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Public Hearings - Riot (May 1935), 7, Subject Files, Box 410, Folder 7 (Roll 195), Records of Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, 1934-1945 (New York City Municipal Archives).
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2022-01-31T20:16:15+00:00
Crowd inside Kress 5, 10 & 25c store
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2024-02-09T17:39:28+00:00
After Patrolman Donahue released Lino Rivera and then himself left Kress’ store around 3:30 PM, groups of shoppers remained. They wanted to know what had happened to the boy and to see that he had not been harmed. Over the next two hours, the manager and several police officers unsuccessfully tried to reassure them and others who came into the store to investigate what was happening. During that time Clara Crowder, a twenty-year-old white clerk, fainted and was attended by an ambulance, and Margaret Mitchell, an eighteen-year-old Black woman, was arrested for disorderly conduct. Sometime around 5:00 PM or 5:30 PM, the manager decided to close the store, and police cleared out all those inside.
Events inside Kress 5, 10 & 25c store after Lino Rivera had been grabbed by store staff moved far more slowly than newspaper narratives portrayed. Whereas reporters strung together the specific incidents they identified into a tight sequence, testimony to the MCCH’s public hearings provided additional information that spread those events over almost two hours.
The Black women and a few men who remained in the store did not immediately start shouting and overturning displays, nor was Margaret Mitchell immediately arrested. They gathered in small groups of two or three. A few minutes after Donahue had released Rivera and left the store, Smith, the manager, as he told a public hearing of the MCCH, had become concerned about their presence and went to the shop floor to investigate. “Some women were going around saying a boy had been beaten, an ambulance had come and she knew it. I went to two groups trying to explain to them that nothing had happened to cause any excitement.” Having no success, Smith went out to 125th Street, where he found Patrolman Miller, a Black officer who had earlier called for the ambulance to treat Hurley and Urban, who he asked to “come in and see if he could not explain to those people.” The women “didn’t pay much attention” to Miller. By 4:00 PM, “the thing was getting to be worse,” Smith testified. That likely meant both that the number of people inside and outside that store was growing, and that, as Thompson later described happening inside the store, as they waited for proof the boy had not been harmed, “patience began to give way to indignation. Their voices rose.” Smith found additional police on 125th Street. Patrolman Timothy Shannon arrived in the store at 4:00 PM. By 4:20 PM he decided he needed to call for radio cars with additional police officers, who arrived within five minutes. Those officers had no more success than those before convincing the women and men in the store that Rivera had been let go, the message Hurley said they were delivering. Ten minutes later, Smith called the station and told them “the thing was beginning to get out of control and to do something.” Like the manager of the neighboring Woolworth's store, he clearly felt "under considerable tension" when a "commotion takes place with a [Black] customer." Sgt Bauer was sent. At some point Shannon claimed that he formed a committee of three shoppers, two men and one woman, whom he took to the basement to see that Rivera was not there, and then went with “from one crowd to another but they would not listen.” No other witness or source mentioned such a committee, and Shannon could not identify its members.
The situation had not improved after 4:30 PM, when Smith testified the number of people in the store had grown to around 100, and Sgt Bauer told him, “'I don’t know what we can do.' We didn’t want to start a riot. We didn’t want to excite them.” Smith decided that he needed to close the store and called the police station again and “pleaded for enough men to close the doors without causing trouble.” Around the same time, Louise Thompson, a Black Communist activist and journalist with many friends among the authors and artists of the Harlem Renaissance, entered the store. She had been shopping at the Woolworth’s store further along 125th Street when she saw groups of people gathered on the sidewalk. Asking around to find out what was going on, a man told her “something was going on in the store and that a boy was beaten,” she testified. Thompson then went into Kress’, which she would describe later in her autobiography as a store “where you have all of these small counters throughout the store,” and found “little clusters of people standing here and there in the store,” with “most of the girls behind the counter ... still in their places but no floor-walkers or officials were in evidence,” she wrote in a version of her testimony published in the New Masses. Approaching the largest group, standing by the candy counter, Thompson learned that they believed a boy had been beaten up by store staff, and that they intended to “stand here until they produce him.”
