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The Negro in Harlem: A Report on Social and Economic Conditions Responsible for the Outbreak of March 19, 1935 (1935), 5-6, Subject Files, Box 167, Folder 8 (Roll 76), Records of Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, 1934-1945 (New York City Municipal Archives).
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2020-12-03T17:22:02+00:00
Looting of Black-owned businesses (?)
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2023-12-13T04:02:56+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.
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 looting 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.
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2021-03-31T23:51:12+00:00
Picketing in front of Kress' store
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2023-12-15T04:58:26+00:00
Around 6:45 PM, three men arrived at the sidewalk of West 125th Street in front of Kress’ store carrying placards and began walking back and forth, picketing the store. A photograph published in the Daily News of the front of the store taken on March 21 shows the area the men would have walked, a wide sidewalk which would have allowed other people to still move past the store or gather in front of it.
About thirty minutes earlier, a window in the store had been broken as Daniel Miller had tried to speak from a ladder on the same stretch of sidewalk, after which he been arrested by Patrolman Timothy Shannon. The three men who walked the picket line were nineteen-year-old Sam Jameson and nineteen-year-old Murray Samuels, both unemployed white men, and Claudio Viabolo, a thirty-nine-year-old Black man. "We were picketing in front of the store. I heard that a child had been killed inside. I thought it ought to be called to the attention of the public, about the child being killed," an unnamed Black man, presumably Viabolo, explained when questioned the next day during a police line-up of those arrested reported in the New York Sun. However the signs the men carried referred to a beating not a killing, reading “Kress Brutally Beats and Seriously Injures Negro Child and Negro Women. Negro and White Don’t Buy Here” and “Kress Brutally Beats Negro Child."
Jackson Smith, the manager of Kress’ store, summoned to the front door earlier when James Parton had set up the stepladder that Miller climbed to speak, told a public hearing of the MCCH that he was still there when the three men began to picket. Louise Thompson testified in an earlier public hearing that she encountered the picketers on her return to the front of the store after being pushed east by police after the arrest of Miller, and witnessing the arrest of Harry Gordon about 300 feet from the store. Patrolman Timothy Moran, who had been stationed across West 125th Street from the store when the window was broken and Miller arrested, told a public hearing that “three other men with placards draped over their shoulders” arrived a few minutes after those events and began walking up and down in front of the store.
The police officers stationed at the store had been instructed to “keep the crowd moving in from of the store, Moran testified. They were likely standing in a similar location to those in the above photograph of Kress' store on March 21. An officer “told or asked [the men] to stop marching in front of Kress’” and when they did not leave “after about five minutes," police arrested them for unlawful assembly. Sgt. Bauer testified he was involved in the arrest, as again was Patrolman Shannon, who had arrested Miller and was recorded as the arresting officer. “The police took the placards and pushed the people carrying them into the vestibule,” Jackson Smith told a public hearing. By 7:00 PM, crowds around Kress’ store had been pushed to 8th and 7th avenues.
A second version of the placard that read “Kress Brutally Beats Negro Child,” photographed for the Daily News in an image available at Getty Images, had “Young Liberators” added at the bottom. That organization, which had ties to the Communist Party, had led a successful boycott campaign in 1934 to force the Empire Cafeteria to employ Black workers. The appeal not to shop at Kress’ store on one sign evoked that campaign and the more extensive boycott campaign undertaken by a coalition of Black organizations that had made pickets in front of stores on West 125th Street a familiar sight in 1934. More broadly, the Young Liberators were “a group of young people who are struggling for Negro rights,” Joe Taylor, the organization's president, told a public hearing of the MCCH, with about 140 Black and white members. A Black man came to their nearby office, at 262 Lenox Ave near 126th Street, about 5 PM, and said “Did you know that a Negro boy had been beaten nearly to death in the Kress store?” Taylor did not, and went to investigate, arriving after Kress’ store was closed. He then went to the police station on West 123rd Street before returning to West 124th Street. Later Taylor went to an address he heard was the home of Lino Rivera, but could find out nothing. Back at the office, other members of the Young Liberators produced a leaflet that was distributed on West 125th starting around 7:30 PM. Headed “Child Brutally Beaten. Woman Attacked By Boss and Cops = Child near Death,” the final line urged people to “Join the Picket Line.” That reference to a picket line provided further evidence that the men arrested for picketing came from the Young Liberators. The first public hearing of the MCCH devoted time to establishing who had produced that leaflet and when it was distributed. Since the leaflets did not appear on the streets before 7:30 PM, the MCCH Final Report concluded that the actions of the Young Liberators “were not responsible for the disorders and attacks on property which were already in full swing.”
