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Public Hearings - Outbreak (March-April 1935), 25-26, Subject Files, Box 408, Folder 8 (Roll 194), Records of Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, 1934-1945 (New York City Municipal Archives).
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2022-07-14T17:02:48+00:00
Police find Lino Rivera
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2024-01-29T16:32:22+00:00
Sometime during the disorder, police tried to locate Lino Rivera so they could show that he had not been killed or beaten. Chief Inspector Seely ordered the boy be located, according to the New York Times, which indicated that those efforts started after 9:00 PM when senior officers took charge of the police response. However, the Daily News, New York Herald Tribune, Home News, New York Times, Times Union, and Afro-American newspapers simply reported that police searched for Rivera throughout the night. They were unable to find him because the home address they had was incorrect: 272 Morningside Avenue rather than 272 Manhattan Avenue. (The New York Age story written early in the disorder included the incorrect address.) The Daily News reported that “the mistake was made” when Eldridge gave the address to an officer at the West 123rd Street station over the telephone — not that he had misrecorded the address as the New York Herald Tribune reported or that Rivera had given a false address as the Home News reported. According to Louise Thompson, a group of women who had tried to locate Rivera at the beginning of the disorder also had the wrong address, although one on the correct street: 410 Manhattan Avenue. Joe Taylor, the leader of the Young Liberators, also heard a rumor that Rivera lived at 410 Manhattan Avenue and went to investigate around 7:30 PM.
At 1:30 AM, Officer Eldridge was woken at his home on Whitlock Avenue in the Bronx by a telephone call telling him to report to the Chief Inspector at the West 123rd Street station, he told a hearing of the MCCH. The police officers who had been at the Kress store, Eldridge and Patrolman Donahue, had gone off duty at 4:00 PM. Until he was woken, Eldridge thought Rivera had been arrested and was unaware of what was happening in Harlem. He was able to go directly to Rivera’s home, arriving around 2:00 AM. He found him asleep, according to his testimony. The boy had not been there all night, as initially reported in the New York Evening Journal and New York Sun, but had gone out around 9:00 PM. Rivera had a cup of coffee and returned home after about twenty-five minutes because he "saw there was a lot of trouble around,” the New York World Telegram and Times Union reported. Rivera said Eldridge told him people thought he was dead, the New York World Telegram and New York Herald Tribune reported.
Eldridge took Rivera to the West 123rd Street station. Only the New York Sun described Rivera as “blubbering and frightened.” Rivera told a reporter for the New York World Telegram that he was at the station for about half an hour. During that time, police questioned him, he spoke with reporters and was photographed with Lt. Battle and Officer Eldridge. Newspaper stories that quoted his statements mentioned that he spoke to two different officers, Kear, according to the Daily News, and Captain Oliver, according to the New York Evening Journal and New York Sun. Battle told the MCCH that he asked Rivera “if he had been hurt by anyone and had he been arrested.” The New York Evening Journal, New York Post, New York Sun, and New York American published separate stories about Rivera’s statements. The Daily News, New York Herald Tribune, and Atlanta World appended his statements to larger stories on the disorder. Reporters also interviewed and photographed Rivera at his home later on March 20. The New York World Telegram, New York Herald Tribune, and La Prensa published separate stories based on those interviews, while the New York Times included Rivera in a larger story.
