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• 1 2020-02-25T19:43:45+00:00 Windows broken (72) 166 plain 2023-12-13T11:07:02+00:00 A window in the S. H. Kress 5 & 10c store being hit by an object and breaking began the disorder. Objects thrown at the windows of stores, mostly those with white owners, was the most prevalent event in the following hours, with at least 300 businesses damaged. Such attacks were unfamiliar from the racial disorder of previous decades. Business and residential property had been the targets of violence, but that property had been Black-owned and damaged or destroyed by white crowds. However, white businesses in Harlem had been the focus of protests against their failure to hire Black workers in the years immediately prior to the disorder, culminating in a campaign by a coalition of Black organizations in 1934. Those efforts involved boycotts and pickets, not breaking store windows. A competing campaign by the Communist Party did extend to smashing windows in the Empire Cafeteria. The potential for picketing to lead to violence, and specifically to a “race riot,” was one of the justifications given by the judge in the New York State Supreme Court who outlawed the tactic in 1934, effectively ending the boycott campaign for the hiring of Black workers. That sentiment was echoed after the disorder by Black columnist Theophilus Lewis in the New York Amsterdam News, a critic of the boycott movement: "There was a time, during the peak of the boycott movement, when a slight indiscretion by a policeman, a white salesgirl or a colored shopper who defied the boycott would have started an outburst quite as serious as the recent disorder. The feeling of race antipathy, perhaps not intended by the leaders of the boycott, has remained pent up in the community waiting for a spark to set it off." The turn to breaking windows as a final resort was captured by Gill Horton, a Black former cabaret owner quoted by Joseph Mitchell in the New York World-Telegram after the disorder. "I didn’t throw no rocks," he reportedly said. "I broke my last window when I was going on 10. Of course, if I was pushed a little I might let loose a few bottles and brickbats, but nobody pushed me yet.” Many others in Harlem clearly had been pushed. When James Hughes, a twenty-four-year-old Black shoe repairer returning home, found himself in a crowd at 8th Avenue and West 125th Street, he heard people saying, "Let's break windows," he later testified in court.
  
  Historians Cheryl Greenberg and Larry Greene have argued that decision had the opposite effect to what the judge intended, shutting off an outlet for discontent and protest, and leaving Harlem’s residents with fewer alternatives to violence. The events in front of Kress’ store before someone threw the object that broke one of its windows replicated and recapitulated those tensions. Three men had been protesting the store employees’ treatment of Lino Rivera by walking in front of the store with banners — picketing. Police officers arrested the group, shutting down those means of protest. On this occasion, unlike earlier protests, members of the crowd attacked the store.
  
  The objects thrown at store windows were most often described as rocks or stones, and less often as bricks — the objects recovered from the windows of Herbert’s Blue Diamond jewelry store displayed by a clerk for a Daily News photographer the day after the disorder. All those objects could be found around Harlem. An employee of the Blackbird Inn told a reporter for the New York Post that much of that material came from the island that ran down the middle of 7th Avenue, where stones and debris left after the paving of the street had been dumped. Other larger objects found on the street were sometimes used: ashcans and trashcans. (The tailor’s dummy allegedly thrown through Sam Lefkowitz's store window likely came from another damaged store.) In a handful of cases, the missiles were objects more likely brought from home — bottles, clubs, and hammers — or items individuals happened to have with them, such as umbrellas (there was rain on the night of the disorder). At least two windows in looted stores were allegedly kicked in.
  
