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• 1 2020-02-25T19:43:45+00:00 Windows broken (72) 166 plain 2023-12-13T11:07:02+00:00 A window in the S. H. Kress 5 & 10c store being hit by an object and breaking began the disorder. Objects thrown at the windows of stores, mostly those with white owners, was the most prevalent event in the following hours, with at least 300 businesses damaged. Such attacks were unfamiliar from the racial disorder of previous decades. Business and residential property had been the targets of violence, but that property had been Black-owned and damaged or destroyed by white crowds. However, white businesses in Harlem had been the focus of protests against their failure to hire Black workers in the years immediately prior to the disorder, culminating in a campaign by a coalition of Black organizations in 1934. Those efforts involved boycotts and pickets, not breaking store windows. A competing campaign by the Communist Party did extend to smashing windows in the Empire Cafeteria. The potential for picketing to lead to violence, and specifically to a “race riot,” was one of the justifications given by the judge in the New York State Supreme Court who outlawed the tactic in 1934, effectively ending the boycott campaign for the hiring of Black workers. That sentiment was echoed after the disorder by Black columnist Theophilus Lewis in the New York Amsterdam News, a critic of the boycott movement: "There was a time, during the peak of the boycott movement, when a slight indiscretion by a policeman, a white salesgirl or a colored shopper who defied the boycott would have started an outburst quite as serious as the recent disorder. The feeling of race antipathy, perhaps not intended by the leaders of the boycott, has remained pent up in the community waiting for a spark to set it off." The turn to breaking windows as a final resort was captured by Gill Horton, a Black former cabaret owner quoted by Joseph Mitchell in the New York World-Telegram after the disorder. "I didn’t throw no rocks," he reportedly said. "I broke my last window when I was going on 10. Of course, if I was pushed a little I might let loose a few bottles and brickbats, but nobody pushed me yet.” Many others in Harlem clearly had been pushed. When James Hughes, a twenty-four-year-old Black shoe repairer returning home, found himself in a crowd at 8th Avenue and West 125th Street, he heard people saying, "Let's break windows," he later testified in court.
  
  Historians Cheryl Greenberg and Larry Greene have argued that decision had the opposite effect to what the judge intended, shutting off an outlet for discontent and protest, and leaving Harlem’s residents with fewer alternatives to violence. The events in front of Kress’ store before someone threw the object that broke one of its windows replicated and recapitulated those tensions. Three men had been protesting the store employees’ treatment of Lino Rivera by walking in front of the store with banners — picketing. Police officers arrested the group, shutting down those means of protest. On this occasion, unlike earlier protests, members of the crowd attacked the store.
  
  The objects thrown at store windows were most often described as rocks or stones, and less often as bricks — the objects recovered from the windows of Herbert’s Blue Diamond jewelry store displayed by a clerk for a Daily News photographer the day after the disorder. All those objects could be found around Harlem. An employee of the Blackbird Inn told a reporter for the New York Post that much of that material came from the island that ran down the middle of 7th Avenue, where stones and debris left after the paving of the street had been dumped. Other larger objects found on the street were sometimes used: ashcans and trashcans. (The tailor’s dummy allegedly thrown through Sam Lefkowitz's store window likely came from another damaged store.) In a handful of cases, the missiles were objects more likely brought from home — bottles, clubs, and hammers — or items individuals happened to have with them, such as umbrellas (there was rain on the night of the disorder). At least two windows in looted stores were allegedly kicked in.
  
  While newspaper reports routinely described store windows as “smashed,” the extent of the damage they suffered varied. A single object generally broke and created a hole in a window rather than shattering it entirely, as is evident in a photograph published in the Daily News that shows a white police officer and a white store manager speaking through a hole in an unidentified shoe store. To remove most or all of the glass from a display window took more than one object, which usually meant more than one person, depending obviously on the size of the window. Stores on West 125th Street, particularly the department stores and those that wrapped around the corners of the intersections with 8th, 7th, and Lenox Avenues had far larger windows than the smaller businesses on the avenues themselves. More extensive damage to windows appears to have been associated with looting, and may have occurred when groups or individuals returned to stores with broken windows to take merchandise. A section of Lenox Avenue in a photograph published by the Daily News shows that variety of damage: closest to the camera is a rental agency with a hole in its window, which still contained the ashcan that created it, that does not appear to be looted; to its left are two grocery stores and a cigar store whose windows are almost entirely gone, and whose contents have been taken. The sources do not offer a clear picture of the extent of the damage to the stores identified as having broken windows but not as looted. The reporter for La Prensa who listed thirty-five businesses with broken windows on Lenox Avenue, West 125th Street, and 8th Avenue, ended their list by alluding to an unspecified number of other stores not on the list that suffered relatively little damage compared with those listed. There are no details for just under half of those identified (33 of 69) in the sources; of the remainder, fragmentary information suggests fourteen businesses could have been suffered limited damage.
  
  Efforts to damage stores may also have extended to destroying merchandise by throwing it into the street, on a night when it rained. The Afro-American most directly reported that practice, in which “the goods was dragged in the wet sidewalk and destroyed.” The New York Times and Atlanta World reported goods taken out of windows and “strewn” and “scattered” on the sidewalk without mention of the intention. So too did Betty Willcox, who told a New York Evening Journal that on West 125th Street, "I saw that the windows of all the stores around there had been shattered and the goods thrown all over the place." Merchandise on the street, however, could also have been a byproduct of looting rather than attacks on businesses, thrown or carried out of stores so they could be taken — as seemed to be the case in a photograph of a damaged grocery store published in the New York Evening Journal. Some of those arrested during the disorder denied "breaking the store windows" and instead insisted "that they had picked the articles up from the street after others had thrown them out of the stores," according to a story in the New York Sun (which dismissed those claims as an effort to avoid responsibility).
  
  When objects broke windows, glass went flying, hitting individuals on at least five occasions. All those reported injuries came after 1:00 AM, so during the period when most of the reported looting took place, and in the areas where that looting was concentrated, on Lenox Avenue from 127th Street to 130th Street and on 7th Avenue and 116th Street. Evidence about the circumstances of those injuries is fragmentary, brief details in lists and hospital records rather than discussions in stories. One record explicitly linked the injuries to windows being broken in stores. In the 32nd Police Precinct book of aided cases, Herbert Holderman was listed as “cut by flying glass when some unknown persons broke windows of stores.” "Flying glass” and “falling glass” were the reported causes of the four other injuries. That glass could have come from smashed windows in cars and buses driving on Harlem's streets, which also had objects thrown at them, although such attacks were reported only on 7th Avenue. Those injuries could also have been the result of throwing objects at windows or climbing or reaching into broken windows to take merchandise. However, crowds of bystanders were on Harlem's streets throughout the disorder, on sidewalks close enough to stores to be hit by glass when someone broke store windows. One storeowner, Herman Young, was also injured by glass from a window broken by a stone.
  
  The seventy-two businesses identified in the sources as having broken windows, and the additional sixty stores looted as well as damaged, amount to around 30% of the total number estimated to have had windows broken. Newspaper stories offered a range of initial assessments of the damage. By noon on March 20, the New York Plate Glass Service Bureau, “whose member companies do 98 per cent of the glass insurance business in the city,” told a reporter for the New York Post that 110 clients had reported broken glass, a fraction of the expected total damage. Other newspapers published totals for the number of windows broken, not stores effected: “at least 130 costly plate gas windows,” according to the New York American; 200 plate-glass store windows according to the New York Times, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Chicago Defender, and Norfolk Journal and Guide; and “more than 250 windows” according to the New York Herald Tribune, 300 windows in the Afro-American, and “more than 1,000 panes of glass” in the New York Post. Inspector Di Martini offered an "approximate number of windows broken" that totaled 624 in his "Report on Disorder" to the police commissioner on March 20, with the disclaimer that the "extent of property damage cannot be estimated at this time." A later survey of forty-seven insurance companies by the National Bureau of Casualty and Surety Underwriters, reported by the New York Times and Pittsburgh Courier, combined the two counts, reporting claims for 697 plate glass windows in 300 businesses, amounting to two-thirds of the broken windows. With the uninsured glass included, the total damage would have been just over 1,000 windows in around 450 businesses.
  
  
  
  “Breakages were most numerous on 125th street, near Seventh avenue,” according to that survey, but also occurred in an area that extended “from 114th to 143rd streets, between Fifth and Eighth Avenues. Several thousand businesses were located in that area, the MCCH business survey found, so attacks away from 125th Street were clearly less extensive. The "approximate number of windows broken" Inspector Di Martini reported to the police commissioner on March 20 was broken down by precincts, with almost all (86%, 538 of 624) located in the 28th Precinct, south of 130th Street. Newspapers stories consistently identified West 125th Street as the most damaged area, with the New York Age specifying the two blocks from 8th to Lenox Avenues, and the New York Herald Tribune identifying the block between 8th and 7th Avenues, on which Kress’ store was located. Those general descriptions are in line with the events which are reported in the sources, which are concentrated on that block, with fewer on the block between 7th and Lenox Avenues. Those blocks were where the disorder originated, and the largest crowds gathered; where Harlem’s largest stores were located; and where all the businesses were white-owned. Beyond 125th Street, newspaper stories presented different pictures of the extent of the area in which windows were broken. As neither the police department nor the MCCH appear to have collected details of the damage, as would happen after the racial disorder in Harlem in 1943, that variation might reflect the limits of what individual reporters investigated or, in the case of very wide areas, a lack of investigation. Only the Daily News identified an area as extensive as the insurance survey, from 110th to 145th Streets. The New York Evening Journal and New York Herald Tribune only encompassed as far south as 120th Street, and as far north as 138th Street. Two newspapers focused only on 7th Avenue, the Pittsburgh Courier reporting smashed windows from 116th to 140th Streets, and the Daily Mirror only from 120th to 125th Streets. The Black newspaper’s area fits the reported events, and suggests an investigation throughout Harlem; the white newspaper included only a portion of that area, the blocks closest to 125th Street. Eighth Avenue attracted special attention in the New York Herald Tribune, which reported “windows broken in virtually every other store and glass covering the sidewalk” from 124th Street to 130th Street, and less damage in the blocks further north. Lenox Avenue, where the reported events are concentrated, drew particular attention only from the Afro-American, which offered the only specific count, that “In the three blocks from 125th to 128th Street, west side Lenox Avenue, there were twenty-two windows broken.” The Times Union offered the vaguest area, "for blocks around the five and ten cent store two-thirds of shop windows had been smashed." The tendency to draw the boundaries at 120th Street, together with inattention to West 116th Street by both the Black and white press, effectively left Spanish-speaking areas of Harlem out of discussions of the disorder.
  
  The businesses reported with windows broken differed from those reported as targets of looting. (Of the seventy-two stores with broken windows, three are unknown, three were vacant, and five were later looted, leaving sixty-one that are identified.) Clothing stores of various types and businesses involving miscellaneous goods (which included department stores, which sold a variety of goods, including clothing but generally not food) were the largest groups; the food stores that made up the largest group of those looted were the smallest portion of those with broken windows. Those different patterns suggest that those who returned to damaged stores to take merchandise, or turned to looting, focused on what they needed, not on the wider range of stores that had been targets earlier in the disorder.
  
  When objects were thrown at windows beyond Kress' store, their targets were initially other businesses on West 125th Street, where all the stores had white owners. As groups moved away from 125th Street, they continued to focus their attacks on white-owned businesses. Five Black-owned businesses were among those identified as having windows broken, a number far below their presence in the neighborhood. Posting signs that identified a business as Black-owned appears to have stopped attacks and prevented windows from being broken. No Black-owned businesses are among those later looted. In addition to Black businesses, there were two white-owned businesses specifically identified as not being damaged in the disorder. Koch's department store was well-known for having hired Black staff. A group of Black boys reportedly protected the other store.
  
  Arrests for allegedly breaking windows were reported for only 24% (17 of 72) of the businesses that suffered damage, a smaller proportion than for looted stores (as no one was arrested for the first broken window in Kress' store, the store appears among those cases in which no arrests were made even though an arrest was made for allegedly breaking a window after another attack over four hours later). The twenty-six individuals arrested for breaking windows were identified either because they were charged with malicious mischief, an offense involving damage to property, or by details of what police alleged they had done recorded in legal records or reported in the press. For five individuals arrested for breaking windows there is no information about their alleged targets; some of those four men and one woman may have been charged with breaking windows in stores for which there was no reported arrests. Three of those arrested were women, and one a white man, similar numbers as among those arrested for looting, but twice the proportion of those arrested. Police do not appear to have made arrests during the first hours of the disorder, when windows were broken on West 125th Street as they struggled to keep crowds from Kress' store and off the streets. The arrests that were made in that area came around 10:30 PM. Leroy Brown's arrest on 8th Avenue at 9:45 PM was during that early phase of violence. The handful of other arrests where the time is known occurred on 7th Avenue and Lenox Avenue when reported looting intensified, thirty minutes either side of midnight.
  
  Courts treated breaking windows less severely than other activities during the disorder, in large part because the value of damaged windows was only sufficient to make a charge of malicious mischief, a misdemeanor. Most store windows cost less than $100 to repair, well below the $250 required for the crime to be a felony. Only the five men also charged with inciting others to violence were sent to the grand jury, just over a third of the proportion of those arrested for looting, and the grand jury sent all those men to the Court of Special Sessions to be prosecuted for misdemeanors. Similarly, magistrates transferred nine men and one woman directly to the Court of Special Sessions and adjudicated eleven cases, discharging Viola Woods and convicting nine men and one woman of disorderly conduct.
• 1 2020-03-11T21:10:35+00:00 Sam Jameson, Murray Samuels, and Claudio Viabolo arrested 109 plain 2023-11-09T05:55:08+00:00 Shortly after 6:45 PM, Patrolman Timothy Shannon and other officers arrested two nineteen-year-old white men, Sam Jameson and Murray Samuels, and Claudio Viabolo, a thirty-nine-year-old Black man, who were picketing in front of Kress’ store at 256 West 125th Street. The three men had arrived a few minutes earlier, likely from 262 Lenox Avenue, the offices of the organization to which they belonged, the Young Liberators. The placards they carried read “Kress Brutally Beats and Seriously Injures Negro Child and Negro Women. Negro and White Don’t Buy Here” and “Kress Brutally Beats Negro Child.” An officer “told or asked [the men] to stop marching in front of Kress'," Patrolman Moran told a public hearing of the MCCH and when they did not leave “after about five minutes," police arrested them for unlawful assembly. Jackson Smith, the store manager, watched the arrest from inside the store. “The police took the placards and pushed the people carrying them into the vestibule,” he told a later public hearing. Around thirty minutes earlier, Patrolman Shannon had arrested another man in front of the store, twenty-year-old white man, Daniel Miller, pulling him down from a stepladder when he tried to speak to a crowd. A few minutes later, around 6:30 PM, other officers, including Patrolman Irwin Young, arrested a second white man, Harry Gordon, when tried to speak to the crowd by climbing a lamppost on 125th Street east of Kress’ store.
  
  The testimony of Moran and Smith in the public hearings provided the only details of the arrests of Jameson, Samuels, and Viabolo. The men themselves did not testify. Patrolman Shannon did testify, but was not asked about any of the arrests he made. Newspaper stories on the arrests grouped the men with Miller, and in some cases, Gordon, reflecting information from police that they had acted together to create the disorder. Two Hearst newspapers, the New York American and New York Evening Journal, published stories that described the arrest, but they included details that testimony in the public hearings indicate did not happen: Jameson and Samuels arrived with Miller and Gordon, not after them, in the newspaper narrative, picketed before Miller spoke, and with Harry Gordon came to Miller’s aid when he was arrested, battling Shannon and two other patrolmen before also being arrested. Viabolo was not on the picket line in those stories, but in the New York American was a member of the crowd who joined in efforts to prevent Miller’s arrest. Although the newspapers said their information came from police, the elements that did not happen seem to be a product of the anti-Communist stance and sensational style of the Hearst newspapers. The New York Times and, somewhat surprisingly, the Daily Worker, also published narratives in which the men picketed before Miller spoke, but without details of their arrest. The New York Times simply reported that the arrest of Jameson, Samuels, and Viabolo, and Miller, came “later,” after Miller spoke. The Daily Worker did not report specific arrests, but rather that “police broke up the picket line, arresting the leaders.”
  
  Jameson, Samuels, and Viabolo all appeared in the lists of those arrested during the disorder published by the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, the New York Evening Journal, the Daily News, the New York American, and the New York Herald Tribune, among those charged with inciting a riot. However, the white men, Jameson and Samuels, as well as Miller and Gordon, are not in the transcription of the 28th Precinct police blotter in the MCCH records. Viabolo did appear, with Margaret Mitchell, the Black woman arrested inside Kress' store. That discrepancy suggests that the white men were omitted from the transcription, perhaps overlooked because they were somehow less readily identified as participants in the disorder among others arrested for unrelated activities at that time. It may be that the charges against those men were not recorded as riot. The charge against Viabolo in the blotter is disorderly conduct, with the note that he was “Disorderly in Kress’ 5 & 10c store,” the same description recorded for Margaret Mitchell.
  
  In a line-up on the morning of March 20 that included ninety-six of those arrested disorder, police put Jameson, Samuels and Viabolo in a group with Miller and Gordon, a New York Herald Tribune story noted. Police described the men as all "arrested at a demonstration in front of the Kress store." That grouping was not mentioned in the two other newspaper stories about the line-up, in the Daily Mirror and New York Sun. An unnamed Black man, presumably Viabolo, was quoted in the New York Sun “giving his version of the start of the trouble:” "We were picketing in front of the store. I heard that a child had been killed inside. I thought it ought to be called to the attention of the public, about the child being killed.” The man then told the officer questioning him that he “and his companions took turns on a soap box “informing the public.”” That last detail was not part of any other description of the picketing. The two other newspaper stories on the line-up did not include Viabolo’s comments, but focused, as the New York Sun did, on Harry Gordon’s exchange with police, in which he refused to answer questions until he saw his lawyer.
  
  The Daily News, New York American, and New York Evening Journal published photographs taken a few seconds apart that are captioned as showing the four white men arrested outside Kress’ store in the West 123rd Street police station on their way to the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20. Surrounded on three sides by both uniformed police and detectives in plainclothes, three white men are visible, with another white man party visible behind them, all but the first, identified as Harry Gordon, looking at the ground. On the right of the image is a Black man, almost certainly Viabolo, as police had grouped him with these men in the line-up earlier that day, and would again in the courthouse. He is unmentioned in the captions, and, perhaps as a result, cropped out of versions of the photograph published by several regional newspapers. Reflecting its anti-communist focus, the New York Evening Journal placed the photograph on page one, across the whole width of the page, with a caption labeling the men “young college-bred Communists.” The next page featured photographs of two placards used in the picket, and the leaflets circulated by both the Young Liberators and the Communist Party. The Daily News photograph, taken at almost the same moment, appeared in the center of a two page spread of photographs of the disorder in the center of the newspaper. The caption did not identify the men as Communists but as inciting the riot, focusing on drawing a contrast between their uninjured appearances and the damage done during the disorder. (Gordon later testified he had been beaten and had injuries to his face; he may be the man whose face was not visible in that photograph, notwithstanding the caption.)
  
  Police continued to group Jameson, Samuels, and Viabolo with Miller and Gordon when they appeared in Harlem Magistrates Court. In stories on the court appearances, the New York American, Home News, New York Herald Tribune, and New York Times all described the men as the "ringleaders" of the disorder, which was likely the term police used. However, while the Daily News, New York Herald Tribune, New York World-Telegram, and Daily Mirror included all five men in that group, the New York American, Home News, and New York Times omitted Gordon. That difference appears to have resulted from Gordon being arraigned separately from the three Young Liberators and Miller. That separation would have resulted from the different arresting officer listed in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book for Gordon, Patrolman Irwin Young, not Patrolman Shannon, the arresting officer recorded for the four other men. The charge recorded for Gordon was also different, assaulting Young, not inciting riot. The Daily News claimed Gordon "was heard separately when he indicated that he would produce his own lawyers."
  
  When the court clerk called the names of Jameson, Samuels, Viabolo, and Miller, two lawyers from the International Labor Defense Fund rose to represent them. The appearance of those attorneys was reported by the New York American, Daily Mirror, Home News, Daily News, New York Herald Tribune, New York Times, New York World-Telegram, and Daily Worker, but for some reason they were not recorded in the column for the name and address of a defendant's lawyer in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book. The ILD's affiliation with the Communist Party would have been well known to readers of those newspapers, but the Daily Mirror explicitly made the connection in its story, stating that the men's "Communistic affiliations were declared" by the identity of their attorneys. The Daily Mirror and Daily Worker named the lawyers as Miss Yetta M. Aronsky and I[sidore] Englander, while the Daily News named only Aronsky, and the New York American, New York Herald Tribune, and New York Times reported only "a woman lawyer" who would not give her name to their reporters. (Englander later testified about being present in the court in a public hearing of the MCCH.)
  
  Assistant District Attorney Richard E. Carey, the Black attorney Magistrate Renaud had requested prosecute those arrested in the disorder, according to the Daily News, asked that the men be held for a hearing on Friday on the maximum bail of $2,500. The men's lawyers protested that sum. Others arrested during the disorder charged with felonies had their bail set at $1,000, including Harry Gordon. Magistrate Renaud dismissed those protests, and complaints by Aronsky, reported by the Daily News and Daily Worker, that the men "had not been fed by police following their arrest."
  
  When Jameson, Samuels, and Viabolo returned to the Harlem Magistrates Court with Miller, Magistrate Ford dismissed the charges against the group because their cases had already been decided by Dodge's grand jury. The Magistrates Court docket book recorded the deposition of the men's cases as "Dism[issed], def[endant] indicted." Stories in the Home News, Daily Mirror, and New York Amsterdam News also reported that they had been indicted by the grand jury. However, while the grand jury did send the men for trial, it was for a misdemeanor, not a felony, so an information, not an indictment, and to the Court of Special Sessions, not the Court of General Sessions. Other newspaper stories included elements of that distinction. The New York American reported that after being discharged, the men were "turned over to detectives with bench warrants based on the grand jury informations voted last week charging inciting to riot." The New York Herald Tribune also reported "two informations charging five persons with inciting riot" without naming them; so too did the Daily News, which alone specified that an information charged a misdemeanor and that the men were sent for trial in the Court of Special Sessions. The grand jury also sent all the other individuals charged with inciting a riot that appeared before it to the Court of Special Sessions to face trial for misdemeanors. If the men were being prosecuted for the form of the crime defined as a misdemeanor, unlawful assembly, their crime was being treated as involving disturbing the peace, not efforts to prevent the enforcement of the law or incite force or violence.
  
  As other prosecutions resulting from the riot made their way through the courts there were no reports mentioning Jamison, Samuels, and Viabolo, or Miller. Finally, on June 20, the four men appeared in the Court of Special Sessions. The New York Amsterdam News reported an additional defendant, a "young sympathizer," Dave Mencher, not mentioned in any other sources, or in the Daily Worker story, the only other report of this trial located. Only one prosecution witness testified before the court's three judges, Sergeant Bauer of the West 123rd Street station (likely the sergeant who testified at the public hearings that he was involved in the arrest, although his name was recorded as Bowe in the transcript). It is not clear why Patrolman Timothy Shannon, the arresting officer, did not appear as a witness. International Labor Defense lawyers again represented the men, but not the same attorneys as the day after the disorder. Instead, Joseph Tauber and Edward Kuntz, who played prominent roles in the MCCH public hearings, represented the men. After cross-examining Bauer to establish that a crowd had collected in front of Kress' prior to the men arriving, they moved to have the charges dismissed. The judges agreed, and freed Jameson, Samuels, and Viabolo, as well as Miller.
  
  Claudio Viabolo lived in Harlem, at 202 West 132nd Street; the two white men did not. Sam Jameson lived at 967 East 178th Street in Washington Heights, north of the Black neighborhood, although when a reporter from the New York Evening Journal went to the address, the tenants denied knowing him. Murray Samuels lived at 8621 Twentieth Avenue, Brooklyn. However, he was not a student at City College, as the New York Evening Journal reported on March 21. A week later the New York Evening Journal acknowledged that the Murray Samuels a reporter had identified as attending evening classes was not the man arrested during the disorder, in a story headlined, "Far From Red, and Riot! Says C. C. N. Y. Man."
  
  
  
  Claudio Viabolo’s name was spelled in a variety of ways in these sources. Viabolo is used here as it was recorded in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book, and in stories about his appearances in the Harlem Magistrates Court published in the Afro-American, Daily News, New York Post, New York Herald Tribune, Home News, New York Sun, New York Times, New York American, and New York Age. The name was spelled Diabolo in the list of those arrested in the disorder published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and stories in New York World-Telegram and New York Evening Journal. In the edition the New York Age rushed to print on March 23, the name was Bilo. In the Daily Worker on March 21, the name was Viano. Sam Jameson's name was also misspelled, but was not corrected over time as Viabolo's name was. Jameson is used here as it was recorded in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book, and in stories published in New York Evening Journal, New York Times, New York Post, New York Herald Tribune, and stories about court appearances published in the Home News and New York Sun. The name was spelled Jamieson in the Daily News, Atlanta World, Norfolk Journal and Guide, and New York American.
  
