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Public Hearings - Outbreak (March-April 1935), 40, 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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Leaflets distributed
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The Young Liberators printed a one-page mimeographed leaflet in the early evening of March 19. Just where they distributed the leaflet was uncertain. "Some white youngsters were passing out handbills" when a reporter for the Afro-American arrived at 125th Street and 7th Avenue at 7:14 PM. Louise Thompson saw people with the leaflet on that corner just after 8:00 PM, suggesting a focus on 125th Street. “They were hurriedly passed put among the throngs of Negro idlers up and down teeming 125th Street,” according to the sensationalized story in Time magazine. The New York American claimed, “These papers received wide circulation throughout Harlem.” The leaflet was also pasted on building walls, according to the New York Evening Journal. Reading its text incited the crowds that had gathered on 125th Street, the police and District Attorney William Dodge claimed, making the Young Liberators, who they considered Communists, responsible for the disorder. The MCCH did not agree. Based on testimony from Louise Thompson that the leaflet did not appear on 125th Street until sometime between 7:30 PM and 8:00 PM, the MCCH's final report concluded that the Young Liberators “were not responsible for the disorder and attacks on property which were already in full swing.” By 7:30 PM, “Already a tabloid in screaming headlines was telling the city that a riot was going on in Harlem,” the MCCH report also noted. Louise Thompson identified that newspaper as the Daily Mirror. Later on March 19, the Communist Party distributed a leaflet, after the Young Liberators approached them, concerned about the growing disorder, according to James Ford’s testimony in a MCCH public hearing. He said that leaflet was “written and distributed” about “9 or 10 o’clock.” Leaflets were still in circulation on Harlem’s streets around 2:00 AM. Sgt. Samuel Battle told a public hearing of the MCCH he came into possession of two or three at that time, without specifying which of the two leaflets.
Both leaflets identified Kress store staff as responsible for the violence against Rivera with only passing mention of police. That narrative focused protests on the store, and white businesses, Bosses, more generally, rather than police, or the white population. In terms of that framework, attacks on Kress’ store, and on other white businesses later in the disorder, appeared not straightforwardly as attacks on property and economic power, but also as retaliation against violence by those who owned and worked in those businesses
A mimeographed page, the Young Liberators’ leaflet combined handwritten and typewritten text. At the top, the handwritten text 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
ISSUED BY YOUNG LIBERATORS.
Predictably, the anti-Communist Hearst newspaper the New York Evening Journal gave the greatest space to the leaflet, publishing both the full text of the Young Liberators' leaflet and photographs of it (and the Communist Party leaflet and two placards carried by pickets, under the headline "Insidious Propaganda That Started Harlem Riot," and a front-page photograph of the men arrested protesting in front of Kress’ store). A portion of the Young Liberators' leaflet appeared in a combination of Associated Press photographs published in several newspapers. In addition to the New York Evening Journal, the Home News, New York World-Telegram, and the New Republic published the text of the leaflet. The New York Herald Tribune quoted only about half of the leaflet, stopping after the first use of “lynch attack.” None of those published versions of the circular included the final line, “JOIN THE PICKET.” That line did appear in the version published by the Norfolk Journal and Guide, the only Black publication in which the leaflets were reproduced. That line was in the photograph published in the New York Evening Journal, in the version of the leaflet in the MCCH’s final report, and was raised by Hays in the public hearing of the MCCH (James Taylor, the leader of the Young LIberators answered that he did not know to what it referred). The text published in the Home News omitted the line DON'T BUY AT KRESS'S. STOP POLICE BRUTALITY IN NEGRO HARLEM and substituted instead “Demand the hiring of Negro workers in Harlem department stores. Boycott the store." That phrase transposed the call not to buy in the store into the terms of boycott of the campaigns of the previous year to effectively treat the tactic as having a single goal. The New York Post quoted only the handwritten headline of the leaflet, the characterization of the incident as “this lynch attack,” and the call for protest. Time quoted only the headline, and the Afro-American only the first two phrases from the headline and omitted “boss” so that the charge of violence was only against police. Quotations in the New York Sun were garbled versions of the actual leaflet text and included words and phrases that appeared but in the wrong form: "A Child Brutally Beaten." "A Twelve-Year-Old Child Was Brutally Beaten for Stealing a Knife from a Five and Ten Cent Store." "Workers Protest Against This Lynch Attack." The Daily News misreported the leaflet as making the more provocative charge that the boy had been beaten to death. Initial stories about the disorder published by the New York Times and New York American did not mention the leaflet but added them to their narrative the next day, March 21.
