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• 1 2020-12-03T17:22:02+00:00 Looting of Black-owned businesses (?) 89 plain 2023-12-09T01:53:02+00:00 While five Black-owned businesses are reported to have had their windows broken, there are no reports of any merchandise being taken from Black-owned businesses. Roi Ottley, in his column in the New York Amsterdam News, specified that it was looting, not damage that Black-owned businesses avoided: “The marauders, although without leadership, followed a studied program of exclusively looting white businesses.” He expressed the same assessment in more direct terms a week later: "The amazing discrimination manifested in deliberately choosing only stores owned by white people to loot...certainly indicated the direction the protest took...Years of pent-up emotion and resentment flashed their fangs in bitter opposition to the economic inequality imposed on a normally peaceful people." A story in the Atlanta World also specified that it was "stores belonging to white merchants" that were looted. The Communist Daily Worker persistently claimed that crowds "did not attack shops owned by Negroes, or shops on which the owners had put up the signed [sic], 'Colored Work Here.'" While that claim suited the Communist focus on the solidarity of Black and white workers, only one newspaper explicitly contradicted it. The Norfolk Journal and Guide reported that "Some Negro establishments were among the 200 which lost their plate-glass windows and had the window contents looted." The New York Evening Journal also reported that "All the stores were raided and their fixtures smashed." But once Black-owned businesses identified themselves with signs, "[t]hose owned by Negroes, in most cases, were not broken into. The rioters concentrated on others." Staff and storeowners put up signs in their windows identifying their business as “Colored,” “Black,” and “This Store Owned by Colored,” according to the Afro-American. Seven signs identifying a store named “Winnette’s Dresses” as a “Colored Store” were visible in both a photograph of an arrest taken during the disorder published in the Daily News and a photograph taken the morning after the disorder published in the Afro-American. Most reported looting occurred some time after attacks on store windows, so signs displayed in response to windows being broken would likely have helped to prevent stores from being looted as well as having their windows broken.
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  The MCCH report was alone in presenting the reverse chronology of when Black-owned business were targeted: "While, of course, many motives were responsible for the actions of these crowds, it seems that as they grew more numerous and more active, the personality or racial Identity of the owners of the stores faded out and the property itself became the object of their fury. Stores owned by Negroes were not always spared if they happened to be in the path of those roving crowds, bent upon the destruction and the confiscation of property." The MCCH "Subcommittee which Investigated the Disturbances of March 19th" had been more definitive in its initial report on May 29, 1935: "Nor is it true that stores owned by Negroes were spared. There is no evidence of any program or leadership of the rioters." While the final version of the report seemed to recognize the evidence of Black-owned stores being spared from attack reported in the press, the fading of that distinction over time was not supported by the lack of reported looting of those businesses. Mentions of Black-owned businesses being spared from attack in the Home News, New York Post, and Afro-American focused on windows being broken and did not mention looting.
  
  The number, nature, and location of those Black-owned businesses also contributed to them not being looted. The MCCH business survey identified 5971 businesses in the blocks of Black Harlem (110th Street to 155th Street, from east of Amsterdam Avenue to west of Madison Avenue); black-owned business constituted only 1,690 (28%) of that total. (The survey was undertaken after the disorder, between June and December 1935, by which time there likely had been some changes in Harlem’s business landscape, but few businesses appear to have been forced to close as a result of the disorder.) In categorizing business owners, the MCCH survey used "Spanish" (largely Puerto Rican) and Chinese as well as white and "colored" (and on occasion "Jewish" and "Italian"). As evidence of looting emphasized that "Spanish" and Chinese businesses were not spared from attack, they are grouped with white-owned businesses in this analysis.
  
