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

Edward Larry arrested

At 1:00 AM, Patrolman William Clements observed Edward Larry, a twenty-six-year-old Black laborer, traveling in a taxi at West 123rd Street and 7th Avenue. He stopped the taxi, and found that Larry had a box containing eight shirts, with a value of $12. Not satisfied with Larry’s explanation that he had found the shirts on the street at West 129th Street and Lenox Avenue, Clements took him to the 28th Precinct for further questioning. The Magistrates Court affidavit simply described Clements as arresting Larry; the Home News report of Larry's appearance in the Magistrates Court described Clements arresting Larry "as he was about to get into a taxicab with two boxes containing a dozen shirts." The more detailed account in the Probation Department investigation described Clements stopping the cab.

Larry was one of nine men arrested away from the scene of their alleged crime, a group making up one third (9 of 27) of the arrests for which that information is known (27 of 60). Although he was the only one arrested in a vehicle, a photograph published in the New York Evening Journal indicated that this was not the only instance in which police stopped vehicles. Larry told police he was returning home to the Salvation Army shelter at 224 West 124th Street, behind Kress' store (some reports listed the address as 218 West 124th Street; the MCCH business survey records that the Salvation Army operated in both buildings). He had lived there for a month, after spending two weeks at the Belmont Hotel on the Bowery, and the previous thirty days in the workhouse serving a sentence for pickpocketing.



At the police station, Morris Towbin saw Larry and identified him as one of a group of men who had threatened him and robbed his haberdashery store at 101 West 125th Street at 10:30 PM the previous evening. Towbin also identified the shirts in Larry's possession as from his store, part of $2,000 of merchandise stolen, $1,000 of fixtures destroyed and $226.89 worth of plate glass windows smashed. Towbin's encounter with Larry was described only in the more detailed account in the Probation Department investigation. The Magistrates Court affidavit recorded only that Towbin had identified the shirts, a standard feature of a charge when an individual had not been seen stealing goods, and that he could "positively identify the defendant as one of the men" who had robbed him. In the police blotter, the charge against Larry was recorded as burglary. That record suggested that Towbin's identification came after his initial booking and after police provided that information to reporters, as the list of those arrested in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and the list in the New York Evening Journal, both included Larry among those charged with burglary. Towbin's allegation of force changed the offense to robbery, which is the charge made against Larry in the Harlem Magistrates Court. However, there was no mention of force or robbery in the story covering his court appearance in the Home News or in reports of Towbin's statements as president of Harlem Merchants Association in the Daily News and Home News. Nor did police find a knife in Larry's possession, the weapon with which Towbin said he had been threatened. Larry's criminal record did not suggest he would have used a weapon as none of his convictions involved the use of force.

When Larry was arraigned in Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, Magistrate Renaud held him without bail for the grand jury. He was one of only seven of those arrested during the disorder for which magistrates did not set bail. Nine days later, on March 29, the grand jury indicted him for robbery in the first degree. It was likely this was the indictment mentioned in stories in the New York Times, New York Evening Journal, and New York American: while the latter two stories gave no details of the case, the New York Times referred to the unnamed defendant being "charged with burglary in the looting of an East 125th Street store." No one else arrested in the disorder was indicted on March 29. Rather than go to trial, Larry agreed to a plea bargain. On April 5, he appeared in the Court of General Sessions to plead guilty to attempted grand larceny in the second degree, a felony punishable by up to five years in prison rather than up to twenty years, the punishment for robbery in the first degree. Ten days later, after an investigation by the Probation Department, Judge Nott sentenced Larry to a term of between fifteen months and thirty months in the state prison. (The 28th Precinct police blotter recorded a different sentence of six months to two years, but the Probation Department investigation and a response to the parole board in the district attorney's case file both record the longer sentence). That was the longest sentence given to anyone arrested in the disorder, a reflection of the charge, and of Larry’s criminal record. He had been convicted three times for picking pockets in New York City in the three years before the disorder, and most significantly, convicted for grand larceny in West Virginia in 1928. New York's Habitual Offender statute, commonly known as the Baumes Act, required that in cases involving individuals with a previous conviction for a felony that a plea bargain be to a felony and set minimum sentences based on the previous felony conviction.

Larry had been born in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1909. His mother died when he was three years of age, leaving his father, and later stepmother to raise him. In 1921, a year after leaving school at age eleven to work in a cotton press, Larry left home. In the only response the Probation Department received to the letters they sent inquiring about Larry's history, the Wilmington Public Welfare Commission reported an interview with his half-sister Rose, in which she said he found work in a coal mine in West Virginia. Larry himself told the Probation Department officer G. H. Royal that he first worked briefly for a transportation company, traveling to Providence, Rhode Island, where he spent two months in a fish factory, followed by time on a truck in Far Rockaway, New York, then in a steel mill in Pittsburgh and a coal mine in Carnegie, Pennsylvania. Beginning in 1924, aged fifteen, he began working irregularly for carnival companies that traveled the North in the summer and the South in the winter.

In February 1928, carnival work, or perhaps coal mining, brought Larry to Welch, West Virginia, where he was convicted of grand larceny. The court did not respond to the Probation Department's request for details of the case; Larry told them that he and another man were accused of stealing money from a drunken man in a poolroom (given Larry's record, the theft was likely accomplished by pickpocketing). Sentenced to six years in the state prison, Larry said he served four years and eight months, which would have seen him released in June 1932. By May 28, 1933, Larry was in New York City; he also said that earlier that month, while working in a carnival, he married Cora Temple, a dancer, in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. In New York City, Larry was arrested for pickpocketing — the criminal record in the district attorney's case file specifying "lush," slicing open the pocket of a drunken individual — and sentenced to thirty days in the workhouse. After his release, he remained in New York City for at least six months, presumably with his wife Cora, but without a home and relying on charity. According to his half sister, Larry returned to Wilmington in December 1933, and found work as a stevedore until July 1934; he told the Probation Department he did not visit until July 1934, and left his wife there while he looked for work.

Almost as soon as Larry arrived back in New York City, on July 29, police arrested him for pickpocketing, again lush, according to the criminal record in the District Attorney's case file. On this occasion, he was sentenced to six months in the Workhouse. Released in January 1935, it was less than a month before officers from the police pickpocket squad arrested him again, and he spent a further 30 days in the Workhouse. In the month between his release and the disorder, he told the Probation Department that he spent a week working on a Salvation Army project in Flushing, Long Island.

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