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

"The Harlem Outbreak," New York Post, March 21, 1935, 20.

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Leaflets distributed The Young Liberators printed a one-page mimeographed leaflet in the early evening of March 19. Just where they distributed the leaflet is uncertain. "Some white youngsters were passing out handbills" when a reporter for the Afro-American arrived at 125th Street and 7th Avenue at 7:14 PM; Louise Thompson saw people with the leaflet on that corner just after 8:00 PM, suggesting a focus on 125th Street. “They were hurriedly passed put among the throngs of Negro idlers up and down teeming 125th Street,” according to the sensationalized story in Time magazine. The New York American claimed, “These papers received wide circulation throughout Harlem.” The leaflet was also pasted on building walls, according to the New York Evening Journal. Reading its text incited the crowds that had gathered on 125th Street, the police and District Attorney William Dodge claimed, making the Young Liberators, who they considered Communists, responsible for the disorder. The MCCH did not agree. Based on testimony from Louise Thompson that the leaflet did not appear on 125th Street until sometime between 7.30 PM and 8.00 PM, the MCCH final report concluded that the Young Liberators “were not responsible for the disorder and attacks on property which were already in full swing.” By 7.30 PM, “Already a tabloid in screaming headlines was telling the city that a riot was going on in Harlem,” the MCCH report also noted. Louise Thompson identified that newspaper as the Daily Mirror. Later on March 19, the CP distributed a leaflet, after the Young Liberators approached them concerned about the growing disorder, according to James Ford’s testimony in a MCCH public hearing. He said that leaflet was “written and distributed” about “9 or 10 o’clock.” Leaflets were still in circulation on Harlem’s streets around 2 AM. Sgt Samuel Battle told a public hearing of the MCCH he came into possession of two or three at that time, without specifying to which of the two leaflets he was referring.

Both leaflets identified Kress store staff as responsible for the violence against Rivera, with only passing mention of police. That narrative focused protests on the store, and white businesses, Bosses, more generally, rather than police, or the white population. In terms of that framework, attacks on Kress’ store, and on other white businesses later in the disorder, appear not straightforwardly attacks on property and economic power, but also as retaliation against violence by those who owned and worked in those businesses

A mimeographed page, the Young Liberators’ leaflet combined handwritten and typewritten text. At the top, the handwritten text read, “Child Brutally Beaten. Woman attacked by Boss and Cops = Child near DEATH.” The remaining typewritten text read:
ONE HOUR AGO A TWELVE-YEAR-OLD NEGRO BOY WAS BRUTALLY BEATEN BY THE MANAGEMENT OF KRESS FIVE-AND-TEN-CENT STORE.
THE BOY IS NEAR DEATH
HE WAS MERCILESSLY BEATEN BECAUSE THEY THOUGHT HE HAD ‘STOLEN’ A FIVE CENT KNIFE.
A NEGRO WOMAN WHO SPRANG TO THE DEFENSE OF THE BOY HAD HER ARMS BROKEN BY THESE THUGS AND WAS THEN ARRESTED.
WORKERS, NEGROES AND WHITE, PROTEST AGAINST THIS LYNCH ATTACK ON INNOCENT NEGRO PEOPLE. DEMAND THE RELEASE OF THE BOY AND WOMAN.
DEMAND THE IMMEDIATE ARREST OF THE MANAGER RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS LYNCH ATTACK.
DON'T BUY AT KRESS'S. STOP POLICE BRUTALITY IN NEGRO HARLEM.
JOIN THE PICKET LINE
ISSUED BY YOUNG LIBERATORS.

