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• 1 2022-02-13T21:48:02+00:00 Margaret Mitchell arrested 57 plain 2024-01-28T05:59:21+00:00 Officer Johnson of the 6th Division arrested Margaret Mitchell, an eighteen-year-old Black woman, inside Kress’ 5, 10 and 25c store, sometime around 5:00 PM on March 19. Police alleged that she was “throwing pans on floor and causing crowd to collect,” according to Inspector Di Martini’s report on the disorder. Pots and pans and glasses were knocked off counters and women screamed, after the store was closed and police tried to clear out those inside, Jackson Smith, the store manager, Patrolman Timothy Shannon, and Louise Thompson all testified. Only Thompson described the circumstances that produced that noise, most fully in an article in New Masses. After a woman she could not see screamed, Thompson joined part of the crowd who rushed to where the noise came from, the rear of the store. Police there pushed that crowd back and refused to answer when women asked “if the boy was injured and where he is,” Thompson wrote. The officers also “began to get rough.” A woman with an umbrella retaliated; she either hit an officer, according to Thompson’s testimony, or “knocked over a pile of pots and pans,” according to her article. Many of those in the store left once the noise and struggles with police began, both Thompson and Smith testified. Thompson remained with the woman she described knocking over pots and pans, who was not arrested, but she was clearly not the only person who knocked over merchandise in efforts to remain in the store until they had information about Rivera. Mitchell could also have been the woman whose scream drew Thompson and others to the rear of the store.
  
  Margaret Mitchell appeared in many newspaper stories about what happened in Kress’ store, but almost all truncated the extended standoff between the Black women and store staff and police into a rapid sequence of events, in the process mistaking what Mitchell was alleged to have done and when she was arrested. The Home News reported that Mitchell “attempted to take the Rivera boy from the department store detectives and cried out that the guards were beating the youth.” La Prensa also reported Mitchell trying to intervene. Although the Home News went on to claim that Mitchell was arrested at that time, neither Charles Hurley nor Patrolman Donahue mentioned a woman being part of their struggles with Rivera, and Donahue testified he did not arrest anyone while at Kress’ store. The Afro-American, New York Amsterdam News, New York Evening Journal (and the New York Times on March 24) reported that Mitchell was arrested after she screamed when the boy was being beaten. However, the New York Times, Daily News, New York American, New York Post, New York Herald Tribune, and Daily Worker did not specify when she screamed (or spread rumors in the New York Times story, or was “a leader of the disturbance” in the New York Herald Tribune story) — although the Daily News, New York American, and New York Post did elsewhere in their stories mention an unnamed woman running into street screaming at the time Rivera was grabbed. The New York Sun alone specified that Mitchell’s actions came later: “The woman whose cries that the boy had been murdered, rekindled the vandalism after the police had succeeded in quenching it earlier in the evening, is Margaret Mitchell, 18, of 283 West 150th street.” The next day, in reporting Mitchell’s arraignment in the Harlem Magistrate’s Court, the Home News combined its description of her trying to intervene when Rivera was grabbed with the later events mentioned in Di Martini’s report. While reiterating that she “attempted to take the Rivera boy from the department store detectives and cried out that the guards were beating the youth,” the story added that after Rivera had been taken to the basement, she was “urging other colored people in the store to demand the release of the boy, started throwing merchandise to the floor and upset many of the counter displays.” Inspector Di Martini's report, while containing few details of events in the store, did distinguish Mitchell from the woman who reacted to Rivera, whose actions he located slightly later than the newspaper stories, "upon the arrival of the ambulance [to treat Hurley and Urban]," when the "unknown female screamed that the boy had been seriously injured or killed and otherwise caused a commotion which attracted a large number of persons." Mitchell's arrest came later, after which "this commotion was soon quieted."
  
  The more specific allegation of “throwing pans on floor and causing crowd to collect” was recorded in the 28th Precinct police blotter as “Disorderly in Kresses 5 & 10c Store.” That language echoed the offense with which the prosecutor charged Mitchell, disorderly conduct. She appeared in lists of those arrested and charged with disorderly conduct in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, the New York Evening Journal, New York American and Daily News. Arraigned in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, Mitchell was found guilty by Magistrate Renaud, who remanded her until March 23 for investigation and sentencing. The Times Union reported that she “denied hysterically she participated in the rioting. She stood up from the witness chair screaming, then collapsed.” No other newspapers included that scene.
  
  Mitchell returned to the court on March 23, telling Magistrate Renaud she was "sorry," according to the Home News and New York World-Telegram. In passing sentence, Renaud commented that “he did not believe the girl acted maliciously,” those two publications and the New York Times and New York Age reported. The sentence reflected that assessment: three days in the Workhouse or a fine of $10. The New York American reported only that outcome, obliquely reporting Renaud's comment by describing her as having "unwittingly started Tuesday's outbreak." A brief mention in the New York Amsterdam News gave the opposite impression by describing Mitchell as having been "found guilty" of "stirring up the mob." The Daily Worker pointed to what its reporter saw as the implications of her sentence, that it "beating of Negro children by Harlem white storekeepers of the police, as frequently has been the case." Mitchell was one of only three people convicted during the disorder who paid a fine. She was also one of only eighteen of those arraigned represented by a lawyer, in her case Sidney Christian, a prominent West Indian attorney.
  
  The lawyer was likely obtained with the help of Mitchell’s father, Thomas E. Thompson. A West Indian immigrant who had arrived in New York City in 1895, Thompson had been a postal worker for thirty-five years at the time of his daughter’s arrest, and an office holder in the Prince Hall Masons. He and his family were among the earliest Black residents of Harlem, recorded in the 1910 census living in 55 West 137th Street. While not featuring on the social pages as Sidney Christian did, Thompson would have had the resources and the standing in the West Indian community to have known of and involved the lawyer. Mitchell, one of the youngest of Thompson's twelve children, had married in April 1934, and at the time of the disorder lived with her husband, David Mitchell, a handyman in an apartment building, at 287 West 150th Street. That she was in a store twenty-five blocks south of her home indicated the distance from which the businesses on West 125th Street drew their customers.
  
  
  
  As the only person arrested in Kress’ store, and named in newspaper stories about the disorder, Mitchell was one of the few identifiable sources of information about the beginnings of the disorder for the MCCH. However, when Lt. Battle called at her home and requested that she be at the public hearing on March 30, “she refused to come.” Asked again about her testimony three weeks later, Battle reiterated that "she absolutely refuses to come to this hearing."
  
  Margaret Mitchell and her husband still lived in the same apartment when the census enumerator called in 1940. In January 1945, she joined 200 family and friends celebrating her parents' 50th wedding anniversary, photographed alongside her siblings in an image published in the New York Amsterdam News. Her husband David was not part of the celebration; he was a sergeant in the US military serving overseas, as were two of Mitchell’s brothers and four nephews.