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

"5 Dying and Scores Wounded as Race Riots in Harlem Subside," Home News, March 20, 1935 [clipping].

In the Home News

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Lino Rivera grabbed & Charles Hurley and Steve Urban assaulted 166 plain 2024-02-23T22:14:27+00:00
When Charles Hurley, a floorwalker, and a Kress' store detective confronted Lino Rivera, an unemployed sixteen-year-old Puerto Rican boy, about stealing a pocketknife in Kress’ store, and started pushing him out of the store, the boy bit the hands of Hurley and a white window dresser who came to their aid, Steve Urban. After initially indicating that they wanted Rivera charged with assault, the two men ultimately did not ask police to arrest him. The incident is treated here as an assault as the New York Evening Journal, New York Post, New York American, and Daily News listed the two men among the injured.

As the incident between Rivera and the store staff triggered the disorder, it was widely reported in the press and investigated by the MCCH. This analysis relies on testimony given in MCCH public hearings as that was by far the most complete and detailed evidence. Newspaper narratives varied in detail, consistently reporting only that a boy had been grabbed by store staff for taking merchandise, and later released, but omitting most other details. Several white newspapers also published separate stories based on statements made by Rivera at the West 123rd police station during the disorder or at his home the next day that included additional details of why he was in the store and his encounter with the store staff but not of subsequent events in the store.

Rivera had begun the day by taking the subway to Brooklyn, in pursuit of job as an errand boy, he told reporters for the New York American and New York Herald Tribune. Finding the job already filled, he returned to Harlem. Getting off the subway at West 125th Street, Rivera decided to go to a show or movie at one of the theaters that lined the street, perhaps at the Apollo Theater opposite Kress' store, as a story in the New York Evening Journal claimed. When the show ended, Rivera went into Kress' store, a detail also reported in the New York Sun. He said he did so because he had "nothing to do," according to the New York Post, "just to look around I guess," according to the New York World-Telegram, "to walk through to 124th Street," according to the New York American, and "to take a short cut home," according to the New York Herald Tribune.

Testifying in a public hearing of the MCCH, Hurley, a twenty-eight-year-old white resident of the Bronx, said he was with the store manager Jackson Smith in an office overlooking the rear of the store when he saw Rivera take a pocketknife from a counter around 2:30 PM. Calling down to the store detective, he pointed out Rivera and then headed to the floor himself. Rivera later admitted to reporters that he did take the knife, after it "caught his eye," according to the New York Post or "attracted" him according to the New York World-Telegram and New York American, or because it "matched a fountain pen set he had," according to the New York Herald Tribune. (The New York Sun mistakenly reported that it was chocolate that Rivera had taken.) When Rivera denied having the knife, Hurley took it from the boy’s pocket. Both Rivera and Hurley testified that the men started to push him out of the store. According to Hurley, near the front door Rivera became scared and started to lash out at them. Rivera reportedly told journalists from the New York World-Telegram, New York Post, and New York Evening Journal that he had told the men he could walk out on his own, and tried to shake free of their hold, "really started fighting" when, as he also testified in a MCCH hearing, Hurley said, "Let's take him down the cellar and beat hell out of him.” Hurley denied making that statement; he told the MCCH hearing that he held Rivera around his shoulders while the store detective tried to calm the boy. As a struggle developed, another store employee, Steve Urban, a thirty-nine-year-old white window dresser, also grabbed hold of Rivera, according to Hurley. Once the group was through the front door and into the store's vestibule, a recessed area of the street surrounded by display windows, the store detective went to get a Crime Prevention Bureau officer. That police agency provided an alternative to having children arrested; its officers instead undertaking investigations of their conditions in order to refer them to social agencies to better prevent “juvenile delinquency.” Kress store staff turned most of the boys they caught shoplifting over to the Crime Prevention Bureau, according to Hurley, and had police arrest only one or two a week.

Sometime after the store detective left, Rivera bit both Hurley and Urban on the hands and wrist while "trying to get away," he told a public hearing, reportedly explaining to journalists from the New York World-Telegram and New York Post that "I didn't want a licking." The struggle in the vestibule attracted the attention of Patrolman Donahue, who was the nearest of several police officers on West 125th Street at the time (identified in some newspapers as a traffic officer and by Rivera in a MCCH hearing as a mounted patrolman). Donahue took Rivera back into the store, to near the candy counter at the front, to get away from a curious crowd gathering on 125th Street, and sent an officer to get an ambulance to provide treatment for Hurley and Urban. (He told the MCCH hearing that the officer was his partner Keel, or another patrolman named Walton; the call log records the man's name as Miller, who was later identified by the store manager as a Black officer.) The telephone call to Headquarters was logged at 2:30 PM, followed by one from Police Headquarters to Harlem Hospital at 2:35 PM, with the ambulance bringing Dr. Sayet recorded in the hospital records as having arrived at 2:40 PM. Those records provide better evidence of the timing of the incident than Donahue’s testimony that he witnessed the struggle at 2:15 PM. Soon after the ambulance arrived, the manager, Jackson Smith, came to the front of the store, he testified in a public hearing, after being told a crowd had gathered by a staff member. Informed that a Crime Prevention Bureau officer had been called, Smith decided there was “nothing further for him to do,” and he returned to his office. A few minutes later Alfred Eldridge, a Black Crime Prevention Bureau officer, arrived. Usually the store staff would have turned Rivera over to Eldridge, who would have taken Rivera with him. However, on this occasion Hurley and Urban told Eldridge they wanted the boy arrested and charged with assault. Hurley told a public hearing he had gone to the rear of the store before Eldridge arrived, and did not want Rivera arrested, but the officer was clear that he spoke with both Hurley and Urban. The store manager similarly told a later public hearing that “Hurley wants to press charges for biting.” Eldridge could not take Rivera with him if he was arrested: “The job and purpose of our bureau is not to arrest a child," the told the MCCH hearing. He telephoned his superior, and told him that “the 5 & 10 wanted the boy arrested.” In response that officer told him to “let the patrolman take care of it due to the fact that he was first on case.” So after about twenty-five minutes at Kress, around 3:15 PM, Eldridge left the store.

However, Eldridge testified he later found out that soon after he left, “the store officials changed their mind.” Donahue simplified those events in the public hearing, testifying that “The boy was not arrested, but was taken through the basement to 124th Street and sent home.” He did not mention Eldridge or who reversed the decision to arrest Rivera. Hurley’s self-interested statement that he did not want him arrested made Urban responsible. Urban himself was not among those who testified before a MCCH public hearing. It does seem that it was Urban who Donahue said was with him when he released Rivera; the officer referred to him not by name but as “the window dresser.” They took Rivera out the rear rather than on to 125th Street as there was a crowd in front of the store and Donahue “didn’t want to start something,” he told a public hearing. He was clearly anxious enough about the situation in the store to ignore another option that Eldridge had given him, “that in the event that Kress Store did not want to press charges, that the boy could be handed over to us for supervision,” according to the Crime Prevention Bureau officer’s testimony. After releasing Rivera on to 124th Street, Donahue left the store, at around 3:30 PM. Many of the fifty or so mostly Black women shopping in the store observed these events, after their attention had been attracted by the struggle between the two men and Rivera, and the appearance of an ambulance. None of these women testified in a public hearing. A Black man named L. F. Cole told a MCCH public hearing that he saw Rivera being taken to the basement by two men. As they had not seen Rivera leave the store, groups of women concerned to find out what had become of him remained in the store until Smith closed it and police pushed them out sometime around 5:00 PM or 5:30 PM.

Bites are a relatively minor injury, and the hospital record indicates that both men received treatment at the scene and were not taken to the hospital. Hurley did still have a scar when he testified at a MCCH public hearing on April 20. Arthur Garfield Hays, the member of the MCCH chairing the hearing, examined it, announcing that “I should say enough [of a scar] to indicate there was a bite,” adding in response to a question from the audience that he saw four teeth marks.” Only one other individual in the disorder was described as having been bitten, Arthur Block, a Black man. He appeared among lists of the injured in only three publications, with no details provided of the circumstances in which he was assaulted.

The significantly less detailed narratives of what happened between Rivera and the store staff published in newspapers largely reflected what Inspector Di Martini told a journalist working for the Afro-American and others in front of the store around 7:30 PM: "A boy stole some little article here this afternoon. The manager caught him, grabbed him by the arm, and was taking him in the back when a woman screamed. The crowd gathered. The manager did not press charges, and let the boy go home through the back.” (Di Martini’s information at that time came only from interviewing Jackson Smith and Hurley, as both Donahue and Eldridge were off duty and would not learn of the disorder until the next day.) Missing from his narrative was Rivera biting the men, a detail that was also missing from stories in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, New York World-Telegram, New York Evening Journal, and Daily Worker. However, the assault was mentioned in the New York American, Home News, New York Sun, New York Herald Tribune, New York Times, Daily News, New York Post, Atlanta World, New York Age, Philadelphia Tribune, Pittsburgh Courier, La Prensa, and in Time magazine and the New Republic. Only the New York American, Daily News, and New York Herald Tribune included language that gave a particular slant to the assault. The New York American and Daily News describing Rivera as “hysterical” in his response to being grabbed by Hurley and the store detective, while the New York Herald Tribune labelled him pugnacious. The New York Age reported that “someone” had hit Rivera, the New York Herald Tribune and Brooklyn Daily Eagle that Hurley or Urban “slapped him," or “slugged him” according to the Pittsburgh Courier, with the New York Age mistakenly reporting that he was being treated at Harlem Hospital. That story was in a special edition of the New York Age published in the midst of the confusion early in the disorder. Two stories, in the New York American and New York Sun, had Rivera leave the store rather than being released. A story in The New Republic by white journalist Hamilton Basso included dialogue, almost certainly invented, between Rivera and the two men who grabbed him and comments from a crowd around him (Basso also mixed up the sequence of events inside and outside the store after Rivera's release).
- Lino Rivera grabbed & Charles Hurley and Steve Urban assaulted (Part 2)
- Lino Rivera grabbed & Charles Hurley and Steve Urban assaulted in secondary sources
Lloyd Hobbs killed Lloyd Hobbs, a sixteen-year-old Black teenager, was shot and killed by Patrolman John McInerney, who claimed Hobbs had been looting an auto supply store.

Around 7:30 PM, Hobbs and his fifteen-year-old brother Russell had made the short trip from their home on St. Nicholas Ave to the Apollo Theater on 125th Street for a show, not emerging until 12:30 AM. When they stepped back onto 125th St, they saw crowds down the block at the intersection with 7th Ave, and went to investigate. They followed as police pushed the crowd north on 7th Ave. As people milled in front of a damaged auto parts store at 2150 7th Avenue near 128th Street, a police radio car pulled up, and one of the officers inside, Patrolman John McInerney got out. Fearing that they would be beaten by the police, the boys and the others in front of the store ran up 7th Avenue. Here the accounts of the boys and seven Black eyewitnesses and those of the two white patrolmen diverged.

McInerney and his partner, Patrolman Watterson, claimed that as they were driving south, their attention had been drawn to the auto parts store by the noise of breaking glass, and they had seen Lloyd in the window handing items out to those on the street. Three of the eyewitnesses, Howard Malloy, Arthur Moore, and Marshall Pfifer, said all the windows of the store had been broken at least an hour earlier and nothing remained in the display by the time the Hobbs brothers arrived there. The patrolmen said that Lloyd climbed out of the window with items in his hands as they pulled up, and when McInerney pursued him up 7th Avenue and called on him to halt, continued to run. When those running from the patrolman got to 128th Street, Lloyd broke away from the group and turned west on to 128th Street. McInerney then shot the boy. Warren Wright, standing in the entrance of the apartments above 2150 7th Avenue, south of the store, Howard Malloy, Arthur Moore, and Samuel Pitts standing on the corner across 128th Street from the auto supply store, in front of Battle's Pharmacy, to which the crowd was running, John Bennett, in 201 West 128th Street toward which Lloyd turned and ran, and Marshall Pfifer, standing on the corner of West 128th Street on the other side of 7th Avenue, all testified that the boy had nothing in his hands as he ran and that McInerney did not call to him to halt before shooting him. After the bullet hit Hobbs and he fell to the ground, McInerney and Watterson, who had remained in the car, backing it into 128th Street, said Lloyd dropped a car horn and socket set, which McInerney picked up. Seven witnesses said that there was nothing on the ground next to the boy.

The two patrolman loaded Lloyd Hobbs into their car and drove him to Harlem Hospital. Russell Hobbs had kept running up 7th Avenue and had not seen the shooting. He learned from the crowd at the scene that it was his brother who had been shot and driven away and immediately ran home to tell his parents, Lawyer and Mary Hobbs. The family rushed to Harlem Hospital. When they found Lloyd, he told them, “Mother, the officer shot me for nothing. I was not doing anything.” 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, in a statement recorded by a police stenographer.

Lloyd Hobbs appeared in all seven published lists of those injured in the disorder, in the New York Evening Journal, New York Post, Daily News, New York American, Home News, New York Herald Tribune, and Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

In the following days, Lawyer Hobbs went to the 28th Precinct several times trying to make a complaint against the officer who had shot his son. He also sought help from the New York Urban League, giving them a statement about what had happened to his son on March 28, which they sent to the MCCH. As a result, Hobbs and his family were among the witnesses asked to come to the MCCH's first public hearing on March 30. Only Russell testified that day, briefly describing how his brother had been shot. A few hours later, at 6:30 PM, Lloyd Hobbs died in Harlem Hospital, the fourth death resulting from the disorder. While the New York Times, Daily News, New York Age, New York Amsterdam News, and Afro-American referred to Russell's testimony in reporting Hobbs' death, the New York Herald Tribune, Times Union, Home News, Daily Mirror, New York American, and Chicago Defender reported only the boy's death in their stories.

The next week, at the MCCH hearing, Lawyer, Mary, and Russell Hobbs testified, together with three Black men who had witnessed the shooting, Howard Malloy, Arthur Moore, and Samuel Pitts, Dr. Arthur Logan, one of the physicians who treated Lloyd Hobbs, the police stenographer who had recorded a statement from the boy soon after he arrived at Harlem Hospital, and James Tartar, a Black investigator for the MCCH. Assistant District Attorney Saul Price heard the testimony of the three eyewitnesses soon after the hearing and had them appear before the grand jury on April 10 so they could consider charges against Patrolman McInerney. The grand jury also heard from Russell Hobbs, both his parents, McInerney's partner, Patrolman Watterson, the police stenographer, the detective who investigated the shooting, John O'Brien, and the owner of the automobile supply store. Patrolman McInerney also offered to testify, but the grand jury opted not to hear him. They dismissed the case.

The MCCH nonetheless continued to investigate the boy's killing, hearing testimony from McInerney's partner, Patrolman Watterson, and Detective O'Brien, who investigated the shooting, at a hearing on April 20 marked by angry interjections from the audience. Four additional witnesses to the shooting testified at an MCCH hearing on May 18. James Tartar, the MCCH investigator, also obtained information that McInerney had not turned in the items he claimed to have found next to Lloyd Hobbs until April 8, more than two weeks after he shot the boy. That interval raised the possibility that the patrolman had not found the items at the scene but had obtained them later, when he needed to justify the shooting. As a result of that information and the testimony of additional eyewitnesses, Assistant District Attorney Saul Price presented the case to the grand jury for a second time on June 10. After hearing from the new witnesses, and from Tartar about the absence of the allegedly stolen items from police records and the Police Property Department until April 8, the grand jury again dismissed the case without hearing testimony from McInerney.

The police department had committed to an internal hearing on the case before ADA Price had decided to resubmit it to the grand jury. The hearing took place on June 14; in attendance were James Tartar and E. Franklin Frazier, the Howard University sociologist who had recently started work leading the MCCH's investigation of Harlem. It was the first time that anyone outside the police department and the district attorney's office heard Patrolman McInerney's testimony. While Tartar and Frazier were unpersuaded, senior police officers found the shooting of Lloyd Hobbs was justified, reprimanding the patrolman only for his delay in handing in the items he claimed to have found at the scene.

While two grand juries and a police department hearing exonerated McInerney, the MCCH and the Black press did not share that view. Arthur Garfield Hays and Oscar Villard gave a central place to McInerney killing Hobbs in the report of the subcommittee submitted to Mayor La Guardia on June 11, 1935. The report of the subcommittee characterized the killing of Lloyd Hobbs as "inexcusable." E. Franklin Frazier included that material in the final report of the MCCH, framed in even harsher terms: the killing of the boy was "a brutal act on the part of the police." Police Commissioner Valentine was unmoved by that censure. He responded to both reports by asserting that Lloyd Hobbs had been looting the store and that two grand juries had exonerated McInerney.
In assessing the case, the two reports gave significant weight to the character of Lloyd Hobbs and his family. The subcommittee argued that "the record of Lloyd Hobbs and that of his family are presumptive evidence that he was not the kind of boy who would engage in looting." The final report of the MCCH described the boy as "having a good record in school and in the community, and being a member of a family of good standing and character." Lloyd Hobbs had been born in Brunswick County, Virginia, in 1916, the second youngest of five children of Mary and Lawyer Hobbs. (The story published in the New York Amsterdam News on April 6, 1935, accompanied by a photograph of Mrs. Hobbs, gave her first name as Carrie, but it was recorded as Mary in the census in 1930, 1940, and 1950). The boy's name was recorded as Lawyer in the 1930 census and as Lawyer, Jr in the "Social and Economical History" of the family written by James Tartar, but elsewhere in that document and in all other sources as Lloyd. The family farmed in Virginia until 1927, and still owned 83 acres there, when Lawyer's ill health required him to get work "which would not necessitate his being in the sun," according to his wife. He had worked previously in New York City, so the family relocated there. Lawyer found work first as a sexton at Union Baptist Church, then for a construction company. Mary Hobbs worked first as a domestic servant, the most common occupation for Black women, before becoming one of a much smaller group employed in factory work, in her case at a lampshade company. That was her occupation in the 1930 census; Lawyer's occupation was recorded as chauffeur. At that time the family lived at 228 West 140th Street, their home since they arrived in New York City. By April, 1931 both parents had lost their jobs, and the family joined many in Harlem applying for work and relief from private and government agencies. Sometime in the intervening years Lawyer Hobbs found some work as a helper on a truck owned by Charles Bell (perhaps a brother-in-law; a sister-in-law named Senora Bell lived with the family in 1930).

Lawyer Hobbs' income allowed the family to settle in a fourth-floor apartment at 321 St. Nicholas Avenue in 1932, having moved twice in the preceding year, as many in Harlem did during the Depression. A lodger helped pay the rent in 1935. James Tartar, the MCCH investigator, described the residence as "a comfortable apartment, clean, nicely arranged, nicely furnished and well ventilated."

Throughout their time in the city, the Hobbs children attended school. By 1935 the eldest, twenty-year-old Cassie, was working, but her twin sisters Hazel and Zenobia remained students at the Textile High School, Lloyd was a student at Haaren High School, and his younger brother Russell a student at Frederick Douglas Junior High School. Lloyd would have graduated in June, according to a story in the New York Amsterdam News.

After Lloyd's death, the family continued to live at 321 St. Nicholas Avenue until at least 1950. All the family members resided there in 1940. Fifty-six-year-old Mary, who provided the information to the census enumerator, did not identify an occupation. Lawyer was working as a laborer in a sugar refinery, Cassie and Zenobia as seamstresses in a dress factory, Hazel in a lampshade factory, and Russell as a clerk in a food store. All but Zenobia were still living in the apartment in 1950, although as Cassie was recorded as divorced she had likely not resided there for all of the intervening ten years. Neither Lawyer nor Mary, who was listed as sixty years old, were working by that time. Hazel had joined Cassie working as a seamstress, while Russell now worked as a driver for a construction company.
Fires (4) Fires broke out in three stores during the disorder, all located on the two blocks of Lenox Avenue between West 130th Street and West 132nd Street. Two of those stores were adjacent, Anna Rosenberg’s notion shop at 429 Lenox Avenue and a hardware store at 431 Lenox Avenue. The third store, Lash's 5 & 10c store, was a block to the south at 400 Lenox Avenue. That area of Lenox Avenue saw extensive looting, attacks on stores, and violence. An additional fire was allegedly set on the roof of 5 West 131st Street, a block to the east in an area that saw few reported events during the disorder.

The fires broke out within a period of around an hour, beginning with the notion and hardware stores after 11:00 PM followed soon after midnight by Lash's store. All three stores were also looted. Only photograph captions in the Daily News linked the fires to looting: "Fire was set by rioters after they looted place" in the case of Lash's store; and a more elaborate account for the image of the other stores: "It is but a step from looting to incendiarism. Here's a fireman tacking a blazing tailor shop at 420 Lexington Ave., fired after it was looted." Looting and damaging a business by setting it on fire were not necessarily as continuous as the caption presented: alleged looters generally took items they needed, such as food and clothing; setting fire to a store offered no similar benefit. Instead fires fitted with breaking windows and other attacks that targeted white-owned businesses.

The New York Evening Journal reported fires in two buildings (it is likely that its story treated the fires in the adjacent stores as a single fire, but as two different businesses were affected, it is treated here as two fires), the New York Herald Tribune and Daily Worker a fire in one building, and the Home News, Daily News, New York Times, and New York World-Telegram referred generally to fires in several stores without offering details. The Black-owned Philadelphia Tribune appeared to have repackaged the New York Evening Journal account, and the Afro-American published photographs of fire-damaged stores not referred to in its stories about the disorder. Other Black newspapers made no reference to fires. Nor did the MCCH report. The roof-top fire was mentioned only in the Home News and the Daily Worker, perhaps because it occurred on the margins of the disorder. Those stories attributed the fires to members of the crowds on the street during the disorder, but only the New York Herald Tribune described how one of the fires started.

Firefighters attended the fires, likely from Fire Engine 59 located at 180 West 137th Street, near the intersection with 7th Avenue. Their efforts to extinguish the fires were captured by press photographers. A Daily News photograph showed smoke coming out of the hardware store window and doors at 431 Lenox Avenue, and firefighters on the scene fighting the fire. One is swinging an axe at the display window, while a second firefighter stands behind him. A third firefighter is just inside the store, his boots visible beneath the smoke. In the original photograph, cropped out of the published version, a hose runs across the photograph to the left, in the direction of Rosenberg's notion store at 429 Lenox Avenue. A photograph of the same scene published in the Home News had that hose running to the left in the foreground and another hose going into the hardware store, and three firefighters in the doorway with their backs to the camera. An ACME agency photograph also published in the Daily News and in the New York Herald Tribune showed flames in the last section of Harry Lash’s 5 & 10c store window on West 130th Street. Firefighters can be seen crouched in front of the window (they were cropped out of the version published in the Daily News). No other people are visible in the photographs, which are focused on the burning stores.

Fighting the fires was not straightforward, according to the New York Herald Tribune, New York Evening Journal, and Afro-American, which described clashes between crowds and police and firefighters. “A gang of thirty-five Negroes” set fire to Lash's 5 & 10c store in the New York Herald Tribune story. A crowd then “tried to prevent a policeman from sounding an alarm. 'Let it burn!' they shouted. When the firemen came, they hindered them, too, bustling about the hydrants and shoving hose lines about. At last the firemen threatened to turn the water on them instead of the fire and they dispersed.” Some of those details also appeared in the New York Evening Journal, but its story collapsed the two fires together: “As detectives and uniformed men closed in on crowds surrounding the burning buildings, they met with resistance. 'Let them burn. Let them burn.' The shout was taken up by hundreds, and it was not until firemen threatened to turn hoselines on the rioting men and women that they dispersed.” An entire block separated the two locations, too far for a single crowd to be involved. Both the number of police and the size of the crowd are larger in the New York Evening Journal story, which repeats the crowd's alleged chant, “Let them burn," giving it more prominence. Where the New York Herald Tribune characterized the crowd as having "hindered" firefighters with actions that seem to involve individuals pressing forward to see the fire getting in their way, the New York Evening Journal characterized the crowd's behavior as "resistance." Those differences and characterizations are in keeping with how that publication sensationalized and exaggerated the actions of Black crowds. The brief photograph caption in the Afro-American mixed elements of the two stories: it followed the New York Herald Tribune in characterizing the crowd as having "hindered" firefighters, but coupled it with the struggle presented by the New York Evening Journal in claiming that "rioters" "fought them away.”

The New York Evening Journal story went on to link the fires to increased police violence, with the decision to fire bullets at crowds being made in response to fires being set: "The police, working under directions of their highest commanders, were under orders to withhold fire unless necessary, but when the two incendiary fires were started, one at 429 Lenox Ave. and the other at Lenox Ave. and 130th St., bullets flew." The Black-owned Philadelphia Tribune repeated that claim as part of its repackaging of the information in the New York Evening Journal. Multiple other reports instead linked police beginning to shoot at crowds rather than in the air to the outbreak of looting rather than to the fires.

Photographs taken the next day showed the damage resulting from the fire. The exteriors of Anna Rosenberg’s notion store and the hardware appeared in an Associated Press photograph and a photograph published in the Daily Mirror. No glass remained in its display window, partially visible in the left side of the photograph, which had been emptied of merchandise. Damage to the exterior wall below the window could be the result of the fire. Inside the store was an L-shaped counter on which a range of different goods are stacked; there may be some damaged items on the ground but neither the ceiling nor the shelves and counter show the fire damage visible in the hardware store to the right. A fire adjuster for Rosenberg’s insurance company, Royal Insurance, put the damage to her store at $980.13, according to the New York Herald Tribune. As the insurance policy did not cover losses from riots, Rosenberg was among the business owners who sued the city to recover their losses. A jury in the Municipal Court awarded Rosenberg $804, confirming the extent of the damage done by the fire.

No such details exist regarding damage to the hardware store, only the images of its exterior and three photographs of its interior, one in the Afro-American mistakenly identified as the notion store, a second also in the Afro-American identified as the hardware store, and the third in the Daily News. All three images featured the table in the center of the store visible in photographs of the exterior, which distinguished it from the notion store, and show damaged merchandise strewn throughout the store, material hanging from the ceiling visible in the foreground that is likely damage produced by the fire, as well as the burned out display window visible in the photograph of the firefighters at work. Burned shelves and merchandise and fire damage to the table in the center of the store were visible on the left of the photograph in the Afro-American that identified the business as a hardware store. A pile of debris in front of the store visible in the Associated Press photograph appeared to be a combination of material from the ceiling and the display windows. The second exterior image showed a white man boarding up the damaged display window.

