Big Apple History . New York Living . Riot, and Aftermath


	Firefighters battle blazes sparked during the riot.

On March 19, 1935, 16 year-old Lino Rivera was caught stealing a penknife from a shop in Harlem. The white shop owner called the police but, by the time a policeman arrived, a crowd had formed around the shop, and the shop owner, afraid of trouble, urged the policeman to let the boy go. The policeman released the boy out the back door. But no one was informed that he had been let go, and rumors spread through Harlem that the boy was dead.

People began to march outside the store with placards and pickets, an act that had been made illegal by court injunction a year before. Soon someone threw a rock. More violence and looting followed, up and down 125th Street. Stores that had tacked up signs saying things like "Black-owned" and "We employ Black people" were largely spared. With the beginnings of forced ghettoization already upon black New Yorkers, the entirely white police force on the streets looked like a hostile government's army of occupation. The riot continued through the night and into the next day. By the riot's end, 125 people had been arrested, over 100 had been injured, and three killed -- all of them black. This was the first race riot by a minority group in a northern city.

The Harlem Riot had taken place only a little more than a year after La Guardia had come to office. After the riot, La Guardia appointed a special commission to study the condition of black New Yorkers. Its report was grim. He refused to release it publicly. La Guardia had been very popular with black leaders and voters as a champion of black causes. He had brought a small number of black New Yorkers into city government. After the riot, La Guardia worked to further expand the opportunities for black New Yorkers in city government, as well as to integrate city hospitals and to improve sanitation, health care, and fire and police protection in Harlem. But the action he took amounted to little as measured against the severity of the problems facing black New Yorkers at that time. Another riot would break out in Harlem in 1943.

The following poem, entitled "What Happens to a Dream Deferred" by Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes, gives us a sense of what was on the minds of black New Yorkers during a time when they were struggling extremely hard for equal rights.

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore, and then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?

Langston Hughes