  At least one-third of Black-owned businesses did not offer the food, drink, or clothing that appear to have been the primary targets of looting. Beauty parlors and barbers were the most common Black-owned businesses; the 230 beauty parlors and 143 barbers made up more than one in every five (22%) of those businesses. (Lieutenant Samuel Battle did insist in his testimony to a public hearing of the MCCH that beauty parlors had been subject to attack, but there was no evidence to support that claim.) The offices of physicians, dentists, and lawyers represented another 10% (177 of 1,690) of Black-owned businesses, including ninety-eight doctor's offices, fifty-eight dentist's offices, and twenty-one lawyer's offices. Beauty parlors were an overwhelmingly Black-owned enterprise (89.15%, 230 of 258); in the other groups, Black practitioners represented slightly more than half of the total — 56.3% (143 of 254) of barbers, 55.06% (98 of 178) of physicians, 54.21% (58 of 107) of dentists, and 53.86% (21 of 39) of lawyers — and well above the overall Black-owned share of Harlem's businesses (28%, 1690 of 5971). By contrast, the types of businesses most often looted were less likely to have Black owners than that overall distribution of ownership, with one exception, tailors: Black owners operated 13.96% of grocery stores (67 of 480); 27.75% of restaurants (101 of 364); 5.88% of liquor stores (2 of 34); 9.94% of clothing stores (17 of 171);14.63% of hat stores (6 of 41); 24.55% of shoe repair stores (41 of 167); 1.39% of shoe stores (1 of 72); 19.53% of laundries and cleaners (91 of 466); and 35.79% of tailors (107 of 299).
  
  In addition to not containing the items looted during the disorder, many of those Black professional offices were located above street level, so removed from the disorder. Similarly, a proportion of the beauty parlors operated in apartments also located above street level. In all, between 125th and 135th streets, on 7th Avenue, fourteen of the one hundred Black-owned business (compared to 6 of 181 other businesses), and on Lenox Avenue, eleven of fifty-five Black-owned businesses (compared to 3 of 112 other businesses) were off the street and away from the disorder.
  
  Moreover, a portion of those businesses were located on cross-streets rather than the avenues which ran north-south through Harlem on which attacks on stores and looting took place. Excluding West 116th, 125th, 135th, and 145th Streets (which as both transport arteries and sites for businesses were akin to avenues), 767 of 1,920 side street businesses were Black owned (40%, compared to 28% of the total businesses). They made up 45% of all Black-owned businesses (767 of 1,690), compared to 27% of businesses owned by other racial groups (1,153 of 4,281).
  
  The blocks of the avenues on which looting was reported in particular had few Black-owned businesses. Most looting occurred on Lenox Avenue between 125th and 135th Streets, blocks which had fewer Black-owned businesses – 23% (55 of 236) - than those blocks on 7th Avenue to the west – 47% (100 of 212). (Those numbers somewhat exaggerate the possible targets of looting as almost one third of those businesses on 7th Avenue (32 of 100) and 27% (15 of 55) of those on Lenox Avenue were beauty shops or barbers). While a very high proportion of the businesses on 8th and 5th Avenues were also white-owned, there were far fewer businesses on those avenues between 125th and 135th Streets than on 7th and Lenox Avenues: only an average of 13.8 each block on 8th Avenue and 10.375 on each block of 5th Avenue (which had several blocks without any businesses); compared to 20.2 on each block on 7th Avenue and 22.7 on each block on Lenox Avenue. White residents predominatied west of 8th Avenue and east of 5th Avenue, particularly south of 125th Street, while 7th and Lenox Avenues were in the midst of the Black population.
  
  Less looting was reported south of West 125th Street as far as West 115th Street, where it was concentrated on 7th Avenue rather than Lenox Avenue. On both avenues there was a smaller proportion of Black-owned businesses than between West 125th and West 135th Streets — 12.4%, 18 of 145 on Lenox Avenue and approximately 34%, 48 of 141, on 7th Avenue (one side of the street is missing from the survey for several blocks). What focused attention on 7th Avenue in these blocks was its greater number of businesses, on all the blocks down to West 115th Street, whereas Lenox Avenue had few businesses between 123rd and 120th Streets. Reported lootings on Lenox Avenue clustered in blocks that had the highest proportion of white businesses, those closest to the retail centers of 125th Street and 116th Street. South of 125th Street, 5th Avenue was interrupted by Mount Morris Park from 124th to 120th Streets, resulting in a similarly small number of businesses as north of 125th Street. 8th Avenue south of 125th Street was lined with businesses to the same extent as 7th Avenue, none of which were Black owned (0 of 184), but around those blocks there were diminishing numbers of Black residents.
   