Fire damage to Lash’s store appeared less extensive, in keeping with the Home News reporter’s assessment that “damage from the fires was not great.” Only one small section at the rear of the store, on West 130th Street furthest from Lenox Avenue, looked to be burned in an Associated Press photograph. However, the rest of the store appeared significantly damaged. Display windows that ran the length of the side of the store on West 130th Street, as well as those facing Lenox Avenue, appeared smashed. In addition to the damage, Lash reported the loss of $1,000 of merchandise. His insurers too refused to pay, he told a Probation Department investigator. He was not among the twenty-five business owners named as suing the city seeking damages for what their insurance did not cover but may have been one of the eighty-nine not named.

The fire on the roof of 5 West 131st Street received less mention in the press with no reference to any damage it did. A Home News reporter explained that fire as “one method by which the mobs stirred up excitement." It was produced, the story claimed, by stacking "great heaps of newspapers on the roofs of buildings," which, "when ignited, led those in the streets to believe spectacular fires were in progress and many fire alarms were sounded.” An eyewitness offered a different explanation that the fire was a distraction, not an incitement, in the story in the Daily Worker: “This was done, I suppose, to draw the attention of the police force and riot squads from Lenox Avenue where they had concentrated their forces and were attacking the Negroes.” False alarms and the sounds of fire engines are mentioned in several newspapers which might indicate that other roof fires were lit, or simply that calls were made to the fire department.

Fire-damaged stores attracted press attention out of proportion with their numbers given that only three of approximately 300 buildings damaged in the disorder caught fire. A mention in the New York World-Telegram highlighted the impact of that emphasis: “The charred interiors of several shops in which fires broke out added to the appearance of a war-ravaged town.” Burned buildings offered a dramatic, ultimately atypical, picture of damage resulting from the disorder. Fires became more prominent in subsequent racial disorders. More were set in Harlem in 1943, but not the dramatic fires given prominence in coverage of the disorder in Watts in 1965. Harlem’s built environment ultimately meant setting fires could harm residents as much, if not more, than white business owners. Beyond West 125th Street, multiple floors of apartments sat above businesses. Fatalities reported in four fires in Harlem at other times in 1935 made clear the risks of setting fires in stores in such buildings.
Events
Kress 5, 10 & 25c store front windows broken Around 6:15 PM, a step was set up on the sidewalk in front of the Kress 5, 10 & 25c store. A Black man climbed up, spoke briefly to the crowd of about 100 gathered there, and then had Daniel Miller, a twenty-four-year-old white man, take his place on the step. As Miller began to speak, someone threw an object through one of the store windows. A second object quickly followed, smashing another window, according to the New York Times and New York Sun. Different objects are identified as having smashed the store window. A bottle was the most common, identified in the New York Times and Home News, and more precisely a milk bottle in the New York Sun and a whiskey bottle in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and by a police inspector quoted in the Afro-American. The Daily News identified the object as a brick, as did the New York Sun in the case of the second object, while Louise Thompson described it as a stone. The MCCH report opted to simply say "a missile" hit the window. These are all everyday objects, likely close to hand on 125th Street, other than the whiskey bottle. A whiskey bottle fit with portrayals of those who attacked white businesses as hoodlums and played to racist stereotypes about African Americans, as was evident in the appearance of this detail in a list of brief items headlined "Highlights on the Harlem Front." Picketing of white-owned businesses on 125th Street by Black organizations in 1934 had not resulted in any broken windows; concern about what had become of the boy arrested at Kress' may have caused this crowd to react differently. There may also have been members of groups affiliated with the Communist Party in the crowd; when those groups picketed the Empire Cafeteria in 1934, they did break windows.

After the windows were broken, police officers moved in to arrest Miller and push people away from the store, most of whom ran across 125th Street to the opposite sidewalk. No one was arrested for breaking the window. Harry Gordon was arrested soon after trying to speak to the crowd on 125th Street east of Kress' store. A few minutes later, around 6:45 PM, three men began picketing in front of Kress' store. They too were soon arrested by police. Three to five police radio cars, an emergency [riot] truck, and six mounted policemen struggled to keep people from the store. No further objects appear to have been thrown at Kress' store front windows at this time. Soon after West 125th Street was cleared, around 7 P.M., people pushed on to 8th Avenue saw a hearse stop behind the store on West 124th Street, triggering rumors it had come to pick up the body of the boy who had been arrested, and a rush to the rear of the store that saw windows there broken.

Sustained and extensive attacks on stores on 125th Street came sometime after those rear windows were broken. Another brick hit Kress' front windows around 10:40 PM, allegedly thrown by William Ford, who then called for others on the street to attack police. Louise Thompson described a group breaking though the police cordon around 125th Street to break all but a few windows in the store, in the context of an exaggerated claim about the extent of smashed windows, and Kress' store does appear on the list of businesses with broken windows compiled by a La Prensa reporter who walked down 125th Street. But a reporter for the Afro-American wrote that the store "suffered very little loss on the front." The store manager, Jackson Smith, confirmed that later in a public hearing of the MCCH. Of the eighteen windows facing 125th Street and in the vestibule, only four were damaged. Repairs to the front of the store next day appeared to have focused on only two sections of the store window on the right side of the left entrance, in a photograph published in the New York American, and on the left side of the right entrance, where a ladder can be seen in Universal newsreel footage. Those repairs cannot have taken long. A photograph of Kress' store published in the Daily News on March 21 showed intact store windows guarded by two police officers. A sustained police presence during the disorder appeared to have protected the front of the store. That was the opinion of Channing Tobias, the fifty-three-year-old Black secretary of the Colored Division of the National Council of the YMCA, who told E. Franklin Frazier that "I guess it was because police were on guard" that Kress' store "got only a small window smashed." Police established a cordon in front of the store after it closed. Officers were still there around 10 PM, when Detective Henry Roge was hit by a rock while standing in front of the store, and after a window was broken at 10:40 PM, there were officers able to arrest William Ford. Later in the evening, the police cordon extended to cover 125th Street from 8th Avenue to Lenox Avenue, with Kress' store remaining at its center, and as the base for police responding to the disorder.

A window being smashed as a speaker began to address a crowd in front of Kress' store featured in narratives in the New York Times, New York Sun, and Home News. Only the New York Times and New York Sun mentioned the second object and smashed window. A broken window, without reference to a speaker, is reported by the Daily News, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, New York Age, and Pittsburgh Courier. No mention of a window in Kress' store being smashed at the beginning of the disorder appears in the narratives published in the New York Herald Tribune, New York Evening Journal, New York American, Daily Mirror, and New York Post, and the Afro-American reported only the damage visible the next day. In the MCCH public hearings, Inspector Di Martini, Patrolman Moran, Jackson Smith, the store manager, and Louise Thompson all discussed how the window was broken. In the MCCH's final report, the arrests of Miller and Gordon police made in the aftermath of the window being broken were included as examples of "actions on the part of the police [that] only tended to arouse resentment in the crowd."

The Kress 5, 10 & 25c store appeared in the MCCH business survey taken in the second half of 1935 and was still visible in the Tax Department photograph from 1939–1941.
Charles Alston arrested At 5:00 AM on March 20, around two hours after police reported the neighborhood streets were quiet, 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.
Police establish perimeter around Kress' store After Inspector Di Martini returned to 125th Street around 7:00 PM, he called for police reinforcements. A New York Evening Journal story celebrated the response as “the most remarkable 'military' feat in the history of the department.” That portrayal was certainly how the police department would have sought to present the deployment. However, the arrival of additional officers appears to have taken longer than the story allowed, and to have been focused on establishing a perimeter around Kress’ store. The piecemeal arrival of reinforcements made that a protracted process. As police struggled to keep crowds away from Kress' store, those clashes served to disperse crowds along the avenues rather than stopping the violence. Unable to prevent windows being broken in businesses on 125th Street, police had to guard damaged stores, limiting the officers who could be deployed on the avenues. Guards appear to have prevented looting; they did not stop additional windows being broken. After crowds broke through on to 125th Street around 10:30 PM, there are only two further incidents in that area during the remaining disorder, an alleged assault on a woman and a shooting, both at the intersection of 125th Street and 7th Avenue. Although other incidents whose timing is unknown may have occurred during that time, the evidence suggests that police perimeter held through that period.

The New York Evening Journal story lauding the police response reported “a small army of 700 police was beating back the rioters” on 125th Street between 8th and 7th Avenues. That number likely reflected the total deployment rather than the force that set up the perimeter around Kress’ store. It was in line with the number Di Martini reported to the police commissioner were in Harlem after midnight and fell between the totals reported by newspapers, with the 1,000 officers mentioned by the Daily Mirror at one extreme, and the 500 officers reported by the Home News and New York Herald Tribune representing the other end of the range. While the officers coming from beyond the local precincts went initially to 125th Street, Lt. Battle later told Langston Hughes that the reserve officers from Harlem's precincts went to their stations, on West 123rd Street and West 135th Street. Some of those officers may have been sent directly to other areas of Harlem, particularly those who arrived later in the evening.

The perimeter established by police extended from 8th to Lenox Avenues, and from 124th to 126th Streets, according to stories in the New York Times, Daily Mirror and Pittsburgh Courier, the only sources that described police deployments. While Inspector Di Martini had summoned the reinforcements, the newspapers credited that deployment to Deputy Chief Inspector McAuliffe, who commanded uniformed police in the borough of Manhattan, and would have taken over from Di Martini when he arrived around 9:00 PM. The department’s emergency trucks attracted the most attention in newspaper stories, presented as the anchors of the police cordon. Six emergency trucks were stationed at the intersection of West 125th Street and 7th Avenue in the strategy reported by the New York Times, Daily Mirror, and Pittsburgh Courier. 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.

The Emergency Services Division had succeeded the police department’s Riot Battalion in 1925. Each truck had a crew of eight officers and, in addition to rescue equipment, carried a Thompson machine gun, three Winchester rifles, and a Remington shotgun, as well as a tear gas gun, for use against "disorderly crowds." The twenty-two trucks in the department in 1935 were dispersed throughout the city. While the two located closest to 125th Street arrived relatively quickly, additional trucks would have taken significantly longer. Squad #6 was based on East 122nd Street, and had been involved in clearing shoppers from Kress’ store earlier. Squad #5, based on Amsterdam Avenue, arrived around 7:15 PM, according to Patrolman Eppler. The New York Evening Journal identified trucks as coming from Kingsbridge in the Bronx and from Coney Island at the southern end of Brooklyn, the latter apparently arriving later: “It slithered perilously over wet streets but arrived in time for its crew to get into action.” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle identified another squad from Brooklyn, Squad #16 from Herbert Street, as having crashed returning from Harlem, at 1:00 AM (a time when there was still significant disorder). Thompson did not mention the trucks. Neither did trucks appear in any of the published photographs of the disorder. Some of their crew did, identifiable because the rifles they carried — described as “riot guns” in newspapers stories and photograph captions — caused them to stand out from other police. They did not, however, have a machine gun that needed to be “set up,” as the Afro-American reported: each truck instead carried a single hand-held "Tommy gun." Nor were the trucks equipped with enough of those weapons for all the crew to have one. And there are no reports that they used tear gas. Those weapons prompted several newspapers to use martial language in stories about the squads’ activities. The New York Evening Journal story on the police reinforcements described Harlem as a “seething battleground,” and the police as “beating back the rioters in a savage and organized attack.” An emergency truck from the Bronx “leaped off the machine and tore into a crowd of window smashers” (perhaps at Herbert’s jewelry store at 125th Street and 7th Avenue, where another New York Evening Journal story described a similar scene). The Daily Mirror described emergency trucks as "being sent to the battle zone."

The other evidence of the presence of emergency trucks placed them in less warlike roles. Newspaper photographs show their crew among the officers who guarded damaged stores. A patrolman with a riot gun stands in front of Herbert’s jewelry store on northeast corner of 125th and 7th Avenue in a photograph published in the Burlington Free Press. Stories in the New York Evening Journal and New York Herald Tribune described police with riot guns guarding the store (the Daily News, New York American, and Home News described the officers simply as patrolmen). Another patrolman with a riot gun was photographed on the corner across 7th Avenue from the jewelry store. The image published in the New York Evening Journal is narrowly focused on the officer, whereas another version of that image published in the Daily Mirror shows a Black man walking past him, and the image published in the Daily News shows several Black men and women walking by on the sidewalk, evidence of the continued presence of people around 125th Street. Two additional patrolmen, one visibly carrying a rifle, stand in front of Sherloff’s jewelry store, just a few buildings north of the intersection, in an AP photograph published in the Los Angeles Times. Taken together, the images suggest that the crew of at least one Emergency Truck guarded stores at the intersection. Captain Rothengast, Patrolman Moran, and Patrolman Eppler told the MCCH that they also guarded other stores on 125th Street, including Kress’ store. A photograph published in the Daily News shows a patrolman talking through a broken window with a man inside a store on 125th Street. Again, Black men and women are visible in the background on the sidewalk in the background, their presence indicating that police had not closed the streets.

The police perimeter appears to have focused on keeping crowds off 125th Street, not individuals and small groups. In addition to those visible in photographs, Captain Rothengast described seeing "groups of people in 125th Street – no more than 250" when he arrived at Kress’ store around 8:30 PM. A story in the Home News also reported that “In an effort to keep traffic moving, police permitted pedestrians to walk through 125th St. The sidewalks on both sides of the street were crowded.” Patrolmen Moran and Eppler testified that at least some of those people approached police guarding Kress' store asking about the boy beaten in the store, encounters also described by a reporter for the Afro-American. Allowing individuals to walk along 125th Street was not incident-free: around 8:30 PM, a white man was allegedly beaten in front of Kress’ store, with police arresting James Smitten for committing the assault. About twenty minutes later, police arrested Frank Wells for breaking a window in the Willow Cafeteria. Just before 10:00 PM, Detective Roge was hit by a rock in front of Kress’ store and another patrolman injured at 124th Street and 7th Avenue. At the same time, Louise Thompson described larger groups being pushed back by police. She told a MCCH hearing she saw "one policeman throw his billy into the crowds while the mounted police were riding them down” at the corner of 125th Street and 7th Avenue between 8:00 PM and 9:00 PM, a scene similar to that captured by a photograph published in the Daily News. There is no evidence of where that photograph was taken, but a second photograph of police dispersing a group of Black men and women, the most widely reproduced photograph of the disorder, was taken at 125th Street and 7th Avenue according to the caption. It shows the island that that divided the north and south lanes on the roadway, which contained trees and were surrounded by the barriers like those visible in the photograph. A group of men and women are scattering in response to a uniformed patrolman moving toward them. One man is bent over; the caption describes him as falling down. He may also have been pushed down or hit by the patrolman; another man obstructs the view of what has happened between the two men. (One version of the caption claimed that the photographer was hit by a rock soon after taking the image, which might explain why the patrolman was trying to move the crowd.)

One of the Black men killed during the disorder, Andrew Lyons, sustained a fractured skull "during the thick of a melee at 125th street and Seventh avenue," according to the New York Amsterdam News, or a block further west at 125th Street and Lenox Avenue according to the Times Union. Police clubs may have been responsible for those injuries, but the doctors who treated Lyons recorded that had been too groggy to tell his roommate or anyone else how he had been injured. No sources mentioned police firing revolvers or rifles to try to disperse the crowds.

On at least two occasions large crowds appear to have broken through the police perimeter. Louise Thompson told a MCCH hearing that around 9:00 PM a crowd broke through on to 125th Street. The Home News also reported that incident. Store windows were broken, Young's hat store looted, and two white men and a white police detective allegedly assaulted around that time. A second crowd broke through around 10:30 PM, resulting in more windows being broken and a white man allegedly being assaulted, and police arresting four Black men.

Most of the incidents on 125th Street before 10:30 PM did not result in arrests, likely because police were heavily outnumbered by crowds and constrained by the responsibility of guarding stores. Only at Kress’ store it seems were enough officers stationed to make arrests: there arrests were made not just around 10:30 PM but also just before 10:00 PM and at 8:30 PM. There are no arrests among those with known times in the period between the arrest of the picketers in front of Kress’ store at 6:45 PM and arrests on 125th Street between 8:30 PM and 9:00 PM. There are approximately a dozen arrests made at unknown times and places that might have occurred during this time, but it is more likely that police were too outnumbered to make arrests, as Lt. Battle later told Langston Hughes. While an arrest for breaking windows was made just before 9:00 PM, police made no arrests for the assaults and broken windows reported when a crowd broke through soon after.

The police perimeter appears to have held after 10:30 PM. Sometime before then, no later than 10:00 PM, and likely as early as between 8:30 PM and 9:00 PM, groups had moved on from 125th Street to attack businesses on 8th Avenue and 7th Avenue, and later, Lenox Avenue. In response, police began to disperse across Harlem, driving along those streets in radio cars and taking up positions on street corners and guarding damaged stores. Exactly when the first police were sent beyond 125th Street is not clear. The first arrest made away from 125th Street, on West 127th Street between St. Nicholas and 8th Avenues around 9:00 PM, appears to have been made by a patrolman on his way to 125th Street rather than being deployed elsewhere in Harlem. The arrest of Leroy Brown around 9:45 PM on 7th Avenue between 127th and 128th Streets is clearer evidence of a spreading police presence.

With the MCCH giving limited attention to this period of the disorder, witnesses who testified at their hearings did not provide the details they do of the earlier police response. Newspaper reporters and photographers were on 125th Street during this time, so would have seen some of these events and been able to obtain information from police. Inspector Di Martini spoke with a group of reporters, including one from the Afro-American during this time. At the same time, those reporters would have had a limited view. The block was too long for those at one intersection to see the details of what was happening at the other intersection, or even for those at Kress' store to clearly see the nearby intersection with 8th Avenue. At the corner of 125th Street and 7th Avenue the Afro-American's reporter saw only "little knots of people on the corner"; "once he walked on, however, he found high police officials and the first detail of 500 extra policemen rushed to the area" and "a large number of people between Seventh and Eighth Avenues." It is unsurprising then that newspaper stories offer only general and fragmented accounts of this period of the disorder. Information on specific events comes from legal records, which are limited largely to the period around 10:00 PM when police made arrests, and narrowly focused on the actions of a single arresting officer.
Looting without arrest (38) 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.)

(In the map, black borders indicate the locations where police arrested individuals for looting). 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.)
Harry Lash's 5 and 10c store looted and set on fire Around 11:15 PM, Harry Lash closed his 5c & 10c store at 400 Lenox Avenue, on the southeast corner of West 130th Street. He likely then went home to his residence at 536 West 178th Street, north of Harlem in Washington Heights. Wherever he was, Lash apparently got news of the disorder in Harlem and returned to the store around two hours later, at approximately 1:20 AM, according to the affidavit he gave later that day in the Magistrates Court. He found the store windows broken, fixtures damaged, and "general merchandise" valued at $1,000 missing. Display windows that ran the length of the side of the store that faced West 130th Street, as well as those that faced Lenox Avenue, could be seen smashed in the Associated Press photograph published in the New York Sun. Significant damage to the window displays was also visible. However, large amounts of merchandise could be seen still inside the store, indicating limits to the scale of the looting. Lash's store was in the heart of the blocks of Lenox Avenue north of West 125th Street where reported looting was concentrated. Disorder continued in this area after the time Lash returned to his store.

The store windows were likely broken and merchandise taken starting around 11:30 PM and continuing until Lash returned to the store. The rear of Lash's store on West 130th Street had also been set on fire, by a "group of 35 blacks...soon after midnight," according to the New York Herald Tribune. That crowd "tried to prevent policeman from sounding an alarm - 'let it burn' they shouted," the report continued. "When firemen came, they hindered them too, bustling about hydrants and shoving hose lines about - when firemen threatened to turn the hose on them, they dispersed." Some of those details also appeared in the New York Evening Journal, but its story combined the fire and those at 429 and 431 Lenox Avenue two blocks to north: “As detectives and uniformed men closed in on crowds surrounding the burning buildings, they met with resistance. 'Let them burn. Let them burn.' The shout was taken up by hundreds, and it was not until firemen threatened to turn hoselines on the rioting men and women that they dispersed.” An entire block separated the two locations, too far for a single crowd to be involved. Both the number of police and the size of the crowd were larger in the New York Evening Journal story, which repeated and gave more prominence to the crowd's alleged chant, “Let them burn." The New York Herald Tribune characterized the crowd as having "hindered" firefighters because some individuals who pressed forward to see the fire got in their way. The New York Evening Journal more sensationally characterized the crowd's behavior as "resistance." Those differences and characterizations were in keeping with how that publication sensationalized and exaggerated the actions of Black crowds.

An ACME agency photograph published in the Daily News showed flames in the last section of the store window on West 130th Street. Firefighters could be seen crouched in front of the window (they were cropped out of the version published in the Daily News). They appeared to have quickly extinguished the fire. Only one small section at the rear of the store, on West 130th Street furthest from Lenox Avenue, looked to be burned in an Associated Press photograph. A Home News reporter’s assessment that “damage from the fires was not great” fit that image. There were no other newspaper stories or photographs of this fire, but it attracted the attention of newsreel cameramen. Some of the limited footage from the night of the disorder showed the fire burning in the store and firefighters crossing in front of the camera. No bystanders were visible. Cameramen returned the next day to shoot footage of the burned section of the building both from Lenox Avenue, and, for the Universal newsreel, West 130th Street by the fire-damaged section looking toward Lenox Avenue. Debris was visible on the sidewalk in front of the fire-damaged section in the footage from Lenox Avenue. Several Black men and women walked by the store in the footage from West 130th Street.

Lash's store was misidentified in several sources including the caption to the Associated Press photograph in the New York Sun: headed "Harlem Rioters Break Every Window in Radio Store," it read "Not a pane of glass was left unbroken in this West 125th Street establishment. The Harlem Church of the Air on the second floor escaped raiders." The New York Herald Tribune also described the store as a Raffer's Radio store. Some of the confusion resulted from the large sign on the store advertising Raffer's Radio Service. By the time the Tax Department photograph was taken between 1939 and 1941, that sign had been changed to read "Harry's 5 and 10c Store." The details of the windows and the shape of the sign in the Associated Press photograph matched those in the Tax Department photograph. Signs for the You Pray for Me Church of the Air visible in the second story windows confirmed that match. Sister Rosa Horn's Pentecostal Church occupied the upper floors of the building spanning 392-400 Lenox Avenue by September 1932, remaining there for several decades. Additionally, the Acme agency caption and the caption published by the Afro-American identified the store as being on Lenox Avenue. The Daily News and New York Herald Tribune captions of the photograph of the store on fire mistakenly located it at 128th Street and Lenox Avenue, but the windows matched the distinctive details of Lash's store, as did the presence of the Hope Wo Chinese Hand Laundry next to the store. A Chinese laundry appeared in the MCCH business survey at 68 West 130th Street, and the sign that was visible in the newspaper photograph could be seen in the Tax Department photograph.

Around 1:50 AM, an arrest for looting the store was made five blocks to the east, on the Third Avenue Bridge connecting the eastern end of West 130th Street in Harlem with the Bronx. Patrolman Louis Frikser observed a Black man, nineteen-year-old Arnold Ford, "walking across the bridge with a package," according to the details provided in the Probation Department investigation. Ford was likely going home; he lived just three blocks beyond the bridge, at 246 East 136th Street in the Bronx. The package he carried cannot have been large as it contained "soap, garters, thread and notions" with a value of $1.15. According to Frikser, Ford admitted being part of a group of men who had entered Lash's store and stolen goods. Later, Ford made clear that he had not broken the store windows but only joined others entering the store and "helping himself to some merchandise." "A few minutes later" the officer stopped a second man crossing the bridge from Harlem, Joseph Moore, a forty-six-year-old West Indian carpenter, and also arrested him for looting Lash's store. None of the reports of this case described what caused Frikser to stop Moore or what he found in his possession. Like Ford, Moore was likely returning home; he lived next door to Ford, at 248 East 136th Street in the Bronx. Only seven other men are identified in the sources as having been arrested away from the stores they allegedly looted, a group making up one third (9/27) of the arrests for which that information is known (27/60).

Police charged both Ford and Moore with burglary in the Harlem Magistrate Court. Subsequently they were indicted by the grand jury and tried in the Court of General Sessions. During the trial on April 1, Ford pled guilty to petit larceny. Moore, however, was acquitted at the direction of the judge, an outcome for which the Daily Worker gave credit to the International Labor Defense lawyers who appeared for him. Ford was the only individual of the ten men convicted in the Court of General Sessions as a result of the disorder placed on probation rather than incarcerated. He remained under supervision under April 1938.

Police also arrested a third man for looting who likely also allegedly took merchandise from Lash's store. Lash was recorded as the complainant when Milton Ackerman, a twenty-four year old Black man, was arraigned in the Harlem Magistrate's Court on March 20. According to the New York Times, Ackerman was charged with "taking two rolls of paper, worth 5 cents, and 8 cents' worth of napkins from a Lenox Avenue store." It seems likely Lash's store at 400 Lenox Avenue was the location referred to in the story, especially given that Ackerman lived at 33 West 130th Street, only a few buildings east of that store. Lash's other store in Harlem was at 2530 8th Avenue, near the corner of West 135th Street, not on Lenox Avenue. There was no mention of where or when police arrested Ackerman.

Ackerman returned to the Magistrate's Court on March 25, when the charges against him were dismissed as he had been indicted by the grand jury, and he was held on $1000 Bail. Three days later he appeared in the Court of General Sessions, where Judge Donnellan dismissed the indictment and released him. Neither of the sources for that outcome, the 28th Precinct Police blotter and the New York Times, provided any explanation for the judge's decision.
Police response The police response to events inside Kress’ store slowly escalated, initially involving several patrolmen on post near the store, then reserves in radio cars, mounted officers, and an emergency truck, led by increasingly senior officers, Sergeant Bauer, then Inspector Di Martini (who commanded four precincts that made up the 6th Division). After Kress' store closed, a small group of officers remained to guard the front and rear entrances. Approximately fifteen officers were present on 125th Street in front of the store when Daniel Miller and then Harry Gordon attempted to speak. The arrests of those men followed police practice of singling out the leaders of a crowd, but came at the cost of reducing the number of officers guarding the store. When the crowd moved to the rear of the store, those officers called for help. Inspector Di Martini returned, and called for further reinforcements, likely in response to attacks on stores on 125th Street. Additional emergency trucks were sent, either three or four, as well as radio cars, uniformed officers, and plainclothes detectives. Estimates of the total number of police ranged from 500 to 1,000 men. Around 9:00 PM, Deputy Chief Inspector McAuliffe, commander of uniformed officers in Manhattan, took charge. The arriving police forces concentrated first on establishing a perimeter around 125th Street. Later, officers were dispersed throughout neighborhood, with radio cars patrolling the avenues, and Emergency trucks likely dispatched to outbreaks of violence. Stories in the New York World-Telegram, New York Herald Tribune, Home News, Norfolk Journal and Guide, Afro-American, and the MCCH report, described police as struggling to contain small groups that reformed soon after police scattered them. Nonetheless, police deployed in Harlem made at least 128 arrests. Officers also killed at least two Black men, Lloyd Hobbs and James Thompson. In the process, at least nine patrolmen and detectives suffered injuries.