More police officers then arrived and went to the rear of the store, where Smith’s office was located, Thompson wrote. They were the additional officers that the manager had had requested. At this time, Smith told a public hearing, he closed the store doors. His testimony was that happened at 5:30 PM, but other evidence suggests that Smith might have been mistaken about the time. Around 5 PM, Clara Crowder, a twenty-year-old white clerk, fainted while “aiding another employee,” according to the records of the ambulance that attended her. That ambulance, the second sent to the store, arrived at 5:05 PM. Thompson testified that she was outside on West 125th Street when she saw it arrive, having been one of the last to leave the closed store. It seems likely that Crowder was behind a counter, and fainted during the struggles between the people in the store and police that began after a woman inside the store screamed and pots, pans and glasses were knocked off displays. Smith testified that damage happened as the door was closed. Thompson also described hearing the closing bell as part of the noise in the store in her article in New Masses.
Jackson Smith and Patrolman Timothy Shannon testified that a woman screamed and knocked merchandise off counters after the store was closed, but only Thompson described the circumstances that produced that noise. She did not see the woman who screamed, but was part of the crowd who rushed to where the noise came from, the rear of the store. Police there pushed those women and men back and refused to answer when women asked “if the boy was injured and where he is,” Thompson wrote in New Masses. The officers also “began to get rough.” A woman with an umbrella retaliated; she either hit an officer, according to Thompson’s testimony, or “knocked over a pile of pots and pans,” according to her article. Many of those in the store rushed to leave once the noise and struggles with police began, both Thompson and Smith testified. It is likely that it was around this time that police in the store arrested Margaret Mitchell, an eighteen-year-old Black woman, although none of those who testified about this period of time in the store mentioned the arrest. Police charged her with “throwing pans on floor and causing crowd to collect,” according to Inspector Di Martini’s report on the disorder. It was only once the store was closed that merchandise was knocked off displays, according to the testimony of those in the store.
A small number of people resisted leaving the store, “refusing to move until they got some information about the boy,” Thompson wrote. Gradually police officers pushed them too out of the store; Thompson was one of the last to leave, about half an hour after she entered. On the street at that time, she testified, were several hundred people, most “in front of the Apollo Theatre,” opposite Kress’ store across 125th Street. By the time Inspector Di Martini, in charge of the four precincts that made up the Sixth Division, arrived at 5:40 PM, to investigate the reports of disorder, the store was closed and only a few employees remained inside. He interviewed Jackson Smith and Charles Hurley, he testified. “After finding out that no assault had been committed and thinking that something might occur, I stationed Sergeant Bauer, two foot policeman, one mounted policeman in the rear to prevent a riot.” Di Martini then spent some time talking to groups of people gathered on West 125th Street, telling them Rivera had not been beaten. As he saw no “indications of further trouble,” the inspector testified that he left around 6:00 PM.
Newspaper narratives truncated the extended standoff between the Black women and men and store staff and police into a rapid sequence of events, eliding the role of Black residents’ distrust of a police force that routinely disregarded their rights and subjected them to violence in fueling the disorder. The New York American, New York Post, New York World-Telegram, Daily News, and Daily Mirror included none of the events in the store in their narratives of the disorder, jumping from Rivera being grabbed to the crowds outside Kress’ store. Those in the store, reported to be mostly Black women, began to damage displays immediately after Rivera had been taken to the basement in the narratives published in the Home News, New York Sun, New York Times, and La Prensa. The New York Times, New York Sun, and Time greatly inflated the size of that crowd, from 50 to 500 customers. The Home News reported they “started to wreck the store, pulling dishes off of the counters and, in some instances, tipping over tables on which merchandise was displayed,” the New York Times that they “went on the rampage, overturning counters, strewing merchandise on the floor and shouting,” La Prensa that “All the people of color who were in the store at the time began to throw all the articles that were on the tables to the floor and to shout in protest.” The New York Sun opted for the most sensational language, that they “had been galvanized into a frenzy of sabotage. Glass in the counters was shattered, tables overturned and merchandise torn and hurled about.” By contrast, the New York Evening Journal, New York Herald Tribune, and Daily Worker (on March 29) reported crowds jamming the store after rumors about a boy being beaten or killed circulated, demanding he be released (the Daily Worker had earlier reported, on March 21, the involvement of a member of the ILD, Reggie Thomas, in leading the women’s protest. He was not mentioned in subsequent stories, and did not testify in the MCCH public hearings, suggesting that he was not in fact present in the store.) Patrolman Shannon was identified by the New York Times and New York Sun as one of the police officers who investigated what was happening in the store, and summoned the reinforcements who cleared the store (Time identified him as "an Irish policeman;" the New York Evening Journal and New York American mentioned Shannon arresting Miller.) The Home News, New York Herald Tribune, and New York Evening Journal simply had police notified, then appearing and clearing the store.
