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

Before court on March 20

For eighty-six of the Black men, six of the white men, and four of the Black women police arrested during the disorder, the legal process began with a trip in police wagons from Harlem to Police Headquarters downtown for a line-up. Led out of the police precincts on to the street in front to be loaded into the wagons, those men and women had to pass by a gauntlet of white press photographers and cameramen. Cameras followed them even into the wagons, capturing images of some groups not simply in police custody but contained in a cell-like space that conveyed that order had been restored in Harlem. Many of those under arrest showed signs of police violence during the disorder, bandages over wounds to their heads and hands, visible bruises and torn clothing. The attention these men drew from reporters indicated that there were many more than the five arrested men identified in newspaper stories and medical records as injured. Some of twenty-nine men and women who had been arrested missing from the line-up had more serious injuries that kept them in Harlem's hospitals. Police officials were clearly still trying to establish exactly how many arrests had been made as they gave different totals to reporters, ranging from 113 reported by the New York Post to 121 reported by both the Home News and New York Times, and 127 reported by the New York American.
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While the morning line-up was part of police practice, the number of prisoners coming from Harlem made it anything but routine. Police diverted traffic and cleared parked cars from the blocks surrounding the headquarters building to ensure access for the collection of patrol wagons. Even after crowding the prisoners disembarking those wagons into cells, there was not space for all those brought to police headquarters. Most were instead put in the photographic gallery.

Police then took groups of three to five prisoners to a floodlit stage, where detectives questioned them. "Did you throw that stone," a detective asked Isaac Daniels, a twenty-nine-year-old Back arrested for allegedly throwing a stone that smashed glass in the window of Herman Young's hardware store and went on to hit Young . "No sir, I didn't have any," Young replied. The detective then changed tack and asked Daniels, "Are you working now." That question may have been for the benefit of representatives of the Department of Public Welfare and the Aldermanic Welfare Committee, who attended the line-up and took notes. Daniels answered, yes, for the C.W.A. [Other answers, and attention given to them by reporters]

The detective then returned to the circumstances of Daniels' arrest. "What were you doing around there?" "I was coming home," Daniels replied. That was all the explanation Daniels was allowed to offer at this point in the legal process. The detective moved on to establishing Daniels' identity. "How long in New York?" "Since 1928." Are you married?" Yes Sir." "Where did you come from?" "Georgia." With that information, which likely helped police find his criminal record, the detective moved on to the next person in the line-up. Aubrey Patterson answered somewhat more effusively when asked to identify himself. In response to being asked if he was a citizen, the twenty-one year-old Black man said "I am a citizen of this great metropolis. I was born in this metropolis in 132nd Street." "What do you do for a living?" "I do laboring in the daytime and I go to school at nighttime." In extending beyond the brief, deferential answers offered by Daniels, Patterson's statements drew the ire of some of the white reporters observing the line-up. They described him as having "assumed a pompous air" and that he "gave off oratory to reply to most of the questions."

Those charged with looting faced questions about items found in their possession when they were arrested, which is some cases they were carrying at the line-up. Several insisted they had found goods ranging from toothbrushes and shirts to cigarettes and bottles of milk lying in the street, denying that they had reached through broken windows to take them from stores. While white reporters at the line-up dismissed those statements, reporting them either as simply an admission of having stolen the items

Aubrey Patterson declined to answer questions about the looting with which he was charged. One reporter made fun of the explanation he offered, which drew laughter from some of those observing the line-up: "?" At least one other prisoner also declined to answer questions. In his case, those in the room reacted differently. Harry Gordon was one of the white men arrested outside the Kress store at the very beginning of the disorder, after he tried to speak to the crowd on the street just as a stone broke the first window in the store. He was grouped on the line-up stage with the three other white men and the Black man identified as members of Communist Party organizations arrested around the same time: Daniel Miller, Murray Samuels, Sam Jamison and Claudio Viabolo.

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