Inspector Di Martini took credit for having Battle appear in the images. “It was my idea to get Lieut. Battle to pose with the boy and get the picture into the streets as soon as possible,” he told a hearing of the MCCH. Battle said the reason Rivera posed with him was “for the moral effect.” Not made explicit in either statement was that having the boy photographed with a Black police officer added to the credibility of the image and cut across the racial divisions expressed in the disorder. “A lot” of pictures were taken, Rivera told a MCCH hearing, but only six different published images have been identified. An Associated Press photo that showed Battle seated with his arm around Rivera, who was standing, was published in the New York Times, New York Post, New York Herald Tribune, and New York Sun. Rivera was only 4 feet 8 inches tall according to the New York Herald Tribune, so that pose put the two on the same level. Their height difference was visible in an image of them standing in the same pose taken by an International Photo Agency photographer. That difference was further emphasized in the photograph of this pose published in the Daily Mirror in which Battle is looking down at Rivera. (The Daily Worker took offense at Battle having "his arm protectively around" Rivera as the "Harlem masses...know that Battles would kill a worker on the slightest excuse.") Photographs taken by the International Photo Agency and Daily News revealed that Eldridge was on the other side of Rivera in both poses. Eldridge did not have an arm around Rivera, as Battle did, so was detached from their grouping. A second Black officer added to message Di Martini wanted to send. However, Battle was in uniform and well known as the senior Black police officer in New York City, while Eldridge was in plainclothes, a suit and tie, and not a public figure. It was likely on that basis that some photographers and editors decided not to include Eldridge. An ANS photo showed Rivera and Battle standing surrounded by white reporters, looking at a camera to their left. Where the other photographs showed Rivera unharmed, in contradiction of the rumors circulating in Harlem, the ANS image presented him as telling his story. Rivera, dressed in a leather jacket, is smiling in all the photographs. Photographed at home later that day, Rivera wore a suit and tie because he said his mother suggested he “dress for the picture." In the image published in the New York Evening Journal, he shows a pensive expression rather than smiling. (The New York Times reporter who visited Rivera at home described him as "a dejected figure," "overwhelmed by the fact that his desire for a ten-cent knife had precipitated the riot and resultant bloodshed.")
If the primary purpose of finding Rivera was to show that he was alive and unharmed, his appearance at the police station also brought some consistency to reports about the identity of the boy who had been in Kress' store. Louise Thompson heard from the women she spoke to in Kress' store that a "colored boy" aged ten to twelve years had been beaten. The signs carried by the Young Liberators who picketed the store an hour or so later referred to a "Negro child" and the leaflets their organization distributed an hour later later described a "12 year old Negro boy." The first newspaper stories published appear to have relied on those rumors and leaflets in describing the boy; with neither Eldridge nor Donahue still on duty, police apparently did not have more precise information until Rivera was found. The New York American mentioned a "colored boy" and a "10-year-old Negro boy," the Daily News a 12-year old "colored boy," the New York Evening Journal a 15-year-old "Negro boy," the Daily Mirror a "little colored boy," the Home News a "young colored boy," and the New York Sun a "Negro boy." Early stories in some Black newspapers featured similar descriptions, a "small Negro boy" in the Norfolk Journal and Guide and a 10-year-old "colored boy" in the Indianapolis Recorder on March 23. Other stories in Black newspapers simply referred to the boy's age not his race: a 16 year old boy in the Atlanta World on March 21, a 12-year-old boy in the New York Age, a 14-year-old boy in the Chicago Defender, and a 16 year old boy in the Afro-American and Pittsburgh Courier on March 23. Newspapers published on March 20 after police found Rivera identified him as a 16-year-old Puerto Rican, in the New York Post and New York World-Telegram, or a "Puerto Rican youth" in the New York Herald Tribune and Times Union. The New York World-Telegram pointed to the differences between Rivera and the boy of the rumors by putting Negro in quotation marks when reporting the rumors and the text of the Young Liberators leaflet. By contrast, the New York Times referred to a 16-year-old "Negro boy" even after Rivera had been found, as did the New York Sun and New York Evening Journal. While the New York Times did eventually identify Rivera as Puerto Rican when he appeared in the Adolescents court after the disorder, the New York Evening Journal continued to describe Rivera as "Negro," while the New York Sun made no mention of his race. Those newspapers' persistent use of "Negro" may have been intended to convey that Rivera was dark-skinned; the New York American described him in those terms, as a "dark-skinned 16-year-old Porto Rican" in a story reporting an interview with the boy in his home, while the Brooklyn Daily Eagle described him as a "Negro born in Porto Rico." Editions of the other newspapers published after Rivera was found, including the Black newspapers, simply switched to identify him as Puerto Rican. (Historian Lorrin Thomas argued that the New York Amsterdam News "failed to identify Rivera as Puerto Rican, referring to him instead as a 'young Negro boy,'" but did not provide a citation. The March 23 issue of that newspaper is missing the news sections, but the March 30 issue identified Rivera as a "16-year-old Puerto Rican youth.")
