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

Sidney Fine, Violence in the Model City: The Cavanagh Administration, Race Relations, and the Detroit Riot of 1967 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2007).

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Looting (67) The disorder resulted in damage to at least 300 Harlem businesses, perhaps as many as 450, many of which also had goods stolen. Such attacks on white businesses distinguished the events in 1935 from collective racial violence earlier in the twentieth century although the scale was far smaller than the disorders that would follow. When racial violence broke out in Harlem in 1943, four times as many businesses were targets of violence. The press labeled the theft as looting, a term that distinguished it on the basis of the context of violence and crisis in which it took place. Such theft often involved crowds publicly stealing goods, but those circumstances were not entirely out of the ordinary. Just over one in five (15 of 67) burglaries at other times in 1935 involved smashing street-front doors and windows to steal goods before police responded, although not crowds of participants.

Although press reports and the Mayor's Commission (MCCH) gave prominence to attacks on property in characterizing the disorder as “not a race riot,” they offered only general descriptions of this violence, including fewer detailed incidents than was the case with assaults and none of the quantitative information that would be collected in subsequent racial disorders. However, damaged businesses did figure prominently in press photographs, which highlighted that such damage represented a spectacle — one which also drew crowds to Harlem the day after the disorder to view the damage for themselves. Only sixty-seven looted businesses were identified in the surviving sources, twenty-nine linked to arrests, with nine stores linked to more than one arrest. An additional seventy-two businesses were identified as having had their windows damaged, which would have exposed them to theft. There were almost certainly more looted businesses than those identified in the sources. In the cases of sixteen of those arrested for looting, there was no information on their alleged targets. While some of those stores may be among those identified in other sources, given the limited number of cases where multiple arrests were made for thefts from the same store, most are likely missing from this picture of the looting. (Two looted businesses that appeared in photographs whose location could not be determined were not included in these counts.)

The stores identified in the sources as having stock stolen represented a cross-section of the small businesses in Harlem focused on needs more than luxuries, and on personal items rather than larger items like furniture. Businesses that provided food make up the largest group (24 of 57). Clothing was also a target (19 of 57), while the remaining businesses sold a variety of goods (14 of 57). Missing from this partial list of businesses attacked during the disorder were large stores and several enterprises prominent in the neighborhood: beauty shops and barbers. There were sixteen individuals charged with looting unidentified businesses. Two looted businesses that appeared in photographs whose location cannot be determined were not included in these counts. At other times in 1935, the full range of stores were targets of burglaries.

However, newspaper reports and legal records indicated that in the initial hours of the disorder, store windows were smashed without efforts to steal their contents. After police dispersed the crowd drawn to Kress’ store and set up a cordon on 125th Street protecting it, another clash at the rear of the store on 124th Street around 7:45PM saw windows broken. Around the same time, crowds smashed windows on 125th Street between 7th and 8th Avenue. Although the police present on this block lacked the numbers to protect the windows, in several cases they responded to damage by taking up positions in front of stores. That strategy appeared to have prevented much looting. While many of the large stores were identified as having windows smashed at this time, only the New York Evening Journal reported that thefts also took place. Around 8:45 PM, when police succeeded in pushing the crowds from 125th St on to 7th and 8th Avenues, the smaller businesses on those streets became targets. Windows were broken and isolated looting reported in the blocks of 7th Avenue immediately north of 125th Street. The New York Times and Afro-American reported goods were thrown into the street rather than taken, actions more akin to efforts to damage property, to ransack, than a turn to theft. However, it was not clear how often that happened. Many of these businesses were still open and staffed, but that did little to curtail theft. In some businesses, staff removed goods from windows and shelves but most hid or fled crowds and bombardment with rocks and stones. More effective were the Black storeowners and staff who put signs in their store windows that identified the business as Black-owned. Those signs spared them from looting if not always from having windows broken. Around 10:00 PM, as crowds began to move away from the block of 125th Street containing Kress’ store where police were concentrated, assaults and attacks on stores intensified and spread through Harlem. Further isolated looting occurred on 7th Avenue north of 125th Street, and after 10.30PM, in the area of 116th Street to the south.

