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Public Hearings - Outbreak (March-April 1935), 28, Subject Files, Box 408, Folder 8 (Roll 194), Records of Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, 1934-1945 (New York City Municipal Archives).
1 2022-03-10T16:48:08+00:00 Anonymous 1 3 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 2023-07-27T20:46:52+00:00 AnonymousThis page is referenced by:
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9:00 PM to 9:30 PM
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Around 9:00 PM, soon after a window was broken in the Willow Cafeteria, Louise Thompson saw a group of people break through the police cordon on the corner of 125th Street and 7th Avenue. She had thought police had established some order at the intersection. Their cordon had prevented groups from going along the street to the Kress store, while officers in front of Herbert’s Blue Diamond Jewelry store on the east side had protected that business from further damage. As a result, Thompson had watched frustrated groups leave the area and move north and south on 7th Avenue. But then “another group broke through the police cordons and swept down to Kress’s once again,” and as Thompson watched, they “broke some windows.” Bricks hit the windows of Young’s Hat Store, the second store west of the corner at 201 West 125th Street. The hat store was in the same building as the Willow Cafeteria on the north side of the street. At least some of the broken windows in the four other stores in that building, the United Cigar store on the corner, the Minks Haberdashery next to it and the Savon Clothes store and General Stationery & Supplies store between the hat store and cafeteria, were likely the result of attacks at this time. Further west, in the building on the other side of the Harlem Opera House, all four businesses — the Conrad Schmidt Music Shop, Adler Shoes, Scheer Clothing, Howard Suits — had windows broken during the disorder, some likely at this time. That may be as far as group who got past police made it along 125th Street before police pushed them back to the corners. Beyond that building were the Empire Savings Bank and Loew's Victoria Theatre. No stores west of the theater suffered significant damage other than those on the corner of 8th Avenue. A clerk in Young’s Hat store reported that its windows were broken “right out,” hit repeatedly until little glass remained. With the glass gone, the merchandise displayed in the window was accessible to people on the street, and some of those hats were taken. There was no other evidence of merchandise being taken at this time, with most groups on the streets then apparently focused on breaking windows, and few store windows yet as damaged as those of the hat store.
Businesses, however, were no longer the only targets of violence. Three white men were also injured around this time near 125th Street, allegedly attacked by groups of Black men. All could have been on 125th Street making their way home, shopping or seeking entertainment, as they lived just west of Harlem, like the white man injured about thirty minutes earlier. Fifty-six-year-old Morris Werner received medical attention for a stab wound that he claimed was the result of being attacked by “by several unknown colored men” near the southwest corner of 125th Street and 7th Avenue. While typical of violence prosecuted as assault at other times in 1935, the injury was one of only two stabbings among the fifty-four assaults that would be reported in the disorder. Louise Thompson, with a group on that corner, did not mention such an assault. Nor did any of the journalists in the area write about it or police arrest anyone for being responsible. Werner may not have been the only white man injured at that intersection around this time. Three of the white journalists gathered there by the police perimeter suffered injuries. Harry Johnson, who worked for the New York American, was reportedly beaten by three Black men, leaving him with injuries to his face that required him to call his editors and ask them to send another reporter to take his place. Everett Breuer, a Daily News photographer, and James Martin, his assistant, were reportedly hit in the face by rocks as they took images of a group of Black men and women in the island in the middle of 7th Avenue. Those forms of violence were typical during the disorder, unlike Werner’s stab wounds. In neither case did police arrest anyone.
At the other end of the block of 125th Street on which the Kress store was located, two additional white men suffered injuries. Maurice Spellman received medical attention for cuts around his right eye that he said were the result of being attacked by several Black men around 9:00 PM at 8th Avenue and 125th Street. Groups of people had gathered there trying to get to the Kress store, but, as with the alleged assault on Werner, no journalist wrote about the attack, nor did police arrest anyone. At the same time a block further west on St. Nicholas Avenue up at 127th Street, Timothy Murphy, a twenty-nine-year-old rock driller on his way home, was knocked to the ground and hit and kicked by a group of Black men. He claimed one of those men said, “You white son-of-a-bitch, take it now,” a phrase that offered little explanation for the violence. While it referenced Murphy’s race, it did not make clear that was why he had been attacked let alone make any connection to rumors about a boy beaten or killed at the Kress store. There were few businesses in the area, so it was not somewhere groups would have come to break store windows. Rumors from 125th Street, however, would have reached residents.