Police found Rivera too late for his appearance to impact the disorder, although it may have contributed to the violence not continuing the next evening. However, the delays in locating him fed rumors that he was not in fact the boy grabbed in Kress’ store. Reflecting questions raised in hearings, the MCCH report noted that, “The final dramatic attempt on the part of police to placate the populace by having the unharmed Lino Rivera photographed with the Negro police lieutenant Samuel Battle only furnished the basis for the rumor that Rivera, who was on probation for having placed a slug in a subway turnstile, was being used as a substitute to deceive people.” After members of the MCCH met with Mayor La Guardia soon after their appointment, on March 22, the New York Herald Tribune and New York Sun both reported that “some” of them said that many in Harlem did not believe that Lino Rivera was the boy who had been caught in the Kress store. (Stories about the meeting in the New York Times, New York Post, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and Daily Worker included no mention of those comments.) An Afro-American journalist reported the rumors before the first hearing of the MCCH: “At the present time Harlem is divided into those who has been presented by the police as the boy in the case, is not the boy who was beaten in the store. They declare that Lino is being paid off to be the scapegoat and a camouflage....The AFRO reporter has run scores of tips about the boy who actually stole the knife, or a bag of jelly-beans, as it was first given out. Everything so far has run up a blind alley. One clue to the real boy is that all during the riot he was referred to as a 12-year-old boy, but became a 16-year-old one with the finding of Lino Riviera." The New York Age hinted at those rumors when it described Rivera as “believed to have been the cause of the whole affair.” Writing in The New Masses, Louise Thompson reported that a man and woman who had been in the store said Rivera was older and taller than the boy they saw. Other publications did not raise the issue. However, as the Afro-American journalist predicted, questions about Rivera were raised in a hearing of the MCCH. In the first hearing, Police Lieutenant Battle was asked, "Is there any evidence that would indicate that Rivera is not the boy? There has been such rumor." He simply answered, "No." L. F. Cole, a thirty-year-old Black clerk who had been in the Kress store, also testified that he had "no doubt" that Rivera was the boy he had seen taken away by police. The question was raised again at the third hearing on April 20. Mention that he had been on parole after being caught putting slugs in a subway turnstile prompted an interjection from "Mrs. Burrows": "My impression is that this boy is not the boy. We have testimony here that he got into trouble before March 19th, 1935. They had a boy under supervision. This is not the boy. They got a boy through these people and this is the boy they presented." Hays, chairing the hearing, pushed the ILD lawyers for evidence that another boy was beaten in the store. They had found none nor could they establish that Rivera had received lenient treatment. A month later, Jackson Smith, the store manager, confirmed in the subcommittee's final hearing that Rivera was the boy he saw from the office, with Donahue and again outside the grand jury room after the disorder. After listening to several questions trying to undermine the certainty of that identification, Hays announced "there is no question about it." Given the lack of evidence to the contrary, there is no reason to think Rivera was not person grabbed in the store. The shoppers who saw him in the store could have assumed he was younger, given his height. Similarly, seeing that he was dark-skinned, they could have assumed he was a Black rather than Puerto Rican.