Around midnight, reporters from the New York Herald Tribune, Daily Mirror, and Afro-American noted a change in the tenor of the disorder reflected in arrests: violence became overshadowed by looting, particularly on Lenox Avenue in the blocks north of 125th Street, and lasted until around 2:00 AM. This more general turn to looting was helped by both earlier damage to windows that offered access to displays and store interiors and the lesser police presence in this area. By that late hour, most undamaged businesses had closed. Iron gates and grills protected the doors and windows of some of those stores. However, those additional obstacles did not prevent looting, an indication of growing violence and limited police presence. At least three businesses in this area were also set on fire after having been looted. Even the return of some business owners, once they learned of the disorder, did little to prevent looting. Several owners reported futile efforts to secure police assistance, which later became the basis of suits for damages they filed against the city. The progression from violence and damage to looting also featured in the later racial disorders in Harlem and Detroit in 1943 and in Detroit in 1967. As Sidney Fine argued was the case in Detroit in 1967, that pattern located looting as a consequence of the violence, not as the defining characteristic of the disorder and as having served to prolong disorder. While the Hearst press and other white publications, and some establishment Black leaders, attributed the looting to "hoodlums," others pointed to the economic situation of Harlem's residents. The Communist Daily Worker offered the starkest statement of that explanation: "It was dire need that turned the window-smashing retaliation against the police and the store-keepers into a 'looting' campaign." It was certainly true that the blocks to the east of Lenox Avenue, where the looting was most extensive, were home to many of Harlem's most desperate and economically deprived residents.

The progression from damage to looting also reflected the involvement of additional groups of men who had not been prominent in the initial violence. In later racial disorders, women would be a much larger presence among those arrested for looting and in images of theft. However, in 1935, while three women are among the sixty individuals arrested for looting, almost as many women were arrested for other offenses: two for breaking windows and another for inciting a crowd. Several newspapers reported that white men also joined the looting, but only two are identified in legal records. One of those men was arrested in circumstances that do not put him in the midst of the disorder: Jean Jacquelin, a thirty-three-year-old Canadian driver with a previous arrest for assault with a knife, arrested at 5:40 AM, after the crowds had left the streets, in possession of clothing stolen from a tailor down the block from his home. Louis Tonick, the second white man arrested, is not linked to a specific business, and lived outside Harlem (one additional white man, Leo Smith, was arrested for breaking windows).

The feature of the looting that drew particular comment in the reports of newspapers and later the MCCH was the extent to which it targeted only white-owned businesses and spared Black-owned businesses. Newspaper stories and the final report of the MCCH allowed that a small number of Black-owned businesses did suffer damage, either before identifying themselves with signs, or after crowds became less discriminating. However, none of the instances of looting identified in the sources involved Black businesses. At the same time, Harlem’s racial landscape was more complex than these reports recognized. Among the “white-owned” businesses targeted were a number of Puerto Rican businesses around 116th Street and Chinese laundries scattered throughout the neighborhood.

Police responded to looting with a greater degree of violence and more arrests than they did to crowds and attacks on stores. In their practices, theft justified firing at suspects, rather than in the air, as police claimed they did in confronting crowds and assaults. Police pursuing suspected looters shot and killed Lloyd Hobbs and James Thompson. Sixty of those arrested were alleged to have been looting, identified in the sources either because they were charged with burglary, an offense which involved breaking into a store and entering it to take merchandise or by details of what police officers alleged an individual had done that fit looting but that resulted in other charges. Those arrests far outnumbered those arrested for any other activity during the disorder. Officers generally claimed to have seen an individual stealing goods from a business. In their defense, at least some of those police arrested claimed to have simply been standing with crowds on the street when police approached. In one-third (9 of 27) of the cases where the circumstances are known, the arrest occurred away from the looted store when police apparently stopped and questioned individuals they encountered carrying goods.

Courts also treated charges of looting more severely than other alleged offenses in the disorder. Magistrates held over half (28 of 50) of those who appeared before them for the grand jury compared to only one-third of those charged with assault. The grand jury did redirect a significant number to the Court of Special Sessions, casting them as having taken goods of insufficient value to warrant prosecution for a felony. District attorneys negotiated guilty pleas for lesser offenses with most of those individuals, so that only two prosecutions for looting went to trial. In doing so, they followed the same approach to such cases as was taken at other times in 1935.

As those criminal prosecutions made their way through the legal system, Harlem's white business owners turned to the civil courts seeking compensation from the city for their losses. Those claims were based a nineteenth-century municipal law that held a city or county liable if property was destroyed or injured by a mob or riot. One hundred and six owners brought actions, twenty-six of whom were identified in newspaper stories. The first of those suits heard in the Municipal Court was brought by William Feinstein, the owner of a liquor store on Lenox Avenue. The jury awarded him damages, a verdict which two months later the judge decided to uphold. In the interim, the city also lost a second case in the Municipal Court, for damages to Anna Rosenberg's notion store, which had been set on fire, and seven actions in the Supreme Court, which heard cases for larger damages.
Events
Introduction 5 plain 6 2024-05-06T19:40:02+00:00
The outbreak of disorder in Harlem on the evening of March 19, 1935 immediately attracted national attention as the first large-scale racial violence in the United States in more than a decade, and as the first occurrence in the nation’s leading Black neighborhood. Historians subsequently seized on it as an outburst that illuminated the end of Harlem’s status as a center of cultural production and empowerment, akin to the interpretation of the racial disorders of the second half of the twentieth century as “an explosive, unproductive response to decades of northern racism.” That focus on underlying grievances, not the events of a disorder, has been widely adopted as an approach in the study of collective racial violence in the United States. Since the 1960s, scholars have recognized that the outbreak in Harlem also marked a beginning: the first instance of a new form of racial violence characterized by Black residents attacking property rather than white men and women attacking Black residents, who resisted that violence, as was characteristic of outbreaks earlier in the twentieth century. However, that interpretation was not based on any detailed analysis of what happened on March 19 and the early hours of March 20. While historians generally acknowledge the multifaceted nature of racial violence, in keeping with the general approach of historical argument, their interpretations have involved selecting one thread to emphasize. Such methods necessarily simplify the character of racial violence and obscure the balance and relationship between different forms of violence.