• 1 2020-12-03T17:21:15+00:00 Black women arrested for looting (3) 74 plain 2023-12-09T01:57:26+00:00 Three Black women are among the sixty individuals arrested for looting. They represent just under half of the women arrested, with three women arrested for breaking windows and another for inciting a crowd. (No women identified as white are among those reported as arrested during the disorder.) Few details of their arrests and alleged actions are recorded. Loyola Williams appears only in the lists of those arrested for burglary; there is no evidence that she was prosecuted. Elizabeth Tai and Elva Jacobs are both charged with taking groceries, although the outcomes of their prosecutions suggest that neither actually had any merchandise in their possession. A district attorney reduced the charge against Tai to disorderly conduct, which suggested a lack of evidence of breaking in to a business or taking items. In Jacobs' case, a district attorney reduced the charge to unlawful entry, which suggested she had been arrested in a store, but without any items in her possession. Those reduced charges indicate that police could only provide evidence that the women were part of crowds on the streets not that they participated in looting.
  
  The presence of Black women in the crowds on Harlem’s streets is recorded in most accounts of the disorder, but they are only rarely mentioned as participants in attacks on stores or looting. The Daily News, New York Evening Journal, New York Times, and Norfolk Journal and Guide all included women and men in their general descriptions of the crowds. (The Daily News highlighted their presence among those who broke windows in a headline, “Women Join Mob of 4,000 In Battering Stores,” without mentioning women breaking windows in the story itself.) Other papers such as the New York American, Home News, New York Sun, New York World-Telegram, and the Black newspapers the Afro-American and Chicago Defender included women only in the initial crowds inside and outside Kress’ store. Their presence at the outbreak of violence distinguishes the disorder in Harlem from those that followed in subsequent decades, in which Marilynn Johnson argues women became involved after men had initiated the violence. Women's early involvement in Harlem resulted from the disorder beginning in a store, at a time when only women were present to witness what happened to Lino Rivera. (Women are not mentioned in stories about the events of the disorder published in the New York Herald Tribune, New York Post, or New York Age.)
  
  Women are specifically reported as participants in looting in only four newspapers. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle's general description of the disorder included "looting stores" among other activities of "Bands of men and women, in some cases joined by whites." When the Daily Mirror’s narrative reached the time when “Looters began to clean out the goods on display in the stores whose windows had been broken,” it noted “Both men and women were doing the looting.” In the Black press, the Atlanta World broadly included women in crowds that looted in a similar manner: “the members of the mob needed little provocation to start on the rampage. Using whatever weapons that were to hand, men, women and children in the mob broke hundreds of plate glass windows in stores belonging to white merchants, scattered and stole merchandise and destroyed fixtures.” Rather than a general presence among looters, women appear in just a crowd looting Herbert's Blue Diamond Jewelry store in the New York Evening Journal: “The emergency squad police swept into the mob with riot guns, drove the yelling, threatening men and women from their loot and then guarded the store until armored trucks could remove the valuables.” However, other sources indicate that Herbert’s was not looted, but only had its windows broken, by the crowds that had gathered early in the disorder across the street around Kress’s store — crowds that multiple sources record included women. (The New York Evening Journal story also presented women as participating in an attack on a white man, B.Z. Kondoul, and in efforts to prevent firefighters from extinguishing a fire in a store on Lenox Avenue.)
  
  Rather than participants, women are presented as instigators in Roi Ottley's column in the New York Amsterdam News: “LENOX AVENUE was the scene of much of the disorder during that riotous fracas...From every shattered window rioters would emerge laden down with spoils...Women stood on the fringes of the mobs and dictated their choice to their men folk, who willingly obliged by bringing forth the desired article.” (Ottley also cast women as inciting the disorder more generally, also from greater distance, in an earlier column: “Women hanging out of windows screamed applause to the reign of terror...and prodded their men-folk on with screeching invectives.”) Those images are somewhat at odds with the agency displayed by the women shopping in Kress' store and may reflect attitudes to women as much as their behavior during the disorder.
  
  While these stories, and the photographs that accompanied them, indicate that women were part of the crowds on March 19, it remains unclear whether those women did not participate in looting or did and were not recorded by reporters or arrested by police focused on men they likely considered more threatening. From a broader perspective more removed from the events of the disorder, the MCCH appears to have concluded that women did participate, noting in its report: "Even some grown-up men and women who had probably never committed a criminal act before, but bad suffered years of privations, seized the opportunity to express their resentment against discrimination in employment and the exclusive rights of property." However, this section of the report was part of an effort to frame looting as less violent and threatening than it appeared in the initial newspaper stories. While noting that "it seems indisputable that the criminal element took advantage of the disorders," the previous sentence argued, "it seems equally true that many youngsters who could not be classed as criminals joined the looting crowds in a spirit of pure adventure." An earlier discussion of crowds in the disorder made a similar claim, that "Some of the destruction was carried on in a playful spirit. Even the looting, which has furnished many an amusing tale, was sometimes done in the spirit of children taking preserves from a closet to which they have accidentally found the key." Including women as participants in "playful" behavior did not run counter to gender roles and stereotypes in the way that their participation in violence did. The only other place women appear in the MCCH report's discussion of the events of the disorder is as shoppers in Kress' store.
  