  While newspaper reports routinely described store windows as “smashed,” the extent of the damage they suffered varied. A single object generally broke and created a hole in a window rather than shattering it entirely, as is evident in a photograph published in the Daily News that shows a white police officer and a white store manager speaking through a hole in an unidentified shoe store. To remove most or all of the glass from a display window took more than one object, which usually meant more than one person, depending obviously on the size of the window. Stores on West 125th Street, particularly the department stores and those that wrapped around the corners of the intersections with 8th, 7th, and Lenox Avenues had far larger windows than the smaller businesses on the avenues themselves. More extensive damage to windows appears to have been associated with looting, and may have occurred when groups or individuals returned to stores with broken windows to take merchandise. A section of Lenox Avenue in a photograph published by the Daily News shows that variety of damage: closest to the camera is a rental agency with a hole in its window, which still contained the ashcan that created it, that does not appear to be looted; to its left are two grocery stores and a cigar store whose windows are almost entirely gone, and whose contents have been taken. The sources do not offer a clear picture of the extent of the damage to the stores identified as having broken windows but not as looted. The reporter for La Prensa who listed thirty-five businesses with broken windows on Lenox Avenue, West 125th Street, and 8th Avenue, ended their list by alluding to an unspecified number of other stores not on the list that suffered relatively little damage compared with those listed. There are no details for just under half of those identified (33 of 69) in the sources; of the remainder, fragmentary information suggests fourteen businesses could have been suffered limited damage.
  
  Efforts to damage stores may also have extended to destroying merchandise by throwing it into the street, on a night when it rained. The Afro-American most directly reported that practice, in which “the goods was dragged in the wet sidewalk and destroyed.” The New York Times and Atlanta World reported goods taken out of windows and “strewn” and “scattered” on the sidewalk without mention of the intention. So too did Betty Willcox, who told a New York Evening Journal that on West 125th Street, "I saw that the windows of all the stores around there had been shattered and the goods thrown all over the place." Merchandise on the street, however, could also have been a byproduct of looting rather than attacks on businesses, thrown or carried out of stores so they could be taken — as seemed to be the case in a photograph of a damaged grocery store published in the New York Evening Journal. Some of those arrested during the disorder denied "breaking the store windows" and instead insisted "that they had picked the articles up from the street after others had thrown them out of the stores," according to a story in the New York Sun (which dismissed those claims as an effort to avoid responsibility).
  
  When objects broke windows, glass went flying, hitting individuals on at least five occasions. All those reported injuries came after 1:00 AM, so during the period when most of the reported looting took place, and in the areas where that looting was concentrated, on Lenox Avenue from 127th Street to 130th Street and on 7th Avenue and 116th Street. Evidence about the circumstances of those injuries is fragmentary, brief details in lists and hospital records rather than discussions in stories. One record explicitly linked the injuries to windows being broken in stores. In the 32nd Police Precinct book of aided cases, Herbert Holderman was listed as “cut by flying glass when some unknown persons broke windows of stores.” "Flying glass” and “falling glass” were the reported causes of the four other injuries. That glass could have come from smashed windows in cars and buses driving on Harlem's streets, which also had objects thrown at them, although such attacks were reported only on 7th Avenue. Those injuries could also have been the result of throwing objects at windows or climbing or reaching into broken windows to take merchandise. However, crowds of bystanders were on Harlem's streets throughout the disorder, on sidewalks close enough to stores to be hit by glass when someone broke store windows. One storeowner, Herman Young, was also injured by glass from a window broken by a stone.
  
  The seventy-two businesses identified in the sources as having broken windows, and the additional sixty stores looted as well as damaged, amount to around 30% of the total number estimated to have had windows broken. Newspaper stories offered a range of initial assessments of the damage. By noon on March 20, the New York Plate Glass Service Bureau, “whose member companies do 98 per cent of the glass insurance business in the city,” told a reporter for the New York Post that 110 clients had reported broken glass, a fraction of the expected total damage. Other newspapers published totals for the number of windows broken, not stores effected: “at least 130 costly plate gas windows,” according to the New York American; 200 plate-glass store windows according to the New York Times, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Chicago Defender, and Norfolk Journal and Guide; and “more than 250 windows” according to the New York Herald Tribune, 300 windows in the Afro-American, and “more than 1,000 panes of glass” in the New York Post. Inspector Di Martini offered an "approximate number of windows broken" that totaled 624 in his "Report on Disorder" to the police commissioner on March 20, with the disclaimer that the "extent of property damage cannot be estimated at this time." A later survey of forty-seven insurance companies by the National Bureau of Casualty and Surety Underwriters, reported by the New York Times and Pittsburgh Courier, combined the two counts, reporting claims for 697 plate glass windows in 300 businesses, amounting to two-thirds of the broken windows. With the uninsured glass included, the total damage would have been just over 1,000 windows in around 450 businesses.
  
