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Harlem in Disorder: A Spatial History of How Racial Violence Changed in 1935

Roi Ottley, "This Hectic Harlem: Soap-Box Oratory Is a Lost Art," New York Amsterdam News, September 15, 1934, 9.

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Communists in Harlem The appearance of members of the Communist Party (CP) outside Kress’ store at the beginning of the disorder reflected the party’s presence in Harlem in the 1930s. It focused resources on the neighborhood beginning in 1928 in “efforts to ‘prove itself’ to a skeptical community through protests against racist practices and efforts to ease the impact of Depression conditions," historian Mark Naison argued. In the 1930s, the party had an office at 415 Lenox Avenue; affiliated organizations had offices nearby, the International Labor Defense (ILD) four blocks south at 326 Lenox Avenue; the Young Liberators (YL) at 262 Lenox Avenue; and the League of Struggle for Negro Rights (LSNR) and Negro Liberator newspaper at 2162 7th Avenue until just before the disorder, when they moved to 308 West 141st Street. The LSNR supported "black self-determination," advocating resistance against racist oppression and lynching, according to Naison, and mobilizing Black residents against evictions, discrimination in relief programs and job discrimination. The YL were the "youth wing" of the League, according to Naison. Joe Taylor, the organization's president, told a public hearing of the MCCH, they were “a group of young people who are struggling for Negro rights,” with about 140 Black and white members. The ILD was the party's legal wing, defending individuals arrested in connection with party activities, in conjunction with mass protest.

Most of those who worked in those offices and protested in Harlem were white men and women. The number of Black residents who joined the party and related organizations did grow slowly, but numbered only a few thousand by the time of the disorder, according to Naison. By 1935, larger numbers did participate in demonstrations led by party members, particularly those in support of the defense of the Scottsboro boys. After the disorder, the party would work with Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Rev. William Imes on a boycott of Weisbeckers Market on 125th Street, and with Black nationalists in protests against Mussolini’s attacks on Abyssinia.

Speaking in street meetings as Daniel Miller and Harry Gordon sought to do in front of Kress’ store was the primary strategy employed by the CP in Harlem. Party members joined the street-corner speakers who had been a staple of Harlem life throughout the 1920s, taking to corners “from 137th Street & 7th Avenue, north to 144th Street and Lenox Avenue, south to 110th Street and 5th Avenue," according to Naison. When they first appeared, the mostly white Communist Party speakers frequently competed with Black nationalist speakers for locations and attention, especially on the corners of Lenox Avenue from 133rd to 135th Streets. At the end of June 1930, fights between the groups drew police intervention, during which a Black Communist named Alfred Levy was fatally injured. Fights continued, but the party held off attackers, helped by former Garveyites it recruited, a struggle described by Naison. In 1930, speakers focused on the unemployed and protests against lynching. The ILD campaign to free the Scottsboro boys that began in 1931, Naison showed, moved the party further into Harlem life, enabling it to supplement street protest with work in churches, fraternal organizations, and political clubs. Initial marches and protests were dominated by white party members, but when new trials in 1933 energized Harlem and the CP revived its campaign of mass demonstrations, marches, and street meetings, Naison found evidence that large numbers of Black residents participated. In a protest parade on April 22, for example, the UNIA, Elks, Masons, and church groups marched alongside the ILD and CP. By September, 1934, Roi Ottley bemoaned the predominance of Communist street speakers in his column in the New York Amsterdam News.

