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• 1 2020-02-24T21:51:52+00:00 Assaults on white men and women (29) 78 plain 2024-02-25T19:46:11+00:00 At least twenty-nine white men and women were assaulted during the disorder, in addition to nine white police officers. This violence has been overlooked in most scholarship on the disorder, which has followed the lead of the final report of the MCCH. Assaults were only obliquely mentioned in that document, which instead emphasized attacks on property: “In fact, the distinguishing feature of this outbreak was that it was an attack upon property and not upon persons. In the beginning, to be sure, the resentment was expressed against whites—but whites who owned stores and who, while exploiting Negroes, denied them an opportunity to work."
  
  Newspapers told a different story, particularly the New York Evening Journal, a Hearst afternoon publication that sought out and gave prominence to white men and women assaulted by Black men. The most sensational and racist example of that emphasis was a story by Richard Levitt published under the page-spanning headline, “Kill the Whites Roar Maddened Harlem Mobs.” It was more a litany of racist fears and stereotypes than an account of the events of the disorder, with the phrase "kill the whites" used as a refrain to separate different elements of the story not in descriptions of specific events. In none of instances was the alleged call associated with the events being described. Invoking Black violence, or fears of Black violence, was a longstanding racist trope, employed in white narratives about the race riots of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Only two specific cases that include such threats were reported in the newspaper. A call to “Kill him” is attributed to a crowd of Black men and women that the New York Evening Journal described threatening B. Z. Kondoul, a thirty-five-year-old white man. Again, only one story mentioned that detail. So too the alleged assault on Betty Willcox, as she waited in a parked car. The story that quoted Willcox appeared alongside Levitt's article. The Black men she described surrounding the car screamed "White- we'll get you' We'll get all of them around here!"
  
  While the New York Evening Journal slanted its coverage to emphasize interracial violence, there was other evidence for all but four of the incidents that it reported. Other white publications reported that violence more sporadically, while the Black press generally did not report it at all. At the other end of the political spectrum, the Daily Worker dismissed the claims of the Hearst press that the disorder had been a race riot and gave credit to Communists on the streets and the leaflets they and the Young Liberators distributed for urging the "unity of black and white workers." However, the radical newspaper obliquely allowed that attacks on whites did take place: "In a few instances where small turbulent groups were suspicious of whites and disposed to attack them, white Communists were pointedly excluded from attack." Several papers reported clashes between bands of Blacks and whites, in line with patterns from earlier racial disorders, but none offered details and there are no reports of blacks injured in those circumstances. Those claims appeared to reflect tropes about racial violence not descriptions of events during the disorder. Violence against whites took place throughout the disorder and across a wide area centered on 125th Street. Assaults on whites are thus woven into the disorder not so marginal as to distinguish the disorder from outbreaks earlier in the century.
  
  
  
  White men and women on the street, newspaper reporters and photographers, storeowners, and passengers in vehicles traveling through Harlem all allegedly suffered injuries at the hands of Black assailants. As the map above shows, the alleged assaults were more geographically contained than in race riots in the north earlier in the twentieth century. Other than one man attacked north of 145th Street in an assault likely unrelated to the disorder, most attacks occurred around 125th Street, with a small number further south, around the stores on 116th Street. Information about timing is missing for thirteen of the twenty-nine assaults, but the other alleged attacks were distributed across the duration of the disorder. The first reported assaults came early in the evening as the crowd on 125th Street clashed with police and began smashing windows. William Kitlitz was allegedly assaulted by James Smitten around 8:30 PM, Timothy Murphy and Maurice Spellman by different groups of men around 9 PM, and Morris Werner around 9:30 PM. All these men lived west of Harlem, relatively close to where they were attacked, so were likely regular visitors to 125th Street to shop, seek entertainment, or access public transport, and on this evening caught up in the disorder. Around 11:00 PM, a small cluster of assaults took place on or near 7th Avenue north of 116th Street, as crowds moved away from 125th Street into an area with white residents. Further assaults occurred north of 125th Street around 1:00 AM, back near the entertainment district frequented by whites. The final assault the timing of which is known was of a storekeeper during the looting that intensified after midnight.
  