  By the time disorder broke out again in Harlem in 1943, and the police recorded attacks on businesses and looting systematically in a way that they had not been in 1935, the press associated looting with Black women, a representation that would intensify in subsequent decades. Harold Orlans' contemporary study of newspaper stories about the 1943 racial disorder and Laurie Leach's more recent analysis both note the attention given to Black women. Photographs of women participating in attacks on stores and being arrested for looting appeared on the front pages of both of Harlem's Black newspapers, the New York Amsterdam News and the New York Age, when they first reported the disorder. One striking image on the front page of the New York Amsterdam News a week later, which also appeared in Life magazine, could be seen as fitting the reading of women's behavior as playful advanced in 1935. Historian Sara Blair described the image as featuring "an attractive young woman [who] smiles openly at the camera, part of a group of style-conscious women balancing boxes of hosiery and other consumer goods (one shopping bag is emblazoned with the logo “Modesse”) as they are escorted by police." She explains the woman's unselfconscious engagement with the camera as reflecting a participation in a social spectacle, a performative response to being photographed, that marked the new visual culture emerging in this period. The figure of the Black woman looter would take a more threatening form in white reporting and photography of the 1967 riots, as "greedy" and "criminal and culpable," as Kevin Mumford insightfully unpacked in his study of Newark in 1967.
• 1 2020-12-04T16:51:58+00:00 Looting of clothing (19) 57 plain 2023-12-01T04:03:32+00:00 Businesses stocking clothing made up one third of those that can be identified as having goods stolen during the disorder (19 of 56). The items in these businesses did not all belong to their owners. Tailors, shoe repair stores, cleaners, and laundries also housed items being repaired belonging to customers, producing losses for Black residents as well as white business owners. The number of these types of business looted reflected in part that they comprised a large proportion of the stores in Black Harlem, with tailors the second most frequently found business after grocery stores, and laundries nearly as numerous. Clothing being taken also fitted the portrayal of the disorder as motivated by economic grievances.
  
  Newspaper accounts of the merchandise taken from businesses featured clothing alongside food and drink. "Men's wear" was a particular target of those who stole from store windows, according to the Afro-American, whose reporter otherwise emphasized destruction over theft, noting "generally the goods were dragged on the wet sidewalk and destroyed." In his "Hectic Harlem" column in the New York Amsterdam News, Roi Ottley included clothing in his description of looting, writing “As Negroes snatched choice hams from butchers stores…lifted suits from tailor shops…and carried out bags of rice and other edibles…the feeling, 'here’s our chance to have some of the things we should have,' was often evidenced.” So too did the Daily Worker: "When the shop windows were broken and wares of all sorts displayed, the starving and penniless Negroes in the crowd seized the opportunity to carry off food, clothes, articles of all sorts." The New York Post also imputed motives while identifying clothing as a target, describing looting as “the glamorous opportunity of snatching food and coats and liquor and tobacco from behind the broken panes.”
  
  Clothing also featured in Louise Thompson’s account of what she saw during the disorder, as “In the cleaning stores people were going in, looking over the suits and dresses, deciding which they wanted to take and walking out with them.” A very similar scene was described by Adam Clayton Powell in the New York Post, in the form of a vignette rather than a general picture of looting: "Witness a young man step through the window of Wohlmuth's Tailoring Establishment at 134th and Lenox Avenue dressed on that cold, rainy night in nothing but a blouse, pants and an excuse for shoes. He comes out a moment later wearing a velvet collar Chesterfield and a smile upon his face - first overcoat this winter." Both vignettes presented the looting of clothing in terms akin to shopping, as involving the selection of items rather than a more indiscriminate grabbing what they could from store windows. So too did the vignette Roi Ottley included in his column in the New York Amsterdam News a week after the disorder: "In a wrecked tailor shop a chap was seen meticulously fitting himself out with a new spring coat, discarding his own shabby garment...He complained bitterly because he wouldn't be able to return for alterations." A probation officer offered an explanation of Horace Fowler's actions that similarly cast them in terms of shopping, writing that he "fell in with mob - needed a suit." It was shoes rather than clothing that was selected in the Daily Worker's image: "One Negro in a shoe shop was seen trying on a pair of shoes, oblivious of the tumult around him!" Framing the looting in those terms presented clothing as requiring discrimination in its selection, needing to fit to be useful, to a greater extent than food and drink. To more indiscriminately take clothing would suggest the items were not for personal use, that taking them was not straightforwardly motivated by economic need. Ottley's second column on the disorder in the New York Amsterdam News featured such an anecdote:

  As we were dashing madly around a certain corner to duck the well-aimed and vicious swings of a policeman's nightstick (all Mose looked alike to the cops that night) we were amazed to see one of the Mose brothers loading a taxicab with suits from a looted store.
  The man worked methodically...He painstakingly piled the suits into a bundle and carried them from the gaping store front to the cab...Indifferent to observers, he made two trips, loading the taxi to capacity...For no boss had he worked so conscientiously.
  He was in progress of gathering his third bundle...when, suddenly and without warning, the taxicab back-fired and was off, speeding up the avenue...The noise attracted the attention of the looter...He ran to the street...and discovered, to his utter dismay and chagrin, that the cabbie had made off with the contraband.
  The infuriated rioter immediately ran up the street in pursuit of the speeding vehicle...screaming at the top of his lungs, "Stop, thief!"
  When last seen he was in mad quest of a cop. 

  Thompson and Powell's recollections of the looting of food and drink were framed differently, focused not on the selection of merchandise but on items being taken home and passed to second floor windows. Notwithstanding how newspapers framed the looting of clothing, suits and coats were a staple of Harlem's pawnshops, a portable form of wealth rather than simply a personal necessity.
  
  Stories about the police line-up the morning after the disorder also featured clothing. The New York Herald Tribune listed "clothing" among the items that many of those paraded before police and reporters admitted to stealing, while the New York Sun listed "shirts." However, none of the three men arrested for looting who appear in photographs is obviously carrying clothing.
  
  Legal records offer a similar mix of broad and individual pictures of the merchandise taken. Four business owners selling clothing are among those identified who sued the city for damages, with losses of $14,125 for Harry Piskin's laundry, $1,219.77 for Estelle Cohen's clothing store, $1,273.89 for William Gindin's shoe store, and $980.13 for Anna Rosenberg's notion store. Those damages are significantly higher than those suffered by all but two of the nine owners of stores selling food and drink who also sued the city. (The nature of eleven of twenty-seven businesses identified in suits against the city are unknown, so could include additional stores selling clothing.) Details of the losses of an additional six businesses are identified in legal proceedings. Two of those businesses suffered losses in the range of those involved in suits against the city: $10,000 for Louis Levy's dry goods store; and $2,000 for Morris Towbin's haberdashery. The other four businesses reported fewer items taken: $800 for Morris Sankin's tailor's store; $585.25 for Nicholas Peet's tailor's store; $66.75 for Ralph Sirico's shoe repair store; and "20 suiting lengths of woollens" for Max Greenwald's tailor shop. An indication of what items made up those totals is provided by the details offered by Ralph Sirico and Nicholas Peet. In both cases, the looted goods included items belonging to customers; Sirico's store was near West 119th Street, so likely had mostly white customers, while Peet's store was several blocks north near West 123rd Street, so likely had more Black customers. Siroco told a probation officer he had lost "18 or 20 hats which had been cleaned and blocked by him; about 25 pair of shoes which he had repaired; 5 or 6 pairs of unfinished shoes; one dozen leather soles; two and a half dozen rubber heels and a quantity of polish and shoe laces." Peet told another probation officer his losses consisted of "$452.25 of secondhand suits, coats and pants, and an addition $133 of suits, overcoats, women's coats and dresses belonging to customers."
  