Communist Party picketers like Sam Jameson, Murray Samuels, and Claudio Viabolo were initially less prominent in Harlem. When Sufi Abdul Hamid and his followers began picketing white-owned businesses seeking jobs for Black workers in 1932, the party remained on the margins, at odds with the race-based appeals. In July 1933, party organizers did invite church and fraternal groups to join an effort to force Harlem chain stores to hire Black clerks without displacing white workers, with the W. T. Grant store on 125th Street as the first target. However, James Ford shut down that initiative, Naison showed, as likely to antagonize white workers and distract participants from the broader struggles the party promoted. Instead, the CP unsuccessfully targeted the 5th Avenue Bus Company. When Hamid’s second campaign against Woolworth's on 125th Street in 1934 helped spur an alliance of Black organizations to mount a campaign of pickets and calls for boycotts initially targeting the Blumstein’s department store, CP members remained on the margins. Once that alliance splintered, however, the party moved to mount a boycott campaign on their terms against the Empire Cafeteria on Lenox Avenue just north of 125th Street seeking gains for white workers as well as jobs for Black workers. A week and a half of picketing and protest meetings in 1934 led by the YL, and store windows twice being broken, brought an agreement to hire Black staff in September 1934.

The rapid arrests of the five men who appeared on 125th Street was typical of the often violent repression of the party by New York City police, as historian Marilynn Johnson has explored. As early as September 1929, the New York Amsterdam News published a letter describing a Black Communist speaker, Richard Moore, and the white Communists who tried to take his place, being pulled from a stepladder by police “without the slightest provocation,” notwithstanding claims of a disruptive demonstration reported in the New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, and New York Amsterdam News. Mayor La Guardia tried to change the police approach after his election in 1934, Johnson shows, requiring more tolerance of protest and a neutral stance in labor disputes. However, Harlem residents had witnessed the limits of that change a year before the disorder. Police who arrived to manage the crowd at a Communist Party meeting protesting the treatment of the Scottsboro boys on March 17, 1934, suddenly drove radio cars on to the sidewalk and into the crowd, and then threw tear gas and bomb canisters. La Guardia did insist on an investigation, after which Chief Inspector Valentine preferred disciplinary action against six officers. However, Police Commissioner John Ryan refused to implement any discipline, the New York Amsterdam News reported.

The appearance of ILD lawyers to represent arrested party members, and their later appearance at the hearings of the MCCH, were consistent with a commitment to representing those involved in party actions, according to Naison. Joseph Tauber, who represented the party members arrested during the disorder and appeared at hearings of the MCCH, had also defended the two men arrested outside the Empire Cafeteria in 1934, according to a story in the New York Amsterdam News and had appeared in the police investigation of the Scottsboro riot, the New York Amsterdam News reported. The ILD provided bail for those arrested outside the Empire Cafeteria, according to the Daily Worker, as it did for those arrested during the disorder who they represented.
Events
Street Speakers in Harlem Groups on Harlem’s street often came together in crowds of several hundred to listen to street speakers who took to stepladders and soapboxes 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, focused more on calls for political action, and drew larger crowds.

Beginning during World War I, spring saw speakers appear on Harlem’s streetcorners. Individual political radicals were among the first to take to stepladders and soapboxes, described as an eclectic mix of “Socialists, Nationalists, freelancers and educators” by historian Irma Watkins-Owens. Socialist Hubert Harrison stood out for the breadth of subjects he tackled, described by a writer in the Pittsburgh Courier as drawing crowds of hundreds to discussions of “philosophy, psychology, economics, literature, astronomy or the drama." Marcus Garvey and members of his UNIA were the one group drawing the largest audiences. By the mid-1920s the political speakers were surrounded by those selling goods rather than spreading ideas, “barefoot prophets, musicians, healers and traders,” as Watkins-Owens described them. Stories about street speakers in the Black press reflected Claude McKay’s observation that “the soap-boxes of Harlem were rough men of the people, whom educated Harlemites considered amusing or dangerous, according to the speakers’ choices of subject.” What happened on Harlem’s streets likely lay somewhere between those extremes.