   
• 1 2020-02-26T14:48:08+00:00 Charles Alston arrested 92 plain 2023-12-15T01:49:41+00:00 Around two hours after police reported the neighborhoods street were quiet, at 5:00 AM on March 20, Patrolman Jerry Brennan arrested Charles Alston, Albert Yerber, Edward Loper, and Ernest Johnson for allegedly shooting at police stationed at Lenox Avenue and West 138th Street. No police officers were reported injured, but Alston suffered a fractured skull as the men fled police. Trying to escape by leaping from the roof of a five-story building to the adjoining building, Alston fell to a second-floor ledge. He was a twenty-one-year-old Black man, as was Loper; Johnson was twenty-two years of age, and Yerber twenty years of age. Alston lived northwest of the alleged shooting, on the edge of Harlem at 512 West 153rd Street. The other men also lived west of where they were arrested, within Harlem, Johnson at 206 West 140th Street, Loper at 298 West 138th Street, and Yerber at 106 Edgecombe Avenue. Only a small proportion of those involved in the disorder lived above 135th Street. The apparent quiet may have made the men willing to travel some distance from where they lived to investigate conditions in the neighborhood. Their arrests starkly illustrated that the reimposition of order did not make Harlem's streets safe for Black residents in the way it did for the reporters who ventured uptown from 125th Street to document their arrest. Discrimination and violence at the hands of police were an everyday feature of the neighborhood's racial order not the result of its breakdown.
  
  
  
  Newspaper stories contained few details of the shooting, even as they employed a range of dramatic and emotive language — for example, the New York World Telegram and Times Union reported a “nest” of snipers “trying to pick off” a "lone policeman." Stories in the New York World Telegram and Brooklyn Daily Eagle did offer the name of the officer allegedly targeted by Alston and his companions, Patrolman Jerry Brennan of the Morrisiana station, and the same dramatic account that a bullet whistled past his ear as he stood on post at Lenox Ave and 138th Street. Taking cover, he saw the men on the roof of the five-story building at 101 West 138th Street. Soon after, police reinforcements arrived and rushed to the roof to arrest the men. One other story, in the Home News, identified Brennan, but cast him not as the target of the shooters but as one of the police who responded. In a radio car assigned to the area with his partner Patrolman McGrady, Brennan “heard the shots and sped to the scene. At the radio car's approach the four snipers [standing in the doorway] ran to the roof of the building.” This story provides the key detail that no guns were found on Alston and his companions.
  
  On March 20, the other three men appeared in court charged with disorderly conduct, according to the Washington Heights Magistrates Court docket book. The clerk annotated that charge with the word "annoy." Under that section of the statute, a person was guilty if they acted "in such a manner as to annoy, disturb, interfere with, obstruct, or be offensive to others." A separate clause punished disorderly or threatening conduct or behavior, so based on that annotation, the men were not charged with attacking Brennan. That charge of annoying better fit the circumstances described in the Home News. Whatever the patrolman alleged, Magistrate Ford did not find sufficient evidence of the men's guilt and acquitted the three men. Given that outcome, it is possible Brennan mistook some other noise for gunfire. Without any evidence of an assault in the sources, these events are treated here only as arrests. It was not until three weeks later that Alston appeared in court, on April 9. On that date he was discharged, an outcome recorded in the transcription of the 32nd Precinct blotter made by the MCCH's researchers. In releasing Alston without trial the Magistrate was following the decision made in the other men's acquittals. 
  
  Alston’s fall attracted more attention than the shooting. Again the Home News offers the most detail, noting that the leap that Alston had attempted was a distance of seven feet (the New York Post said six feet), and that after he landed on the ledge he managed to crawl through the window into an apartment and hide under a bed. His escape bid failed as the occupants of the apartment called police. The Home News report also made clear that Alston did not appear seriously injured at the time of his arrest. It was at the 135th Street police station that he collapsed and was found to have a fractured skull, the serious injury noted in less detailed stories and in lists of the injured. (The New York Evening Journal was the only other newspaper to report these details, although it mistakenly reported that the group arrested numbered three, not four. The New York Post did report that Alston hid under a bed.)
  
  The Daily News published a photograph of Alston's arrest in which he is holding his head, suggesting he did appear injured at that time. The caption published with the photo drew attention to the “clubbed gun” held by the uniformed officer leading Alston to a patrol wagon (seeming to suggest that the officer had used the gun butt to hit Alston). It concludes starkly, “He’s dying.” The photo published in the Norfolk Journal and Guide and New York World-Telegram credited to the International Photo agency and likely taken with the camera visible in the foreground of the Daily News photo a few seconds earlier, also clearly shows Alston clutching his head, with marks on his trousers and jacket that may be evidence of his fall. The officer’s clubbed gun is also again visible, together with the night stick of his partner. The full photograph from which the published image is cropped, part of the Bettman Collection digitized by Getty Images, provides a clearer view of those gathered around the building.
  Embed from Getty Images
  
  
  Visible to the right of this group are three black men obscured in the Daily News photo, which shows only white men. Given the location of this arrest in the heart of Harlem, at 5:00 AM, the only white men likely to be present would be reporters and police detectives in plainclothes. The photographs are some of the few taken beyond the area around 125th Street. By the time of Alston’s arrest, the disorder was over, allowing white reporters to travel more freely in Harlem than they had earlier, when crowds had attacked them. The captions accompanying the published cropped versions of the photo in the Norfolk Journal and Guide and New York World Telegram misidentified Alston as a suspected looter.
  
  The New York American, New York Evening Journal, and New York Post included Alston in their lists of the injured, as did the New York Herald Tribune on March 21, and the Black newspapers the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide several days later, all describing the nature of his injuries with no reference to the circumstances in which he suffered them. He was not listed among those arrested. A photograph published in the Daily News of four patrolmen carrying a stretcher containing an injured Black "victim of the rioting" out of the West 135th Street station may be an image of Alston being taken to the hospital. The photograph was not published until March 21, and the caption identified it as having been taken "early yesterday." As the location was the 135th Street station, the "victim" would have been injured above 130th Street, the southern boundary of that precinct. Most seriously injured individuals would have been taken directly to hospital.
• 1 2020-02-24T22:38:05+00:00 Two men speak to a crowd & Patrolman Irwin Young assaulted 92 plain 2023-12-15T04:23:43+00:00 Harry Gordon, a twenty-year-old white man in his senior year at City College, was walking along West 125th Street between 7th and 8th Avenues about 6:00 PM, he told a public hearing of the MCCH, when he noticed groups of “excited” people “milling around the street.” While Gordon claimed to have been simply passing by, it seems likely he was one of the Communist Party members who came to Kress’ store in response to rumors a boy had been attacked. He did identify himself at the hearing as a member of the New York Students League, a Communist-led organization. Gordon gave his address as 699 Prospect Avenue in the Bronx.
  
  Gordon testified that he asked several people on the street what was happening, but he “couldn’t get anything at all from them.” He then saw a Black man, James Parton, set up a ladder in front of Kress' store and briefly speak to the crowd before Daniel Miller stepped up to speak. A window then smashed and police officers immediately seized Miller. Other officers chased Gordon and other people who had been listening to Miller across West 125th Street to the opposite sidewalk and then pushed them away from the store, east toward 7th Avenue. About 300 feet from Kress’ store, Gordon estimated, Parton climbed a lamppost and again spoke to those on the street, saying “that a boy had been killed and that a crowd should gather in protest,” according to Gordon’s testimony. Then he climbed the lamppost, intending, he told a public hearing, “to get a committee from the crowd” “to go to the police to find out if a child was killed.” He was only able to say “Friends” before Patrolman Irwin Young pulled him down from the lamppost. Gordon’s alleged assault on Young came when he “grabbed Patrolman Irwin Young’s nightstick and used it to hit the officer,” according to a story in the New York Times. That story was the only source that mentioned the nature of the assault in reporting Gordon’s second appearance in the Magistrates Court. After arresting Gordon, Young and other officers dragged him to a police radio car and drove him to the police station on West 123rd Street.
  
  Lists of the injured variously described the injuries Young suffered as “cuts on hands,” in the Daily News and New York Evening Journal, “lacerations of right hand” in the New York Herald Tribune, and "bruised on the hand" in the New York American. No version represented a sufficient injury to constitute a felony assault, which was the charge police initially made against Gordon. The New York Herald Tribune reported Young received medical treatment at the scene, but when Gordon’s lawyer cross-examined him in the Harlem Magistrates Court, Young testified that he did not go to a doctor or the hospital, Gordon told the public hearing. Young did not appear in the hospital records, as the other police officers injured around this time did, confirmation of those statements. Moreover, Young was back on the streets by 10:10 PM, when he arrested Leroy Gillard at 200 West 128th Street, allegedly for looting. He was the first police officer allegedly assaulted in the disorder; five others would be assaulted around 125th Street before 10:30 PM, after which time the crowds had moved to other parts of the neighborhood.
  
  
  
  Gordon denied he assaulted Young. He was grabbed from behind, he testified in a public hearing of the MCCH, and then “a rain of blows descended on me such that I have never experienced before" against which he could do nothing. Louise Thompson, part of the crowd on 125th Street, offered a more detailed account, although as a member of the Communist Party, she was not an entirely disinterested observer. She described to a public hearing of the MCCH how “a cop kicked him, another knocked him over the head with his billy and another slapped him in the face and punched him in the ribs.” Thompson more clearly stated that Gordon did not assault Young when interviewed earlier by a reporter for the Daily Worker for a story published on the same day she testified in the public hearing: "I was standing a few feet from Harry Gordon when he was arrested. He did not strike any policeman. He did nothing.” In the same story in the Daily Worker, Gordon denied committing assault, implying that Young made the charge to justify his violence: “I did not strike any policeman. He struck me over the head with his club before I even saw him. He said, 'So you'll hit a cop, will you?' as he struck me.”
  
  As was the case with events inside Kress’ store, testimony in the public hearings of the MCCH provided the most detailed evidence of the events outside the store in the early evening of March 19. Louise Thompson testified on March 30 and Harry Gordon on May 4. (Thompson only mentioned the first speaker, Miller, in her article in New Masses.) The MCCH subcommittee report and final report both describe a second person trying to speak in front of Kress who was arrested, without naming that person, but make no mention of his alleged assault on a police officer. More striking, Inspector Di Martini’s report names Gordon without mentioning an alleged assault on one of his officers. That report has no reference to Daniel Miller, presenting Gordon as the only person to speak in front of the store: “At about 7PM, one Harry Gordon, #699 Prospect Avenue arrived in front of Kress’ Store with a number of others carrying placards and made a speech to a group which was attracted and incited a number of colored persons to break windows of the store. He was immediately arrested by Ptl. Young #3203, 32nd Precinct.”
  
  No newspaper stories explicitly reported the narrative in the MCCH hearings and reports, as they truncated events outside the store and presented Gordon, Daniel Miller, and the three Young Liberators who picketed the store as a single group arriving and acting together. Only some described Gordon as speaking, and only three of the initial stories about the disorder describe him as assaulting Young, in different circumstances that were both unlike what was described in the MCCH public hearings. Even later stories about Gordon’s first appearance in the Harlem Magistrates Court do not all mention the assault charge, and several describe him as picketing Kress’ store, not trying to speak to the crowd. When Gordon testified in a public hearing of the MCCH, newspaper stories described him speaking, and being arrested by Young, but omitted the context he provided for those events as coming after Miller had tried to speak and been arrested.
  
  Only some newspapers described Gordon as speaking in front of the store. The New York Age accurately captured the event, if not its context: “Harry Gordon, white Communist, was arrested when Patrolman Young of the 123rd Street police station found him addressing a group. He was taken to the station house charged with inciting a riot.” The New York Post more briefly described Gordon, Miller, and the two other white men as having been arrested for “haranguing crowds, urging them to fight.” The Daily Mirror identified Gordon as a speaker, describing him as “a 'Red' orator,” but with no details of circumstances of his speaking or arrest. The New York World-Telegram included Gordon in a group obliquely described as being arrested for being “Communist agitators.”
  
  Only three of the initial stories about the disorder described Gordon assaulting Young, in different circumstances that were unlike what was described in the MCCH public hearings. Gordon came to Miller’s aid when he was arrested, joined by the three Young Liberators, and battled Patrolman Shannon and two other officers before also being arrested, according to the New York American and New York Evening Journal. That story also mistakenly had Gordon picketing the store. The New York Times relocated the encounter between Gordon and Young to the rear of Kress’ store on West 124th Street. In the struggle between police and a crowd that took place there, the story reported, Young “was cut on the right hand by a rock” thrown by Gordon. That clash occurred around thirty minutes after Gordon was arrested, and involved officers other than Young being injured.
  
  Later stories about Gordon’s first appearance in the Harlem Magistrates Court did not all mention the assault charge, and several described him as picketing Kress’ store, not trying to speak to the crowd. Gordon was described as charged with assault in the New York Sun, in a story about a line-up of those arrested, and in the New York American and New York Amsterdam News, which had him picketing the store. Four other papers did not mention the assault charge: the Daily Mirror described Gordon and the others grouped with him as “curb-stone orators who had deliberately incited the 125th St. mobs;” in the Home News, the charge was inciting a riot, for “making a speech in front of Kress’ store;” in the Daily News it was an unspecified “separate charge” from that made against the other men, which was inciting riot; and in the New York Evening Journal Gordon and three others were charged with “circulating false placards to the effect that a Negro boy had been beaten to death.” Gordon’s subsequent appearances in the Harlem Magistrates courts were generally not reported. Only the New York World-Telegram, Home News, and New York American mentioned his appearance on March 25, with no details of his alleged offense. The New York Times story of Gordon’s appearance on May 27 provided the only details of the assault, that he “grabbed Patrolman Irwin Young’s nightstick and used it to hit the officer.” The New York Herald Tribune story on the same hearing not only made no mention of those details, but omitted the assault entirely and instead made Gordon only indirectly responsible for Young’s injuries: his speech telling the crowd “that a Negro boy had been killed in the store… so excited the neighborhood that Patrolman Irving Young, of the West 123d Street station, and several others were hurt in the ensuing riot.”
  
  Stories about Gordon’s testimony in the MCCH public hearing on May 4 published in the New York Times, New York Age, and Associated Negro Press described him speaking, and being arrested by Young, but omitted the context he provided for those events as coming after Miller had tried to speak and been arrested. The New York American and Afro-American had an even narrower focus, mentioning only that Gordon alleged he had been beaten by police, with no description of the circumstances of his arrest. The only story about Gordon’s allegation published before the hearing was in the Daily Worker on March 30, reflecting his association with the Communist Party. Reporters for the New York Evening Journal had been unable to locate him. When the Daily Worker’s journalist spoke to Gordon, “his left eye [was] still black from the police beating more than a week ago.” However, in a Daily News photograph published on March 20 captioned as showing Gordon and the other men grouped with him by police, none of the men have visible injuries. As there are only three men, the image may be of the Miller and the Young Liberators without Gordon, perhaps around the time he was arraigned separately.
  
  Harry Gordon did not appear in the MCCH's transcription of the 28th Precinct police blotter; Claudio Viabolo, the Black Young Liberator, is the only one of the five speakers and picketers in that record. Gordon appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, shortly after the other white men arrested at the start of the disorder. Magistrate Renaud remanded him to reappear on March 25, and then again on March 27. While Miller and the three Young Liberators that police grouped with Gordon as the instigators of the riot were sent by the grand jury to the Court of Special Sessions, the ADA reduced the charge against Gordon to misdemeanor assault in the Magistrates Court, with his ILD lawyers claiming credit in the public hearing of the MCCH, as they had elicited testimony from Young that he had not needed medical treatment for his injury. Magistrate Renaud then transferred Gordon to the Court of Special Sessions. For some reason, the trial did not take place until November, when the judges convicted him.
  
  In the narratives of historians Mark Naison, Cheryl Greenberg, Marilynn Johnson, Lorrin Thomas, and Nicole Watson, Gordon and Miller are grouped together as “speakers” pulled down by police. Historian Thomas Kessner named Miller in his narrative as the only speaker in front of the store. None of those historians mention Gordon's alleged assault of Young. They all follow the narrative provided by police that presents the speakers as part of a single group protesting in front of Kress’ store, stepping up to speak to the crowd after picketing of the store had begun. That framing implicitly introduces the idea that the disorder was orchestrated by those men, while offering no details of how the crowds of women and men around them acted to weigh against that evidence. Weight is added to that implication by the failure to fully identify the men involved in the protests. While Greenberg and Thomas do not identify the men, Naison, Kessner, Johnson, and Watson describe them as members of the Young Liberators. None of those historians mention that four of the five, and both the speakers arrested, were white men. Naison did describe the Young Liberators as an interracial group; so too did Watson, however she did not identify the men in front of the store as members of the Young Liberators. Neglecting their race makes those men appear more representative of the crowd than they were, particularly in Greenberg and Watson’s narratives, which do not identify them as Young Liberators. Naison, Kessner, Greenberg, Thomas, Johnson, and Watson all follow the chronology that has the picketing begin before the speakers were arrested. Grouping the men places an organized Communist protest at the center of the outbreak of disorder, and makes the window being broken and the men’s arrest a response to the feeling they built in the crowd. Recognizing that the protests occurred in a less coordinated way highlights that police responded immediately to any sign of protest, not just to a window being broken. They may also have acted so quickly because they recognized the men as Communists; the men’s language and appeals would have given them away. Communist protest in Harlem, and across the city, drew violent responses from police in the months prior to the disorder. Recognition of the fragmented nature of the protests and the identity of those involved directs attention away from those events to the crowds of Black men and women around them. Crowd members gathered in groups, talked amongst themselves, sought answers from police about what had happened to the boy, and responded to police efforts to clear the street. Rather than organized or orchestrated by the Young Liberators, those behaviors appear more spontaneous, in line with the interpretation offered in the MCCH’s final report.
• 1 2021-04-29T16:49:22+00:00 Looting without arrest (38) 82 plain 2023-12-13T04:09:34+00:00 No one was identified as being arrested for looting just over half of the businesses identified in the sources. There are eighteen individuals arrested for looting for whom there is no information about their alleged targets; some of those men may have been charged with taking goods from stores for which there was no reported arrests. There are also twenty-one men charged with disorderly conduct in the Magistrates Court for which there is no information about their alleged actions. They may have been initially arrested for looting and then had the charges against them reduced when police could not produce evidence that they had taken property rather than been part of crowds around looted businesses. However, only 6% (3 of 50) of those accused of looting were ultimately charged with disorderly conduct (the charges brought against ten of those arrested for looting are unknown).
  
  That evidence supports the claim that police were unable to protect businesses made in multiple newspaper stories and by business owners who sued the city for damages, as well as in the Mayor 's Commission (MCCH) report. Once the crowd around Kress’ store broke into smaller groups sometime after 9:00 PM, police were unable to clear the streets or contain all those groups. Irving Stekin told the city comptroller that the two police officers who eventually responded to his call to protect his store "couldn't do anything. The mob was too big for them," according to a report in the New York World-Telegram. When police did disperse crowds, they simply reformed, according to the New York Herald Tribune, New York World-Telegram, Norfolk Journal and Guide, and the MCCH Report. A more pointed image of that futility, in which police dispersed crowds only to see them gather again on the opposite side of the street, was described in the Afro-American and by business owners who testified in the Municipal Court. An alternative account in the Daily News presented crowds not as elusive but as "too scattered" to be controlled. As a result, rather than being ineffective, police were absent from the scene of some attacks on businesses. Business owners who sued the city for damages made that complaint. No police officers came to protect the stores of Harry Piskin, Estelle Cohen, and George Chronis despite Piskin approaching police officers on the street and them all visiting or calling the local stationhouse.
  
  The absence of police from some parts of Harlem resulted in part from a decision to concentrate them elsewhere. Reported police deployments focused on West 125th Street. Inspector McAuliffe used the reserves sent to Harlem after 9:00 PM to establish a perimeter around the main business blocks of the street, from 8th to Lenox Avenues, from 124th to 126th Streets, according to stories in the New York Times, Daily Mirror, and Pittsburgh Courier, the only stories that described police deployments. Six emergency trucks were stationed at the intersection of West 125th Street and 7th Avenue in that strategy. Each truck had a “crew of 40 men and [was] equipped with tear gas and riot guns,” according to the Daily Mirror. Emergency trucks were more dispersed according to the New York Herald Tribune; two at West 125th and 7th Avenue, one at West 125th and Lenox Avenue, and one at West 127th and 7th Avenue. Armed patrolmen guarded Herbert’s Blue Diamond Jewelry store on the northeast corner of that intersection as well as other businesses with broken windows in this area. The Daily News noted that guarding “windowless stores” handicapped police without referring to which stores received that protection. This scale of police presence is likely why only one business on West 125th Street — Young’s hat store — was among those reported looted despite at least twenty-three other stores having their windows broken. (The New York Evening Journal did report that "the rioting Negroes swarmed into stores. First the Woolworth "five and ten" then McCrory's and then the department store right and left in both sides of the street,” but as no other sources reported such looting, that claim was apparently a product of the sensationalization and exaggeration that marked that publication's stories about the disorder.)
  
  Beyond West 125th Street, the police relied on radio cars patrolling the avenues and limited numbers of uniformed police and detectives in plainclothes moving through the streets. The New York Times reported that an emergency truck was stationed at West 130th Street and Lenox Avenue, in the heart of the blocks that saw the most reported looting. Police made eighteen arrests on Lenox Avenue between 125th and 135th, but clearly lacked the numbers to guard damaged stores or prevent crowds from forming as they did around West 125th Street. Similarly, police arrested three men for looting Jack Garmise's cigar store on 7th Avenue near West 116th Street, indicating the presence of uniformed officers and detectives, but their activity apparently did not extend to the blocks of West 116th Street to the east or the adjacent blocks of Lenox Avenue where Hispanic-owned businesses predominated. Two stores were reported looted in that area, and at least another eleven had windows broken, a reporter from La Prensa found, without an arrest being made during the disorder. The police were not alone in their inattention to that area. Several newspapers drew the boundary of the disorder north of West 116th Street: crowds only went as far south as 120th Street according to the New York World-Telegram, New York Herald Tribune, New York Evening Journal, and Daily Mirror, and as far south as 118th Street according to the Home News. (The Daily News and Afro-American did report crowds as far south as 110th Street.)
  
   
• 1 2022-06-22T13:13:29+00:00 Police deploy beyond 125th Street 76 plain 2023-11-09T03:23:58+00:00 “As they arrived, the police were distributed through 125th Street from Lenox to St. Nicholas Avenues from 125th to 135th Streets,” the New York Herald Tribune reported. Disorder spread beyond 125th Street sometime before police were deployed in those areas. Windows were reported broken on 7th Avenue north of 127th Street not long after 8:30 PM with no indication that police were present until around 9:45 PM, when an officer from the 40th Precinct in the Bronx arrested Leroy Brown at 7th Avenue and 127th Street. After 10:00 PM police began to appear on 7th Avenue south of 125th Street. There is no evidence of when police deployed on 8th Avenue, but it seems likely it occurred around the time they moved on to 7th Avenue as officers were concentrated on that block of 125th Street. It was over an hour later that the sources mention police on Lenox Avenue north of 125th Street, an area east of where they had been concentrated. Crowds had been attacking stores on Lenox Avenue since at least 10:30 PM. Those crowds were not concentrated as they had been on 125th Street between 7th and 8th Avenues. Officers attempted to guard damaged stores that might be looted or patrolled blocks and intersections on foot as they had on 125th Street to respond to any crowds that gathered. Between twenty and thirty radio cars patrolled larger sections of the avenues, pulling over when they encountered incidents of disorder. It is not clear if Emergency trucks also patrolled the avenues; they are mentioned in the press only taking up fixed positions. There is no mention of mounted police anywhere but 125th Street. The New York Times, Home News, and New York Sun also reported that patrolling police saved white men and women from assault, with the New York Evening Journal and New York American reporting specific incidents that might have occurred in this time period, although no arrests were made in such circumstances to provide evidence to confirm either the general or specific claims.
  
  The area over which disorder spread was too large to occupy or cordon off, and officers appear to have spent much of their time reacting to attacks on property. They succeeded in stopping those attacks only for as long as they were present. And even then, the range of their protection was limited to one side of the street. In Harlem, 7th Avenue and Lenox Avenue were major roadways, with two lanes of traffic in each direction, and an island planted with trees in the middle of 7th Avenue. The time it took officers to cross that distance often gave crowds times to disperse and avoid arrest. Unlike on 125th Street, police were not involved in the clashes with large crowds that saw officers injured; three police suffered injuries, one making an arrest and two driving on 8th Avenue. As they deployed across Harlem, police appear to have more often fired their guns than they had when establishing a perimeter around 125th Street. Newspaper reports of that shooting generally attributed it to the outbreak of looting, a legally more serious crime that police practice treated as justifying firing at suspects. The two Black men killed by police gunfire were both alleged to have been looting. However, five unattributed shootings of Black men suggest that police fired more indiscriminately at crowds. Police also appear to have continued to have hit those they arrested with their nightsticks and revolver and rifle butts. Police also appear to have made more arrests during this period of the disorder than earlier; almost half of the arrests with information on timing occurred between 11:00 PM and 2:00 AM. Arrests for looting are a large part of that total; as a more serious crime, police may have been more likely to make arrests for looting than for breaking windows or other activities.
  
  The timing of arrests provides one source of evidence of when police began to deploy beyond 125th Street. However, Lt. Battle later told his biographer Langston Hughes that arrests were not an option early in the disorder as police were too outnumbered. An arrest required officers leaving the street to take their prisoner to a station house. Stories in the New York Evening Journal pointed to the need to guard damaged stores as an additional constraint on police. Furthermore, information on timing and location was available for only forty-seven of the 128 arrests (37%), with information on location but not timing for an additional thirty-two arrests (so 62%, 79 of 128, of arrests can be mapped). Consequently, the lack of arrests, particularly before 11:00 PM, was uncertain evidence of the absence of police.
  
