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Harlem in Disorder: A Spatial History of How Racial Violence Changed in 1935

3:00 AM to 3:30 AM

The apparent ebb in violence in the areas where the disorder had become concentrated lasted only until around 3:00 AM. While police made only one arrest, injuries suffered by several men indicated that they clashed with groups on Lenox Avenue around West 129th Street and West 128th Street as well as on 7th Avenue around West 116th Street. Lt. Samuel Battle would later tell his biographer, Langston Hughes, that he cautioned the patrolmen and detectives on the streets that “there were to be no wholesale clubbings of Negroes.” His account seems more a product of the criticism Battle would face for police brutality against Harlem residents in the aftermath of the disorder than a description of his actions at the time. The mostly white officers deployed in Harlem during the disorder, many from outside the district so without experience of serving under a Black officer, would likely have reacted dismissively if not with hostility to such advice.

Lenox Avenue around West 129th Street appeared to have been the site of the largest outbreak of violence. James White, a twenty-nine-year-old Black man, had an “altercation” with a white man, likely a detective in plainclothes, that left him with cuts to his head. Forty-year-old Jack Ponder received cuts to his ear and twenty-year-old Thomas Brown cuts to his forehead in unspecified circumstances. None of the men lived nearby. The most likely cause of their injuries were batons swung by police seeking to clear crowds off the street. There were no reported arrests. Had the police been responding to looting, officers were present in the area to have made an arrest. Louis Levy, who returned to the dry goods store he owned at 374 Lenox Avenue around this time, made no mention of seeing any looting or attacks on businesses. Rather, he had found his store “entirely cleaned out of its stock,” suggesting few opportunities for such attacks remained. Police efforts to clear the streets extended down Lenox Avenue toward West 128th Street. Just off that intersection, Benjamin Bell was shot in the thigh. The thirty-two-year-old man was standing in front of his home so might have been hit by a stray bullet fired by police on Lenox Avenue or by gunshots aimed at people on the street.

In the area around West 116th Street and 7th Avenue, businesses were still being attacked and looted despite the presence of police at the intersection. Officer Necas saw Robert Tanner reach through the broken windows of Garmise’s cigar store on the southwest corner of West 116th Street and take a pipe. The store windows had first been broken a little over an hour earlier. The seventeen-year-old Black student lived nearby so may have been among those on 7th Avenue watching what was happening for some time before looking to take advantage of the damage done to the store, as had been the case with Joseph Wade half an hour or so earlier.

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"Battle of Harlem," Draft, Box 276, Folder 4545, Langston Hughes Papers, James Weldon Johnson Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.