The Communist Party leaflet, also a mimeographed page, similarly began with handwritten text that read, “FOR UNITY OF NEGRO AND WHITE WORKERS! DON'T LET THE BOSSES START RACE RIOTS IN HARLEM!”. The typewritten portion went on:The brutal beating of the 12-year-old boy, Riviera, by Kress's special guard, for taking a piece of candy, again proves the increasing terror against the Negro people of Harlem. Bosses, who deny the most immediate necessities from workers' children, who throw workers out of employment, who pay not even enough to live on, are protecting their so-called property rights by brutal beatings, as in the case of the boy Riviera. They shoot both Negro and white workers in strikes all over the country. They lynch Negro people in the South on framed-up charges.
The bosses and police are trying to bring the lynch spirit right here to Harlem. The bosses would welcome nothing more than a fight between the white and Negro workers of our community, so that they may be able to continue to rule over both the Negro and white workers.
Our answer to the brutal beating of this boy, by one of the flunkies of Mr. Kress, must be an organized and determined resistance against the brutal attacks of the bosses and the police.
WORKERS, NEGRO AND WHITE: DEMAND THE IMMEDIATE DISMISSAL AND ARREST AND PROSECUTION OF THE SPECIAL GUARD AND THE MANAGER OF THE STORE.
DEMAND THE RELEASE OF THE NEGRO AND WHITE WORKERS ARRESTED.
DEMAND THE HIRING OF NEGRO WORKERS IN ALL DEPARTMENT STORES IN HARLEM
DON'T LET BOSSES START ANY RACE RIOTS IN HARLEM.
DON'T TRADE IN KRESSES.
Issued by
Communist Party
Young Communist League
The Daily Worker published the Communist Party leaflet text, while not publishing the Young Liberators' leaflet, perhaps because the public position of the Young Liberators was that the organization was not affiliated with the Communist Party. The handwritten headline of that leaflet appeared at the end of the story in the New York World-Telegram, after the full text of the Young Liberators' leaflet: “In another manifesto, signed by the Communist party and the Young Peoples’ League, a plea was made “for unity of Negro and white workers—don’t let the bosses start race riots in Harlem!” While the New York Evening Journal published a photograph of the leaflet, no other white newspapers reproduced the text, nor did it appear in the MCCH final report. The Norfolk Journal and Guide was the only Black publication in which the leaflet text was published.
Initial newspaper stories reported that police said that the leaflets were responsible for moving the crowds on 125th Street to violence. The sensationalized version of that story employed metaphors of fire that placed the leaflets at the start of the disorder: leaflets were the “match which ignited Harlem and pitted its teeming thousands against the police and white spectators and shopkeepers” in the Daily News, “inflammatory handbills, the spark that fired the tinder” in Newsweek, and "inflame the populace" in a New York Age editorial; and in the New York Sun and Daily Mirror leaflets fanned the crowd’s fury. The New York Evening Journal opted for a more racist image evoking slavery, in which the leaflet was “largely responsible for whipping the Negroes to a frenzy.” The New York Age columnist the "Flying Cavalier" described the leaflets as as an example of the Communist "technique in the making up of their messages which would incite a lamb to jump on a tiger—if the lamb didn’t think first." Other newspapers framed the leaflets in terms of rumors: as having started the rumor in the New York Herald Tribune, as “the chief agency which spread the rumor" in the Home News; and as having “helped spread resentment” in the New York Post. (The New York World-Telegram described the leaflet without giving it a specific role; the “tinder for the destructive conflict” was the rumor that a boy had been beaten and killed, “assiduously spread by Communists.”) Writing in the New Republic, white journalist Hamilton Basso devoted two paragraphs to weighing the role the leaflet played in the disorder. He concluded that it “helped to rouse the crowds to violence,” but rejected the idea that the leaflet’s purpose “was deliberately to provoke a race riot” as requiring belief in “the stupid Red Scare of the Hearst press.”