Predictably, the anti-Communist Hearst newspaper the New York Evening Journal gave the greatest space to the leaflet, publishing both the full text of the Young Liberators' leaflet and photographs of it (and the YCP leaflet and two placards carried by pickets, under the headline "Insidious Propaganda That Started Harlem Riot," and a front-page photograph of the men arrested protesting in front of Kress’ store). A portion of the Young Liberators' leaflet appeared in a combination of AP photographs published in several newspapers. In addition to the New York Evening Journal, the HN, WT and the New Republic published the text of the leaflet. The NYHT quoted only about half of the leaflet, stopping after the first use of “lynch attack.” None of those published versions of the circular included the final line, “JOIN THE PICKET.” That line did appear in the version published by the Norfolk Journal and Guide, the only Black publication in which the leaflets appeared. That line is visible in the photograph published in the NYEJ, was in the version of the leaflet in the MCCH’s final report, and was raised by Hays in the public hearing of the MCCH (Taylor answered that he did not know to what it referred [31]). The text published in the HN omitted the line DON'T BUY AT KRESS'S. STOP POLICE BRUTALITY IN NEGRO HARLEM, substituting instead “Demand the hiring of Negro workers in Harlem department stores. Boycott the store." That phrase transposed the call not to buy in the store into the terms of boycott the campaigns of the previous year, effectively treating the tactic as having a single goal. The NYP quoted only the handwritten headline of the leaflet, the characterization of the incident as “this lynch attack,” and the call for protest. Time quoted only the headline, and the AA only the first two phrases from the headline, omitting “boss” so that the charge of violence was only against police. Quotations in the NYS were garbled versions of the actual leaflet text, including words and phrases that appeared but in the wrong form: "A Child Brutally Beaten." "A Twelve-Year-Old Child Was Brutally Beaten for Stealing a Knife from a Five and Ten Cent Store." "Workers Protest Against This Lynch Attack." The DN misreported the leaflet as making the more provocative charge that the boy had been beaten to death. Initial stories about the disorder published by the NYT and Am did not mention the leaflet, but added them to their narrative the next day, 3/21.

The CP leaflet, also a mimeographed page, similarly began with handwritten text that read, “FOR UNITY OF NEGRO AND WHITE WORKERS! DON'T LET THE BOSSES START RACE RIOTS IN HARLEM!”. The typewritten portion went on:
The brutal beating of the 12-year-old boy, Riviera, by Kress's special guard, for taking a piece of candy, again proves the increasing terror against the Negro people of Harlem. Bosses, who deny the most immediate necessities from workers' children, who throw workers out of employment, who pay not even enough to live on, are protecting their so-called property rights by brutal beatings, as in the case of the boy Riviera. They shoot both Negro and white workers in strikes all over the country. They lynch Negro people in the South on framed-up charges.
The bosses and police are trying to bring the lynch spirit right here to Harlem. The bosses would welcome nothing more than a fight between the white and Negro workers of our community, so that they may be able to continue to rule over both the Negro and white workers.
Our answer to the brutal beating of this boy, by one of the flunkies of Mr. Kress, must be an organized and determined resistance against the brutal attacks of the bosses and the police.
WORKERS, NEGRO AND WHITE: DEMAND THE IMMEDIATE DISMISSAL AND ARREST AND PROSECUTION OF THE SPECIAL GUARD AND THE MANAGER OF THE STORE.
DEMAND THE RELEASE OF THE NEGRO AND WHITE WORKERS ARRESTED.
DEMAND THE HIRING OF NEGRO WORKERS IN ALL DEPARTMENT STORES IN HARLEM
DON'T LET BOSSES START ANY RACE RIOTS IN HARLEM.
DON'T TRADE IN KRESSES.

Issued by
Communist Party
Young Communist League

The Daily Worker published the CP leaflet text, while not publishing the Young Liberators' leaflet, perhaps because the public position of the Young Liberators was that the organization was not affiliated with the CP. The handwritten headline of that leaflet appeared at the end of a WT story, after the full-text of the Young Liberators' leaflet: “In another manifesto, signed by the Communist party and the Young Peoples’ League, a plea was made “for unity of Negro and white workers—don’t let the bosses start race riots in Harlem!” While the New York Evening Journal published a photograph of the leaflet, no other white newspapers reproduced the text, nor did it appear in the MCCH final report. The Norfolk Journal and Guide was the only Black publication in which the leaflet text appeared.

Initial newspaper stories reported that police said that the leaflets were responsible for moving the crowds on 125th Street to violence. The sensationalized version of that story employed metaphors of fire that placed the leaflets at the start of the disorder: leaflets were the “match which ignited Harlem and pitted its teeming thousands against the police and white spectators and shopkeepers” in the Daily News, “inflammatory handbills, the spark that fired the tinder” in Newsweek, and "inflame the populace" in a New York Age editorial; and in the NYS and DM leaflets fanned the crowd’s fury. The NYEJ opted for a more racist image evoking slavery, in which the leaflet was “largely responsible for whipping the Negroes to a frenzy.” The New York Age columnist the "Flying Cavalier," described the leaflets as as an example of the Communist "technique in the making up of their messages which would incite a lamb to jump on a tiger—if the lamb didn’t think first." Other newspapers framed the leaflets in terms of rumors: as having started the rumor in the NYHT, as “the chief agency which spread the rumor in the HN; and as having “helped spread resentment” in the NYP. (The WT described the leaflet without giving it a specific role; the “tinder for the destructive conflict” was the rumor that a boy had been beaten and killed, “assiduously spread by Communists.”) Writing in the New Republic, white journalist Hamilton Basso devoted two paragraphs to weighing the role the leaflet played in the disorder. He concluded that it “helped to rouse the crowds to violence,” but rejected the idea that the leaflet’s purpose “was deliberately to provoke a race riot” as requiring belief in “the stupid Red Scare of the Hearst press.”

