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• 1 2022-01-31T20:16:15+00:00 Crowd inside Kress 5, 10 & 25c store 65 plain 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.
   
• 1 2020-02-25T20:01:19+00:00 Crowds in Harlem 24 plain 2024-02-24T15:45:45+00:00 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.”

  Events

  
   
• 1 2022-05-23T18:33:23+00:00 4:00 PM to 4:30 PM 12 plain 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."