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

Assaults on police (9)

Nine police officers were among those reported as injured, six hit by objects thrown at them. One was attacked by an individual likely from the same crowds that threw objects at police. Another was shot attempting to apprehend a suspected looter, injuring himself with his own weapon during a struggle. (Another officer was allegedly shot by a group of men, although he was never identified and the men were acquitted in the Magistrates Court). The final assault also occurred during an arrest, of a man attempting to speak to the crowd on 125th Street at the beginning of the disorder. Assault in police making arrests also occurred at other times in 1935; police being hit by objects did not. Six of the assaults occurred around 10 pm, when police sought to disperse crowds around Kress’ store. Only two assaults occurred after 10 pm, when the crowd broke up and smaller groups spread north and south on Harlem’s avenues, suggesting that the later disorder and police response did not involve the same violence directed at police.

Most of the assaults on police occurred in the period before 10 PM, when the disorder was focused on Kress’ store and 125th Street, where large crowds gathered and police struggled to disperse them and protect the avenues on the streets. Although police several times succeeded in moving crowds away from Kress’ and off the roadway of 125th Street, there were too few officers to hold and control the crowds until after 9PM. As 125th Street and 7th and 8th Avenues were major thoroughfares accommodating buses and streetcars, they had wide roadways, with two lanes of traffic traveling in each direction, as well as wide pavements. That created significant distances between police and crowds when officers set up cordons in front of Kress’ store and at the intersections of 125th Street and the avenues. As a result much of the violence directed against police came in form of objects thrown at them. Patrolman Michael Kelly was assaulted behind Kress’ around 7 PM, where police had followed a crowd drawn there by the appearance of a hearse they assumed had come for the body of the boy rumored to have been killed in the store. Hit on the right leg by a stone, Kelly's injury was serious enough that he was taken to Harlem Hospital for an x-ray and observation. Detective Charles Foley was hit on the left shoulder, possibly suffering a fracture, a few minutes after the assault on Kelly, also at the rear of Kress’ store on 124th Street. This was the only time police and crowds clashed off a major thoroughfare, on a narrower cross street that exposed officers to objects thrown from roofs as well as the street level.

While news reports include the assault on Detective William Boyle with those on Kelly and Foley the hospital records tell a slightly different story, with Boyle treated around 9 PM, two hours later than Kelly and Foley, for injuries “received while attempting to rescue an unknown white man being assaulted at scene of riot.” Several of the whites assaulted during the riot did report being rescued by police officers, and the New York Times reported that police also broke up additional attacks on whites at this time. None of these officers suffered the head injuries that predominated among the civilians who sought medical treatment during the disorder.

Two other officers were assaulted several hours later, around 10PM, in a later stage of police efforts to control the disorder around 125th Street. At 9 PM, after additional reinforcements arrived, police tried to further extend their cordon and disperse crowds on 7th Avenue and 8th Avenue. Detective Henry Roge was hit by a rock allegedly thrown by James Hughes as he stood in front of Kress just after police had cleared 125th Street. Unusually, Roge’s partner claimed that as there were no other objects being thrown at the time he was able to see who threw the rock and apprehend the man, James Hughes. Roge himself had been hit in the head, and was bleeding profusely. The New York Evening Journal published two different photographs of a bleeding Roge being helped by a uniformed officer, the only images of injured police published. While Hughes pled guilty to misdemeanor assault the presiding judge believed his target had been the store windows not the police officer, and sentenced him to only three months in the workhouse.

Around the same time someone hit Patrolman Charles Robins over the head by an iron bar, or a brick in some accounts. Being hit by a weapon not a thrown object required being in closer proximity to your assailant. 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. However, it should be noted that in both the images, it is police officers who are wielding weapons or moving against the crowd, not the other way around. The caption to one photo also indicates that objects were thrown from the crowd at such moments: a New York Daily News photographer was hit on the head soon after taking the photo.

The very first alleged assault on a police officer of the evening also involved police dealing with a crowd, but was less obviously shaped by the the circumstances of disorder. It occurred during the arrest of five members of the Young Liberators, an organization associated with the Communist Party, who picketed Kress’ store. Soon after one of the men began to speak to the crowd, someone threw a rock through one of the store windows. Police responded by moving to arrest the speaker and his companions. In the ensuing struggle, one of the men, a white student named Harry Gordon allegedly grabbed Patrolman Irwin Young’s nightstick and used it to hit the officer. Police hurried all five men into waiting cars and booked them at the station on West 123rd Street. Gordon would later charge that Young beat him on the journey to the station and again later while he was in custody. Violence during arrests was nothing out of the ordinary in 1935.

The attack on Detective Lt Frank Lenahan as he drove his car along 8th Avenue, likely also occurred around 10 PM, as it was at this time that crowds gathered on 8th Avenue, but there is no evidence of its timing. According to the New York Herald Tribune, the only report of the incident, Lenahan’s car “was badly battered by rocks and most of its glass shattered.” Apparently the officer himself was unscathed, as he does not appear in lists of the injured.

Once the crowds fragmented and spread, the police response changed and offficers do not appear to have been targets of violence to the extent they had been. While police maintained a cordon around 125th Street, and guarded some stores, their presence in other parts of the neighborhood took the form of mobile patrols in radio cars or emergency trucks. On one occasion a police vehicle was targeted in the same way that other vehicles driven by whites were, with the Daily Mirror reporting “Harry Whittington, an emergency policeman, was "sniped" off of the emergency truck he was riding at 8th Ave. and 123rd St. by a rock that felled him unconscious.” While cars driven by whites were frequent targets, this is the only reported attack on a police vehicle.

There was a second, widely reported, incident of alleged “sniping” at police at the very end of the disorder. It does not appear in the count of assaults on police as there are no reported injuries other than to one of the four purported assailants, Charles Alston, who fell from a roof fleeing police. In fact, the evidence that police were actually targets of a shooting is limited. Stories in the World Telegram and Brooklyn Daily Eagle did report that a bullet whistled past the air of Patrolman Jerry Brennan of the Morrisiana station as he stood on post at Lenox Ave and 138th Street, after which he saw the four men on the roof of the six-story building at 101 West 138th. Soon after police reinforcements arrived and rushed to the roof to arrest the men. But in the Home News story Brennan is not the target of the shooters but one of the police who responded after hearing shots. This report provides the key detail that no guns were found on Alston and his companions, explaining both police charged them with the lesser charge of disorderly conduct and their acquittal, and giving the report some more credibility than other accounts.

More officers may have been assaulted during the disorder. The New York Evening Journal reported bandaged officers as well as prisoners in court the next day. However, while news photographs confirm the presence of bandaged prisoners, no injured officers appear in those images.

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