This page was created by Anonymous.
R. J. McBride, Visit to McCrory's, June 10, 1935," Harlem Survey: Part III, Chapter V, Box 131-124, Folder 17, E. Franklin Frazier Papers (Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University).
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Crowds in Harlem
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The crowds that gathered on Harlem’s streets on March 19 and 20 were not out of the ordinary in 1935. The presence of large numbers of people on the streets was remarked on by commentators such as Channing Tobias of the YMCA, who pointed to the “thousands of Negroes standing in enforced idleness on the street corners of Harlem with no prospect of employment” in a widely reprinted newspaper column. Such crowds drew comment because they had not been a feature of Harlem’s streets before 1930. With most jobs for Black workers outside the neighborhood, “Every morning sees an exodus of workers filling subways, surface cars and elevated trains and every evening sees them returning to their homes,” a journalist for the New York Times observed. In the evening, as I have explored, Harlem’s residents had shopped, sought leisure, and attended meetings of churches, fraternal lodges, and social clubs — activities out of reach without an income.
Groups on the street often came together in larger crowds to listen to the street speakers who took to stepladders and soap boxes on many of the corners of Lenox and 7th Avenues north of 125th Street. While speakers had been a feature of Harlem’s streets throughout the 1920s, many of those found on Harlem’s corners in the 1930s came from different groups and focused more on calls for political action. Garveyites remained a presence, joined by the Communist Party (CP), and later by Sufi Abdul Hamid and his Negro Industrial and Clerical Alliance (NICA). While CP speakers focused on the unemployed, protests against lynching, and the campaign to free the Scottsboro boys, promoting unity between white and Black workers, the Garveyites urged support for Black-owned businesses and Hamid attacked white businessmen for their failure to hire Black staff, promoting what New York Amsterdam News columnists J. A. Rogers and Roi Ottley labeled “race consciousness” across class lines. In the 1930s, those appeals were delivered in “an incessant flow of language, a little good, a lot more bad, some of it profane and all of it violent,” lamented a New York Age columnist. These street meetings continued after March 19, with Italian goods and businesses becoming an additional target after Mussolini’s attack on Ethiopia.
Competition between these groups occasionally went beyond violent language to acts of violence as the Garveyites sought to hold on to their favored locations on the corners of Lenox Avenue around 135th Street, drawing police. Street meetings involving the CP and its affiliated groups were also subject to police violence, as they were throughout the city, sometimes provoked by Communists. The first major incidents in 1930, which saw two men killed, occurred at events that involved few Black residents, as the CP had yet to engage the community. The violent repression of the Scottsboro meeting in 1934, which included significant numbers of Black participants and featured Ada Wright, the mother of one of the Scottsboro boys, was covered more extensively in the Black press. Violent policing of crowds, however, was not limited to gatherings of Communists. Crowds drawn to police making arrests reacted to officers’ beating those they arrested and bystanders.
Crowds focused on white-owned businesses on West 125th Street, and elsewhere in Harlem, were also not out of the ordinary in the 1930s. Although not present in the weeks before the disorder, speakers and pickets calling for boycotts of stores that did not employ Black staff repeatedly took to 125th Street from 1932, drawing particular attention from the Black press the year before the disorder. Many of the picketers were women, like the crowds inside and outside Kress’ store at the beginning of the disorder. Although ideally a non-violent form of protest, picketers did clash with shoppers and police. Black shoppers complained of being obstructed, annoyed, and on occasion assaulted and having their purchases destroyed. However, the violence around the picket lines did not extend to breaking windows as happened during the disorder. Pickets also drew police, who could make arrests if picketers drew crowds or obstructed shoppers. By the time of the disorder, the New York Supreme Court had restricted picketing to labor disputes, ending those protests and contributing to the speed with which police acted to arrest the Young Liberators on March 19.
