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

5:00 AM to 5:30 AM

Harlem’s streets had been free of disorder for just under two hours when two patrolmen in a radio car traveling on Lenox Avenue heard what they thought were gunshots in the vicinity of West 138th Street. As they approached the corner, Patrolmen Brennan and O’Grady saw four Black men standing in the doorway of the building on the northwest corner, 101 West 138th Street. As the radio car approached, the men fled into the building. The officers called for helped and rushed in after them. Twenty-year-old Albert Yerber, twenty-one-year-old Edward Loper and twenty-two-year-old Ernest Johnson were caught and arrested on the roof of the six-story building. Twenty-one-year-old Charles Alston tried to avoid arrest by leaping six to seven feet from the roof to the adjoining building. He landed on a second-story ledge and managed to crawl through a window into an apartment and hide under a bed. However, Alston did not escape as the occupants of the apartment called police. His efforts instead drew attention to his arrest thanks to photographs of two patrolmen escorting him out of the building that appeared in several newspapers. Alston also suffered a head injury during his attempt to escape that caused him to collapse later while in custody at the 32nd Precinct. The four men did not live in the building or even nearby.



The patrolmen’s initial report that they had heard gunshots led several white newspapers to publish sensational stories that portrayed the four men as snipers who had shot at police officers standing on the street. Nothing like that proved to have happened. No guns were found on the men, nor was there any other evidence that a gun had been fired. Police did charge the men with disorderly conduct, to which the Magistrate Court clerk added the note “annoy” in the docket book. The charge implied that the men had somehow deliberately attracted the attention of the patrolling police and provoked their arrest. Whatever the officers alleged they had done, they did not convince Magistrate Ford. Later that day, he acquitted Yerber, Loper, and Johnson. Alston was too sick to be arraigned with his companions, but when he appeared in court three weeks later, he too was acquitted. None of those verdicts were reported in the press. The picture of Black snipers taking shots at police was left to distort how readers of the city’s sensational white press saw the violence of the disorder.

While no explanation was offered for why the four men were on West 138th Street, they had likely come to the area as a new day began in Harlem rather than having been there during the disorder. Their arrest would not be the only encounter between police radio cars and Black residents and white men who worked in Harlem’s businesses returning to the streets.

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