The only direct evidence of when the Young Liberators' leaflet was distributed came from Louise Thompson. She told a public hearing of the MCCH that the leaflets were not in circulation when she left 125th Street around 7.30 PM. It was when Thompson returned around 8.00 PM that she “first saw the leaflet” in the hands of several people, but not anyone handing them out. Thompson was not a disinterested witness; as a member of the Communist Party she would not have wanted to see them held responsible for the disorder. L. T. Cole, who like Thompson had been inside Kress’ store after Rivera was grabbed but was not a Communist, told the MCCH he saw pamphlets in the crowd around 8.00 PM (the number is smudged in the transcript so that time is uncertain). Inspector Di Martini’s report supported that timeline, locating the appearance of “a number of pamphlets under the heading of the YL and YCP” after the crowd that gathered the rear of Kress’ store around 7.00 PM had been dispersed. Presumably that timing was based on the statements of officers on 125th Street -- but not Patrolman Moran, who told the MCCH he was on duty in front of Kress’ store from 6.00 PM throughout the night and did not see leaflets passed out. Copies of the leaflets were attached to the report. They may have been the copies that Sgt Battle told the MCCH public hearing that he had gathered near the end of the disorder, around 2 AM.

Newspaper stories presented a different timeline that had the leaflet appear earlier, around 6.00 PM, for which there was no direct evidence. The NYEJ and HN, the New York Post the next day, and the New Republic, reported that the Young Liberators' leaflet appeared about an hour after Kress’ staff grabbed Rivera, which would have been around 3.30 PM. When DA William Dodge spoke to reporters on March 20, the DN and WT (and Am 3/22) reported him as saying that the leaflets appeared within two hours of the incident in the store. No one at the scene described that timeline. It was likely based on the text of the leaflet, which read “One hour ago a twelve-year-old boy was brutally beaten by the management of Kress five-and-ten-cent store.” At that time, however, the Young Liberators were unaware of what had happened in the store. It was not until around 5.00 PM, as police were clearing people from Kress’ store, a black man brought news to the offices of the Young Liberators, James Taylor testified. Taylor, the leader of the Young Liberators, was asked about the timing referred to in the leaflet; he replied that he did not know whether that was correct.[29] The NYT story reporting Dodge’s comments had the “first of the Communist handbills” appear at 6:00 PM. That timeline is at least plausible; it would have been around an hour after the Young Liberators learned of an incident in Kress’ store. It was not, however, a timeframe that fitted with Di Martini’s report. The DN had the Young Liberators distributing the leaflets as they picketed Kress’ store, at a time not specified in the story. However, that detail is part of the truncated timeline police provided that had all five men they arrested arriving at Kress’ store at the same time, rather than separately over a period of forty-five minutes starting around 6.00 PM as testimony from those at the scene indicated. The pickets were the final protesters to arrive at Kress’ store, around 6.45 PM. Thompson saw them, so would have seen leaflets being distributed at that time.

William Ford’s testimony in a MCCH public hearing is the only evidence related to the origins and timing of the CP pamphlet. The CP leaflet appeared after members of the Young Liberators visited Ford, about an hour after distributing their leaflet, he testified. They “were very much disturbed” that “these leaflets had not been able to allay mass resentment in Harlem,” and instead “a rumor had got around that a race riot had started in Harlem.” The CP immediately produced a leaflet intended “to stop race rioting,” Ford testified, and he went to Harlem around 8 PM. The leaflet arrived an hour or two later, about “9 or 10 o’clock.” The MCCH report stated that that CP leaflet was issued “about the same time” as the YL’s leaflet. None of the newspapers mentioned the time that the leaflet was distributed.