Police officers already present on West 125th Street were the first to respond to events inside Kress’ store. Patrolman Donahue and his partner Patrolmen Keel saw three men struggling with Lino Rivera. At least one other officer, a Black officer named Miller, joined those two men. Keel and Miller must have remained outside the store, perhaps trying to move on the crowds that Donahue reporting seeing in line with police practice at the time, as neither are mentioned as having been involved inside Kress’ store. While Donahue left at 3:30 PM via the front entrance after he released Rivera, the store manager found only Miller on West 125th Street when he sought help sometime before 4:00 PM. Looking for police on post was how New Yorkers had traditionally sought their assistance. Miller must have left for the 4:00 PM shift change, as he was not mentioned again. Patrolman Timothy Shannon likely replaced Miller on West 125th Street, as he was in the store at 4:00 PM.

After twenty minutes in the store, Patrolman Shannon called for help, in the form of radio cars. In 1935, the Radio Motor Patrol, which worked sectors of 15–20 blocks, served as police reserves. Each car carried two officers. They were not yet equipped with two-way radios, so three cars were typically dispatched to each call to ensure that at least one responded. Shannon did not specify how many officers responded to his call. They clearly had little impact in dispersing the customers, as within minutes of their arrival Smith, the store manager, was telephoning the police for more help. A call to Police Headquarters was the means of seeking police assistance being promoted in the 1930s. Police responded by sending a sergeant to take control of the scene. According to the store manager, Sergeant Bauer soon told him that he did not know what to do. The manager then telephoned again, asking for enough officers to clear the store so he could close it. Additional officers were sent; the New York American reported that "About 40 radio patrolmen and detectives — the first major force to arrive — stamped into the store and cleared it" (although the story mistakenly claimed those officers cleared the store later, after it had been stormed by crowds from the street). The New York Herald Tribune reported three radio cars and an emergency truck arrived to help clear the store, which would have amounted to fourteen additional police. The Emergency Services Division had succeeded the police department’s Riot Battalion in 1925, with twenty-two trucks distributed around the city in 1935. Each truck had a crew of eight officers, equipped with a Thompson machine gun, three Winchester rifles, and a Remington shotgun, as well as a tear gas gun, for use against "disorderly crowds." Such incidents represented a very small part of the work of those squads, only 1.49% (100 of 6725) of the cases in which the squads were involved in 1935 according to the department's Annual Report. One arrest was made as the store was cleared, of Margaret Mitchell by Detective Johnson, confirming the presence of officers in plainclothes. Detectives in radio cars also served as reserves at this time.

Kress' store had been cleared and closed by the time Inspector Di Martini arrived at 5:40 PM. Although he told a MCCH hearing that he saw no “indications of further trouble" and left at 6:00 PM, the inspector did station "Sergeant Bauer, two foot policeman, one mounted policeman in the rear to prevent a riot.” Additional officers remained in front of the store, likely the "15 patrolmen, six mounted police and uniformed men of five radio cars" that the New York Evening Journal reported were present when Di Martini returned around 7:15 PM. Those officers focused on preventing a crowd from forming in in front of the store, moving along any who stopped, likely using their nightsticks. Although outnumbered by the crowds, the police followed their practice of arresting those they perceived to be leaders in an attempt to disperse the crowd. In this case, they arrested two white men who tried to speak to the crowds gathered on 125th Street and then two white men and a Black man who picketed in front of the store. Those arrests also brought police reinforcements. By the time Inspector Di Martini returned, some of the people police had pushed off 125th Street onto 8th Avenue had moved to 124th Street and attacked the rear of Kress' store. Two officers were injured as police dispersed that crowd. As police worked to keep 125th Street clear, mounted patrolmen played a prominent role, riding on sidewalks to clear crowds. While their efforts and those of officers patrolling the street swinging nightsticks kept the crowds moving, they did not prevent windows being broken in stores the length of the block between 8th and 7th Avenues. Only when reinforcements from other precincts began arriving around 8:00 PM were police able to start establishing a perimeter around 125th Street.

Several hundred police officers from surrounding precincts arrived on 125th Street around Kress' store, with Deputy Chief Inspector McAuliffe, who commanded uniformed police in the borough of Manhattan, taking charge around 9:00 PM. The six emergency trucks were given the most attention in newspaper accounts. They were stationed at several intersections to anchor the police cordon, with members of their crews, identifiable by the rifles — "riot guns" — they carried photographed guarding damaged stores around the intersection of 125th Street and 7th Avenue. The need to guard businesses continued to limit how many police could be deployed to control crowds, as police continued to focus on preventing large groups from forming or moving onto the block of 125th Street containing Kress' store, with mounted patrolmen and nightsticks again prominent. They did let individuals and small groups walk along the sidewalk. Further damage to store windows in this area was limited by the increased numbers of police, with additional windows broken seemingly only on two occasions when crowds broke through the police cordon, around 9:00 PM and again around 10:30 PM. Police made at least four arrests on that second occasion, but none are recorded around the time of the earlier incident. It could be that there were still insufficient police to make arrests at 9:00 PM, or that those arrested are among those for which there is no information on timing. Sometime between those two clashes, groups began to move away from 125th Street and direct their attacks at businesses and white individuals they encountered on 8th, 7th, and later Lenox Avenues. In response, police began to be deployed beyond 125th Street.

Rather than concentrating on a specific location, the crowds beyond 125th Street came together in smaller groups, scattering when police appeared and reforming when they departed. They ranged over an area too large for police to guard with any sort of cordon. Instead, police responded to calls, patrolled the streets in radio cars, and took up positions at some locations. Unlike earlier in the disorder, they encountered looting, which officers regarded as a serious enough offense to warrant shooting at alleged offenders. Police fatally shot two Black men allegedly caught looting, and likely shot and wounded several others. They also made more arrests during this period of the disorder than earlier, with almost half of the arrests with information on timing occurring between 11:00 PM and 2:00 AM. However, the gunfire and arrests did not prevent widespread damage and looting. More than one hundred business owners cited a lack of police protection when they sued the city for failing to protect their property from the disorder. By 4:00 AM, Deputy Chief Inspector McAuliffe claimed the streets were quiet. There were three incidents an hour later involving radio cars patrolling 8th and Lenox Avenues, including the fatal shooting of James Thompson.

While police reserves from outside Harlem were sent home, a large force of police was on Harlem's streets on March 20, and additional police were present in the neighborhood for several more weeks, including numbers of detectives in plainclothes.
Events
Police deploy beyond 125th Street “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.
Black women arrested for looting (3) Three Black women were among the sixty individuals arrested for looting. They represent just under half of the women arrested, with three women arrested for breaking windows and another woman for inciting a crowd. (No women identified as white are among those reported as arrested during the disorder.) Few details of their arrests and alleged actions are recorded. Loyola Williams appeared only in the lists of those arrested for burglary; there is no evidence that she was prosecuted. Elizabeth Tai and Elva Jacobs were both charged with taking groceries, although the outcomes of their prosecutions suggest that neither actually had any merchandise in their possession. A district attorney reduced the charge against Tai to disorderly conduct, which suggested a lack of evidence of breaking in to a business or taking items. In Jacobs' case, a district attorney reduced the charge to unlawful entry, which suggested she had been arrested in a store, but without any items in her possession. Those reduced charges indicated that police could only provide evidence that the women were part of crowds on the streets not that they participated in looting.

The presence of Black women in the crowds on Harlem’s streets was recorded in most accounts of the disorder, but they are only rarely mentioned as participants in attacks on stores or looting. The Daily News, New York Evening Journal, New York Times, and Norfolk Journal and Guide all included women and men in their general descriptions of the crowds. (The Daily News highlighted their presence among those who broke windows in a headline, “Women Join Mob of 4,000 In Battering Stores,” without mentioning women breaking windows in the story itself.) Other papers such as the New York American, Home News, New York Sun, New York World-Telegram, and the Black newspapers the Afro-American and Chicago Defender included women only in the initial crowds inside and outside Kress’ store. Their presence at the outbreak of violence distinguishes the disorder in Harlem from those that followed in subsequent decades, in which Marilynn Johnson argues women became involved after men had initiated the violence. Women's early involvement in Harlem resulted from the disorder beginning in a store, at a time when only women were present to witness what happened to Lino Rivera. (Women are not mentioned in stories about the events of the disorder published in the New York Herald Tribune, New York Post, or New York Age.)

Women were specifically reported as participants in looting in only four newspapers. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle's general description of the disorder included "looting stores" among other activities of "Bands of men and women, in some cases joined by whites." When the Daily Mirror’s narrative reached the time when “Looters began to clean out the goods on display in the stores whose windows had been broken,” it noted “Both men and women were doing the looting.” In the Black press, the Atlanta World broadly included women in crowds that looted in a similar manner: “the members of the mob needed little provocation to start on the rampage. Using whatever weapons that were to hand, men, women and children in the mob broke hundreds of plate glass windows in stores belonging to white merchants, scattered and stole merchandise and destroyed fixtures.” Rather than a general presence among looters, women appeared just in a crowd looting Herbert's Blue Diamond Jewelry store in the New York Evening Journal: “The emergency squad police swept into the mob with riot guns, drove the yelling, threatening men and women from their loot and then guarded the store until armored trucks could remove the valuables.” However, other sources indicate that Herbert’s was not looted, but only had its windows broken, by the crowds that had gathered early in the disorder across the street around Kress’s store — crowds that multiple sources record included women. (The New York Evening Journal story also presented women as participating in an attack on a white man, B.Z. Kondoul, and in efforts to prevent firefighters from extinguishing a fire in a store on Lenox Avenue.)

Rather than participants, women were presented as instigators by Roi Ottley in his column in the New York Amsterdam News: “LENOX AVENUE was the scene of much of the disorder during that riotous fracas...From every shattered window rioters would emerge laden down with spoils...Women stood on the fringes of the mobs and dictated their choice to their men folk, who willingly obliged by bringing forth the desired article.” (Ottley also cast women as inciting the disorder more generally, also from greater distance, in an earlier column: “Women hanging out of windows screamed applause to the reign of terror...and prodded their men-folk on with screeching invectives.”) Those images are somewhat at odds with the agency displayed by the women shopping in Kress' store and may reflect Ottley's attitudes to women as much as their behavior during the disorder.

While these stories, and the photographs that accompanied them, indicate that women were part of the crowds on March 19, it remains unclear whether those women did not participate in looting or did and were not recorded by reporters or arrested by police focused on men they likely considered more threatening. From a broader perspective more removed from the events of the disorder, the MCCH appears to have concluded that women did participate, noting in its report: "Even some grown-up men and women who had probably never committed a criminal act before, but bad suffered years of privations, seized the opportunity to express their resentment against discrimination in employment and the exclusive rights of property." However, this section of the report was part of an effort to frame looting as less violent and threatening than it appeared in the initial newspaper stories. While noting that "it seems indisputable that the criminal element took advantage of the disorders," the previous sentence argued, "it seems equally true that many youngsters who could not be classed as criminals joined the looting crowds in a spirit of pure adventure." An earlier discussion of crowds in the disorder made a similar claim, that "Some of the destruction was carried on in a playful spirit. Even the looting, which has furnished many an amusing tale, was sometimes done in the spirit of children taking preserves from a closet to which they have accidentally found the key." Including women as participants in "playful" behavior did not run counter to gender roles and stereotypes in the way that their participation in violence did. The only other place women appear in the MCCH report's discussion of the events of the disorder is as shoppers in Kress' store.

By the time disorder broke out again in Harlem in 1943, when the police recorded attacks on businesses and looting systematically in a way that they had not been in 1935, the press associated looting with Black women, a representation that would intensify in subsequent decades. Harold Orlans' contemporary study of newspaper stories about the 1943 racial disorder and Laurie Leach's more recent analysis both note the attention given to Black women. Photographs of women participating in attacks on stores and being arrested for looting appeared on the front pages of both of Harlem's Black newspapers, the New York Amsterdam News and the New York Age, when they first reported the disorder in 1943. One striking image on the front page of the New York Amsterdam News a week later, which also appeared in Life magazine, could be seen as in line with the reading of women's behavior as playful advanced in 1935. Historian Sara Blair described the image as featuring "an attractive young woman [who] smiles openly at the camera, part of a group of style-conscious women balancing boxes of hosiery and other consumer goods (one shopping bag is emblazoned with the logo “Modesse”) as they are escorted by police." She explains the woman's unselfconscious engagement with the camera as reflecting a participation in a social spectacle, a performative response to being photographed, that marked the new visual culture emerging in this period. The figure of the Black woman looter would take a more threatening form in white reporting and photography of the 1967 riots, as "greedy" and "criminal and culpable," as Kevin Mumford insightfully unpacked in his study of Newark in 1967.
Kress 5, 10 & 25c store rear windows broken When police officers pushed people away from the front of S. H. Kress' store and off West 125th Street after someone threw objects that broke the store's front windows, some ended up on 8th Avenue and West 124th Street. Around 7:00 PM, a hearse stopped on 124th Street near the rear of the S. H. Kress' store, located about a third of the way along the block to the east, attracting the attention of members of the crowd. A woman saw the vehicle, according to reports in the New York Times, New York Sun, and New York Herald Tribune. She called out "There’s the hearse come to take the boy’s body out of the store,” according to New York Times and New York Sun, and "It's come to get the dead child," according to the New York Herald Tribune. While there were many Black women inside and outside the store, singling out one fit the emphasis in the narratives published by those newspapers on the hysterical nature of the crowds: the New York Herald Tribune described the woman who called out as "excitable;" the New York Times reported that she "shrilled;" while in the New York Sun "her piercing scream lifted itself above the hoarse shouts of the mob," with the result that other people were "Incited." The outcry is more generalized in the New York Evening Journal, in line with its more explicitly racist narrative. That story claimed that "the Negroes were worked up to such a frenzy that they did not realize [the arrival of the hearse] was simply a coincidence. The cry went up 'They've killed him! They've killed him! They're taking him away in a hearse!'" No one arrested during the disorder was identified as being charged with inciting the crowd.

Whether they saw the hearse as evidence of the fate of the boy arrested in the S. H. Kress store or responded to shouts making that connection, people moved to the rear of the store. Those at the rear of the store may have found further reason to think the boy had come to harm when they found the store lights on and men moving around inside, workmen repairing displays and counters damaged earlier, according to the New York Herald Tribune and New York American. Or members of the crowd moved directly to renew the attack on the store begun on West 125th Street, as reported in the New York Times, New York Evening Journal, and Times Union. Or the crowd gathered at the rear of the store was joined by "a number of colored persons, believed to be inmates of the Salvation Army located on 124th Street, west of 7th Avenue,...[who] began throwing stones," as Inspector Di Martini wrote in a report to the Police Commissioner the next day. (The Salvation Army operated a hostel for homeless men at that location.) One result was that windows in the rear of S. H. Kress' store were broken.

An "L" shaped building that spanned the width of the block between 125th and 124th Streets, S. H. Kress' store had twice as much storefront on West 124th Street as it had facing 125th Street. There were retail counters in the wider rear section of the store, and basement exits out on to West 124th Street (Lino Rivera had been released through one). Windows also faced 124th Street, but no images have been found that show their size and extent. Whatever their extent, more windows in the rear of the store appear to have been broken than in the front. Compared to the "very little loss on the front," a reporter for the Afro-American described "the windows in the rear showed signs of the stone and whiskey bottle barrage." Similarly, the New York Age reported "a plate glass window in the front of the store was smashed, while the back part of the building suffered several broken windows." Without the comparison, the Times Union reported similar damage, "the store's rear windows were smashed," as did the New York Times less precisely, noting "Stones were hurled through windows." With typical exaggeration, both the Home News and New York Herald Tribune claimed all the rear windows were shattered.

Windows were possibly not the only target of objects thrown on West 124th Street. Police officers had been stationed at the store's rear entrance earlier in the evening. Together with officers who followed the crowds from 8th Avenue, police once again tried to clear them from the street. Two mounted patrolmen were part of that group, according to Joe Taylor, the leader of the Young Liberators. Unlike on West 125th Street earlier, objects struck police officers. At least two officers suffered injuries that required an ambulance. Patrolman Michael Kelly was hit on the right leg by a rock and Detective Charles Foley was hit on the shoulder by a stone. Officers trying to push crowds away from the rear of the store could have been hit by objects thrown at the windows, but white newspapers reported in sensational terms that police were the targets. "A barrage of missiles fell on the ranks of police," according to the New York Times, while the New York Herald Tribune described a more dramatic scene in which "Negroes showered [police] with miscellaneous missiles from roofs, hallways and other hiding places." News of the hearse's appearance and renewed police clashes with crowds on the street spread to people gathered on 8th Avenue, and windows in other stores on 125th Street began to be smashed. Despite these attacks, police appear to have cleared the crowd from 124th Street within a few minutes. When Emergency Truck #5 arrived on the block around 7:15 PM, Patrolman Henry Eppler told a MCCH hearing that "everything was quiet," which led to the truck relocating to 125th Street.

Several newspapers made no mention of broken windows in the rear of S. H. Kress' store. A hearse appears in most of those narratives, provoking generalized reactions from the crowds on the street. It served to "fire the crowd" in the Afro-American's narrative, and in stories in the Home News and New York Post, although in the white newspapers crowds see the vehicle on West 124th Street before the speakers try to address the crowd, a different chronology. The New York Sun described the crowd moving directly to attacks on police and stores and looting. The hearse appears in front of the store, not at its rear, in the Daily Mirror. And it is mentioned as appearing in the area without mention of a specific location in the Atlanta World and in an ANP story published in both the Atlanta World and Pittsburgh Courier. Neither broken windows in the rear of Kress' store nor a hearse are features of the narratives in the Daily News and New York World-Telegram, and are likewise missing from Louise Thompson's account (she was on 125th Street when the rear windows were broken).
Herbert's Blue Diamond Jewelry store windows broken Herbert's Blue Diamond Jewelry store on the northeast corner of 125th Street and 7th Avenue had windows broken in the early hours of the disorder, beginning after police drove crowds on 125th Street toward 7th Avenue after 8:00 PM. Just how much damage the store suffered the store suffered is uncertain. "One brick was thrown through the window," the New York American reported, while the New York Post and New York Evening Journal reported windows on just one side of the store had been smashed, and the New York Herald Tribune that two windows were broken. The most damage was reported in an interview with Bernard Newman, the store manager, published in the Daily News. He claimed that fourteen "big show case windows" were broken. However, despite being attributed to the manager, the accuracy of that claim is questionable as the story also reported Newman as saying that "the mob jumped in the windows and scrambled for the jewelry," taking at least "Several thousand dollars worth" of merchandise. No other newspaper reported such looting; they all reported to the contrary that the store was not looted. "No attempt was made to loot the windows," according to the New York Herald Tribune, a statement echoed by the Home News. There was nothing to loot, in the New York American's story, as clerks had removed the display from the window. It was police arriving that prevented looting, according to the New York Evening Journal, describing the scene in typically sensational terms, "The emergency squad police swept into the mob with riot guns, drove the yelling, threatening men and women from their loot, and then guarded the store until armored trucks could remove the valuables." Newman was "deeply impressed with the police by the way they handled the situation in the vicinity of the store on the night of the riot," he told a MCCH investigator two months after the disorder, adding weight to the evidence that they did protect the store from being looted.

Two photographs show a smashed window and empty display that is likely a section of the windows of Herbert's Blue Diamond Jewelry store. Both show the same section of the window; in one there was a white man with his back to the camera looking in the window. The store was identified as a jewelry store by the captions to both photographs, and several bracelets and a pearl necklace can be seen on the back row of the display in the image that includes the white man (no example of that image being published has been found; it is part of the Bettman collection).
Embed from Getty Images

Only the caption of the photograph in the Afro-American gave a location for the store, on Lenox Avenue, so not at the address of Herbert's store. However, compelling details in the photograph point to Herbert's, namely the distinctive panels beneath the windows, which are visible in the Tax Department photographs of the store, most clearly in the section visible in the photograph of the building to the store's north on 7th Avenue. Mistakenly locating the store on Lenox Avenue, as the caption appears to have done, also occurred a story in the New York Evening Journal, quoting the manager. The Afro-American photo caption also reported that items had been taken from the store window, but did not use the term looting, instead describing merchandise "scattered in all directions" rather than taken. The image itself could equally well fit with the displays having been emptied by clerks, as several other newspapers reported, as with having been looted.

Whenever they arrived, police "were stationed in front of the store for the night," as the Home News put it, one of the few stores identified as receiving such protection. One patrolman standing in front of the store appears in a image taken by a photographer for World Wide Photos, published in the Burlington Free Press and several other newspapers. While the caption did not identify the store, the distinctive panels that decorated the exterior below the windows are visible behind the officer. He was armed with a "riot gun," a rifle, rather than pistols regularly carried by police. Additional officers may have guarded other sections of the storefront. Four patrolmen with riot guns guarded the store in a New York Evening Journal story, three patrolmen in the Daily News, while the New York American and Home News reported two policemen guarded the store, and the New York Herald Tribune did not specify how many "police with riot guns." (Only the Afro-American mentioned police setting up "machine guns to prepare for pitched battle," weapons that were not part of police equipment). Clashes between those policemen and crowds are mentioned only by Bernard Newman, interviewed in the Daily News:
It looked for a while, according to Newman, as though the mob would crash the doors and pillage the store, despite three policemen with drawn guns who guarded the entrance. "We waited near the rear, ready to barricade ourselves in the cellar," Newman continued breathlessly, "but by some miracle the doors held."
In other reports, the police presence less dramatically deterred crowds from approaching the store windows. Police "patrolled in front of the building," in the New York Herald Tribune's account, "Their armament effectively preventing attack by looters," according to the New York American. A second patrolman with a riot gun was photographed guarding another store at the intersection of 7th Avenue and West 125th Street, likely the United Cigar Store across 7th Avenue from Herbert's Blue Diamond Jewelry on the northwest corner of 125th Street. Notwithstanding the police guards, no one arrested for breaking windows, or looting, was charged with targeting the jewelry store.

However many windows were broken, multiple rocks were apparently thrown at the store, as Newman displayed a collection of rocks to reporters from the New York Evening Journal, New York Post, and Daily News, the latter publishing a photograph of them. The United Cigar Store and the businesses on the other corners were also targeted during the disorder; Regal Shoes on the southeast corner was also reported looted, while the United Cigar Store on the northwest corner and the branch of the Chock Full O'Nuts restaurant chain on the southwest corner only had windows broken. Only three stores with broken windows are reported on West 125th Street east of 7th Avenue, suggesting that most of the crowd instead went north and south on the avenue, where there were multiple reports of looting and assaults, including the looting of another jewelry store, owned by Jack Sherloff, opposite Herbert's store by the Alhambra Theatre.

The broken windows in Herbert's Blue Diamond Jewelry store were more widely and extensively reported by the white press than any other damaged business. The prominent location of the business likely contributed to that coverage, as did the apparent willingness of the store manager, Bernard Newman, to speak with reporters.

The jewelry store is recorded at the address in the MCCH business survey in the second half of 1935 and is visible in the Tax Department photograph from sometime between 1939 and 1941.
Assaults on police (9) Nine police officers were among those reported as injured, six hit by objects thrown at them. One was attacked by an individual likely from the same crowds that threw objects at police. Two officers were injured making arrests, one hit by a shot from his own gun while attempting to apprehend a suspected looter, the other allegedly hit by a man who grabbed his baton. Assaults of police making arrests also occurred at other times in 1935; police being hit by objects did not. Six of the assaults occurred early in the disorder, two in front of Kress' store, two at the store's rear entrance, and two when police tried to establish a perimeter around Kress’ store. Only two assaults occurred after 10:00 PM, when the crowd broke up and smaller groups spread north and south on Harlem’s avenues, suggesting that the later disorder did not involve the same violence directed at police. There is no evidence of when the other assault, rocks thrown at a detective's car as he drove along 8th Avenue, took place. (This total excludes an incident in which newspapers reported four men allegedly shot at an unidentified police officer on Lenox Avenue and 138th Street as the men were charged merely with "annoying," not any form of violence, and acquitted of even that charge.)

Most of the assaults on police occurred when the disorder was focused on Kress’ store and 125th Street, where large crowds gathered and police struggled to disperse them. Although police several times succeeded in moving crowds away from Kress’ and off the roadway of 125th Street, there were too few officers to hold and control the crowds until after 10:00 PM. As 125th Street and 7th and 8th Avenues were major thoroughfares accommodating buses and streetcars, they had wide roadways, with two lanes of traffic traveling in each direction, as well as wide pavements. That created significant distances between police and crowds when officers set up cordons in front of Kress’ store and at the intersections of 125th Street and the avenues. As a result, much of the violence directed against police came in the form of objects thrown at them. Patrolman Michael Kelly was hit on the right leg by a stone around 7:00 PM behind Kress’ store, where police had followed a crowd drawn there by the appearance of a hearse. Kelly's injury was serious enough that he was taken to Harlem Hospital for an x-ray and observation. Detective Charles Foley was hit on the left shoulder, possibly suffering a fracture, a few minutes after the assault on Kelly, also at the rear of Kress’ store on 124th Street. This incident was the only time police and crowds clashed away from a major thoroughfare, on a narrower cross street that exposed officers to objects thrown from roofs as well as from the street level. Two hours later, around 9:00 PM, Detective William Boyle was treated on 125th Street for injuries “received while attempting to rescue an unknown white man being assaulted at scene of riot.” None of these officers suffered the head injuries that predominated among the civilians who sought medical treatment during the disorder.