  
  
  The first recorded arrest away from 125th Street does not appear to result from the dispersal of officers across Harlem. The patrolman who intervened in an attack on a white man by a group of Black men on St. Nicholas Avenue and West 127th Street around 9:00 PM and arrested Paul Boyett was likely in a radio car going to 125th Street from the 30th Precinct not sent from where police were gathered. The next arrest, of Leroy Brown on 7th Avenue and 127th Street at 9:45 PM, offers clearer evidence of police deploying. Patrolman Edward Doran came from the 40th Precinct, directly across the river from Harlem in the Bronx. He testified to seeing a crowd gather in front of the store, and Brown then throw a tailor’s dummy through the window. While Doran arrested Brown, the other members of the group he heard and saw break windows further up 7th Avenue were not arrested. Twenty-five minutes later, Patrolman Irwin Young, who had earlier arrested Harry Gordon on 125th Street, made the second arrest on the same block of 7th Avenue, across the street. Although the first arrests south of 125th Street did not occur until after 11:00 PM, officers were reported to have clashed with crowds at 121st Street around 10:30 PM. That those officers made no arrests likely indicates that there were too few of them to control the crowd. A New York Evening Journal story sensationalized the incident in those terms: “Policemen attached to the West 123rd st. station were surrounded by men and women. Guns were drawn but the mob refused to disband and in the ensuing exchange of shots Lyman Quarterman, 34, 306 W. 146th St., was shot in the abdomen,” almost certainly by police. By 12:30 AM when Fred Campbell drove by, there were “an unusual number of patrolmen and policemen out with riot guns” at that intersection. Officers made arrests as far south as West 116th Street after midnight, but the number of damaged and looted businesses suggests a limited presence and concern with the Puerto Rican neighborhood centered on 116th Street.
  
  Police likely deployed along 8th Avenue around the same time as they did along 7th Avenue as police had gathered at that intersection with 125th Street as they had at the other end of the block. There was no evidence of the timing of any of the arrests made on that street, which took place both north and south of 125th Street, although there are no arrests north of 135th Street as there were on 7th Avenue.
  
  The first arrests on Lenox Avenue north of 125th Street came after 11:00 PM, but in that area there was not any indication of a police deployment earlier. Most of the arrests after midnight occurred on those blocks of Lenox Avenue, where police took people into custody as far north as 135th Street. Those blocks also saw the most extensive looting, a combination that suggests that the number of arrests reflected the scale and changed character of the disorder rather than indicating that police more effectively controlled the people on the streets. There was only one arrest recorded on Lenox Avenue south of 125th Street, an area with relatively few businesses, and not until 2 AM. That arrest was of a man carrying goods allegedly stolen from a hardware store, not damaging or looting a store. Around the same time police made arrests on the same sections of 7th Avenue.
  
  After 3:00 AM there is a lull in both arrests and reported events. Earlier, when Deputy Chief Inspector McAuliffe, in charge of uniformed police in the borough of Manhattan, had been driven through Harlem just before midnight, he told a reporter from the New York Herald Tribune that “thousands of persons were staying in the streets late,” although he judged that “most of them appeared to be spectators.” Although Lt. Battle told a hearing of the MCCH that “there was no excitement” when he went on to Harlem streets at 2:00 AM, there was evidence of violence and arrests on Lenox and 7th Avenues on both sides of 125th Street at that time. However, when McAuliffe toured the neighborhood again at 4:00 AM, he “reported that all was quiet,” according to a story in the New York World Telegram. That assessment was likely why police called from precincts outside Harlem were sent home at that time, according to the New York Evening Journal. By that time it appears that police were relying on radio cars to patrol the avenues. The final arrests of the disorder came around 5:00 AM, made by officers in radio cars patrolling 8th Avenue and Lenox Avenue.
  
  The combination of arrest and continued violence in the first arrest beyond 125th Street prefigured the results of police activity for the remainder of the disorder. The MCCH report summarized the situation as one in which “Crowds constantly changed their make-up. When bricks thrown through store windows brought the police, the crowds would often dissolve, only to gather again and continue their assaults upon property.” The New York World Telegram offered a similar picture: "Whenever the police succeeded in scattering them, the mobs reformed to continue their outbreaks." Predictably, the New York Evening Journal offered a sensationalized version of that narrative, in which "[mobs] disappeared, though, only to turn up at some other corner to wreak vengeance again on all whites and the police." In the Times Union's narrative, the violence, while not ephemeral, was as discontinuous as those newspapers, with "sporadic and small riots [breaking] out in various parts of Harlem." The Daily News focused on the dispersal of the crowds, describing how "armed bands of colored and white guerillas, swinging crowbars and clubs, roamed through barricaded Harlem," "too scattered for police to corral." So too did the New York Herald Tribune's narrative, in which "outbreaks spread to other parts of Harlem, with smaller groups here and there." In the New York Times "roving bands of Negro men and women" forcibly resisting "500 policemen patrolling streets in an area of more than a square mile," later becoming "marauding bands." In the New York Sun it was "small roving mobs which prowled through the city throughout the night," although most of its narrative attributed the violence to a single "frenzied and race-crazed mob...who tore through the streets." The dispersed nature of the violence is less clear in the narratives of other publications. The New York Post described a "tidal wave of rioting" that "surged through the district," and "recurring waves" of rioting. The Home News offered little sense of the location of the disorder, noting only that "the disorder spread to adjoining streets," and making one mention of "roving bands of colored men." So too did the New York American, which mentioned only that the outbreak "spread with disastrous results over an area of several blocks," and the Daily Mirror, in which the description was more dramatic and vaguer: "It was a wild night of melee with mob violence spreading as the night wore on.... The “battlefield” was no longer W. 125th St. It was spreading. It was Harlem."
  
  Storeowners seeking police to protect their businesses reported that telephone calls and visits to the stationhouses failed to bring officers. Even when they arrived, police could often offer limited protection. After officers who fired their pistols in the air to disperse a crowd near Lenox Avenue and 132nd Street succeeding only in moving them from one side of the street to the other without interrupting their attacks on business, the frightened staff of William Feinstein’s liquor store locked up and fled. Several hours later police failed to stop the store from being looted, only arriving in time to arrest one of a group who took bottles of liquor. After the disorder, Feinstein joined more than a hundred business owners who successfully sued the city for failing to protect their property. Representing approximately a third of the businesses reported damaged or looted during the disorder, that number suggests a widespread scenario. However, the litigants and evidence of looting are concentrated on Lenox Avenue between 125th and 135th Streets. Those blocks also saw significant numbers of arrests. By contrast, 7th Avenue north of 129th Street saw very few reported incidents and only two arrests, although at least half of the eighteen arrests for which they are no details could have been in that area.
  
  The gunfire that frightened Feinstein’s staff was a more frequent feature of the police response beyond 125th Street. The New York Times attributed that shooting to officers who “fired their pistols into the air, frightening away various groups of would-be disturbers,” as occurred around Feinstein’s liquor store. So too did the New York Herald Tribune, until midnight, when “as looting developed, the police began shooting.” That account fitted claims in the New York Times, New York Evening Journal, and New York Post that officers were under orders not to fire at crowds, or only “in the greatest emergency,” according to the New York Post. Inspector Di Martini told a hearing of the MCCH that he "gave instructions to police not to do any shooting." Instead, they used the butts of their guns as clubs (as can be seen in photographs of the arrest of Charles Alston and of an arrest on Lenox Avenue). As well as looting, it was violence directed against white men and women that led officers to use their guns, according to the New York Evening Journal: “But as the night wore on and the looting and violence increased to a point never before reached in New York City, the police were forced to use their guns—were forced to use them to protect helpless whites from being beaten and kicked and stamped to death under the feet of the stampeding blacks.” Sensationalized stories of violence against white men and women was the focus of that white newspaper's narrative of the disorder. In another story the New York Evening Journal presented police as using guns in response to crowds starting two fires on Lenox Avenue. (While firefighters extinguished those blazes, the claim in the Daily Mirror that they were “also pressed into the work of taming the mob"” appears to be an invention. There is no other evidence that “Fire engines were placed at advantageous positions in the side streets of the riot zone prepared to 'wet down' the more heated.” To the contrary, Inspector Di Martini told an MCCH hearing that he did not "call upon the fire department" as the crowds on 125th Street were not large enough to require them.)
  
  Both the incidents in which police shot and killed Black men, Lloyd Hobbs on 7th Avenue and James Thompson on 8th Avenue, involved alleged looting. No one was identified as responsible for shooting and wounding an additional five Black men; all those incidents took place after 1:00 AM, in the areas where at that time looting was most prevalent. The New York Sun somewhat obliquely linked those shootings to the police, presenting police as using their guns in response to the increasing “fury of the mob": ”The crack of revolver shot bit into the din. Seven men reeled under the impact of the bullets.” Eunice Carter asked Captain Rothnengast for details of those shootings during an MCCH hearing, suggesting that they had been shot by police: “Officer, you stated that other people were shot but who shot them? Was there any effort to find out who shot them? Was any check made on the bullets to ascertain whether they came from police guns?” He replied simply that “No bullets were recovered.” Rothengast had earlier told the hearing that "several shots were fired from roofs and windows at us. I saw the fire from a pistol as it was shot from a roof on 129th Street.” Several white newspapers reported incidents of police being shot at that other evidence suggests did not happen. The New York American, Home News, New York Herald Tribune, and New York Post reported James Thompson shot at the detectives trying to arrest him, while the New York Evening Journal sensationally reported an even larger gunfight in which "other rioters" returned the officer's shots. However, police records make clear that only the detectives fired weapons, hitting Thompson and a white passerby, while one also shot himself in the hand. Similarly, a sniper attack on police reported by New York World Telegram, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Times Union, and Home News appears not to have happened. The four men police arrested were charged with disorderly conduct for “annoying,” a charge that would not have been made had they actually shot at police. If anyone did shoot at police, they failed to hit their targets.
  
  Only two police officers were injured away from 125th Street, in large part because the situations in which officers had been injured around Kress’ store did not occur when the disorder was not concentrated on a single location. Patrolman Whittington of Emergency Squad #9 was reportedly hit by a rock on a truck at 8th Avenue at 123rd Street around midnight. That location was close enough to the perimeter which police established around Kress’ store and 125th Street that the truck may have been part of that response to the disorder rather than involved in efforts to control crowds in the wider neighborhood. (A car driven by Detective Lt. Frank Lenahan on 8th Avenue was also hit by rocks, perhaps also away from 125th Street. Cars and buses driving on 7th Avenue were also attacked with rocks, including one with a Black driver, so Lenahan may not have been targeted as a policeman.) The second officer, Detective Nicholas Campo, was shot with his own revolver while trying to make an arrest; Irwin Young allegedly had also allegedly been assaulted during an arrest at the beginning of the disorder. Otherwise, the clashes between police and crowds that occurred around 125th Street did not happen when the disorder was not concentrated on Kress store: rather than attacking police guarding stores, crowds drew them away or waited until they moved away; and rather than resisting police efforts to disperse them, crowds scattered and reformed when police moved on.
  
  With police killing Lloyd Hobbs the only incident beyond 125th Street to which the MCCH gave attention, information on the police response came from newspaper stories and legal records. When the disorder spread beyond 125th Street, reporters appear to have remained there, where police were concentrated, at the police stations on West 123rd Street and West 135th Street, and at Harlem Hospital. In reporting this period of the disorder they relied on police accounts of the incidents in which they made arrests. The narrow focus of arrest reports, which mentioned only the arresting officer, obscured the details of the police deployment. In a small number of cases, arrests by officers patrolling in radio cars were identified; however, radio cars were likely involved in additional arrests.
• 1 2022-07-14T17:02:48+00:00 Police find Lino Rivera 69 plain 2023-12-17T18:57:12+00:00 Sometime during the disorder, police tried to locate Lino Rivera so they could show that he had not been killed or beaten. Chief Inspector Seely ordered the boy be located, according to the New York Times, which indicated that those efforts started after 9:00 PM when senior officers took charge of the police response. However, the Daily News, New York Herald Tribune, Home News, New York Times, Times Union, and Afro-American newspapers simply reported that police searched for Rivera throughout the night. They were unable to find him because the home address they had was incorrect: 272 Morningside Avenue rather than 272 Manhattan Avenue. (The New York Age story written early in the disorder included the incorrect address.) The Daily News reported that “the mistake was made” when Eldridge gave the address to an officer at the West 123rd Street station over the telephone — not that he had misrecorded the address as the New York Herald Tribune reported or that Rivera had given a false address as the Home News reported. According to Louise Thompson, a group of women who had tried to locate Rivera at the beginning of the disorder also had the wrong address, although one on the correct street: 410 Manhattan Avenue. Joe Taylor, the leader of the Young Liberators, also heard a rumor that Rivera lived at 410 Manhattan Avenue and went to investigate around 7:30 PM.
  
  At 1:30 AM, Officer Eldridge was woken at his home on Whitlock Avenue in the Bronx by a telephone call telling him to report to the Chief Inspector at the West 123rd Street station, he told a hearing of the MCCH. The police officers who had been at the Kress store, Eldridge and Patrolman Donahue, had gone off duty at 4:00 PM. Until he was woken, Eldridge thought Rivera had been arrested and was unaware of what was happening in Harlem. He was able to go directly to Rivera’s home, arriving around 2:00 AM. He found him asleep, according to his testimony. The boy had not been there all night, as initially reported in the New York Evening Journal and New York Sun, but had gone out around 9:00 PM. Rivera had a cup of coffee and returned home after about twenty-five minutes because he "saw there was a lot of trouble around,” the New York World Telegram and Times Union reported. Rivera said Eldridge told him people thought he was dead, the New York World Telegram and New York Herald Tribune reported.
  
  Eldridge took Rivera to the West 123rd Street station. Only the New York Sun described Rivera as “blubbering and frightened.” Rivera told a reporter for the New York World Telegram that he was at the station for about half an hour. During that time, police questioned him, he spoke with reporters and was photographed with Lt. Battle and Officer Eldridge. Newspaper stories that quoted his statements mentioned that he spoke to two different officers, Kear, according to the Daily News, and Captain Oliver, according to the New York Evening Journal and New York Sun. Battle told the MCCH that he asked Rivera “if he had been hurt by anyone and had he been arrested.” The New York Evening Journal, New York Post, New York Sun, and New York American published separate stories about Rivera’s statements. The Daily News, New York Herald Tribune, and Atlanta World appended his statements to larger stories on the disorder. Reporters also interviewed and photographed Rivera at his home later on March 20. The New York World Telegram, New York Herald Tribune, and La Prensa published separate stories based on those interviews, while the New York Times included Rivera in a larger story.
  
  Inspector Di Martini took credit for having Battle appear in the images. “It was my idea to get Lieut. Battle to pose with the boy and get the picture into the streets as soon as possible,” he told a hearing of the MCCH. Battle said the reason Rivera posed with him was “for the moral effect.” Not made explicit in either statement was that having the boy photographed with a Black police officer added to the credibility of the image and cut across the racial divisions expressed in the disorder. “A lot” of pictures were taken, Rivera told a MCCH hearing, but only six different published images have been identified. An Associated Press photo that showed Battle seated with his arm around Rivera, who was standing, was published in the New York Times, New York Post, New York Herald Tribune, and New York Sun. Rivera was only 4 feet 8 inches tall according to the New York Herald Tribune, so that pose put the two on the same level. Their height difference was visible in an image of them standing in the same pose taken by an International Photo Agency photographer. That difference was further emphasized in the photograph of this pose published in the Daily Mirror in which Battle is looking down at Rivera. (The Daily Worker took offense at Battle having "his arm protectively around" Rivera as the "Harlem masses...know that Battles would kill a worker on the slightest excuse.") Photographs taken by the International Photo Agency and Daily News revealed that Eldridge was on the other side of Rivera in both poses. Eldridge did not have an arm around Rivera, as Battle did, so was detached from their grouping. A second Black officer added to message Di Martini wanted to send. However, Battle was in uniform and well known as the senior Black police officer in New York City, while Eldridge was in plainclothes, a suit and tie, and not a public figure. It was likely on that basis that some photographers and editors decided not to include Eldridge. An ANS photo showed Rivera and Battle standing surrounded by white reporters, looking at a camera to their left. Where the other photographs showed Rivera unharmed, in contradiction of the rumors circulating in Harlem, the ANS image presented him as telling his story. Rivera, dressed in a leather jacket, is smiling in all the photographs. Photographed at home later that day, Rivera wore a suit and tie because he said his mother suggested he “dress for the picture." In the image published in the New York Evening Journal, he shows a pensive expression rather than smiling. (The New York Times reporter who visited Rivera at home described him as "a dejected figure," "overwhelmed by the fact that his desire for a ten-cent knife had precipitated the riot and resultant bloodshed.")
  
  If the primary purpose of finding Rivera was to show that he was alive and unharmed, his appearance at the police station also brought some consistency to reports about the identity of the boy who had been in Kress' store. Louise Thompson heard from the women she spoke to in Kress' store that a "colored boy" aged ten to twelve years had been beaten. The signs carried by the Young Liberators who picketed the store an hour or so later referred to a "Negro child" and the leaflets their organization distributed an hour later later described a "12 year old Negro boy." The first newspaper stories published appear to have relied on those rumors and leaflets in describing the boy; with neither Eldridge nor Donahue still on duty, police apparently did not have more precise information until Rivera was found. The New York American mentioned a "colored boy" and a "10-year-old Negro boy," the Daily News a 12-year old "colored boy," the New York Evening Journal a 15-year-old "Negro boy," the Daily Mirror a "little colored boy," the Home News a "young colored boy," and the New York Sun a "Negro boy." Early stories in some Black newspapers featured similar descriptions, a "small Negro boy" in the Norfolk Journal and Guide and a 10-year-old "colored boy" in the Indianapolis Recorder on March 23. Other stories in Black newspapers simply referred to the boy's age not his race: a 16 year old boy in the Atlanta World on March 21, a 12-year-old boy in the New York Age, a 14-year-old boy in the Chicago Defender, and a 16 year old boy in the Afro-American and Pittsburgh Courier on March 23. Newspapers published on March 20 after police found Rivera identified him as a 16-year-old Puerto Rican, in the New York Post and New York World-Telegram, or a "Puerto Rican youth" in the New York Herald Tribune and Times Union. The New York World-Telegram pointed to the differences between Rivera and the boy of the rumors by putting Negro in quotation marks when reporting the rumors and the text of the Young Liberators leaflet. By contrast, the New York Times referred to a 16-year-old "Negro boy" even after Rivera had been found, as did the New York Sun and New York Evening Journal. While the New York Times did eventually identify Rivera as Puerto Rican when he appeared in the Adolescents court after the disorder, the New York Evening Journal continued to describe Rivera as "Negro," while the New York Sun made no mention of his race. Those newspapers' persistent use of "Negro" may have been intended to convey that Rivera was dark-skinned; the New York American described him in those terms, as a "dark-skinned 16-year-old Porto Rican" in a story reporting an interview with the boy in his home, while the Brooklyn Daily Eagle described him as a "Negro born in Porto Rico." Editions of the other newspapers published after Rivera was found, including the Black newspapers, simply switched to identify him as Puerto Rican. (Historian Lorrin Thomas argued that the New York Amsterdam News "failed to identify Rivera as Puerto Rican, referring to him instead as a 'young Negro boy,'" but did not provide a citation. The March 23 issue of that newspaper is missing the news sections, but the March 30 issue identified Rivera as a "16-year-old Puerto Rican youth.")
  
  Police found Rivera too late for his appearance to impact the disorder, although it may have contributed to the violence not continuing the next evening. However, the delays in locating him fed rumors that he was not in fact the boy grabbed in Kress’ store. Reflecting questions raised in hearings, the MCCH report noted that, “The final dramatic attempt on the part of police to placate the populace by having the unharmed Lino Rivera photographed with the Negro police lieutenant Samuel Battle only furnished the basis for the rumor that Rivera, who was on probation for having placed a slug in a subway turnstile, was being used as a substitute to deceive people.” After members of the MCCH met with Mayor La Guardia soon after their appointment, on March 22, the New York Herald Tribune and New York Sun both reported that “some” of them said that many in Harlem did not believe that Lino Rivera was the boy who had been caught in the Kress store. (Stories about the meeting in the New York Times, New York Post, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and Daily Worker included no mention of those comments.) An Afro-American journalist reported the rumors before the first hearing of the MCCH: “At the present time Harlem is divided into those who has been presented by the police as the boy in the case, is not the boy who was beaten in the store. They declare that Lino is being paid off to be the scapegoat and a camouflage....The AFRO reporter has run scores of tips about the boy who actually stole the knife, or a bag of jelly-beans, as it was first given out. Everything so far has run up a blind alley. One clue to the real boy is that all during the riot he was referred to as a 12-year-old boy, but became a 16-year-old one with the finding of Lino Riviera." The New York Age hinted at those rumors when it described Rivera as “believed to have been the cause of the whole affair.” Writing in The New Masses, Louise Thompson reported that a man and woman who had been in the store said Rivera was older and taller than the boy they saw. Other publications did not raise the issue. However, as the Afro-American journalist predicted, questions about Rivera were raised in a hearing of the MCCH. In the first hearing, Police Lieutenant Battle was asked, "Is there any evidence that would indicate that Rivera is not the boy? There has been such rumor." He simply answered, "No." L. F. Cole, a thirty-year-old Black clerk who had been in the Kress store, also testified that he had "no doubt" that Rivera was the boy he had seen taken away by police. The question was raised again at the third hearing on April 20. Mention that he had been on parole after being caught putting slugs in a subway turnstile prompted an interjection from "Mrs. Burrows": "My impression is that this boy is not the boy. We have testimony here that he got into trouble before March 19th, 1935. They had a boy under supervision. This is not the boy. They got a boy through these people and this is the boy they presented." Hays, chairing the hearing, pushed the ILD lawyers for evidence that another boy was beaten in the store. They had found none nor could they establish that Rivera had received lenient treatment. A month later, Jackson Smith, the store manager, confirmed in the subcommittee's final hearing that Rivera was the boy he saw from the office, with Donahue and again outside the grand jury room after the disorder. After listening to several questions trying to undermine the certainty of that identification, Hays announced "there is no question about it." Given the lack of evidence to the contrary, there is no reason to think Rivera was not person grabbed in the store. The shoppers who saw him in the store could have assumed he was younger, given his height. Similarly, seeing that he was dark-skinned, they could have assumed he was a Black rather than Puerto Rican.
   
• 1 2022-01-31T20:16:15+00:00 Crowd inside Kress 5, 10 & 25c store 63 plain 2023-11-21T23:24:32+00:00 After Patrolman Donahue released Lino Rivera and then himself left Kress’ store around 3:30 PM, groups of shoppers remained. They wanted to know what had happened to the boy and to see that he had not been harmed. Over the next two hours, the manager and several police officers unsuccessfully tried to reassure them and others who came into the store to investigate what was happening. During that time Clara Crowder, a twenty-year-old white clerk, fainted and was attended by an ambulance, and Margaret Mitchell, an eighteen-year-old Black woman, was arrested for disorderly conduct. Sometime around 5:00 PM or 5:30 PM, the manager decided to close the store, and police cleared out all those inside.
  
  
  
  Events inside Kress 5, 10 & 25c store after Lino Rivera had been grabbed by store staff moved far more slowly than newspaper narratives portrayed. Whereas reporters strung together the specific incidents they identified into a tight sequence, testimony to the MCCH’s public hearings provided additional information that spread those events over almost two hours.
  
  The Black women and a few men who remained in the store did not immediately start shouting and overturning displays, nor was Margaret Mitchell immediately arrested. They gathered in small groups of two or three. A few minutes after Donahue had released Rivera and left the store, Smith, the manager, as he told a public hearing of the MCCH, had become concerned about their presence and went to the shop floor to investigate. “Some women were going around saying a boy had been beaten, an ambulance had come and she knew it. I went to two groups trying to explain to them that nothing had happened to cause any excitement.” Having no success, Smith went out to 125th Street, where he found Patrolman Miller, a Black officer who had earlier called for the ambulance to treat Hurley and Urban, who he asked to “come in and see if he could not explain to those people.” The women “didn’t pay much attention” to Miller. By 4:00 PM, “the thing was getting to be worse,” Smith testified. That likely meant both that the number of people inside and outside that store was growing, and that, as Thompson later described happening inside the store, as they waited for proof the boy had not been harmed, “patience began to give way to indignation. Their voices rose.” Smith found additional police on 125th Street. Patrolman Timothy Shannon arrived in the store at 4:00 PM. By 4:20 PM he decided he needed to call for radio cars with additional police officers, who arrived within five minutes. Those officers had no more success than those before convincing the women and men in the store that Rivera had been let go, the message Hurley said they were delivering. Ten minutes later, Smith called the station and told them “the thing was beginning to get out of control and to do something.” Like the manager of the neighboring Woolworth's store, he clearly felt "under considerable tension" when a "commotion takes place with a [Black] customer." Sgt Bauer was sent. At some point Shannon claimed that he formed a committee of three shoppers, two men and one woman, whom he took to the basement to see that Rivera was not there, and then went with “from one crowd to another but they would not listen.” No other witness or source mentioned such a committee, and Shannon could not identify its members.
  