  The ten individuals arrested for looting clothing allegedly only had a small proportion of that merchandise in their possession, as the vignettes offered by Powell, Thompson, and Ottley suggest. Leroy Gillard had two suits, Horace Fowler had a man's suit and a woman's coat, Jean Jacquelin had two women's coats and two pairs of trousers, Daughty Shavos had "wearing apparel" worth $30, Clifford Mitchell had "wearing apparel" worth $25 (sums that suggest two or three suits or coats), Lamter Jackson had a bag of laundry, Edward Larry had eight men's shirts, Charles Saunders and John Vivien each had one pair of shoes, and Julian Rogers had three odd shoes. Also included in this group is James Hayes, as he allegedly looted the Danbury Hat store, although he took not clothing but a baseball bat.
• 1 2022-03-09T20:45:58+00:00 Crowds incited by Black women (3) 20 plain 2023-10-26T04:12:52+00:00 Women made up a large proportion of those inside Kress’ store when Charles Hurley and Steve Urban grabbed Lino Rivera, and in the crowd inside and outside the store in the hours immediately after. During that time, three woman allegedly incited crowds, but not by calling for action. Two unnamed women, one inside Kress' store and one on 124th Street, shouted that Rivera had been beaten or killed rather than the direct calls to act attributed to men. Knocking pans to the floor, as Margaret Mitchell allegedly did, was a similarly indirect way of causing a crowd to gather, different from the speeches and pickets attributed to men.
  
  The prominent place of women in the events that began the disorder was unusual; men typically initiated outbreaks of violence, joined later by women. In this instance, however, the site was a store in a retail district, realms of shopping and consumption associated with women. However, the women were not presented calling for action, so not cast as leaders in the same way as the men alleged to have incited crowds. Some newspapers amplified that distinction by casting these women in stereotypical terms as not entirely in control of their actions, as “emotional” in the New York Sun, as “frantic” and “excitable” in the New York Herald Tribune, as “hysterical” in the New Republic, as screaming rather than shouting in the New York Evening Journal, New York American, New York Post, and New York Sun, and the New Republic and Newsweek, as having “shrieked” in Time and “shrilled” in the New York Times, their cries as “gossip-mongering” in the New York Herald Tribune.
  
  The women who alerted those around them to Rivera being beaten and the hearse arriving were effectively acting as protectors. Historian Marilynn Johnson has pointed that women's experiences in the racial disorders of the first half of the twentieth century included that role, as well as being victims of violence, and from mid-century, participants in looting. Where Johnson's examples are women acting who tried to protect family or loved ones from white violence, in 1935 Black women sought to protect a boy unrelated to them. Those actions were within societal expectations of women's roles, as Johnson noted, but by extending beyond family, they echoed the extension of women's role in consumption to include the political act of picketing white businesses the previous year.
  
  Away from the store where Rivera was apprehended, and from 125th Street, no women shouting or leading crowds are mentioned in newspaper stories or arrested by police, with one exception, Roi Ottley's column in the New York Amsterdam News. In one column, Ottley described women as inciting men to looting: “Women stood on the fringes of the mobs and dictated their choice to their men folk, who willingly obliged by bringing forth the desired article.” Ottley also cast women as inciting violence without joining the crowds on the streets in an earlier column: “Women hanging out of windows screamed applause to the reign of terror...and prodded their men-folk on with screeching invectives.” No other source reported such scenes. Writing a column rather than a news story, Ottley’s account was impressionistic rather than specific, making it difficult to link to other evidence. He also casts women in secondary roles, with men acting on their behalf, which may echo attitudes toward women as much as their behavior. Certainly, the women in and around Kress’ store took action themselves. There were also a small number of women among those arrested for activities other than inciting crowds, three for looting and three for breaking windows. There are also three women among those reported as injured/treated for injuries during the disorder
  
  The presence of Black women in the crowds beyond 125th Street indicated by those arrests was recorded in some accounts of the disorder. The Daily News, New York Evening Journal, New York Times, and Norfolk Journal and Guide all included women and men in their general descriptions of the crowds. The Daily News highlighted their presence among those who broke windows in a headline, “Women Join Mob of 4,000 In Battering Stores,” without mentioning women breaking windows in the story itself.
  
  Other papers, however, such as the New York American, Home News, New York Sun, New York World-Telegram, and the Black newspapers the Afro-American and Chicago Defender, included women only in the initial crowds inside and outside Kress’ store. Photographs also captured only the women’s presence on 125th Street, in a crowd facing a patrolman swinging his baton, among a group being scattered by police, and knocked to the ground. Women are not mentioned in stories about the events of the disorder published in the New York Herald Tribune, New York Post, or New York Age.