Two other officers were assaulted several hours later, around 10:00 PM, after additional reinforcements arrived and police tried to establish a cordon and disperse crowds on 7th Avenue and 8th Avenue. Detective Henry Roge was hit by a rock allegedly thrown by James Hughes as he stood in front of Kress' store just after police had cleared 125th Street. Unusually, Roge’s partner claimed that as there were no other objects being thrown at the time, he was able to see who threw the rock and apprehend the man, James Hughes. Roge himself had been hit in the head and was bleeding profusely. The New York Evening Journal published two different photographs of a bleeding Roge being helped by a uniformed officer, one on the scene at 125th Street and the other somewhere inside, the only images of injured police published. While Hughes later pled guilty to misdemeanor assault, the presiding judge believed his target had been the store windows, not the police officer, and sentenced him to only three months in the Workhouse.

Around the same time, someone hit Patrolman Charles Robbins over the head with an iron bar, or a brick in some accounts. Being hit by a weapon, not a thrown object, involved an assailant in close proximity. Treated at 124th Street and 7th Avenue, Robbins had likely been involved in efforts to keep crowds from 125th Street. Images of police trying to hold back crowds show officers moving into the midst of groups of people, potentially exposing themselves to attacks such as Robbins suffered — and allowing their assailants to disappear into the crowd before they could be apprehended. However, it should be noted that in both the images, it is police officers who are wielding weapons or moving against the crowd, not the other way around. The caption to one photo also indicates that objects were thrown from the crowd at such moments: a Daily News photographer was hit on the head soon after taking the photo.

One of the two arrests in which a police officer was allegedly assaulted came at the very beginning of the disorder. When Patrolman Irwin Young and several other officers arrested Harry Gordon, a twenty-year-old white man, after he tried to speak to the crowds in front of Kress' store, Young alleged Gordon grabbed his nightstick and hit him with it. Gordon denied he assaulted Young, claiming instead that Young beat him; Louise Thompson also told a hearing of the MCCH she saw Young beat Gordon. Gordon also told the MCCH that Young beat him on the journey to the station and again later while he was in custody. Violence during arrests was nothing out of the ordinary in 1935. The outcome of Gordon's prosecution is unknown. The second officer allegedly assaulted during an arrest was also injured with his own weapon, in that case a revolver, at the very end of the disorder. According to the arrest report and police blotter, as James Thompson fled a grocery store where he had allegedly been discovered looting, he knocked into Detective Nicholas Campo, causing the officer's revolver to go off and a bullet to hit him in the hand.

Once the crowds broke up and spread, the police response changed and officers do not appear to have been targets of violence to the extent they had been. While police maintained a cordon around 125th Street and guarded some stores their presence in other parts of the neighborhood took the form of mobile patrols in radio cars or emergency trucks. On one occasion, a police vehicle was targeted in the same way that other vehicles driven by whites were, with the Daily Mirror reporting “Harry Whittington, an emergency policeman, was 'sniped' off of the emergency truck he was riding at 8th Ave. and 123rd St. by a rock that felled him unconscious.” Cars driven by whites were frequent targets of rocks and stones. The attack on Detective Lt. Frank Lenahan as he drove his car along 8th Avenue may also have occurred away from 125th Street; there is no evidence of its timing. According to the New York Herald Tribune, which provided the only description of the incident, Lenahan’s car “was badly battered by rocks and most of its glass shattered.” Apparently the officer himself was unscathed, as he does not appear in lists of the injured.

A widely reported incident of alleged “sniping” at police at the very end of the disorder was not included in the count of assaults on police as there is little evidence that police were actually targets of a shooting. Stories in the New York World Telegram and Brooklyn Daily Eagle did report that a bullet whistled past the air of Patrolman Jerry Brennan of the Morrisiana station as he stood on post at Lenox Ave and 138th Street, after which he saw four men on the roof of the six-story building at 101 West 138th. Soon after police reinforcements arrived and rushed to the roof to arrest the men. But in the Home News story, Brennan is not the target of the shooters but one of the police who responded after hearing shots. He appeared as the arresting officer in the Magistrates Court. This story provided the key detail that no guns were found on the men arrested, explaining both why police charged them with the lesser charge of disorderly conduct (annotated in the docket book as "annoy") and their acquittal, giving the story more credibility than other accounts.

More officers may have been assaulted during the disorder. The New York Evening Journal reported bandaged officers as well as prisoners in court the next day. However, while news photographs confirm the presence of bandaged prisoners, no injured officers appear in those images.
Police find Lino Rivera 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.
Crowd inside Kress 5, 10 & 25c store 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.
Leaflets distributed 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.
Two men speak to a crowd in front of Kress' store 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.
Timothy Murphy assaulted & Paul Boyett shot Around 9:00 PM, as police reinforcements tried to disperse the large crowds that had gathered on 7th and 8th Avenues around 125th Street, a few blocks northwest on West 127th Street between 8th Avenue and St Nicholas Avenue, a group of around Black men allegedly attacked Timothy Murphy, a twenty-nine-year-old white rock driller, on his way to his home at 44 Moylan Place. Murphy alleged that the men knocked him to the ground and then hit and kicked him. The men told him “they were beating me because I was a white man,” the Daily Mirror reported Murphy as saying. What they actually said was “You white son-of-a-bitch, take it now," according to his affidavit in the Magistrates Court. As a result of the beating Murphy suffered “lacerations, contusions [about his head, face and body], a broken nose and loss of hearing in his left ear.” Press reports simply said he received a broken nose.

The men beating Murphy allegedly attracted the attention of Patrolman George Conn from the 30th Precinct, immediately west of Harlem. He may have been in a radio car on his way to 125th Street, as the New York Amsterdam News reported "police drove up." His Magistrates Court affidavit described the crowd as numbering around ten men, a number reported by the New York Herald Tribune, Home News, and Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Other newspapers described larger crowds, twelve men according to the Daily Mirror, twenty men according to the Associated Press, and forty to fifty men in the sensationalized narrative published in the New York Evening Journal. The New York Times and New York Sun simply reported that several men had attacked Murphy. As Conn ran toward Murphy, newspaper stories and legal records agreed that he shot Paul Boyett, a twenty-year-old Black garage worker who lived only a few buildings away, at 310 West 127th Street. The New York Sun and New York Times reported Conn's statement that he had first fired a shot in the air to disperse the crowd and then ordered Boyett to halt and shot him only when he continued running. The Daily Mirror and Home News reported those details without making clear that Conn was the source of that information. The New York Evening Journal reported Conn fired two shots, one "in the air and then a second shot which struck Boyett in the back." A brief account in the New York Herald Tribune and Associated Press simply had Conn shooting Boyett, one of the group attacking Murphy. Several other newspapers did not mention that anyone else but Boyett had allegedly been involved in attacking Murphy: the New York American had Conn shooting Boyett "when he tried to flee," the Daily News "as he was about to strike" Murphy, and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle simply reported that Conn had shot Boyett. This incident was the most widely reported assault in the disorder, both because it occurred early in the evening, and because it fit the sensationalized narrative of racial violence which the Hearst newspapers and white tabloids employed.

Boyett testified at his trial that he had been “an innocent onlooker” drawn to the “disturbance,” and “struck no one at that time,” the New York Amsterdam News reported. In the confusion as the crowd rushed to leave as police appeared, a bullet hit him. While the newspaper stories on March 20 give the impression that Conn arrested Boyett where Murphy had been assaulted, testimony at the trial revealed that Boyett continued running back to his home, apparently pursued by Conn, who arrested him in the building's hallway. A trial jury accepted Boyett's account and acquitted him of assaulting Murphy. The only source on the trial, the story in the New York Amsterdam News, did not mention what evidence was presented. One issue may have been how Conn claimed he picked Boyett out of the crowd; only the Daily News explicitly mentioned that he saw Boyett beating Murphy, although the 28th Precinct police blotter recorded the charge against him as "kicked complainant." A likely alternative scenario to that offered by Conn was that he simply fired at the crowd rather than singling out Boyett and calling on him to halt, and that his shot hit Boyett, whose injury consequently led Conn to arrest him.

The New York Herald Tribune, Daily News, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and Associated Press reported Boyett had been shot in the right shoulder, the Daily Mirror in the left shoulder, the New York American and Home News in the shoulder, and the New York Times, New York Sun, and New York Evening Journal reported the wound was in his back. Hospital records indicate that a doctor from Knickerbocker Hospital treated a wound to Boyett's right shoulder before he was placed in a cell. Conn was based at the 30th Precinct; St. Nicholas Avenue was the boundary between that precinct and the 28th Precinct. Rather than taking Boyett to his own precinct, Conn took him to the 28th Precinct station on West 123rd Street, as Boyett appeared in that precinct's police blotter. Both Murphy and Boyett appear in lists of the injured published in the New York Evening Journal, New York Post, Daily News, and New York American. Only Murphy appears in the list of injured published in the Home News and New York Post and only Boyett, in a list of those shot, in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and New York Herald Tribune.

Groups of Black men allegedly targeted at least three other white men around this time, all, unlike Murphy, in the area where crowds were clashing with police. William Kitlitz reported being attacked by James Smitten in front of Kress’ store, Maurice Spellman being assaulted at 125th Street and 8th Avenue, and Morris Werner at 125th Street and 7th Avenue. All those white men lived west of Harlem, relatively close to where they were attacked, so were likely regular visitors to 125th Street, to shop, seek entertainment, or access public transport, on this evening caught up in the disorder. The area around 125th Street and 7th Avenue would continue to be the location of alleged assaults on white men and women for at least the next three hours, with three men and two women targeted. However, the assault on Murphy represented the western boundary of the disorder, the only event west of 8th Avenue. That section of Harlem was still an area of Black residents.

Murphy was one of four white men and women allegedly rescued from assaults by the intervention of police officers (with some press reports suggesting that this happened more frequently). Only in this case did police also make an arrest. In one of those other cases, an officer also fired shots at the crowd, but in that instance no one was reported as being injured. Police did shoot and kill two Black men, Lloyd Hobbs and James Thompson, in the latter case also injuring two white bystanders.
James Thompson killed & Detective Nicholas Campo shot 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.
Shot and wounded (7) 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 charged them 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.
Assaults (54)
In Harlem court on March 20 (76) Seventy-six of those arrested in the 28th Precinct, south of West 130th Street, during the disorder appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20. Magistrate Renaud decided just over half of those prosecutions. He rendered verdicts in only nine cases, convicting five men and one woman and discharging three men. That was far fewer cases than Magistrate Ford decided in the Washington Heights Court that day in large part because those arraigned in Harlem faced more serious charges. Renaud sent twelve others for trial on misdemeanor charges in the Court of Special Sessions and eighteen more charged with felonies to the grand jury. The remaining thirty-seven people he remanded in custody on bail. Those hearings were reported in all of 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.

Descriptions of the scene at the court emphasized the number of police present and how they kept onlookers at a distance. The Home News put the number of police at fifty, the New York Post at sixty-five. The New York Times reported “Heavy police guards composed of men on foot, mounted and on motorcycles, surrounded the courts,” the Home News reported “cordons," and later that “Heavy police guards surrounded the courts and held back many colored persons who attempted to enter the buildings,” the New York Sun “lines of policemen formed in the street” that stopped anyone from going “west of Third Avenue or east of Sylvan Place," the Daily News that “Spectators were kept a block away from the buildings," and the New York American that the court was "heavily guarded,” with the "crowd gathered in the vicinity but was not permitted near the courthouse.” Only the Daily News noted the police presence in the crowd itself, that “plainclothesmen prowled through the crowds.”

The New York Sun also reported an additional 25 officers in the court building, ten on the stairs leading up to the courtroom and 15 in the courtroom itself, the Daily News more generally that “police lined the corridors of the courts.” Despite police restricting access to the courthouse, newspaper stories did mention the presence of spectators in the courtroom. That crowd had arrived early according to the New York Post, which reported that by 9:30 AM the space had become so crowded that the doors were closed. The Times Union described those present as Black, while the New York Evening Journal said the courtroom was crowded with participants in the disorder, prisoners awaiting arraignment.

Newspapers offered only slightly more details about the crowd outside the courthouse. Only the New York American put a number on those present, 1,500 people, which is likely an exaggeration given the sensational style of that publication. The New York Post described the crowd as lining the curbs outside the courthouse rather than giving its size. The New York Sun, New York Times, and Daily News mentioned crowds without describing their size. Those stories focused on the composition and behavior of the people, about which they offered contradictory pictures. Most of the spectators, inside and out, were Negroes, according to the New York Post, while the New York Times described them as “Negro friends of the prisoners assembled to attend the arraignments.” To the contrary, the Daily News portrayed them as “evenly distributed between white and colored.” Descriptions of how they behaved ran the gamut, with the New York Post portraying them as showing “clearly that they were there just to see the sights," to the Daily News insisting that they were “entirely orderly,” and the New York Sun and New York Times highlighting moments of anger, “a storm of boos and jeers from the crowd” as a wagon loaded with prisoners drove by in the New York Sun, and “considerable grumbling, some shouting of threats, but no violence” recounted in the New York Times.

Two photographs published in the Daily News captured the arrival of prisoners at the Harlem courthouse. In a photograph that appeared on the front page on March 21, shot from street level, a crowd can be seen in the background, held back by a uniformed patrolman, the elevated railway line indicating that they were on 3rd Avenue. An injured man is visible in the photograph; unlike the photograph published in the same newspaper of men being loaded into a wagon at the 28th Precinct, the caption to that image made no mention of the man’s injury. However, a second photograph published in the Daily News of a different group of men exiting a wagon and entering the court, shot from above, did draw attention to prisoners’ injuries, in both the headline and caption attached to it. “Casualties of Race War,” was the headline given to the image, which was captioned, “Prisoners of War! Wounded in the battle of Harlem, these prisoners arrive at Harlem Court in police wagon.” (It is difficult to determine which of the men shown in the photograph are injured as the only available image is scanned from microfilm and is of poor quality. One of the men in the foreground may have a bandaged head.) A third photograph of prisoners arriving at the courthouse, found in the Getty Images collection, is not attributed to a newspaper or agency and did not appear in any of the publications examined for this study. Taken from a similar elevated angle to the first of the Daily News images, it showed a different group of prisoners being taken into the courthouse. The different arrangement of vehicles indicates that the photographs are of two different groups of prisoners. None of the men in that image have visible injuries, nor did the caption reference any. It simply noted, “Members of the press as well as police officers watch as police vans escort the arrested to the courthouse the day after rioting in the Harlem neighbourhood in the Manhattan borough of New York City, New York, 20th March 1935.”
Embed from Getty Images

As was the case in reports of the police line-up, several newspaper stories included incidental mentions of the visible injuries of many of those under arrest. The New York World-Telegram merely noted “many battered and sore” among the prisoners. The Daily News mentioned that “numerous minor defendants appeared in court with bandaged and plastered heads” but only to contrast them with the group of alleged Communists, none of whom was “hurt.” Alone among the mentions of injured prisoners, the New York Sun story explicitly stated what would have been widely understood to be the source of their injuries, describing “Groups of prisoners battered and bruised after their furious battles with the police.” The implicit acceptance of police violence against Black New Yorkers by the white press stood in stark contrast to the attention and criticism it attracted in the Black press.

Only the New York Evening Journal and Home News published lists of those being arraigned, neither of which was complete. The Home News identified thirty-seven of the seventy-six individuals, including their name, address, charge, the magistrate’s decision, the amount he set for bail, and also brief descriptions of their alleged offense. (In several cases those descriptions provide the only details of those events.) Three of those omitted were discharged; those discharged were also omitted from the publication's list of those arraigned in the Washington Heights court. There is no obvious reason why the other thirty-six were not listed. As discussed below, the New York Post, Daily News, and Daily Worker did note the speed with which cases were processed, which might have made it difficult for reporters to hear or otherwise gather information about them. The list in the New York Evening Journal also included the name, address, charge, the magistrate’s decision, and the amount he set for bail, without any information on the alleged offense. (My copy of this story is incomplete, so I do not know how many of those arraigned the newspaper identified; sixteen names are visible, but there were more in the list.)

The appearances of the four alleged Communists, Daniel Miller, Murray Samuels, Sam Jamison, and Claudio Viabolo, and in some cases Harry Gordon, also arrested at the beginning of the disorder were the only widely reported arraignments, with the Daily News, New York American and New York Evening Journal, also publishing photographs of the men leaving the 28th Precinct station for court. 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. And the New York Sun mentioned four white men but identified only 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 Gordon being arrested by a different police officer. The Daily News claimed Gordon "was heard separately when he indicated that he would produce his own lawyers." The New York World-Telegram simply reported that “The fifth [man] was to be arraigned later in Harlem Court.”

These men drew reporters’ attention at least in part because police identified them as the instigators of the disorder, a claim that the Daily Worker reported that ADA Carey also made during the men’s arraignment. 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. The Daily Mirror elaborated that description in more sensational terms, describing them as “the curb-stone orators who had deliberately incited the 125th St. mobs to looting frenzy,” while the Daily News and New York World-Telegram used less sensational variations, with the Daily News describing them as those “whose propaganda is blamed for the riot” and the New York World-Telegram describing them as “accused of store picketing activities alleged to have been the direct causes of the riot.”

The stories also labeled the men Communists, with the New York World-Telegram and New York Sun directly attributing that information to police. The Daily Worker obliquely confirmed that source, reporting “Authorities declared that they 'would prove they were Reds.'” The anti-Communist Daily Mirror claimed the men identified themselves, that they were “all admitted Communists.” While the other stories did not explicitly label the men Communists, they identified the lawyers who represented them, details which would have conveyed to their readers that they were Communists. The Home News, New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, and Daily News all described the lawyers as from the ILD, well known in the 1930s as the legal arm of the Communist Party. 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 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.)

The other element of the men’s arraignment that drew attention was the bail of $2,500 that Magistrate Renaud set for Miller and the three Young Liberators (but not for Gordon). While the New York Herald Tribune, New York American, New York World-Telegram, Home News, and New York Times simply noted the amount of the bail, the Daily Mirror noted that sum was the “maximum bonds,” and was requested by the prosecutor, Carey. Without noting the high level of the bail, the Daily News reported that the men’s ILD lawyers “protested vehemently against the amount of bail.” That story also reported that one of those lawyers, Aronsky also complained that the men "had not been fed by police following their arrest," a detail that only the Daily Worker also reported. Magistrate Renaud responded to that complaint with a “retort,” the Daily News reported obliquely, and by saying “that he had no responsibility in the matter,” according to the Daily Worker.

Newspapers reported the other arraignments with summary statements (The Daily Mirror and New York Herald Tribune reported only the arraignments of the alleged Communists). That most cases were not decided but instead held over for further hearings, was noted by the New York American, New York Times, Home News, and Daily Worker. The New York Post and Daily News specified that it was defendants facing the “more serious charges” that were held on bail, with the New York Post identifying those charges as burglary and inciting to riot. The New York Sun merely noted that “The more serious cases were brought before Magistrate Renaud in the Harlem Court.” Only the New York Post, New York Times, and Daily News also noted that Renaud did decide some cases. Where the New York Times simply reported that “several were sentenced immediately,” the Daily News specified that “In the cases of those charged with misdemeanors he invariably found them guilty and held them either without bail for investigation or in bail of $500 for sentence Friday" and the New York Post add the detail that these were “The relatively unimportant charges, disorderly conduct, simple assault and so on” in which “Small fines with alternative jail sentences were administered, with most of the prisoners taking the jail terms.” The summary details offered by the Daily News and New York Post mask the small number of cases Renaud decided: he convicted only five men and one woman, and actually acquitted three other men, of the total of seventy-six who appeared before him. He also did not sentence any of those he convicted, instead ordering them investigated and returned to court for sentencing three days later, on March 23. What the New York Post described happened in the Washington Heights court, not the Harlem court.

The other feature of the hearings noted in those stories was the speed, the short time taken on each case. An early edition of the New York Post reported that “cases were handled with almost unprecedented speed.” A later edition elaborated that minor charges were “handled at a speed of ten minutes or less to a case” and more serious charges “also were jammed through rapidly.” The Daily Worker, which cast the work of the “capitalist courts” as “frame-up cases and grinding out convictions,” had case handled even faster: “30 cases of Negroes were disposed of in almost as many minutes.” The Daily News described the speed in terms of the activities involved rather than time: “As rapidly as overtaxed court clerks could draw the necessary papers Renaud heard defendants.”

Newspaper stories had little to say about how those in the courtroom reacted to the proceedings. What they did mention suggested a wariness that the Black community might see racial discrimination at work that could prompt further disorder. Only the Daily News reported that Magistrate Renaud expressed such concerns at the beginning of the hearing, announcing that at his request Assistant District Attorney Richard E. Carey, who was Black, had been assigned to prosecute the accused rioters so that "there can be no charge of discrimination." Only the Brooklyn Daily Eagle also explicitly linked Carey’s role to racial tensions, pointed to him being the prosecutor in the Harlem Court to claim “it could hardly be said there was racial discrimination against the Negro Prisoners.” That story did not mention that Renaud had requested Carey. The Daily Mirror did note that Carey, whom the story described as “a colored attache of District attorney Dodge’s office,” was specially assigned at the demand of Renard without providing his explanation for that request. The New York Post and Daily Worker simply noted Carey’s involvement in the prosecutions. On at least one occasion, Carey’s involvement produced the racial tensions Renaud had sought to prevent, according to stories in the Daily News and Times Union. The fullest account was provided by the Daily News: “…when a white attorney, who refused to give his name to reporters, sought to inject a question of race while a colored patrolman was testifying against Leo Smith, 18, of 305 E. 118th St., who is white, Renaud denounced the attorney. 'The patrolman in this case happens to be colored, the Judge happens to be white and the prosecutor is colored.' said Renaud. 'We recognize no race, color or creed here. We are looking for justice and law and order.'" Missing from that story was the reaction in the courtroom, which is what the Times Union reported: “The tenseness lingering from the night was apparent in Harlem Court, where Negroes in the jammed room muttered disapprovingly as a lawyer for a white defendant hinted the trouble was started by Negroes and was racial in origin. Magistrate Renaud quickly reprimanded the attorney.” (Strikingly, that account, and mention of Margaret Mitchell’s reaction to be charged — that she "denied hysterically she participated in the rioting. She stood up from the witness chair screaming, then collapsed" — are the only references to the court proceedings in the Times Union story). Neither story made clear just what Smith’s lawyer had said. The Black officer who testifed against Smith was one of four Black patrolmen, together with a Black detective, that the Brooklyn Daily Eagle story referenced alongside Carey to refute the possibility of racial discrimination in the courts. The New York Herald Tribune was the only other newspaper to note that “Among the arresting officers were five Negro patrolmen and detectives.”
Margaret Mitchell arrested Officer Johnson of the 6th Division arrested Margaret Mitchell, an eighteen-year-old Black woman, inside Kress’ 5, 10 and 25c store, sometime around 5:00 PM on March 19. Police alleged that she was “throwing pans on floor and causing crowd to collect,” according to Inspector Di Martini’s report on the disorder. Pots and pans and glasses were knocked off counters and women screamed, after the store was closed and police tried to clear out those inside, Jackson Smith, the store manager, Patrolman Timothy Shannon, and Louise Thompson all testified. Only Thompson described the circumstances that produced that noise, most fully in an article in New Masses. After a woman she could not see screamed, Thompson joined part of the crowd who rushed to where the noise came from, the rear of the store. Police there pushed that crowd back and refused to answer when women asked “if the boy was injured and where he is,” Thompson wrote. 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 left once the noise and struggles with police began, both Thompson and Smith testified. Thompson remained with the woman she described knocking over pots and pans, who was not arrested, but she was clearly not the only person who knocked over merchandise in efforts to remain in the store until they had information about Rivera. Mitchell could also have been the woman whose scream drew Thompson and others to the rear of the store.

Margaret Mitchell appeared in many newspaper stories about what happened in Kress’ store, but almost all truncated the extended standoff between the Black women and store staff and police into a rapid sequence of events, in the process mistaking what Mitchell was alleged to have done and when she was arrested. The Home News reported that Mitchell “attempted to take the Rivera boy from the department store detectives and cried out that the guards were beating the youth.” La Prensa also reported Mitchell trying to intervene. Although the Home News went on to claim that Mitchell was arrested at that time, neither Charles Hurley nor Patrolman Donahue mentioned a woman being part of their struggles with Rivera, and Donahue testified he did not arrest anyone while at Kress’ store. The Afro-American, New York Amsterdam News, New York Evening Journal (and the New York Times on March 24) reported that Mitchell was arrested after she screamed when the boy was being beaten. However, the New York Times, Daily News, New York American, New York Post, New York Herald Tribune, and Daily Worker did not specify when she screamed (or spread rumors in the New York Times story, or was “a leader of the disturbance” in the New York Herald Tribune story) — although the Daily News, New York American, and New York Post did elsewhere in their stories mention an unnamed woman running into street screaming at the time Rivera was grabbed. The New York Sun alone specified that Mitchell’s actions came later: “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.” 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.” Inspector Di Martini's report, while containing few details of events in the store, did distinguish Mitchell from the woman who reacted to Rivera, whose actions he located slightly later than the newspaper stories, "upon the arrival of the ambulance [to treat Hurley and Urban]," when the "unknown female screamed that the boy had been seriously injured or killed and otherwise caused a commotion which attracted a large number of persons." Mitchell's arrest came later, after which "this commotion was soon quieted."

The more specific allegation of “throwing pans on floor and causing crowd to collect” was recorded in the 28th Precinct police blotter as “Disorderly in Kresses 5 & 10c Store.” That language echoed the offense with which the prosecutor charged Mitchell, disorderly conduct. She appeared in lists of those arrested and charged with disorderly conduct in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, the New York Evening Journal, New York American and Daily News. Arraigned in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, Mitchell was found guilty by Magistrate Renaud, who remanded her until March 23 for investigation and sentencing. The Times Union reported that she “denied hysterically she participated in the rioting. She stood up from the witness chair screaming, then collapsed.” No other newspapers included that scene.

Mitchell returned to the court on March 23, telling Magistrate Renaud she was "sorry," according to the Home News and New York World-Telegram. In passing sentence, Renaud commented that “he did not believe the girl acted maliciously,” those two publications and the New York Times and New York Age reported. The sentence reflected that assessment: three days in the Workhouse or a fine of $10. The New York American reported only that outcome, obliquely reporting Renaud's comment by describing her as having "unwittingly started Tuesday's outbreak." A brief mention in the New York Amsterdam News gave the opposite impression by describing Mitchell as having been "found guilty" of "stirring up the mob." The Daily Worker pointed to what its reporter saw as the implications of her sentence, that it "beating of Negro children by Harlem white storekeepers of the police, as frequently has been the case." Mitchell was one of only three people convicted during the disorder who paid a fine. She was also one of only eighteen of those arraigned represented by a lawyer, in her case Sidney Christian, a prominent West Indian attorney.