The Garveyites remained a presence on street corners in the 1930s, when political organizations were a larger presence, as the Communist Party (CP), and later Sufi Abdul Hamid and his Negro Industrial and Clerical Alliance (NICA), sought audiences among the growing numbers of unemployed. Responding to the Depression, the tone of street speakers was “more threatening” than in the past in the assessment offered in a feature story in the New York Amsterdam News in 1937. They delivered their appeals 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. CP speakers focused on the unemployed, protests against lynching, and the campaign to free the Scottsboro boys, promoting unity between white and Black workers. One result of their appearance bemoaned by New York Amsterdam News columnist Roi Ottley was “that 'capitalist,' 'working classes' and 'class war' have become common household words.” At odds with that message, Garveyites and Hamid advocated for what Ottley and New York Amsterdam News columnist J. A. Rogers labeled “race consciousness” across class lines. Both groups could have been the subject of the complaints that street speakers gave “listeners an earful of what the white man is doing and what the black man must do” in a letter published in the New York Amsterdam News and who “viciously attack the white business man in Harlem” about which a letter to the New York Age complained in 1932. While UNIA speakers typically promoted Black economic activity and race pride, St William Grant was “engaging in talks on the streets of New York and elsewhere in the city, calculated to create disturbance and to provoke the peace of the community,” according to Garvey’s explanation for his expulsion from the organization in 1934. Beginning in 1933, another off-shoot of Garvey’s movement, the African Patriotic League (APL), led by Arthur Reid and Ira Kemp, urged support of Black businesses and joined in calls for white-owned businesses in Harlem to hire Black workers, Reid explained, “to train Negroes in white-owned concerns in order that they might eventually go in business for themselves.”

The campaign for jobs in white-owned businesses was Hamid’s focus, which he brought to Harlem from a successful movement in Chicago. His speeches played on that experience, in Claude McKay’s account, as he taunted audiences “by saying that Chicago’s Negroes were better fighters and more race-conscious.” Hamid initially distinguished himself from the APL by calling for direct action. “He said that the Harlem Negroes were folding their arms, waiting for the white folk to do something, but that white folk could not help them if they did not help themselves,” McKay wrote. “We are only asking the white merchants to give the colored community a fighting chance,” the Sufi cried. “Live and let live. Share the jobs!” He delivered those speeches in a garb whose visual appeal echoed those who sold on street corners: in 1934, New York Age journalist Lou Layne described Hamid as a “knee length, gold-braided green cape, black whipcord breeches, green shirt and black tie, Sam Browne belt and black riding boots, all topped by a gold-tasseled blue turban.” Hamid’s “movement was full of “ginger”,” in McKay’s assessment.

The increasingly large audiences for Hamid’s street meetings provoked a reaction from Harlem’s white and Black leaders. In October 1934, allegations that Hamid’s speeches were anti-Semitic filled the press. A white insurance adjuster and member of the Jewish Minutemen of America named Edgar Burman claimed that Hamid had made anti-Semitic statements at a meeting on the corner of West 125th Street and 7th Avenue, resulting in police charging Hamid with disorderly conduct. The New York Age reprinted in full the story from the Jewish Day reporting those allegations, and later took on its claim that Hamid had called himself the “Black Hitler,” signaling the support of Harlem’s establishment Black leaders for the attack on the street speaker. Magistrate Harris acquitted Hamid, however, unable to resolve the contradictory statements of the white accusers and Hamid’s supporters, the New York Age reported, and frustrated that no police officer had been at the meeting to provide “disinterested” testimony, according to the New York Herald Tribune. Three months later police again arrested Hamid, charging him with preaching atheism and selling books without a permit. On this occasion a police officer was present at the street meeting to provide evidence, and Fred Moore, editor of the New York Age, and senior police officers were on hand as character witnesses to aid the Magistrate in sentencing, the New York Age reported. Hamid received two concurrent sentences of ten days in the Workhouse. “From the crowded courtroom, from the number of prominent citizens and law officers in hand ready to tell the court what kind of a man the uniformed Mohamed is, it was quite obvious,” a journalist for the Afro-American wrote, “that a trap had been set for the caustic soapbox orator and non-conformist and that the threat of police and certain Harlemites to “get him yet” was being realized.” Claude McKay agreed. “The nation was treated to a fantastically exaggerated idea of the growth of an organized Nazi and anti-Semitic movement among Negroes.” His assessment that Hamid did attack Jewish storeowners but only alongside Italians and Greeks, as one of the groups of whites who did business in Harlem, seems to better describe what happened at the street meetings than the label “Black Hitler.” As a result of the sensational stories as much as Hamid’s street meetings, many white businessmen shared the fears that butcher John Guimarro expressed to a MCCH investigator that “a serious race war is going to break out in Harlem soon, due to Sufi and the Communists."