  
  
  “Breakages were most numerous on 125th street, near Seventh avenue,” according to that survey, but also occurred in an area that extended “from 114th to 143rd streets, between Fifth and Eighth Avenues. Several thousand businesses were located in that area, the MCCH business survey found, so attacks away from 125th Street were clearly less extensive. The "approximate number of windows broken" Inspector Di Martini reported to the police commissioner on March 20 was broken down by precincts, with almost all (86%, 538 of 624) located in the 28th Precinct, south of 130th Street. Newspapers stories consistently identified West 125th Street as the most damaged area, with the New York Age specifying the two blocks from 8th to Lenox Avenues, and the New York Herald Tribune identifying the block between 8th and 7th Avenues, on which Kress’ store was located. Those general descriptions are in line with the events which are reported in the sources, which are concentrated on that block, with fewer on the block between 7th and Lenox Avenues. Those blocks were where the disorder originated, and the largest crowds gathered; where Harlem’s largest stores were located; and where all the businesses were white-owned. Beyond 125th Street, newspaper stories presented different pictures of the extent of the area in which windows were broken. As neither the police department nor the MCCH appear to have collected details of the damage, as would happen after the racial disorder in Harlem in 1943, that variation might reflect the limits of what individual reporters investigated or, in the case of very wide areas, a lack of investigation. Only the Daily News identified an area as extensive as the insurance survey, from 110th to 145th Streets. The New York Evening Journal and New York Herald Tribune only encompassed as far south as 120th Street, and as far north as 138th Street. Two newspapers focused only on 7th Avenue, the Pittsburgh Courier reporting smashed windows from 116th to 140th Streets, and the Daily Mirror only from 120th to 125th Streets. The Black newspaper’s area fits the reported events, and suggests an investigation throughout Harlem; the white newspaper included only a portion of that area, the blocks closest to 125th Street. Eighth Avenue attracted special attention in the New York Herald Tribune, which reported “windows broken in virtually every other store and glass covering the sidewalk” from 124th Street to 130th Street, and less damage in the blocks further north. Lenox Avenue, where the reported events are concentrated, drew particular attention only from the Afro-American, which offered the only specific count, that “In the three blocks from 125th to 128th Street, west side Lenox Avenue, there were twenty-two windows broken.” The Times Union offered the vaguest area, "for blocks around the five and ten cent store two-thirds of shop windows had been smashed." The tendency to draw the boundaries at 120th Street, together with inattention to West 116th Street by both the Black and white press, effectively left Spanish-speaking areas of Harlem out of discussions of the disorder.
  
  The businesses reported with windows broken differed from those reported as targets of looting. (Of the seventy-two stores with broken windows, three are unknown, three were vacant, and five were later looted, leaving sixty-one that are identified.) Clothing stores of various types and businesses involving miscellaneous goods (which included department stores, which sold a variety of goods, including clothing but generally not food) were the largest groups; the food stores that made up the largest group of those looted were the smallest portion of those with broken windows. Those different patterns suggest that those who returned to damaged stores to take merchandise, or turned to looting, focused on what they needed, not on the wider range of stores that had been targets earlier in the disorder.
  
  When objects were thrown at windows beyond Kress' store, their targets were initially other businesses on West 125th Street, where all the stores had white owners. As groups moved away from 125th Street, they continued to focus their attacks on white-owned businesses. Five Black-owned businesses were among those identified as having windows broken, a number far below their presence in the neighborhood. Posting signs that identified a business as Black-owned appears to have stopped attacks and prevented windows from being broken. No Black-owned businesses are among those later looted. In addition to Black businesses, there were two white-owned businesses specifically identified as not being damaged in the disorder. Koch's department store was well-known for having hired Black staff. A group of Black boys reportedly protected the other store.
  