  The presence of white men and women on West 125th Street and the nearby blocks of the avenues was nothing out of the ordinary, as can be seen in a photograph of the corner of West 125th Street and 7th Avenue taken in 1938. The map below of the residences of the white men and women assaulted and otherwise involved in the disorder below reveals that most lived near West 125th Street (the legend identifies the event in which they were involved). Columbia University student Hector Donnelly would not have been alone in going to the area that evening as usual unaware of the disorder. While his experience indicates that additional violence went unreported or was limited by police intervention, it was nonetheless clear that not all the white men and women on the streets were attacked.
  
  
  Most assaults involved attacks by individuals or groups who targeted white individuals they encountered walking in the neighborhood. Almost all the attacks on white pedestrians took the form of beatings, with only two men stabbed, Edward Genest and Morris Werner. Attacks on Betty Willcox, B. Z. Kondoul, and Timothy Murphy only ended when police officers intervened, while William Ken was saved by Black coworkers. Such violence was not endemic to the disorder. "All night until dawn on the Tuesday of the outbreak white persons, singly and in groups, walked the streets of Harlem without being molested," Claude McKay reported in an article in The Nation. While McKay insisted that "there was no manifest hostility between colored and white," it was clear that he mistook the lack of attacks on whites at some times and places for a general attitude. Hector Donnelly's experience captured the intermittent presence of violence against whites among the variety of behavior during the disorder. He reported being hit on the shoulder by a milk bottle while walking on West 135th Street and Lenox Avenue having gone to the neighborhood unaware of the disorder. As several members of the crowd on the street then moved toward him, he knew he was "in for it." A policeman came running, however, and dragged Donnelly away. Although the officer told him, "You better stay out of here," the white student met a reporter he knew so decided to stay "to watch the excitement." He remained despite further warnings from police until he "got into more trouble." A group of four or five men bumped him as they passed him on the sidewalk and then stopped and continued to push him. Again, a police officer came and "broke up the trouble." After that encounter, Donnelly decided that he needed to leave the neighborhood.
  
  Crowds also threw stones and rocks at whites. The occupants of vehicles traveling through the neighborhood became targets, with Patricia O'Rourke hit in her car and Joseph Rinaldi in a Boston-bound bus. In other cases, whites standing apart, observing crowds came under attack, including newspaper photographer Everett Breuer, his assistant Joseph Martin, and security guard James Wrigley. Others appeared at the hospital with similar injuries resulting from flying glass and rocks that they did not report as assaults, and that did not result from efforts to injure them but rather from the attacks on property. One of them was likely the unidentified white man who appeared in a photograph published in the Daily News, bleeding from a head wound after being hit by an object.
  
  White storeowners also appear among those assaulted, but in very small numbers not as the focus of violence as the MCCH report claimed. Herman Young's injuries resulted from glass from a smashed window rather than a direct attack. Max Newman was attacked as he closed his store, as was Joseph Sarnelli, with his assailants also attempting to rob him.
  
  Four white women appear among those assaulted in Harlem. Two of the women were attacked in cars, Patricia O'Rourke while driving through Harlem, Betty Willcox while parked. Alice Gordon was assaulted by a group on the street. Elizabeth Nadish was reported simply as having been “beaten."
  
  Most assaults on white men and women left few traces in the official record: police made arrests in only seven cases (there was no information on the circumstances that led to the arrest of two of the men charged with assault). Seven victims of alleged assaults appeared only in records of ambulance callouts and hospital admissions. Fifteen assaults are reported only in newspapers. Four cases appeared in only the New York Evening Journal, a publication that reported the disorder with an emphasis on violence against whites distinct from the rest of the press.
  
  Rivers Wright, only one of the five Black men arrested for assaulting whites, was convicted, and only for the misdemeanor offense of disorderly conduct for which he received a sentence of ten days in the Workhouse. That charge indicated that Wright had not been involved in the assault, but had been on the street nearby and been mistakenly arrested by police pursuing the assailants. In one case, there was no evidence of the outcome, one case was dismissed by the grand jury, and two men were acquitted by trial juries.
• 1 2023-09-04T23:59:36+00:00 A new framework (1969, 1971) 30 plain 2024-03-11T20:26:15+00:00 Efforts to understand the outbreak of collective racial violence in the 1960s led to a wave of scholarship by sociologists and historians focused on how those racial disorders related to the race riots of earlier periods. Although early arguments cast the violence of the 1960s as unlike anything in the past, scholars soon recognized that those outbreaks shared key features with racial disorder in Harlem in 1935 and 1943. The new interest in collective racial violence led to the publication of an edition of the MCCH’s final report that made more information about the disorder readily available.
  