The place of the picketing in the sequence of events outside Kress’ was described most clearly in testimony given in the public hearings of the MCCH. However, those details did not become well known as neither the MCCH subcommittee nor final reports mentioned the picketing. Those narratives included only the two men arrested for trying to speak in front of the store, Miller and Gordon, who were not named. Newspaper stories truncated and confused the events established in the public hearings, as police told reporters that Jameson, Samuels, and Viabolo had arrived and acted together with Miller and Gordon to cause the disorder.
The most common version of that narrative had the group picketing the store before Daniel Miller attempted to speak. The New York Times, New York Sun, New York Evening Journal, New York American, and Daily Worker all published stories with that chronology, with different descriptions of who was involved. The New York Times reported "Two white and two Negro pickets paraded back and forth in front of the store, bearing placards of the Young Liberators League with the inscription: 'Kress Brutality Beats Negro Child' and 'Kress Brutality Beats and Seriously Injures Negro Child.'" The New York Sun used similar phrasing: “a group of agitators, two white and two Negroes, arrived in front of the establishment and took up picket posts carrying placards of the Young Liberators League, which shouted in type that 'Kress brutally beats and seriously injures Negro child.'” The Hearst newspapers, the New York Evening Journal and New York American, identified Samuels, Jameson, and Harry Gordon as picketing, and omitted Diabolo or any mention of Black men among those carrying placards. The Daily Worker more vaguely referred to an unspecified number of Young Liberators forming a picket line. The New York Age substituted Gordon for Miller but otherwise followed the same narrative in which “several Communist leaders gathered and began a picket movement before the store,” before Gordon was arrested for “addressing a group” and Samuels and Viabolo arrested for “acting in concert with Gordon.” The arrests of Jameson, and Miller, were reported separately without any details of the circumstances.
The consistent reporting of what was written on the placards likely resulted from police displaying them to reporters as well as photographers, with images published in the New York Evening Journal (and taken by the Daily News). The Daily Mirror did describe a placard that read, "Avenge the death of this little colored boy!" Given that the photographed placards, and the leaflet distributed by the Young Liberators soon after the picket, refer to a beaten boy, that placard is likely an invention that fit the sensationalized tone of the tabloid's reporting. However, stories in the Home News and New York Age about the men’s appearance in the Harlem Magistrates Court the next day, had them distributing placards, not picketing, placards which read "Kress store is resorting to lynching.” Jackson Smith, the manager of Kress’ store, told a public hearing of the MCCH that he saw a placard that read “Kess brutally beats Negro child.” Patrolman Moran’s testimony was less certain: “As I can recall, they referred to a child being beaten in Kress in the earlier part of the afternoon.”
Several of the narratives that mistakenly had the three Young Liberators picketing before Miller spoke also included inaccurate accounts of the circumstances of the men’s arrests. The New York American and the New York Evening Journal had Jameson and Samuels, together with Gordon, going to Miller’s aid when Patrolman Shannon arrested him. Viabolo was missing from the New York Evening Journal story and appeared in the New York American’s narrative as a bystander who also obstructed Miller's arrest. The New York Times simply reported that the arrest of Jameson, Samuels, and Viabolo came “later,” after Miller spoke. The Daily Worker did not report specific arrests, but rather that “police broke up the picket line, arresting the leaders.”
Mentions of the picketing were vaguer and more fragmentary in the Afro-American, New York Herald Tribune, Daily News, and New York Post. The Afro-American reporter who arrived in front of Kress store around 7:14 PM noted that before he “got on the spot, the screaming of the girl and the flying rumors had brought forth four youngsters, three white, with sandwich signs telling of ''Boy Brutally Beaten.'” “[F]rom somewhere pickets had appeared," the New York Herald Tribune reported, "bearing placards reading: 'Kress Brutality Beats Negro Child.' Neither story mentioned the arrest of those picketing, although the New York Herald Tribune story later noted that “Police seized members of the mob who appeared to be its leaders as they drove it back.” Neither of the other two stories described picketing. The Daily News came closest, reporting “the Young Liberators marched through various streets with red and black smeared placards on which in tremendous letters was the legend: 'CHILD BRUTALLY BEATEN: WOMAN ATTACKED BY BOSS AND COPS: CHILD NEAR DEATH.' The New York Post, while naming the three men among those arrested, described them only as speaking to the crowd.
