A00107 - Harlem Race Riot of 1935

At 2:30 in the afternoon on March 19, 1935, an employee at the Kress Five and Ten store at 256 W. 125th Street (just across the street from the Apollo Theater) caught 16-year-old black Puerto Rican Lino Rivera shoplifting a 10-cent penknife. When his captor threatened to take Rivera into the store's basement and "beat the hell out of him," Rivera bit the employee's hand. The manager intervened and the police were called, but Rivera was eventually released. In the meantime, a crowd had begun to gather outside around a woman who had witnessed Rivera's apprehension and was shouting that Rivera was being beaten. When an ambulance showed up to treat the wounds of the employee who had been bitten, it appeared to confirm the woman's story, and when the crowd took notice of a hearse parked outside of the store, the rumor began to circulate that Rivera had been beaten to death. The woman who had raised the alarm was arrested for disorderly conduct, the Kress Five and Ten store was closed early, and the crowd was dispersed.

In the early evening, a group called the Young Liberators started a demonstration outside the store, quickly drawing thousands of people. Handbills were distributed: One was headlined "CHILD BRUTALLY BEATEN". Another denounced "the brutal beating of the 12 year old boy [...] for taking a piece of candy."

At some point, someone threw a rock, shattering the window of the Kress Five and Ten store, and the destruction and looting began to spread east and west on 125th Street, targeting white-owned businesses between Fifth and Eighth Avenues.  Some stores posted signs that read "COLORED STORE" or "COLORED HELP EMPLOYED HERE". In the early hours of the morning, as the rioting spread north and south, Lino Rivera was picked up from his mother's apartment and photographed with a police officer. The photographs were distributed in order to prove that Rivera had not been harmed. New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia also had posters drawn up urging a return to peace.

By the end of the next day, the streets of Harlem were returned to order. District Attorney William C. Dodge blamed Communist incitement.  Mayor LaGuardia ordered a multi-racial Mayor's Commission on Conditions in Harlem headed by African-American sociologist E. Franklin Frazier and included Judge Hubert Thomas Delany, Countee Cullen, and A. Philip Randolph to investigate the causes of the riot. The committee issued a report, "The Negro in Harlem: A Report on Social and Economic Conditions Responsible for the Outbreak of March 19, 1935," which described the rioting as "spontaneous" with "no evidence of any program or leadership of the rioters." The report identified "injustices of discrimination in employment, the aggressions of the police, and the racial segregation" as conditions which led to the outbreak of rioting. The report congratulated the Communist organizations as deserving "more credit than any other element in Harlem for preventing a physical conflict between whites and blacks." Alain Locke was appointed to implement the report's findings.

The Harlem Riot of 1935 was the first modern race riot in that it symbolized that the optimism and hopefulness that had fueled the Harlem Renaissance was gone.  The Harlem Riot of 1935 was the first manifestation of a 'modern' form of racial rioting satisfying three criteria:

1. violence directed almost entirely against property
2. the absence of clashes between racial groups
3. struggles between the lower-class African American population and the police forces

Whereas previous race riots had been characterized by violent clashes between groups of African American and European American rioters, subsequent riots (including those of the early twenty-first century) would resemble the 1935 riot in Harlem.