Street meetings saw some violence in the 1930s. Competition between groups occasionally crossed from violent language to acts of violence as the Garveyites sought to hold on to their favored locations in the blocks around 135th Street and Lenox Avenue, drawing police. St. William Grant’s Tiger Division of the UNIA was at the center of the most publicized violence. In 1930, Grant’s group clashed with Communist speakers, resulting in police intervention which led to the death of a Black party member named Alfred Levy, clashes described by historian Mark Naison. In August 1932 it was Hamid’s NICA with whom Grant fought. Clashes between adjacent street corner meetings resulted in police banning both from speaking on Harlem’s streets, and later sending them to corners further apart, the New York Age and New York Amsterdam News both reported. A subsequent alleged attack on the UNIA headquarters by the NICA, on August 30, 1932, saw Hamid and five others arrested according to the New York Amsterdam News. By 1934, more speakers set up south of 135th Street, in the blocks around 125th Street where the boycott campaign’s pickets were located, and where a variety of organizations affiliated with the CP had offices.

Street meetings involving the CP and its affiliated groups in Harlem were regularly subject to police violence, as they were throughout the city in the 1930s, sometimes provoked by Communists. The first major incidents in 1930, which saw Levy and another man killed, occurred at events that involved few Black residents, as the CP had yet to engage the community. The violent repression of a meeting protesting the treatment of the Scottsboro boys in 1934, which included significant numbers of Black participants and featured Ada Wright, the mother of one of the boys, was reported more extensively in the Black press. Police in radio cars broke up the crowd, as happened during the disorder; they also used tear gas and smoke bombs, which there were no reports were used during the disorder.

Even as some journalists drew connections between the disorder on March 19 and street speakers, the CP, APL, and NICA continued to speak on Harlem’s street corners after the disorder. The CP now joined the Black organizations in attacking white businessmen for not employing Black staff, as it responded to the popularity of those campaigns by leading a protest against Weisbecker’s Market. A new cause also animated the APL and the CP: the Italian attack on Ethiopia. As they had in regards to the jobs campaign, the two groups diverged in their responses. The CP promoted a boycott of Italian goods but not of Italian businessmen, as a MCCH investigator heard a party speaker tell a crowd of about 450 on the corner of Lenox Avenue and 133rd Street in July. Reid and Kemp, however, not sharing the party's concern with the unity of Black and white workers, promoted boycotts of Italian businesses. On October 3rd, participants in a street meeting in front of 170 Lenox Avenue tried to stop Black shoppers from entering the Italian-owned vegetable and meat markets at that address, resulting in a large police detail being sent in to break up the crowd. Further protests by the Harlem Labor Union, Reid and Kemp’s new organization, followed in 1936, where the violence extended to breaking windows in Italian businesses, and police attacks on spectators.
Crowds incited by white men (4) The arrests of white men for inciting crowds all occurred in the vicinity of Kress’ store on West 125th Street and involved efforts to speak or picketing. White men protesting in those ways on Harlem’s streets were a familiar sight by 1935. In the 1930s, the Communist Party had an office at 415 Lenox Avenue; affiliated organizations had offices nearby: the International Labor Defense four blocks south at 326 Lenox Avenue, the Young Liberators at 262 Lenox Avenue, and the League of Struggle for Negro Rights and Negro Liberator newspaper at 2162 7th Avenue until just before the disorder, when they moved to 308 West 141st Street. Most of those who worked in those offices and protested in Harlem were white men and women. Although the four men arrested did not identify themselves as Communists, the organizations of which they did admit membership — the Nurses and Hospital League in the case of Daniel Miller, the New York Student League in the case of Harry Gordon, and the Young Liberators in the cases of Sam Jameson and Murray Samuels — were all connected to the Party. The men also fit the profile of those the Party assigned to work in Harlem described to historian Mark Naison: they were “in their teens or early twenties and came either from the two colleges located in the Harlem Section — Columbia and City — or form the immigrant neighborhoods surrounding Black Harlem.” Miller was twenty-four years of age and lived on Morningside Avenue on the boundary of Harlem. Gordon was twenty years of age and lived in the Bronx. Jameson and Samuels were both nineteen years of age, with Jameson living in Washington Heights north of Harlem and Samuels in Brooklyn. The number of Black residents who joined the Party and related organizations did grow slowly, but numbered only a few thousand by the time of the disorder. By 1935, larger numbers did participate in demonstrations led by Communist Party members, particularly those in support of the defense of the Scottsboro boys.