Unlike those initial stories, newspaper stories about proceedings in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20 consistently grouped Viabolo with the four white men arrested in front of Kress’ store. Police presented the five men as a group first in a line-up before they were taken to court, the New York Herald Tribune reported, and then at the courthouse, describing the men as the "ringleaders" of the disorder. When Jameson, Samuels, and Diabolo were arraigned with Miller in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, the charge recorded in the docket book for all of them was riot. Assistant District Attorney Carey requested each man be held for a hearing on March 23, on the maximum bail of $2,500. When the four men returned to court, the charges against them were dismissed as they had already been indicted as a result of District Attorney Dodge's investigation. While the Magistrates Court docket book recorded the deposition of each of the men's cases as "Dism[issed], def[endant] indicted," Dodge announced the day after their indictment that he was instead sending them for trial on misdemeanor charges in the Court of Special Sessions, not felony charges in the Court of General Sessions. The men's trial did not take place until June 20. After hearing evidence that that a crowd had collected in front of Kress' prior to the men arriving, the men's ILD lawyers moved to have the charges dismissed, the New York Amsterdam News and Daily Worker reported. The judges granted that motion and freed the four men.
Claudio Viabolo’s name was spelled in a variety of ways in these sources. Viabolo is used here as it was recorded in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book, and in stories about his appearances in the Harlem Magistrates Court published in the Afro-American, Daily News, New York Post, New York Herald Tribune, Home News, New York Sun, New York Times, New York American, and New York Age. The name was spelled Diabolo in the list of those arrested in the disorder published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and stories in New York World-Telegram and New York Evening Journal. In the edition the New York Age rushed to print on March 23, the name was Bilo. In the Daily Worker on March 21, the name was Viano. Sam Jameson's name was also misspelled, but was not corrected over time as Viabolo's name was. Jameson is used here as it was recorded in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book, and in stories published in New York Evening Journal, New York Times, New York Post, New York Herald Tribune, and stories about court appearances published in the Home News and New York Sun. The name was spelled Jamieson in the Daily News, Atlanta World, Norfolk Journal and Guide, and New York American.
Historians’ descriptions of the protests outside Kress’ store follow the narrative provided by police, treating all those arrested as part of a single group. That framing implicitly introduces the idea that the disorder was orchestrated by those men, while offering no details of how the crowds of women and men around them acted to weigh against that evidence. Weight is added to that implication by the failure to fully identify the men involved in the protests. While Cheryl Greenberg and Lorrin Thomas do not identify the men, Mark Naison, Thomas Kessner, Marilynn Johnson, and Nicole Watson describe them as members of the Young Liberators. None of those historians mentions that four of the five, and both the speakers arrested, were white men. Naison did describe the Young Liberators as an interracial group; so too did Nicole Watson, however she did not identify the men in front of the store as members of the Young Liberators. Neglecting their race makes those men appear more representative of the crowd than they were, particularly in Greenberg and Watson’s narratives, which do not identify them as Young Liberators. Naison, Kessner, Greenberg, Thomas, Johnson, and Watson all follow the chronology that has the picketing begin before the speakers were arrested. Grouping the men places an organized Communist protest at the center of the outbreak of disorder and makes the window being broken and the men’s arrest a response to the feeling they built in the crowd. Recognizing that the protests occurred in a less coordinated way highlights that police responded immediately to any sign of protest, not just to a window being broken. They may also have acted so quickly because they recognized the men as Communists; the men’s language and appeals would have given them away. Communist protest in Harlem, and across the city, drew violent responses from police throughout the early 1930s. Recognition of the fragmented nature of the protests and the identity of those involved directs attention away from those events to the crowds of Black men and women around them. Crowd members gathered in groups, talked among themselves, sought answers from police about what had happened to the boy, and responded to police efforts to clear the street. Rather than organized or orchestrated by the Young Liberators, those behaviors appear more spontaneous, in line with the interpretation offered in the MCCH’s final report.
