In the Heat of the Summer. Michael W. Flamm
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positions. Frustrated, a broad and uneasy coalition of moderate, radical, religious, and nationalist organizations launched a “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaign, which persuaded Blumstein’s to agree to hire fifteen black female clerks, all of them light-skinned and attractive.13
But the department store reneged on promises to hire more black employees, other businesses followed suit, and in 1935 the campaign collapsed amid charges of corruption and anti-Semitism (a majority of white store owners in Harlem were Jewish). “I remember meeting no Negro in the years of my growing up, in my family or out of it,” recalled James Baldwin, the celebrated writer and Harlem native, “who would really ever trust a Jew and few who did not, indeed, exhibit for them the blackest contempt.”14 In the bitter climate of dashed expectations and mutual distrust, the stage was set for an explosion whose causes and aftermath were similar to the 1964 riot.
On the cool afternoon of March 19, 1935, Lino Rivera walked into the Kress Five and Ten store on West 125th Street across from the Apollo Theater. Unemployed and broke, the sixteen-year-old Puerto Rican had spent the day looking for work in Brooklyn and catching a movie. As he strolled through the store around 3 P.M., he noticed a ten-cent penknife on a counter. “I wanted it and so I took it,” he later admitted. Two employees (both white) saw him and grabbed him, but Rivera bit one of them in the hand, drawing blood. They managed to restrain him and summon a police officer, who took the youth to the basement for questioning.15
As a group of onlookers formed, a black woman screamed that they were going to beat or kill Rivera. After she was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct, the arrival of an ambulance—to treat the employee—added to the rumors flying through the crowd. Then the driver of a hearse stopped at the scene and another woman shouted, “There’s the hearse come to take the boy’s body out of the store.” In fact, Rivera was already on his way home—uninjured, he had left Kress through a rear exit after the manager had chosen not to file charges against him. The manager also tried to inform the bystanders, but many had dispersed and so word of the supposed brutality spread like wildfire throughout Central Harlem.16
With counters overturned and merchandise scattered in the aisles, the police began to clear the Kress store and ordered it closed at 5:30 P.M. But as people returned from work and heard the rumors, a fresh crowd gathered. Between 6 and 7 P.M. two groups of young communists, black and white, arrived with newly painted placards and printed pamphlets alleging that Rivera was near death and that the police had broken the arms of the woman who was arrested (neither charge was true). The radicals also organized a picket line and made inflammatory speeches at street meetings. Suddenly, bottles or rocks shattered the large plate glass windows and hundreds of looters swarmed into the five-and-dime, grabbing whatever items they could reach. Thousands of others quickly joined the fray, smashing windows and robbing stores along 125th Street from Fifth to Eighth Avenue.17 The Harlem Riot of 1935 had begun.
The rioters were not solely the “riffraff” or hoodlums as many blacks and whites later claimed—they were a mix of the poor, the provoked, and the prominent. “One of the most unusual was a Harlem playgirl and relative of one of the most conservative of Harlem’s ministers,” wrote Claude McKay, the gifted author and poet from Jamaica. “Under her coat she was carrying a bag full of bricks and was taxied from place to place hurling them through the plate glass.”18
Sixteen years earlier, during the race riots that marked the “Red Summer” of 1919, McKay had composed “If We Must Die,” an anthem for the “New Negro” movement. “Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,” the poem declared, “pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!” Now McKay belittled the 1935 riot as little more than a “party.” Few whites were affected, he observed, and then “not nearly to the extent they might be during the celebration of a Joe Louis victory.”19 But as always, blacks who lived and worked in Harlem would pay for the party and suffer the hangover.
After a desperate search, the police located Rivera and brought him back to the Kress store at 2 A.M. to demonstrate that he was unharmed. But they failed to make effective use of radio stations or sound trucks and by then the looting had spread south to 120th Street and north to 138th Street as owners rushed to post signs indicating that the business employed African Americans or was black-owned. In his classic novel Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison described the scene: “The crowd was working in and out of the stores like ants around spilled sugar…. I saw a little hard man come out of the crowd carrying several boxes. He wore three hats upon his head, and several pairs of suspenders flopped about his shoulders, and now as he came toward us I saw that he wore a pair of gleaming new rubber hip boots. His pockets bulged and over his shoulder he carried a cloth sack that swung heavily behind him.”20
More than five hundred officers raced to Harlem and flooded the area. In the streets, squads of mounted and foot patrolmen waded into the crowds, which had grown to around three thousand, using their night sticks and gun butts on rioters. On the rooftops, police combed tenement buildings in an effort to arrest snipers and halt the fusillade of “Irish confetti” (bricks, bottles, and bats) that rained down on their fellow officers below. Emergency units and prisoner wagons occupied strategic positions throughout Central Harlem while radio cars cruised the blocks and tried to coordinate operations. The next morning order was restored, but not before one male was dead (two more would die later) and more than a hundred (including seven officers) were wounded. Another 125 were arrested (mostly black youths charged with disorderly conduct or inciting to riot), and more than two hundred stores were vandalized if not looted.21
The overwhelming majority of police were white, which aggravated the confrontation. Before the riot began, several black residents politely asked officers in the Kress store about the condition of Rivera. It was, they were gruffly informed, “none of their business.” An older woman made another plea: “Can’t you tell us what happened?” She was warned to move on “if you know what’s good for you.” Once the looting was under way, witnesses asserted that one of the victims, a high school student coming home from a movie with his brother, was shot and mortally wounded by a white policeman who never fired a warning shot or told the black youth to halt when he ran from the officer as part of a crowd outside an auto supply store.22 More black police, testified the ranking African American officer in the NYPD at the first public hearing of the mayor’s commission to investigate the riot, could have made a difference because they were better suited to handle trouble in Harlem.23
In the debate over who caused the explosion, Mayor La Guardia and city officials immediately cast blame on the communists, who in their view had sought to exploit the racial unrest for political gain. “We have evidence,” charged Manhattan District Attorney William Dodge, “that two hours after the boy stole that knife the Reds had placed inflammatory leaflets on the streets.” He announced that he would convene a grand jury “to let the Communists know that they cannot come into this country and upset our laws.”24
Black conservatives were careful to finger white radicals and agitators. “The peace of Harlem was disrupted by people from other places last night,” stated Fred R. Moore, editor of the New York Age (an African American newspaper) and a former alderman. “These people were dissatisfied with the place they came from and they are dissatisfied with American ways. They were determined to incite irresponsible people to revolt against law and order.… We are a peace-loving people who never subscribe to so-called ‘red’ notions.” An elderly waiter called white communists the “prime instigators,” and a window washer concurred.25
Black radicals in turn initially pointed to the white police, whose “brutality and provocation against the Negro people” had triggered the “race riots” according to James Ford, executive secretary of the Harlem section of the Communist Party.26 But most African Americans—including the communists in time—placed primary responsibility on the economic pressures in Central Harlem.
“Continued exploitation of the Negro is at the bottom of all the trouble, exploitation as regards wages, jobs, and working conditions,” contended the younger Powell. A porter stated that the “rioting was due to economics” and a barber agreed. “The Communists are only responsible for setting