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

"Business Men Score 'Pampering' of Reds in Protest to Mayor on Riots," Home News, March 22, 1935, 1, 11.

In the Home News

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Dodge grand jury hearing, March 21 (12) With only a handful of those arrested during the riot arraigned in the Magistrates Court on March 21, the focus of the press shifted downtown to District Attorney Dodge’s grand jury investigation. As grand jury proceedings were closed, no details of the evidence presented were available to reporters, and only how many individuals the jurors voted to indict, not their names. Partly as a result, statements Dodge made to the assembled reporters dominated the stories. That he focused attention and blame for the disorder on Communists resulted in particularly prominent stories in the city’s anti-Communist newspapers. Among the Black newspapers, only the Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide published any details of Dodge’s claims, while both the Amsterdam News and New York Age quoted editorials rejecting the idea that Communists were responsible for the disorder.

The first day of District Attorney Dodge’s grand jury investigation was widely reported in New York City’s white daily newspapers. Twenty-six witnesses appeared before the grand jury that day according to the New York American, Daily News, New York World-Telegram, New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, and Home News; three other publications reported a different number, 25 witnesses in the New York Evening Journal, and 30 witnesses in the New York Post, New York Sun and Times Union (the Daily Mirror did not mention witnesses). According to the New York Post, more than seventy additional witnesses were in attendance, likely responding to the subpoenas sent the previous day. The New York Sun reported that Assistant District Attorney Saul Price questioned a number of those witnesses before the grand jury convened at 10:30 AM. The witnesses were described as mostly policemen in the New York Times and New York World-Telegram, and as a mix of policemen and Black witnesses by the New York Post, New York American, and Times Union, which all included the detail that the police were bandaged.

Several newspapers identified Lino Rivera as among the witnesses. ADA Saul Price questioned Rivera (before the grand jury convened at 10:30 AM, according to the New York Sun), with photographs of the pair sitting at a desk published in the Daily Mirror, New York American, and New York Evening Journal. Price told the assembled reporters that a threatening postcard had been sent to the boy’s home. It read: "Get out of this city or we will burn you alive. Fair Warning." The threat and text of the postcard were reported by the New York Sun, New York Evening Journal, Times Union, New York Herald Tribune, Daily News, Daily Mirror, and New York American. The New York Post and New York Times simply mentioned Rivera as “among the witnesses,” without noting the threat. No mention of the boy appeared in the New York World-Telegram. Price also told reporters he had placed Rivera under the supervision of Patrolman Eldridge of the Crime Prevention Bureau (the New York Evening Journal described him as also a “guard” for Rivera, the Times Union as assigned to Rivera as “safety measure;" the Daily Mirror reported a police guard for Rivera without mentioning Eldridge). The Daily News published a photograph of Rivera and Eldridge leaving the building. While the New York Times and Home News included Rivera among the twenty-six witnesses who appeared before the grand jury and the New York Evening Journal reported that he “testified,” other newspaper stories did not include him in those proceedings. The Daily News story had Rivera dismissed when Dodge left for the grand jury. The Times Union reported he would be called before the grand jury. No mention of Rivera testifying appeared in the New York Herald Tribune, New York Sun, Daily Mirror, and New York American. Later, Jackson Smith, the manager of the Kress store, told a hearing of the MCCH that he had sat beside Rivera “before we went in to the Grand Jury room.” It is not clear on what day that happened.

Dodge himself presented the cases to the grand jury, despite assigning that role to ADA Price the previous day, a change only the New York Post noted. Dodge and Price spent much of the day in the grand jury with the result that the body voted for seven indictments charging twelve individuals. While the New York Post, and New York Times reported only the number of people indicted, the New York American, New York Evening Journal, Daily Mirror, Times Union, Daily News, New York World-Telegram, New York Sun, and New York Herald Tribune also mentioned the crimes with which they had been charged: inciting riot in the case of five men, assault in the case of two others, and burglary for the remaining five men. (The next day Dodge announced he had decided not to prosecute the men charged with rioting in the Court of General Sessions, for a felony, but instead in the Court of Special Sessions, for a misdemeanor, according to stories in the New York Sun, Times Union, and New York World-Telegram.) While the seventeen men indicted as a result of Dodge's investigation can be identified, either by notes in the court docket book or in the testimony of ADA Kaminsky at the first public hearing of the MCCH, which of those men were in that group is not clear. Certainly those charged with riot included Daniel Miller and the three Young Liberators, the only group indicted together for riot, who were all prosecuted in the Court of Special Sessions, as Dodge intimated they were the men indicted on this date. However, none of the others identified as indicted by Dodge's grand jury are recorded as charged with riot. While the two indictments for assault reported on this date were the only ones for that offense reported as resulting from Dodge's investigation, three men identified as indicted in that process were charged with assault: James Hughes, Isaac Daniels, and Douglas Cornelius. Any of the ten men in the group charged with burglary could have been indicted on this day.