The lawyer was likely obtained with the help of Mitchell’s father, Thomas E. Thompson. A West Indian immigrant who had arrived in New York City in 1895, Thompson had been a postal worker for thirty-five years at the time of his daughter’s arrest, and an office holder in the Prince Hall Masons. He and his family were among the earliest Black residents of Harlem, recorded in the 1910 census living in 55 West 137th Street. While not featuring on the social pages as Sidney Christian did, Thompson would have had the resources and the standing in the West Indian community to have known of and involved the lawyer. Mitchell, one of the youngest of Thompson's twelve children, had married in April 1934, and at the time of the disorder lived with her husband, David Mitchell, a handyman in an apartment building, at 287 West 150th Street. That she was in a store twenty-five blocks south of her home indicated the distance from which the businesses on West 125th Street drew their customers.

As the only person arrested in Kress’ store, and named in newspaper stories about the disorder, Mitchell was one of the few identifiable sources of information about the beginnings of the disorder for the MCCH. However, when Lt. Battle called at her home and requested that she be at the public hearing on March 30, “she refused to come.” Asked again about her testimony three weeks later, Battle reiterated that "she absolutely refuses to come to this hearing."

Margaret Mitchell and her husband still lived in the same apartment when the census enumerator called in 1940. In January 1945, she joined 200 family and friends celebrating her parents' 50th wedding anniversary, photographed alongside her siblings in an image published in the New York Amsterdam News. Her husband David was not part of the celebration; he was a sergeant in the US military serving overseas, as were two of Mitchell’s brothers and four nephews.
Arrests (128) 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.
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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.
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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
Isaac Daniels arrested
Isaac Daniels, a twenty-nine-year old Black man, was arrested for assaulting Herman Young, in his hardware store at 346 Lenox Avenue. After hearing glass smashing, Young and his wife, Rose, had come downstairs from their apartment to the store, whose windows had been looted and encountered a man on the stoop, trying to come through the door. The man allegedly cursed at Young — "You Goddam Jew I am going to kill you if you don’t get out of here” — and then threw a stone that smashed the glass in the door. Both the stone and flying glass hit Young. Taken to Harlem Hospital, Young was being stitched by a doctor when Daniels entered to receive treatment. Young identified him as the man who had assaulted him, and an officer at the hospital arrested Daniels. Another man, James Williams, was later arrested for looting the store. The affidavit in his case made no mention of Young being assaulted, instead recording that he had come downstairs to find four men in the store stealing merchandise.

Questioned in a lineup at the Manhattan Police HQ, Daniels denied throwing the stone at Young, and said he had been in the area because he was on his way home. Daniels, a native of Georgia who had come to New York City in 1928, lived with his wife only a few blocks from Young's store at 73 W. 130th Street. Later, at his trial, Daniels added the detail that he had gone out to buy cigarettes. His wife said that he had gone to the movies, and was listening to the radio at home at 1:00 AM when Young was attacked.

The report of the arrest in the Home News linked Daniels and Young and included the detail that Young had been cut by flying glass. Daniels also appeared in lists of those who arrested and charged with assault published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the New York Evening Journal, neither of which included the circumstances which led to his arrest. He also appeared in lists of the injured published in the Home News and New York Post, one of four men arrested for assault with injuries. In Daniels' case, the list identified him as having "contusions" on his left arm.

Daniels was one of the first of those arrested to appear in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, where he was charged with felonious assault. The Home News and New York Post reported he was back in the court two days later, joining James Hughes and Charles Saunders in being discharged as they had already been indicted by the grand jury and then rearrested and held for trial (which is likely why Daniels appears in the 28th Precinct police blotter as having been discharged, as did James Hughes). The indictment in the district attorney's case file has a charge of first degree assault, with intent to kill, struck out, leaving a charge of second degree assault, with intent to cause bodily harm. That change suggests that prosecutors reduced the charge after obtaining details of what happened (Young's wife had mentioned that the man who assaulted him had used a piece of pipe, but later reports mention only him throwing a stone). Indicted for assault, Daniels was one of the handful of individuals tried for alleged offenses during the disorder. On April 9, the district attorney's case file recorded that a jury acquitted Daniels, likely because of questions over Young's identification of him.
Before court on March 20 For eighty-six of the Black men, six of the white men, and four of the Black women police arrested during the disorder, the legal process began with a trip in police wagons from Harlem to Police Headquarters downtown at 240 Center Street for a line-up. At least at the 28th Precinct station on West 123rd Street, where most of those arrested were held, they were led out on the front doors on to the street to be loaded into the wagons. On that walk the men and women had to pass by a gauntlet of white press photographers and cameramen. Many of those under arrest showed signs of police violence during the disorder, bandages over wounds to their heads and hands, visible bruises, and torn clothing. The attention these men drew from reporters indicated that there were many more injured than the five arrested men identified in newspaper stories and medical records. Some of the twenty-nine men and women who had been arrested missing from the line-up had more serious injuries that kept them in Harlem's hospitals. Police officials were clearly still trying to establish exactly how many arrests had been made as they gave different totals to reporters, ranging from 113 reported by the New York Post to 121 reported by the Home News and 127 reported by the New York American. Three of those arrested during the disorder had already appeared in the Night Court the previous evening; Magistrate Capshaw had found Claudius Jones guilty of disorderly conduct for "refusing to obey police order to move away from a Harlem corner" and given him a suspended sentence, remanded James Smitten, charged with assault, and held Leo Smith on bail to appear in the Harlem court.

While the morning line-up was part of police practice, the number of prisoners coming from Harlem made it anything but routine. Police diverted traffic and cleared parked cars from the blocks surrounding the headquarters building to ensure access for the collection of patrol wagons. Even after crowding the prisoners disembarking those wagons into cells, there was not space for all those brought to police headquarters. Most were instead put in the photographic gallery.

Police then took groups of three to five prisoners to a floodlit stage, where detectives questioned them. "Did you throw that stone," a detective asked Isaac Daniels, a twenty-nine-year-old Black man arrested for allegedly throwing a stone that smashed glass in the window of Herman Young's hardware store and went on to hit Young . "No sir, I didn't have any," Young replied. The detective then changed tack and asked Daniels, "Are you working now?" That question may have been for the benefit of representatives of the Department of Public Welfare and the Aldermanic Welfare Committee, who attended the line-up and took notes. Daniels answered, yes, for the C.W.A. Twenty-one others in the line-up identified themselves as unemployed and on public relief, with three more on relief until recently, circumstances that reporters for the New York Herald Tribune, New York Sun and Daily Mirror highlighted, implying that they thought it helped explain their alleged offenses.

The detective then returned to the circumstances of Daniels' arrest. "What were you doing around there?" "I was coming home," Daniels replied. That was all the explanation Daniels was allowed to offer at this point in the legal process. The detective moved on to establishing Daniels' identity. "How long in New York?" "Since 1928." "Are you married?" "Yes Sir." "Where did you come from?" "Georgia." With that information, which likely helped police find his criminal record, the detective moved on to the next person in the line-up. Aubrey Patterson answered somewhat more effusively when asked to identify himself. In response to being asked if he was a citizen, the twenty-one year-old Black man said "I am a citizen of this great metropolis. I was born in this metropolis in 132nd Street." "What do you do for a living?" "I do laboring in the daytime and I go to school at nighttime." In extending beyond the brief, deferential answers offered by Daniels, Patterson's statements drew the ire of some of white reporter from the New York Sun observing the line-up. They described him as having "assumed a pompous air" and that he "gave off oratory to reply to most of the questions."

Those charged with looting faced questions about items found in their possession when they were arrested, which in some cases they were carrying at the line-up. Several insisted they had found goods ranging from toothbrushes and shirts to cigarettes and bottles of milk lying in the street, denying that they had reached through broken windows to take them from stores. White reporters at the line-up dismissed those statements, reporting them either as simply an admission of having stolen the items or defenses that lacked credibility

Aubrey Patterson declined to answer questions about the looting with which he was charged. One white reporter made fun of the explanation he offered, claiming that it drew laughter from some of those observing the line-up: "I don't want to extricate myself from any guilt." Patterson may have misspoken; those in the room may also have misheard him, especially as the question posed to him about his citizenship suggests that he had an accent, likely West Indian. Either way, making fun of Patterson served to present him, and the others arrested during the disorder, as less threatening.

At least one other prisoner also declined to answer questions. In his case, those in the room reacted differently. Harry Gordon was one of the white men arrested outside the Kress store at the very beginning of the disorder. He was grouped on the line-up stage with the three other white men and the Black man identified as members of Communist Party organizations arrested around the same time: Daniel Miller and Murray Samuels, Sam Jamison, and Claudio Viabolo. Gordon identified himself as "a student at City College of New York," and then refused to answer any further question. Standing with one hand in his pocket, he announced, "I have no comment to make until I see my lawyer. I understand that anything I might say would be used against me." Captain Edward Dillon tried again, asking "If you are not guilty why do you want to see a lawyer?" "I know all that, but I won't talk until I see my lawyer," Gordon responded with a wave of his hand. Journalists in the room described Gordon as "defiant," his stance as a "Napoleonic pose," his statement marking him out to Daily Mirror's reporter as "the inciter of the night's rioting." As was the case with the city's then stridently anti-Communist Hearst newspapers, that publication was far more interested in the radicals arrested during the disorder than the Black residents. The four avowed Communists did not appear to respond in the same way. Viabolo, at least, offered an answer to what he had been doing before his arrest: "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."

After the line-up, the arrested men and women were loaded back into police wagons. Once again they encountered press photographers. Cameras followed them even into the wagons, capturing images of at least two groups not simply in police custody but contained in a cell-like space that conveyed that order had been restored in Harlem.
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Escorted by police motorcycles, the wagons transported those under arrest uptown to be arraigned in the two courts whose jurisdictions encompassed the disorder, the Harlem court at 170 East 121st Street and the Washington Heights court at 455 West 151st Street.
Paul Boyett arrested Around 9:00 PM, Patrolman George Conn arrested Paul Boyett, a twenty-eight-year-old Black garage worker, for assaulting Timothy Murphy, a twenty-nine-year-old white rock driller. Conn testified in the Magistrates Court that he had come upon a crowd attacking Murphy on West 127th Street between 8th Avenue and St. Nicholas Avenue. He may have been in a radio car as the New York Amsterdam News reported "police drove up." After firing his pistol into the air to scatter the crowd, he then called on Boyett to halt, and when he did not, shot him. Although the bullet struck Boyett in his back or shoulder, he was able to continue running toward his home, only a few buildings away at 310 West 127th Street. Conn pursued him, eventually catching him in the building hallway. Boyett denied assaulting Murphy, testifying that he had been “an innocent onlooker” drawn to the “disturbance," the New York Amsterdam News reported, and “struck no one at that time.” In the confusion as the crowd rushed to leave when police appeared, a bullet hit him.

Conn was based at the 30th Precinct; St. Nicholas Avenue was the boundary between that precinct and the 28th Precinct. Rather than taking Boyett to his own precinct, Conn took him to the 28th Precinct station on West 123rd Street, as Boyett appeared in that precinct's police blotter. Hospital records indicate that a doctor from Knickerbocker Hospital treated Boyett's wound before he was placed in a cell. That hospital record and New York Herald Tribune, Daily News, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and Associated Press reported Boyett had been shot in the right shoulder. Several newspapers reported other locations for the injury: the Daily Mirror in the left shoulder, the New York American and Home News in the shoulder, and the New York Times, New York Sun, and New York Evening Journal reported the wound was in his back.

Boyett appear in lists of the injured published in the New York Evening Journal, New York Post, Daily News, and New York American, and in a list of those shot in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and New York Herald Tribune. He also appears in the lists of the arrested published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, the Daily News, New York American, and New York Evening Journal.

Boyett appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, charged with felonious assault. The docket book indicates that he was remanded until March 22, and then again on March 25 and April 1, before Magistrate Renaud sent him to the grand jury on April 9. Unusually, Boyett did not appear in any of the newspaper stories about the legal proceedings after the disorder. On April 23, the grand jury heard the case against Boyett, according to the district attorney's case file records; they indicted him for first degree assault. His trial in the Court of General Sessions occurred just over a month later, on May 29, where his lawyer was William T. Andrews, a prominent member of Harlem's elite elected to the New York State Assembly in 1934. Boyett testified he had been “an innocent onlooker” drawn to the “disturbance," the New York Amsterdam News reported, and “struck no one at that time.” In the confusion as the crowd rushed to leave as police appeared, a bullet hit him. There is no mention in that story of what evidence was presented at Boyett's trial. Whatever it was, the jury acquitted Boyett, an outcome that indicated they accepted his account.

The 28th Precinct police blotter recorded the outcome of that trial but the only source for details is that brief story in the New York Amsterdam News. Headlined "Wins Acquittal in Disturbance Charge," the story only summarized Boyett's testimony and included no details of the alleged assault on Murphy or Conn's account of the shooting. In that way it fit with the approach Black newspapers took of not reporting alleged violence against whites during the disorder. The story mistakenly identified the complainant as Kennedy Murphy rather than Timothy Murphy, and mispelled Boyett's last name as Boyette.
William Kitlitz assaulted & James Smitten injured William Kitlitz, a twenty-year-old white mail clerk standing in front of Kress’ store, was allegedly attacked by a twenty-six-year-old Black man named James Smitten. Dr. Russell of Harlem Hospital attended Smitten at 8:45 PM at the 28th Precinct, after his arrest, a Medical Attendance record indicated, so the alleged assault took place before that, likely around 8:30 PM. Attacks by individuals represented a very small proportion of both the assaults reported in the riot (7 of 53) and the assaults on whites (3 of 29). There are no details of the alleged violence other than the men's injuries: Kitlitz was described as "beaten on head" in a list in the New York American and having “bruises on face" in the Daily News. There is no record of an ambulance being called to attend him, so those injuries were likely minor. An ambulance was called to attend Smitten, who had "lacerations of scalp." Given that he was treated at the police station, he may have suffered those injuries at the hands of police, as had allegedly happened to Harry Gordon two hours earlier, rather than Kitlitz.

Both men lived only a few blocks from the site of the assault — Smitten at 158 West 123rd Street between 7th and Lenox Avenues, southeast of Kress, and Kitlitz on St. Nicholas Avenue between 125th and 124th Streets just a block west of the store. The proximity of their homes to 125th Street likely contributed to them being present early in the disorder. This was the first reported assault on a white man or woman, occurring as clashes between Black crowds and white police and attacks by Blacks on white-owned stores began, intertwining all those forms of racial violence. Three other white men were allegedly assaulted shortly after Kitlitz. Morris Spellman reported being attacked by group of Black men a few buildings to the west at 125th Street and 8th Avenue at 9:00 PM and Timothy Murphy a few blocks further west by a group of Black men at around the same time. Half an hour later, another group of Black men allegedly attacked Morris Werner at 125th Street and 7th Avenue, the eastern end of the block on which Kress’ stood. All those white men lived west of Harlem, relatively close to where they were attacked, so were likely regular visitors to 125th Street, to shop, seek entertainment or access public transport, on this evening caught up in the disorder.

With police concentrated on 125th Street, and on protecting Kress' store, at this time it is not surprising that Kitlitz’s alleged assailant was one of only thirteen men arrested for assault, with 85% (46 of 54) of reports not producing an arrest. Patrolman Gross of the 23rd Precinct made the arrest, the Medical Attendance record detailed.

Only two sources directly connected Smitten and Kitlitz. The Medical Attendance record identified Smitten as having been arrested for assaulting Kitlitz. A story in New York Herald Tribune described the assault. In addition, Smitten appeared in lists of those arrested for assault in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, New York Evening Journal, and Daily News, while Kitlitz appeared in lists of the injured in the New York Evening Journal, Daily News, New York American (on March 20), and Home News.

Smitten’s arrest occurred early enough on March 19 that he was arraigned that evening, in the Night Court, the New York Herald Tribune reported, one of three who appeared in that court mentioned in the story. Magistrate Capshaw remanded Smitten for investigation until Saturday, March 23, the New York Herald Tribune reported, but there is no evidence of the outcome of his legal proceedings. One of the other men the story identified as appearing in the Night Court, an eighteen-year-old white man named Leo Smith, appeared in the Magistrates Court on March 20. The other man, Claudius Jones, was convicted and sentenced by Magistrate Capshaw in the Night Court on March 19.
Lyman Quarterman shot 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).
Windows broken without arrest (53) No one was identified as being arrested for breaking windows in 74% (53 of 72) of the businesses identified in the sources (as no one was arrested for the first broken window in Kress' store or for breaking the rear windows, the store appears among those cases in which no arrests were made even though an arrest was made for allegedly breaking a front 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, 74% (53 of 72) compared with 55% (37 of 67). (In the map, black borders indicate the locations where police arrested individuals for breaking windows). 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, an area with many Spanish-speaking residents and business owners. 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 precinct.

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.
Douglas Cornelius arrested Around 10:30 PM, Patrolman Walter MacKenzie arrested Douglas Cornelius, a twenty-two-year old Black man, for allegedly using a rock to hit Thomas Wijstem, a thirty-year-old white carpenter, in front of the W. T. Grant store at 226 West 125th Street. Newspapers reported that a group of men had attacked Wijstem, but police arrested only Cornelius. Patrolman Mackenzie appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court as the arresting officer of two other men arrested in the same area of West 125th Street around the same time: Claude Jones, also at 10:30 PM at Blumstein's department store at 230 West 125th Street, immediately west of where Cornelius was arrested; and William Ford, ten minutes later, at Kress' store at 256 West 125th Street, several buildings further west. It is not clear he actually made the arrests. There are no details of what MacKenzie said in regards to the assault on Wijstem, but in the other two incidents, which resulted in the arrests of Jones and Ford, he stated he had witnessed the men breaking windows and inciting the crowd, but made no mention of arresting them. Police had established a headquarters in front of Kress' store, and officers from throughout the city had begun arriving there before 10:30 PM, so there were likely other officers in the area who could have made the arrests.

Like the man he allegedly assaulted, Cornelius lived in East Harlem, at 52 East 118th Street, a mixed black and Puerto Rican section. He appears in the list of those arrested for assault published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, but he is linked to the unidentified man with the fractured skull only in a story in the New York Times, a list of the arrested in the New York Evening Journal, and lists of the injured in the New York Herald Tribune, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and Home News. (Wijstem was named as the unidentified man in stories published by the New York Post and New York World-Telegram on March 22).

After being one of the last of those arrested in the disorder to appear in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, Cornelius was charged with felonious assault. He was one of only eighteen of those arrested in the disorder to have a lawyer representing him listed in court docket book, in his case Pope Billings, a former state assemblyman and prominent member of the Elks Lodge with an office at 211 West 135th Street (both the other men arrested at same time, Claude Jones and William Ford, also had Black lawyers representing them). Magistrate Renaud held him until March 25 on bail of $1,000, according to the docket book. When he appeared again, Magistrate Ford dismissed the charge against him, as he had been indicted by the grand jury. The 28th Precinct police blotter simply listed the charges as "Dism[issed]," as it did with other men dismissed in the Magistrates Court, as they had been indicted. However, there was no case file for Cornelius in the District Attorney's records, and no other information on the outcome of his prosecution. Wijstem's condition may have delayed the legal process. A brief story in New York Herald Tribune in June 1935 reported Wijstem had died in Bellevue Hospital without regaining consciousness.
Detective Henry Roge assaulted Just before 10 PM, police on 125th Street succeeded in dispersing the crowd in front of Kress’ store, moving them across the street and west on to 8th Avenue. Detective Henry Roge of the West 123rd Street Precinct and his partner, Raymond Gill, were among the police standing in front of the store, watching the crowd, backlit by the lighted store. A rock thrown from the crowd then struck Roge in the head, causing deep cuts to his eye and face. Gill claimed he saw a man appear from behind the cars parked on the street, look around, and throw the rock that hit Roge. At that moment there were no other objects being thrown at stores or police, so Gill was certain that it was that rock that hit his partner, and he was able to keep his eyes on the man who threw it. After chasing him through the crowd, he trapped him among the parked cars. Gill frisked the man, twenty-four-year-old James Hughes, and found five stones in his pockets; Hughes insisted the stones were to defend himself, and he had not thrown the rock that struck Roge.

As Hughes was being arrested, Roge's injuries were bleeding profusely. A call for medical assistance brought Dr. Fabian of the Joint Disease Hospital to attend to the detective. New York Evening Journal photographers captured two images of a uniformed officer helping a bleeding Roge from the scene (the only images of an injured police officer published). One photograph taken at the scene shows Roge and the officer from the side. The officer is in the foreground, supporting Roge, who is leaning forward, his left hand over his eyes and forehead. A store display window is in the background, with what appears to be broken glass in front of it. In a photograph that may have been taken somewhere inside, Roge is in the foreground of the image, with a handkerchief covering his forehead and eyes. Next to him, a white uniformed patrolman has one arm behind Roge's back, guiding him, and is holding the lapel of Roge's jacket with his other hand, in which he has his baton. Over the patrolman's left shoulder is a Black man. The Daily Mirror also published an image of Roge and the uniformed officer, which may have been taken on the street, There are two Black men in the image, one behind the officer and one to right of the detective holding a handkerchief he appears to be offering the officer. This image was not published until April 3, when the newspaper miscaptioned it as showing a white man rather than a police officer, "One of the casualties in the Riot. The man was struck over the eyes with a stick. The policeman holds him until an ambulance arrives. But the victim was only one of many white persons injured in the mad Harlem riot."

According to the record of medical attendances, Roge remained on duty after being attended by the doctor, but other sources reported that his injury required two stitches, which involved Roge being taken to Harlem Hospital. The Probation Department report recorded that Roge was on sick leave for ten days after his injury, making it more likely his injury required him to leave the scene for treatment.

Hughes was tried and convicted of misdemeanor assault. The prosecutor’s notes on the trial suggest that Gill’s testimony stressed that he was certain of his identification of Hughes as the man who threw the rock, against which Hughes offered his denial and a series of character witnesses. In response, the prosecutor argued that Hughes “saw plenty of trouble – went right into it.” At the sentencing hearing, the judge expressed belief that Hughes had thrown the rock at the store window, not Roge, so sentenced him to a term of only three months in the Workhouse.

As with other assaults, the press coverage of this case was fragmented. Roge appeared on the lists of those injured published by white newspapers the New York American (on both March 20 & 21), New York Evening Journal, Home News, Daily News, New York Herald Tribune, and New York Post, and in stories in the Daily Mirror. Hughes appeared in lists of those arrested published in the Black newspapers the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and the white New York Evening Journal. The two were linked in only three stories, in the New York Times, Home News, and Daily Worker. Even when Hughes was tried, producing additional coverage, only two of the five stories mentioned Roge. But that legal process did generate case files in both the DA’s office and the Probation Department, which provided details that are available for only a handful of the events of the disorder.
Thomas Wijstem assaulted & killed Around 10:30 PM, Thomas Wijstem, a thirty-four-year-old white carpenter, was struck on the head by a rock and knocked unconscious in front of the W. T. Grant store at 226 West 125th Street.There is no information on why Wijstem was on West 125th Street at that time. He lived across town to the east, at 16 East 127th Street, a racially mixed section likely too far away for him to have heard the noise of the disorder. By 10:30 PM, police had established a perimeter around 125th Street and the large crowds that had been concentrated there earlier had broken into smaller groups, many of which scattered north and south up the avenues. However, around 10:30 PM, crowds broke through the police cordon on to this block of 125th Street. Three of the four brief newspaper accounts of the assault reported that a group of Black men attacked Wijstem. At the same time, a rock was thrown through the window of Blumstein's department store, the building immediately to the west of where Wijstem was struck, and ten minutes later, a rock was thrown that broke windows in Kress' store. In both those cases, police alleged that the men responsible urged people on the street to attack police, causing large crowds to gather. With police reinforcements having arrived, unlike earlier in the disorder, police made arrests in all three of those incidents, albeit of only one individual at each location. Douglas Cornelius, a twenty-four-year-old Black man, was arrested for allegedly throwing a rock that struck Wijstem. Given the objects being thrown at nearby store windows at this time, it is possible that the rock that hit Wijstem may have been meant for the windows of the W. T. Grant store, which were broken during the disorder

While many of those injured in the disorder suffered head injuries, Wijstem’s injury was one of the most severe, a fractured skull that rendered him unconscious. As a result, he appears in stories of the disorder and lists of the injured in the New York Evening Journal, Daily News, New York American, Home News, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide as a seriously injured "unidentified white man." The Home News, New York Post and New York World-Telegram did eventually name him, on March 22, with the Home News and New York World-Telegram reporting that his brother had identified him and the New York Post that his neighbors had identified him (the Home News misreported his name as "Thor Wigstrom"). Three months later, a brief story in New York Herald Tribune reported Wijstem had died in Bellevue Hospital without regaining consciousness. However, as the attack on Wijstem led to an arrest and prosecution for assault, he is included among both those assaulted and killed (but not among those injured in assaults).

Like the man he targeted, Cornelius lived in East Harlem, at 52 East 118th Street, a mixed Black and Puerto Rican section. He appeared in lists of those arrested for assault in nine newspapers, but only five of those reports link him to the unidentified man with the fractured skull. After appearing in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, charged with felonious assault, he was remanded in custody. He appeared in court again on March 25, when Magistrate Ford dismissed the charge against him as he had been indicted by the grand jury. The 28th Precinct police blotter simply listed the charges as "Dism[issed]," as it did with other men dismissed in the Magistrates Court because they had been indicted already. However, there is no case file for Cornelius in the district attorney's records, and no other information on the outcome of his prosecution.
Albert Yerber arrested Near the end of the disorder, at 5:00 AM on March 20, Patrolman Jerry Brennan arrested Albert Yerber, Charles Alston, 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, Yerber was twenty years of age, and Johnson was twenty-two years of age. Yerber lived on the other side of Harlem at 106 Edgecombe Ave, as did Loper, at 298 West 138th Street and, even further west, Alston at 512 West 153rd Street, while Johnson lived close to where they were arrested, at 206 West 140th Street. 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 illustrate 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 Yerber 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 Yerber and his companions.

On March 20 Yerber, Loper, and Johnson were charged with disorderly conduct, according to the Washington Heights Magistrates Court docket book, which identified Brennan as the arresting officer for all three men. (Alston did not appear in court, likely because of his injury). The clerk annotated that charge with the word "annoy." Under that section of the statute, a person is guilty if they act "in such a manner as to annoy, disturb, interfere with, obstruct, or be offensive to others." A separate clause punishes disorderly or threatening conduct or behavior, so based on that annotation, the men were not charged with attacking Brennan. That charge fits better with 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 Yerber and his two companions. 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.