District Attorney William Dodge and Police Commissioner Valentine both amplified the police narrative when they spoke to reporters on March 20 after Dodge appeared before the grand jury to seek indictments against alleged participants in the disorder. The leaflets remained central to that charge, and to the evidence that the authorities presented in an effort to substantiate it. Valentine summarized Di Martini’s “departmental report on the cause of the rioting” as detailing “that a Negro youth had been caught stealing, that a woman had screamed, that the "Young Liberators" had met, that they had thereafter disseminated "untruthful deceptive and inflammatory literature" and that all these events had been climaxed by the appearance of a hearse in the vicinity,” the NYS reported, a chronology also reported in the Am (3/22), WT, TU [3/21_LaG] and BDE. (The hearse is not the final element in Di Martini’s report; it is mentioned before the YLs). Two days later Dodge showed the grand jury a typewriter and mimeograph machine. The fruits of police raids on the offices of several organizations affiliated with the Communist Party, the machines were used to produce the YL’s leaflet, he told the grand jury, according to stories in HT, NYP, Am, DN, NYT. (The mimeograph machine was taken from the Nurses and Hospital Workers League, the organization which employed one of the men arrested for trying to speak in front of Kress’ store, Daniel Miller, the NYP and Am reported). According to the DN, after the grand jury examined that material, “Dodge said arrests might be expected momentarily.” There are no reports of any arrests related to the leaflets.

Mayor La Guardia did not echo the DA and Police Commissioner in directly blaming Communists for the disorder. While the statement he issued that was distributed and displayed in Harlem the evening after the disorder followed the same police narrative, and mentioned the leaflets, it did not present them as triggering the disorder. Instead, they were used to characterize those responsible: “The maliciousness and viciousness of the instigators are betrayed by the false statements contained in mimeographed handbills and placards.” That statement indirectly implicated the Young Liberators and Communist Party, who had signed the leaflets (as the DW noted, 3/21). However, the circular presented the disorder as “instigated and artificially stimulated by a few irresponsible individuals,” who went unnamed. Questioned by journalists, La Guardia "would not say whether he agreed with the police that the instigators were Communists," the New York Herald Tribune reported.

Newspaper stories about the MCCH public hearing treated the testimony regarding the time at which the leaflets appeared in a variety of ways. The HT and an editorial in the AN highlighted how that testimony undermined what police said in the aftermath of the disorder. “Reds' Handbills Are Cleared As 'Chief Cause' of Harlem Riot” was the headline of the HT story [3/31, 1], which reported that “The committee learned that the circulars did not appear on the streets until 8:30 p. m., fully two hours after the worst of the rioting was over. Therefore, the committee was asked by Communist lawyers to conclude that the literature could not have been a cause of much loss of property or life.” The title of the AN editorial, “The Road is Clear,” described the testimony that “The much-publicized Young Liberator pamphlets, carrying the false reports, did not appear on the streets until two hours after the worst rioting was over” as “one important fact” established by the MCCH. “With the red herring out of the way,” the editorial went on, “the investigating body can set out to probe the basic factors which really precipitated the riots - the discrimination, exploitation and oppression of 204,000 American citizens in the most liberal city in America. The NYA, HN, and NYT reported the testimony on when the leaflets appeared without addressing the implications of that evidence for the police narrative of the disorder. The Am and Daily News mentioned other aspects of Taylor’s testimony about the leaflet, but not when it was distributed, with the Daily News continuing to describe the leaflet as having "brought the riot into being." No mention of testimony about the leaflet appeared in stories about the hearing in the WT, TU, NYP, and NYEJ. In other words, the anti-communist Hearst newspapers that had given the most attention to the leaflets did not respond to the testimony at odds with their narrative.
Reactions to La Guardia's appointments The dissatisfaction of unnamed “anti-Red organizations” with the “distinct liberal leanings” and radical associations of the white men La Guardia appointed reported in the New York Sun as well as the anti-Communist New York American was soon overshadowed by editorial endorsements from the New York Post, New York World-Telegram and New York Herald Tribune. The New York Herald Tribune and New York Post both described the committee members as “distinguished.” Referring to the white men La Guardia appointed, the New York World-Telegram described them as “highly intelligent humanitarians.” A story in the New York Post offered an alternative description of the white members as “men who have the confidence of Negro leaders.”

