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5:00 AM to 5:30 AM
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.