The second ambulance that arrived at the store, to attend Clara Crowder, was mentioned only in the Daily News. That story somewhat vaguely claimed that the appearance of the ambulance inflamed rumors that Rivera had been killed. The New York Herald Tribune also mentioned Crowder was attended by an ambulance, but mistakenly identified it as the same one that had come to attend Hurley and Urban. That ambulance had returned to Harlem Hospital two hours earlier. Similarly, the Home News and La Prensa reported Margaret Mitchell as being arrested in Kress’ store, but identified her as having intervened when Rivera was grabbed. The Afro-American, New York Amsterdam News, and New York Evening Journal (and New York Times on March 24) reported Mitchell was arrested having run screaming into 125th Street immediately after Rivera had been grabbed. Only the New York Sun’s story allowed for Mitchell’s arrest to be later, as the store was being closed: “The woman whose cries that the boy had been murdered, rekindled the vandalism after the police had succeeded in quenching it earlier in the evening, is Margaret Mitchell, 18, of 283 West 150th street. Her cry was taken up and passed to the milling crowd outside the store.” The next day, in reporting Mitchell’s arraignment in the Harlem Magistrate’s Court, the Home News combined its description of her trying to intervene when Rivera was grabbed with the later events mentioned in Di Martini’s report. While reiterating that she “attempted to take the Rivera boy from the department store detectives and cried out that the guards were beating the youth,” the story added that after Rivera had been taken to the basement, she was “urging other colored people in the store to demand the release of the boy, started throwing merchandise to the floor and upset many of the counter displays.”
The historians who have described these events have not identified the leading role played by women in protests inside Kress’ store, even as the MCCH report noted that the shoppers in the store were women. Mark Naison, Thomas Kessner, and Marilynn Johnson summarized events in the store, adding details about merchandise being thrown on the floor from newspaper stories to the narrative in the MCCH report. Cheryl Greenberg simply described the crowd as having dispersed, discounting protests in the store. So too did Lorrin Thomas, who attributed that response to the arrest of a woman for “inciting the disturbance,” implicitly making that arrest occur soon after Rivera was released, not later when police cleared the store. (No other narratives mention that arrest). Naison identified those involved as "black shoppers," while Kessner identified two Black women as crying out, but not who else was in the crowd. The other historians simply referred to crowds. Jonathan Gill and Nicole Watson include no details of events inside the store in their descriptions of the events at the beginning of the disorder. That the shoppers in Kress' store were women is unsurprising given the gendered nature of consumption in the 1930s. However, the role of those women in the early stages of the disorder is more unexpected given historians' attention to men's role in initial outbreaks of violence. As Marilynn Johnson has pointed out, women's experiences in the racial disorders of the first half of the twentieth century extended beyond that looting with which they were associated in the 1960s to include not just being victims of violence but also protectors. Where Johnson's examples of women acting in that role were trying to protect family or loved ones from white violence, in 1935 Black women sought to protect a boy unrelated to them. While, as Johnson notes, those actions were within societal expectations of women's roles, they did represent a broader scope, echoing the extension of women's role in consumption to include the political act of picketing white businesses the previous year. In Kress' store, Black women once again stood up to white businessmen.