Speaking from stepladders, as Miller and Gordon tried to do, and picketing, as Jameson and Samuels did, were favored tactics of Communist activity in Harlem. Party members joined the streetcorner speakers who had been a staple of Harlem life throughout the 1920s, taking to corners “from 137th Street & 7th Avenue, north to 144th Street and Lenox Avenue, south to 110th Street and 5th Avenue," according to historian Mark Naison. When they first appeared, the mostly white Communist Party speakers frequently competed with Black nationalist speakers for locations and attention, especially on the corners of Lenox Avenue from 133rd to 135th Streets, and challenged their calls for race-based action with appeals for unity between Black and white workers. By September, 1934, Roi Ottley bemoaned the predominance of Communist street speakers in his column in the New York Amsterdam News. Communist Party pickets were initially less prominent in Harlem. When Sufi Hamid and his followers began picketing white-owned businesses seeking jobs for Black workers, first on 135th Street and later on 125th Street, the Party remained on the margins, at odds with the race-based appeals, even as the campaign expanded in 1934. When that movement splintered, however, the Party moved to mount a boycott campaign on their terms against the Empire Cafeteria on Lenox Avenue just north of 125th Street, seeking gains for white workers as well as jobs for Black workers. A week and a half of picketing and protest meetings led by Young Liberators, and store windows twice being broken, brought an agreement to hire black staff.

The reaction of police to the white men protesting on 125th Street was typical of the violent repression of Communist Party demonstrations in New York City from when they began in 1928, a repression which was explored by historian Marilynn Johnson. As early as September 1929, the New York Amsterdam News published a letter describing a Black Communist speaker, Richard Moore, and the white Communists who tried to take his place, being pulled from a stepladder by police “without the slightest provocation,” notwithstanding claims of a disruptive demonstration reported in the New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, and New York Amsterdam News. Mayor La Guardia had been trying to change the police approach since his election in 1934, historian Marilynn Johnson shows, requiring more tolerance of protest and a neutral stance in labor disputes. However, Harlem residents had witnessed the limits of that change a year before the disorder. Police who arrived to manage the crowd at a Communist Party meeting protesting the treatment of the Scottsboro boys suddenly drove radio cars on to the sidewalk and into the crowd, and then threw tear gas and bomb canisters. Whatever the mayor prescribed, hostility to Communists remained strong among rank-and-file police. It was that attitude that was on display in the speed with which officers moved against the men in front of Kress’ store, while not arresting James Parton, who introduced the two white men who tried to speak, or Black members of the crowd.

Some other white men and women appear to have been among the crowds around 125th Street. Louise Thompson told a MCCH hearing that she “did not see many white people," who amounted to only "a very few” percentage of the groups around 125th Street. Some of those white men and women may also have been affiliated with the Communist Party. Almost an hour after the arrests of Jameson and Samuels, the last of the four white men arrested, the Young Liberators distributed leaflets on 125th Street, and perhaps in surrounding areas. At least some of those handing out those documents would have had to have been white, given the makeup of the organization. So too would some of those who distributed a second leaflet, printed by the Communist Party an hour or so later.

