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Windows broken in Black-owned business (5)
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 too were likely in white-owned businesses. However, that number seems exaggerated, as Inspector Di Martino'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.
The five 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 on when they were damaged, so no evidence if fit the picture provided in the MCCH Report. 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.
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- "1 Dead, 7 shot, 100 Hurt as Harlem Crowds Riot over Boy, 16, and Hearse," New York Herald Tribune, March 20, 1935, 1.
- Inspector Di Martino (Commanding Officer, Sixth Division), "Report of Disorder," (March 20, 1935), 1, Subject Files, Box 179, Folder 10 (Roll 86), Office of the Mayor, Fiorello H. La Guardia records (New York City Municipal Archives).
- 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).
- "Numerosos Establecimientos Hispanos Apedreados y Saqueados por la Turba," La Prensa, March 21, 1935, 1.
- C. C. Nicolet, "One Dead in Wake of Harlem Riots," New York Post, March 20, 1935 [clipping]
- Percy Gould, "20,000 Fight Police in Orgy of Looting," New York Evening Journal, March 20, 1935, 1.
- "Police Guard Against New Uprising as Mayor Acts to Probe Race Riot," Home News, March 21, 1935 [clipping]
- "Machine Guns Set Up in New York Streets. False Rumor Causes Death of One, Wounding of 50, and Looting of 300 Stores," Afro-American, March 23, 1935, 1.
- Judith Weisenfeld, New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity During the Great Migration (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 236.
- "Tropas Para Harlem Pedidas Ayer; Centenares de Policias Patrullaban Anoche Ei Barrio," La Prensa, March 21, 1935, 1.