the two officers in the car poked and kicked him, beatings that continued in the station and during the forty-eight hours he spent in police custody.
After watching Gordon’s arrest, Louise Thompson and others whom police had moved toward 7th Avenue returned to the Kress store. There they found three men picketing the store. Their placards identified them as members of the Young Liberators, who had made their way along the south side of 125th Street to the store while police had been moving people on the north side of the street away from store. The organization’s leader, Joe Taylor, was still inside the West 123rd Street police station seeking information on what had happened in the Kress store. The placards read “Kress Brutally Beats and Seriously Injures Negro Child and Negro Women. Negro and White Don’t Buy Here” and “Kress Brutally Beats Negro Child,” reflecting the reports earlier brought to the Young Liberators’ office. Two of those carrying placards were unemployed white men, named Sam Jameson and Murray Samuels, both nineteen years of age; the third was an older Black man, thirty-nine-year-old Claudio Viabolo.
While pickets in front of white businesses on 125th Street had become a familiar sight in the previous year, those pickets had mostly been Black women, joined by a small number of Black men. The mix of white and Black protesters was typical of the Communist Party pickets seen elsewhere in Harlem as part of labor disputes. Picketers had rarely been arrested before a court decision handed down on October 31, 1934, usually only if they became involved in struggles with shoppers or staff. Since the decision restricting picketing to labor disputes, simply walking up and down in front of a business in any other circumstance could result in being arrested.
Police officers in front of the Kress store told the three men to move on, as they had others who had gathered in front of the store. When the men continued to picket, a group of police arrested them, including Patrolman Shannon, who had arrested Daniel Miller about thirty minutes earlier, and Sgt. Bauer, who had been inside the store before it closed. Jackson Smith, watching the arrests from inside the store, saw police take the placards and pull the men into the store vestibule, out of sight of most of those on the street. The three men were held there until they could be transported to the West 123rd Street police station.
Meanwhile, police stepped up their efforts to move people on 125th Street away from the Kress store, pushing them toward 8th Avenue. The number of people on the street had also grown by this time, fed by those beginning to make their way to shows in the nearby theaters. Reinforcements had also increased police numbers beyond those stationed at the store by Inspector Di Martini. After he learned that police had made arrests, he had telephoned for additional men. About fifteen patrolmen, six mounted police and uniformed men from five radio cars were on 125th Street by this time. Louise Thompson, who “walked up and down 125th Street” after seeing the picket at the Kress store, saw the “riot squads were out” and mounted police “ride the people off the sidewalk.” Those officers were able to move the groups of people back to the corner of 8th Avenue by 7:00 PM. A glimpse of how they did that is provided by a photograph published in the Daily News. A patrolman in the center of the image is pushing a man back and swinging his nightstick towards him. To his left is another patrolman walking toward the crowd of men and women. Behind him, next to the photographer, is a horse, indicating the presence of a mounted patrolman. Men and women in front of the police are turning and walking in the direction the officers are moving them, while those to the right of the police remain standing, either because they are not obstructing the sidewalk or because police have yet to turn their attention to them. -
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2022-05-23T17:57:39+00:00
6:00 PM to 6:30 PM
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James Parton and Daniel Miller arrived in front of the Kress store around 6:15 PM. Louise Thompson returned to 125th Street around the same time, making her way from 7th Avenue toward 8th Avenue a little behind the two men. She encountered more people on that block than when she had been pushed out of the Kress store. Small groups talked more excitedly about a range of grievances in addition to the treatment of the boy grabbed in the store: against the agency providing relief for those without work, high rents, prices charged by white businesses and their lack of Black staff. Harry Gordon, a twenty-year-old white student and member of the New York Student League, an organization affiliated with the Communist Party, and two (likely white) companions walking along this block of 125th Street also encountered groups of “excited” people. Unlike Thompson, Gordon claimed he did not know that something had happened in the Kress store. Nor could he get “anything at all” from the groups on the street about the cause of their agitation, likely because he was a white man. He and his companions may have actually have been in the area as part of the Communist Party response to the rumors circulating in Harlem, or, like Channing Tobias, have come for the entertainments of 125th Street at the end of their workday. When Tobias completed his shopping, he came back to 125th Street and 7th Avenue and continued along the street “to go the theatre.” However, he found “the crowd was pretty thick” and “so threatening” that he reconsidered those plans. Although Black residents made up the majority of those who patronized 125th Street in 1935, white men and women from neighborhoods further west and east would have been among the crowds on the street.
Parton and Miller set up their stepladder and banner in front of the Kress store. While street speakers typically set up on the corners on 7th Avenue and Lenox Avenue, speaking elsewhere on the street as Parton and Miller did was not uncommon even if it offered less space for an audience. Communist Party speakers set up in front of the offices of affiliated organizations and had spoken in front of the Empire Cafeteria during their boycott campaign the previous year. Inside the Kress store, the ladder being placed in front of the store caused one of the four staff who remained to call the manager, Jackson Smith, to the front to see what was happening.
Parton climbed the ladder and spoke first. Few in the small groups around the Kress store stopped talking to listen to him, making it difficult to hear his brief appeal for Blacks and whites to come together against the trouble in the store. He then introduced Miller, who climbed the stepladder and started to speak. The white man had spoken only a few words when someone in the crowd threw an object at the Kress store, breaking one of the display windows. Such attacks had not occurred during the campaigns targeting white businesses on 125th Street the previous year; however, windows in the Empire Cafeteria had been broken during the protests organized by the Communist Party. Both Black and white men and women were on street around Miller when he spoke, including Louise Thompson and Harry Gordon.
The sound of breaking glass brought an immediate reaction from the police in front of the store entrance. Patrolman Shannon pulled Miller down from the stepladder and arrested him. Other patrolmen cleared the sidewalk as the people around Miller scattered. Channing Tobias watched from that side of the street as “a policemen came up on the sidewalk on his horse and attempted to charge through the crowd.” Seeing the crowd come back after the officer went by, Tobias “decided it was going to be some real trouble,” and left for home. Police officers followed some of the scattering crowd, including Louise Thompson and Harry Gordon, across 125th Street, pushing groups east away from the Kress store and towards 7th Avenue. About 300 feet further down the block, Parton climbed a lamppost and again spoke to the crowd, saying “that a boy had been killed and that a crowd should gather in protest.”