  The situation had not improved after 4:30 PM, when Smith testified the number of people in the store had grown to around 100, and Sgt Bauer told him, “'I don’t know what we can do.' We didn’t want to start a riot. We didn’t want to excite them.” Smith decided that he needed to close the store and called the police station again and “pleaded for enough men to close the doors without causing trouble.” Around the same time, Louise Thompson, a Black Communist activist and journalist with many friends among the authors and artists of the Harlem Renaissance, entered the store. She had been shopping at the Woolworth’s store further along 125th Street when she saw groups of people gathered on the sidewalk. Asking around to find out what was going on, a man told her “something was going on in the store and that a boy was beaten,” she testified. Thompson then went into Kress’, which she would describe later in her autobiography as a store “where you have all of these small counters throughout the store,” and found “little clusters of people standing here and there in the store,” with “most of the girls behind the counter ... still in their places but no floor-walkers or officials were in evidence,” she wrote in a version of her testimony published in the New Masses. Approaching the largest group, standing by the candy counter, Thompson learned that they believed a boy had been beaten up by store staff, and that they intended to “stand here until they produce him.”
  
  More police officers then arrived and went to the rear of the store, where Smith’s office was located, Thompson wrote. They were the additional officers that the manager had had requested. At this time, Smith told a public hearing, he closed the store doors. His testimony was that happened at 5:30 PM, but other evidence suggests that Smith might have been mistaken about the time. Around 5 PM, Clara Crowder, a twenty-year-old white clerk, fainted while “aiding another employee,” according to the records of the ambulance that attended her. That ambulance, the second sent to the store, arrived at 5:05 PM. Thompson testified that she was outside on West 125th Street when she saw it arrive, having been one of the last to leave the closed store. It seems likely that Crowder was behind a counter, and fainted during the struggles between the people in the store and police that began after a woman inside the store screamed and pots, pans and glasses were knocked off displays. Smith testified that damage happened as the door was closed. Thompson also described hearing the closing bell as part of the noise in the store in her article in New Masses.
  
  Jackson Smith and Patrolman Timothy Shannon testified that a woman screamed and knocked merchandise off counters after the store was closed, but only Thompson described the circumstances that produced that noise. She did not see the woman who screamed, but was part of the crowd who rushed to where the noise came from, the rear of the store. Police there pushed those women and men back and refused to answer when women asked “if the boy was injured and where he is,” Thompson wrote in New Masses. The officers also “began to get rough.” A woman with an umbrella retaliated; she either hit an officer, according to Thompson’s testimony, or “knocked over a pile of pots and pans,” according to her article. Many of those in the store rushed to leave once the noise and struggles with police began, both Thompson and Smith testified. It is likely that it was around this time that police in the store arrested Margaret Mitchell, an eighteen-year-old Black woman, although none of those who testified about this period of time in the store mentioned the arrest. Police charged her with “throwing pans on floor and causing crowd to collect,” according to Inspector Di Martini’s report on the disorder. It was only once the store was closed that merchandise was knocked off displays, according to the testimony of those in the store.
  
  A small number of people resisted leaving the store, “refusing to move until they got some information about the boy,” Thompson wrote. Gradually police officers pushed them too out of the store; Thompson was one of the last to leave, about half an hour after she entered. On the street at that time, she testified, were several hundred people, most “in front of the Apollo Theatre,” opposite Kress’ store across 125th Street. By the time Inspector Di Martini, in charge of the four precincts that made up the Sixth Division, arrived at 5:40 PM, to investigate the reports of disorder, the store was closed and only a few employees remained inside. He interviewed Jackson Smith and Charles Hurley, he testified. “After finding out that no assault had been committed and thinking that something might occur, I stationed Sergeant Bauer, two foot policeman, one mounted policeman in the rear to prevent a riot.” Di Martini then spent some time talking to groups of people gathered on West 125th Street, telling them Rivera had not been beaten. As he saw no “indications of further trouble,” the inspector testified that he left around 6:00 PM.
  
  Newspaper narratives truncated the extended standoff between the Black women and men and store staff and police into a rapid sequence of events, eliding the role of Black residents’ distrust of a police force that routinely disregarded their rights and subjected them to violence in fueling the disorder. The New York American, New York Post, New York World-Telegram, Daily News, and Daily Mirror included none of the events in the store in their narratives of the disorder, jumping from Rivera being grabbed to the crowds outside Kress’ store. Those in the store, reported to be mostly Black women, began to damage displays immediately after Rivera had been taken to the basement in the narratives published in the Home News, New York Sun, New York Times, and La Prensa. The New York Times, New York Sun, and Time greatly inflated the size of that crowd, from 50 to 500 customers. The Home News reported they “started to wreck the store, pulling dishes off of the counters and, in some instances, tipping over tables on which merchandise was displayed,” the New York Times that they “went on the rampage, overturning counters, strewing merchandise on the floor and shouting,” La Prensa that “All the people of color who were in the store at the time began to throw all the articles that were on the tables to the floor and to shout in protest.” The New York Sun opted for the most sensational language, that they “had been galvanized into a frenzy of sabotage. Glass in the counters was shattered, tables overturned and merchandise torn and hurled about.” By contrast, the New York Evening Journal, New York Herald Tribune, and Daily Worker (on March 29) reported crowds jamming the store after rumors about a boy being beaten or killed circulated, demanding he be released (the Daily Worker had earlier reported, on March 21, the involvement of a member of the ILD, Reggie Thomas, in leading the women’s protest. He was not mentioned in subsequent stories, and did not testify in the MCCH public hearings, suggesting that he was not in fact present in the store.) Patrolman Shannon was identified by the New York Times and New York Sun as one of the police officers who investigated what was happening in the store, and summoned the reinforcements who cleared the store (Time identified him as "an Irish policeman;" the New York Evening Journal and New York American mentioned Shannon arresting Miller.) The Home News, New York Herald Tribune, and New York Evening Journal simply had police notified, then appearing and clearing the store.
  
  The second ambulance that arrived at the store, to attend Clara Crowder, was mentioned only in the Daily News. That story somewhat vaguely claimed that the appearance of the ambulance inflamed rumors that Rivera had been killed. The New York Herald Tribune also mentioned Crowder was attended by an ambulance, but mistakenly identified it as the same one that had come to attend Hurley and Urban. That ambulance had returned to Harlem Hospital two hours earlier. Similarly, the Home News and La Prensa reported Margaret Mitchell as being arrested in Kress’ store, but identified her as having intervened when Rivera was grabbed. The Afro-American, New York Amsterdam News, and New York Evening Journal (and New York Times on March 24) reported Mitchell was arrested having run screaming into 125th Street immediately after Rivera had been grabbed. Only the New York Sun’s story allowed for Mitchell’s arrest to be later, as the store was being closed: “The woman whose cries that the boy had been murdered, rekindled the vandalism after the police had succeeded in quenching it earlier in the evening, is Margaret Mitchell, 18, of 283 West 150th street. Her cry was taken up and passed to the milling crowd outside the store.” The next day, in reporting Mitchell’s arraignment in the Harlem Magistrate’s Court, the Home News combined its description of her trying to intervene when Rivera was grabbed with the later events mentioned in Di Martini’s report. While reiterating that she “attempted to take the Rivera boy from the department store detectives and cried out that the guards were beating the youth,” the story added that after Rivera had been taken to the basement, she was “urging other colored people in the store to demand the release of the boy, started throwing merchandise to the floor and upset many of the counter displays.”
  
  The historians who have described these events have not identified the leading role played by women in protests inside Kress’ store, even as the MCCH report noted that the shoppers in the store were women. Mark Naison, Thomas Kessner, and Marilynn Johnson summarized events in the store, adding details about merchandise being thrown on the floor from newspaper stories to the narrative in the MCCH report. Cheryl Greenberg simply described the crowd as having dispersed, discounting protests in the store. So too did Lorrin Thomas, who attributed that response to the arrest of a woman for “inciting the disturbance,” implicitly making that arrest occur soon after Rivera was released, not later when police cleared the store. (No other narratives mention that arrest). Naison identified those involved as "black shoppers," while Kessner identified two Black women as crying out, but not who else was in the crowd. The other historians simply referred to crowds. Jonathan Gill and Nicole Watson include no details of events inside the store in their descriptions of the events at the beginning of the disorder. That the shoppers in Kress' store were women is unsurprising given the gendered nature of consumption in the 1930s. However, the role of those women in the early stages of the disorder is more unexpected given historians' attention to men's role in initial outbreaks of violence. As Marilynn Johnson has pointed out, women's experiences in the racial disorders of the first half of the twentieth century extended beyond that looting with which they were associated in the 1960s to include not just being victims of violence but also protectors. Where Johnson's examples of women acting in that role were trying to protect family or loved ones from white violence, in 1935 Black women sought to protect a boy unrelated to them. While, as Johnson notes, those actions were within societal expectations of women's roles, they did represent a broader scope, echoing the extension of women's role in consumption to include the political act of picketing white businesses the previous year. In Kress' store, Black women once again stood up to white businessmen.
   
• 1 2020-02-25T17:59:47+00:00 James Thompson killed & Detective Nicholas Campo shot 60 plain 2023-12-08T04:20:15+00:00 Around 5:30 AM James Thompson, a nineteen-year old Black man, was shot and killed by Detectives Nicholas Campo and Theodore Beckler.
  
  
  
  The officers claimed that while driving on 8th Avenue they heard breaking glass in a damaged grocery store at 2364 8th Avenue near the southeast corner of West 127th Street. Police crime scene photographs of the store taken later showed that there were several large holes in the windows and no merchandise left in their displays. However, like many other businesses, the shelves inside the store were untouched. To get inside, Thompson smashed the glass in one of the entrance doors, making the noise that the detectives heard. Investigating, they entered the store, a branch of the A & P chain. Press reports offered a variety of different accounts of what happened next. The New York American, Home News, New York Herald Tribune, and New York Post reported a gun battle between the officers and Thompson, during which he was shot in the chest and Detective Campo in the hand. The New York Evening Journal sensationally reported an even larger gunfight in which "other rioters" returned the officer's shots. The New York World-Telegram reported a struggle between Thompson and Campo during which Thompson was shot; the officer then dropped his gun, causing it to go off and a bullet to hit his fingers. The New York Amsterdam News reported, several days later, that the officer’s gun went off accidentally, hitting Thompson.
  
  The arrest report and police blotter made no mention of Thompson having a gun or struggling with the officers. Instead, as Campo and Beckler moved through the store, Thompson burst out of the rear storeroom and ran for entrance. He collided with Campo, causing the detective’s pistol to fire and the bullet to hit two fingers on his left hand. When Thompson got out on to the street, he ran across 8th Avenue toward his home at 301 West 127th Street. As the two detectives followed, they both shot at him; Campo fired twice, Beckler five times. Only one of those bullets hit Thompson, but it struck him in the chest, perforating his liver. One of the other shots hit Stanley Dondoro, a white man walking along the west side of 8th Avenue, in his left leg. A resident of Hoboken, New Jersey, Dondoro was likely on his way to work in one of Harlem’s businesses. The Home News and New York Post added the detail that a third bullet had passed through the trousers of a man with Dondoro without injuring him. Campo and Beckler caught up with Thompson in front of the building where he lived and arrested him. A note at the end of the hospital admission records indicated that Thompson died at Harlem Hospital at 9:30 AM, four hours after the shooting, a time of death that led to him being listed as the only fatality of the disorder in newspapers published on March 20. Campo appeared in lists of the injured published by the New York Evening Journal, New York Post, and New York American.
  
  Police investigated the shooting after the disorder, according to the records gathered by the MCCH. A police blotter record of Captain Mulholland’s investigation identified the detectives as responsible for shooting Dondoro, specifying that Campo had shot twice at Thompson and his partner Detective Beckler had shot three times, as well as twice in the air, a warning to stop that was a common police practice. One of the bullets struck Thompson in the chest, killing him. The blotter also recorded Captain Mulholland’s conclusion that Campo sustained his injury “in proper performance of police duty and no negligence on the part of the aforesaid detective contributed thereto." Campo and Becker also appear not to have been disciplined or charged for killing Thompson. Asked in reference to the killing of Thompson and other Black men killed during the disorder in a hearing of the MCCH, “Has anyone been arrested, charged with using deadly weapons with which these men were killed?", Captain Rothengast replied, "Some of the detectives were exonerated."
  
  Although the New York World-Telegram story reported Thompson as saying at the hospital that “he was hungry," “that others were stealing, anyway,” and that he was “long out of work,” there was no record of an admission in the report of the police investigation. James Tartar, an investigator for the MCCH, did interview Thompson’s aunt, Sarah Rhue, on April 20. She reported hearing from Thompson’s landlady that he had brought home canned goods during the disorder, with the implication that he had been looting prior to the shooting. However, she also reported that he worked at a barber’s shop, contradicting the statement that he was out of work in the admission reported in the New York World-Telegram.
  
  The police records and newspaper for some reason all mistakenly identified the address of the grocery store as 2365 8th Avenue. However, a large bank building was at that address with no other businesses. The A & P grocery store was included in the MCCH business survey at 2364 8th Avenue and was visible in the Tax Department photograph of that address taken between 1939 and 1941. In addition, the NYPD crime scene photograph, taken soon enough after the shooting to show the damage to the store and debris still on the street, showed a distinctive raised stoop entrance to the upstairs apartments that was also visible in the Tax Department photograph of 2364 8th Avenue.
• 1 2022-03-11T22:00:36+00:00 Leaflets distributed 60 plain 2023-12-15T05:03:51+00:00 The Young Liberators printed a one-page mimeographed leaflet in the early evening of March 19. Just where they distributed the leaflet was uncertain. "Some white youngsters were passing out handbills" when a reporter for the Afro-American arrived at 125th Street and 7th Avenue at 7:14 PM. Louise Thompson saw people with the leaflet on that corner just after 8:00 PM, suggesting a focus on 125th Street. “They were hurriedly passed put among the throngs of Negro idlers up and down teeming 125th Street,” according to the sensationalized story in Time magazine. The New York American claimed, “These papers received wide circulation throughout Harlem.” The leaflet was also pasted on building walls, according to the New York Evening Journal. Reading its text incited the crowds that had gathered on 125th Street, the police and District Attorney William Dodge claimed, making the Young Liberators, who they considered Communists, responsible for the disorder. The MCCH did not agree. Based on testimony from Louise Thompson that the leaflet did not appear on 125th Street until sometime between 7:30 PM and 8:00 PM, the MCCH's final report concluded that the Young Liberators “were not responsible for the disorder and attacks on property which were already in full swing.” By 7:30 PM, “Already a tabloid in screaming headlines was telling the city that a riot was going on in Harlem,” the MCCH report also noted. Louise Thompson identified that newspaper as the Daily Mirror. Later on March 19, the Communist Party distributed a leaflet, after the Young Liberators approached them, concerned about the growing disorder, according to James Ford’s testimony in a MCCH public hearing. He said that leaflet was “written and distributed” about “9 or 10 o’clock.” Leaflets were still in circulation on Harlem’s streets around 2:00 AM. Sgt. Samuel Battle told a public hearing of the MCCH he came into possession of two or three at that time, without specifying which of the two leaflets.
  
  
  
  Both leaflets identified Kress store staff as responsible for the violence against Rivera with only passing mention of police. That narrative focused protests on the store, and white businesses, Bosses, more generally, rather than police, or the white population. In terms of that framework, attacks on Kress’ store, and on other white businesses later in the disorder, appeared not straightforwardly as attacks on property and economic power, but also as retaliation against violence by those who owned and worked in those businesses
  
  A mimeographed page, the Young Liberators’ leaflet combined handwritten and typewritten text. At the top, the handwritten text read, “Child Brutally Beaten. Woman attacked by Boss and Cops = Child near DEATH.” The remaining typewritten text read:

  ONE HOUR AGO A TWELVE-YEAR-OLD NEGRO BOY WAS BRUTALLY BEATEN BY THE MANAGEMENT OF KRESS FIVE-AND-TEN-CENT STORE.
  THE BOY IS NEAR DEATH
  HE WAS MERCILESSLY BEATEN BECAUSE THEY THOUGHT HE HAD ‘STOLEN’ A FIVE CENT KNIFE.
  A NEGRO WOMAN WHO SPRANG TO THE DEFENSE OF THE BOY HAD HER ARMS BROKEN BY THESE THUGS AND WAS THEN ARRESTED.
  WORKERS, NEGROES AND WHITE, PROTEST AGAINST THIS LYNCH ATTACK ON INNOCENT NEGRO PEOPLE. DEMAND THE RELEASE OF THE BOY AND WOMAN.
  DEMAND THE IMMEDIATE ARREST OF THE MANAGER RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS LYNCH ATTACK.
  DON'T BUY AT KRESS'S. STOP POLICE BRUTALITY IN NEGRO HARLEM.
  JOIN THE PICKET LINE
  ISSUED BY YOUNG LIBERATORS.

  
  Predictably, the anti-Communist Hearst newspaper the New York Evening Journal gave the greatest space to the leaflet, publishing both the full text of the Young Liberators' leaflet and photographs of it (and the Communist Party leaflet and two placards carried by pickets, under the headline "Insidious Propaganda That Started Harlem Riot," and a front-page photograph of the men arrested protesting in front of Kress’ store). A portion of the Young Liberators' leaflet appeared in a combination of Associated Press photographs published in several newspapers. In addition to the New York Evening Journal, the Home News, New York World-Telegram, and the New Republic published the text of the leaflet. The New York Herald Tribune quoted only about half of the leaflet, stopping after the first use of “lynch attack.” None of those published versions of the circular included the final line, “JOIN THE PICKET.” That line did appear in the version published by the Norfolk Journal and Guide, the only Black publication in which the leaflets were reproduced. That line was in the photograph published in the New York Evening Journal, in the version of the leaflet in the MCCH’s final report, and was raised by Hays in the public hearing of the MCCH (James Taylor, the leader of the Young LIberators answered that he did not know to what it referred). The text published in the Home News omitted the line DON'T BUY AT KRESS'S. STOP POLICE BRUTALITY IN NEGRO HARLEM and substituted instead “Demand the hiring of Negro workers in Harlem department stores. Boycott the store." That phrase transposed the call not to buy in the store into the terms of boycott of the campaigns of the previous year to effectively treat the tactic as having a single goal. The New York Post quoted only the handwritten headline of the leaflet, the characterization of the incident as “this lynch attack,” and the call for protest. Time quoted only the headline, and the Afro-American only the first two phrases from the headline and omitted “boss” so that the charge of violence was only against police. Quotations in the New York Sun were garbled versions of the actual leaflet text and included words and phrases that appeared but in the wrong form: "A Child Brutally Beaten." "A Twelve-Year-Old Child Was Brutally Beaten for Stealing a Knife from a Five and Ten Cent Store." "Workers Protest Against This Lynch Attack." The Daily News misreported the leaflet as making the more provocative charge that the boy had been beaten to death. Initial stories about the disorder published by the New York Times and New York American did not mention the leaflet but added them to their narrative the next day, March 21.
  
  The Communist Party leaflet, also a mimeographed page, similarly began with handwritten text that read, “FOR UNITY OF NEGRO AND WHITE WORKERS! DON'T LET THE BOSSES START RACE RIOTS IN HARLEM!”. The typewritten portion went on:

  The brutal beating of the 12-year-old boy, Riviera, by Kress's special guard, for taking a piece of candy, again proves the increasing terror against the Negro people of Harlem. Bosses, who deny the most immediate necessities from workers' children, who throw workers out of employment, who pay not even enough to live on, are protecting their so-called property rights by brutal beatings, as in the case of the boy Riviera. They shoot both Negro and white workers in strikes all over the country. They lynch Negro people in the South on framed-up charges.
  The bosses and police are trying to bring the lynch spirit right here to Harlem. The bosses would welcome nothing more than a fight between the white and Negro workers of our community, so that they may be able to continue to rule over both the Negro and white workers.
  Our answer to the brutal beating of this boy, by one of the flunkies of Mr. Kress, must be an organized and determined resistance against the brutal attacks of the bosses and the police.
  WORKERS, NEGRO AND WHITE: DEMAND THE IMMEDIATE DISMISSAL AND ARREST AND PROSECUTION OF THE SPECIAL GUARD AND THE MANAGER OF THE STORE.
  DEMAND THE RELEASE OF THE NEGRO AND WHITE WORKERS ARRESTED.
  DEMAND THE HIRING OF NEGRO WORKERS IN ALL DEPARTMENT STORES IN HARLEM
  DON'T LET BOSSES START ANY RACE RIOTS IN HARLEM.
  DON'T TRADE IN KRESSES.
  
  Issued by
  Communist Party
  Young Communist League

  
  The Daily Worker published the Communist Party leaflet text, while not publishing the Young Liberators' leaflet, perhaps because the public position of the Young Liberators was that the organization was not affiliated with the Communist Party. The handwritten headline of that leaflet appeared at the end of the story in the New York World-Telegram, after the full text of the Young Liberators' leaflet: “In another manifesto, signed by the Communist party and the Young Peoples’ League, a plea was made “for unity of Negro and white workers—don’t let the bosses start race riots in Harlem!” While the New York Evening Journal published a photograph of the leaflet, no other white newspapers reproduced the text, nor did it appear in the MCCH final report. The Norfolk Journal and Guide was the only Black publication in which the leaflet text was published.
  
  Initial newspaper stories reported that police said that the leaflets were responsible for moving the crowds on 125th Street to violence. The sensationalized version of that story employed metaphors of fire that placed the leaflets at the start of the disorder: leaflets were the “match which ignited Harlem and pitted its teeming thousands against the police and white spectators and shopkeepers” in the Daily News, “inflammatory handbills, the spark that fired the tinder” in Newsweek, and "inflame the populace" in a New York Age editorial; and in the New York Sun and Daily Mirror leaflets fanned the crowd’s fury. The New York Evening Journal opted for a more racist image evoking slavery, in which the leaflet was “largely responsible for whipping the Negroes to a frenzy.” The New York Age columnist the "Flying Cavalier" described the leaflets as as an example of the Communist "technique in the making up of their messages which would incite a lamb to jump on a tiger—if the lamb didn’t think first." Other newspapers framed the leaflets in terms of rumors: as having started the rumor in the New York Herald Tribune, as “the chief agency which spread the rumor" in the Home News; and as having “helped spread resentment” in the New York Post. (The New York World-Telegram described the leaflet without giving it a specific role; the “tinder for the destructive conflict” was the rumor that a boy had been beaten and killed, “assiduously spread by Communists.”) Writing in the New Republic, white journalist Hamilton Basso devoted two paragraphs to weighing the role the leaflet played in the disorder. He concluded that it “helped to rouse the crowds to violence,” but rejected the idea that the leaflet’s purpose “was deliberately to provoke a race riot” as requiring belief in “the stupid Red Scare of the Hearst press.”
  
  The only direct evidence of when the Young Liberators' leaflet was distributed came from Louise Thompson. She told a public hearing of the MCCH that the leaflets were not in circulation when she left 125th Street around 7:30 PM. It was when Thompson returned around 8:00 PM that she “first saw the leaflet” in the hands of several people, but not anyone handing them out. Thompson was not a disinterested witness; as a member of the Communist Party, she would not have wanted to see them held responsible for the disorder. L. F. Cole, who like Thompson had been inside Kress’ store after Rivera was grabbed but was not a Communist, told the MCCH he saw pamphlets in the crowd around 8:00 PM (the number is smudged in the transcript so that time was uncertain). Inspector Di Martini’s report supported that timeline, locating the appearance of “a number of pamphlets under the heading of the YL and YCP” after the crowd that gathered the rear of Kress’ store around 7:00 PM had been dispersed. Presumably that timing was based on the statements of officers on 125th Street — but not Patrolman Moran, who told the MCCH he was on duty in front of Kress’ store from 6:00 PM throughout the night and did not see leaflets passed out. Copies of the leaflets were attached to the report. They may have been the copies that Lieutenant Battle told the MCCH public hearing that he had gathered near the end of the disorder, around 2:00 AM.
  
  Newspaper stories presented a different timeline that had the leaflet appear earlier, around 6:00 PM, for which there was no direct evidence. The New York Evening Journal and Home News, the New York Post the next day, and the New Republic, reported that the Young Liberators' leaflet appeared about an hour after Kress’ staff grabbed Rivera, which would have been around 3:30 PM. When District Attorney William Dodge spoke to reporters on March 20, the Daily News, New York World-Telegram, and New York American reported him as saying that the leaflets appeared within two hours of the incident in the store. No one at the scene described that timeline. It was likely based on the text of the leaflet, which read “One hour ago a twelve-year-old boy was brutally beaten by the management of Kress five-and-ten-cent store.” At that time, however, the Young Liberators were unaware of what had happened in the store. It was not until around 5:00 PM, as police were clearing people from Kress’ store, that a Black man brought news to the offices of the Young Liberators, James Taylor testified. Taylor, the leader of the Young Liberators, was asked about the timing referred to in the leaflet; he replied that he did not know whether that was correct. The New York Times story reporting Dodge’s comments had the “first of the Communist handbills” appear at 6:00 PM. That timeline was at least plausible; it would have been around an hour after the Young Liberators learned of an incident in Kress’ store. It was not, however, a timeframe that fitted with Di Martini’s report. The Daily News had the Young Liberators distributing the leaflets as they picketed Kress’ store at a time not specified in the story. However, that detail was part of the truncated timeline police provided that had all five alleged Communists that they arrested arriving at Kress’ store at the same time rather than separately over a period of forty-five minutes starting around 6:00 PM as testimony from those at the scene indicated. The pickets were the final protesters to arrive at Kress’ store at around 6:45 PM. Thompson saw them so would have seen leaflets had they been distributed at that time.
  