Dodge spoke to the reporters before and after he went into the grand jury, and again after he later met with police officials. Those statements and responses to questions from reporters expanding on his claim the previous day that Communists were responsible for the disorder dominated stories about the grand jury, reported in varying detail and emphasis by different publications. A handful of newspapers noted that Dodge’s statements came at different times; most simply combined them in some way.

On his way into the grand jury, according to the New York World-Telegram and New York Evening Journal, Dodge told reporters: “The Reds have been boring into our institutions for a long time, but when they begin to incite to riot it is time to stop them.” "They have been safe because we are sticklers for free speech, but when that free speech undermines our laws and causes riots drastic action must be taken.” Those were Dodge’s most widely reported statement, in the New York Evening Journal, New York Post, New York World-Telegram, Times Union, Daily News, New York American, New York Herald Tribune, Daily Mirror, and New York Sun. The New York Evening Journal, New York World-Telegram, Times Union, and New York Post added, “We must stiffen our laws.” Only the Daily Mirror reported Dodge suggesting that as “dealing with rioters on the basis of their having committed misdemeanors is not practical” an alternative would be to use Sect. 161 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, which provided a sentence of ten years for those advocating the overthrow of organized government by force or violence.” Given the reaction provoked when Dodge made the same call several days later, it is unlikely that would have gone unreported by other publications. (A reporter from the New York American raised the use of this statute in questions posed to Commissioner Valentine after he left a meeting with Dodge later in the day.)

In seeking action against those involved in the disorder, Dodge also argued that those found guilty should be removed from Home Relief rolls and if aliens, deported. He would make those recommendations to the Mayor and the Home Relief Bureau and Commission of Immigration respectively. The New York Post, New York World-Telegram, Times Union, New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, Home News, and New York Sun reported those proposals; they were not mentioned, somewhat surprisingly, in the Hearst newspapers, the New York Evening Journal, New York American, and Daily Mirror, that otherwise amplified Dodge’s anti-communism.

Some of the charges Dodge made against the Communist Party were also absent from the three Hearst newspapers. They did not join the New York Post, New York World-Telegram, Times Union, New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, New York Sun in reporting that Dodge said, “Half the troubles in labor unions are caused by Reds.” However, the New York Evening Journal together with the New York Post, New York World-Telegram, Times Union, New York Times, did report his charge that Communists had sent threatening letters to judges. The Times Union named General Sessions Judge Joseph E. Corrigan, Judge Otto A. Rosalsky, and Edward R. Finch as recipients, the New York Post Corrigan and Rosalsky, the New York Evening Journal Corrigan and Finch, the New York Times only Finch, and the New York World-Telegram just “various judges.”

Dodge’s claims were staple anti-Communist charges. The New York Post reporter recognized them as such, noting that the “inquiry threatened to turn into a red-baiting campaign.” That prospect concerned the New York Herald Tribune, which saw "red-baiting" as one of "passions, fears and follies" that the disorder could incite, and wished that Dodge had restrained himself from "making allegations and proclaiming crusades." A New York Sun editorial (reprinted in the New York Age on March 30) was more dismissive of Dodge’s charges commenting that “seeing red is an official privilege, diversion and avocation at the moment; no disorder can occur without being attributed to those terror-inspiring Communists whose shadows darken the sky at noonday.” So too was a story in the Afro-American later in the week, which asserted that “Colored goody, goodies—ministers, social workers, et al—who are whooping it up that last week’s rioting was the work of Communists, and who are ready to deny freedom of speech to 'radicals who come to Harlem,' are, right now, a greater menace to Harlem than the Reds.”

After Dodge left the grand jury, the Daily News, New York Times, New York American, New York Herald Tribune and Home News reported he made a more specific claim about the Communist role in the disorder. "We have evidence that within two hours after that boy stole a knife the Reds had placed inflammatory leaflets on the streets. We know who printed those leaflets and where they were printed.” That allegation echoed what police had told reporters in the immediate aftermath of the disorder; those papers that did not include it in their stories may not have seen it as new information.