  Robert Fogelson, an urban historian, was involved in both of those endeavors. After initially overlooking the 1935 disorder in his analysis of the outbreaks of the mid-1960s, he oversaw the publication of the MCCH report in a series he edited for Arno Press and then incorporated the disorder into the book-length version of his interpretation of the disorders of the 1960s. His research began when he was recruited to contribute to the work of the Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, established by President Johnson on July 23, 1965, in the aftermath of the uprising in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. After the directors of the commission rejected his report, Fogelson opted to make the topic part of his own research agenda in place of a project on the Harlem "ghetto." Somewhat ironically given those plans, an early version of his argument published in Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science in 1968 made no mention of the racial disorders in Harlem in 1935 and 1943. He argued that “on a closer examination of the race riots-and even of the 1917, 1919, and 1943 riots, which, as the most recent, should be the most homologous-it is clear that the riots of the 1960s were not extensions of this tradition [of interracial rioting in the United States].”
  
  In January 1969, Fogelson included the MCCH report in the series Mass Violence in America that he edited for Arno Press. The press, founded by Arnold Zohn in 1962 and taken over by the New York Times in 1968, specialized in reprinting previously published, out-of-print reference materials. Fogelson’s series included at least forty-four volumes, ranging from Henry Dawson's The Sons of Liberty in New York and Zechariah Chafee's The Third Degree to U. S. Congressional reports on the 1866 New Orleans Riot and hearings on the Ku Klux Klan. The text of the MCCH report was typed from the New York Amsterdam News by Sharon Thompson, a secretary at the Bureau of Applied Social Research. A xeroxed copy of the newspaper was in the Columbia University library. Fogelson also consulted a copy in the New York City Municipal Archives, apparently without noting the differences from the text he had published. For some reason, he would cite the archived text not the one he had help publish when he came to write about the disorder in Harlem. The Arno Press series of reprints were widely purchased by libraries, giving the MCCH report a significant influence on subsequent scholarship.
  
  At the end of that year, historians working for the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence published analyses that linked the disorders in Harlem to the racial violence of the 1960s. Richard Maxwell Brown saw the disorders as "foreshadowing" the new patterns of racial violence of the 1960s. He noted that, of the disorders prior to the 1960s, only in the Harlem disorders were whites not the main aggressors and the violence "concentrated on property destruction," but he nonetheless positioned the events in Harlem outside the "new pattern" inaugurated in 1964. Not so, said Elliot Rudwick and August Meier in the same Staff Report to the Commission. The "'new style' riot first appeared in Harlem in 1935 and 1943," they asserted. Since 1964, "the riot pattern" involved "Negro aggression mainly against white-owned property, not against white people." Before then, between the Harlem disorder in 1935 and 1964, some racial violence had followed the earlier form, most notably the disorder in Detroit in 1943. Where Brown had relied on the research of sociologist Allen Grimshaw, Rudwick and Meier cited Roi Ottley's New World A-Coming and the Black newspaper the New York Age.
  
  Fogelson’s book length study, Violence as Protest, published in 1971, added an aside to his argument published three years earlier about the racial disorders in Harlem that elaborated and expanded those arguments about their place in the longer history of racial violence. The disorders in Harlem in 1935 and 1943 shared "common and distinctive features" that made them "direct precursors" of the disorders of the 1960s. 

  These riots were spontaneous and unorganized, triggered by police actions, and distinguished by looting and burning of neighborhood stores and assaults on patrolmen and white passers-by. In all of them, the governmental authorities responded vigorously to increase the risks in participating, and, save in 1935, the moderate black leaders labored valiantly, if vainly, to restrain the rioters. Hence the essence of the Harlem riots and the 196os riots is an intense resentment of the police, an intolerable accumulation of grievances, the ineffectiveness of the customary restraints on rioting, and the weakness of moderate black leadership. It is against police malpractice and other grievances, especially economic deprivation, consumer exploitation, and racial discrimination, that the blacks were protesting

  Fogelson, borrowing Frazier's displacement of violence against whites in the MCCH report, argued that the "Harlem rioters directed most of their aggression against property rather than people." However, he went on to specifically mention that when crowds spread from the Kress store in 1935, "they roamed the streets, attacking white passers-by." In departing from the MCCH, report Fogelson relied on stories in the New York Times, Claude McKay's article in the Nation and Hamilton Basso's article in the New Republic.