  William Ford’s testimony in a MCCH public hearing was the only evidence related to the origins and timing of the Communist Party pamphlet. The leaflet appeared after members of the Young Liberators visited Ford about an hour after distributing their leaflet, he testified. They “were very much disturbed” that “these leaflets had not been able to allay mass resentment in Harlem,” and instead “a rumor had got around that a race riot had started in Harlem.” The Communist Party immediately produced a leaflet intended “to stop race rioting,” Ford testified, and he went to Harlem around 8:00 PM. The leaflet arrived an hour or two later, about “9 or 10 o’clock.” The MCCH report stated that that Communist Party leaflet was issued “about the same time” as the Young Liberators’ leaflet. None of the newspapers mentioned the time that the leaflet was distributed.
  
  District Attorney William Dodge and Police Commissioner Valentine both amplified the police narrative when they spoke to reporters on March 20 after Dodge's appearance before the grand jury to seek indictments against alleged participants in the disorder. Valentine summarized Di Martini’s “departmental report on the cause of the rioting” as detailing “that a Negro youth had been caught stealing, that a woman had screamed, that the 'Young Liberators' had met, that they had thereafter disseminated 'untruthful deceptive and inflammatory literature' and that all these events had been climaxed by the appearance of a hearse in the vicinity,” the New York Sun reported, a chronology also reported in the New York American, New York World-Telegram, Times Union, and Brooklyn Daily Eagle. (The hearse was not the final element in Di Martini’s report; it was mentioned before the Young Liberators). Two days later, Dodge showed the grand jury a typewriter and mimeograph machine. The fruits of police raids on the offices of several organizations affiliated with the Communist Party, the machines were used to produce the Young Liberators’ leaflet, he told the grand jury, according to stories in New York Herald Tribune, New York Post, New York American, Daily News, and New York Times. (The mimeograph machine was taken from the Nurses and Hospital Workers League, the organization which employed one of the men arrested for trying to speak in front of Kress’ store, Daniel Miller, the New York Post and New York American reported.) According to the Daily News, after the grand jury examined that material, “Dodge said arrests might be expected momentarily.” There were no reports of any arrests related to the leaflets.
  
  Mayor La Guardia did not echo the district attorney and police commissioner in directly blaming Communists for the disorder. While his statement distributed and displayed in Harlem the evening after the disorder followed the same police narrative, and mentioned the leaflets, it did not present them as triggering the disorder. Instead, he used them to characterize those responsible: “The maliciousness and viciousness of the instigators are betrayed by the false statements contained in mimeographed handbills and placards.” That statement indirectly implicated the Young Liberators and Communist Party, who had signed the leaflets. However, the circular presented the disorder as “instigated and artificially stimulated by a few irresponsible individuals” who went unnamed. Questioned by journalists, La Guardia "would not say whether he agreed with the police that the instigators were Communists," the New York Herald Tribune reported.
  
  Newspaper stories about the MCCH public hearing treated the testimony regarding the time at which the leaflets appeared in a variety of ways. The New York Herald Tribune and an editorial in the New York Amsterdam News highlighted how that testimony undermined what police said in the aftermath of the disorder. “Reds' Handbills Are Cleared As 'Chief Cause' of Harlem Riot” was the headline of the New York Herald Tribune story, which reported that “The committee learned that the circulars did not appear on the streets until 8:30 PM, fully two hours after the worst of the rioting was over. Therefore, the committee was asked by Communist lawyers to conclude that the literature could not have been a cause of much loss of property or life.” The New York Amsterdam News editorial, “The Road is Clear,” described the testimony that “The much-publicized Young Liberator pamphlets, carrying the false reports, did not appear on the streets until two hours after the worst rioting was over” as “one important fact” established by the MCCH. “With the red herring out of the way,” the editorial went on, “the investigating body can set out to probe the basic factors which really precipitated the riots - the discrimination, exploitation and oppression of 204,000 American citizens in the most liberal city in America. The New York Age, Home News and New York Times reported the testimony on when the leaflets appeared without addressing the implications of that evidence for the police narrative of the disorder. The New York American and Daily News mentioned other aspects of Taylor’s testimony about the leaflet but not when it was distributed, with the Daily News continuing to describe the leaflet as having "brought the riot into being." No mention of testimony about the leaflet appeared in stories about the hearing in the New York World-Telegram, Times Union, New York Post, and New York Evening Journal. In other words, the anti-Communist Hearst newspapers that had given the most attention to the leaflets did not respond to the testimony at odds with their narrative.
   
• 1 2022-02-04T19:39:37+00:00 Two men speak to a crowd in front of Kress' store 59 plain 2023-11-09T04:53:24+00:00 Around 5.30 PM, Daniel Miller, a twenty-four-year-old white man who identified himself as a member of the Nurses and Hospital League, left the Empire Cafeteria at 306 Lenox Avenue, just north of 125th Street, he testified in a public hearing of the MCCH. Walking along 125th Street toward his home at 35 Morningside Avenue, a man he knew named James Parton approached him, carrying a ladder and an American flag. Although Miller did not mention it, other witnesses identified Parton as a Black man. He told Miller, “there had been a little trouble and would you mind calling the Negroes and whites to boycott Kress store.” Parton then set up the ladder at 125th Street and 7th Avenue, “a corner frequently used for such purposes” according to the report of the MCCH subcommittee. However, on this occasion when he started speaking the traffic officer at the intersection allegedly told him to “take that ladder in front of Kress’ store,” Miller testified. While a traffic police officer might have been concerned to avoid having speakers attract a crowd that blocked traffic, it seems unlikely he would tell the men to instead go to the store, where the officers charged with guarding the store would have to deal with them. The men may instead have decided it would be more effective to speak in front of the location they were targeting.
  
  By the time the Parton and Miller arrived in front of the store it was around 6:15 PM. Inspector Di Martini told a public hearing of the MCCH that he had left Kress’ store about fifteen minutes earlier, when the area seemed quiet to him. He left a sergeant and four patrolmen stationed in front of Kress’ store, according to his report on the disorder. Patrolman Moran testified in a MCCH hearing he was stationed across 125th Street opposite Kress’ store. Patrolman Timothy Shannon, who had been in the store since 4:00 PM, must have been one of the officers stationed directly in front of the store, given his later involvement in arresting Miller, along with Sergeant Bauer, who testified he was a witness to that arrest.
  
  
  
  Climbing the ladder, Parton said “there had been some trouble in Harlem and [he?] would like to have the Negroes and whites come together,” Miller told a MCCH public hearing. Louise Thompson wrote in New Masses that she heard him speak of "'Negro and white solidarity against police-provoked race-rioting." Other witnesses and newspaper stories simply reported that Parton introduced Miller. About 150-200 people were on 125th Street around Kress when he climbed the ladder, according to Miller. As he began speaking, someone in the crowd threw an object that broke a window in Kress’ store, behind Miller. At that moment Patrolman Shannon pulled Miller down from the ladder and arrested him. (Although Shannon testified in the public hearing, he was not asked to provide details about the arrest of Miller.) Other police officers then "cleared the crowd from the front of the Kress store," Patrolman Moran testified in a MCCH hearing. The people who had been listening to Miller scattered, many moving across 125th Street to the opposite sidewalk. There James Parton again attempted to speak to the crowd, but was moved on by police. Further east on 125th Street, he was able to climb a lamppost and speak, after which he introduced another white man, twenty-year-old Harry Gordon. He too would be dragged down and arrested by police around 6:30 PM.
  
  As was the case with events inside Kress’ store, testimony in the public hearings of the MCCH provide the most detailed evidence of the events outside the store in the early evening of March 19. Louise Thompson testified on March 30, Patrolmen Shannon and Moran testified on April 6, and Miller and Harry Gordon testified on May 4. (Thompson’s article in New Masses mentioned only Miller speaking, without naming him.) The MCCH subcommittee report summarized that testimony briefly, a paragraph that appeared revised and slightly expanded in the final report. Neither narrative named the speakers.
  
  By contrast, newspaper stories truncated the events and presented Miller as arriving and acting together with the three members of the Young Liberators, two white men and one Black man, arrested about half an hour later picketing in front of Kress, and in some cases with Harry Gordon. In those stories, the men’s speeches and actions were responsible for moving the crowd to violence. That portrayal reflected what police told reporters. (The MCCH final report argued to the contrary that “It was probably due in some measure to the activities of these racial leaders, both white and black, that the crowds attacked property rather than persons.”)
  
  The New York American focused on Miller’s arrest by Shannon, triggered not by the broken window but after he refused an order to move on, and added a second episode that other evidence indicates did not happen: the two white Young Liberators and Gordon came to Miller’s aid when he was arrested, and battled Shannon and two other patrolmen before also being arrested. (That story relied on information from the police and misidentified Gordon as picketing the store and portrayed the Black man who did picket, Viabolo, as a bystander “who had offered the boys help.”) A briefer version of that inaccurate narrative appeared in the New York Evening Journal, without the names of the other officers involved, and omitting Viabolo. Both Hearst newspapers shared an anti-Communist stance and a sensational style.
  
  The New York Sun identified Miller as speaker, but described an extended speech that aroused a crowd that other sources indicate did not happen: “Miller's exhortations played upon their credulity until whispers that the boy had been murdered began to creep around the fringe of the restive mob.” Only after being “harangued” by Miller did someone in the crowd break a window (harangue was also the word used by the New York Times, New York Post, Afro-American, and New York Evening Journal). The story did not mention the circumstances of his arrest. The New York Times more briefly described a similar scene and also mentioned Miller’s arrest. Neither newspaper included Gordon in the group of men. The New York Post more briefly described Miller, Gordon, and the two other white men as having been arrested for “haranguing crowds, urging them to fight.” The New York Age reported the arrest of the four men in front of the store without details of what police alleged they had done. The New York Herald Tribune, Home News, Daily News, and Afro-American initially reported only the presence of unnamed speakers, to whom the Daily News, Afro-American and Home News gave an inflated role in moving those on the street to act, and did not mention that police arrested them.
  
  Additional stories featuring Miller appeared when he was arraigned in the Magistrates Court on March 20, including in the papers who the previous day had not named him and the others who spoke and picketed. Again, Miller was grouped with the three Young Liberators who picketed, following police presenting them as a group in court, with Patrolman Shannon as the arresting officer of all four men. In court, Gordon appeared separately, and charged with assaulting the police officer who arrested him. Gordon was also alone in speaking out in the police line-up, attracting attention from reporters. The Daily Mirror reported Gordon identified himself as a college student, apparently leading that reporter to assume that Miller and the other men were also students. The New York Times and New York Sun instead recorded Miller as unemployed, while other newspapers did not list his occupation. Police told reporters that Miller and the other men were all members of the Young Liberators and Communists, according to the New York Sun, a label also employed by the Daily News and New York Age, and unsurprisingly, the three Hearst newspapers, the New York American, Daily Mirror, and New York Evening Journal,. Lawyers from the ILD who appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court to represent them provided further confirmation of that association (Gordon refused that representation in favor of getting himself a lawyer, but that man was also an ILD attorney, Gordon revealed in the public hearing, whom he claimed he knew through his son, not political activities.)
  
  In the public hearing, Miller testified he was a member not of the Young Liberators but of the Nurses and Hospital League. Nonetheless the goal of that organization, “to fight for Negro workers and Hospitals” still associated him with the Communist Party. So too did his choice of restaurant in Harlem. The Empire Cafeteria had been the target of a Communist Party campaign to force the owners to hire Black staff six months earlier, after which it became a regular advertiser in the Daily Worker. That Communist Party newspaper would report that the Empire Cafeteria was one of the businesses not damaged during the disorder.
  
  On March 29, several days after Miller and the other men appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court, and before the first public hearing of the MCCH, the Daily Worker published a detailed narrative of the events in and outside Kress at the beginning of the disorder. It was the only newspaper to revisit these events after the initial reporting. Police dragging Miller down and arresting him are included in that narrative. However, before the arrest, the story described an “orderly” meeting in which the “speakers urged unity of black and white workers in the fight against Negro oppression. They pointed out the discrimination in jobs, in housing, in relief. They referred to Scottsboro. They urged particularly that the workers guard against boss incitement to race riot, which would be the opposite of workers' solidarity in the struggle for Negro rights and for working class rights in general.” While that is likely what the Communist speakers would have said, Miller testified a little over a month later that no such meeting took place. “Fellow Workers” was all he said before a window was broken and police arrested him. The Daily Worker did not publish a story about the MCCH hearing in which Miller appeared. The newspapers that did publish stories on that hearing did not mention Miller. It was at that hearing on May 4 that Gordon testified about how police beat him while he was in custody, and denied him food and access to a lawyer. His testimony was widely reported, effectively overshadowing what Miller said. Neither man's testimony was reported in stories in the New York World-Telegram, New York Evening Journal, which focused on the upheaval in the audience, or the New York Post, which focused on another police brutality case.
  
  Daniel Miller did not appear in the MCCH's transcription of the 28th Precinct police blotter; Claudio Viabolo, the Black Young Liberator, is the only one of the five speakers and picketers in that record. When Miller appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, the charge recorded in the docket book was riot. Assistant District Attorney Carey requested Miller be held for a hearing on March 23, on the maximum bail of $2,500, like the three Young Liberators arrested after Miller for picketing Kress' store. The police grouped the four men together, telling newspaper reporters they were the "ringleaders" of the disorder. When Miller and the three other men returned to court, the charges against them were dismissed as the grand jury had already sent them for trial. While the Magistrates Court docket book recorded the deposition of the men's cases as "Dism[issed], def[endant] indicted," the grand jury had actually voted informations against them, sending them for trial on misdemeanor charges in the Court of Special Sessions, rather than indictments for more serious felony charges, a distinction most clearly reported in the Daily News. The men's trial did not take place until June 20. After hearing evidence that that a crowd had collected in front of Kress' prior to the men arriving, the judges found the men not guilty of inciting a riot, the New York Amsterdam News reported.
  
  Only one historian, Thomas Kessner, names Miller in his narrative of the beginning of the disorder. He mentions him as speaking, at more length than he did, immediately before the window in Kress' store was broken. Miller's arrest was not part of Kessner's account, nor was Harry Gordon speaking. Mark Naison, Cheryl Greenberg, Marilynn Johnson, Lorrin Thomas, and Nicole Watson group Miller and Gordon together as “speakers” pulled down by police. All these historians follow the narrative provided by police that presents the speakers as part of a single group protesting in front of Kress’ store, stepping up to speak to the crowd after picketing of the store had begun. That framing implicitly introduces the idea that the disorder was orchestrated by those men, while offering no details of how the crowds of women and men around them acted to weigh against that evidence. Weight is added to that implication by the failure to fully identify the men involved in the protests. While Greenberg and Thomas do not identify the men, Naison, Kessner, Johnson, and Watson describe them as members of the Young Liberators. None of those historians mention that four of the five, and both the speakers arrested, were white men. Naison did describe the Young Liberators as an interracial group; so too did Watson, however she did not identify the men in front of the store as members of the Young Liberators. Neglecting their race makes those men appear more representative of the crowd than they were, particularly in Greenberg and Watson’s narratives, which do not identify them as Young Liberators. Naison, Kessner, Greenberg, Thomas, Johnson, and Watson all follow the chronology that has the picketing begin before the speakers were arrested. Grouping the men places an organized Communist protest at the center of the outbreak of disorder, and makes the window being broken and the men’s arrest a response to the feeling they built in the crowd. Recognizing that the protests occurred in a less coordinated way highlights that police responded immediately to any sign of protest, not just to a window being broken. They may also have acted so quickly because they recognized the men as Communists; the men’s language and appeals would have given them away. Communist protest in Harlem, and across the city, drew violent responses from police in the months prior to the disorder. Recognition of the fragmented nature of the protests and the identity of those involved directs attention away from those events to the crowds of Black men and women around them. Crowd members gathered in groups, talked among themselves, sought answers from police about what had happened to the boy, and responded to police efforts to clear the street. Rather than organized or orchestrated by the Young Liberators, those behaviors appear more spontaneous, in line with the interpretation offered in the MCCH’s final report.
  
   
• 1 2020-02-24T23:10:53+00:00 Shot and wounded (7) 57 plain 2023-12-11T03:04:19+00:00 Seven individuals were shot during the disorder (and two others shot and killed). The targets of five of the seven shootings were Black men, whereas those hit by objects were mostly white men and women. Few details exist of who shot the Black men or the man of unknown race. The police officer was shot by his own gun in a struggle with James Thompson during his arrest. No one was arrested for the other shootings. (Not included in that total was an incident in which four men allegedly shot at, but did not hit, a police officer. The men were not charged with assault, only disorderly conduct, and were acquitted.)
  
  The shooting of Lyman Quarterman attracted the most attention largely because newspapers initially reported that the thirty-four-year-old Black man had been killed, but also because his shooting occurred early in the riot, around 10:30 PM, in the midst of a crowd at 7th Avenue and 121st Street. The remaining men were shot in unknown circumstances, with no details in either hospital records or in the lists of the injured published by newspapers, where their names were accompanied only by brief descriptions of the nature of their wounds, about which different publications rarely agreed.
  
  It is likely that police were responsible for most of these shootings. Officers assigned to control the disorder carried pistols and the crews of emergency trucks carried “riot guns” — rifles. Images of armed officers are a staple of the photographs that accompanied newspaper stories. That some police fired their guns in the air as part of their efforts to disperse crowds was widely reported. The New York Times reported officers who “fired their pistols into the air, frightening away various groups of would-be disturbers,” as did the New York Herald Tribune and Afro-American. That narrative fit claims in the New York Times, New York Evening Journal and New York Post that officers were under orders not to fire at crowds, or only “in the greatest emergency,” according to the New York Post. Inspector Di Martini told a hearing of the MCCH that he "gave instructions to police not to do any shooting." Instead, they used the butts of their guns as clubs (as can be seen in photographs of the arrest of Charles Alston and of an arrest on Lenox Avenue). However, the shooting of Lyman Quarterman was an awkward fit with that narrative. Police were struggling with the crowd of which he was part, but the white press overwhelmingly chose to address the possibility that an officer had shot him only obliquely. Those stories offered conflicting details, with the New York Herald Tribune reporting that no officers fired their weapons, the Times Union that many had, but only into the air, and the New York Evening Journal that they had exchanged gunfire with the crowd. An exception was the headline the New York Times published for its story on the disorder on March 20, "Police Shoot Into Rioters; Kill Negro in Harlem Mob." However, the story itself only reported that the "police launched an investigation to determine who fired the fatal shot."
  
  By later in the disorder, police were shooting at people on the streets according to a variety of sources. The New York Herald Tribune reported that around midnight, “as looting developed, the police began shooting.” As well as looting, it was violence directed against white men and women that led officers to use their guns according to the New York Evening Journal: “But as the night wore on and the looting and violence increased to a point never before reached in New York City, the police were forced to use their guns-were forced to use them to protect helpless whites from being beaten and kicked and stamped to death under the feet of the stampeding blacks.” That was the time period in which the other shootings, and the two additional fatal shootings by police, took place; after 1:00 AM, and with one exception in areas where looting occurred. The exception was De Soto Windgate, who was shot while walking on West 144th Street, six blocks from any other incident in the disorder. Details of his shooting appeared only in the 32nd Precinct records of individuals aided by officers. The only connection to the disorder was the timing of his shooting, so it may be unrelated. The New York Sun somewhat obliquely linked those shootings to the police by presenting officers as using their guns in response to the increasing “fury of the mob" "The crack of revolver shot bit into the din. Seven men reeled under the impact of the bullets.” Eunice Carter asked Captain Rothnengast for details of those shootings during a MCCH hearing, suggesting that they had been shot by police: “Officer, you stated that other people were shot but who shot them? Was there any effort to find out who shot them? Was any check made on the bullets to ascertain whether they came from police guns?” He replied simply that “No bullets were recovered.” If these Black men were hit by police bullets, they may not have been the targets of those shots. When officers shot at James Thompson as he fled a building on 8th Avenue, stray bullets hit two white men on the other side of the street. Police firing into crowds to disperse them could also have hit bystanders.
  
  One incident of Black men firing guns was reported by white newspapers and the Associated Press as involving a group of men firing on police from a rooftop on 138th Street and Lenox Avenue at the very end of the disorder. But the fullest account of those events, in the Home News, did not offer clear evidence that a shooting took place: the officers who made the arrests responded to the sound of gunshots rather than seeing a shooting, and found no guns on the four men they arrested — “During the chase they are said to have thrown away their pistols.” Police clearly had no other evidence that the men had fired at police as they chargedthem only with disorderly conduct, annotated as "annoy." And evidence of even that charge was clearly not presented as three of the men, Albert Yerber, Edward Loper, and Ernest Johnson, were tried and acquitted in the Magistrates Court, and the fourth, Charles Alston, whose injuries suffered trying to escape police delayed his appearance, discharged. Similarly, while Inspector Di Martini told a hearing of the MCCH that he heard gunshots fired around 130th Street at some point in the disorder, he could not establish who fired them: "I tried to see where they came from. Apparently they came from some roof or window on the side streets." Those shots were more likely fired by police.
  
  Two men arrested in the disorder were charged with possession of a firearm, one white and one Black. No stories about the circumstances of their arrests appeared in the press, as you would expect had they been involved in shootings.
  
  In two striking examples, white newspapers reported gun fights that did not happen. When Stanley Dondoro was hit by shots fired by two detectives pursuing James Thompson, a New York Evening Journal story reported Dondoro had been hit by “other rioters [who] returned the fire.” The New York American, Home News, New York Herald Tribune, and New York Post reported a gun battle between the officers and Thompson, who was unarmed.

  As Part of Related Categories:

  • Assaults on Black men (5/13)
  • Assaults on police (1/9)
  • Assault in the courts (1/9)
  • Injured in assaults (7/49)
  • Assaults by police (?)

  Assaults (54)

• 1 2020-02-25T17:19:47+00:00 Lyman Quarterman shot 42 plain 2023-11-28T20:59:34+00:00 At around 10:30 PM, Lyman Quarterman, a thirty-four-year-old Black man, was part of a crowd at 121st Street and 7th Avenue that police were struggling to disperse when he was shot in the abdomen. A few minutes earlier, Anthony Cados, a thirty-four-year-old white man, reported being assaulted nearby by "some unknown colored person or persons." While Cados lived approximately ten blocks to the south, Quarterman lived at the other end of Black Harlem, at 306 West 146th Street.
  
  
  
  Hospital records of the ambulance called to attend Quarterman simply recorded he had a "gunshot wound of the abdomen received when shot by some unknown person at the scene of riot." The New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, New York American, Brooklyn Citizen, and Daily Mirror, and the Associated Press, reported on March 20, and the Chicago Defender on March 23, that Quarterman had died, a mistake the Home News attributed to "many conflicting reports during the night," and the New York Evening Journal attributed more specifically to a "report having been sent out on the police teletype." By late on March 20 the New York Evening Journal, New York Post, and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle listed Quarterman among the injured, as did the Atlanta World on March 27 and the Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide on March 30. He was one of eight men still in hospital on March 21, the New York Herald Tribune reported, and still there as late as April 8 according to the New York Age, but there are no reports that he died.
  
  The New York Times headlined the story it published on March 20, "Police Shoot Into Rioters; Kill Negro in Harlem Mob." However, the story itself was less definitive, saying only that the "police launched an investigation to determine who fired the fatal shot." However, other white newspaper stories discounted in various ways the possibility police shot Quarterman. The New York Herald Tribune, reported that no policeman in the vicinity could remember discharging his revolver, whereas the Times Union said many had, but “only into the air to frighten the mob.” The New York Evening Journal story made an oblique reference to shots being fired into the crowd, as the culmination of a narrative justifying police actions as a response to escalating violence, in which officers from the 123rd Street station surrounded by a crowd, first drew their nightsticks “to save their own lives,” and when the crowd armed themselves with baseball bats and clubs, drew their guns and exchanged shots with the crowd. No other newspapers reproduced this narrative. The New York American simply said Quarterman had been shot by an unknown assailant, the Daily Mirror by a “stray bullet,” and the Daily News reported his assailant had escaped, stories which all implicitly assumed the police were not responsible for his death. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle explicitly expressed such an assumption in reporting Quarterman had been shot “presumably by rioters.” Only the Brooklyn Citizen stated directly that “Whether he had been shot by police or other rioters could not be determined.”
  
  Four of the six others shot and wounded during the disorder were Black men like Quarterman, one of unknown race, and one white police officer. As in his case, no one was arrested for any of those shootings (the man with whom the police officer struggled, James Thompson, was shot and killed by police).
   
• 1 2022-09-03T17:48:37+00:00 Arrests (128) 42 plain 2023-12-10T22:14:11+00:00 Police records, legal records, and newspapers contained information on 128 arrests made by police across a period of approximately twelve hours from around 5:00 PM to 5:40 AM. The sources included information on the precise timing of only forty-seven arrests, just over one-third (37%) of the total. Most of those occurred between 10:30 PM and 1:30 AM. The final arrests of the riot, at 5:00 AM and 5:40 AM, came after a two-hour period without arrests with known times, and an hour after Deputy Chief Inspector McAuliffe had declared the streets quiet. They were made by patrolmen patrolling the avenues in radio cars. Three arrests were made after the disorder. Police arrested two men arrested in their homes and a third man in an unknown location.
  
  Few of those arrests were made in the early hours of the disorder when it was concentrated on or around 125th Street. For much of that time, there were relatively few police on the street so they were perhaps too outnumbered to make arrests, as Lt. Battle later told his biographer Langston Hughes. However, two newspaper stories did suggest that some of the forty-nine arrests for which there was no information on time or location could have been made during this time. The New York Herald Tribune reported that "By 11 p.m. both the West 123d Street and West 135th Street police stations were filled with suspects arrested for alleged assaults with rocks, bludgeons, knives and revolver butts." The Home News included a similar statement in its story: "By midnight both the W. 123d St. and W. 135th St. stations were filled with suspects arrested for assaults with rocks, knives and clubs." The New York Herald Tribune story mentioned a total of fifty arrests, likely a number police gave a reporter around the same time so an interim total reflecting when that edition of the newspaper was finalized. The New York Times, a morning newspaper like the New York Herald Tribune, also reported fifty arrests in its story. Only sixteen arrests with a known time occurred before 11:00 PM, with an additional five arrests before midnight. Newspapers published later reported larger totals closer to the number identified here: "100 or more under arrest" in the New York Evening Journal; "113 men and women, mostly Negroes, under arrest" in the New York Post; "120 prisoners" in the New York World Telegram; "more than 120 arrested" in the Times Union; "more than 125 arrested" in the Home News; "127 prisoners" in the New York American; "more than 150 under arrest" in the New York Sun; and "150 arrests" in the weekly Afro-American published on March 23. Many of those numbers would have been provided by police when those arrested were arraigned in the two Magistrates Courts that had jurisdictions over sections of Harlem. If there were additional people arrested beyond the 128 men and women identified here, they likely were not prosecuted as the research included the docket books that listed all those who appeared in the Magistrates Court.
  
  There were locations for seventy-nine of the 128 arrests, 62% of the total. Police made arrests across a wide area of Harlem, with concentrations on 125th Street, where Kress' store drew crowds, on Lenox Avenue north of 125th Street, and on 7th Avenue between 125th and 130th Streets, where extensive damage and looting was reported.
  Only eleven (14%) of those arrests took place above 130th Street; however, the proportion may have been greater. Those arrested north of 130th Street were arraigned in the Washington Heights Magistrates Court as that street was the boundary between the 28th Precinct based at West 123rd Street station and the 32nd Precinct based at the West 135th Street station. Thirty-two of the 115 (28%) people arrested whose names appeared in docket books were arraigned in the Washington Heights Magistrates Court indicating they had been arrested north of 130th Street. That proportion was in line with a story in the Home News that more than 90 arrests had been made by police at the West 123rd Street station. The docket books showed that statement was not accurate in the sense that officers based at that station made that many arrests, but it would reflect the number of arrests made within the precinct’s boundaries, the area south of 130th Street.
  
  Police most commonly alleged that those they arrested had been looting, in sixty of the 100 arrests (60%) for which that information can be found. Despite their relative frequency, arrests for looting related to only a small proportion of the looted stores. Of the sixty-five looted businesses identified here, police made arrests related to twenty-eight (43%) locations. Police made an additional eighteen arrests for alleged looting that could be related to one of the other thirty-seven businesses identified as having been looted in the sources. However, those sixty-five businesses did not represent all those that were looted: only twenty-seven of the 171 businesses who sued or tried to sue the city were identified in the sources, meaning that a total of at least 133 businesses were looted (assuming all 65 of the identified businesses are among those that filed suits), with arrests related to at most 21% (28 of 133). The next most frequently alleged activity was breaking windows, in twenty-six arrests (24%, 26 of 109), with seven of those individuals allegedly also inciting others to attack stores or police. Those arrests related to only 24% (17 of 72) of the businesses identified in the sources that suffered damage. Again, those businesses represented only a proportion of the total with damage, estimated at around 450. Some of those businesses would also have been looted; if around 300 businesses only had windows broken, the total arrests would be related to only about 9% (26 of 300) of the damaged stores. Taken together, arrests for alleged looting and breaking windows related to only about 13% of the approximately 450 damaged businesses. Police arrests for alleged assaults were in a similar proportion to those for attacks on businesses. Despite the attention given to assaults in some white newspapers, police alleged only thirteen of those arrested (13%, 13 of 100) had committed such violence. Seven of those arrests related to one of the fifty-four reported assaults, around 13%. Similarly, despite newspaper reports of those on Harlem’s streets being armed with various weapons (including the claims that those arrested early in the disorder had used weapons quoted above), only four of those arrested allegedly had weapons in their possession. For an additional nineteen of those arrested (15%, 19 of 128) there is no information on what police alleged they had done.
  
  Police violence was a routine part of arrests in Harlem. Newspapers treated the injuries of those who had been arrested as unremarkable. The New York Post reported that “prisoners were herded in police stations when they did not require hospital treatment” without any additional comment. Similarly, the New York Sun described several of those being transported to court the next day as “bruised and beaten and their clothing was torn.” Injured prisoners are also visible in several photographs published in the press. Mentions of police hitting people with their nightsticks in the Times Union and New York Herald Tribune focused on them being used on people in the streets not during arrests. However, five of those arrested also appeared in lists of the injured, four Black men and a white man. Details existed only in the case of the white man, Harry Gordon, who told a hearing of the MCCH that he was beaten with a nightstick while being arrested, again in a radio car while being transported to the precinct, and one more while being placed in a cell. The only other evidence of the circumstances of an arrest was a photograph published in the Daily News. Two officers are visible, on the southeast corner of Lenox Avenue and 127th Street, with one standing over a Black man seated on the ground on the ground. He is “dragging a recalcitrant rioter off to prison,” according to the caption; he may also have knocked him to the ground. That officer has his nightstick under his arm, while the officer in the foreground has a revolver in one hand and a nightstick in the other, indicating that they employed those weapons while apprehending the man. In addition, the New York Evening Journal published two photographs of police officers searching Black men for weapons according to the captions. Presumably, if they had found anything, the photographs would have been of the subsequent arrests. In one, the officer was a detective in plainclothes searching a single man. In the other, police have stopped a car and a uniformed patrolman was searching one man standing next to it with his hands in the air while a second man sat in the car lifting his hand to hide his face from the camera.
  
  Other photographs of police with individuals they arrested were taken as they were entering police stations not during the arrest itself. The officers walked alongside the arrested men, in one image grasping a man’s arm and pushing him with a nightstick. Three images, two of the same group, including the one below published in the New York Evening Journal, showed Black men under arrest for looting carrying merchandise they had allegedly stolen.
  Embed from Getty Images
  
  By contrast, there was nothing in a photograph published in the New York Evening Journal captioned “Suspected Rock-Tosser” to indicate that was the charge against the Black man in the image. Police arresting Charles Alston on Lenox Avenue and 138th Street were photographed by men working for both the International Photo service (the image below) and the Daily News as they brought him to the street for transport to the precinct. They alleged he had been part of a group of men that shot at police; the photograph captions, however, identified him as having been arrested for looting. That arrest was at the very end of the disorder, after the streets were quiet, when more journalists began to venture beyond 125th Street.
  Embed from Getty Images
  
  Police almost always arrested individuals even when they described seeing groups. In only nine instances did police make multiple arrests at one time, three people on four occasions and two people on five occasions. Those arrests amounted to 16% of the identified arrests (21 of 128). Although a single arresting officer was identified in seven of those incidents, they almost certainly involved multiple officers as the arrest of the three picketers in front of Kress’ store did. Details of these arrests were limited but do suggest one explanation for why police did not make multiple arrests more often: officers had to chase the group of which David Smith and Leon Mauraine were part and caught up with those two men several buildings away. Others in the group obviously outran police, which may have happened on other occasions. It could also have been that there were too few police to make additional arrests. Just how many officers were present for an arrest was difficult to establish as legal sources focused narrowly on the arresting officer who appeared in court.
  
  Police overwhelmingly arrested Black men during the disorder, 102 of the 117 (87%) of those arrested with a recorded race, together with only seven Black women and eight white men (eleven of the arrested men are of unknown race). Women were a larger proportion of the crowds on Harlem’s streets, particularly on 125th Street, in most accounts of the disorder than of those arrested. However, they are only rarely mentioned as participants in attacks on stores or the looting that occurred away from Kress’ store. Given the prominence of women in stories about the disorder in Harlem in 1943, only eight years later, it was possible that their involvement in 1935 was overlooked by reporters and police focused on men they likely considered more threatening. Those women police did arrest were allegedly involved in breaking, windows, looting and inciting crowds; none were accused of assault. The four alleged Communists - Daniel Miller, Harry Gordon, and the two picketers -  who police arrested at the very beginning of the disorder amounted to half of the white men taken into custody during the disorder. Police also arrested one of other four white men early in the disorder, Leo Smith, for breaking a store window. He may also have been part of the Communist protests. There was little evidence that white men were in the groups police encountered attacking and looting stores later in the disorder. There are details of only one of the other arrests, the last of the disorder, when a patrolman arrested Jean Jacquelin carrying clothing allegedly stolen from tailor on the block where he lived.
  
  Only a small number of those arrested in the disorder lived outside Harlem.
  
  Most of those arrested lived local to the disorder. Although a cluster resided around 7th Avenue south of 125th Street, those arrested came from throughout the neighborhood.
  

  Events

• 1 2021-10-21T23:34:41+00:00 White men arrested for looting (2) 36 plain 2023-11-07T17:05:05+00:00 Two white men are among those arrested for looting, the others being forty-seven Black men, three Black women, and eight men of unknown race. An additional six white men are among those arrested, including Leo Smith, for allegedly breaking store windows.
  
  One of the men resided in Black Harlem, which was very rare by 1935. Jean Jacquelin’s address was recorded as 222 West 128th Street, in the area north of West 125th Street and east of 8th Avenue where Black residents made up well over 90% of the population. He was arrested at West 128th Street and 8th Avenue, just west of his home, at the very end of the disorder, early the next morning, likely based on the clothing in his possession. That clothing, later identified as coming from tailor’s east of his home, provided enough evidence for a charge of larceny, a misdemeanor as it had a value less than $100. But the judges in the Court of Special Sessions dismissed the charges. That outcome, and Jacquelin’s arrest well after crowds had left the streets, mean there is no clear evidence he actually participated in the disorder.
  
  Louis Tonick, the second white man arrested for looting, lived outside Harlem, in the Bronx. There is no information on why he was in the neighborhood. Only eighteen years of age, Tonick was unlikely to have been working. He could have been simply passing through to or from his home or have been drawn to the neighborhood by reports of the disorder. There is also no information on where he was arrested. Although listed among those charged with burglary in the press, the charge against Tonick in police and legal records was robbery. However, the Magistrate, after holding Tonick in custody for two weeks, dismissed those charges. That outcome suggests the prosecutor lacked evidence he had participated in robbery or looting. With no information on when Tonick was arrested, he may have been in the crowds on the streets during the disorder. At least four of the other six white men arrested during the disorder also had the charges against them dismissed.
  
  Accounts of the events of the disorder similarly lack clear evidence of the participation of white men. While the MCCH report made no mention of white men other than the protesters in front of Kress’ store, both white and Black newspapers did include whites among their general descriptions of the crowds on the streets of Harlem. However, the statements in the Black press appear to be based on the arrest of the four men in front of Kress’ store at the very beginning of the disorder rather than any wider presence or participation. Under the subtitle “Some Rioters White,” the Afro-American asserted that “there were no strict opposing camps racially. Some of the most vicious rioters were white men who egged the crowd on and who handed out the leaflets and carried picket signs.” Prof. G M James, in a column in the New York Age offering an assessment of the disorder, reported that “I am informed by eye witnesses that (1) the riot was precipitated by both white and colored assailants alike.” Other Black newspapers that included white people in the crowds were less explicit about their role. The Norfolk Journal and Guide reported “About 4000 colored men and women and their white sympathizers took the law into their own hands when they heard that 'a small Negro boy' had been brutally or fatally beaten by a manger of a five and ten cent store for stealing either candy or a penknife valued at five cents.” The Atlanta World was even less explicit: “Whites joined their Negro fellow citizens as the story of the fatal beating of the youth by the store clerks gained more magnitude.”
  
  White men are more explicitly presented as part of violent crowds in several white newspapers. While identifying some of those men as the alleged Communists on which Black newspapers focused, the New York Evening Journal reported an additional group: “There were many whites among the rioters also, police said. Some are known to be Communist agitators, others were pictured as hoodlums, joining the mob only for the loot that they could accumulate throughout the mad night.” “Hoodlums” also appeared in the Daily News, which less explicitly identified them as white men: “Looting of stores was the objective of hundreds of hoodlums who swarmed into the district from Manhattan and the Bronx after news of the riot spread.” The newspaper’s readers would have been aware that the Black population was concentrated in Harlem, making those who came from outside the neighborhood members of other racial groups. (The editor of the New York Amsterdam News did also use “hoodlum” to describe crowd members, but not in his paper. He told a Daily News reporter that “irresponsible persons and hoodlums took advantage of the situation,” a statement that does not appear to refer to white men.) A similar emphasis on white looters appears in the New York Times, but its story labeled those men “agitators,” collapsing together the two groups identified by the New York Evening Journal: “Roving bands of Negroes, with here and there a sprinkling of white agitators, stoned windows, set fire to several stores and began looting.” The same New York Times story also used "hoodlum" without reference to race, as the Daily News had: “While the police seemed certain that they had enough men in the district to put down any new uprising of the hoodlum element that looted stores and broke more than 200 shop windows during the riot...” A wider range of commentators would point to hoodlums to explain the racial disorder in Harlem in 1943, using the term to distance participants in the disorder from the broader Black population.
  
  Only the New York Daily News, New York Herald Tribune, and Brooklyn Daily Eagle included white men among those committing assaults during the disorder. (The New York Evening Journal, which gave the violence the most attention, presented it as motivated by racial hatred, a framing that did not allow for participation by white men.) In accounts of assault, the Daily News used the labels “bands” and “guerillas” for the crowds involved: “armed bands of colored and white guerillas, swinging crowbars and clubs, roamed through barricaded Harlem from 110th to 145th St., assaulting every person of opposite color to cross their paths, setting fires and smashing shop windows after a night of fighting.” This contradictory image both groups Black and white men together and presents the assaults as interracial, on “every person of opposite color to cross their paths,” as does the almost identical description in the New York Herald Tribune. Those stories make no specific mention of groups of white men, or of attacks by white men on Black residents, nor do any other sources; the phrasing seems to come from slipping into describing the clashes that characterized racial disorder in preceding decades rather than what happened in Harlem. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle resolved that contradiction by essentially having white participants remove themselves from groups that assaulted white men and women: “Bands of men and women, in some case joined by whites and in other cases assaulting any white they met, roared up and down the byways of Harlem, smashing more than 200 windows, looting stores, and fleeing from or fighting police.” These awkwardly phrased descriptions suggest that claims of white participation in assaults came from how reporters sensationalized the disorder, not the information they had, that it was in groups breaking windows and looting stores, and picketing in front of Kress’ store, that white men were seen and that those who police arrested were allegedly among.
  
  Just how many white men were in the crowds on Harlem’s streets is uncertain. The small proportion of those arrested who were white men does not necessarily reflect how many were present; white police officers were likely more inclined to arrest Black men and women in this context, and it seems like few of the Black officers stationed in Harlem made arrests during the disorder. Most newspaper stories do not offer an assessment of the size of the white presence; those that do range from a "sprinkling” in the New York Times to “many” in the New York Evening Journal to “hundreds” (in crowds of several thousand) in the Daily News. James Hubert of the Urban League was alone in claiming that white men made up a majority of the crowds, based on a report from a member of his staff: "A man from my own office who went out into the streets said that fully 75 per cent of the persons causing the trouble were whites," he told a reporter from the New York Herald Tribune. "They got up on soap boxes and agitated and incited the Negroes. I am told that the persons who threw bricks into windows included many whites who rode about in taxicabs.” The details Hubert offered in support of his generalization do not actually put white men in the crowds on the street. As well as following the Black press in focusing on the men who picketed Kress’ store, he locates white participants in vehicles, not crowds. Cars regularly appear as targets of violence in descriptions of the disorder; they are not otherwise reported as sources of violence.
  
  White men in the crowds in Harlem’s streets were not necessarily drawn to the neighborhood by news of the disorder, as the Daily News claimed. Many white-owned businesses on West 125th Street refused, discouraged or discriminated against Black customers, highlighting that the district catered to whites from surrounding neighborhoods, including those in the blocks immediately south and east whose populations changed from predominantly white in 1930 census to predominantly Black in the 1940 census. Other white men came to Black Harlem for nightlife and vice.
   
• 1 2020-02-24T23:09:46+00:00 Assaults by groups (17) 36 plain 2023-12-11T01:15:42+00:00 During the disorder, seventeen individuals were allegedly attacked by groups of people. All those reported attacked were white, fifteen men and two women, and all the groups that allegedly attacked them were made up of Black men and women. In these attacks, rather than throwing rocks and stones from a distance, assailants came close enough to hit their targets with their fists and other weapons. That distinction was not always clear cut: in the case of the assault on James Wrigley, newspaper reports differed on whether he had been beaten or had objects thrown at him.
  
  Sources disagreed about the size of groups who committed the alleged assaults. Small groups reportedly committed five of the sixteen assaults, two groups specified as including three people, three others as made up of “several” people. Attacks by groups of this size regularly occurred in Harlem outside the disorder. Larger groups committed eight alleged assaults, two specified as made up of five or eight people and ten people, and six groups described in general terms (“group,” “number," “some,” and “Negroes”). These attacks highlight the fragmented nature of the disorder, in which groups emerged from the larger crowds on the streets. “Mobs,” and a “gang of 40 or 50,” committed the remaining four assaults, all reported only in the New York Evening Journal or New York Post, white publications which presented violence against whites in sensational terms (and did not show any concern with reporting more specific numbers).
  
  A number of the attacks by groups occurred near 125th Street, where crowds concentrated in the early hours of the disorder and other assaults and attacks on stores took place. Despite the presence of those crowds, several of the assaults involved only small groups: just three men allegedly attacked Joseph Sarnelli in his store, “several” assaulted Morris Werner, and a “number” assaulted Maurice Spellman. Likewise, the areas where groups of men allegedly attacked Michael Krim-Shamhal, William Burkhard, Alice Gordon, B.Z. Kondoul and William Ken also saw other forms of disorder. On the other hand, the two assaults in the north of Harlem, on Max Newman and Julius Narditch, occurred in an area that saw no other reported disorder or reports of crowds on the streets. The attack on Timothy Murphy fell in between these spaces, on the fringes of the disorder.
  The most extensively reported attack by a group occurred early in the disorder. A group of around ten Black men attacked Timothy Murphy on West 128th Street between 8th Avenue and St. Nicholas Avenue. They beat him, knocked him down, and kicked him, until Patrolman George Conn arrived on the scene and dispersed the crowd (in the process shooting Paul Boyett, a twenty-eight-year old Black man, who was arrested for assaulting Murphy, but testified he was simply a bystander and was acquitted at trial). One other attack by a group was widely reported, in which group of four men allegedly shot at police on post at Lenox Avenue and West 138th Street. While police arrested four men, they did not find any guns on them and all the men were acquitted in the Magistrates Court, so the attack is not included in this category.
  
  Police made an arrest in just one other alleged assault by a group. After a “mob” attacked Thomas Wijstem in front of W. T. Grant’s department store on 125th Street, police arrested twenty-two-year-old Douglas Cornelius for assaulting him. The New York Herald Tribune reported Cornelius allegedly struck Wijstem with a rock; however inflicted, Wijstem’s injuries left him unconscious. That this attack occurred near the origins of the disorder, where police concentrated their forces, likely contributed to an arrest being made. But as in the case of Paul Boyett and the four men arrested on West 138th Street, it appears that police could not prove that Cornelius was actually involved in the assault. A grand jury dismissed the charges against him.
  
  Evidence exists of the details of only two other assaults, each reported in similar sensational language in only a single story in the New York Evening Journal: a “gang of 40 or 50 Negroes pursued B. Z. Kondoul up Lenox Ave; and a group surrounded Betty Willcox as she sat in a parked car at 125th St. and 7th Avenue. Both stories refer to mobs, shouting and screaming threats to kill whites. In both cases it takes police wielding clubs and shooting guns to save the white victims, an explicit justification of police violence against the crowds, notwithstanding that the stories make clear that no one in the crowds had a weapon. In neither case do police make any effort to arrest members of the mob. Betty Willcox’s first person account of being attacked is even more sensational and steeped in racist tropes than the story about Kondoul. The mob is “howling” and “roar for blood,” and all have “murderous rage” in their faces. When police drive the crowd back, they stay nearby, with an “undertone of ominous muttering and shuffling.”
  
  Two other victims were also rescued from attacks by groups. The New York Post published the only report of a “group” of men attacking Joseph Sarnelli as he closed his barber’s shop in the Hotel Theresa. Refusing to give up his razors, Sarnelli fought the men, and “was being badly pummeled” until Patrolman Thomas Jordan came to his aid. As happened when Murphy, Kondoul, and Willcox were rescued, no one was arrested, an indication of the limited control police had over the crowds. In a third case reported only in the New York Evening Journal, William Ken was rescued not by white police officers but by two of his Black coworkers. According to the story, Ken was “seized” as he entered the Blue Heaven Restaurant at 378 Lenox Ave, punched a couple of times, but then dragged to safety by two Black employees who convinced the crowd to “spare him.”
  
  The fact that these details are reported only in the New York Evening Journal, and New York Post, newspapers whose coverage of the riot stands out for its emphasis on violence against whites and sensational language, raises some questions about their reliability. In other cases, the evidence is again fragmented: victims of assault appear in lists of the injured, with details of how they were injured only in one or two papers. The New York Herald Tribune and New York American reported that a group of either eight or five men attacked Max Newman, like Joseph Sarnelli, as he closed his store. Only the New York Herald Tribune explained the injuries of Julius Narditch as the result of being attacked by three men just across the street from Newman’s store.
  
  There are no details of the circumstances of the remaining attacks other than that they involved groups. Three of those attacked are described as having been stabbed, the only reports of knives being used in the disorder. All the reports of injuries to Edward Genest, a white sailor, mention him being stabbed, as does the only source mentioning Morris Werner, his hospital record. Only one of the multiple sources that mention Julius Narditch report him as being stabbed, a story in the New York American, and the police report of his case just describes him as being “jumped” and suffering head wounds and lacerations of the kind that resulted from beatings. A knife allegedly taken from one of those arrested during the disorder was also displayed in a photograph published in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

  Assaults (54)

• 1 2021-11-21T17:48:45+00:00 Windows broken without arrest (54) 30 plain 2023-11-07T16:28:13+00:00 No one was identified as being arrested for breaking windows in 75% (54 of 72) of the businesses identified in the sources (as no one was arrested for the first broken window in Kress' store, the store appears among those cases in which no arrests were made even though an arrest was made for allegedly breaking a window after another attack over four hours later). There are four individuals arrested for breaking windows for whom there is no information about their alleged targets; some of those three men and one woman may have been charged with breaking windows in stores for which there were no reported arrests. So could the twenty-one men charged with disorderly conduct in the Magistrates Court for which there is no information about their alleged actions, although only just over one in four of those accused of breaking windows were charged with that offense.
  
  There are significantly more businesses with broken windows for which no one was charged than businesses that were looted, 75% (54 of 72) compared with 55% (37 of 67). Most of those stores were on and around West 125th Street, the area where the disorder began, and likely suffered damage during the time when small numbers of police struggled to control crowds that had gathered in front of Kress' store. Three arrests on West 125th Street, of Frank Wells, Claude Jones, and William Ford, came after police reinforcements arrived. The reported arrests on Lenox Avenue around West 125th Street for which there is information on timing, of John Kennedy Jones, Bernard Smith, and Leon Mauraine and David Smith, came after midnight, when businesses in that area began to be looted. Another cluster of businesses with broken windows for which no one was arrested was on West 116th Street and the blocks of Lenox Avenue around it. That lack of arrests could indicate the absence of police in that area, which also was ignored in the English-language press. Those damaged businesses were only reported in La Prensa, with the arrest of Jackie Ford two days after the disorder for allegedly breaking a window in a store at 142 Lenox Avenue also mentioned in the New York Post and New York World-Telegram. Several newspapers drew the boundary of the disorder north of West 116th Street: crowds only went as far south as 120th Street according to the New York World-Telegram, New York Herald Tribune, New York Evening Journal, and Daily Mirror; and as far south as 118th Street according to the Home News. (The Daily News and Afro-American did report crowds as far south as 110th Street).
  
  The low proportion of arrests supports the claim that police were unable to protect businesses made in multiple newspaper stories and by business owners who sued the city for damages, as well as in the MCCH report. Once the crowd around Kress’ store broke into smaller groups sometime after 9:00 PM, police were unable to clear the streets or contain all those groups. When police did disperse crowds, they simply reformed, according to the New York Herald Tribune, New York World-Telegram, Norfolk Journal and Guide, and the MCCH Report. An alternative account in the Daily News presented crowds not as elusive but as "too scattered" to be controlled. As a result, rather than being ineffective, police were absent from the scene of some attacks on businesses. Business-owners who sued the city for damages made that complaint. No police officers came to protect the stores of Harry Piskin, Estelle Cohen, and George Chronis despite Piskin approaching police officers on the street and them all visiting or calling the local stationhouse.
  
  The absence of police from some parts of Harlem resulted in part from a decision to concentrate them elsewhere. Reported police deployments focused on West 125th Street. Inspector McAuliffe used the reserves sent to Harlem after 9:00 PM to establish a perimeter around the main business blocks of the street, from 8th to Lenox Avenues, from 124th to 126th Streets, according to stories in the New York Times, Daily Mirror, and Pittsburgh Courier, the only stories that described police deployments. Beyond West 125th Street, the police relied on radio cars patrolling the avenues and limited numbers of uniformed police and detectives in plainclothes moving through the streets.
• 1 2021-04-26T21:26:03+00:00 Mario Pravia's candy store looted 30 plain 2023-11-29T21:04:25+00:00 Around 11:30 PM, Mario Pravia and his wife Gertrude were in their candy store at 1953 7th Avenue when a group of around five people on the street outside began throwing stones at the store window. Crowds had started to move down 7th Avenue from 125th Street around 10:00 PM, reportedly attacking whites and stores before and and they continued to do so after the stones were thrown at the store window. Why the Pravias were in their store was not mentioned in the sources. The store was unlikely to have been open that late, but they may have remained inside after closing the store when they saw the crowds begin to gather.
  
  When the store window shattered, members of the crowd began to take goods from the window display. Officer Harmon of the 18th Division witnessed the attack on the store, and reported seeing Amie Taylor, a twenty-one-year-old Black butcher, throw a stone and reach into the window to take something. Taylor lived south of the store, at 1800 7th Avenue, so may not have been part of the crowd that came from 125th Street. He was the only member of the group in front of the store arrested, despite at least one other police officer being at the scene, Detective Harry Wolf of the 28th Precinct, listed as a witness on the Magistrates Court affidavit and an arresting officer with Harmon on Taylor's criminal record. The New York Evening Journal identified a different officer as making the arrest, Deputy Chief Inspector John Ryan. In a vignette within the paper’s narrative of the disorder, that senior officer observed the attack on the store while driving to 125th Street. He pulled over and attempted to round up the thieves in “a terrific battle” from which “Ryan emerged...with Amie Taylor, 21, as his prisoner.” No other sources supported that account.
  
  
  
  Harmon allegedly found eighteen packets of chewing gum, valued at three cents each, in Taylor’s possession. Struck out information on the Magistrates Court affidavit suggested $200 worth of merchandise was stolen from Pravia’s store. Pravia appeared to have remained in business despite those losses, perhaps because he had insurance, although that would have been unusual for such a small-scale business. The MCCH business survey identified a white-owned business operating at 1953 7th Avenue in the second half of 1935, although it was categorized as a stationery store.
  
  Pravia, born in Uruguay in 1899, had arrived in New York City from Chile in 1925, and married his German-born wife Gertrude in 1929. His naturalization petition identified him as white. While the building had Black residents, it was located just a block north of an area populated by Spanish speaking residents. A business advertising candy and other merchandise also appeared in the tax photograph of the building taken sometime between 1939 and 1941. But by 1942, whatever business was at 1953 7th Avenue, Pravia was not its owner. When Pravia registered for the draft, they lived nearby at 126 West 119th Street, but he no longer worked at the store. He was working as a butcher, according to his naturalization petition, and his draft registration records his place of employment as a hotel in East Orange, New Jersey.
  
  Taylor appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, when Magistrate Renaud remanded him until March 22. When he appeared in court again, Renaud sent him to the grand jury. They transferred him to the Court of Special Sessions. The police blotter recorded that the judges in that court acquitted Taylor. The sources are silent on what alternative account of events Taylor offered, but others arrested in the disorder claimed to have been bystanders mistakenly grabbed by police trying to pick offenders out of crowds.
   
• 1 2022-12-06T03:27:53+00:00 In the Washington Heights Magistrates Court on March 20 30 plain 2023-12-16T18:24:48+00:00 Thirty blocks to the north, the hearings before Magistrate Ford had very different outcomes from those in the Harlem court that suggested that the area above West 130th Street over which his court had jurisdiction had seen less violence and more indiscriminate policing. While the police presence at the Washington Heights courthouse was similar to that at the Harlem courthouse, spectators appear to have been fewer in number. Forty uniformed patrolmen were stationed on all the street corners surrounding the building, along the corridors inside and in the courtroom itself. If the sensational New York Evening Journal is to be believed, there were thirty more officers "hidden in a nearby garage," three emergency trucks on hand, and some police on the courthouse roof. None of the journalists who reported from the court mentioned crowds inside the courtroom or on the surrounding streets. That may in part have been because police brought only twenty-nine men and one woman to the Washington Heights court for arraignment, less than half the number who appeared in the Harlem court. The white men arrested during the disorder were all arraigned in the Harlem court; only Black men and women appeared in the Washington Heights court.
  
  Julius Hightower, an eighteen-year-old Black man who police alleged had broken windows, was first of those arrested to appear before Magistrate Ford. He was one of the youngest of those arrested; two other eighteen-year-olds appeared after him, James Smith and Elva Jacobs, the only woman to appear in the Washington Heights courtroom. Well over half of the arrested men, eighteen of the thirty, were aged between twenty and twenty-nine years, a similar proportion as appeared in the Harlem court. Fifty-year-old Joseph Payne was the oldest of those arrested, one of nine men over thirty years of age, the others evenly split between those aged in their thirties and those in aged their forties.
  
  Hightower faced the same allegations as the first defendant in the Harlem court, breaking windows, as did the man who followed Hightower, forty-two-year-old Robert Porter. The assistant district attorney initially charged him with the offense of malicious mischief, which punished damage to property, but foreshadowing how the prosecution of those who appeared in the Washington Heights court would differ from what happened in the Harlem court, the charge was changed to disorderly conduct. That was also the offense with which Porter was charged. The decision to charge the men with disorderly conduct indicated police could offer no evidence that they broken windows. Just which of the broad range of actions considered breaches of the peace that the offense covered police charged Hightower and Porter with committing was not specified. Police had likely indiscriminately grabbed them from crowds, perhaps as part of efforts to clear the streets.
  
  Whether Magistrate Ford heard other accounts of windows being broken in the rest of the day’s proceeding cannot be discerned from any of the surviving sources. None of the twelve men and one woman who appeared later in the day whose alleged offenses were recorded had been arrested for breaking windows. However, for fifteen other men charged with the offense of disorderly conduct — half of all those who appeared before Ford — there is no record of what police alleged they did. Over the course of the day, the prosecutor used the charge of disorderly conduct not only in cases of men arrested for breaking windows, but also for men arrested for assault and looting. In the Harlem court, ADA Carey took the same approach, with men arrested for assault, looting, and inciting crowds, as well as breaking windows, charged with the offense of disorderly conduct. What was different in the uptown court was how extensively the charge was used, in two-thirds of the prosecutions compared to less than one in five, 15%, of the cases Carey prosecuted in the Harlem court. The difference suggested both less violence and more indiscriminate policing had occurred above West 130th Street.
  
  Twenty-seven-year-old Richard Jackson followed Porter. Police had arrested him for assault. The next four men to appear before Ford after Jackson faced the same allegation. However, where in the Harlem court Carey charged only one of the men arrested for assault, Rivers Wright, with disorderly conduct, all six men in the Washington Heights court faced that charge. Those decisions could indicate that the alleged acts of Jackson and the other men did not result in injury or more likely that police did not have evidence that they participated in an assault. The latter was almost certainly the situation of the final three men in that group, Albert Yerber, Ed Loper, and Ernest Johnson, arrested just before daylight on March 20 (together with Charles Alston, who was injured and would not appear in court for several weeks). Police officers had pursued and arrested the group after claiming to have heard shots fired from a building at patrolmen stationed on a street corner but found no guns in their possession. The short sentences of two days in the Workhouse that Ford gave to Jackson and the other man arrested for assault, Salathel Smith, suggests that they too had not been involved in violent assaults.
  
  After the string of men arrested for assault, police brought Lamter Jackson before the Magistrate. The twenty-four-year-old man had been arrested for looting. That was the accusation that Ford likely heard most frequently over the course of the day, as was Renaud’s experience in the Harlem court. Jackson faced a charge of petit larceny, as Earl Davis did later in the day, indicating evidence they had taken merchandise but not that they had broken into a store to do so. As in the Harlem court, an arrest for looting more often resulted in being charged with burglary, which involved breaking into a business in addition to taking merchandise: four men, including the fifty-year-old Joseph Payne, and Elva Jacobs faced that charge. the prosecutor charged one man arrested for looting, James Smith, with disorderly conduct. If anyone arrested for inciting crowds or possession of a weapon appeared before Ford, they were among those charged with disorderly conduct for whom there is no record of their alleged offense.
  
  Magistrate Ford departed from Magistrate Renaud in remanding only one in six of those who appeared before him, four men and Elva Jacobs, a third as many as Renaud did in the Harlem court. All five had been arrested for looting. He also sent only two for trial in the Court of Special Sessions, Earl Davis and Lamter Jackson, the men arrested for looting who faced charges of petit larceny, and referred no one to the grand jury. None of the men arrested for assault was remanded or sent for trial, nor were any of those arrested for breaking windows or unknown offenses. In all twenty-three cases where men were charged with disorderly conduct, Ford adjudicated the prosecutions. Renaud had held a quarter of those facing that charge in his court for investigation, which contributed to him adjudicating only nine cases. However, it was the significantly higher proportion of defendants who faced charges of disorderly conduct that produced the disparity in outcomes: as reporters noted, the cases that appeared before Ford were not as serious as those on Renaud’s docket. Whatever evidence police presented, it did little to distinguish those individuals from the many spectators watching the events of the disorder. Perhaps because of the lesser charges they faced, none of those who appeared in the Washington Heights court was represented by a lawyer, as fourteen men and two women were in the Harlem court.
  
  Ford handed down guilty verdicts to nineteen of the men he put on trial, including both Hightower and Porter, arrested for breaking windows, James Smith, the one man arrested for looting charged with disorderly conduct, and all but Ernest Barnes of the fifteen arrested for unknown offenses. Yerber, Loper and Johnson, Ford acquitted. The testimony that Ford heard must have been quite different from the sensational stories about snipers targeting police that reports of the arrests generated in several white newspapers. Unlike the acquittals in the Harlem court, those in the Washington Heights court were mentioned in two newspaper stories but with no details. While the sentences that the convicted men received would prove to be typical of those given to those arrested during the disorder, that they had been convicted only of disorderly conduct created a picture of the events above 130th Street, where those who appeared in the Washington Heights court had been arrested, as less violent than in the blocks to the south where those who appeared in the Harlem court had been arrested.
   
• 1 2021-04-27T19:22:05+00:00 Amie Taylor arrested 22 plain 2023-10-21T03:32:42+00:00 Officer Harmon of the 18th Division arrested Amie Taylor, a twenty-one-year-old Black butcher, near Mario Pravia's candy store at 1953 7th Avenue around 11:30 PM. Harmon and at least one other police officer, Detective Harry Wolf of the 28th Precinct, reported seeing Taylor throw a stone at the store window and take merchandise from the window display. Wolf appeared as a witness on the Magistrates Court affidavit and an arresting officer with Harmon on Taylor's criminal record. Taylor was also not alone. "About 5 others" threw stones at the store and took merchandise at the same time, while Pravia and his wife watched from inside, but police managed to arrest only Taylor. Harmon allegedly found eighteen packets of chewing gum, valued at three cents each, in his possession. The Home News reported that a total of $200 of merchandise was taken from the store.
  
  The New York Evening Journal identified a different officer as making the arrest, Deputy Chief Inspector John Ryan, in a vignette within the paper’s narrative of the disorder:

  Deputy Chief Inspector John Ryan, in charge of all Manhattan detectives, figured in another incident in which police were forced to draw their revolvers, although no shot was fired. While speeding to the trouble zone, Ryan saw a group of men looting a store at 1952 Seventh ave. The detective chief, with his chauffeur, swung into action and attempted to round up the thieves. there was a terrific battle, but Ryan emerged from it with Amie Taylor, 21, as his prisoner.

  No other sources support that account. The story's framing of the incident in relation to the force used by police did direct attention to the unremarked upon means by which police made arrests. The New York Evening Journal was one of several white newspapers that claimed that police showed restraint in responding to the disorder, and did not shoot at crowds until the after midnight, when looting became widespread. If police drew their revolvers but did not fire them in this "terrific battle," they likely used the gun butts as clubs, as they are in several photographs taken during the disorder.
  
  Crowds had moved down 7th Avenue from West 125th Street around 10 PM. This event was the first this far south on the avenue. Taylor may have come from the opposite direction. He lived south of the store, at 1800 7th Avenue, next to Central Park, in an area home to Black, white, and Spanish speaking residents. Taylor's first name caused confusion about his identity. In the 28th Precinct police blotter, the name is "Annie," and he is identified as female, information likely responsible for Annie also being used in the list of those arrested in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and the list in the New York Evening Journal. While the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book identifies Taylor as male, the clerk recorded the name as Annie on his examination, and on the back of the Magistrates Court affidavit, where it is struck out and Amie written underneath.
  
  
  
  When Taylor appeared in Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20 charged with burglary, Magistrate Renaud remanded him to appear again on March 22. Reporters from the Home News, New York Daily News, New York Evening Journal, and Daily Worker were in court when Taylor appeared again; the Daily Worker somehow misreported his name as Annie. Renaud sent Taylor to the grand jury, who on April 3 transferred him to the Court of Special Sessions, which as it adjudicated misdemeanors, means they must have reduced the charge from burglary to an offense such as unlawful entry or petit larceny. Two weeks later, on April 17, the judges acquitted Taylor, according to the police blotter. Given the low value of what Taylor allegedly stole — a total of 54c — it would not have been surprising to see him receive a minor punishment; but to acquit him the judges would have had to find fault with the evidence against him provided by Officer Harmon and Detective Wolf. The sources are silent on what alternative account of events Taylor offered, but others arrested in the disorder claimed to have been bystanders mistakenly grabbed by police trying to pick offenders out of crowds. It could also be that prosecutors could not prove that the chewing gum found on Taylor had been taken from the store; it was a common enough item, in a large but not inexplicable quantity, that he could have obtained it legitimately elsewhere.
• 1 2021-04-30T21:27:27+00:00 Mrs. Salefas' delicatessan looted 21 plain 2023-12-01T02:14:13+00:00 Mrs. B. Salefas was in her "corner two-window delicatessen store" at Lenox Avenue and 123rd Street on March 19 when objects struck and shattered the windows. As glass flew around the store, she sheltered in a rear storeroom. Interviewed the next day, Salefas told Edna Ferguson of the Daily News:

  It broke my heart to abandon my store, but what could I do all alone? Every time I peeked out from in back a shower of bricks greeted me. They got away with about $100 worth of food and all my beautiful dishes I was saving for prizes.

  The newspaper story was the only source to mention the looting of Salefas' store. Of the four stores mentioned in that story, only one appeared in any other source. There was no information on the time of the attack on the delicatessen other than the vague statement that Salefas was trapped "when the trouble started." That she was in the store suggested that it was still open, so the windows were likely broken before midnight. Attacks on Morris Towbin's haberdashery on the corner of 125th Street and Lenox Avenue started around 10:30 PM, and stores on the two blocks south of 125th Street across Lenox Avenue from Salefas' store had windows broken sometime during the disorder, likely starting around 11:00 PM. Police made no arrests in this area, perhaps because there were far fewer businesses than in the blocks to the north. The presence of police may also have limited activity. The New York Evening Journal mentioned that Patrolman William Clements was "on guard duty" outside a grocery store at West 123rd Street and Lenox Avenue at some point during the night, when B.Z. Kondoul encountered him as he fled down 122nd Street from 7th Avenue. His presence could also have contributed to the relatively limited value of Salefas' losses. No one among those arrested for looting was identified as taking goods from this business.
  
  
  
  The location of Salefas' store cannot be precisely established. There are businesses on only the northeast corner of the intersection. No business at that corner appeared in the MCCH business survey. None of the stores visible in the Tax Department photographs from 1939-1941 was a delicatessen. However, the signage of the partially visible store at 27 West 123rd Street included "Groceries and Vegetables" that make it a possible location. The store on the corner itself had a stretch of windows along West 123rd Street that could produce the "crossfire of missiles" described in the story, but it appeared too large to be a delicatessen that could be staffed by one person. It was more likely the branch of the James Butler grocery chain mentioned in the New York Evening Journal account of the later assault on B. Z. Kondoul. The jewelers next to that store on Lenox Avenue in the Tax Department photograph had windows either side of the door and may have taken the place of the delicatessen some time after the disorder.
   

• 1 2020-08-20T20:52:05+00:00 Stanley Dondoro injured 21 plain 2023-12-08T04:11:24+00:00 Just after 5:30 AM, Stanley Dondoro, a thirty-four-year-old white chauffeur, was shot while walking on 8th Avenue near 127th Street. Two police detectives pursuing James Thompson, a nineteen-year-old black man they allegedly found looting a grocery store, fired multiple shots as he fled out the rear exit onto 127th Street. One of those shots struck Thompson in the chest, while another hit Dondoro in the left leg. Thompson died four hours later. Dondoro’s own injury, however, was superficial, as hospital records indicate that he was not admitted to Harlem Hospital. All the other men shot during the disorder had been admitted to the hospital except for one of the detectives who shot Dondoro, Nicholas Campo, who had accidentally shot himself in the finger when struggling with Thompson. The Home News and New York Post added the detail that a bullet had passed through the trousers of an unnamed man with Dondoro without injuring him.
  
  A transcript of the police blotter record of Captain Mulholland’s investigation of the shooting among the records gathered by the MCCH identified the detectives as responsible for shooting Dondoro. The police record specified that Campo had shot twice at Thompson, and his partner Detective Beckler had shot three times, as well as twice in the air, a warning to stop that was required police practice. The blotter also recorded Captain Mulholland’s conclusion that Campo sustained his injury “in proper performance of police duty and no negligence on the part of the aforesaid detective contributed thereto.”
  
  Newspaper stories and lists did not attribute Dondoro's shooting to police. The New York American, New York Herald Tribune, Home News, and New York Post described an exchange of shots between Thompson and the detectives that did not happen; neither did “other rioters” shoot at police, as the New York Evening Journal reported. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle simply listed Dondoro among the injured. Dondoro also appeared in lists of the injured in the New York Evening Journal, New York Post, and New York American. The hospital record described him as having been shot in “some unknown manner during an arrest at 126th St. and 7th Ave.” (The MCCH's transcript of the hospital record had the time Dr. Payne attended Dondoro at Harlem Hospital as 4:00 AM; that was likely a mistaken transcription of 6:00 AM).
  
  
  
  Dondoro lived across the river in Hoboken, New Jersey. It is not clear why he was on the streets of Harlem. By the time of the shooting there was little disorder in the neighborhood, and police cars patrolled the streets — Campo and Beckler were traveling in one when the sound of breaking glass in the grocery store caused them to stop. The avenue on which the shooting happened was not a major thoroughfare like 7th Avenue to the east, and while an area of Black residences, was near the western boundary of Black Harlem, only three blocks from a white district. Dondoro may have been walking to or from the elevated train station on 8th Avenue and West 130th Street. He may have worked as a taxi-driver in Harlem, a job still largely held by white men.
   
• 1 2022-03-21T20:25:43+00:00 Crowds incited by white men (4) 20 plain 2023-10-31T17:15:18+00:00 The arrests of white men for inciting crowds all occurred in the vicinity of Kress’ store on West 125th Street and involved efforts to speak or picketing. White men protesting in those ways on Harlem’s streets were a familiar sight by 1935. In the 1930s, the Communist Party had an office at 415 Lenox Avenue; affiliated organizations had offices nearby: the International Labor Defense four blocks south at 326 Lenox Avenue, the Young Liberators at 262 Lenox Avenue, and the League of Struggle for Negro Rights and Negro Liberator newspaper at 2162 7th Avenue until just before the disorder, when they moved to 308 West 141st Street. Most of those who worked in those offices and protested in Harlem were white men and women. Although the four men arrested did not identify themselves as Communists, the organizations of which they did admit membership — the Nurses and Hospital League in the case of Daniel Miller, the New York Student League in the case of Harry Gordon, and the Young Liberators in the cases of Sam Jameson and Murray Samuels — were all connected to the Party. The men also fit the profile of those the Party assigned to work in Harlem described to historian Mark Naison: they were “in their teens or early twenties and came either from the two colleges located in the Harlem Section — Columbia and City — or form the immigrant neighborhoods surrounding Black Harlem.” Miller was twenty-four years of age and lived on Morningside Avenue on the boundary of Harlem. Gordon was twenty years of age and lived in the Bronx. Jameson and Samuels were both nineteen years of age, with Jameson living in Washington Heights north of Harlem and Samuels in Brooklyn. The number of Black residents who joined the Party and related organizations did grow slowly, but numbered only a few thousand by the time of the disorder. By 1935, larger numbers did participate in demonstrations led by Communist Party members, particularly those in support of the defense of the Scottsboro boys.
  
  Speaking from stepladders, as Miller and Gordon tried to do, and picketing, as Jameson and Samuels did, were favored tactics of Communist activity in Harlem. Party members joined the streetcorner speakers who had been a staple of Harlem life throughout the 1920s, taking to corners “from 137th Street & 7th Avenue, north to 144th Street and Lenox Avenue, south to 110th Street and 5th Avenue," according to historian Mark Naison. When they first appeared, the mostly white Communist Party speakers frequently competed with Black nationalist speakers for locations and attention, especially on the corners of Lenox Avenue from 133rd to 135th Streets, and challenged their calls for race-based action with appeals for unity between Black and white workers. By September, 1934, Roi Ottley bemoaned the predominance of Communist street speakers in his column in the New York Amsterdam News. Communist Party pickets were initially less prominent in Harlem. When Sufi Hamid and his followers began picketing white-owned businesses seeking jobs for Black workers, first on 135th Street and later on 125th Street, the Party remained on the margins, at odds with the race-based appeals, even as the campaign expanded in 1934. When that movement splintered, however, the Party moved to mount a boycott campaign on their terms against the Empire Cafeteria on Lenox Avenue just north of 125th Street, seeking gains for white workers as well as jobs for Black workers. A week and a half of picketing and protest meetings led by Young Liberators, and store windows twice being broken, brought an agreement to hire black staff.
  
  The reaction of police to the white men protesting on 125th Street was typical of the violent repression of Communist Party demonstrations in New York City from when they began in 1928, a repression which was explored by historian Marilynn Johnson. As early as September 1929, the New York Amsterdam News published a letter describing a Black Communist speaker, Richard Moore, and the white Communists who tried to take his place, being pulled from a stepladder by police “without the slightest provocation,” notwithstanding claims of a disruptive demonstration reported in the New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, and New York Amsterdam News. Mayor La Guardia had been trying to change the police approach since his election in 1934, historian Marilynn Johnson shows, requiring more tolerance of protest and a neutral stance in labor disputes. However, Harlem residents had witnessed the limits of that change a year before the disorder. Police who arrived to manage the crowd at a Communist Party meeting protesting the treatment of the Scottsboro boys suddenly drove radio cars on to the sidewalk and into the crowd, and then threw tear gas and bomb canisters. Whatever the mayor prescribed, hostility to Communists remained strong among rank-and-file police. It was that attitude that was on display in the speed with which officers moved against the men in front of Kress’ store, while not arresting James Parton, who introduced the two white men who tried to speak, or Black members of the crowd.
  
  Some other white men and women appear to have been among the crowds around 125th Street. Louise Thompson told a MCCH hearing that she “did not see many white people," who amounted to only "a very few” percentage of the groups around 125th Street. Some of those white men and women may also have been affiliated with the Communist Party. Almost an hour after the arrests of Jameson and Samuels, the last of the four white men arrested, the Young Liberators distributed leaflets on 125th Street, and perhaps in surrounding areas. At least some of those handing out those documents would have had to have been white, given the makeup of the organization. So too would some of those who distributed a second leaflet, printed by the Communist Party an hour or so later.
  
  The other four white men arrested in the disorder, however, do not appear to have been connected with the Party. Leo Smith, the one white man arrested for breaking windows, was apprehended early in the disorder when white Communist party members were among the crowds, but there is no evidence linking him to the Party. There is no evidence of what the one white man arrested for possession of a weapon, Jose Perez, was doing in Harlem, and he may not have been involved in the disorder at all. The two other white men were arrested for looting, one with stolen clothing in his possession, the other in unknown circumstances. The lack of information about those arrests means they do not offer clear evidence that white men were among the crowds on Harlem's streets after disorder spread beyond 125th Street.
  
  Accounts of the events of the disorder similarly lack clear evidence of the participation of white men. While the MCCH Report made no mention of white men other than the protesters in front of Kress’ store, both white and Black newspapers did include whites among their general descriptions of the crowds on the streets of Harlem. However, the statements in the Black press appear to be based on the arrest of the four men in front of Kress’ store at the very beginning of the disorder rather than any wider presence or participation. Under the subtitle “Some Rioters White,” the Afro-American asserted that “there were no strict opposing camps racially. Some of the most vicious rioters were white men who egged the crowd on and who handed out the leaflets and carried picket signs.” Prof. G M James, in a column in the New York Age offering an assessment of the disorder, reported that “I am informed by eye witnesses that (1) the riot was precipitated by both white and colored assailants alike.” Other Black newspapers that included white people in the crowds were less explicit about their role. The Norfolk Journal and Guide reported “About 4000 colored men and women and their white sympathizers took the law into their own hands when they heard that 'a small Negro boy' had been brutally or fatally beaten by a manger of a five and ten cent store for stealing either candy or a penknife valued at five cents.” The Atlanta World was even less explicit: “Whites joined their Negro fellow citizens as the story of the fatal beating of the youth by the store clerks gained more magnitude.”
  