Yerber, and Loper and Johnson, are among those charged with disorderly conduct in the list of the arrested published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide. They are not mentioned in stories about the proceedings in the Washington Heights Magistrates Court on March 20 in the New York Age and New York Herald Tribune, which listed only those convicted.
Wise Shoe store windows broken Wise Shoe store at 202 West 125th Street is one of the businesses in a list of those with broken windows made by a reporter for La Prensa who walked along West 116th Street, Lenox Avenue, and West 125th Street on the day after the disorder. After walking north on Lenox Avenue from West 116th Street, the reporter turned left on West 125th Street, walking west toward Kress' store where the disorder originated. The shoe store was one storefront to the west of the corner of 7th Avenue, on the block of West 125th Street where police clashed with crowds gathered in front of Kress' store.

Windows were broken in large numbers of businesses on this block of West 125th Street. Two newspapers reported very extensive damage. Attacks on this store likely began around 7:30 PM or 8:00 PM, with more windows likely broken around 9:00 PM and further damage possibly done around 10:30 PM. "Practically every store window on the block had been shattered by 10 PM," according to the Home News; that damage was both less extensive and took longer in the New York Herald Tribune story: "By midnight one or more windows had been smashed in almost every storefront" on that block between 7th and 8th Avenues (although in another mention of that damage in the story it had been done by 8 PM). The New York Herald Tribune also listed seven specific stores with broken windows, all of which were also identified by the New York American, and six of which were reported in the Daily Mirror. Another business was identified by both the New York American and the Daily Mirror. No reason is given in those stories for why that mix of businesses were singled out. The reporter for La Prensa identified a total of nineteen businesses with broken windows between 7th and 8th Avenues, not including four identified by the other newspapers. Where the other newspapers mentioned only stores between 7th Avenue and Kress' store at 256 West 125th Street, the La Prensa reporter walked all the way to 8th Avenue. It is possible that other stores in this block suffered only minor damage; the La Prensa reporter concluded his list by noting he had not included others as they had only suffered minor damage ("y otras mas que por ser los danos ocasionados relativamente pequeños no creimus de interes catalogar entre los establecimientos ya mencionados").

No other sources mention the Wise Shoe store, and no one arrested during the disorder is identified as breaking the business' windows. The MCCH business survey taken between June and December 1935 does record the white-owned business, giving its address as 200 West 125th Street not 202 West 125th Street. The shoe store is also visible in the Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941, with another storefront visible on the corner, which would have been the Chock Full O'Nuts luncheonette also recorded in the survey at 200 West 125th Street.
Child's restaurant windows broken The branch of the Child's restaurant chain at 272 West 125th Street had windows broken during the disorder. Spectators told a reporter from the Afro-American that they "watched a crowd of men break the windows and destroy food." The restaurant was "one of the first marks for rioters," according to that story. Located only three buildings west of Kress' store, the restaurant would have been in the path of crowds pushed toward 8th Avenue by police in their early attempts to clear West 125th Street. One witness on 125th Street at that time, Channing Tobias, then secretary of the Colored Division of the National Council of the YMCA, told E. Franklin Frazier, the head of the MCCH investigation, that Child's windows were "smashed up" after crowds "went all the way down the line," although the damage was "not much of a smash." More than location caused the windows to be broken, according to those quoted in the Afro-American. Child's was "a lily-white restaurant," so those watching "approved this vandalism because of the refusal of Child's to serve them." Along the same lines, Carlton Moss, a Black playwright, heard someone at 125th Street and 7th Avenue during the disorder claim, “We got Childs – Bastards don’t ‘llow Niggahs in dare, we got ‘em.” L. F. Cole expressed the same opinion in a letter to Arthur Garfield Hays during the MCCH investigation of the disorder, noting "Of course they do not tell us that they will not serve us, they just refuse to serve us." A New York Age reporter echoed that perception of the restaurant in reporting a survey of businesses on 125th Street a month after the disorder, noting "For a long time the opinion has prevailed in Harlem that this restaurant does not desire the patronage of Negroes." A manager's response did little to contradict that view. Noting that "colored people were welcomed as customers" as required by the Civil Rights law, he went on to say that "no effort was made to cater to their trade." Channing Tobias was confused by charges that Child's did not serve Black customers, as he had been served there, suggesting to Frazier that those who made that allegation were "too chicken hearted and assumed they would not serve colored people.”

Windows were broken in large numbers of businesses on this block of West 125th Street between 7th and 8th Avenues, where police clashed with crowds gathered in front of Kress' store. Two newspapers reported very extensive damage. "Practically every store window on the block had been shattered by 10 PM," according to the Home News; that damage was both less extensive and took longer in the New York Herald Tribune story: "By midnight one or more windows had been smashed in almost every storefront" on that block between 7th and 8th Avenues (although in another mention of that damage in the story it had been done by 8 PM). However, the businesses identified in the New York Herald Tribune, New York American, and Daily Mirror as having windows broken were east of Kress' store, near the intersection with 7th Avenue rather than 8th Avenue. No reason is given in those stories for why that mix of businesses were singled out. The reporter for La Prensa who walked along 125th Street from Lenox Avenue to 8th Avenue listed only one business west of Kress' store, the branch of London Shoes at 276 West 125th Street. The scale of damage described in the Afro-American should have warranted inclusion in that list; it may have been repaired before the reporter walked by.

No other sources mentioned broken windows in Child's restaurant. No one among those arrested during the disorder was identified as having broken windows in the restaurant. The restaurant does not appear in the MCCH business survey. It was no longer at this location by the time that the Tax department photograph was taken between 1939 and 1941, which instead showed Gonshaks department store, opened in August 1938, in a new building on the site. The restaurant closed in late May 1935, according to a story in the Pittsburgh Courier, which reported that it had been subject to a boycott over its refusal to serve Black customers, a change that had been made by "several other white restaurants in the same block, which had formerly discriminated against Negroes." Channing Tobias told Frazier the restaurant went out of business because it was "not getting enough business from whites to keep it open and Negroes did not go there — It was just losing all the time. It went out very suddenly.”
Crowds incited by Black women (3) Women made up a large proportion of those inside Kress’ store when Charles Hurley and Steve Urban grabbed Lino Rivera, and in the crowd inside and outside the store in the hours immediately after. During that time, three woman allegedly incited crowds, but not by calling for action. Two unnamed women, one inside Kress' store and one on 124th Street, shouted that Rivera had been beaten or killed rather than the direct calls to act attributed to men. Knocking pans to the floor, as Margaret Mitchell allegedly did, was a similarly indirect way of causing a crowd to gather, different from the speeches and pickets attributed to men.

The prominent place of women in the events that began the disorder was unusual; men typically initiated outbreaks of violence, joined later by women. In this instance, however, the site was a store in a retail district, realms of shopping and consumption associated with women. However, the women were not presented calling for action, so not cast as leaders in the same way as the men alleged to have incited crowds. Some newspapers amplified that distinction by casting these women in stereotypical terms as not entirely in control of their actions, as “emotional” in the New York Sun, as “frantic” and “excitable” in the New York Herald Tribune, as “hysterical” in the New Republic, as screaming rather than shouting in the New York Evening Journal, New York American, New York Post, and New York Sun, and the New Republic and Newsweek, as having “shrieked” in Time and “shrilled” in the New York Times, their cries as “gossip-mongering” in the New York Herald Tribune.

The women who alerted those around them to Rivera being beaten and the hearse arriving were effectively acting as protectors. Historian Marilynn Johnson has pointed that women's experiences in the racial disorders of the first half of the twentieth century included that role, as well as being victims of violence, and from mid-century, participants in looting. Where Johnson's examples are women acting who tried to protect family or loved ones from white violence, in 1935 Black women sought to protect a boy unrelated to them. Those actions were within societal expectations of women's roles, as Johnson noted, but by extending beyond family, they echoed the extension of women's role in consumption to include the political act of picketing white businesses the previous year.

Away from the store where Rivera was apprehended, and from 125th Street, no women shouting or leading crowds are mentioned in newspaper stories or arrested by police, with one exception, Roi Ottley's column in the New York Amsterdam News. He described women as inciting men to looting: “Women stood on the fringes of the mobs and dictated their choice to their men folk, who willingly obliged by bringing forth the desired article.” Ottley also cast women as inciting violence without joining the crowds on the streets in an earlier column: “Women hanging out of windows screamed applause to the reign of terror...and prodded their men-folk on with screeching invectives.” No other source reported such scenes. Writing a column rather than a news story, Ottley’s account was impressionistic rather than specific, making it difficult to link to other evidence. He also presented women in secondary roles, with men acting on their behalf, which may echo attitudes toward women as much as their behavior. Certainly, the women in and around Kress’ store took action themselves. There were also a small number of women among those arrested for activities other than inciting crowds, three for looting and three for breaking windows. There are also three women among those reported as injured/treated for injuries during the disorder

The presence of Black women in the crowds beyond 125th Street indicated by those arrests was recorded in some accounts and photographs of the disorder. The Daily News, New York Evening Journal, New York Times, and Norfolk Journal and Guide all included women and men in their general descriptions of the crowds. The Daily News highlighted their presence among those who broke windows in a headline, “Women Join Mob of 4,000 In Battering Stores,” without mentioning women breaking windows in the story itself.

Other papers, however, such as the New York American, Home News, New York Sun, New York World-Telegram, and the Black newspapers the Afro-American and Chicago Defender, included women only in the initial crowds inside and outside Kress’ store. Photographs also captured only the women’s presence on 125th Street, in a crowd facing a patrolman swinging his baton, among a group being scattered by police, and knocked to the ground. Women are not mentioned in stories about the events of the disorder published in the New York Herald Tribune, New York Post, or New York Age.
Everett Breuer and Joseph Martin assaulted Everett Breuer, a twenty-eight-year-old white photographer working for the Daily News, was taking images of the crowd at 7th Avenue and 125th Street when a rock hit him in the head. It was likely one of several objects thrown in Breuer’s direction as the office boy carrying his plates, Joseph Martin, was also hit on the face. Breuer’s own publication reported he was “beaten,” not hit by a rock, as did the New York American, but the Daily Mirror, Home News, New York Herald Tribune, and New York Times all reported him being hit by an object. The New York Evening Journal and New York Post reported only the resulting cuts. According to all the publications but the New York Evening Journal, Breuer’s cuts were bad enough to require a trip to the hospital. The stories disagreed on where he received treatment. The New York American, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, New York Times, and Daily Mirror reported it was at Harlem Hospital, the Home News at Sydenham Hospital on Manhattan Avenue and West 124th Street, and the Daily News at the Hospital for the Ruptured and Crippled on 42nd St and Lexington Avenue.

James Martin attracted less attention than Breuer. Other than a mention in the story and an appearance in the list of the injured in the Daily News, Martin appeared only in the list of injured published by the New York Evening Journal. Both sources described him as having cuts on his face, with the latfter recording that an ambulance treated Martin.

The area around 7th Avenue and 125th Street saw a cluster of assaults during the disorder, with six other assaults reported there, including the beating of another reporter, Harry Johnson of the New York American. It was also at this location that Andrew Lyons was killed. All those events occurred despite police being deployed at the intersection. The attack on Breuer and Martin may have occurred during violence around 8:00 PM or when several other white men were assaulted around 9:00 PM.

A photograph Breuer took immediately before the rock struck him became the most widely reproduced image of the disorder. When it initially appeared in the Daily News, the caption noted “After making this picture, The News photographer was struck down and went to hospital. He suffered lacerations to the scalp.” In later editions that information was omitted, and it did not appear in the caption of the photograph when it was reprinted by other publications. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle list of the injured did report Breuer was "hit by a rock while taking pictures of a riotous group." The scene the photographer captured shows two black men apparently trying to move away from a uniformed police officer; one man has fallen, while the officer is trying to hold the other. Neither they nor the three men and two women in the background look poised to throw anything at the photographer.
Injured and arrested (5) Four Black men arrested for assault, and one arrested for inciting a riot and possession of a firearm are recorded as being injured.

In two cases, that injury is mentioned in accounts of the assault. Paul Boyett was shot in the right shoulder by a policeman who alleged he was part of a group the officer interrupted assaulting Timothy Murphy. A physician from Knickerbocker Hospital attended him at the 30th Precinct, after which he was placed in a cell. Charles Alston allegedly fell when trying to escape police by jumping from the roof of one building to an adjacent building. He landed on a ledge three floors below, fracturing his skull. Photographs of Alston's arrest show him holding his head, but the severity of his injury only became apparent at the police station, when he passed out — a detail reported only in the Home News. Alston did appear in the lists of the injured published by several newspapers.

In two cases, accounts of the assault make no mention of an injury to the men arrested, which could indicate that they had been assaulted by police. James Smitten, arrested for assaulting William Kitlitz, had "lacerations of [sic] scalp," according to medical records, that may have come at the hands of Kitlitz during the alleged assault, or from police during his arrest. A physician from Harlem Hospital attended him at the 28th Precinct, where he remained after treatment. Isaac Daniels, arrested for assaulting Herman Young by throwing a stone through the window of his store, had "contusions" of his left arm according to the list of the injured in the New York Post that may have come from police during his arrest .

No details survive of the circumstances of the fifth case. Hashi Mohammed, a twenty-two-year-old Black man identified as of "Abyssinian" origin, charged with inciting a riot and possession of a firearm, also appeared in lists of the injured published in three newspapers.
Injured
De Soto Windgate shot At 1:15 AM, “some unknown person” shot a twenty-four-year-old Black man named De Soto Windgate as he walked along West 144th Street between Lenox and 7th Avenues. The shooting was one of only two reported incidents associated with the disorder north of West 138th Street, and one of only a handful of events that might have occurred away from the avenues on residential cross streets.

There was no information on the circumstances of the shooting. There was no evidence of any disorder in which he might have participated, that might have attracted his attention or have brought police into the area. Windgate lived at the opposite end of Harlem at 7 East 114th Street, a section mostly occupied by Puerto Rican and white residents. He may have come north to patronize one of the theaters on West 145th Street; the Roosevelt was on the corner of 7th Avenue. Or he may have been visiting friends. Given the location and limited evidence, there was some question about whether this shooting was part of the disorder.

Windgate appeared in the Aided Cases book of the 32nd Precinct, based on West 135th Street. Procedure required police to record all incidents reported to them in that book. Only three other cases appear in the 32nd Precinct book for the period of the disorder, the alleged assault on a white man named Julius Narditch by a group of Black men at 8th Avenue and West 147th Street, the assault on Thomas Suares on West 134th Street near Lenox Avenue, and the injury of Herbert Holderman near Lenox Avenue and West 132nd Street. Police appeared to have included his name in the list of those injured during the disorder they released to the press. Windgate was included in the list of those “near death” in the New York American, Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the New York Evening Journal’s list of the “dying.” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle and New York Herald Tribune simply described his condition as “serious.” Those reports said the bullet hit Windgate in the abdomen causing a wound serious enough for him to be admitted to Harlem Hospital. However, he did not appear in the hospital records gathered by the MCCH.

The police record did not identify Windgate’s race, but the newspaper stories did. The New York American, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Home News, New York Daily News, New York Post, New York Times, and New York Sun all included information about his race; the New York Herald Tribune and New York Evening Journal did not. Four of the six others shot and wounded in the disorder were Black men, one of unknown race, and one white police officer. No one was arrested for shooting Windgate, as was the case with all of those shot and wounded. (Detective Campo’s alleged assailant was shot and killed.)
Blumstein department store windows broken At about 10:30 PM, a brick broke a window of the Blumstein department store at 230 West 125th Street, likely a large display window, as it caused $200 damage. Patrolman Walter MacKenzie told the Harlem Magistrates Court that he saw Claude Jones, a twenty-four-year-old Black musician, throw the brick, and then shout "in a loud voice, 'Kill the cops, the dirty mother-fucking sons of bitches,' causing a large crowd to gather." By that time the large crowds that had been focused on 125th Street had broken into smaller groups, many of which scattered north and south up the avenues, as police established a perimeter around the block between 8th and 7th Avenues. Ten minutes after windows were broken in Blumstein's store, William Ford allegedly threw a rock that broke a window at Kress' store several buildings to to the west and then called on the people on the street to attack police, drawing a large crowd. Around the same time, a white man named Thomas Wijstem was hit by a rock in front of the W. T. Grant store immediately east of Blumstein's, allegedly while being attacked by a group of Black men. Jones lived four blocks south, at 170 West 121st Street, close enough to where the disorder began to have been among those drawn to 125th Street by the noise, crowds, or rumors.

Windows were broken in large numbers of businesses on this block of West 125th Street. Two newspapers reported very extensive damage. "Practically every store window on the block had been shattered by 10 PM," according to the Home News; that damage was both less extensive and took longer in the New York Herald Tribune story: "By midnight one or more windows had been smashed in almost every storefront" on that block between 7th and 8th Avenues (although in another mention of that damage in the story it had been done by 8 PM). Blumstein's department store was one of seven businesses identified as having broken windows by the New York Herald Tribune, New York American, and Daily Mirror. No reason is given in those stories for why that mix of businesses were singled out. They were not just the largest stores, although the W. T. Grant and McCrory's department stores were also included. The United Cigar store spanned several storefronts on the corner on West 125th Street and 7th Avenue, but the other stores, Scheer's clothing store, Young's Hats, Willow Cafeteria, and the Conrad Schmidt music shop identified in the New York American and New York Herald Tribune, did not have similarly large displays. All the stores identified by these newspapers were located between Kress' store at 256 West 125th Street and 7th Avenue, so may have been the damaged stores that reporters could see. The Blumstein department store was also one of the nineteen businesses on this block with broken windows listed by a reporter for La Prensa who walked along West 125th Street on the day after the disorder. That list included businesses west of Kress' store.

Only the New York American included the address of the department store, which was one of the best-known businesses in Harlem. The Blumstein department store was included in the MCCH business survey taken between June and December 1935 and is visible in the Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941.

Claude Jones appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, charged with inciting a riot. Remanded in custody, he was returned to the court a week later, when Magistrate Ford held him on $1,000 bail for the grand jury. On April 12, they sent Jones to the Court of Special Sessions for trial, likely to be tried for the offenses written in a note on the Magistrates Court affidavit, both the misdemeanor forms of inciting a riot and malicious mischief, an offense involving damage to property used in the prosecution of those who allegedly broke windows during the disorder. Convicted by the judges in that court, Jones received a suspended sentence on April 16, according to the 28th Precinct police blotter.
Willow Cafeteria windows broken Around 8:50 PM, Officer Henry Eppler was stationed in front of the Willow Cafeteria at 207 West 125th Street, he told a public hearing of the MCCH, where he would have been part of the cordon police established around Kress' store. He allegedly saw Frank Wells, a twenty-six-year-old Black man, throw a automobile hubcap at the window and break it. Opposite the McCrory department store, the restaurant was at the western end of the building at the intersection of West 125th Street and 7th Avenue. All the businesses in the building to the east of the store had windows broken; the General Stationery & Supplies store, Savon Clothes store, Young's Hats, Minks Haberdashery, and the United Cigar store on the corner. Only Young's Hats was reported looted.

Windows were broken in large numbers of businesses on this block of West 125th Street, where police clashed with crowds gathered in front of Kress' store. Two newspapers reported very extensive damage. "Practically every store window on the block had been shattered by 10 PM," according to the Home News; that damage was both less extensive and took longer in the New York Herald Tribune story: "By midnight one or more windows had been smashed in almost every storefront" on that block between 7th and 8th Avenues (although in another mention of that damage in the story it had been done by 8 PM). The Willow Cafeteria was one of seven businesses identified as having broken windows by the New York Herald Tribune, New York American, and Daily Mirror. No reason is given in those stories for why that mix of businesses were singled out. They were not just the largest stores, although the Blumstein and McCrory's department stores were included, together with the W. T Grant 5 & 10c store in the New York American and Daily Mirror. The United Cigar store spanned several storefronts on the corner on West 125th Street and 7th Avenue, but the other stores, Scheer's clothing store, Young's Hats, and the Conrad Schmidt music shop identified in the New York American and New York Herald Tribune, did not have similarly large displays. All the stores identified by these newspapers were located between Kress' store at 256 West 125th Street and 7th Avenue, so may have been the damaged stores that reporters could see. Willow Cafeteria store was also one of the nineteen businesses on this block with broken windows listed by a reporter for La Prensa who walked along West 125th Street on the day after the disorder. That list included businesses west of Kress' store.

Only the New York American provided an address for Willow Cafeteria, 207 West 125th Street. The MCCH business survey taken between June and December 1935 located the white-owned business at 209 West 125th Street. However, the Tax Department photograph of that building taken between 1939 and 1941 shows that the cafeteria was one building further east, its sign partly visible beyond the canopy over the entrance to the Harlem Opera House. The cafeteria sign is also partly visible on the left in the Tax Department photograph of 2100-2106 7th Avenue.

Eppler's testimony in the public hearing is the only evidence that specifically associates Wells with the Willow Cafeteria, which he identified by address, not name. A story in the New York Herald Tribune did say Wells had been arrested for allegedly "hurling an automobile hub through a cafeteria window on 125th Street," but did not name the cafeteria. On March 20, Wells appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court, one of the last arraigned after being one of the first arrested. The docket book recorded the charge against him as disorderly conduct, not malicious mischief, the offense involving damage to property that was the charge most often made against those alleged to have broken windows. That charge suggests that Wells did only limited damage to the window. He returned to court on March 26, at which time his bail was set at $500. Wells returned to court a further five times, according to the docket book, on April 9, 12, 17, 18, and finally on April 20, when he was convicted and sentenced to thirty days in the Workhouse.
General Stationery & Supplies store windows broken The General Stationery & Supplies store at 205 West 125th Street is one of the businesses in a list of those with broken windows made by a reporter for La Prensa who walked along West 116th Street, Lenox Avenue, and West 125th Street on the day after the disorder. After walking north on Lenox Avenue from West 116th Street, the reporter turned left on West 125th Street, walking west toward Kress' store where the disorder originated. The stationery store was at the western end of the building on the corner of 7th Avenue, on the block of West 125th Street where police clashed with crowds gathered in front of Kress' store. All the stores in that building facing West 125th Street had windows broken; to the east, the Savon Clothes store, Young's Hats, Minks Haberdashery, and the United Cigar store on the corner; and to the west, the Willow Cafeteria. Only Young's Hats was reported looted.

Windows were broken in large numbers of businesses on this block of West 125th Street. Two newspapers reported very extensive damage. Attacks on this store likely began around 7:30 PM or 8:00 PM, with more windows likely broken around 9:00 PM. "Practically every store window on the block had been shattered by 10 PM," according to the Home News; that damage was both less extensive and took longer in the New York Herald Tribune story: "By midnight one or more windows had been smashed in almost every storefront" on that block between 7th and 8th Avenues (although in another mention of that damage in the story it had been done by 8 PM). The New York Herald Tribune also listed seven specific stores with broken windows, all of which were also identified by the New York American, and six of which were reported in the Daily Mirror. Another business was identified by both the New York American and the Daily Mirror. No reason is given in those stories for why that mix of businesses were singled out. The reporter for La Prensa identified a larger group of nineteen businesses with broken windows between 7th and 8th Avenues, not including four identified by the other newspapers. It is possible that other stores in this block suffered only minor damage; the La Prensa reporter concluded his list by noting he had not included others as they had only suffered minor damage ("y otras mas que por ser los danos ocasionados relativamente pequeños no creimus de interes catalogar entre los establecimientos ya mencionados").

No other sources mention the stationery store, and no one arrested during the disorder is identified as breaking the business' windows. The MCCH business survey taken between June and December 1935 does record the white-owned business. The stationery store was no longer at that address when the Tax Department photograph was taken between 1939 and 1941, a Crawford clothing store having opened there in December 1936.
Clarence London shot Sometime shortly before 1:00 AM, Clarence London, a thirty-four-year-old Black man, was shot in the leg while walking on the street near West 122nd Street and 7th Avenue. London lived in north Harlem, at 676 St Nicholas Avenue, so was far from home when the bullet hit him. Dr. Payne attended London at Harlem Hospital at 1:00 AM.

The location of the shooting was recorded in hospital admission records as West 122nd Street and 7th Avenue. That record was a more reliable source than the stories in the New York Times and New York Herald Tribune that located the shooting three blocks north, at 125th Street and 7th Avenue. An ambulance from Harlem Hospital also attended a white man, John Eigler, who reported being hit by an object thrown by a Black assailant at 122nd Street and 7th Avenue around the time London was shot. Fred Campbell's car was hit by a brick at the same intersection a few minutes earlier. He saw police officers with riot guns and heard shots being fired as he drove by. The New York American reported London had been “shot by an unidentified man” but offered no other details. Other newspapers simply listed him as “shot.” The hospital records further obscured the circumstances by describing London as “wounded.” His wound was consistently reported as in the right leg, although the Home News did report it was in the left leg. Given the evidence of both looting and the police response to it at the time, and the lack of any evidence that Black individuals on the streets during the disorder used guns, London was likely hit by shots fired by police — as were the other men reported as shot and wounded during the disorder.

The New York American, New York Post, Home News, New York Herald Tribune, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and New York Times all identified London as a Black man; only the Daily News and New York Evening Journal did not specify his race. Four of the six other individuals shot and wounded in the disorder were Black men; the others were one man of unknown race, and one white police officer.

No one was arrested for shooting London, as was the case with all of those shot and wounded. (Detective Campo’s alleged assailant was shot and killed.)
Stanley Dondoro injured 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.
Patrolman Michael Kelly assaulted Patrolman Michael Kelly, a thirty-year-old white officer, was hit on the leg "by a stone thrown by an unknown person" at the rear of Kress’ store on 124th Street, according to the record of the ambulance that attended him. Dr. Russell of Harlem Hospital treated Kelly at 7:15 PM, so the assault likely took place around 7:00 PM. That was the time newspaper stories reported that the crowd pushed from the front of Kress' store on 125th Street moved to the store's rear in response to the appearance of a hearse they assumed had come for the body of the boy rumored to have been killed in the store and began breaking windows. Kelly was one of the officers listed in a story in the New York Times as injured after "a barrage of missiles fell on the ranks of the police who had caught up with the crowd" after it moved from the front of the store. A similar account appeared in the New York Age, which described police arriving at the rear of the store as being "greeted with a fusillade of stone hurled by the crowd," as a result of which Kelly was one of two patrolmen "forced to undergo treatment for injuries." He was assigned to a radio car, the Medical Attendance record detailed, which may have allowed him to get to the rear of the store faster than other officers. The street had a narrower roadway and pavements than 125th Street, making officers easier to target with objects thrown from roofs as well as the street level. One other officer, Detective Charles Foley, was seriously injured enough to be attended by an ambulance after being hit by a stone thrown at him at the rear of the store around the same time as Kelly.