  Arrests for allegedly breaking windows were reported for only 24% (17 of 72) of the businesses that suffered damage, a smaller proportion than for looted stores (as no one was arrested for the first broken window in Kress' store, the store appears among those cases in which no arrests were made even though an arrest was made for allegedly breaking a window after another attack over four hours later). The twenty-six individuals arrested for breaking windows were identified either because they were charged with malicious mischief, an offense involving damage to property, or by details of what police alleged they had done recorded in legal records or reported in the press. For five individuals arrested for breaking windows there is no information about their alleged targets; some of those four men and one woman may have been charged with breaking windows in stores for which there was no reported arrests. Three of those arrested were women, and one a white man, similar numbers as among those arrested for looting, but twice the proportion of those arrested. Police do not appear to have made arrests during the first hours of the disorder, when windows were broken on West 125th Street as they struggled to keep crowds from Kress' store and off the streets. The arrests that were made in that area came around 10:30 PM. Leroy Brown's arrest on 8th Avenue at 9:45 PM was during that early phase of violence. The handful of other arrests where the time is known occurred on 7th Avenue and Lenox Avenue when reported looting intensified, thirty minutes either side of midnight.
  
  Courts treated breaking windows less severely than other activities during the disorder, in large part because the value of damaged windows was only sufficient to make a charge of malicious mischief, a misdemeanor. Most store windows cost less than $100 to repair, well below the $250 required for the crime to be a felony. Only the five men also charged with inciting others to violence were sent to the grand jury, just over a third of the proportion of those arrested for looting, and the grand jury sent all those men to the Court of Special Sessions to be prosecuted for misdemeanors. Similarly, magistrates transferred nine men and one woman directly to the Court of Special Sessions and adjudicated eleven cases, discharging Viola Woods and convicting nine men and one woman of disorderly conduct.
• 1 2020-02-25T19:43:29+00:00 Looting (67) 140 plain 2023-12-13T04:11:14+00:00 The disorder resulted in damage to at least 300 Harlem businesses, perhaps as many as 450, many of which also had goods stolen. Such attacks on white businesses distinguished the events in 1935 from collective racial violence earlier in the twentieth century although the scale was far smaller than the disorders that would follow. When racial violence broke out in Harlem in 1943, four times as many businesses were targets of violence. The press labeled the theft as looting, a term that distinguished it on the basis of the context of violence and crisis in which it took place. Such theft often involved crowds publicly stealing goods, but those circumstances were not entirely out of the ordinary. Just over one in five (15 of 67) burglaries at other times in 1935 involved smashing street-front doors and windows to steal goods before police responded, although not crowds of participants.
  
  Although press reports and the Mayor's Commission (MCCH) gave prominence to attacks on property in characterizing the disorder as “not a race riot,” they offered only general descriptions of this violence, including fewer detailed incidents than was the case with assaults and none of the quantitative information that would be collected in subsequent racial disorders. However, damaged businesses did figure prominently in press photographs, which highlighted that such damage represented a spectacle — one which also drew crowds to Harlem the day after the disorder to view the damage for themselves. Only sixty-seven looted businesses were identified in the surviving sources, twenty-nine linked to arrests, with nine stores linked to more than one arrest. An additional seventy-two businesses were identified as having had their windows damaged, which would have exposed them to theft. There were almost certainly more looted businesses than those identified in the sources. In the cases of sixteen of those arrested for looting, there was no information on their alleged targets. While some of those stores may be among those identified in other sources, given the limited number of cases where multiple arrests were made for thefts from the same store, most are likely missing from this picture of the looting. (Two looted businesses that appeared in photographs whose location could not be determined were not included in these counts.)
  
