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Windows broken in Black-owned businesses (8)
"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 the 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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- "Tropas Para Harlem Pedidas Ayer; Centenares de Policias Patrullaban Anoche El Barrio," La Prensa, March 21, 1935, 1.
- Percy Gould, "20,000 Fight Police in Orgy of Looting," New York Evening Journal, March 20, 1935, 1.
- "Numerosos Establecimientos Hispanos Apedreados y Saqueados por la Turba," La Prensa, March 21, 1935, 1.
- "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.
- Edward P. Flynn, "Communists Inspired Harlem Riots, Survey Shows," New York Evening Journal, March 23, 1935, 5.
- C. C. Nicolet, "One Dead in Wake of Harlem Riots," New York Post, March 20, 1935 [clipping].
- Judith Weisenfeld, New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity During the Great Migration (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 236.