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

Stephen Robertson, “Constrained But Not Contained: Patterns of Everyday Life and the Limits of Segregation in 1920s Harlem,” in The Ghetto in Global History: 1500 to the Present, ed. Wendy Z. Goldman and Joe William Trotter, Jr. (New York: Routledge, 2017

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Crowds in Harlem 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.”
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