Mischief Out of Misery

In Manhattan's Harlem one afternoon last week a dusky little Puerto Rican of 16 wandered past the cutlery counter in a Kress 5-10-25-c- store on 125th Street . Into Lino Rivera's kinky, stocking-capped head popped the notion of stealing a penknife to match his pen & pencil set at home. Into the pocket of Lino Rivera's leather coat a moment later popped the 10-c- knife.

Two floorwalkers spotted the theft, pounced on Rivera. Someone threatened to "take him down in the basement and beat the hell out of him." Lino began frantically biting his captors' hands. A salesgirl fainted. Some 500 Negro customers, thrown into a panic by the commotion, began upsetting counters of goods, yelling, breaking things. An Irish policeman went in, saw he could not quell the hysterical confusion singlehanded, sent for emergency reserves. It was almost twilight before the police had driven the disturbers from the debris-strewn store.

In the excitement, Lino Rivera had vanished.

There the affair would probably have ended had not a mischiefmaking band of youthful Harlem Reds calling themselves the Young Liberators seized upon the incident as material for a demonstration. They quickly issued hundreds of mimeographed handbills crying:

CHILD BRUTALLY BEATEN

WOMAN ATTACKED BY BOSS AND COPS

CHILD NEAR DEATH

These were hurriedly passed out among the throngs of Negro idlers up & down teeming 125th Street. Believing that one of their own race had been victimized, a black rabble of 3,000 marched to the Kress store. Orators hoisted themselves up to shout against the additional injustice of white storekeepers in Harlem refusing to employ Negro help. Squads of white police arrived on the scene to be met with a barrage of stones and bottles. Before long three officers were hospitalized. Thereupon, the police waded in roughly with nightsticks, made arrests right & left. At this critical point a hearse drove up, destined for a house in the neighborhood. "They've come for the child's body!" shrieked a black woman. For the rest of the night most of Harlem gave itself over to riot, pillage and bloodshed.

Bands of Negro hoodlums went about bashing in store windows. A few Negro shopkeepers sought immunity with signs saying: COLORED STORE. Some white merchants took this cue to post notices: COLORED HELP EMPLOYED HERE. Vainly a Chinese laundryman pleaded: ME COLORED TOO. Hanging eternally out of their windows, Harlem's less excitable householders saw a Fifth Avenue bus stoned, heard the frightened cries of passengers in a Boston bus as eleven pistol shots thudded into its side. Looting followed the smashing of more than 200 shop windows. And when the looting started, police dropped their nightsticks, took out their guns. Five robbers were shot, one fatally. In a wholly irrelevant brawl, a white man was so badly beaten by Negroes that he died within 72 hours. With their streets swarming with police afoot, in squad cars and on horseback, the Harlem Merchants Association wildly telegraphed Governor Lehman at Albany for National Guardsmen.

Gathering in 100 Negro rioters, police meantime were looking high & low for the cause of it all: Lino Rivera. It was not until 2 a. m. that he was discovered in his widowed mother's apartment. He was hastily taken to a police station house, exhibited and photographed to prove that he had not been harmed, then sent home. Following evening Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia circulated thousands of posters throughout the area urging the responsible element in Harlem to make the rest of the neighborhood behave itself. By next day Governor Lehman could tell Harlem's white merchants that the city authorities had the situation well in hand.

Whose Fault? Only in the inflammatory shorthand of the tabloid Press was that night's ruckus in the largest Negro centre in the U. S. described as a RACE RIOT. Black citizens did not fight white citizens as they did in the inter-racial affrays at Chicago, East St. Louis, Philadelphia and Washington a decade and a half ago. But last week's Harlem riot was New York City's most violent civil disturbance in 35 years. Whose fault was it?

With the indictment of 16 ringleaders (including a bumptious young white radical from nearby College of the City of New York) for assault, burglary and incitement to riot, Tammanyite District Attorney William C. Dodge loudly attributed the whole affair to a Communist plot, started a grand jury investigation. Negro Communist Solomon Harper, War veteran, inventor and member of the radical League of Struggle for Negro Rights, absolved his organization of complicity, denied any connection with the Young Liberators whose members, he said, were all in their ''early twenties."

Speaking more soberly for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Managing Editor Roy Wilkins of The Crisis declared that it was "a great mistake to dismiss the riot as a demonstration of a few Communists and agitators." Dr. Robert W. Searle, general secretary of the Greater New York Federation of Churches, echoed this view: "We cannot make the Communists the scapegoats for a basic condition which made possible such a hysteric outburst." Most sociologists agreed with Dr. Searle that the "basic condition" was economic discrimination against New York's Negroes, which had in turn set up a tragic train of unemployment, undernourishment, bad housing, disease, vice, unrest and, last week, resentful disorder. In three centuries the Negro has attained legal and political equality with the white citizen in New York City. Economically and socially, however, his position has stood still.