Following a meeting with several police leaders, including Commissioner Valentine, that lasted around an hour and a half, Dodge returned to his broad attacks on Communists. While the New York American and Home News stories suggested a statement (and the New York American reported slightly different wording), the New York Times reported Dodge as responding to questions from reporters. Dodge likely announced his plan to have the grand jury undertake a city-wide investigation of radical agitators. It was in answer to a question as to whether that investigation would be focused on Communists that Dodge asserted, "I am not interested in the labels by which they are known. We are interested in any people, no matter what they call themselves, who believe and advocate the overthrow of the Government.” He went on, “A challenge has been thrown down to law and order, and the Grand Jury, the District Attorney and the Police Department have accepted that challenge.” Despite repeated questions, he declined to offer further details. That it was late in the day by the time the meeting was over likely contributed to how few papers reported; other reporters had left.

Despite the unity of purpose Dodge claimed with the police department, Commissioner Valentine did not echo the DA’s plans to target Communists. He took the opportunity of appearing before reporters to announce a summary of the report Inspector Di Martini had submitted about the disorder. The New York American, Home News, New York Sun, New York World-Telegram, and New York Times reported Valentine pointed to four causes for the disorder: "a Negro youth had been caught stealing, that a woman had screamed, that the 'Young Liberators' had met, that they had thereafter disseminated 'untruthful deceptive and inflammatory literature' and that all these events had been climaxed by the appearance of a hearse in the vicinity," as summarized by the New York Sun. The New York Times and Home News offered slightly longer summaries that described the woman who screamed as “hysterical” and the appearance of the hearse as “accidental.” The Daily Mirror mentioned only the role of the Young Liberators and the appearance of the hearse, quoting Valentine as saying that he believed “that the hearse which drew up in front of the store Tuesday was part of the plot.” The remaining reports of Valentine’s statements in the New York Post, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and Daily Worker described him as simply blaming Communists for the disorder. The New York Post, New York Evening Journal, Times Union, New York Herald Tribune, and Daily News made no mention of Valentine's statement in their stories.

The reporter for the New York American also put a series of “written” questions to Valentine reflecting the newspaper’s anti-Communist agenda, asking: “Why are Communists allowed to roam in Harlem?"; "Why was the situation allowed to get out of control?"; and "Why were no steps taken to invoke the penal law regarding advocacy of criminal anarchy?” Only the New York Times joined the New York American in including his answers in its story, publishing more extensive answers to some questions, with the New York Evening Journal following suit the next day, while the New York Post summarized those answers as Valentine indicating “that his men would be careful not to violate constitutional rights of agitators.” Valentine had answered that the Constitution gave Communists the right to assemble, that the situation did not get out of control, and that there had been arrests under the criminal anarchy statute but “It is difficult to convict under this section. The smart fellow does not advocate anarchy. He is very cautious not to overstep himself."
Benjamin Zelvin's jewelry store looted Benjamin Zelvin locked his jewelry store at 372 Lenox Avenue around 11:30 PM on March 19. The forty-eight-year-old Russian-born resident of Brooklyn may also have boarded up the windows, as a Home News story mentioned boards later being pulled away when the store was attacked. Although there were no reports of looting in this area at that time, there apparently were crowds or other activity that led Zelvin to seek police protection for his store before leaving it. Across the street at 371 Lenox Avenue, Irving Stekin had also called police after a window in his grocery store was broken, likely around this time. The New York World-Telegram reported that Zelvin told a representative of the city comptroller's office that he waited more than half an hour after calling the station house before police reached his store (Stekin reported waiting two hours). Those officers apparently did not remain at Zelvin's store, as it was later looted, probably starting around midnight; police told Zelvin "they didn't know anything about it." However, Officer Astel of the 25th Precinct arrested two men, John Henry, a sixteen-year-old Black student, and Oscar Leacock, a twenty-year-old Brazilian laborer around 2:15 AM at Lenox Avenue and 126th Street. He allegedly found a quantity of jewelry in the men's possession, which they admitted to taking from Zelvin's store. A Home News story reported that they had "pushed away one of the boards" in order to take "several articles of merchandise." The officer then had the men take him to the store, which was only three blocks north, where he found all the windows broken. Zelvin later identified the jewelry found on the men as coming from his store. In the charge against Henry and Leacock, the value of the jewelry was initially typed as $100, but then struck out and $75 handwritten in its place. Zelvin later assessed his total losses as far greater. When he joined other merchants in filing claims for damages suffered in the disorder, the New York World-Telegram reported that he asked for $2,685. The New York Evening Journal reported Zelvin told the comptroller that his losses were "because of the lack of police protection."