Police witnessed the attack on Murphy unlike the other alleged assaults on white men at this time. Patrolman George Conn, in a radio car on its way to 125th Street, saw a group of around ten men gathered around Murphy. Jumping out of the car, Conn drew his pistol and fired a shot in the air to disperse the group as he ran toward them. As the men scattered, he fired a second shot at the group, hitting Paul Boyett, a twenty-year-old Black garage worker, in his right shoulder. Despite the wound, Boyett kept running toward his home, only a few buildings away at 310 West 127th Street. Conn caught up to him in the hallway and arrested Boyett despite his insistence that he was “an innocent onlooker” drawn to the disturbance who had not hit or kicked Murphy. Later, a trial jury did accept Boyett’s explanation and acquitted him. No one else was arrested for the assault on Murphy, who suffered cuts and bruises to his head, face and body, and a broken nose.
Somewhere on 125th Street, another police officer also responded to an assault on a white man around this time. Detective William Boyle attempted to “rescue an unknown white man being assaulted.” That man was likely having bricks and rocks thrown at him, as Boyle was hit in the left ankle. By 9:15 PM, Boyle was in the 28th Precinct station on West 123rd Street. Dr. Sayet, who earlier in the day had treated the Kress store staff bitten by Lino Rivera, arrived in an ambulance from Harlem Hospital at that time to treat Boyle’s cuts and bruises. The detective then remained on duty.
Given that there would have been many more white men and women on the streets around 125th Street at this time than those identified as being assaulted, even as they were far outnumbered by Black residents, the groups who directed violence at white individuals rather than white-owned businesses were a very small portion of those reacting to events at the Kress store. That violence occurred in the midst of the disorder; only those who attacked Timothy Murphy may have sought out someone to assault. The others encountered white men while focused on 125th Street and the Kress store. While at odds with later claims that the disorder was targeted at property, these attacks were in keeping with sentiments Thompson and Moss heard expressed in the crowds trying to get to the Kress store. The white identity of those rumored to have been involved in the boy’s death mattered to at least some of Harlem’s Black residents, directing their anger toward white individuals not only white property. Crucially, unlike the disorders of subsequent decades, that anger would have found targets at a time when significant numbers of white New Yorkers still frequented the businesses around 125th Street as well as worked in them.
While people on the four corners of 8th Avenue and 125th Street had not yet begun to move away and break windows at the time of the alleged attacks on the two white men, at the other end of the block more windows were being broken on 7th Avenue. On the northwest corner of 127th Street, around 9:00 PM, a window was broken in the saloon, next to the grocery store damaged a few minutes earlier. Three more windows were broken in the tailor and cleaning store in the middle of that block that had had a window broken earlier. As was the case earlier, those attacks do not appear to be the actions of a crowd acting together, but of small groups and individuals. They could have been the same people who had thrown objects at windows on this block earlier, or those people could have moved on and been replaced by others coming from or to 125th Street. There was still no evidence that police were in the area to deter or respond to these attacks. The white owners and staff of those businesses were still present; there was no indication that they were targeted by those breaking windows.
Fourteen blocks south of 125th Street, Lino Rivera left his home, where he had been since leaving the Kress store, at 9:00 PM. He had a cup of coffee somewhere relatively close by, where he saw “a lot of trouble around.” Whatever was happening likely involved some of the people that Carlton Moss had described people going south on 7th Avenue from 125th Street beginning around 8:30 PM. However, Rivera did not hear any explanation for the “trouble” that connected it with what had happened to him hours earlier. Perhaps still wary after that experience, he decided to cut short his plans for the evening, and returned home before 9:30 PM.
