This tag was created by Anonymous. The last update was by Stephen Robertson.
5:00 AM to 5:30 AM
Harlem’s streets had been free of disorder for just under two hours when a pair of 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 just off 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 five-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, the occupants of the apartment called police.
Photographs of two patrolmen escorting Alston out of the building that appeared in several newspapers, including this image published in the Daily News, drew attention to his arrest. Alston appeared holding his head, evidence of a head injury suffered as he fled police. The injury would later cause him to collapse while in custody at the 32nd Precinct.
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. However, subsequent events indicated that nothing like that had 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 had happened, their testimony did not convince Magistrate Ford. Later that day, he acquitted Yerber, Loper, and Johnson. Alston was too ill 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.
The photographs of Alston indicated that white reporters were now venturing beyond the area around West 125th Street. The period of quiet clearly had made them feel safe enough from the attacks directed against their colleagues Everett Breuer and Harry Johnson early in the disorder to leave the area where police were concentrated. Alston, Yerber, Loper and Johnson had also traveled some distance from where they lived. Their arrests starkly illustrated that the reimposition of order did not make Harlem's streets safe for Black residents. Discrimination and violence at the hands of police were an everyday feature of the neighborhood's racial order, not the result of its breakdown. In fact, this would not be the only encounter between police radio cars and Black residents returning to the streets as a new day began.