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Crowds incited by white men (4)
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The arrests of white men for inciting crowds all occurred in the vicinity of Kress’ store on West 125th Street and involved efforts to speak or picketing. White men protesting in those ways on Harlem’s streets were a familiar sight by 1935. In the 1930s, the Communist Party had an office at 415 Lenox Avenue; affiliated organizations had offices nearby: the International Labor Defense four blocks south at 326 Lenox Avenue, the Young Liberators at 262 Lenox Avenue, and the League of Struggle for Negro Rights and Negro Liberator newspaper at 2162 7th Avenue until just before the disorder, when they moved to 308 West 141st Street. Most of those who worked in those offices and protested in Harlem were white men and women. Although the four men arrested did not identify themselves as Communists, the organizations of which they did admit membership — the Nurses and Hospital League in the case of Daniel Miller, the New York Student League in the case of Harry Gordon, and the Young Liberators in the cases of Sam Jameson and Murray Samuels — were all connected to the Party. The men also fit the profile of those the Party assigned to work in Harlem described to historian Mark Naison: they were “in their teens or early twenties and came either from the two colleges located in the Harlem Section — Columbia and City — or form the immigrant neighborhoods surrounding Black Harlem.” Miller was twenty-four years of age and lived on Morningside Avenue on the boundary of Harlem. Gordon was twenty years of age and lived in the Bronx. Jameson and Samuels were both nineteen years of age, with Jameson living in Washington Heights north of Harlem and Samuels in Brooklyn. The number of Black residents who joined the Party and related organizations did grow slowly, but numbered only a few thousand by the time of the disorder. By 1935, larger numbers did participate in demonstrations led by Communist Party members, particularly those in support of the defense of the Scottsboro boys.
Speaking from stepladders, as Miller and Gordon tried to do, and picketing, as Jameson and Samuels did, were favored tactics of Communist activity in Harlem. Party members joined the streetcorner speakers who had been a staple of Harlem life throughout the 1920s, taking to corners “from 137th Street & 7th Avenue, north to 144th Street and Lenox Avenue, south to 110th Street and 5th Avenue," according to historian Mark Naison. When they first appeared, the mostly white Communist Party speakers frequently competed with Black nationalist speakers for locations and attention, especially on the corners of Lenox Avenue from 133rd to 135th Streets, and challenged their calls for race-based action with appeals for unity between Black and white workers. By September, 1934, Roi Ottley bemoaned the predominance of Communist street speakers in his column in the New York Amsterdam News. Communist Party pickets were initially less prominent in Harlem. When Sufi Hamid and his followers began picketing white-owned businesses seeking jobs for Black workers, first on 135th Street and later on 125th Street, the Party remained on the margins, at odds with the race-based appeals, even as the campaign expanded in 1934. When that movement splintered, however, the Party moved to mount a boycott campaign on their terms against the Empire Cafeteria on Lenox Avenue just north of 125th Street, seeking gains for white workers as well as jobs for Black workers. A week and a half of picketing and protest meetings led by Young Liberators, and store windows twice being broken, brought an agreement to hire black staff.
The reaction of police to the white men protesting on 125th Street was typical of the violent repression of Communist Party demonstrations in New York City from when they began in 1928, a repression which was explored by historian Marilynn Johnson. As early as September 1929, the New York Amsterdam News published a letter describing a Black Communist speaker, Richard Moore, and the white Communists who tried to take his place, being pulled from a stepladder by police “without the slightest provocation,” notwithstanding claims of a disruptive demonstration reported in the New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, and New York Amsterdam News. Mayor La Guardia had been trying to change the police approach since his election in 1934, historian Marilynn Johnson shows, requiring more tolerance of protest and a neutral stance in labor disputes. However, Harlem residents had witnessed the limits of that change a year before the disorder. Police who arrived to manage the crowd at a Communist Party meeting protesting the treatment of the Scottsboro boys suddenly drove radio cars on to the sidewalk and into the crowd, and then threw tear gas and bomb canisters. Whatever the mayor prescribed, hostility to Communists remained strong among rank-and-file police. It was that attitude that was on display in the speed with which officers moved against the men in front of Kress’ store, while not arresting James Parton, who introduced the two white men who tried to speak, or Black members of the crowd.
Some other white men and women appear to have been among the crowds around 125th Street. Louise Thompson told a MCCH hearing that she “did not see many white people," who amounted to only "a very few” percentage of the groups around 125th Street. Some of those white men and women may also have been affiliated with the Communist Party. Almost an hour after the arrests of Jameson and Samuels, the last of the four white men arrested, the Young Liberators distributed leaflets on 125th Street, and perhaps in surrounding areas. At least some of those handing out those documents would have had to have been white, given the makeup of the organization. So too would some of those who distributed a second leaflet, printed by the Communist Party an hour or so later.