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2021-11-01T19:56:41+00:00
Windows broken in Black-owned business (8)
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2023-04-16T02:44:13+00:00
At least eight Black-owned businesses had windows broken during the disorder, 11% (8 of 72) of the businesses reported damaged. That proportion is far below the share of Harlem's businesses that had black owners, 28% (1690 of 5791) in the area from 110th Street to 155th Street, east of Amsterdam Avenue to west of Madison Avenue identified by the MCCH business survey taken after the disorder. The limited scale of that damage fits with stories in the Home News, New York Post, New York Evening Journal and Afro-American , and Inspector Di Martini's "Report on Disorder" for the Police Commissioner, that the windows of Black-owned businesses were generally not broken. Lieutenant Samuel Battle, New York City's most senior Black police officer, asked in the MCCH's first public hearing on March 30, 1935 if the crowds made any distinction between white-owned and Black-owned stores, insisted that Black-owned businesses did have windows broken, but then qualified the extent of such attacks: "In many cases, if they knew it was colored, they passed the shop up." James Hughes, a twenty-four-year-old Black shoe repairer, who was part of the crowd at West 125th and 8th Avenue around 10 PM, also told a Probation officer that those around him were breaking windows "where no colored were employed."
"Fully 30 of the store fronts shattered in Harlem were in Negro establishments," white journalist Edward Flynn claimed in a story in the New York Evening Journal focused on Communist activities in Harlem. In arguing that "the riot [was] conducted on the best Communist lines," the reporter pointed to how "the Negro merchant's property was destroyed as well as that of the white." Three Black-owned businesses close together on 7th Avenue that had windows broken were identified in the story. Battle's Pharmacy on the northwest corner of 7th Avenue and West 128th Street was mentioned together with the Williams drug store, across 7th Avenue on the southeast corner of 128th Street. "Both of these stores were damaged by the rioters although virtually everyone in Harlem knows who operates them." The third store was the Burmand Realty office at 2164 7th Avenue, two buildings north of the pharmacy. Not mentioned in the New York Evening Journal story was the Cozy Shoppe restaurant at 2154 7th Avenue across the street from Williams drug store which had a sign on its window identifying it as Black-owned, and had no windows broken. If the number of Black-owned stores with broken windows did total thirty, that would amount to approximately 10% of those damaged, a little over one third of the proportion of Harlem's businesses that were Black-owned. That disproportionate share of the damage does not suggest indiscriminate attacks on store windows.
A claim of more extensive damage to Black-owned businesses, that "forty windows were broken in the exclusively Negro section [of 8th Avenue] north of 130th Street,” did appear in a story published in the New York Herald Tribune. However, that story misrepresented those blocks of 8th Avenue; the MCCH business survey showed they were still predominantly populated by white-owned businesses. The character of the street did change, but from 92.5% (74 of 80) white-owned businesses from 125th to 130th Streets, to 71% (34 of 48) white-owned businesses from 130th to 135th Streets and 74% (65 of 88) white-owned businesses from 135th to 140th Streets. The one arrest in this area for allegedly breaking windows, of Henry Stewart, involved a white-owned business, a meat market at 2422 8th Avenue, between 130th and 131st Streets. If there were another thirty-nine windows broken in this area almost all were likely also in white-owned businesses. However, that number seems exaggerated, as Inspector Di Martini's "Report on Disorder" estimated only eighty-five broken windows in total north of 130th Street, in the 32nd Precinct that also covered 7th, Lenox and 5th Avenues.
The MCCH Report did also seek to emphasize that damage was done to Black-owned businesses rather than how many were spared damage. It only implicitly recognized that those on the street chose their targets, casting that behavior as present only early in the disorder, giving way to more indiscriminate violence, cast as more important to understanding the events: "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." Unmentioned in the Report is the countervailing development in which, after the initial attacks on store windows, Black-owned businesses identified themselves with signs. The New York Evening Journal, New York Post and Afro-American reversed the chronology presented by the MCCH Report, locating the damage to Black-owned businesses early in the disorder, until signs appeared identifying "Colored Stores," after which they were no longer attacked. The period of indiscriminate violence posited by the Report was also when looting became widespread, according to newspaper narratives of the disorder and reported events. However, there were no reports of Black-owned stores being looted, and New York Evening Journal and New York Post noted that merchandise had not been taken from them, which they attributed to the signs placed on those businesses.