There were no newspaper stories about the looting. Henry and Leacock appeared only in the four most comprehensive lists of those arrested published in Black newspapers and in the New York Evening Journal. The District Attorney's case file contained some details; as the grand jury sent the cases to the Court of Special Sessions, the only information was from the Magistrate Court affidavit. The 28th Precinct police blotter recorded that the judges convicted both men.

Zelvin appeared in the Harlem Magistrate's Court on March 21 to charge an additional man, a thirty-one-year-old Black man named Henry Goodwin, with burglary (the only other individual charged for an offense related to the disorder in the court that day was John Henry, although Zelvin was not listed as the complainant in that case). Goodwin appeared only in the docket book and the 28th Precinct Police Blotter; there were no details of his alleged crime. If he did take goods from 372 Lenox Avenue, they were worth less than $100. When Goodwin appeared again, the charge was reduced to petit larceny and the Magistrate transferred him to the Court of Special Sessions. Like Henry and Leacock, the police blotter recorded that the judges convicted him.

Zelvin had started his own business soon after arriving in the city in 1904. By 1918 at the latest, when he registered for the draft, his business was located at 372 Lenox Avenue. By that time Zelvin was also living in Harlem, at 327 Lenox Avenue, where he still resided at the time of the 1920 federal census. Sometime before the state census in 1925, he relocated to a house he bought on 83rd Street in Brooklyn, which is where he lived at the time of the disorder, according to the 1940 census. It was possible that Zelvin did not reopen his jewelry store in Harlem after the disorder. It did not appear in the MCCH Business survey in the second half of 1935, which recorded no business at 372 Lenox Avenue. The Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941 was from an angle that did not offer a clear view of the business at that address. By the time the fifty-six year old Zelvin registered for the draft in 1942, he listed his place of business as 4116 8th Avenue in Brooklyn.
Before civil court, July 23 On July 23, Barney Rosenstein, one of the attorneys representing business owners, made public the testimony several of his clients had given when questioned by the comptroller. By that time, the three-month deadline set in the statute for filing claims for damages resulting from a riot had passed. Just how many claims had been filed is uncertain. A total of one hundred and six claims was reported by the press at this time, with an additional sixty-five claims rejected as submitted too late. Later newspaper stories would refer to a total of 160 claims for small sums and at least twenty-two claims for larger sums. No official source provided a total number of claims. If the higher numbers were accurate, claims were filed for at least one-third of the estimated 450 businesses damaged during the disorder.

Not only business owners had filed claims against the city. So too did at least six of the insurance companies with whom Harlem's businesses had policies. By this time, claims on those policies had resulted in payments $147,315 to replace 697 glass windows broken in 300 stores, according to a widely reported survey. Business owners had lost merchandise as well as windows, so insurance companies also faced additional, larger claims. However, those policyholders faced almost certain disappointment. Their policies excluded losses suffered as a result of riots. In fact, it was such exclusions that had contributed to the enactment of statutes like Section 71 of New York's General Municipal Law to provide property owners with compensation in those circumstances. The insurance companies who filed claims sought to have the city reimburse them for payments they had made for windows. They would also have been aware that they needed to act to ensure that city's response to the claims did not shift liability back to them.

City officials had decided on their response to the claims by this time: a "general denial," as stories in the New York World-Telegram, New York Sun, and New York Amsterdam News put it. As a result, the claims would be decided by juries in the city's civil courts, the Municipal Court, in the case of smaller claims, and the Supreme Court, in the case of larger claims. A blanket denial clearly relied on the law and involved the city's lawyers, not individual assessments of the sums claimed made by the comptroller. That did not mean that the value of the claims had no bearing on the city's position. The total reported at this time would not have been overly burdensome for the city: $116,000, with individual claims that ranged from $2.65 to $14,000. The later reports of a larger number of claims, however, referred to a dramatically higher total: $1 million. Liability on that scale could not be managed by disputing claims and negotiating reduced settlements: it needed to be avoided. One defense the city could employ to avoid liability was of particular concern to the companies who had insured Harlem's businesses: that the events of March 19 and 20 had not been a riot. If the city's lawyers were to succeed in persuading a jury to take that view, they would not have simply avoided liability but shifted it to insurance companies whose policies would no longer exclude the damage.

