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

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 six-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.



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 six-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.

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