This tag was created by Anonymous. 

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

Windows broken in Black-owned business (5)

At least five Black-owned businesses had windows broken during the disorder, 7% (5 of 69) 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

The five Black-owned businesses that were reported damaged are not clearly at odds with a picture of those on the street directing violence at specific targets. 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.

Black-owned businesses being spared from attack are mentioned in the Home News, New York Evening Journal, New York Times, New York Post, New York World-Telegram and Afro-American. [include details here that not in looting of Black owned business page]. The one contrary report was published in the New York Herald Tribune: 40 windows broken in the exclusively Negro section north of 130th St (of 8th Avenue). However, that story misrepresents those blocks, which remained overwhelmingly populated by white-owned businesses. The character of the street did change, but from entirely white-owned businesses from ? to ? Streets, to a small proportion of Black-owned businesses on blocks from ? to ? street. [The one arrest in this area for allegedly breaking windows, of Henry Stewart, involved a white-owned business] If there were another thirty-nine windows broken in this area they too were likely in white-owned businesses.

Police Report on riot for Mayor/MCCH = white stores. 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." The reported events of the disorder contradict that claim. No Black-owned businesses are among those identified as looted.

 

This page has tags:

Contents of this tag:

This page references: