This tag was created by Anonymous. The last update was by Stephen Robertson.
1:00 AM to 1:30 AM
After 1:00 AM, it was again Lenox Avenue north of 125th Street that saw the most violent and extensive disorder, with incidents spanning the blocks up to 134th Street and perhaps as far as 137th Street with only limited intervention by police. Several people injured seriously enough by flying glass to seek medical attention was an indication that there were significant numbers of spectators and people going about their business on the streets as those attacks took place. By contrast, 7th Avenue was quiet. In fact, it was so free of incidents that Samuel Pitts left the corner of West 128th Street where he’d been watching the disorder for three hours and went west to see what was happening on 8th Avenue. There had been no reported incidents on that street for several hours so he likely returned home disappointed.
If Pitts had instead crossed 7th Avenue and walked east to Lenox Avenue, he would have found groups of spectators made up of residents from the surrounding blocks and witnessed attacks on white storeowners and attacks on stores that sent glass flying into the streets. At 125th Street, twenty-three-year-old James Connel and forty-six-year-old William Holland both suffered cuts to their heads. Those injuries could have come from the batons police swung as they tried to move crowds and stop attacks on businesses, from one of the stones being thrown at store windows, or from shattering glass. At the next intersection, a Black resident who was only a short distance from his home was hit on the head by an object thrown by someone on the street. Henry Blackwell also suffered cuts to his head. The forty-one-year-old man, a driver for a family in 1930, was likely a WPA laborer for the Parks Department by 1935. Around the same time, George Chronis arrived at his restaurant on West 126th Street just off Lenox Avenue. It was too late to do anything to protect the business. He found the restaurant “completely demolished” and his white staff member still hiding in the washroom.
Two blocks further north, between West 127th and West 128th Streets, Herman Young, a fifty-three-year-old white man, and his wife Rose also arrived at their hardware store at 346 Lenox Avenue. The couple had closed the store at 9:30 PM, well before disorder spread to Lenox Avenue, and were in their apartment on the floor directly above the business. Somehow they had slept through the noise of yelling, gunshots, sirens, and breaking glass coming from the street for over two hours until the noise of the glass in their store windows shattering woke them. Looking outside, Herman saw four men in his window display taking merchandise. The couple rushed downstairs and out the building entrance immediately next to the store. Rose arrived first and turned on the lights but remained on the stoop while Herman went inside. A Black man came up behind her, she told police, "called her names," and tried to push past her into the store, but her husband closed the door. The man then started cursing him, calling out, "You Goddam Jew I am going to kill you if you don’t get out of here,” and broke the glass in the door. Rose testified that the man used a piece of pipe; Herman said he used "some instrument." Police later reported a stone had been thrown through the door. Rose said she saw glass hit Herman; the stone may also have hit him. He went to Harlem Hospital for treatment; in his absence more merchandise was taken from the hardware store.
While no police officers intervened in the events at Young’s hardware store, there were police nearby. A little further north, at the intersection with West 128th Street, Wilmont Hendricks, a twenty-five-year-old Black man, was shot around this time. Although the hospital staff recorded that the shooting occurred “in some unknown manner,” the bullet would have come from one of the police weapons being fired with great frequency at this time. Harry Lash arrived at the intersection not long after Hendricks was transported to the hospital. He had traveled from his home in Washington Heights north of Harlem after hearing news of the disorder. Like George Chronis two blocks to the south, he arrived too late to protect his business from attack. While the fire set in the store had been extinguished, he found the windows broken, fixtures damaged, and a significant quantity of merchandise missing. Nonetheless, there is reason to think that his arrival helped prevent more items on the shelves inside the store from being taken.
Another block to the north, around the intersection with West 129th Street, it was again glass not bullets that hit local residents on the street. Both Hugh Young, a twenty-four year-old Black man, and Alice Mitchell, a twenty-one-year-old Black woman, were within a block of their homes when they were cut by flying glass. Multiple businesses around the intersection and in the block to the north were looted during the disorder: Harry Levinson's store at 100 West 129th Street; the Manhattan Renting Agency at 385 Lenox Avenue; Manny Zipp's grocery store at 383 Lenox Avenue; Anthony Avitable's grocery store at 381 Lenox Avenue; and Jacob Saloway's stationary store at 381 Lenox Avenue. At least some of those attacks would have occurred at this time; Young and Mitchell could have been nearby or involved in any of those attacks. Police, however, apparently were not close enough to intervene as they made no arrests.
Police were still near the intersection with West 132nd Street where the first attacks on white property and white people on Lenox Avenue had begun two hours earlier. Violence flared there too. William Feinstein’s liquor store at 452 Lenox Avenue, closed up during the increasingly frequent police gunfire around midnight, was targeted by a group of thirty to forty people around 1:15 AM. It would have taken a concerted attacks to first tear down the iron gate then smash all the glass in the windows and demolish the storefront and enter the store. By the time Officer Nathaniel Carter arrived at the store, he found only a handful of men who were leaving the store carrying bottles, most of group having already scattered. Carter was able to apprehend only one of those men, Louis Cobb. The thirty-eight-year-old Black laborer allegedly had a bottle of gin and two bottles of whiskey in his possession. Given his convictions and long prison terms for burglary, robbery, drug possession, procuring and possession, Cobb likely was among those most looking to take merchandise rather than simply targeting white-owned property. Around the same time Carter arrested Cobb, flying glass cut Herbert Holderman, an injury he specifically attributed to people breaking store windows. Unlike the others cut by glass on Lenox Avenue around this time, Holderman did not live locally, but rather several blocks to the southeast at 73 East 128th Street, so he may have been among the groups moving around rather than a casual spectator.
Further attacks on white-owned businesses were also occurring around West 134th Street. Some of those on the street were taking advantage of windows that had been broken earlier. An unidentified Black man climbed into the display of the branch of the Wohlmuth clothing store on the southwest corner of West 134th Street and took an overcoat, unimpeded by police, as Adam Clayton Powell watched. The milk bottle that struck Thomas Suares was evidence that windows were still being broken. The twenty-seven-year-old Black man who lived nearby had been walking along West 134th Street. In the context of the violence at this time, he was less likely to have been the intended target of the bottle than to have stepped into its path toward a store window.
If police were unable to respond to those incidents around West 134th Street, Officer William Butler did arrest a man for taking merchandise from a tailors shop owned by Philip Jaross two blocks further north. However, Butler was limiting rather than preventing attacks on the business. Earl Davis, the twenty-six-year-old Black man he took into custody, had evidently not had to break into the store as the patrolman charged him with petty larceny rather than burglary. The business had been damaged some time before the arrest.
The violence on Lenox Avenue may have reached ten blocks further north. De Soto Windgate, a twenty-four-year-old Black man, was shot as he walked along West 144th Street between Lenox and 7th Avenues. He told police that he did not know who had shot him. Had Windgate been on either avenue, he could have been among those shot by police or hit by stray police bullets as officers patrolled those streets. However, there was no evidence those patrols traversed residential streets like West 144th Street and no reported violence in the vicinity in which Windgate might have participated or watched that would have brought police into the area. Rather than an element of the disorder, the shooting might be a reminder that not all Harlem’s residents were occupied with the disorder.
Among those who made their way along Lenox Avenue with little regard for the violence were Lawyer and Mary Hobbs and their son Russell on their way to Harlem Hospital to see their older son Lloyd. The medical staff were notorious for their poor treatment of Black residents even when they were not dealing with unusually large numbers of injuries and the presence of numbers of police officers. When Lawyer and Mary Hobbs asked to see their son, they were initially told they could not because he was a criminal. When they did find their way to Lloyd, he told them, “Mother, the officer shot me for nothing. I was not doing anything.” Patrolman McInerney, guarding the boy, said "Why didn't you halt when I told you to?" Lloyd offered the same account when questioned in the hospital by Homicide Bureau detectives.
As the crowds and violence on Lenox Avenue intensified, the disorder on 7th Avenue south of 125th Street abated. An attack on a car containing a white woman named Betty Willcox that stopped on 7th Avenue at 125th Street likely took place around this time. Vehicles driving through Harlem were not having objects thrown at them to the extent that Fred Campbell had experienced earlier nor was the noise of breaking glass and gunfire as loud. It was only when the man driving stopped the car at 125th street so he could get cigarettes that Willcox noticed stores in the area had been damaged, and their stock strewn across the street. She then heard gunshots, and saw a white man pursed by a crowd of black men, some of whom caught and beat him. When they saw Willcox, they came toward her, surrounding the car, pounding on it and screaming threats at her. She frantically honked the horn, attracting the attention of a group of uniformed and plainclothes police who "with big clubs swinging, dashed up and began to strike out at random and shoot in the air." The police then formed a cordon around the car while the crowd milled around before slowly dispersing. When the man with her returned, he drove them away from the disorder.
Willcox’s account may not be entirely reliable; it was certainly sensationalized by the New York Evening Journal, the only source to report it, in the form of a first-person account accompanied by a photograph of a smiling Willcox jauntily sitting on the corner of a desk, her legs crossed and her hands on her hips. Nonetheless, the only reported incident on 7th Avenue around 1:00 AM was in keeping with the relative calm she encountered. The circumstances in which Patrolman William Clements arrested Edward Larry indicated police were not rushing to respond to outbreaks of violence as they had been. He stopped a taxi in which he saw the twenty-six-year-old black laborer and found he had a box containing eight shirts, with a value of $12. Larry explained that he had found the shirts on the street at West 129th Street and Lenox Avenue and was returning to the Salvation Army shelter where he lived at 224 West 124th Street, behind Kress' store. The patrolmen was not satisfied by that explanation and took Larry to the 28th Precinct for further questioning. Clements later found evidence to support his suspicion. Morris Towbin, still at the precinct having come to report the robbery of his haberdashery store several hours earlier, identified Larry as one of the men who robbed him.
If the violence on 7th Avenue had ebbed, it may have been that some of those on the street were moving to extend their attacks to the area around West 116th Street. Violence would soon break out there, ending the temporary lull in the disorder on 7th Avenue.