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

Assaults by police (?)

There are no reported victims of assaults by police officers during the disorder, aside from Lloyd Hobbs and James Thompson, the two men shot and killed by police. Four additional Black men arrested by police appear in lists of the injured, one shot, three with injuries that may have resulted from being beaten, as Harry Gordon, a white man arrested trying to speak at the beginning of the disorder, claimed he was while in custody. Generalized reports of violence by police suggest that some unattributed incidents of violence and injuries may have been the work of police officers.

The uniformed patrolmen who responded to the disorder carried both nightsticks and pistols. Detectives did not typically carry nightsticks but were issued them to deal with the crowds, according to the New York Evening Journal. Emergency trucks carried rifles that were used by the patrolmen who crewed those vehicles. All those weapons are evident in photographs of police taken during the disorder. Officers first resorted to nightsticks, and pistols used as clubs. A Daily News photograph of the arrest of Charles Alston shows one of the officers holding his pistol by the barrel so the butt could be function as a club, a detail to which the paper’s caption drew attention.  The Times Union story on the riot noted that “Police night sticks accounted for almost as many minor injuries as the shower of stones thrown from rooftops, windows and hallways by rioters.” Officers used nightsticks when they sought to move or contain crowds. One can be seen in hand of the officer pushing into the crowd in a Daily News photograph; that one of the Black men to his right appears to be reaching for the officer’s arm confirms he is swinging into the people in front of him.

One Afro-American journalist reported that while mounted police had been "somewhat rough" early in the disorder, violence by other officers only came later in the disorder, "early Wednesday morning, as the news that fellow-officers had been wounded with bricks increased, [when] other officers "got even" by "mussing up" whoever came into their hands." Further evidence of that more indiscriminate use of nightsticks appeared in  a New York Herald Tribune story about the “best joke” doing the rounds at the West 135th Street station after the disorder. It involved Detectives McCane and Teed chasing a group of Black residents into a hallway near 130th Street and Lenox Avenue. Although that area saw the most concentrated looting of the disorder, the officers were not seeking to make an arrest. Instead, after Teed went into the hallway, McCabe waited outside. As Teed caused each of the black individuals to flee back to the street, McCabe “hit them over the head with a nightstick” as they went by. It became a joke when his “zealousness” led him to hit his partner when he too exited the hallway. Similarly, police responded to a crowd attacking the car in which Betty Wilcox sat, she related, "with big clubs swinging,... and began to strike out at random and shoot in the air."

Another black man, James White suffered a “laceration of the scalp…during an altercation with an unknown white man” just a block away from that incident, at 129th Street and Lenox Ave. He reported that assault only to the hospital staff from whom he sought treatment. White did not identify his assailant as a police officer, perhaps indicating the man was not in uniform. But detectives like McCabe and Teed wore plainclothes, and officers like them would have made up a significant proportion of the white men present at the heart of the disorder. Andrew Lyons, a Black man who suffered a fatal injury to his skull during the disorder, may also have been hit with a nightstick. Two newspapers reported he had been injured on 125th Street, at different locations on the police perimeter. However, medical records indicate he did not receive medical attention until the evening after the disorder, when he was described as "stuporous," too groggy to tell doctors what had happened to him.

The only published photograph of an arrest being made, in the Daily News, did not show, but suggested, violence by police. Two officers are visible, on the southeast corner of Lenox Avenue and 127th Street, with one standing over a Black man seated on the ground on the ground (none of the arrests with locations identified in the sources occurred at the corner). He was “dragging a recalcitrant rioter off to prison,” according to the caption, although the image does not offer a view of the patrolman's hands. That kind of treatment could produce some of the injuries reported in the press. More serious injuries would have come from being hit with a nightstick. That officer has his nightstick under his arm, while the officer in the foreground has a revolver in one hand and a nightstick in the other, indicating they employed those weapons while apprehending the man. He may have fallen, but it seems more likely that the officers knocked him down during the arrest. His face was obscured by his hat, so there are no visible signs that he was beaten. (In the background several Black women are visible walking past the police along 127th Street, one looking back over her shoulder at the police).

Black men arrested during the disorder displayed further evidence of police violence. The New York Post reported that many of the prisoners who filled the West 123d and West 135th Street police stations before midnight were “slightly injured,” while the New York Sun described "groups of prisoners battered and bruised." Descriptions and published photographs of the appearance of prisoners the next day in line-ups and being transported to court confirmed those reports, with many having bandaged heads and visible bruises. The New York Sun unambiguously attributed those injuries to the men’s “furious battles with the police.”

Four Black men and a white man arrested by police were also among those reported injured. Patrolman Conn hit Paul Boyett in the shoulder when he shot at the crowd around a group of men assaulting Timothy Murphy. A doctor from Knickerbocker Hospital treated Boyett's wound before he was placed in a cell. When James Smitten was arrested for assaulting William Kitlitz, the “lacerations to the scalp he received in some unknown manner” were severe enough that doctors were also called to the 28th Precinct to treat him. Isaac Daniels had contusions on his arm and Hashi Mohammed internal injuries, with no description of the circumstances in which they were wounded. In addition, Louise Thompson reported to the MCCH the “severe beating” that she saw Patrolman Irwin Young and his colleagues administer to Harry Gordon, a white Communist, when they arrested him on 125th Street.

While few reports of the disorder showed any concern about the indiscriminate use of nightsticks by police, officers use of their guns was another matter. No one disputed that guns were fired, beginning almost as soon as police faced crowds. The officer in the foreground of the Daily News photograph of an arrest above has drawn his revolver, ready to fire it not use it as a club. However, newspaper stories emphasized that prior to midnight, officers fired those shots into the air not at any individuals. The Daily News reported very precisely that the detachment of police trying to clear crowds from 125th Street after someone broke the first window in Kress’ store fired five shots into the air. The shooting of Lyman Quarterman around 10:30 PM appears to be at odds with that claim: he was part of a crowd police were attempting to disperse on 7th Avenue at 121st Street, firing their weapons, supposedly only in the air. However, there were no reports of anyone else firing guns during that incident.

After midnight, when looting and damage to property increased, whatever restraint police had shown in using their guns disappeared, notwithstanding one Afro-American journalist claiming that police "did not fire into crowds." It was during this period that officers shot and killed Lloyd Hobbs and James Thompson, and that Patrolman William Clement shot at a crowd pursuing B. Z. Kondoul, a white man, allegedly in order to protect him from assault, a situation that several white newspapers claimed happened repeatedly. Four other black men suffered gunshot wounds from unidentified shooters in the same period, all but one in the area in which looting was concentrated. It is likely that at least some were shot by police. Eunice Carter asked Captain Rothnengast for details of those shootings during a MCCH hearing, suggesting that they had been shot by police: “Officer, you stated that other people were shot but who shot them? Was there any effort to find out who shot them? Was any check made on the bullets to ascertain whether they came from police guns?” He replied simply that “No bullets were recovered.” There is little evidence of black individuals firing guns: there were two arrests for possessing a gun and a Boston-bound bus was hit by eleven bullets. Inspector Di Martini told a hearing of the MCCH that he heard gunshots around 130th Street sometime during the disorder that "apparently came from some roof or window on the side streets," but he did not actually see that himself. Despite the evidence of police firing at crowds, the New York Post reporter compared the fatalities and injured favorably to "the long lists of deaths that might easily have resulted," indicating that "the police handled the crisis so carefully." A journalist for the Afro-American agreed that "the police, on the whole were restrained," but saw a different consequence, that the "crowd would not have been downed if colored bodies were scattered here and there felled by police bullets."
 

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