The other four white men arrested in the disorder, however, do not appear to have been connected with the Party. Leo Smith, the one white man arrested for breaking windows, was apprehended early in the disorder when white Communist party members were among the crowds, but there is no evidence linking him to the Party. There is no evidence of what the one white man arrested for possession of a weapon, Jose Perez, was doing in Harlem, and he may not have been involved in the disorder at all. The two other white men were arrested for looting, one with stolen clothing in his possession, the other in unknown circumstances. The lack of information about those arrests means they do not offer clear evidence that white men were among the crowds on Harlem's streets after disorder spread beyond 125th Street.

Accounts of the events of the disorder similarly lack clear evidence of the participation of white men. While the MCCH Report made no mention of white men other than the protesters in front of Kress’ store, both white and Black newspapers did include whites among their general descriptions of the crowds on the streets of Harlem. However, the statements in the Black press appear to be based on the arrest of the four men in front of Kress’ store at the very beginning of the disorder rather than any wider presence or participation. Under the subtitle “Some Rioters White,” the Afro-American asserted that “there were no strict opposing camps racially. Some of the most vicious rioters were white men who egged the crowd on and who handed out the leaflets and carried picket signs.” Prof. G M James, in a column in the New York Age offering an assessment of the disorder, reported that “I am informed by eye witnesses that (1) the riot was precipitated by both white and colored assailants alike.” Other Black newspapers that included white people in the crowds were less explicit about their role. The Norfolk Journal and Guide reported “About 4000 colored men and women and their white sympathizers took the law into their own hands when they heard that 'a small Negro boy' had been brutally or fatally beaten by a manger of a five and ten cent store for stealing either candy or a penknife valued at five cents.” The Atlanta World was even less explicit: “Whites joined their Negro fellow citizens as the story of the fatal beating of the youth by the store clerks gained more magnitude.”

The Daily News, New York Herald Tribune, and Brooklyn Daily Eagle explicitly included white men among those breaking windows during the disorder, but only in broad statements. The Daily News described “armed bands of colored and white guerillas, swinging crowbars and clubs, roamed through barricaded Harlem from 110th to 145th St., assaulting every person of opposite color to cross their paths, setting fires and smashing shop windows after a night of fighting.” Almost the same language appeared in the New York Herald Tribune. A similar description in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle added looting and clashes with police: “Bands of men and women, in some case joined by whites and in other cases assaulting any white they met, roared up and down the byways of Harlem, smashing more than 200 windows, looting stores, and fleeing from or fighting police.”

Just how many white men were in the crowds on Harlem’s streets is uncertain. The small proportion of those arrested who were white men does not necessarily reflect how many were present; white police officers were likely more inclined to arrest Black men and women in this context, and it seems like few of the Black officers stationed in Harlem made arrests during the disorder. Most newspaper stories do not offer an assessment of the size of the white presence; those that do range from a "sprinkling” in the New York Times to “many” in the New York Evening Journal to “hundreds” (in crowds of several thousand) in the Daily News. James Hubert of the Urban League was alone in claiming that white men made up a majority of the crowds, based on a report from a (Black?) member of his staff: "A man from my own office who went out into the streets said that fully 75 per cent of the persons causing the trouble were whites," he told a reporter from the New York Herald Tribune. "They got up on soap boxes and agitated and incited the Negroes. I am told that the persons who threw bricks into windows included many whites who rode about in taxicabs.” The details Hubert offered in support of his generalization do not actually put white men in the crowds on the street. As well as following the Black press in focusing on the men who picketed Kress’ store, he locates white participants in vehicles, not crowds. Cars regularly appear as targets of violence in descriptions of the disorder; they are not otherwise reported as sources of violence.

White men in the crowds in Harlem’s streets were not necessarily drawn to the neighborhood by news of the disorder, as the Daily News claimed. Many white-owned businesses on West 125th Street refused, discouraged or discriminated against Black customers, highlighting that the district catered to whites from surrounding neighborhoods, including those in the blocks immediately south and east whose populations changed from predominantly white in the 1930 census to predominantly Black in the 1940 census. Other white men came to Black Harlem for nightlife and vice.