The Medical Attendance report described Kelly's injury as "contusion of muscle and right leg," serious enough that he was taken to Harlem Hospital for an x-ray and "surgical observation." The lists of the injured in the New York American on both March 20 and 21 and in the New York Herald Tribune, as well as the story in the New York Times echoed that information, while the lists in the Home News and New York Evening Journal reported the injury as a sprain without noting that Kelly was taken to the hospital. A story in the Daily Mirror, and lists in the Daily News and New York Post replaced the injury to the leg with a more dramatic head injury. The New York Age did not specify the nature of Kelly's injury.

No one was arrested for assaulting Kelly, as was the case in seven of the nine assaults on police.
Scheer's Capitol clothing store windows broken The Scheer's Capitol clothing store at 217 West 125th Street had windows broken during the disorder. Opposite the W. T. Grant and Blumstein department stores, the clothing store was four buildings from the intersection of West 125th Street and 7th Avenue, on the block of West 125th Street where police clashed with crowds gathered in front of Kress' store.

Windows were broken in large numbers of businesses on this block of West 125th Street. Two newspapers reported very extensive damage. Attacks on this store likely began around 7:30 PM or 8:00 PM, with more windows likely broken around 9:00 PM and further damage possibly done around 10:30 PM. "Practically every store window on the block had been shattered by 10 PM," according to the Home News; that damage was both less extensive and took longer in the New York Herald Tribune story: "By midnight one or more windows had been smashed in almost every storefront" on that block between 7th and 8th Avenues (although in another mention of that damage in the story it had been done by 8 PM). Scheer's Capitol clothing store was one of seven businesses identified as having broken windows by the New York Herald Tribune, New York American, and Daily Mirror. No reason is given in those stories for why that mix of businesses were singled out. They were not just the largest stores, although the Blumstein and McCrory's department stores were included, together with the W. T Grant 5 & 10c store in the New York American and Daily Mirror. The United Cigar store spanned several storefronts on the corner on West 125th Street and 7th Avenue, but the other stores, the Willow Cafeteria, and Young's Hats, and Conrad Schmidt Music Shop identified in the New York American and New York Herald Tribune, did not have similarly large displays. Scheer's clothing store, which the New York Herald Tribune described as "a small clothing store," appears to have had an unusually narrow storefront, the space occupied by Westin Clothes in the Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941. All the stores identified by these newspapers were located between Kress' store at 256 West 125th Street and 7th Avenue, so may have been the damaged stores that reporters could see. Scheer's Capitol clothing store is not one of the nineteen businesses on this block with broken windows listed by a reporter for La Prensa who walked along West 125th Street on the day after the disorder. That list included businesses west of Kress' store. It may have been omitted because it had only minor damage; the La Prensa reporter concluded his list by noting he had not included others as they had only suffered minor damage ("y otras mas que por ser los danos ocasionados relativamente pequeños no creimus de interes catalogar entre los establecimientos ya mencionados").

Only the New York American provided an address for Scheer's clothing store, 213 West 125th Street. The business is not recorded at that address in the MCCH business survey taken between June and December 1935. The store's location at 217 West 125th Street appeared in an advertisement in the New York Amsterdam News on March 24, 1934. That address is missing from the MCCH business survey. A second branch of the store appears in the advertisement, at 109 West 125th Street. That address may be a mistake, as the MCCH business survey records a Scheer's Capitol clothing store at 139 West 125th Street, an address that also appears in a advertisement in the New York Amsterdam News on March 30, 1940. The store at 217 West 125th Street does not appear in the Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941, indicating it closed sometime between 1935 and 1940.
Ernest Johnson arrested Near the end of the disorder, at 5:00 AM on March 20, Patrolman Jerry Brennan arrested Ernest Johnson, Albert Yerber, Charles Alston, and Edward Loper 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, Yerber was twenty years of age, and Johnson was twenty-two years of age. Johnson lived close to where they were arrested, at 206 West 140th Street. Yerber lived on the other side of Harlem at 106 Edgecombe Ave, as did Loper, at 298 West 138th Street and, even further west, Alston at 512 West 153rd Street. 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 Johnson 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, Johnson, Yerber, and Loper were charged with disorderly conduct, according to the Washington Heights Magistrates Court docket book, which identified Brennan as the arresting officer for all three men. (Alston did not appear in court, likely because of his injury). The clerk annotated that charge with the word "annoy." Under that section of the statute, a person is guilty if they act "in such a manner as to annoy, disturb, interfere with, obstruct, or be offensive to others." A separate clause punishes disorderly or threatening conduct or behavior, so based on that annotation, the men were not charged with attacking Brennan. That charge fits better with 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 Johnson and his two companions (Alston was later discharged when he appeared in court on April 9, presumably after he recovered from his injuries.) 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.

Johnson, and Loper and Yerber, are among those charged with disorderly conduct in the list of the arrested published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide. They are not mentioned in stories about the proceedings in the Washington Heights Magistrates Court on March 20 in the New York Age and New York Herald Tribune, which listed only those convicted.
Roof set on fire Sometime after midnight a fire was set on the roof of 5 West 131st Street, according to an eyewitness writing for the Daily Worker. A fire was first set at a 5 & 10c store on Lenox Avenue, according to the story, a reference to a fire at Lash's store soon after midnight, then on the roof. The fire on the roof, that writer surmised, was a distraction: “This was done, I suppose, to draw the attention of the police force and riot squads from Lenox Avenue where they had concentrated their forces and were attacking the Negroes.” Police did come to the area around the building sometime during the night, even though there were few reports of disorder. A patrolman arrested Lamter Jackson for allegedly taking items from Israel Riehl's unclaimed laundry store in the adjacent building, 3 West 131st Street.

The only other mention of rooftop fires, in the Home News, did not refer to any specific locations. The story explained such fires as an incitement as much as a distraction: “One method by which the mobs stirred up excitement was to stack great heaps of newspapers on the roofs of buildings. The paper, when ignited, led those in the streets to believe spectacular fires were in progress and many fire alarms were sounded.” False alarms and the sounds of fire engines are mentioned in several newspapers, which might indicate that other roof fires were lit, or simply that calls were made to the fire department. Unlike fires in stores on the ground floor, those on a roof posed less danger to the apartments in the building.

The three fires in stores during the disorder were a block west of this building, on Lenox Avenue and West 130th Street, and at 429 and 431 Lenox Avenue, between West 131st and West 132nd Streets.
Patrolman Charles Robbins assaulted Patrolman Charles Robbins, a member of the 6th Emergency Squad (a riot squad), was "struck over head with an iron bar by some unknown person,” according to the record of the ambulance that attended him. Dr. Russell of Harlem Hospital treated Robbins at 124th Street and 7th Avenue, at 10:15 PM, indicating that that assault took place sometime earlier, around 10:00 PM. The location of the assault was the "scene of the riot," in the Medical Attendance record, likely where Robbins was treated. By 10:00 PM, police had established a perimeter around the block of 125th Street between 7th and 8th Avenues on which Kress' store was located. As a result crowds trying to get to the Kress store were stuck on those corners, leading some to leave in frustration and instead go up or down 7th Avenue. Emergency trucks were part of the police perimeter. While newspaper stories differed over precisely where the vehicles were stationed, both the New York Times and New York Herald Tribune located at least one truck on 125th Street between 7th and 8th Avenues. (The New York Times put the others on 124th Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, 126th Street between Lenox and Seventh Avenues, and at 130th Street and Lenox Avenue, while the New York Herald Tribune had them at Lenox Avenue and 125th Street, and 7th Avenue and 127th Street.)

Robbins was included in lists of the injured published in the press. Four of those lists provided details of the circumstances in which he was injured. The Home News and the New York American on March 20 described the injury as caused by an iron bar, following the Medical Attendance record. The New York Herald Tribune and Brooklyn Daily Eagle, which listed the injured policemen separately, included the detail that Robbins had been hit by a brick. An iron bar was not a typical weapon during the disorder; bricks, however, were frequently used as weapons. The New York Evening Journal, New York Post, New York American (on March 21), and Daily News all listed Robbins among the injured without details of the circumstances. His injury was listed as a “possible fractured skull,” but the Medical Attendance record described Robbins' injury as only a "laceration of scalp." Nonetheless, it noted that Robbins was "removed" to Harlem Hospital for further treatment, which may be why newspapers identified him as having suffered a more serious injury.

No one was arrested for assaulting Robbins, as was the case in seven of the nine alleged assaults on police.
Detective Charles Foley assaulted Detective Charles Foley, a thirty-two-year-old white officer from the 28th Precinct on West 123rd Street, was "struck by a stone thrown by some unknown person while at scene of riot in rear of Kress’ Store" on 124th Street, according to the Medical Attendance record of the ambulance that attended him. Dr. Sayet of Harlem Hospital treated Foley in front of Blumstein's department store, on 125th Street, at 7:30 PM, so the assault likely took place around 7:15 PM. Around the same time, a second officer, Patrolman Michael Kelly, was hit by an object at the rear of the store, where police had followed a crowd drawn to 124th Street around 7:00 PM by the appearance of a hearse they assumed had come for the body of the boy rumored to have been killed. Foley was one of the officers listed in a story in the New York Times as injured after "a barrage of missiles fell on the ranks of the police who had caught up with the crowd" after it moved from the front of the store. The street had a narrower roadway and pavements than 125th Street, making officers easier to target with objects thrown from roofs as well as the street level.

The Medical Attendance record described Foley's injury as a "possible fracture of left shoulder." Lists in the Home News, New York Herald Tribune, Daily News, and New York Evening Journal, and a story in the New York Times identified him as having a shoulder injury. Three other papers, the New York American on March 20 and 21, the Daily Mirror, and the New York Post, instead listed a head injury, the most common injury resulting from being hit by objects. According to the New York Times, Foley "refused medical attention." Given that an ambulance attended him, that claim is likely a misstatement of the fact that he was not taken back to Harlem Hospital, as Kelly was, but treated at the scene.

No one was arrested for assaulting Foley, as was the case in seven of the nine assaults on police.
London shoe store windows broken A branch of the London shoe store chain at 276 West 125th Street is one of the businesses in a list of those with broken windows made by a reporter for La Prensa who walked along West 116th Street, Lenox Avenue, and West 125th Street on the day after the disorder. After walking north on Lenox Avenue from West 116th Street, the reporter turned left on West 125th Street, walking west toward Kress' store where the disorder originated. The shoe store was two storefronts from the southeast corner of West 125th Street and 8th Avenue.

Windows were broken in large numbers of businesses on this block of West 125th Street, on the block of West 125th Street where police clashed with crowds gathered in front of Kress' store. Two newspapers reported very extensive damage. "Practically every store window on the block had been shattered by 10 PM, according to the Home News; that damage was both less extensive and took longer in the New York Herald Tribune story: "By midnight one or more windows had been smashed in almost every storefront" on that block between 7th and 8th Avenues (although in another mention of that damage in the story it had been done by 8 PM). However, the businesses identified in the New York Herald Tribune, New York American, and Daily Mirror as having windows broken were all east of Kress' store, near the intersection with 7th Avenue rather than 8th Avenue. No reason is given in those stories for why that mix of businesses were singled out. The only mention of broken windows west of Kress' store came from the reporter for La Prensa, who walked West 125th Street all the way to 8th Avenue, and an anecdote regarding the Child's restaurant at 272 West 125th Street in the Afro-American. However, the shoe store is the only one of the nineteen businesses with broken windows between 7th and 8th Avenues the reporter identified that was west of Kress', together with five around the eastern corners of 8th Avenue. It is possible that other stores in this block suffered only minor damage; the La Prensa reporter concluded his list by noting he had not included others as they had only suffered minor damage ("y otras mas que por ser los danos ocasionados relativamente pequeños no creimus de interes catalogar entre los establecimientos ya mencionados").

No other sources mention the London shoe store, and no one arrested during the disorder is identified as breaking the business' windows. The white-owned store is included in the MCCH business survey taken between June and December 1935. By the time the Tax Department photographs were taken between 1939 and 1941, a new department store had replaced the buildings at this address in 1935. (London shoes had relocated by January 8, 1938, when an advertisement gave its new address as 252 West 125th Street; a sign for London shoes can be seen at that address, left of Kress' store, in the Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941.)
Black women arrested for breaking windows (3) Three Black women are among the twenty-six individuals arrested for breaking windows. They represent just under half of the women arrested, with three women arrested for looting and another for inciting a crowd. (No women identified as white are among those reported as arrested during the disorder.) Few details of their arrests and alleged actions are recorded, but the outcomes of their prosecution indicate that at least two did not actually break windows. Rose Murrell and Louise Brown were both arrested in the same area, on 8th Avenue, around 127th Street, by the same police officer. However, the different outcomes of the women's prosecutions suggest that police only produced evidence that Murrell broke a window. She was convicted in the Court of Special Sessions and sentenced to one month in the Workhouse. By contrast, Brown had the charge against her reduced to disorderly conduct, suggesting that police did not have evidence that she had broken a window but only that she had been part of a crowd on the street. While Magistrate Ford convicted her, he suspended Brown's sentence, further indicating a lack of evidence she had been responsible for damage to a store. Although newspaper stories reported that Viola Woods, the third woman, had broken a window, when she appeared in court she was charged instead with disorderly conduct. Police again appear not to have produced evidence Woods had broken a window, but in this case, Magistrate Renaud discharged Woods. That Woods was not instead convicted of disorderly conduct might be the result of being represented by a lawyer, a rare occurrence in the Magistrates Court.

The presence of Black women in the crowds on Harlem’s streets is recorded in most accounts of the disorder, but they are only rarely mentioned as participants in attacks on stores (and looting). The Daily News, New York Evening Journal, New York Times, and Norfolk Journal and Guide all included women and men in their general descriptions of the crowds. Other papers such as the New York American, Home News, New York Sun, New York World-Telegram and the Black newspapers the Afro-American and Chicago Defender included women only in the initial crowds inside and outside Kress’ store. Their presence at the outbreak of violence distinguishes the disorder in Harlem from those that followed in subsequent decades, in which Marilynn Johnson argues women became involved after men had initiated the violence. Women's early involvement in Harlem resulted from the disorder beginning in a store, at a time when only women were present to witness what happened to Lino Rivera. (Women are not mentioned in stories about the events of the disorder published in the New York Herald Tribune, New York Post, or New York Age.)

Women are explicitly mentioned as participants in breaking windows in only four newspapers. The Daily News published a headline, “Women Join Mob of 4,000 In Battering Stores,” but did not include women in descriptions of attacks on store windows. The New York Times described “a riot in which roving bands of Negro men and women smashed 200 plate-glass store windows.” Two general descriptions of the disorder included women, making them participants in both breaking windows and looting. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle's description of the disorder included "smashing more than 200 windows" among other activities of "Bands of men and women, in some cases joined by whites." In the Black press, the Atlanta World included women in crowds that broke windows in a similar manner: “the members of the mob needed little provocation to start on the rampage. Using whatever weapons that were to hand, men, women and children in the mob broke hundreds of plate glass windows in stores belonging to white merchants, scattered and stole merchandise and destroyed fixtures.”

While these stories, and the photographs that accompanied them, indicate that women were part of the crowds on March 19, it remains unclear whether those women did not participate in breaking windows or did and were not recorded by reporters or arrested by police focused on men they likely considered more threatening. From a broader perspective more removed from the events of the disorder, the MCCH appeared to have concluded that women did participate, noting in its report: "Even some grown-up men and women who had probably never committed a criminal act before, but bad suffered years of privations, seized the opportunity to express their resentment against discrimination in employment and the exclusive rights of property." However, this section of the report was part of an effort to frame the disorder as less violent and threatening than it appeared in the initial newspaper stories. While noting that "it seems indisputable that the criminal element took advantage of the disorders," the previous sentence argued, "it seems equally true that many youngsters who could not be classed as criminals joined the looting crowds in a spirit of pure adventure." An earlier discussion of crowds in the disorder made a similar claim, that "Some of the destruction was carried on in a playful spirit." Including women as participants in "playful" behavior did not run counter to gender roles and stereotypes in the way that their participation in violence did. The only other place women appear in the MCCH report's discussion of the events of the disorder is as shoppers in the Kress store.
Edward Loper arrested Near the end of the disorder, at 5:00 AM on March 20, Patrolman Jerry Brennan arrested Edward Loper, Charles Alston, Albert Yerber, 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. Yerber was twenty years of age, and Johnson was twenty-two years of age. Loper lived on the other side of Harlem at at 298 West 138th Street, as did Yerber, at 106 Edgecombe Ave, and, even further west, Alston at 512 West 153rd Street, while Johnson lived close to where they were arrested, at 206 West 140th Street. 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 illustrate 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 arrests. 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 Loper, Yerber, and Johnson were charged with disorderly conduct, according to the Washington Heights Magistrates Court docket book, which identified Brennan as the arresting officer for all three men. (Alston did not appear in court, likely because of his injury.) The clerk annotated that charge with the word "annoy." Under that section of the statute, a person is guilty if they act "in such a manner as to annoy, disturb, interfere with, obstruct, or be offensive to others." A separate clause punishes disorderly or threatening conduct or behavior, so based on that annotation, the men were not charged with attacking Brennan. That charge fits better with 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 Loper and his two companions. 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.

Loper, and Yerber and Johnson, are among those charged with disorderly conduct in the list of the arrested published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide.They are not mentioned in stories about the proceedings in the Washington Heights Magistrates Court on March 20 in the New York Age and New York Herald Tribune, which listed only those convicted.
Max Newman assaulted At 10:30 PM, Max Newman, a thirty-six-year-old white man, was closing his grocer’s store at 2274 8th Avenue when a group of Black men allegedly attacked him. They beat him around the head, leaving him with cuts and bruises on his forehead. An ambulance was called, and a doctor treated Newman’s injuries at the scene. Newman was one of three white business owners allegedly attacked by groups of Black men. Joseph Sarnelli was also closing his store, and his assailants allegedly tried to steal razors. Herman Young was hit by a rock thrown from a crowd during a period of looting.

Newman appeared only in lists of the injured. Two lists included some details of the circumstances in which he suffered those wounds. The New York Herald Tribune provided the details that he was beaten by a group of eight Black men, when the assault occurred, and that an ambulance treated him. The New York American described a smaller group of five men, and did not mention the timing or the ambulance. The reports in the Home News, New York Evening Journal, and New York Post only listed Newman’s injuries. The Home News and New York Evening Journal did include his home address, 3200 Rochambeau Avenue in the Bronx.

Two different locations for the assault were reported. The list published in the New York Herald Tribune reported the store was at 2774 8th Avenue, “near 138th St," but that address was actually near 148th Street, not 138th Street. It was too far north to fit the other events of the disorder around that time. However, the list in the New York American located the store at 2274 8th Avenue, which was near 122nd Street, not 138th Street. The MCCH business survey identified both addresses as white-owned grocery stores. The area around 122nd Street saw windows being broken and violence intensifying around 10:30 PM as groups moved away from 125th Street. The assault fits that context so has been mapped at 2274 8th Avenue.
B. Z. Kondoul assaulted 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.
Victor Fain shot Victor Fain, a nineteen-year-old Black man born in South Carolina, was shot in “some unknown manner during [the] disorder” at 128th Street and 7th Avenue, according to a hospital admission record. Dr. Payne attended Mitchell at Harlem Hospital at 2:30 AM, so he was likely shot sometime after 2:00 AM. The bullet almost certainly came from a police gun. The noise of police gunfire had been one of the sounds of the disorder from early on, with many of those shots fired in the air in an attempt to disperse groups who gathered on the street. Around midnight, police had begun shooting more indiscriminantly, aiming at those on the street and shooting sufficient rounds to prodice many stray shots.

Fain was shot some distance from his home fifteen blocks to the south, at 315 West 113th Street, in a section on the southern margins of Harlem mostly occupied by whites and Puerto Ricans. Sometime later in 1935 he relocated to section of Black Harlem, lodging at 208 West 141st Street. Fain was still at that address when a census enumerator called on April 30, 1940.

The hospital record described Fain as having been shot in the left ankle. All the newspaper lists of the injured, in the New York American, Home News, Daily News, New York Post, and New York Evening Journal, and a story in the New York Times, reported the same injury. That unusual consistency might result from him being admitted to the hospital after being attended.

The hospital record did not identify Fain’s race, but the newspapers did. The lists of the injured in the New York American, Home News and the story in the New York Times identified him as a Black man. The lists of injured in the Daily News, New York Post, and New York Evening Journal did not. Four Black men were among the six men shot and wounded in the disorder, with one man of unknown race, and one white police officer.

No one was arrested for shooting Fain, as was the case with all of those shot and wounded. (Detective Campo’s alleged assailant was shot and killed.)
In the Night Court (3) Three men arrested during the disorder were arraigned in the Night Court, a branch of the city's magistrates courts that operated after the other courts closed. The New York Herald Tribune, New York Post, and Home News were the only newspapers to mention those hearings. The Home News provided the least information, noting only that "some few [of those arrested] were arraigned in Night Court last night before Magistrate Capshaw." Both the other newspapers specified that three men appeared in the Night Court. While the New York Post offered no further details, the New York Herald Tribune published brief descriptions of the men's alleged offenses.

Magistrate Capshaw adjudicated the prosecution of Claudius Jones, who the New York Herald Tribune reported was charged with "refusing to obey police order to move away from a Harlem corner." Capshaw found Jones guilty and gave him a suspended sentence. He remanded in custody James Smitten, accused of assaulting a white man named William Kitilitz, for investigation of the case. Although the news story reported Capshaw ordered Smitten returned to court on March 23, there are no other mentions of his prosecution in the sources so its outcome is unknown. A third man, Leo Smith, charged with throwing a stone through a store window, was remanded in custody on bail of $500 for arraignment in the Harlem court the next day. The New York Herald Tribune did not mention that Smith was a white man. He appeared in the Harlem court the next day.

These three men were not the only arrests made by police during the hours that the Night Court operated. An explanation for why no more of those arrested were taken to the Night Court was offered in the New York Post : "when the proportions of the disturbance became evident no attempt was made to use the usual machinery for handling petty offenses."
Savon Clothes store windows broken A branch of the Savon Clothes chain at 203 West 125th Street is one of the businesses in a list of those with broken windows made by a reporter for La Prensa who walked along West 116th Street, Lenox Avenue, and West 125th Street on the day after the disorder. After walking north on Lenox Avenue from West 116th Street, the reporter turned left on West 125th Street, walking west toward Kress' store where the disorder originated. The clothing store was in the building on the corner of 7th Avenue, on the block of West 125th Street, "two doors west of 7th Ave," according to an advertisement in 1934. All the businesses in that building facing West 125th Street had windows broken; to the east, Young's Hats, Minks Haberdashery and the United Cigar store on the corner; and to the west, General Stationery & Supplies and Willow Cafeteria. Only Young's Hats was reported looted.

Windows were broken in large numbers of businesses on this block of West 125th Street, where police clashed with crowds gathered in front of Kress' store. Two newspapers reported very extensive damage. Attacks on this store likely began around 7:30 PM or 8:00 PM, with more windows likely broken around 9:00 PM and again around 10:30 PM. "Practically every store window on the block had been shattered by 10 PM," according to the Home News; that damage was both less extensive and took longer in the New York Herald Tribune story: "By midnight one or more windows had been smashed in almost every storefront" on that block between 7th and 8th Avenues (although in another mention of that damage in the story it had been done by 8 PM). The New York Herald Tribune also listed seven specific stores with broken windows, all of which were also identified by the New York American, and six of which were reported in the Daily Mirror. Another business was identified by both the New York American and the Daily Mirror. No reason is given in those stories for why that mix of businesses were singled out. The reporter for La Prensa identified a larger group of nineteen businesses with broken windows between 7th and 8th Avenues, not including four identified by the other newspapers. It is possible that other stores in this block suffered only minor damage; the La Prensa reporter concluded his list by noting he had not included others as they had only suffered minor damage ("y otras mas que por ser los danos ocasionados relativamente pequeños no creimus de interes catalogar entre los establecimientos ya mencionados").

No other sources mention Savon Clothes, and no one arrested during the disorder is identified as breaking the business' windows. The MCCH business survey taken between June and December 1935 records the white-owned business. However, the store was no longer at that address when the Tax Department photograph was taken between 1939 and 1941, a Crawford clothing store having opened there in December 1936.
James Wrigley assaulted At 12:45 AM, forty-nine-year-old James Wrigley, a white security guard from Teaneck, New Jersey, suffered a serious head injury. Several newspaper reports identified Wrigley as an employee of the Holmes Protective Agency, which apparently provided private police officers (security guards) for one or more of the stores on 125th Street.

The conflicting press accounts of how he came to be injured put the case in different categories of assault. As only the New York Times provided a specific time for the assault on Wrigley, and a detailed account of his injuries, Wrigley has been categorized here as having been hit by rocks. The newspaper’s story included Wrigley among the victims of “stone-throwers,” “struck by a stone at 126th Street and Seventh Avenue, receiving cuts about both eyes and a serious head injury, possibly a concussion of the brain.” The Home News likewise cast him as “another victim of the rock hurlers,” but then proceeded to report Wrigley was “set upon by several colored men [and] beaten into unconsciousness before he was able to draw his gun.” The New York Evening Journal also reported Wrigley had been “seized and beaten,” an attack that apparently did not draw attention as the story went on to recount that “Radio patrol cars found him lying on the pavement, unconscious, suffering from concussion of the brain.” The Daily News, which published no details of the assault, was the only other publication to report Wrigley was found unconscious in an alley. The Associated Press reporter’s brief summary opted for this second narrative that Wrigley had been attacked by a gang. The New York American, Daily News, New York Post, New York Evening Journal, and Home News only included Wrigley in their lists of the injured. He also appeared in lists of the injured in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide. Wrigley's injury was apparently serious enough that he was one of the eight men that the New York Herald Tribune reported was still in the hospital on March 21.