"Nigger Hell." Among the first settlers on Manhattan Island were eleven blacks, who arrived with the Dutch in 1626. The first New York City race riot occurred under the English in 1712, when a wild rumor that slaves were plotting to massacre the whites condemned 21 Negroes to death. In 1741 a similar tale circulated by a white servant girl caused the colonists to burn 14 Negroes "alive with a slow fire until dead and consumed to ashes," hang 18 more. Refusing to be impressed into the war to make Negroes free, shanty Irishmen in 1863 staged the historic "Draft Riots," featured by the burning of a Negro orphanage at 43rd Street and Fifth Avenue, and the sacking of an early Negro quarter (now Chinatown). In 1900 a policeman allegedly arresting a Negro woman for soliciting started another race riot.

"San Juan Hill," a settlement of some 40,000 on the middle West Side of Manhattan, was the Negro quarter before the War. The War and post-War industrial boom of 1917-18 brought thousands of unskilled workers North. In New York they spilled out of San Juan Hill into the Italian-Spanish colony of Harlem. By 1920 New York's Negro population had jumped to 250,000. The recession of the boom stranded the blackamoors, changed New York's "Nigger Heaven" into a "Nigger Hell."

New York has no tradition for hiring Negroes either as unskilled laborers or as domestic servants. A few blacks work as "red caps," as cooks, butlers or elevator boys. But the dominant whites have pre-empted most available jobs since Depression with the result that of the city's 250,000 Negroes, less than 15,000 work regularly. More than 100,000 are now on relief.

Unlike Chicago's Black Belt, Harlem's businesses are run practically without Negro participation. A handful of professional blacks live in the fine old Stanford White block known as Strivers Row. In good times they aped the manners of Park Avenue, subscribed to a social register, gave their daughters debut parties. Theatrical folk like Duke Ellington, sporting characters like Harry Wills, live farther north in Sugar Hill. But even Harlem's unique assets are flagrantly exploited by whites. Jews own the successful colored bands, the Cotton Club, the Savoy Ball Room, all Harlem's saloons, its brothels and its $50,000,000 a year policy game business. Jews also run Harlem's markets and are its principal landlords.

One result is abnormally high food prices, demanded and obtained because segregated Negroes cannot trade elsewhere. And Harlem's housing problem is an open scandal. The Urban League, estimating that 50% of an employed Negro's income must go for rent, has found that Harlem rentals are from 15% to 20% higher than those in the corresponding poor quarters of the city's French, Germans, Italians, Jews. High rents mean unhealthy "doubling up" of families. So, while Harlem's broad, clean streets make a better appearance than those of Yorkville or Little Italy, the district's population density of 222 to the acre is 75% greater than that of the rest of Manhattan.

Malnutrition and overcrowding have caused an appalling health situation. Whereas the general city death rate is less than 11 per 1,000, Harlem's is 18.15 and in its worst section ("the sore spot") the rate reaches 21. Tuberculosis causes 60 deaths out of every 1,000 in the city at large. Harlem's figure of 191 in 1929 has climbed to 250 since Depression.

To cry out against such evils, a quarter of a million Negroes must rely on an extraordinarily feeble collection of politicians of their own race. Tammany runs Harlem politically, parcels out a few appointive jobs to Negroes. In the district are one Negro police lieutenant, a Negro acting school superintendent, a Negro tax commissioner, two Negro judges, a Negro Civil Service commissioner, two Negro district attorneys. But in elective offices, Harlem has scant representation: two members of the Board of Aldermen, two State Assemblymen. Holding a balance of power last week, Harlem's two Assemblymen managed to defeat Governor Lehman's New York State reapportionment bill which would have given Harlem one more Assemblyman but no State Senator or U. S. Representative.

Committee & Culprit. After the Chicago riots a commission was appointed to see what could be done about improving the Negroes' lot. Following suit, Mayor LaGuardia last week appointed a similar committee composed of prominent Negroes like Poet Countee Cullen and President A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, such professional white committeemen as Trustee William Jay Schieffelin of Tuskegee Institute, Lawyers Morris Ernst and Arthur Garfield Hays.

And as the week ended, Culprit Lino Rivera bobbed up in a Brooklyn court on a charge of trying to use a tinfoil slug in place of a nickel in a subway turnstile. Promising once more to be good, he was paroled to a city probation officer.

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