However, the question of whether a riot had occurred was not one that came up when the comptroller questioned the business owners represented by Rosenstein. What attracted the attention of the journalists were the business owners' testimony that police had either not made an effort to protect their premises or had been unable to handle the crowds when they did. Henry Piskin tried three times to get police to protect his laundry from being bombarded by rocks and looted. A police officer a block away at the intersection of West 125th Street and Lenox Avenue told him, "Report it--I can't leave my post," according to the New York Post. When he did report it at the 28th Precinct station on West 123rd Street, the response was, "Oh we know all about it." When Piskin complained about not receiving help, a police officer answered, "My life is more important to me than your business is to you." When Anthony Avitable rushed to Harlem on learning of the disorder, and saw crowds breaking into his store and no police nearby, he drove on to the 28th Precinct station to report the looting, the New York Post reported. Officers there said they "couldn't do anything for me," and told him to phone police headquarters. The officer who answered assured Avitable that, "I'll have men there in two minutes." They did not arrive for forty-five minutes. Irving Stekin waited two hours for police to respond after he reported that a stone had been thrown through his store window. The two patrolmen who did arrive "couldn't do anything. The mob was too big for them," according to a report in the New York World-Telegram. Benjamin Zelvin waited half an hour after calling the 28th Precinct for police to arrive to protect his jewelry store. However, that protection proved fleeting. Some time after Zelvin left for home, the officers also left, so police "didn't know anything about" the subsequent looting, the New York World-Telegram reported. Calls to police by staff in George Chronis' restaurant brought no response, leading the two Black staff to leave and the white staff member to lock himself in a washroom while the restaurant was attacked.

That testimony prompted very different reactions in the New York Post and in the New York Sun. The New York Post story used it to taunt the police: "Where were those tough, hard-boiled cops when a riot broke out in Harlem, March 19? Why did they forget then that swaggering aggressiveness which pickets and soapboxers know so well?" By contrast, the New York Sun took the other side in the ongoing tension between Mayor La Guardia and the police department, blaming the Mayor's "kid-glove methods" for the failed police response: "While scenes of terror rocked the Negro section during most of the late afternoon and night, Mayor La Guardia persisted in his attitude that things would come out alright, that the police had the situation in hand. His attitude, it was apparent, was responsible for the comparative gentleness with which the situation was handled by the cops." The Uptown Chamber of Commerce, an organization made up of white owners of larger businesses, had in the immediate aftermath of the disorder leveled a similar charge that police were "pampering" radicals, calling on the mayor to tell the police "that they will be backed to the limit as long as they exercise restraint and display good judgment" in order to dispel the impression that "the police are under wraps when dealing with rioters." At the same time they were condescendingly dismissed the complaints of the "small merchants of Harlem" that the police lacked the ability to control the riot. The Harlem Merchants Association had claimed police were "inadequately equipped to handle the situation" in a telegram sent the day after the disorder appealing to the Governor of New York to send troops.

It would be some time before the business owners would find out how jurors rather than journalists reacted to their testimony. Civil proceedings to resolve their claims threatened to take even more time than the criminal process, in which only two cases resulting from the disorder remained outstanding by this time. The full calendars of the civil courts would likely delay trials until the next year, according to the New York World-Telegram.
In Harlem court on March 22 (18) Only the stories in the New York Times and Daily News described the scene at the courtroom on March 22. Police searched several who entered courtroom for weapons, according to the former story, and turned away those who “bore indications of connection with the Young Liberators, the Communist organization which fomented the disorder” according to Daily News. Neither of those stories indicated that police had to control a crowd like that which had gathered two days earlier. However, the Daily Mirror reported that "several hundred Colored persons" "thronged" outside the court. That story was discounted given that reporters from other publications had noted the presence of crowds earlier in the week, so it was likely that they would have again on this day if they had been present.

The Daily Mirror story did provide a context for the day's proceedings, that "Magistrate Renaud began yesterday the work of cleaning his calendar of the remainder of 85 cases growing out of the Harlem riots." Only the New York Times explicitly offered a similar framing, that Renaud had "disposed of the cases of Negroes accused in the rioting and looting Tuesday night and Wednesday morning." The number of cases in the Daily Mirror story does not fit the legal records. No newspaper story identified all those who appeared in the court. The Home News, as it did on other dates, mentioned the largest number, ten of the seventeen. Its story described the charges against three of those convicted, Elizabeth Tai, Arthur Davis, and Herbert Hunter and reported testimony by the storeowner whose business Daughty Shavos and Clifford Mitchell had allegedly looted. Tai, Davis, and Hunter's convictions were the hearings reported most widely and in the most detail, also mentioned in the New York Evening Journal, Daily News, and Daily Worker. Mitchell and Shavos, appearing in the Magistrates Court for the first time and sent to the grand jury, were also mentioned in the New York Evening Journal, Daily News, and Daily Mirror.