The area around the intersection of 7th Avenue and West 125th Street where Wrigley was struck down saw a cluster of assaults on white men and women throughout the disorder, including other civilians and police hit by rocks, as well as crowds breaking windows and looting. Those hit by objects commonly suffered head injuries, as Wrigley did, although no others were reported as having been knocked unconscious.
Edward Genest assaulted Edward Genest, a thirty-two-year-old white sailor from the S.S. Virginia, was stabbed in the left arm on 7th Avenue at 123rd Street. Lists of the injured in two newspapers, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and the New York Herald Tribune, added the detail that he had been stabbed by Black assailants. Five newspapers noted only that he had been stabbed: the New York American (on both March 20 and 21), Daily News, New York Evening Journal, New York Post, and Home News.

Genest was likely a visitor to Harlem seeking entertainment on 125th Street who became caught up in the disorder. He could have travelled by subway, unaware of what was happening until he arrived. There was no information on when Genest was assaulted. The area around 125th Street and 7th Avenue was the site of clashes between Black crowds and police from early in the disorder, and reported attacks on white men and women around 9:30 PM, 10:00 PM, 11:00 PM, 12:30 AM, and 1:00 AM. The attack on Genest could have occurred at any of those times.

The use of a knife in this assault was unusual; only one other of the fifty-four assaults in the disorder involved a stabbing, the attack on Morris Werner. In the rest of 1935, knives were a favored weapon of those committing acts of violence, used in two-thirds of felony assault cases.
Wilmont Hendricks shot Wilmont Hendricks, a twenty-five-year-old Black man, was shot on Lenox Avenue near 128th Street. Dr. Payne attended Hendricks at Harlem Hospital at 1:30 AM, the hospital staff recorded, so he was likely injured sometime around 1:00 AM (not around 2:00 AM, as a New York Times story reported). No details survived of the circumstances of Hendricks’ injury: the hospital record noted that he had been shot in “in some unknown manner,” while newspapers only reported he had been shot. There was considerable violence on the blocks of Lenox Avenue north of 125th Street around this time, including other assaults and looting. Police had begun shooting more indiscriminately after midnight than earlier in the disorder, and it is likely that Hendricks was shot by police. No one was arrested for shooting Hendricks, as was the case with all of those shot and wounded. (Detective Campo’s alleged assailant was shot and killed.)

After being seen by Dr. Payne, Hendricks' injury was sufficiently serious for him to be admitted to the hospital, and to still be there a day later, according to the New York Herald Tribune. While the hospital recorded his wound as being in his left shoulder, only the list of injured in the Home News echoed that report. The lists in the New York American, New York Post, Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide instead locating the gunshot in his chest, and the lists in the Daily News and New York Evening Journal, and a story in the New York Times reported it was in in his back.

The hospital record did not identify Hendricks' race, but the newspaper lists in the New York Post, Home News, New York American, and New York Evening Journal did. Four of the six other men shot and wounded in the disorder were Black, one of unknown race, and one white police officer. When he was shot, Hendricks was some distance from his home at 214 West 146th Street, which was almost twenty blocks to the north.
Adler's shoe store windows broken Adler's shoe store at 215 West 125th Street is one of the businesses in a list of those with broken windows made by a reporter for La Prensa on the day after the disorder. After walking north on Lenox Avenue from West 116th Street, the reporter turned left on West 125th Street, walking west toward Kress' store where the disorder originated. Opposite the W. T. Grant and Blumstein department stores, the shoe store was four buildings from the intersection of West 125th Street and 7th Avenue, on the block of West 125th Street where police clashed with crowds gathered in front of Kress' store.

Windows were broken in large numbers of businesses on this block of West 125th Street. Two newspapers reported very extensive damage. Attacks on this store likely began around 7:30 PM or 8:00 PM, with more windows likely broken around 9:00 PM and further damage possibly done around 10:30 PM. "Practically every store window on the block had been shattered by 10 PM," according to the Home News; that damage was both less extensive and took longer in the New York Herald Tribune story: "By midnight one or more windows had been smashed in almost every storefront" on that block between 7th and 8th Avenues (although in another mention of that damage in the story it had been done by 8 PM). Two other stores in the building housing Adler's shoe store, Scheer's Capitol clothing store and the Conrad Schmidt music store, are among the seven mentioned as having broken windows by the New York Herald Tribune, New York American, and Daily Mirror. No reason is given in those stories for why that mix of businesses was singled out; Adler's may have been damaged less or later than those stores. The reporter for La Prensa identified a total of nineteen businesses with broken windows between 7th and 8th Avenues, not including four identified by the other newspapers. Where the other newspapers mentioned only stores between 7th Avenue and Kress' store at 256 West 125th Street, the La Prensa reporter walked all the way to 8th Avenue. It is possible that other stores in this block suffered only minor damage; the La Prensa reporter concluded his list by noting he had not included others as they had only suffered minor damage ("y otras mas que por ser los danos ocasionados relativamente pequeños no creimus de interes catalogar entre los establecimientos ya mencionados").

No other sources mention Adler's shoe store, and no one arrested during the disorder is identified as breaking the business' windows. The MCCH business survey taken between June and December 1935 does record the white-owned business. The shoe store is also visible in the Tax Department photograph of 213-217 125th Street taken between 1939 and 1941.
Patrolman Harry Whittington assaulted Just after midnight, Patrolman Harry Whittington, a thirty-five-year-old white member of Emergency Squad 9 (a riot squad) was hit by a rock on 8th Avenue. The Daily Mirror provided the most details of the assault. The story reported that the attack came as the emergency truck on which Whittington rode passed West 123rd Street. Only Whittington and one other officer were reported as being assaulted after crowds moved away from 125th Street around 10:00 PM. The other seven reported assaults on police occurred in the initial disorder around Kress’ store.

After 10:00 PM, when the crowd moved away from 125th Street, police used patrolling radio cars and emergency trucks to respond to violence and to try to control crowds. Cars and buses driven by whites were also targets of rocks thrown by black crowds throughout the disorder. However, those attacks took place on 7th Avenue, the major route to the Bronx and northern neighborhoods, not the less traveled 8th Avenue. The one other police vehicle reported as being hit by rocks, a car driven by Detective Frank Lenahan, was also attacked on “a riotous section of Eighth Avenue” at an unspecified time. The windows of the car were smashed, but Lenahan was not injured. Whittington did not have windows to shield him from missiles. Most of the members of an emergency squad traveled on the outside of the vehicle.

As well as the detail that Whittington was assaulted while riding on an emergency truck, the Daily Mirror described the attack as a “sniping,” a sensational term used to heighten the threat associated with the violence.

Whittington appeared in lists of the injured published by the New York American (on March 20 & 21), Home News, New York Herald Tribune, Daily News, New York Evening Journal, and New York Post, as well as the story published in the Daily Mirror. Although the New York American and the New York Herald Tribune reported he was treated at Harlem Hospital, he did not appear in either the list of admissions or the ambulance call-outs. The Home News and New York Evening Journal described his injuries simply as lacerations; the other lists specified a head injury.
Conrad Schmidt music shop windows broken Conrad Schmidt music shop at 213 West 125th Street had windows broken during the disorder. Opposite the W. T. Grant department store, the music shop was four buildings from the intersection of West 125th Street and 7th Avenue, on the block of West 125th Street where police clashed with crowds gathered in front of Kress' store.

Windows were broken in large numbers of businesses on this block of West 125th Street. Two newspapers reported very extensive damage. Attacks on this store likely began around 7:30 PM or 8:00 PM, with more windows likely broken around 9:00 PM and further damage possibly done around 10:30 PM. "Practically every store window on the block had been shattered by 10 PM, according to the Home News. That damage was both less extensive and took longer in the New York Herald Tribune story: "By midnight one or more windows had been smashed in almost every storefront" on that block between 7th and 8th Avenues (although in another mention of that damage in the story it had been done by 8 PM). The music shop was one of a small number of businesses identified as having broken windows by the New York Herald Tribune and New York American (but was missing from the Daily Mirror, which otherwise mentioned the same businesses). No reason was given in those stories for why that mix of businesses was singled out. They were not just the largest stores, although the Blumstein and McCrory's department stores were included, together with the W. T Grant 5 & 10c store in the New York American. The United Cigar store spanned several storefronts on the corner on West 125th Street and 7th Avenue, but the other stores, the Willow Cafeteria, Young's Hats, and Scheer's clothing store, did not have similarly large displays. All the stores identified by these newspapers were located between Kress' store at 256 West 125th Street and 7th Avenue, so may have been as far as groups who broke through the police cordon at 125th and 7th Avenue at around 9:00 PM reached. The music shop was also one of the nineteen businesses on this block with broken windows listed by a reporter for La Prensa who walked along West 125th Street on the day after the disorder. That list included businesses west of Kress' store. Other stores on the block might also have been damaged; the La Prensa reporter concluded his list by noting he had not included others as they had only suffered minor damage ("y otras mas que por ser los danos ocasionados relativamente pequeños no creimus de interes catalogar entre los establecimientos ya mencionados").

Only the New York American provided an address for the Conrad Schmidt music shop. It also appeared at that address in the MCCH business survey as a white-owned business in the second half of 1935, but was not in the Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941 in which a liquor store occupied the location (a liquor store shared the address with the music shop in the MCCH business survey). In 1937, Frances Kraft Reckling, who identified herself as a former staff member, advertised a music shop in the New York Amsterdam News located across the street, above the Woolworth's store at 210 West 125th Street.
W. T. Grant department store windows broken The W. T. Grant department store at 226 West 125th Street had windows broken during the disorder. Between the Blumstein department store to the west and the McCrory's department store to the east, the W. T. Grant store was close to the intersection of West 125th Street and 7th Avenue, on the block of West 125th Street where police clashed with crowds gathered in front of Kress' store. No one arrested during the disorder is identified as breaking the business' windows.

Windows were broken in large numbers of businesses on this block of West 125th Street. Two newspapers reported very extensive damage. Attacks on this store likely began around 7:30 PM or 8:00 PM, with more windows likely broken around 9:00 PM and further damage possibly done around 10:30 PM. "Practically every store window on the block had been shattered by 10 PM," according to the Home News; that damage was both less extensive and took longer in the New York Herald Tribune story: "By midnight one or more windows had been smashed in almost every storefront" on that block between 7th and 8th Avenues (although in another mention of that damage in the story it had been done by 8 PM). The W. T. Grant store was one of seven businesses identified as having broken windows by the New York American, and Daily Mirror (but is missing from a list in the New York Herald Tribune that otherwise included the same stores). No reason is given in those stories for why that mix of businesses were singled out. They were not just the largest stores, although the Blumstein and McCrory's department stores were included. The United Cigar store spanned several storefronts on the corner on West 125th Street and 7th Avenue, but the other stores, Scheer's clothing store, Young's Hats, Willow Cafeteria, and the Conrad Schmidt music shop identified in the New York American and New York Herald Tribune, did not have similarly large displays. All the stores identified by these newspapers were located between Kress' store at 256 West 125th Street and 7th Avenue, so may have been the damaged stores that reporters could see. The W. T. Grant store was also not one of the nineteen businesses on this block with broken windows listed by a reporter for La Prensa who walked along West 125th Street on the day after the disorder. That list included businesses west of Kress' store.

Neither newspaper included the address of the department store. W.T. Grant was included in the MCCH business survey taken between June and December 1935, and is visible in the Tax department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941.
Minks Haberdashery store windows broken Minks Haberdashery store at 201 West 125th Street is one of the businesses in a list of those with broken windows made by a reporter for La Prensa who walked along West 116th Street, Lenox Avenue, and West 125th Street on the day after the disorder. After walking north on Lenox Avenue from West 116th Street, the reporter turned left on West 125th Street, walking west toward Kress' store where the disorder originated. The store was in the building on the corner of 7th Avenue, on the block of West 125th Street. All the businesses in that building had windows broken; to the United Cigar store on the corner; and to the west of the Mink's store, Young's Hats, Savon Clothes, General Stationery & Supplies, and Willow Cafeteria. Only Young's Hats was reported looted.

Windows were broken in large numbers of businesses on this block of West 125th Street, where police clashed with crowds gathered in front of Kress' store. Two newspapers reported very extensive damage. Attacks on this store likely began around 7:30 PM or 8:00 PM, with more windows likely broken around 9:00 PM and again around 10:30 PM. "Practically every store window on the block had been shattered by 10 PM, according to the Home News; that damage was both less extensive and took longer in the New York Herald Tribune story: "By midnight one or more windows had been smashed in almost every storefront" on that block between 7th and 8th Avenues (although in another mention of that damage in the story, it had been done by 8 PM). The New York Herald Tribune also listed seven specific stores with broken windows, all of which were also identified by the New York American, and six of which were reported in the Daily Mirror. Another business was identified by both the New York American and the Daily Mirror. No reason is given in those stories for why that mix of businesses were singled out. The reporter for La Prensa identified a larger group of nineteen businesses with broken windows between 7th and 8th Avenues, not including four identified by the other newspapers. It is possible that other stores in this block suffered only minor damage; the La Prensa reporter concluded his list by noting he had not included others as they had only suffered minor damage ("y otras mas que por ser los danos ocasionados relativamente pequeños no creimus de interes catalogar entre los establecimientos ya mencionados").

No other sources mention Minks Haberdashery, and no one arrested during the disorder is identified as breaking the business' windows. The MCCH business survey taken between June and December 1935 records the white-owned business. The store sign is visible immediately to the left of the United Cigar store in the Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941.
McCrory's 5 & 10c store windows broken McCrory's 5 & 10c store at 216 West 125th Street had windows broken during the disorder. Between the W. T. Grant department store to the west and the Woolworth's 5 & 10c store to the east, the McCrory's store was close to the intersection of West 125th Street and 7th Avenue, on the block of West 125th Street where police clashed with crowds gathered in front of Kress' store. No one arrested during the disorder is identified as breaking the business' windows.

Windows were broken in large numbers of businesses on this block of West 125th Street. Two newspapers reported very extensive damage. Attacks on this store likely began around 7:30 PM or 8:00 PM, with more windows likely broken around 9:00 PM and further damage possibly done around 10:30 PM. "Practically every store window on the block had been shattered by 10 PM," according to the Home News; that damage was both less extensive and took longer in the New York Herald Tribune story: "By midnight one or more windows had been smashed in almost every storefront" on that block between 7th and 8th Avenues (although in another mention of that damage in the story it had been done by 8 PM). The McCrory's store was one of seven businesses identified as having broken windows by the New York Herald Tribune, New York American, and Daily Mirror. No reason is given in those stories for why that mix of businesses were singled out. They were not just the largest stores, although the Blumstein and W. T Grant's department stores were included. The United Cigar store spanned several storefronts on the corner on West 125th Street and 7th Avenue, but the other stores, Scheer's clothing store, Young's Hats, Willow Cafeteria, and the Conrad Schmidt music shop identified in the New York American and New York Herald Tribune, did not have similarly large displays. All the stores identified by these newspapers were located between Kress' store at 256 West 125th Street and 7th Avenue, so may have been the damaged stores that reporters could see. McCrory's store was also one of the nineteen businesses on this block with broken windows listed by a reporter for La Prensa who walked along West 125th Street on the day after the disorder. That list included businesses west of Kress' store.

Only the New York American included the address of the department store. McCrory's store was included in the MCCH business survey taken between June and December 1935, and is visible in the Tax department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941.
Mylady's store windows broken Mylady's store at 206 West 125th Street is one of the businesses in a list of those with broken windows made by a reporter for La Prensa on the day after the disorder. After walking north on Lenox Avenue from West 116th Street, the reporter turned left on West 125th Street, walking west toward Kress' store, where the disorder originated. The store was three storefronts to the west of the corner of 7th Avenue, on the block of West 125th Street where police clashed with crowds gathered in front of Kress' store.

Windows were broken in large numbers of businesses on this block of West 125th Street. Two newspapers reported very extensive damage. Attacks on this store likely began around 7:30 PM or 8:00 PM, with more windows likely broken around 9:00 PM and further damage possibly done around 10:30 PM. "Practically every store window on the block had been shattered by 10 PM," according to the Home News; that damage was both less extensive and took longer in the New York Herald Tribune story: "By midnight one or more windows had been smashed in almost every storefront" on that block between 7th and 8th Avenues (although in another mention of that damage in the story it had been done by 8 PM). The New York Herald Tribune also listed seven specific stores with broken windows, all of which were also identified by the New York American, and six of which were reported in the Daily Mirror. Another business was identified by both the New York American and the Daily Mirror. No reason is given in those stories for why that mix of businesses were singled out. The reporter for La Prensa identified a total of nineteen businesses with broken windows between 7th and 8th Avenues, not including four identified by the other newspapers. Where the other newspapers mentioned only stores between 7th Avenue and Kress' store at 256 West 125th Street, the La Prensa reporter walked all the way to 8th Avenue. It is possible that other stores in this block suffered only minor damage; the La Prensa reporter concluded his list by noting he had not included others as they had only suffered minor damage ("y otras mas que por ser los danos ocasionados relativamente pequeños no creimus de interes catalogar entre los establecimientos ya mencionados").

No other sources mention the Mylady's store, and no one arrested during the disorder is identified as breaking the business' windows. The store does not appear in the MCCH business survey taken between June and December 1935, but it is visible in the Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941.
Lino Rivera grabbed & Charles Hurley and Steve Urban assaulted (Part 2) 11 plain 2024-01-28T01:16:31+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)
Woolworth's 5 & 10c store windows broken Woolworth's 5 & 10c store at 210 West 125th Street is one of the businesses in a list of those with broken windows made by a reporter for La Prensa who walked along West 116th Street, Lenox Avenue, and West 125th Street on the day after the disorder. After walking north on Lenox Avenue from West 116th Street, the reporter turned left on West 125th Street, walking west toward Kress' store where the disorder originated. The Woolworth's store was one building to the west of the corner of 7th Avenue, on the block of West 125th Street where police clashed with crowds gathered in front of Kress' store.

Windows were broken in large numbers of businesses on this block of West 125th Street. Two newspapers reported very extensive damage. Attacks on this store likely began around 7:30 PM or 8:00 PM, with more windows likely broken around 9:00 PM and further damage possibly done around 10:30 PM. "Practically every store window on the block had been shattered by 10 PM," according to the Home News; that damage was both less extensive and took longer in the New York Herald Tribune story: "By midnight one or more windows had been smashed in almost every storefront" on that block between 7th and 8th Avenues (although in another mention of that damage in the story it had been done by 8 PM). The New York Herald Tribune also listed seven specific stores with broken windows, all of which were also identified by the New York American, and six of which were reported in the Daily Mirror. Another business was identified by both the New York American and the Daily Mirror. No reason is given in those stories for why that mix of businesses were singled out; the three department stores immediately west of Woolworth's store are included. The reporter for La Prensa identified a total of nineteen businesses with broken windows between 7th and 8th Avenues, not including four identified by the other newspapers. Where the other newspapers mentioned only stores between 7th Avenue and Kress' store at 256 West 125th Street, the La Prensa reporter walked all the way to 8th Avenue. It is possible that other stores in this block suffered only minor damage; the La Prensa reporter concluded his list by noting he had not included others as they had only suffered minor damage ("y otras mas que por ser los danos ocasionados relativamente pequeños no creimus de interes catalogar entre los establecimientos ya mencionados").

The only other mention of windows broken in Woolworth's store is a passing reference in the New York Evening Journal: "Windows were smashed and 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.” (No other sources reported such looting, so that claim was apparently a product of the sensationalization and exaggeration that marked that publication's stories about the disorder.) No one arrested during the disorder is identified as breaking the business' windows. Woolworth's 5 & 10c store appears in the MCCH business survey and is visible in the Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941.
Simco shoe store window broken A branch of the Simco shoe store chain at 246 West 125th Street is one of the businesses in a list of those with broken windows made by a reporter for La Prensa who walked along West 116th Street, Lenox Avenue, and West 125th Street on the day after the disorder. After walking north on Lenox Avenue from West 116th Street, the reporter turned left on West 125th Street, walking west toward Kress' store where the disorder originated. The shoe store was on the west side of Blumstein's department store, in the middle of the block between 7th and 8th Avenues.

Windows were broken in large numbers of businesses on this block of West 125th Street, on the block of West 125th Street where police clashed with crowds gathered in front of Kress' store. Two newspapers reported very extensive damage. "Practically every store window on the block had been shattered by 10 PM," according to the Home News; that damage was both less extensive and took longer in the New York Herald Tribune story: "By midnight one or more windows had been smashed in almost every storefront" on that block between 7th and 8th Avenues (although in another mention of that damage in the story it had been done by 8 PM). The New York Herald Tribune also listed seven specific stores with broken windows, all of which were also identified by the New York American, and six of which were reported in the Daily Mirror. Another business was identified by both the New York American and the Daily Mirror. No reason is given in those stories for why that mix of businesses were singled out. The reporter for La Prensa identified a total of nineteen businesses with broken windows between 7th and 8th Avenues, not including four identified by the other newspapers. Where the other newspapers mentioned only stores between 7th Avenue and Kress' store at 256 West 125th Street, the La Prensa reporter walked all the way to 8th Avenue. It is possible that other stores in this block suffered only minor damage; the La Prensa reporter concluded his list by noting he had not included others as they had only suffered minor damage ("y otras mas que por ser los danos ocasionados relativamente pequeños no creimus de interes catalogar entre los establecimientos ya mencionados").

No other sources mention the Simco shoe store, and no one arrested during the disorder is identified as breaking the business' windows. The store is not included in the MCCH business survey taken between June and December 1935, but does appear in the Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941.
Howard suits store windows broken The Howard Suits store at 217 West 125th Street had windows broken during the disorder. Opposite the W. T. Grant and Blumstein department stores, the clothing store was four buildings from the intersection of West 125th Street and 7th Avenue, on the block of West 125th Street where police clashed with crowds gathered in front of Kress' store.

Windows were broken in large numbers of businesses on this block of West 125th Street. Two newspapers reported very extensive damage. Attacks on this store likely began around 7:30 PM or 8:00 PM, with more windows likely broken around 9:00 PM and further damage possibly done around 10:30 PM. "Practically every store window on the block had been shattered by 10 PM, according to the Home News; that damage was both less extensive and took longer in the New York Herald Tribune story: "By midnight one or more windows had been smashed in almost every storefront" on that block between 7th and 8th Avenues (although in another mention of that damage in the story it had been done by 8 PM). Howard Suits was one of a small number of businesses identified as having broken windows by the Daily Mirror; the New York Herald Tribune and New York American mentioned the same seven businesses other than this clothing store. No reason is given in those stories for why that mix of businesses were singled out. They were not just the largest stores, although the Blumstein and McCrory's department stores were included, together with the W. T Grant 5 & 10c store in the New York American. The United Cigar store spanned several storefronts on the corner on West 125th Street and 7th Avenue, but the other stores, the Conrad Schmidt music shop, Willow Cafeteria, Young's Hats, and Scheer's clothing store, did not have similarly large displays. All the stores identified by these newspapers were located between Kress' store at 256 West 125th Street and 7th Avenue, so may have been the damaged stores that reporters could see. The music shop is not one of the nineteen businesses on this block with broken windows listed by a reporter for La Prensa who walked along West 125th Street on the day after the disorder. That list included businesses west of Kress' store. Other stores on the block might also have been damaged; the La Prensa reporter concluded his list by noting he had not included others as they had only suffered minor damage ("y otras mas que por ser los danos ocasionados relativamente pequeños no creimus de interes catalogar entre los establecimientos ya mencionados").

The Daily Mirror did not give an address for the store, and mispelled the name as "Coward suits." The store does not appear in the MCCH business survey, which did not record any businesses at 217 West 125th Street. Howard suits is visible in the Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941, between two other locations that had windows broken, Adler shoes at 215 West 125th Street, and the former location of Scheer's clothing store at 217 West 125th Street.
Patricia O'Rourke assaulted When the car carrying Patricia O’Rourke, a thirty-year-old white woman, north on 7th Avenue reached 118th Street, a brick thrown at it smashed one of the windows. Shattered glass cut O'Rourke's eyes, forehead, and cheeks. The car detoured from its journey to her home at 160 West 180th Street in the Bronx to take her to Harlem Hospital for treatment. A photograph of O’Rourke leaving the hospital with bandages obscuring most of her face appeared on the front page of the Daily News. However, she did not appear in the lists of those attended at the hospital collected by the MCCH. Police did not arrest anyone for the assault on O’Rourke.

Seventh Avenue was the most heavily trafficked roadway north of 59th Street, a major route in and out of the city. While Black New Yorkers owned and drove cars, automobiles driven by whites made up most of the traffic that passed through Harlem, including the vast majority of the taxis serving the neighborhood, thanks to the refusal of the three largest taxicab companies to employ Black drivers. As police apparently made no effort to stop traffic from traveling through Harlem during the disorder other than briefly closing 125th Street early in the evening, vehicles containing whites continued to provide new targets for Black residents into the early hours of March 20. There were several general references to objects being thrown at vehicles traveling on Harlem’s streets. Only four other attacks were reported in detail, two on a car driven by Fred Campbell, the Black owner of two barbershops, on 7th Avenue at 121st and 123rd Streets just after midnight, and two on buses on 7th Avenue at 125th Street and 127th Street. The attack on O’Rourke occurred near the southern boundary of the disorder, in a cluster of events in the blocks north of 116th Street. It likely happened after midnight, as Campbell did not report seeing any damaged vehicles that far south on 7th Avenue when he drove by just before midnight.

The New York Herald Tribune carried the most detailed of report of the assault, framing the woman as not “a participant in the fight.” It put O’Rourke’s two sisters in the car with her, and identified her father as a “contractor who helped to build Rockefeller Center.” That account closed quoting her as saying "My father will see about this," as she left the hospital. The Daily News also cast O’Rourke in relation to her father, as a daughter, in its account, and the thirty-year-old as a “Girl Victim” in the title of the photograph it published of her leaving the hospital (the story also got both the location of the assault and her address wrong). The tabloid also invoked familiar sensational tropes in the photo caption, drawing attention to her fur coat and labeling her father “wealthy.”

The other reporting on the assault was limited to including O’Rourke in lists of victims of the disorder in the Home News, New York Evening Journal, and New York Post, in some cases with a few words that described the circumstances of her injury. Both the New York American and Daily News portrayed the assault as a direct attack, in which a bottle struck her on the face. The Daily Mirror went as far as claiming “a bottle was hurled into her face with such force that it broke.” (The American shifted from those details on March 20 to a listing on March 21 that mentioned only O'Rourke's injuries, "cuts about head and face, and eyes.") The more detailed account in the New York Herald Tribune story had O’Rourke “showered with glass,” suggesting the bottle smashed a window on the car, as Fred Campbell and the passengers on the Boston-bound and Fifth Avenue buses experienced.