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2022-02-13T21:48:02+00:00
Margaret Mitchell arrested
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2024-01-28T05:59:21+00:00
Officer Johnson of the 6th Division arrested Margaret Mitchell, an eighteen-year-old Black woman, inside Kress’ 5, 10 and 25c store, sometime around 5:00 PM on March 19. Police alleged that she was “throwing pans on floor and causing crowd to collect,” according to Inspector Di Martini’s report on the disorder. Pots and pans and glasses were knocked off counters and women screamed, after the store was closed and police tried to clear out those inside, Jackson Smith, the store manager, Patrolman Timothy Shannon, and Louise Thompson all testified. Only Thompson described the circumstances that produced that noise, most fully in an article in New Masses. After a woman she could not see screamed, Thompson joined part of the crowd who rushed to where the noise came from, the rear of the store. Police there pushed that crowd back and refused to answer when women asked “if the boy was injured and where he is,” Thompson wrote. The officers also “began to get rough.” A woman with an umbrella retaliated; she either hit an officer, according to Thompson’s testimony, or “knocked over a pile of pots and pans,” according to her article. Many of those in the store left once the noise and struggles with police began, both Thompson and Smith testified. Thompson remained with the woman she described knocking over pots and pans, who was not arrested, but she was clearly not the only person who knocked over merchandise in efforts to remain in the store until they had information about Rivera. Mitchell could also have been the woman whose scream drew Thompson and others to the rear of the store.
Margaret Mitchell appeared in many newspaper stories about what happened in Kress’ store, but almost all truncated the extended standoff between the Black women and store staff and police into a rapid sequence of events, in the process mistaking what Mitchell was alleged to have done and when she was arrested. The Home News reported that Mitchell “attempted to take the Rivera boy from the department store detectives and cried out that the guards were beating the youth.” La Prensa also reported Mitchell trying to intervene. Although the Home News went on to claim that Mitchell was arrested at that time, neither Charles Hurley nor Patrolman Donahue mentioned a woman being part of their struggles with Rivera, and Donahue testified he did not arrest anyone while at Kress’ store. The Afro-American, New York Amsterdam News, New York Evening Journal (and the New York Times on March 24) reported that Mitchell was arrested after she screamed when the boy was being beaten. However, the New York Times, Daily News, New York American, New York Post, New York Herald Tribune, and Daily Worker did not specify when she screamed (or spread rumors in the New York Times story, or was “a leader of the disturbance” in the New York Herald Tribune story) — although the Daily News, New York American, and New York Post did elsewhere in their stories mention an unnamed woman running into street screaming at the time Rivera was grabbed. The New York Sun alone specified that Mitchell’s actions came later: “The woman whose cries that the boy had been murdered, rekindled the vandalism after the police had succeeded in quenching it earlier in the evening, is Margaret Mitchell, 18, of 283 West 150th street.” The next day, in reporting Mitchell’s arraignment in the Harlem Magistrate’s Court, the Home News combined its description of her trying to intervene when Rivera was grabbed with the later events mentioned in Di Martini’s report. While reiterating that she “attempted to take the Rivera boy from the department store detectives and cried out that the guards were beating the youth,” the story added that after Rivera had been taken to the basement, she was “urging other colored people in the store to demand the release of the boy, started throwing merchandise to the floor and upset many of the counter displays.” Inspector Di Martini's report, while containing few details of events in the store, did distinguish Mitchell from the woman who reacted to Rivera, whose actions he located slightly later than the newspaper stories, "upon the arrival of the ambulance [to treat Hurley and Urban]," when the "unknown female screamed that the boy had been seriously injured or killed and otherwise caused a commotion which attracted a large number of persons." Mitchell's arrest came later, after which "this commotion was soon quieted."
The more specific allegation of “throwing pans on floor and causing crowd to collect” was recorded in the 28th Precinct police blotter as “Disorderly in Kresses 5 & 10c Store.” That language echoed the offense with which the prosecutor charged Mitchell, disorderly conduct. She appeared in lists of those arrested and charged with disorderly conduct in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, the New York Evening Journal, New York American and Daily News. Arraigned in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, Mitchell was found guilty by Magistrate Renaud, who remanded her until March 23 for investigation and sentencing. The Times Union reported that she “denied hysterically she participated in the rioting. She stood up from the witness chair screaming, then collapsed.” No other newspapers included that scene.