The three men discharged and rearrested as they had been indicted by Dodge's grand jury, James Hughes, Charles Saunders, and Isaac Daniels, are identified in the Home News and are the only individuals whose appearance was reported by the New York Post. Only Hughes and Saunders are mentioned by the Daily Worker, which describes them simply as held for the grand jury, omitting any reference to their discharge. Of the five additional men Renaud sent to the grand jury, Amie Taylor and Arthur Merritt are mentioned in the Home News, New York Evening Journal Daily News, and Daily Worker. No newspaper mentioned the appearances of the other three men sent to the grand jury, James Williams, John Henry, and Oscar Leacock (although the Home News had reported that morning that Henry and Leacock would appear, they were not in its story on the hearings published the next day, March 23).

Nor did any publication mention the four men sent to the Court of Special Sessions, William Jones, Henry Goodwin, Frederick Harwell, and Jackie Ford. Ford, the third man to appear in court for the first time on March 22, with Shavos and Mitchell, was not mentioned in any of the stories on the day's hearings, although his arrest that day was reported by the New York Post, New York World-Telegram, and La Prensa. Paul Boyett, remanded a second time, also did not appear in stories about the day's hearings.

According to stories in the Daily Mirror and the Home News, police also brought Daniel Miller and the three Young Liberators to Harlem court on March 22. They did not appear before the magistrate, according to the Home News, because just before the hearing began, police found out that they had been indicted by Dodge's grand jury. The Daily Mirror reported only the consequence of that news, that they waited for a bench warrant to be served that would allow them to be discharged and rearrested as Hughes, Saunders, and Daniels had been. By the next day, March 23, several newspapers reported that process would occur at a later hearing, on March 25.

The uneven coverage of these hearings is a further example of the incomplete and unreliable nature of newspaper stories about legal proceedings. That the mix of cases the stories reported included convictions and referrals of those charged with felonies but not any of those sent to the Court of Special Sessions suggests newspapers focused only on the more serious allegations. That focus is also evident in how the Home News emphasized the charges against Tai, Davis, and Hunter, notwithstanding that the outcome of the prosecution and short sentence indicated that they had been involved in less serious acts. The story reported their arrest for "stealing groceries" and that they had been found guilty of disorderly conduct and sentenced to five and ten days in the Workhouse, before noting that the original charge of burglary had been reduced by the court without addressing the implications of that change.
Thomas Wijstem assaulted & killed Around 10:30 PM, Thomas Wijstem, a thirty-four-year-old white carpenter, was struck on the head by a rock and knocked unconscious in front of the W. T. Grant store at 226 West 125th Street.There is no information on why Wijstem was on West 125th Street at that time. He lived across town to the east, at 16 East 127th Street, a racially mixed section likely too far away for him to have heard the noise of the disorder. By 10:30 PM, police had established a perimeter around 125th Street and the large crowds that had been concentrated there earlier had broken into smaller groups, many of which scattered north and south up the avenues. However, around 10:30 PM, crowds broke through the police cordon on to this block of 125th Street. Three of the four brief newspaper accounts of the assault reported that a group of Black men attacked Wijstem. At the same time, a rock was thrown through the window of Blumstein's department store, the building immediately to the west of where Wijstem was struck, and ten minutes later, a rock was thrown that broke windows in Kress' store. In both those cases, police alleged that the men responsible urged people on the street to attack police, causing large crowds to gather. With police reinforcements having arrived, unlike earlier in the disorder, police made arrests in all three of those incidents, albeit of only one individual at each location. Douglas Cornelius, a twenty-four-year-old Black man, was arrested for allegedly throwing a rock that struck Wijstem. Given the objects being thrown at nearby store windows at this time, it is possible that the rock that hit Wijstem may have been meant for the windows of the W. T. Grant store, which were broken during the disorder

While many of those injured in the disorder suffered head injuries, Wijstem’s injury was one of the most severe, a fractured skull that rendered him unconscious. As a result, he appears in stories of the disorder and lists of the injured in the New York Evening Journal, Daily News, New York American, Home News, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide as a seriously injured "unidentified white man." The Home News, New York Post and New York World-Telegram did eventually name him, on March 22, with the Home News and New York World-Telegram reporting that his brother had identified him and the New York Post that his neighbors had identified him (the Home News misreported his name as "Thor Wigstrom"). Three months later, a brief story in New York Herald Tribune reported Wijstem had died in Bellevue Hospital without regaining consciousness. However, as the attack on Wijstem led to an arrest and prosecution for assault, he is included among both those assaulted and killed (but not among those injured in assaults).

