The Harlem Riot of 1935

On March 19, 1935, sixteen-year-old Lino Rivera, a Black Puerto Rican teenager, was caught shoplifting a ten-cent penknife at the S.H. Kress Five and Ten on West 125th Street. When a store employee threatened to drag him to the basement and beat him, Rivera bit the man's hand, and police quietly let him go out the back door, unharmed. But a crowd had gathered outside, an ambulance came for the bitten employee, and when someone spotted a passing hearse the rumor spread that a boy had been beaten to death. By nightfall thousands filled 125th Street, white-owned stores between Fifth and Eighth Avenues were smashed and looted while Black-owned shops nearby were left alone, and when it was over three people were dead, about 100 injured, 125 arrested, and roughly $2 million in property destroyed.