Mitchell returned to the court on March 23, telling Magistrate Renaud she was "sorry," according to the Home News and New York World-Telegram. In passing sentence, Renaud commented that “he did not believe the girl acted maliciously,” those two publications and the New York Times and New York Age reported. The sentence reflected that assessment: three days in the Workhouse or a fine of $10. The New York American reported only that outcome, obliquely reporting Renaud's comment by describing her as having "unwittingly started Tuesday's outbreak." A brief mention in the New York Amsterdam News gave the opposite impression by describing Mitchell as having been "found guilty" of "stirring up the mob." The Daily Worker pointed to what its reporter saw as the implications of her sentence, that it "beating of Negro children by Harlem white storekeepers of the police, as frequently has been the case." Mitchell was one of only three people convicted during the disorder who paid a fine. She was also one of only eighteen of those arraigned represented by a lawyer, in her case Sidney Christian, a prominent West Indian attorney.
The lawyer was likely obtained with the help of Mitchell’s father, Thomas E. Thompson. A West Indian immigrant who had arrived in New York City in 1895, Thompson had been a postal worker for thirty-five years at the time of his daughter’s arrest, and an office holder in the Prince Hall Masons. He and his family were among the earliest Black residents of Harlem, recorded in the 1910 census living in 55 West 137th Street. While not featuring on the social pages as Sidney Christian did, Thompson would have had the resources and the standing in the West Indian community to have known of and involved the lawyer. Mitchell, one of the youngest of Thompson's twelve children, had married in April 1934, and at the time of the disorder lived with her husband, David Mitchell, a handyman in an apartment building, at 287 West 150th Street. That she was in a store twenty-five blocks south of her home indicated the distance from which the businesses on West 125th Street drew their customers.
As the only person arrested in Kress’ store, and named in newspaper stories about the disorder, Mitchell was one of the few identifiable sources of information about the beginnings of the disorder for the MCCH. However, when Lt. Battle called at her home and requested that she be at the public hearing on March 30, “she refused to come.” Asked again about her testimony three weeks later, Battle reiterated that "she absolutely refuses to come to this hearing."
Margaret Mitchell and her husband still lived in the same apartment when the census enumerator called in 1940. In January 1945, she joined 200 family and friends celebrating her parents' 50th wedding anniversary, photographed alongside her siblings in an image published in the New York Amsterdam News. Her husband David was not part of the celebration; he was a sergeant in the US military serving overseas, as were two of Mitchell’s brothers and four nephews. -
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2020-08-20T20:50:26+00:00
Clara Crowder injured
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2024-01-18T23:59:52+00:00
Around 5:00 PM, during the struggles inside Kress' store as police tried to clear out the customers who had remained after Patrolman Raymond Donahue took Lino Rivera into the basement, Clara Crowder, a twenty-year-old white woman employed as a clerk in the store, fainted. According to the Medical Attendance record of the ambulance that arrived at the store at 5:05 PM, she had been aiding another store employee at the time.
Jackson Smith, Kress' manager, had decided sometime after 4:30 PM that efforts to convince those in the store that Rivera had been released unharmed were failing and had called for additional police to help him close the store. When those officers began to move customers from the rear of the store, "they began to get rough," Louise Thompson wrote in the account of what she witnessed published in New Masses. Displays of pots and pans and glasses were knocked over and women screamed. Crowder and the unnamed colleague she tried to help were likely behind counters in the store, where the sales staff worked, perhaps counters whose displays were knocked to the ground. The noise and shouting led many customers to rush to leave the store, Thompson and Jackson Smith testified in the MCCH public hearings, so could also have led Crowder to faint. Neither Smith nor Thompson mentioned Crowder when describing what they saw happen in Kress' at that time.