The only direct evidence of when the Young Liberators' leaflet was distributed came from Louise Thompson. She told a public hearing of the MCCH that the leaflets were not in circulation when she left 125th Street around 7:30 PM. It was when Thompson returned around 8:00 PM that she “first saw the leaflet” in the hands of several people, but not anyone handing them out. Thompson was not a disinterested witness; as a member of the Communist Party, she would not have wanted to see them held responsible for the disorder. L. F. Cole, who like Thompson had been inside Kress’ store after Rivera was grabbed but was not a Communist, told the MCCH he saw pamphlets in the crowd around 8:00 PM (the number is smudged in the transcript so that time was uncertain). Inspector Di Martini’s report supported that timeline, locating the appearance of “a number of pamphlets under the heading of the YL and YCP” after the crowd that gathered the rear of Kress’ store around 7:00 PM had been dispersed. Presumably that timing was based on the statements of officers on 125th Street — but not Patrolman Moran, who told the MCCH he was on duty in front of Kress’ store from 6:00 PM throughout the night and did not see leaflets passed out. Copies of the leaflets were attached to the report. They may have been the copies that Lieutenant Battle told the MCCH public hearing that he had gathered near the end of the disorder, around 2:00 AM.
Newspaper stories presented a different timeline that had the leaflet appear earlier, around 6:00 PM, for which there was no direct evidence. The New York Evening Journal and Home News, the New York Post the next day, and the New Republic, reported that the Young Liberators' leaflet appeared about an hour after Kress’ staff grabbed Rivera, which would have been around 3:30 PM. When District Attorney William Dodge spoke to reporters on March 20, the Daily News, New York World-Telegram, and New York American reported him as saying that the leaflets appeared within two hours of the incident in the store. No one at the scene described that timeline. It was likely based on the text of the leaflet, which read “One hour ago a twelve-year-old boy was brutally beaten by the management of Kress five-and-ten-cent store.” At that time, however, the Young Liberators were unaware of what had happened in the store. It was not until around 5:00 PM, as police were clearing people from Kress’ store, that a Black man brought news to the offices of the Young Liberators, James Taylor testified. Taylor, the leader of the Young Liberators, was asked about the timing referred to in the leaflet; he replied that he did not know whether that was correct. The New York Times story reporting Dodge’s comments had the “first of the Communist handbills” appear at 6:00 PM. That timeline was at least plausible; it would have been around an hour after the Young Liberators learned of an incident in Kress’ store. It was not, however, a timeframe that fitted with Di Martini’s report. The Daily News had the Young Liberators distributing the leaflets as they picketed Kress’ store at a time not specified in the story. However, that detail was part of the truncated timeline police provided that had all five alleged Communists that they arrested arriving at Kress’ store at the same time rather than separately over a period of forty-five minutes starting around 6:00 PM as testimony from those at the scene indicated. The pickets were the final protesters to arrive at Kress’ store at around 6:45 PM. Thompson saw them so would have seen leaflets had they been distributed at that time.
William Ford’s testimony in a MCCH public hearing was the only evidence related to the origins and timing of the Communist Party pamphlet. The leaflet appeared after members of the Young Liberators visited Ford about an hour after distributing their leaflet, he testified. They “were very much disturbed” that “these leaflets had not been able to allay mass resentment in Harlem,” and instead “a rumor had got around that a race riot had started in Harlem.” The Communist Party immediately produced a leaflet intended “to stop race rioting,” Ford testified, and he went to Harlem around 8:00 PM. The leaflet arrived an hour or two later, about “9 or 10 o’clock.” The MCCH report stated that that Communist Party leaflet was issued “about the same time” as the Young Liberators’ leaflet. None of the newspapers mentioned the time that the leaflet was distributed.