There is no information on when the eight stores were damaged, so no evidence if they fit the picture provided in the MCCH Report. Five of the Black-owned businesses that were reported damaged do not clearly contradict claims that those on the street directed violence at specific targets (there is no information related to Battle's Pharmacy, Burmand Realty or Gonzales Jeweler). The Manhattan Renting Agency storefront was the office of Everard M. Donald, a twenty-seven-year-old Black real estate broker and owner of a chain of barbers, but also where Hary Pomrinse, a sixty-six-year-old Jewish real estate broker did business. A similar ambiguity surrounded the ownership of the grocery store that had windows broken, a Peace Market operated by followers of Father Divine, a Black religious leader whose theology and claim to be God in a body drew criticism from Harlem's black clergy and leaders. The Peace Food Market name and sign would have identified the store as not being a white-owned business, but Divine's Peace Mission had white members in its Harlem ranks, historian Judith Weisenfeld has shown. That interracialism that may have made the store a target; so too might the controversy Divine provoked within Harlem's Black community.
The nature of the damage done to the other three Black-owned businesses reported to have had windows broken offers another manifestation of how confusion over the ownership of stores, rather than disregard for it, produced attacks on stores. After the front windows of the Williams Drug Store facing 7th Avenue were broken, the owner wrote “Colored Store, Nix Jack” on the side windows on West 127th Street. Those windows were not damaged. Two other businesses that a La Prensa reporter recorded as having damaged windows, a billiard parlor and the Castle Inn saloon on Lenox Avenue south of 125th Street, also put up signs, according to another story in La Prensa. That reporter did not appear to understand the intent of the signs, seeing them as an effort to establish a racial divide in the neighborhood, to segregate Black and white residents, and did not relate them to the damage suffered. However, as the reporters could see the signs as well as broken windows, those stores too had been able to prevent extensive damage by identifying themselves as having Black owners. Other businesses also put up signs, and at least three suffered no damage. The success of that strategy suggests that broken windows in Black-owned businesses resulted from ignorance of who owned them, produced perhaps by residents joining crowds that moved beyond the areas where they lived. Edward Flynn, a white journalist writing for the New York Evening Journal, insisted that "virtually everyone in Harlem knows who operates [Battles Pharmacy and Williams drug store]," which nonetheless had windows broken. While he was certainly right about those who lived nearby or passed by that section of 7th Avenue, it is less clear how widely that knowledge would have been shared by those who lived and spent their time in other areas of the neighborhood and found themselves part of crowds moving up the avenue. Although the MCCH business survey found only six other black-owned drug stores in Harlem, compared to 116 white-owned stores, neither business advertised extensively nor were pharmacies and drug stores unusual enough to make them widely known to the changing population of the neighborhood who largely frequented drug store chains. -
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2021-10-13T21:18:12+00:00
Windows not broken (7)
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2023-12-13T04:16:37+00:00
Seven businesses were reported as not having their windows broken. The absence of damage drew attention because of claims that violence had been directed only at white-owned businesses rather than being an indiscriminate attack on property in Harlem. Stories in the Home News, New York Post, New York Evening Journal, and Afro-American made the claim that the windows of Black-owned businesses were generally not broken. The newspapers linked Black-owned businesses being spared to the appearance of signs identifying them in store windows. "It was significant that almost no windows of Negro-owned or Negro-staffed stores were broken," the white New York Post reporter wrote. "Many Negro storekeepers scrawled on their windows, with soap, the word "colored" and the heat of the mob was never sufficient to cause the Negroes to attack their own." Attacks on stores were initially indiscriminate in the account published in the New York Evening Journal, as "the mob made no choice, at first, of victims,...[a]nd then one colored man who owned a small restaurant pasted a sign in the window. It bore one word: 'Colored.' The mob passed him by and when others saw how the 'miracle' was worked, signs flashed up in store windows throughout West Harlem. Those owned by Negroes, in most cases, were not broken into." The Black reporter for the Afro-American similarly portrayed the crowd as less controlled and less discriminating. “Stores owned by colored persons in the rioting area had to rush improvised signs reading ‘Colored,' 'Black,' 'This Store Owned by Colored,' in order to be spared in the rain of bricks, whiskey bottles, and other missiles. At that, several colored establishments suffered." That description appears to have reflected the reporter's treatment among the crowds on the street, whose "ring leaders," he complained, "were ready to jump on the reporters of 'the Uncle Tom press' as they would on many whites.” The mention in the Home News appears to have confused the nature of the signs displayed. Explaining how it was that "Most of the damage was done to shops which were known to be operated by white persons," the reporter claimed "The colored persons who owned stores protected their shops against vandalism by picketing their establishments. They carried signs stating that the store was operated by colored people." No other sources mention pickets in front of Black-owned stores.
