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• 1 2023-09-04T23:58:18+00:00 Echoes (1943, 1964) 10 plain 2024-01-24T00:11:48+00:00 Only eight years passed before large-scale racial disorder again broke out in Harlem. The New York Amsterdam News was alone among the city’s newspapers in giving attention to the 1935 disorder in its reporting on the violence in 1943. Alongside stories describing the events and aftermath of the disorder on the front page, a headline announced “1935 Riot Causes Started ’43 Riot.” The concern with causes continued the approach of focusing on the conditions and underlying racial discrimination revealed by the disorder evident in the newspaper’s anniversary stories. Missing was the optimism about the efforts of La Guardia’s administration to improve conditions evident in the first anniversary story: “Much has happened since that time but little or no improvement has come to raise the morale of black folk in New York.” In the weeks that followed, the New York Amsterdam News published a series of nine articles that elaborated that perspective by comparing the findings of the MCCH report with conditions in 1943.
  
  What happened in 1935 was briefly summarized in the opening of the story: “three Negroes and one white man were killed and more than 100 men and women of both races were either shot, clubbed, stoned or stabbed, and millions of dollars were lost in destruction of property.” While putting that description in the passive voice of that description left unclear just who was responsible for the violence, collapsing together those of “both races” carried an implication of interracial violence of the kind associated with the race riots of the earlier period. Omitting mention of the police who were responsible for much of the violence in 1935 contributed to the distorted picture of the earlier disorder (just how the story framed the events in 1943 is not clear as that section of the story is illegible). The Afro-American published a brief reminder of “Harlem’s Last Riot in 1935” to accompany its story that also presented the violence in the passive voice without attributing it to anyone: “One colored man was killed; thirty-four colored and white men were hurt and 100 arrested.” Perhaps readers' memories of the events of 1935 would have added who was responsible for the events to those summaries.
  
  Other newspapers largely ignored that there had been a large-scale racial disorder in Harlem prior to 1943. The New York Times referred to the MCCH report in a story on the long-standing ills responsible for the disorder. After a brief reference to the report being “critical of certain aspects of the way the problem had been handled,” the story went on to list the areas in which the city had made improvements. The disorder that led to that investigation was not mentioned. Arthur Garfield Hays offered another perspective in a letter to the editor (reprinted in the New York Age). “The recent riot, like that of 1935,” Hays wrote, was an explosion induced by "pent-up feelings of resentment.” The subject of that anger in his account was the attitude of police toward Black residents. He went on to quote the MCCH report's conclusion about police and recommendations for how the behavior of officers could be changed. Hays was the lone voice pointing to how the role of police violence in 1943 echoed the events of 1935.
  
  Twenty-one years later, when the behavior of police was at the center of how the Black press reported the outbreak of racial violence in Harlem, the events of 1935 were not invoked. Only the Philadelphia Tribune provided a historical context for the disorder in 1964. It published a three-article series that began with a story distinguishing the events of 1964 from the race riots of the early twentieth century and also included a story on the 1943 disorder. Just what conditions made Harlem “ripe for bursting” in 1935 was not explained in the story, which presented the report of a boy’s arrest for theft as triggering rumors about his death that were “like a match touched to kerosene.” The result was four dead, 100 injured, and over a million dollars of damage to “white-owned stores.” Who was responsible for the deaths and injuries was left unclear and the role of police unmentioned.
  
  Discussion of the 1935 disorder in a story in the New York Times included the same count of deaths, injuries, and damage and discussion of rumors about a boy’s arrest as the trigger. It went on to focus on causes, referring to the findings of the MCCH and quoting its chair, Charles Roberts, who was ninety-one years of age. The story offered a list of the “forces that caused the disorder that included 'community charges of police brutality'” along with housing conditions, poor health care, and schooling and discrimination. Details from recent studies that showed the persistence of those conditions dominated the remainder of the text. The only other mention of police was of the shootings that triggered the disorder in 1943 and a demonstration in 1959. Almost two months later, the New York Times widened its historical lens. A story quoting sociologist Allen Grimshaw distinguished the “Negro riots” of 1964 from the race riots that were attacks by whites earlier in the history of the United States. The outbreaks of racial violence in Harlem in 1935 and 1943 are mentioned as exceptions in taking place in Black neighborhoods, not on the borders between Black and white sections of a city and a precedent for disorders dominated by looting. No details are included of events in 1935 other than that it shared with the events of 1943 the characteristic that “Except for the police and the merchants, the white population was affected only remotely.” The concern to identify change pushed into the background and out of focus the violence targeted against white businesses and white individuals in protest against white control of Harlem that occurred in 1935.