District Attorney William Dodge and Police Commissioner Valentine both amplified the police narrative when they spoke to reporters on March 20 after Dodge's appearance before the grand jury to seek indictments against alleged participants in the disorder. Valentine summarized Di Martini’s “departmental report on the cause of the rioting” as detailing “that a Negro youth had been caught stealing, that a woman had screamed, that the 'Young Liberators' had met, that they had thereafter disseminated 'untruthful deceptive and inflammatory literature' and that all these events had been climaxed by the appearance of a hearse in the vicinity,” the New York Sun reported, a chronology also reported in the New York American, New York World-Telegram, Times Union, and Brooklyn Daily Eagle. (The hearse was not the final element in Di Martini’s report; it was mentioned before the Young Liberators). Two days later, Dodge showed the grand jury a typewriter and mimeograph machine. The fruits of police raids on the offices of several organizations affiliated with the Communist Party, the machines were used to produce the Young Liberators’ leaflet, he told the grand jury, according to stories in New York Herald Tribune, New York Post, New York American, Daily News, and New York Times. (The mimeograph machine was taken from the Nurses and Hospital Workers League, the organization which employed one of the men arrested for trying to speak in front of Kress’ store, Daniel Miller, the New York Post and New York American reported.) According to the Daily News, after the grand jury examined that material, “Dodge said arrests might be expected momentarily.” There were no reports of any arrests related to the leaflets.
Mayor La Guardia did not echo the district attorney and police commissioner in directly blaming Communists for the disorder. While his statement distributed and displayed in Harlem the evening after the disorder followed the same police narrative, and mentioned the leaflets, it did not present them as triggering the disorder. Instead, he used them to characterize those responsible: “The maliciousness and viciousness of the instigators are betrayed by the false statements contained in mimeographed handbills and placards.” That statement indirectly implicated the Young Liberators and Communist Party, who had signed the leaflets. However, the circular presented the disorder as “instigated and artificially stimulated by a few irresponsible individuals” who went unnamed. Questioned by journalists, La Guardia "would not say whether he agreed with the police that the instigators were Communists," the New York Herald Tribune reported.
Newspaper stories about the MCCH public hearing treated the testimony regarding the time at which the leaflets appeared in a variety of ways. The New York Herald Tribune and an editorial in the New York Amsterdam News highlighted how that testimony undermined what police said in the aftermath of the disorder. “Reds' Handbills Are Cleared As 'Chief Cause' of Harlem Riot” was the headline of the New York Herald Tribune story, which reported that “The committee learned that the circulars did not appear on the streets until 8:30 PM, fully two hours after the worst of the rioting was over. Therefore, the committee was asked by Communist lawyers to conclude that the literature could not have been a cause of much loss of property or life.” The New York Amsterdam News editorial, “The Road is Clear,” described the testimony that “The much-publicized Young Liberator pamphlets, carrying the false reports, did not appear on the streets until two hours after the worst rioting was over” as “one important fact” established by the MCCH. “With the red herring out of the way,” the editorial went on, “the investigating body can set out to probe the basic factors which really precipitated the riots - the discrimination, exploitation and oppression of 204,000 American citizens in the most liberal city in America. The New York Age, Home News and New York Times reported the testimony on when the leaflets appeared without addressing the implications of that evidence for the police narrative of the disorder. The New York American and Daily News mentioned other aspects of Taylor’s testimony about the leaflet but not when it was distributed, with the Daily News continuing to describe the leaflet as having "brought the riot into being." No mention of testimony about the leaflet appeared in stories about the hearing in the New York World-Telegram, Times Union, New York Post, and New York Evening Journal. In other words, the anti-Communist Hearst newspapers that had given the most attention to the leaflets did not respond to the testimony at odds with their narrative.
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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. 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.