  The Daily News, New York Herald Tribune, and Brooklyn Daily Eagle explicitly included white men among those breaking windows during the disorder, but only in broad statements. The Daily News described “armed bands of colored and white guerillas, swinging crowbars and clubs, roamed through barricaded Harlem from 110th to 145th St., assaulting every person of opposite color to cross their paths, setting fires and smashing shop windows after a night of fighting.” Almost the same language appeared in the New York Herald Tribune. A similar description in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle added looting and clashes with police: “Bands of men and women, in some case joined by whites and in other cases assaulting any white they met, roared up and down the byways of Harlem, smashing more than 200 windows, looting stores, and fleeing from or fighting police.”
  
  Just how many white men were in the crowds on Harlem’s streets is uncertain. The small proportion of those arrested who were white men does not necessarily reflect how many were present; white police officers were likely more inclined to arrest Black men and women in this context, and it seems like few of the Black officers stationed in Harlem made arrests during the disorder. Most newspaper stories do not offer an assessment of the size of the white presence; those that do range from a "sprinkling” in the New York Times to “many” in the New York Evening Journal to “hundreds” (in crowds of several thousand) in the Daily News. James Hubert of the Urban League was alone in claiming that white men made up a majority of the crowds, based on a report from a (Black?) member of his staff: "A man from my own office who went out into the streets said that fully 75 per cent of the persons causing the trouble were whites," he told a reporter from the New York Herald Tribune. "They got up on soap boxes and agitated and incited the Negroes. I am told that the persons who threw bricks into windows included many whites who rode about in taxicabs.” The details Hubert offered in support of his generalization do not actually put white men in the crowds on the street. As well as following the Black press in focusing on the men who picketed Kress’ store, he locates white participants in vehicles, not crowds. Cars regularly appear as targets of violence in descriptions of the disorder; they are not otherwise reported as sources of violence.
  
  White men in the crowds in Harlem’s streets were not necessarily drawn to the neighborhood by news of the disorder, as the Daily News claimed. Many white-owned businesses on West 125th Street refused, discouraged or discriminated against Black customers, highlighting that the district catered to whites from surrounding neighborhoods, including those in the blocks immediately south and east whose populations changed from predominantly white in the 1930 census to predominantly Black in the 1940 census. Other white men came to Black Harlem for nightlife and vice.
   
• 1 2020-03-09T19:39:02+00:00 B. Z. Kondoul assaulted 17 plain 2023-10-25T01:58:05+00:00 B. Z. Kondoul, a thirty-five year-old white man who lived at 55 West 110th Street, was allegedly assaulted by a crowd of "40-50" Black men and women on 7th Avenue near 122nd Street. Kondoul fled from the crowd until he saw a police officer guarding a grocery store, part of the James Butler chain, at West 123rd St and Lenox Avenue, according to a report in the New York Evening Journal. The officer, Patrolman William Clements, drew his revolver and fired at the crowd to hold them back. After he fired two shots, the crowd backed away from the two white men and began to throw objects at them: stones, fruit, garbage can lids. When the crowd closed in again, Clements "emptied his gun." The shots kept the crowd at bay long enough for a police radio car to arrive and "rescue" Clements and Kondoul. The New York Evening Journal reported the event in the sensational language it favored for alleged attacks by Black men and women on white men and women: Clement's "heroism" saved Kondoul from "probable death" at the hands of a "gang" crying "Kill him."
  
  
  
  A brief report in the New York American was more to the point. It simply stated that Kondoul was "rescued by a patrolman who fired several shots at his assailants without hitting anyone." Police officers commonly fired shots in the air to attempt to disperse crowds. In this case, however, the reports suggested that Clements fired at the crowd. It was not clear when the event took place. Crowds likely came down Lenox Avenue from 125th Street sometime after 10:30 PM, when the first reported disorder in the area occurred at the intersection. Police did not arrive until sometime later. There were no police at the West 123rd Street and Lenox Avenue when Mrs Salefas' delicatessan had windows broken and merchandise taken. Those attacks likely began sometime around 11:00 PM. The alleged assault on Kondoul would have been sometime after that, once the presence of police led crowds to disperse, so likely after midnight. Clement's use of his firearm was evidence that police shooting at residents might have been responsible for the unattributed injuries from gunfire during the disorder.
  
  Although neither story mentioned any injury suffered by Kondoul, he did appear in lists of the injured in the New York Evening Journal and New York Daily News. They described him as having bruises to the face for which he was treated at Harlem Hospital. The Home News reported that Kondoul was "among the white persons injured by rocks, flying glass or in personal encounters," with "lacerations and bruises." He did not appear in the list of the injured in the New York American.
  
  The spelling of Kondoul's name was different in all the stories: Kondoul and Kendul in the New York Evening Journal and Daily News, Kendel in the Home News, and Aambel in the New York American.
• 1 2021-12-20T18:21:41+00:00 White men arrested for breaking windows (1) 16 plain 2023-12-10T21:21:47+00:00 Only one white man, Leo Smith, was among the twenty-six men and women arrested for breaking windows. He was one of only eight white men arrested during the disorder; two of those men were arrested for looting, one for possession of a weapon, and the remaining four men arrested for inciting riot by protesting in front of Kress' store. Two newspaper stories reported that Smith had broken a store window early enough in the disorder to be arraigned in the Night Court. However, the charge against Smith when he appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court was disorderly conduct, not malicious mischief, the charge made against most of those alleged to have broken windows. That charge indicated that police did not have evidence that he had damaged a window. Evidence that Smith had been part of the crowds on the street could have been enough evidence for a charge of disorderly conduct. Magistrate Renaud convicted Smith, and sentenced him to one month in the Workhouse (in contrast to the two white men arrested for looting, who both had the charges against them dismissed, as did at least four of the other six white men arrested in the disorder).
  
  Accounts of the events of the disorder similarly lack clear evidence of the participation of white men. While the MCCH report made no mention of white men other than the protesters in front of Kress’ store, both white and Black newspapers did include whites among their general descriptions of the crowds on the streets of Harlem. However, the statements in the Black press appear to be based on the arrest of the four men in front of Kress’ store at the very beginning of the disorder rather than any wider presence or participation. Under the subtitle “Some Rioters White,” the Afro-American asserted that “there were no strict opposing camps racially. Some of the most vicious rioters were white men who egged the crowd on and who handed out the leaflets and carried picket signs.” Prof. G M James, in a column in the New York Age offering an assessment of the disorder, reported that “I am informed by eye witnesses that the riot was precipitated by both white and colored assailants alike.” Other Black newspapers that included white people in the crowds were less explicit about their role. The Norfolk Journal and Guide reported “About 4000 colored men and women and their white sympathizers took the law into their own hands when they heard that 'a small Negro boy' had been brutally or fatally beaten by a manger of a five and ten cent store for stealing either candy or a penknife valued at five cents.” The Atlanta World was even less explicit: “Whites joined their Negro fellow citizens as the story of the fatal beating of the youth by the store clerks gained more magnitude.”
  
  The Daily News, New York Herald Tribune, and Brooklyn Daily Eagle explicitly included white men among those breaking windows during the disorder, but only in broad statements. The Daily News described “armed bands of colored and white guerillas, swinging crowbars and clubs, roamed through barricaded Harlem from 110th to 145th St., assaulting every person of opposite color to cross their paths, setting fires and smashing shop windows after a night of fighting.” Almost the same language appeared in the New York Herald Tribune. A similar description in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle added looting and clashes with police: “Bands of men and women, in some case joined by whites and in other cases assaulting any white they met, roared up and down the byways of Harlem, smashing more than 200 windows, looting stores, and fleeing from or fighting police.”
  
  Just how many white men were in the crowds on Harlem’s streets is uncertain. The small proportion of those arrested who were white men does not necessarily reflect how many were present; white police officers were likely more inclined to arrest Black men and women in this context, and it seems like few of the Black officers stationed in Harlem made arrests during the disorder. Most newspaper stories do not offer an assessment of the size of the white presence; those that do range from a "sprinkling” in the New York Times to “many” in the New York Evening Journal to “hundreds” (in crowds of several thousand) in the Daily News. James Hubert of the Urban League was alone in claiming that white men made up a majority of the crowds, based on a report from a member of his staff: "A man from my own office who went out into the streets said that fully 75 per cent of the persons causing the trouble were whites," he told a reporter from the New York Herald Tribune. "They got up on soap boxes and agitated and incited the Negroes. I am told that the persons who threw bricks into windows included many whites who rode about in taxicabs.” The details Hubert offered in support of his generalization did not actually put white men in the crowds on the street. As well as following the Black press in focusing on the men who picketed Kress’ store, he located white participants in vehicles, not crowds. Cars regularly appeared as targets of violence in descriptions of the disorder; they are not otherwise reported as sources of violence.
  
  White men in the crowds in Harlem’s streets were not necessarily drawn to the neighborhood by news of the disorder, as the Daily News claimed. Many white-owned businesses on West 125th Street refused, discouraged, or discriminated against Black customers, highlighting that the district catered to whites from surrounding neighborhoods, including those in the blocks immediately south and east whose populations changed from predominantly white in the 1930 census to predominantly Black in the 1940 census. Other white men came to Black Harlem for nightlife and vice.
• 1 2022-12-03T17:44:02+00:00 In Washington Heights court on March 20 (30) 15 plain 2023-12-14T18:51:51+00:00 Thirty of those arrested during the disorder appeared in the Washington Heights court on March 20. Magistrate Ford adjudicated over 80% of those prosecutions, twenty-five of the thirty. He rendered verdicts in most cases, convicting nineteen men and discharging four others. That was far more cases than Magistrate Renaud decided in the Harlem Court that day, in large part because those arraigned in the Washington Heights court faced less serious charges. That difference was also apparent in the small number of people Ford sent for trial on misdemeanor charges in the Court of Special Sessions, just two men, and the lack of anyone charged with a felony referred to the grand jury. The remaining four men and one woman he remanded in custody on bail. Those hearings were reported in all Harlem’s white newspapers, but not in Black newspapers, which did not report the disorder until March 30, when they reported later court appearances. The newspaper stories varied in detail, with most only offering general accounts in less detail than they reported the hearings in the Harlem court.
  
  Only the New York Evening Journal, New York Sun, and New York Post provided specific descriptions of the scene at the court. All three noted the building was “heavily” guarded by police. The New York Sun added the details that “Policemen were stationed at all corners surrounding the building, in the corridors of the building and in the court. Forty were on duty.” Typically, the details published in the New York Evening Journal were more sensational as well as describing more police, "53 policemen, nightsticks in hand, patrolling the block," thirty more hidden in a nearby garage, three emergency wagons on hand, and a few policemen stationed on the courthouse roof. The Home News, Daily News, New York Times, New York Post, and New York American offered generalizations about the scene at both the Washington Heights and Harlem courts which described the presence of police keeping crowds away from the building. Given that the stories in which those descriptions appeared focused on events at the Harlem court, they are entirely reliable as evidence of the scene at the Washington Heights court.
  
  No newspaper stories gave details about the crowd size. The only mention of the crowd’s behavior was the general statement in the New York Times — “There was considerable grumbling, some shouting of threats, but no violence” — that fitted other evidence of the crowd at the Harlem court. There were also no photographs published of prisoners arriving at the court, as there were of those scenes at the Harlem court.
  
  Only the Home News and New York Herald Tribune published lists of those being arraigned, neither of which was complete (the list of those arraigned published in the New York Evening Journal appeared to include only those who appeared in the Harlem court, although the copy of this story examined for this study was incomplete). The list in the Home News was more complete than its list of those arraigned in the Harlem court, including twenty-five of those who appeared, omitting only one man remanded on bail and, as had the Harlem list, those the magistrate discharged. However, the list included details of alleged offenses for only five men and one woman, all those either remanded on bail or sent to the Court of Special Sessions included in the list. Only the name, age, and address of the nineteen men convicted was provided. The list in the New York Herald Tribune likewise provided only those details, for fifteen of the nineteen convicted, adding the length of their sentences. That story provided details of the alleged offenses of two additional men convicted by Magistrate Ford, the first two men who appeared in court. It omitted two of those convicted (Salathel Smith and Walter Jones) and made no mention of the cases on which the Home News focused attention, the men and women remanded or sent for trial, while following that publication in not mentioning the four men the magistrate discharged.
  
  There were no cases in the Washington Heights court that attracted reporters as the arraignment of the five alleged Communists in the Harlem court did. The New York Post mentioned the details of one case in its summary account, a man “held in $1,000 bail for stealing a can of coffee from a windowless grocery store.” That man was likely Raymond Taylor, the only one of the three men who allegedly took goods from a grocery store arraigned in the court for whom Magistrate Ford set bail at $1,000 (although none of the other sources that mention Taylor specify that he took coffee). It is not clear why the reporter singled him out for mention.
  
  The other detail that the New York Post reported was that “Up to noon, only four of the persons arraigned in both courts had been discharged. All four of these cases were at Washington Heights.” Those four men were the only prisoners Magistrate Ford discharged. That he discharged prisoners was also mentioned in the New York Sun. That story noted that “Of the first nine arraigned at this court, all charged with disorderly conduct, three were discharged; the others were found guilty and given the alternative of paying a fine of $25 or serving five days in jail.” The Washington Heights court docket book recorded the outcome of those prosecutions slightly differently: Ford discharged three men among the first nine arraigned, but convicted only five of the others. He sent the other man, Lamter Jackson, the eighth arraigned, for trial in the Court of Special Sessions. These were the only stories to mention that any of those arraigned had been discharged.
  
  Those stories gave a misleading picture of the hearings as a whole. The focus on the number of men discharged, and on the first men arraigned, in those stories suggests that the reporters left the court before all those arrested in the disorder had been arraigned. The Daily News reporter likely remained longer, as the newspaper’s story identified that what distinguished the hearings in the Washington Heights court overall was that “Magistrate Michael A. Ford meted out punishment in a majority of cases brought before him.” Where Renaud convicted only 8% of those who appeared before him, Ford convicted almost two-thirds, 63%. That difference was the result of those arraigned in the Washington Heights court facing less serious charges. However, as those convictions were reported without details, just what those convicted had allegedly done is unknown. (Although the statement that “In most instances, the cases were set over for further hearings” in the New York American came directly after a reference to the Washington Heights court being heavily guarded, it likely referred to outcomes in the Harlem court.) The only other reference to arraignments in the Washington Heights court was in the Daily Mirror, which noted that “40 of the 89 arrested during the night were dealt with later in the day,” and “16 pleaded guilty of sabotage charges and received sentences of varying degrees.” None of those details align with the legal records: only thirty of those arrested appeared in the court; one hundred and six of those arrested appeared in court on March 20; no one pleaded guilty.
   
• 1 2023-02-03T21:34:28+00:00 Dodge announces grand jury hearings, March 20 14 plain 2023-12-14T20:15:39+00:00 District Attorney William Dodge’s statement that he was having the grand jury investigate the disorder was reported widely:

  The Mayor communicated with me last night and at his request I will immediately present to the Grand Jury the evidence I have procured in connection with the riot. My purpose in presenting the matter at once is to let the Communists know that they cannot come into this country and upset our laws. From my information, Communists distributed literature and took an active part in the rioting.

  
  The three-sentence statement was quoted in full by the Home News and New York Herald Tribune. Three other papers, the New York American, New York Post, and New York Times paraphrased the mention of the mayor’s request and quoted the two sentences blaming Communists for the disorder. The New York Sun, Daily Mirror, New York Evening Journal, and New York World-Telegram, as well as the Daily Worker, quoted only the second sentence, Dodge’s statement about his purpose in starting the investigation was to send a message to Communists. The Times Union reported Dodge had begun an investigation without mention of his statement.
  
  Only a small proportion of those publications reported any details of the proposed investigation. The New York Post and Times Union mentioned the number of subpoenaed witnesses. The Times Union explained the delayed start as the result of “the great number of suspects being questioned by police, wide-spread complaints and the mass of information confronting officials.” Another explanation was offered in the New York Post: “the detail involved was so great that the evidence could not be presented to the Grand Jury today.” The New York Sun reported that “the policemen and citizens needed as witnesses were unable to appear, being busy in other courts as the prisoners arrested during the riot were being arraigned.”
   
• 1 2022-12-15T16:03:39+00:00 Lino Rivera grabbed & Charles Hurley and Steve Urban assaulted (Part 2) 10 plain 2023-12-17T18:50:45+00:00 Until police found Rivera, newspapers described the boy caught shoplifting as a younger Black child, in line with the rumors and leaflets circulating in Harlem. Louise Thompson heard from the women she spoke to in Kress' store that a "colored boy" aged ten to twelve years had been beaten. The signs carried by the Young Liberators who picketed the store an hour or so later referred to a "Negro child," while the leaflets their organization distributed another hour later later described a "12 year old Negro boy." The first newspaper stories repeated those descriptions. The New York American mentioned a "colored boy" and a "10-year-old Negro boy," the Daily News a 12-year-old "colored boy," the New York Evening Journal a 15-year-old "Negro boy," the Daily Mirror a "little colored boy," the Home News a "young colored boy," and the New York Sun a "Negro boy." Early stories in some Black newspapers featured similar descriptions, a "small Negro boy" in the Norfolk Journal and Guide and a 10-year-old "colored boy" in the Indianapolis Recorder on March 23, or simply referred to the boy's age, not his race, a 16-year-old boy in the Atlanta World on March 21, a 12-year-old boy in the New York Age, a 14-year-old boy in the Chicago Defender, and a 16-year-old boy in the Afro-American and Pittsburgh Courier on March 23. Newspapers published on March 20 after police found Rivera identified him as a 16-year-old Puerto Rican, in the New York Post, New York World-Telegram, and Brooklyn Daily Eagle or a "Puerto Rican youth" in the New York Herald Tribune, Times Union, and Brooklyn Citizen (although later in that story Rivera was referred to as a "Negro"). (The New York World-Telegram also pointed to the differences between Rivera and the boy of the rumors by putting Negro in quotation marks when reporting the rumors and the text of the Young Liberators leaflet.) By contrast, the New York Times referred to a 16-year-old "Negro boy" even after Rivera had been found, as did the New York Sun and New York Evening Journal. While the New York Times did eventually identify Rivera as Puerto Rican when he appeared in the Adolescents court after the disorder, the New York Evening Journal continued to describe Rivera as "Negro," while the New York Sun made no mention of his race. Those newspapers' persistent use of "Negro" may have been intended to convey that Rivera was dark-skinned; the New York American described him in those terms, as a "dark-skinned 16-year-old Porto Rican" in a story reporting an interview with the boy in his home, while the Brooklyn Daily Eagle described him as a "Negro born in Porto Rico." Editions of the other newspapers published after Rivera was found, including the Black newspapers, simply switched to identify him as Puerto Rican. (Historian Lorrin Thomas argued that the New York Amsterdam News "failed to identify Rivera as Puerto Rican, referring to him instead as a 'young Negro boy,'" but did not provide a citation. The March 23 issue of that newspaper is missing the news sections, but the March 30 issue identified Rivera as a "16-year-old Puerto Rican youth.")
  
  Stories in the New York Evening Journal, Home News, La Prensa, and Daily Worker misidentified Hurley and Urban as store detectives. None mentioned the store detective, Smith, perhaps because he was not bitten and therefore not identified in any official records. He may also have been confused with Jackson Smith, the store manager. Many stories gave the manager a larger role than he played, involved in grabbing Rivera and making the decision to release him with Rivera in this office. That expanded role came at the expense not only of the store detective but also the police. Only the Daily News, and a vague statement in the New York Post story of what Rivera said mentioned that officers were at the store. The Daily News included only Eldridge, misidentifying him as the officer who released Rivera. Rivera said “two policeman came in” after he bit the men, the New York Post reported. The New York Evening Journal, Daily News, Atlanta World, and Philadelphia Tribune stories quoting Rivera omitted that statement.
  
  Several newspaper stories included a Black woman interceding or screaming when the store staff grabbed Rivera, which some accounts claimed precipitated broader disorder. The statements of those on the scene suggest any outcry came when Donahue and Urban took Rivera into the basement. Rivera testified in the public hearing that a woman screamed “They’re going to take him down the cellar and beat him up!” While Hurley made no mention of that scream, L. F. Cole, a thirty-year-old Black clerk, did testify that when he saw Donahue and Urban taking Rivera to the basement “a woman made a statement that the boy had been struck.” Cole's choice not to describe the woman as screaming suggests the possibility that the woman simply called out, with the gendered language of the press rendering any shouting by a woman as a scream. "They're beating that boy! They're killing him!" were the “screams” reported by the New York Evening Journal. Speeding up events, the New York American, New York Post, and Atlanta World, and the New Republic, describe the woman as running into the street, screaming "Kress beat a colored boy! Kress Beat a colored boy!" according to the New York American. The New York Sun made this response collective: “Emotional Negro women shouted that the boy was being beaten and this information was quickly relayed to the curious crowds which had gathered in front of the store.” Rather than reacting, the woman intervened in the narrative presented in Home News and La Prensa, and was pushed aside by Hurley, after which she screamed.
  
  Margaret Mitchell was identified as the woman who reacted to Rivera being grabbed in the New York Evening Journal, Home News, Philadelphia Tribune, and La Prensa (and later in stories about those arrested in the New York Amsterdam News, Afro-American, New York Post, and New York Times). Here journalists with a truncated timeline of events were assuming that as she was arrested in Kress’ store it must have been when Rivera was grabbed. However, Donahue told the public hearing he had not made an arrest, and none of the store staff mentioned an arrest at this time. The circumstances of Mitchell's arrest recorded by police, the testimony of Louise Thompson, and the New York Sun story suggest that it took place after the store was closed, as police tried to clear out the women who remained inside, with an officer named Johnson making the arrest. Similarly, in describing customers struggling with Hurley and Urban or attacking displays as Rivera was taken away, the narratives of the New York Sun, La Prensa, and the Home News collapsed together events that took place at different times. Testimony in the public hearings identified that struggle as coming later, when Kress’ manager decided to close the store and police cleared out those inside.
  
  Several newspapers also published statements by Rivera made either at the West 123rd Street station after Eldridge, awoken at 1:30 AM, had located him and brought him to a police station around 2:00 AM, or in his home the next day that provided more details of what happened before and when he was grabbed than the broad narratives. The New York Evening Journal, New York Herald Tribune, Daily News, New York Post, New York Sun, Atlanta World, and Philadelphia Tribune quoted Rivera at the police station describing biting the men and the threat to beat him that had precipitated that struggle. In an ANS agency photograph of Rivera standing with Lt. Battle taken at that time, journalists can be seen taking notes. It’s not clear if they questioned Rivera directly, or recorded answers he gave to police officers: the Daily News reported his statements as told to Deputy Chief Inspector Frances Kear, the New York Evening Journal and New York Sun reported he talked to Captain Richard Oliver, and the New York Herald Tribune quoted Eldridge rather than Rivera. The New York Evening Journal story also mentioned the reporter speaking with Rivera. The New York World-Telegram and New York Herald Tribune published stories quoting statements made by Rivera at this home later on March 20; a New York American story combined statements from the station and at his home. The Daily News simply published a photograph of Rivera flexing his biceps, presumably to demonstrate that he was unharmed. The information that before entering Kress', Rivera had gone to Brooklyn looking for work, having left high school six months earlier, that his mother needed help because his father was dead, was reported in the interviews published in the New York American and New York Herald Tribune. His father's death was also reported in La Prensa and the Brooklyn Citizen. Only the New York Herald Tribune, New York Evening Journal, and New York Sun reported that Rivera went to a show after returning from Brooklyn. Only La Prensa reported that Rivera had a job when he first left school. That interview with Rivera in his home focused on emphasizing his lack of responsibility for the disorder and willingness to try to pacify the crowds had he been asked, and contained no details of what had happened in the store as he did not want to talk about them. That focus was in line with La Prensa's concern to distance Puerto Rican residents from the disorder. Rivera gave an account of what happened in the store again when he appeared in the Adolescents Court on March 23 for inserting slugs in a subway turnstile before the disorder, in answer to questions from the magistrate.
  
  The MCCH public hearings elicited more details of the assault, with Rivera, the two police officers, and Hurley all testifying, together with Jackson Smith, the store manager. Provided in five separate hearings spread over nearly six weeks, that testimony described the roles of Officers Donahue and Eldridge, which were missing from the initial newspaper reports. Few newspapers included these new details in their stories about the hearings. The most extensively reported hearing was the first, on March 30, in which Donahue testified. A majority of newspapers highlighted Donahue’s decision to release Rivera through the rear of the store rather than in view of concerned customers as a mistake, with several reporting that Donahue had admitted that mistake. However, the hearing transcript did not include such a statement. Instead, it was Edward Kuntz, one of the ILD lawyers in the audience, who offered that assessment while questioning the officer. After Donahue testified that crowds on 125th Street caused him to take Rivera into the store, Kuntz commented, “If you had let the boy go at that time there would not have been any excitement.” Eldridge and Hurley did not testify until three weeks later, and Jackson Smith until two weeks after that, when they were not given any attention in the briefer newspaper stories about those hearings.
  • Lino Rivera grabbed & Charles Hurley and Steve Urban assaulted in secondary sources
  • Lino Rivera grabbed & Charles Hurley and Steve Urban assaulted (Part 1)