The official police account of the disorder, likely reflecting information shared with journalists, did not mention Black-owned businesses being attacked. Instead, in a “Report of Disorder” to the police commissioner, Inspector Di Martini, the commanding officer of the Sixth Division, described the “vandals who continued to break windows on 125th Street, Seventh Avenue, Lenox Avenue, 8th Avenue, Fifth Avenue” as targeting “stores occupied by whites.” However, the MCCH initially concluded that the violence against businesses was indiscriminate: the "Subcommittee which Investigated the Disturbances of March 19th" reported 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." The final MCCH Report was less definitive, but argued that any discrimination displayed by those on the streets faded over time. "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." That chronology is the reverse of the narrative in the stories in New York Post and Afro-American, in which the appearance of signs stopped attacks on Black-owned businesses.
Four of the businesses reported with undamaged windows displayed signs identifying them as Black-owned, in line with the chronology offered in the press rather than that in the MCCH Report. The Monterey Luncheonette, Winnette’s Dresses, and the Cozy Shoppe did not suffer any damage. In the case of the Cozy Shoppe, all five white businesses on the same block of 7th Avenue had windows broken and merchandise taken, evident in newsreel footage and information gathered by MCCH investigator James Tartar. Less detailed information is available on the block of Lenox Avenue where Winnette’s Dresses was located, but two white-owned stores were reported looted, and multiple other white-owned businesses were damaged or looted in the blocks to the north and south. While there were only two reported white-owned businesses with windows broken near the Monterey Luncheonette, it was located further north, on 7th Avenue and West 137th Street, an area north of West 135th Street where there were few white-owned businesses: only 8 of 24 businesses on the block on which the restaurant was located, and only 10 of 38 and 6 of 29 businesses on the blocks occupied by the damaged white-owned businesses. The fourth business, the Williams drug store, did suffer broken windows in its storefront facing 7th Avenue, but the windows facing West 128th Street, on which someone painted “Colored Store, Nix Jack” were not broken. The drug store was across 7th Avenue from the Cozy Shoppe, in an area where white businesses were significantly damaged and looted.
Three additional businesses reported as undamaged were white-owned. The Koch Department store and the Empire Cafeteria had both not been attacked, according to newspaper stories, because they had hired Black employees in 1934 during the boycott movement. White-owned businesses that employed Black staff drew some general attention in newspaper descriptions of attacks on businesses, distinguished from the businesses targeted for attack. The only white newspaper to make that distinction, the New York Post, reported "It was significant that almost no windows of Negro-owned or Negro-staffed stores were broken." The Pittsburgh Courier likewise reported that when "window smashing" extended beyond West 125th Street, "Most of it [was] directed against stores not employing colored clerks (with no mention of Black-owned businesses). Two other Black newspapers reported the opposite situation, although with a qualification. "Many white business houses which employ colored help in high positions were pillaged, " according to the Afro-American, and "Those employing Negroes in high positions were not spared," according to the Norfolk Journal and Guide. Just which businesses the stories referred to is uncertain. One possibility is that "high positions" referred to salespeople, rather than the porters and cleaners more commonly employed by white-owned businesses. Those positions had been the focus of the boycott movement in 1934. A survey by the New York Age a month after the disorder, likely not an accurate picture of the situation at the time of the disorder as there are reports of stores moving to hire Black staff after the disorder, found only 101 Black clerical staff in 134 stores (with the larger chain stores generally refusing to provide information). Harlem's Black newspapers made no mention that stores employing Black staff were not damaged, other than the New York Age publishing the interview in which the manager of Koch's asserted that his store was undamaged. The Empire Cafeteria hired Black staff after a campaign by the Communist Party, and its condition after the disorder is only reported in their newspaper, The Daily Worker. Although the story fitted the Party's efforts to show they had support from Harlem's Black residents, it is unlikely they would have made a claim that could so easily be checked unless it was true. It seems more likely that only they had any reason to give particular attention to that business.
The state of the other white-owned business identified as undamaged had nothing to do with its staff. Stan Katz's business was reported to have been protected rather than spared. A group of Black "boys" stood in front of the shop, "shouting to passing crowds that he was a friend of the Negroes," according to the New York Post. Neither of the two newspaper stories that mention the shop made clear if or how the boys knew the store owner.