Like the man he targeted, Cornelius lived in East Harlem, at 52 East 118th Street, a mixed Black and Puerto Rican section. He appeared in lists of those arrested for assault in nine newspapers, but only five of those reports link him to the unidentified man with the fractured skull. After appearing in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, charged with felonious assault, he was remanded in custody. He appeared in court again on March 25, when Magistrate Ford dismissed the charge against him as he had been indicted by the grand jury. The 28th Precinct police blotter simply listed the charges as "Dism[issed]," as it did with other men dismissed in the Magistrates Court because they had been indicted already. However, there is no case file for Cornelius in the district attorney's records, and no other information on the outcome of his prosecution.
John Henry arrested Patrolman Astel of the 28th Precinct arrested John Henry, a sixteen-year-old Black student, together with Oscar Leacock, a twenty-year-old Brazilian laborer, around 2:15 AM, at Lenox Avenue and 126th Street. There is no mention of what prompted Officer Astel to stop the men; the blocks of Lenox Avenue north of 125th Street had been the site of attacks on stores for around two hours before he stopped Henry and Leacock. He reported that he found on them "a quantity of jewelry," which when questioned they admitted taking from Benjamin Zelvin's store at 372 Lenox Avenue. The officer then had the men take him to the store, which was only three blocks north, where they found all the windows broken — and perhaps boarded up, as a Home News story about one of the men's court appearances reported that they "pushed away one of the boards" in order to take "several articles of merchandise." Zelvin had locked his jewelry store at 372 Lenox Avenue around 11:30 PM and did not return from his home in Brooklyn until opening time the next day. Given that there was extensive disorder in Harlem by the time Zelvin left, he may have boarded up the store as well as locking it.

Henry and Leacock were two of nine men known to have been arrested away from the stores they allegedly looted, one-third (9 of 27) of the arrests for which that information is known (27 of 60).

Henry lived at 313 West 118th Street, near 8th Avenue. Leacock lived at the opposite end of the same street, at 39 West 118th Street, near 5th Avenue. Henry was one of the youngest people arrested during the disorder; James Hayes was also sixteen years of age (two seventeen-year-old men were also arrested, one of whom, Robert Tanner, was the only other identified as a student). There is no indication how he and Leacock came to be together on March 19.

Zelvin later identified the jewelry found on the men as coming from his store. In the charge against Henry and Leacock, the value of the jewelry was initially typed as $100, but then struck out and $75 handwritten in its place. The grand jury reduced the felony burglary charge against the men to a misdemeanor, a decision that likely reflected the lack of evidence that the men had broken into the store that a charge of burglary required. Given that they had been arrested with merchandise in their possession, the grand jury likely charged them with petit larceny; a felony larceny charge was not an option as the jewelry they had allegedly taken was worth less than $100. Zelvin appeared in the Harlem Magistrate's Court on March 21 to charge one additional man, a thirty-one-year-old Black man named Henry Goodwin, with burglary. That charge was reduced to petit larceny, suggesting he too had only allegedly taken jewelry worth less than $100.

There was no newspaper coverage of the looting; Henry and Leacock appeared only in the most comprehensive lists of those arrested, published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and the New York Evening Journal. The details came from the district attorney's case file; as the grand jury sent the cases to the Court of Special Sessions, the only information was from the Magistrate Court affidavit. Although arrested together, the men appeared in the Harlem Magistrate Court at different times, Leacock on March 20 with most of those arrested during the disorder, and Henry not until the next day. Despite Patrolman Astel's report that the men had confessed at the time of their arrest, they pled not guilty in court. Both men appeared in court again on March 22, when the Magistrate sent them to the grand jury charged with burglary, an outcome reported in the Home News. It was not until April 2 that the grand jury heard their cases, sending them to the Court of Special Sessions, not the Court of General Sessions. The 28th Precinct police blotter is the only source for the outcome of those trials, that the judges convicted both men. On April 17, they sent Henry to the House of Refuge, a juvenile reformatory on Randalls Island (which would close less than a month later, on May 11). The next day the judges gave Leacock a suspended sentence.
In court on March 21 On March 21, with the arraignments of 122 men and women arrested during the disorder completed, around seventy witnesses, mostly police officers together with a few Black residents, responded to subpoenas to appear before the grand jury convened by District Attorney Dodge. Who among that group actually testified, what evidence they provided, and who the grand jury voted to send for trial are not known as such proceedings took place behind closed doors. Only the number of people indicted was provided to journalists, twelve individuals named in seven indictments. At odds with what legal records indicate were the details of those charges, outside the grand jury room Dodge took the opportunity of the legal proceedings to expand the claims he had made the previous day that Communists were responsible for the disorder. So focused was he on Communists that a story in the New York Post noted that the “inquiry threatened to turn into a red-baiting campaign.”