This study reverses that approach and analyses the details of what happened and where those events occurred to understand the complex character of the disorder in Harlem in 1935 and how it fits in the broader history of racial violence in the United States. In doing so, it responds to Amanda Seligman’s call in her award-winning article on disorders in 1960s Chicago to “look inside a riot and examine both the actions of participants and the responses of their neighbors.” “Cracked open,” disorders can reveal a broad range of actors pursuing a variety of goals rather than a community unanimous in sentiment, “periods of action punctuated by rest and quiet” in rhythms that were “irregular and staccato” rather than continuous activity.

The rich and extensive literature on other racial disorders in the twentieth-century United States includes studies that examine the events of disorders in more detail than the existing accounts of the events in Harlem in 1935. However, those studies are more selective than this project in what events they include, focusing on specific categories of events, typically deaths, and those involving large groups of people. In part, those limitations are imposed by the scale and duration of the violence being examined: Gerald Horne’s powerful extended narrative of the 1965 Watts disorder, which couples extensive accounts of the thirty-four deaths with more general statements and aggregates about incidents involving attacks on property, examines an outbreak that lasted six days and involved 1,032 injuries and 3,438 arrests. Examining only one evening, and only 128 arrests, allowed me to take the approach of historians like Horne one step further and analyze every event that could be identified in the available sources to produce a more comprehensive picture. Such a granular approach provides the basis for a data-driven analysis that identifies and contextualizes patterns quantitatively. Cheryl Greenberg and other historians of collective racial violence, most notably Senechal de la Roche, Dominic Capeci and Martha Wilkerson, and Sidney Fine, have pursued a data-driven approach in analyzing participants but not in relation to events. The granular data about events developed in this approach also allows for the locations of the violence to be mapped. While almost every study of a racial disorder includes a map, none are visualizations of data related to events of the detail and extent employed in this project. Instead, those maps show only the neighborhoods under study, occasionally including landmarks and flashpoints of violence. The maps in this study show the details of the ebb and flow of its spread and incidence across time.

What this analysis reveals is that the disorder in Harlem was not simply an 'economic riot' or attack on the neighborhood's businesses. It also involved violence, in which Black women as well as Black men participated, targeted specifically at white-owned businesses, intermittent attacks by Black residents on white men and women they encountered in the neighborhood, and police violence against both Black men and women who participated in the disorder and those who were spectators. In this more complex picture, the actions of Black residents go beyond protests directed against economic discrimination and more broadly challenge white economic and political power. This violence threatened the racial order that had been imposed on Harlem.

This study extends beyond March 20 to trace how the complex violence of the events of the disorder was distorted, diminished, and marginalized in the courts and the investigation launched by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. As the police response to the disorder had been ineffective and indiscriminate, the cases prosecuted in the courts encompassed little of the nature and scale of the violence and many of those arrested could ultimately only be charged for being in the streets near acts of violence rather than participating in them. At the same time, just one case of police violence during the disorder reached the courts, which the grand jury voted to not prosecute. Only the actions for damages that Harlem's white business owners brought against the city offered glimpses of the scale of the violence against property. Only the events in and around the Kress store that triggered the disorder and the fatal police shooting of Lloyd Hobbs, a sixteen-year-old Black boy, received attention from the thirteen Black and white New Yorkers who undertook an investigation of conditions in Harlem for the mayor. Neither their public hearings nor their published reports addressed violence against white men and women or provided details of the damage to property. Most of Harlem's Black leaders and their white allies did not want to pursue the broad challenge to white power mounted during the disorder.

To effectively present this argument, Harlem in Disorder takes the form of a multi-layered, hyperlinked narrative that connects different scales of analysis: individual events, aggregated patterns, and a chronological narrative. The expansive scope of a digital publication allows for the inclusion of the details of the events on which the argument relies to an extent far beyond what would be possible in print. The organization of that material in layers allows for the argument to be elaborated in a familiar linear format while also allowing readers to explore the details from which it is constructed when, and to the extent, that they want.
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