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Herman Young's hardware store looted
Young’s store was in the heart of the blocks of Lenox Avenue north of 125th Street where the reported looting was concentrated. That violence had begun shortly after midnight, although clearly not close enough to the Young’s apartment to wake them before their store windows were smashed at 1 AM. Young had lived in Harlem for twenty years, at 346 Lenox since at least 1920, when he appeared in the census schedule. At that time, his neighbors were white families. By the time the 1930 census enumerator visited the building, its occupants were all Black (the Youngs do not appear on that schedule).
Whatever happened, police arrested no one at the scene. An hour later, around 2 AM, ten blocks south of the store at Lenox Avenue and West 118th St, an officer from the 28th Precinct arrested James Williams, a twenty-eight-year-old West Indian cook who allegedly had in possession a “quantity of hardware” taken from Young’s store. It is not clear how Williams was carrying the collection of four pots of different sizes, two pans, a pitcher, two pails, a bread box and a cloth lamp. Young identified those goods as his property. With a combined value of $12.55, they represented only a small portion of the $500 of hardware reported stolen from his. Williams may have been on route home from Young’s store. For the last two years he had lived a block further south and west at 153 West 117th Street.
There is no mention of what caused the officer to arrest Williams. Young told police that he “was seen taking property from the store,” phrasing that suggests someone other than Young witnessed the theft. Young is unlikely to have been directly involved in the arrest. Half an hour earlier he had been in Harlem Hospital, having the wound to his head stitched, when Isaac Daniels appeared seeking treatment. Young identified Daniels as the man who had assaulted him, causing officers at the hospital to arrest and charge him with assault.
Williams was one of nine men known to have been arrested away from the stores they allegedly looted, one third (9/27) of the arrests for which that information is known (27/60).
Charged with burglary the morning after the disorder, Williams was brought before a Grand Jury on April 10. They transferred him to the Court of Special Sessions, according to the District Attorney's case file, where the judges acquitted him. Despite his losses, Herman Young appears to have stayed in business. Although he does not appear in the MCCH business survey taken in the second half of 1935, his store does appear in the tax photograph of the address taken in 1939-41.