Before the grand jury convened at 10:30 AM, Assistant District Attorney Saul Price interviewed several witnesses, including Lino Rivera, with whom he posed for photographs. Speaking to reporters, Price displayed a threatening postcard that had been sent to the boy’s home. It read: "Get out of this city or we will burn you alive. Fair Warning." Who might be responsible for the threat went unexplained, although it was largely only the anti-Communist press and tabloids who reported it. The journalists in attendance did not agree on whether Rivera was among the gathered witnesses who actually testified before the grand jury. Nor did they agree on how many testified, reporting numbers of witnesses ranging from twenty-five to thirty, suggesting the lack of an official source for that information.

Price was to have presented the witnesses to the grand jury, but Dodge changed his mind and took on that task himself. That gave the district attorney the opportunity to speak to reporters on his way in and out of the grand jury room. He offered up a series of staple anti-Communist charges and remedies to them that echoed the line taken by the Hearst newspapers. “The Reds have been boring into our institutions for a long time,” Dodge stated in his most widely reported claim, “but when they begin to incite to riot it is time to stop them.” More specifically, he charged that “Half the troubles in labor unions are caused by Reds” and that they had sent threatening letters to several judges who served in the Court of General Sessions. "They have been safe because we are sticklers for free speech, but when that free speech undermines our laws and causes riots drastic action must be taken.” Dodge promoted removing those found guilty from Home Relief rolls and deporting any found to be aliens. At that time he did not mention invoking the criminal anarchy law, an approach promoted in questions journalists from the anti-Communist Hearst newspaper the New York American later asked Police Commissioner Valentine. That would come the next day, after Dodge had to withdraw several indictments charging riot he would secure in the day’s hearing.

The grand jury voted a total of seven indictments charging twelve individuals in response to the evidence that Dodge presented to them. Two of those indictments charged five men with riot, almost certainly among them Daniel Miller and the three Young Liberators arrested at the beginning of the disorder. Two additional indictments each charged an individual with assault, likely James Hughes, accused of throwing rocks which hit a police officer, and Isaac Daniels, who likewise had allegedly thrown rocks, in his case hitting a white storeowner. The remaining three indictments charged five individuals with burglary, for looting. Neither Hughes nor Daniels nor any of those indicted for burglary had any connection to the Communist Party.

While less than half of those indicted had any connection with the Communist Party, it was still the party who Dodge wanted to talk about on his way out of the hearing. "We have evidence that within two hours after that boy stole a knife the Reds had placed inflammatory leaflets on the streets. We know who printed those leaflets and where they were printed.” Pressed on his focus on Communists after a meeting with police officials later in the day, Dodge asserted, "I am not interested in the labels by which they are known. We are interested in any people, no matter what they call themselves, who believe and advocate the overthrow of the Government.” He went on, “A challenge has been made to law and order, and the Grand Jury, the District Attorney and the Police Department have accepted that challenge.” Despite the unity of purpose Dodge claimed with the police department, Commissioner Valentine did not echo the DA’s plans to target Communists. At the same press conference he summarized a police report that while identifying the Young Liberators disseminating "untruthful deceptive and inflammatory literature" as one cause of the disorder also pointed to three other causes that did not appear to be the responsibility of the Communist Party, "a Black youth caught stealing, a woman who screamed, and the appearance of a hearse." Such a disjuncture between Dodge’s rhetoric and the details of the disorder being reported led the New York Sun to editorialize dismissively that “seeing red is an official privilege, diversion and avocation at the moment; no disorder can occur without being attributed to those terror-inspiring Communists whose shadows darken the sky at noonday.” A distorted picture of the events of the disorder was not the only result of his anticommunism. His pursuit of Communists meant that the grand jury did not investigate the details of the violence of the disorder.

While Dodge focused on the role of Communists and the grand jury hearing began the process of deciding who should be tried and in what court, police brought two additional men arrested during the disorder to the Harlem Magistrates Court. They charged both with looting Benjamin Zelvin’s jewelry store. It is not clear why they had not been arraigned the day before. John Henry had been arrested in the company of Oscar Leacock, who had appeared in court the previous day. Henry, however, was only sixteen years of age, so police may have been confirming his age in case he was young enough to be sent to the juvenile court. Henry Goodwin was older, thirty-one years of age, but was missing from lists of those arrested police circulated to the press, so perhaps had been arrested later. Both were remanded to appear again the next day. No additional individuals arrested during the disorder appeared in the Washington Heights court, although one man, Louis Cobb, appeared again as police still did not have the information on his criminal record needed to set bail.