Louise Thompson, on West 125th Street after being cleared from the store by police, did mention seeing the ambulance arrive, but testified in a public hearing of the MCCH that "we never knew whom he was going to treat." L. F. Coles, who, like Thompson, had been in the store, likewise told a MCCH hearing that none of those he asked knew why the ambulance was there, with a police officer telling them "it wasn't any of our business." In fact, only three narratives of the events in Kress' store mention Crowder. The New York Herald Tribune had her faint as Hurley and Urban grabbed Rivera: "[Rivera] bit two Kress employees on the hand when they hauled him from the counter and this, in turn, caused a woman clerk to faint." The story returned later to Crowder, in describing customers being cleared from the story, reporting “As police beat the crowd back it was discovered that Miss Clara Browder [sic], twenty, a clerk, of 473 West 158th Street, had fainted.” The story went on to say she was attended by the ambulance attending the two store employees bitten by Rivera. Had Crowder fainted when Rivera was grabbed, she could have been attended by that ambulance, but police did not clear the store until two hours after it had returned to Harlem Hospital. The Medical Attendances records indicate it was a second ambulance, carrying a different intern physician, that attended Crowder. That timing makes the clearing of the store, not Rivera being grabbed, the context in which the woman fainted. The Daily News did report that a second ambulance came to Kress, but offered a vaguer account of the circumstances, noting only that Crowder “fainted after the boy had been released.” The Daily Mirror mentioned Crowder without making clear whether she was in the store or on the street outside, but did sensationalize the circumstances, reporting she “fainted in that crush and was trampled upon until rescued, by a football wedge of police.”
While not including Crowder in their narratives, the New York American, New York Evening Journal, and New York Post did list her among the injured. As in the narratives and the hospital record, her injury was recording as fainting, other than by the New York Evening Journal, which listed her as “treated for shock,” which was also her injury in the Daily News list. Crowder, one of three women among those injured (14%, 3 of 21) is the only individual reported as having fainted. After being attended by the physician, Crowder left for home, 473 West 158th Street. Beyond Harlem to the north, that address was emblematic of the distance between Kress’ largely white staff and its Black customers.
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2022-05-23T17:56:54+00:00
4:30 PM to 5:00 PM
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2024-02-13T03:49:25+00:00
In response to the call from the store manager, Sergeant Bauer arrived at the Kress store just after 4:30 PM. With police officers telling people that Rivera had been released unharmed failing to convince them to leave the store, Bauer told the manager, Jackson Smith, that he did not know what else to do. The two men were concerned not to “excite” the crowds in the store, which they feared would “start a riot.”
On 125th Street, two or three groups of people stood outside the store, agitated enough to attract the attention of passersby. Among those who stopped to ask “what the excitement was about” was Louise Thompson, a Black Communist organizer, civil rights activist, and journalist with many friends among the authors and artists of the Harlem Renaissance. Told that “something was going on in the store and that a boy was beaten,” she went inside to investigate, likely not the only person drawn into the Kress store by rumors circulating on the street. She found two or three groups of women in the front of the store. Approaching a crying woman whom she knew, Thompson asked what had happened, and was again told that a boy had been beaten. She moved on to the largest group, standing around the candy counter where Donahue had brought Rivera around two hours earlier. From them Thompson heard that a “little colored boy,” “10 or 12 years old,” had been beaten, and that they were not leaving the store until he was produced. While white salesgirls stood behind some of the counters, Thompson could see no police or managers at the front of the store
In the rear of the store, Smith decided he had to close the store early. He went back upstairs to the offices and called the West 123rd Street police station for the second time, pleading that they send enough officers to allow him “close the doors without causing trouble.” At that time there were likely about eight officers in the store, and about one hundred people, mostly Black women. Three more radio cars and an emergency truck were dispatched. The eight officers on an emergency truck served as the police riot squad and were equipped with a Thompson machine gun, three Winchester rifles, and a Remington shotgun, as well as a tear gas gun. Radio cars, which carried two officers each, were an additional means by which police could rapidly respond. When the fourteen officers arrived, they went directly to the rear of the store, not stopping by Thompson and her group.