It was similarly common in 1930s for crowds to respond to incidents between Black shoppers and white storeowners and staff, as shoppers did when Kress staff grabbed Lino Rivera. Storeowners on 125th Street reported that tense encounters between shoppers and their staff were a regular part of their business. The Woolworth’s store was “under considerable tension from time to time when some little commotion takes place with a customer,” the manager told a MCCH investigator. An example was provided by the manager of the Peter Pan Dress Shop. “On one occasion,” he told a MCCH investigator, “a Negro loitered in front of his store window and interfered with the view of women who were trying to look at his merchandise. He was asked to move away from the window, whereupon he raised his voice in such objection that a small crowd gathered; not wishing to see any further trouble, the store owner did not insist further on the Negro leaving the front of the place.” In McCrory’s department store, a Black store detective named Laurie “many times a day, is called upon to smooth over little difference arising from people who feel they have been imposed upon,” the MCCH investigator reported. An example of what white storeowners feared would result from those encounters took place at a bakery at 470 Lenox Avenue just over a month before the disorder. After a woman shopper claimed she had been kicked in the stomach by the white owner, Samuel Tonicci, a New York Amsterdam News story described a crowd of around 200 attracted by her screams smashing the store windows. The allegations of violence produced attacks on the business that picketing had not. In this context, what stands out about the events of March 19 is the failure to manage the tension. Kress’ store detective, presumably white since all the floor staff were, grabbed Rivera, fetched a police officer and then was no longer involved. Other white staff, and later police, failed to reassure Black shoppers. However, that reassurance would not have been necessary had those in the store seen Rivera released or even taken away by the CPB or police. That was Arthur Garfield Hays’ conclusion. At a public hearing of the MCCH, he told Patrolman Donahue, who had instead let the boy go out a rear entrance, “If you had let the boy go at that time there would not have been any excitement.”
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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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Lino Rivera grabbed & Charles Hurley and Steve Urban assaulted in secondary sources
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None of the historical scholarship on the disorder offers a narrative of these events that is entirely in line with the evidence gathered for this study. The unpublished public hearings are a source for only one narrative of these events in the historical scholarship, Cheryl Greenberg’s description. She is also the only historian to cite other unpublished sources, Di Martini’s report and the subcommittee report. For some reason, Greenberg relies on Di Martini’s report to describe only one store employee grabbing Rivera and being bitten, rather than both Hurley and Urban. That report was compiled the day after the disorder, on March 20, without time for the information gathering undertaken by the MCCH. While Greenberg asserted “The Mayor’s Commission agreed with the police description of the events,” both the subcommittee report and the final report identify Hurley and another employee as grabbing Rivera. Greenberg also asserts that Rivera was released before police arrived, rather than by Donahue, as the MCCH reports describe. Di Martini’s report did not mention Rivera’s release, so the source for that element of Greenberg’s narrative is uncertain.
Other historians rely on the MCCH report. However, those narratives consistently misidentify the store manager, Jackson Smith, as one of those who grabbed Rivera, even though the MCCH report describes Smith only as witnessing the theft, and Hurley and another employee as grabbing the boy. Mark Naison, Lorrin Thomas, and Jonathan Gill portray the manager acting alone, and Naison makes no mention of Rivera biting him or anyone else. The manager acts with an unnamed store guard in Marilynn Johnson’s narrative, replacing Smith with the store detective. There is no mention of Rivera biting either man; they simply turn him over to a police officer. Nicole Watson likewise replaces the store detective with the store manager, who is bitten along with Hurley. Thomas Kessner is the only historian not to mistakenly include the store manager, describing Rivera as grabbed by two employees. Kessner, Greenberg, Johnson, and Watson all mention a woman shouting that the boy was being beaten up. Naison and Thomas more generally refer to a rumor spreading through the crowd, with no mention that women made up the bulk of those in the store. None of these historians mention whether the woman was arrested.
While Naison, Kessner, Johnson, and Thomas follow the MCCH report in describing police releasing Rivera through the back entrance, Gill and Watson offer narratives more at odds with the evidence. Gill echoes Greenberg in describing Rivera as taken to the basement before police arrive (there are no notes in Gill’s book, so it is not clear if he is relying on Greenberg for that detail). Watson offers two possible narratives, that Rivera escaped as Donahue tried to quell the crowd as Time reported, or Donahue released him on Smith’s instructions. While the magazine story was published at a greater distance from the events than newspaper stories, no evidence that Rivera escaped rather than being released was found by the MCCH investigation. To the contrary, testimony in the public hearings and the MCCH’s report are consistent in saying that is not what happened, with Donahue’s decision drawing specific attention at the hearings and in the report as a "mistake.’"Watson’s account is not clear on just how unbalanced the weight of evidence is in regards to those events; she simply posits the description in Time against “other versions.”
Portraying the store manager as involved in grabbing Rivera matters because it obscures the number of staff employed by the store to undertake surveillance and policing, a store detective and a floor walker. (Other large stores on 125th Street employed similar staff; around this time, however, Black store detectives were employed at the nearby McCrory, W. T. Grant, and Blumstein stores, which at least at the McCrory store often defused encounters between white staff and Black customers.) That apparatus contributed to how routine it was to apprehend a boy shoplifting, something that did not warrant the involvement of the manager, but did reflect the kind of treatment Black customers received in white-owned businesses. Portraying store employees as releasing Rivera or the boy as escaping obscures the involvement of police in his custody. Given the level of violence Black residents suffered at the hands of police, a patrolman taking him to the basement would have heightened the concern of those in the store that Rivera would be subject to violence.