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Assaults by individuals (7)
Two assaults are clearly ascribed to an individual. One is an alleged assault on a police officer during an arrest in the very early stages of the disorder. Harry Gordon, a white member of the Young Liberators, was one of group that picketed Kress’ store around 6pm. When a member of the group began to speak to the crowd gathered there, someone threw a rock through the window of Kress’ store, prompting police moved to arrest the speaker. In the ensuing struggle, Gordon allegedly grabbed Patrolman Irwin Young’s nightstick and used it to hit the officer.
The second assault mostly clearly ascribed to an individual is reported only in hospital admission records, a record that does not need to extrapolate an individual from a group. It is also one of the small number of reported assaults of blacks during the disorder, in this case explicitly by a white man. Staff at Harlem Hospital recorded that James White was treated for “laceration of the scalp, received during an altercation with an unknown white man at 129th Street and Lenox Ave.” This location was at the heart of the area where the most extensive looting took
The hospital record for Patrolman Charles Robins reports his injury as the result of having been attacked “by some unknown person,” but locates that attack “at scene of riot,” suggesting the assault occurred in an encounter between a group of police and a crowd rather than two isolated individuals. Robins was “struck over the head with an iron bar,” an unusual weapon in the context of the disorder, according to the hospital report and one newspaper account. Two other papers reported him being “hit over the head with a brick,” a more common weapon. Treated at 124th St and 7th Avenue, he 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.
William Kitlitz, a white clerk, was also allegedly assaulted at the heart of the disorder, “beaten on the head” in front of Kress’ store on 125th Street around 8.30PM. The assault report comes from a legal proceeding, one of the few (4?) reports that link a victim and an alleged assailant, in this case James Smitten, a twenty-two-year-old black man. Given that the police were concentrated on 125th Street at that time, it is not surprising that this assault is one of the very few that led to an arrest. Few sources exist on this case as it occurred very early in the riot and Smitten was arraigned in the Night Court that evening not the next day, when almost all those arrested appeared in court. (Only the HT appears to have had a reporter in the Night Court, although Smitten does appear in several lists of those arrested in the disorder). Smitten, not Kitlitz, also appears in hospital records: doctors were called to treat him at the 28th Precinct after his arrest “for lacerations to the scalp he received in some unknown manner.”
One additional assault is reported in terms of an individual act that caused injury without more explicit details of the circumstances of the assault. Arthur Block, a black man, is reported having been bitten on the hand, again with no details of the circumstances, only in lists of the injured not in stories. Biting rarely appears as a form of assault. There are two other men listed as having been bitten, but those assaults are not part of the disorder. Lino Rivera allegedly bit both Charles Hurley and Steve Urban, clerks in Kress’ store, when they held him after his was caught stealing a pocketknife, in the incident that became a trigger for the disorder. Hurley and Urban were treated at Kress’ for their injuries at 2.30PM, several hours before crowds gathered.