Not long after, a woman screamed in the rear of the store. Thompson and other women in the front rushed in that direction to investigate. They found that police had started to move people toward the front entrance and out of the store, as the closing bell was sounded. Women told to move responded by asking what had happened to the boy; police now refused to answer their questions and instead told them it was none of their business. That unresponsiveness further angered many in the crowd. As police began pushing the women and men back towards the entrance, pots and pans were knocked off counters. A police detective arrested Margaret Mitchell, an eighteen-year-old Black woman, for “throwing pans on [the] floor.” The noise as the tinware hit the ground triggered a rush for the exit by many of those in the store. In the confusion, Clara Crowder, a twenty-year-old white clerk, fainted while assisting another store employee, likely behind one of the store counters. While that incident went unnoticed by Thompson and the other women being pushed out of the store, someone in the store called an ambulance for Crowder.
Thompson was in the last group of women pushed out of the store on to 125th Street by police. The women around her continued to appeal for information about Rivera, worried that he was injured and dying in the basement. On the street they joined a crowd that had been swelled by those pushed out of the store and by increasing numbers of people drawn to the entrance by the concerns and rumors being shared along the street. As they had been in the pickets and boycotts of the preceding year, Black women were at the forefront of these protests.
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2022-05-23T17:56:38+00:00
3:30 PM to 4:00 PM
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Inside the Kress store, the Black women who had been watching Rivera since staff grabbed him became increasingly concerned as the boy failed to return from the basement. Groups of two or three gathered throughout the store as the women shared the information that a boy had been beaten. Seeing the clusters of shoppers, Smith, the store manager, came down from his office to investigate. When he heard what was being said, he approached two groups “trying to explain to them that nothing had happened.” The women were unconvinced; years of mistreatment and discrimination at the hands of white staff would have made them see the store manager as an untrustworthy source of information.
Smith then went out on to 125th Street seeking help in calming those in the store. He did not have the option of turning to Black staff as did the manager of McCrory’s department store down the block, who several times a day called on the Black store detective to “smooth over little differences” between customers and staff. Outside the store Smith found Officer Miller, the Black patrolman who had been at the entrance since calling an ambulance for Hurley and Urban. Asked by the store manager to try to convince the people that Rivera had been released, Miller spoke to several groups inside the store. The Black women were no more persuaded by what he said than they were by Smith. They had seen or heard that a patrolman had joined with a staff member to take Rivera to the basement, implicating police in what had happened to Rivera. Some knew that Miller had not been in the store at the time Rivera had been taken away so had not himself seen what had been done to the boy. They wanted to see Rivera for themselves.
The Black patrolman left the store just before 4:00 PM, when the police shift changed. Back on 125th Street, the crowd outside was growing and becoming more agitated. Rumors about a boy beaten in the store spread beyond the area around the Kress store, carried by those shopping in the district’s businesses and the crowds of unemployed residents who occupied their time standing on street corners.
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2022-05-23T18:33:23+00:00
4:00 PM to 4:30 PM
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2024-02-21T19:14:52+00:00
Returning to 125th Street, Smith, the store manager, found Patrolman Timothy Shannon. The officer arrived in the store just after 4:00 PM. Going from group to group, he told them there was no dead boy in the store. The Black women “would not listen” to him. By 4:20 PM, there were people gathered outside the front and rear entrances of the store, as well as inside. Although the crowds were not disorderly, Shannon decided he needed more help than the two mounted officers outside on 125th Street and called for radio cars.
The cars arrived within five minutes; they would have come either from the precinct police station only two blocks south on West 123rd Street, or from assignments patrolling areas of 15-20 blocks. Each car carried two officers; two or three cars were likely sent in response to Shannon’s call. It took only a few minutes for Smith to decide their arrival was not causing the groups of people inside his store to disperse and leave. Around 4:30 PM he called the West 123rd St. station to tell police they needed to “do something” as “the thing was beginning to get out of control.” It was not that the people in the store were disorderly; Smith, like Patrolman Shannon, perceived their continued presence as threatening violence. Like the manager of the neighboring Woolworths store, he clearly felt "under considerable tension" when a "commotion takes place with a [Black] customer."