The other four white men arrested in the disorder, however, do not appear to have been connected with the Party. Leo Smith, the one white man arrested for breaking windows, was apprehended early in the disorder when white Communist party members were among the crowds, but there is no evidence linking him to the Party. There is no evidence of what the one white man arrested for possession of a weapon, Jose Perez, was doing in Harlem, and he may not have been involved in the disorder at all. The two other white men were arrested for looting, one with stolen clothing in his possession, the other in unknown circumstances. The lack of information about those arrests means they do not offer clear evidence that white men were among the crowds on Harlem's streets after disorder spread beyond 125th Street.
Accounts of the events of the disorder similarly lack clear evidence of the participation of white men. While the MCCH Report made no mention of white men other than the protesters in front of Kress’ store, both white and Black newspapers did include whites among their general descriptions of the crowds on the streets of Harlem. However, the statements in the Black press appear to be based on the arrest of the four men in front of Kress’ store at the very beginning of the disorder rather than any wider presence or participation. Under the subtitle “Some Rioters White,” the Afro-American asserted that “there were no strict opposing camps racially. Some of the most vicious rioters were white men who egged the crowd on and who handed out the leaflets and carried picket signs.” Prof. G M James, in a column in the New York Age offering an assessment of the disorder, reported that “I am informed by eye witnesses that (1) the riot was precipitated by both white and colored assailants alike.” Other Black newspapers that included white people in the crowds were less explicit about their role. The Norfolk Journal and Guide reported “About 4000 colored men and women and their white sympathizers took the law into their own hands when they heard that 'a small Negro boy' had been brutally or fatally beaten by a manger of a five and ten cent store for stealing either candy or a penknife valued at five cents.” The Atlanta World was even less explicit: “Whites joined their Negro fellow citizens as the story of the fatal beating of the youth by the store clerks gained more magnitude.”
The Daily News, New York Herald Tribune, and Brooklyn Daily Eagle explicitly included white men among those breaking windows during the disorder, but only in broad statements. The Daily News described “armed bands of colored and white guerillas, swinging crowbars and clubs, roamed through barricaded Harlem from 110th to 145th St., assaulting every person of opposite color to cross their paths, setting fires and smashing shop windows after a night of fighting.” Almost the same language appeared in the New York Herald Tribune. A similar description in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle added looting and clashes with police: “Bands of men and women, in some case joined by whites and in other cases assaulting any white they met, roared up and down the byways of Harlem, smashing more than 200 windows, looting stores, and fleeing from or fighting police.”
Just how many white men were in the crowds on Harlem’s streets is uncertain. The small proportion of those arrested who were white men does not necessarily reflect how many were present; white police officers were likely more inclined to arrest Black men and women in this context, and it seems like few of the Black officers stationed in Harlem made arrests during the disorder. Most newspaper stories do not offer an assessment of the size of the white presence; those that do range from a "sprinkling” in the New York Times to “many” in the New York Evening Journal to “hundreds” (in crowds of several thousand) in the Daily News. James Hubert of the Urban League was alone in claiming that white men made up a majority of the crowds, based on a report from a (Black?) member of his staff: "A man from my own office who went out into the streets said that fully 75 per cent of the persons causing the trouble were whites," he told a reporter from the New York Herald Tribune. "They got up on soap boxes and agitated and incited the Negroes. I am told that the persons who threw bricks into windows included many whites who rode about in taxicabs.” The details Hubert offered in support of his generalization do not actually put white men in the crowds on the street. As well as following the Black press in focusing on the men who picketed Kress’ store, he locates white participants in vehicles, not crowds. Cars regularly appear as targets of violence in descriptions of the disorder; they are not otherwise reported as sources of violence.
White men in the crowds in Harlem’s streets were not necessarily drawn to the neighborhood by news of the disorder, as the Daily News claimed. Many white-owned businesses on West 125th Street refused, discouraged or discriminated against Black customers, highlighting that the district catered to whites from surrounding neighborhoods, including those in the blocks immediately south and east whose populations changed from predominantly white in the 1930 census to predominantly Black in the 1940 census. Other white men came to Black Harlem for nightlife and vice.