By contrast, considerable criticism emerged in Harlem of the Black members of the committee. Even as Mayor La Guardia announced his appointments, he appeared to have had some concerns about the representativeness of those he had chosen. On the evening of March 20, he had Charles Roberts contact Reverend John Robinson, seeking a meeting with “the more sober and thoughtful portion of our Harlem residents.” The clergyman responded enthusiastically, writing at 11:30 PM that night suggesting that the mayor attend the Interdenominational Ministers meeting scheduled for the afternoon of March 25 at Salem Methodist Episcopal Church. In the intervening days the criticisms of his appointments that the mayor feared did indeed emerge. La Guardia’s mistake, New York Age columnist J. A. Rogers, wrote, was to choose only among “routine names” at a time when life in Harlem had become far from routine. What was needed instead were Black members who “had practical knowledge of conditions in Harlem,” as Charles Hanson of the Harlem Committee on Public Policy, an organization of business and professional men and women, put it at a meeting the group organized at the YMCA on March 22. Only A. Philip Randolph had that knowledge in Hanson’s opinion. Particularly unqualified, in the judgement of others who spoke at the meeting were Hubert Delaney, dismissed as a political ally of La Guardia, and Countee Cullen, labeled as just a “poet.”

Others echoed that assessment in the following days. The Consolidated Tenants League endorsed only Randolph as “sufficiently free from political and other affiliations and views to render them capable of obtaining the proper economic-social view of the problem.” More representative of the people of Harlem would be an unemployed person, in the opinion of men and women a New York Amsterdam News journalist interviewed on the street, labor leader Frank Crosswaith, a suggestion of the Consolidated Tenants Union and columnist J. A. Rogers, or a social worker, the proposal of the New York chapter of the National Association of College Women and James Hubert of the New York Urban League (who snidely dismissed Carter’s past experience when he wrote to La Guardia that “there is no one named up to now who is thought of as a social worker”). Several nationalist groups in the Puerto Rican community sought representation, even as Puerto Rican leaders disassociated their community from the disorder and attributed it to Black residents “with distinct problems, absolutely different interests, and ethnic characteristics that disassociate Hispanics from their colored American neighbors.”

The most widely criticized omissions from the committee, however, were representatives of Harlem’s black clergy. La Guardia came face to face with that criticism on March 25 when he met with the Interdominational Preachers Meeting of Greater New York and Vicinity, a group of about fifty Black religious leaders, at the Salem Methodist Episcopal Church. The mayor must have felt that he could marshal support from the ministers as he changed his original plan to meet with them privately and had journalists from both white and Black newspapers alerted that he was making the trip to Harlem. When he spoke to the meeting, appealing for them to help the committee in its investigation, La Guardia tried to preempt criticism, explaining that he had not appointed a minister because “If I had appointed one I would have had to appoint many others.” When he stopped speaking, it immediately became obvious that he had failed to convince his audience. A minister in the front row shouted, “There ought to be a minister on that committee! There is not a minister in this community who is not in touch with more persons than any member of your committee.” Others complained that the mayor had failed to recognize their leadership and standing in Harlem and psychological influence in the community. As the criticism mounted, La Guardia backed down, admitting that it had been a mistake not to appoint clergymen. He committed to appoint a member of the group if they sent him a suggestion, and to add a second religious leader from a denomination not included in their ranks. Soon after the mayor left the group elected as its representative its leader, Reverend John W. Robinson, the retired pastor of St. Mark's, the city's largest AME church and a campaigner for education reform. An indirect political connection likely made La Guardia receptive to that suggestion: Robinson’s second wife, pharmacist Dr. Julia Coleman, was active in the Republican Party in Harlem. The mayor appointed Robinson four days later, on March 29, in time for him to attend the committee’s second meeting.

It took until April 4, almost a week after Robinson's appointment, for the mayor to finalize his choice of a second clergyman: Father McCann of St. Charles Borromeo Catholic Church on West 141st Street. On March 23, the priest had made public a pastoral letter blaming Communists for the disorder and calling for a movement to keep them out of Harlem. The priest's anti-communism offered La Guardia a way to address those who had criticized him for the entirely liberal character of the committee. However, La Guardia had clearly also decided the second clergyman on the committee should be Catholic as he had sought the advice of Edmund B. Butler, a prominent Catholic lawyer who was secretary of the city’s Emergency Relief Bureau about who to appoint immediately after he met with the Black ministers. Butler suggested McCann as “he has always been very much interested in Negroes and volunteered for the work.” As that endorsement implied, the priest was a white man, likely another criteria for the appointment given that the committee had two more Black members than white members after Robinson was added.

No press statements were released announcing those appointments, and they went unreported other than in the New York Amsterdam News. Having included the two clergymen, La Guardia made no further moves to address the other criticisms of the committees' Black members.