As Rivera was arriving home, Louise Thompson also decided to leave the streets and go to the home of a friend. For her, however, it was the lack of “trouble” and the diminishing number of people at 125th Street and 7th Avenue that appear to have prompted that decision. Police had cleared 125th Street of those who broke through the cordon half an hour earlier, and groups of people unable to reach the Kress store again began to disperse up and down 7th Avenue. Thompson likely joined those going south on 7th Avenue; when she returned about an hour later, it would be at 7th Avenue and 118th Street. -
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8:00 PM to 8:30 PM
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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. 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. 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, perhaps along 8th Avenue by the corners as well as on 125th Street.
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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Kress 5, 10 & 25c store front windows broken (10:40 PM)
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At 10:40 PM, a large display window in Kress' store at 256 West 125th Street broke after being hit by a brick. Patrolman Walter MacKenzie told the Harlem Magistrates Court that he saw William Ford, a seventeen-year-old Black laborer throw the brick, and them allegedly shout, "in a loud tone of voice "Shed white blood, kill the cops, there has been enough black blood shed now." A "very large and threatening crowd" gathered in response to Ford's shouts. By that time the large crowds on 125th Street had been cleared from the street and had broken into smaller groups, many of which scattered north and south up the avenues, but some groups remained. Ten minutes before windows were broken in Kress' store, Claude Jones allegedly threw a rock that broke a window at Blumstein's department store several buildings to to the east, and then called on the people on the street to attack police, drawing a large crowd. Around the same time, a white man named Thomas Wijstem was hit by a rock in front of the W. T. Grant store immediately east of Blumsteins, allegedly while being attacked by a group of Black men. Those incidents are likely what Louise Thompson was referring to when she told a public hearing of the MCCH that, "At a certain time the crowd broke through to the Kress store and broke more windows. The police tried to drive them back. They didn’t want to be driven back. They felt they wanted to be there. There was one young fellow yelling and screaming at the top of his voice.”
One or two display windows at the front of Kress' store had been broken earlier, at the beginning of the disorder, as well as more windows at the rear of the store not long after. However, a reporter for the Afro-American wrote that the store "suffered very little loss on the front." Repairs to the front of the store next day appear to have focused on only two sections of the store window, on the right side of the left entrance, in a photograph published in the New York American, and on the left side of the right entrance, where a ladder can be seen in Universal newsreel footage. Those repairs cannot have taken long. A photograph of Kress' store published in the Daily News on March 21 showed intact store windows, guarded by two police officers. A sustained police presence during the disorder appears to have protected the front of the store. Police established a cordon in front of Kress' store from the time it closed; officers were still there around 10 PM, when Detective Henry Roge was hit by a rock while standing in front of the store, and after the windows was broken at 10:40 PM, there were officers able to arrest William Ford. Later in the evening the police cordon extended to cover 125th Street from 8th Avenue to Lenox Avenue, with Kress' store remaining at its center, and as the base for police responding to the disorder. It was also the case that Ford was not alleged to have been trying to incite others to break more windows, as most of the other men arrested for inciting crowds allegedly did, but to attack police.
There is no mention of this specific incident in any newspapers reporting on the disorder. William Ford did appear in the Harlem Magistrates Court, on March 20, but his case was not among those about which the Home News reported details. Eventually sent to the grand jury, Ford was transferred to the Court of Special Sessions to be tried for both the misdemeanor forms of inciting a riot, and malicious mischief, an offense involving damage to property used in the prosecution of those who allegedly broke windows during the disorder. There ws no information on the outcome of that trial; Ford does not appear in the transcript of the 28th Police Precinct blotter that provides outcomes for most of those prosecuted in the Harlem Magistrates Court.
The Kress 5, 10 & 25c store appears in the MCCH business survey taken in the second half of 1935 and was still visible in the Tax Department photograph from 1939-1941.