  The stores identified in the sources as having stock stolen represented a cross-section of the small businesses in Harlem focused on needs more than luxuries, and on personal items rather than larger items like furniture. Businesses that provided food make up the largest group (24 of 57). Clothing was also a target (19 of 57), while the remaining businesses sold a variety of goods (14 of 57). Missing from this partial list of businesses attacked during the disorder were large stores and several enterprises prominent in the neighborhood: beauty shops and barbers. There were sixteen individuals charged with looting unidentified businesses. Two looted businesses that appeared in photographs whose location cannot be determined were not included in these counts. At other times in 1935, the full range of stores were targets of burglaries.
  
  However, newspaper reports and legal records indicated that in the initial hours of the disorder, store windows were smashed without efforts to steal their contents. After police dispersed the crowd drawn to Kress’ store and set up a cordon on 125th Street protecting it, another clash at the rear of the store on 124th Street around 7:45PM saw windows broken. Around the same time, crowds smashed windows on 125th Street between 7th and 8th Avenue. Although the police present on this block lacked the numbers to protect the windows, in several cases they responded to damage by taking up positions in front of stores. That strategy appeared to have prevented much looting. While many of the large stores were identified as having windows smashed at this time, only the New York Evening Journal reported that thefts also took place. Around 8:45 PM, when police succeeded in pushing the crowds from 125th St on to 7th and 8th Avenues, the smaller businesses on those streets became targets. Windows were broken and isolated looting reported in the blocks of 7th Avenue immediately north of 125th Street. The New York Times and Afro-American reported goods were thrown into the street rather than taken, actions more akin to efforts to damage property, to ransack, than a turn to theft. However, it was not clear how often that happened. Many of these businesses were still open and staffed, but that did little to curtail theft. In some businesses, staff removed goods from windows and shelves but most hid or fled crowds and bombardment with rocks and stones. More effective were the Black storeowners and staff who put signs in their store windows that identified the business as Black-owned. Those signs spared them from looting if not always from having windows broken. Around 10:00 PM, as crowds began to move away from the block of 125th Street containing Kress’ store where police were concentrated, assaults and attacks on stores intensified and spread through Harlem. Further isolated looting occurred on 7th Avenue north of 125th Street, and after 10.30PM, in the area of 116th Street to the south.
  
  
  
  Around midnight, reporters from the New York Herald Tribune, Daily Mirror, and Afro-American noted a change in the tenor of the disorder reflected in arrests: violence became overshadowed by looting, particularly on Lenox Avenue in the blocks north of 125th Street, and lasted until around 2:00 AM. This more general turn to looting was helped by both earlier damage to windows that offered access to displays and store interiors and the lesser police presence in this area. By that late hour, most undamaged businesses had closed. Iron gates and grills protected the doors and windows of some of those stores. However, those additional obstacles did not prevent looting, an indication of growing violence and limited police presence. At least three businesses in this area were also set on fire after having been looted. Even the return of some business owners, once they learned of the disorder, did little to prevent looting. Several owners reported futile efforts to secure police assistance, which later became the basis of suits for damages they filed against the city. The progression from violence and damage to looting also featured in the later racial disorders in Harlem and Detroit in 1943 and in Detroit in 1967. As Sidney Fine argued was the case in Detroit in 1967, that pattern located looting as a consequence of the violence, not as the defining characteristic of the disorder and as having served to prolong disorder. While the Hearst press and other white publications, and some establishment Black leaders, attributed the looting to "hoodlums," others pointed to the economic situation of Harlem's residents. The Communist Daily Worker offered the starkest statement of that explanation: "It was dire need that turned the window-smashing retaliation against the police and the store-keepers into a 'looting' campaign." It was certainly true that the blocks to the east of Lenox Avenue, where the looting was most extensive, were home to many of Harlem's most desperate and economically deprived residents.
  
  The progression from damage to looting also reflected the involvement of additional groups of men who had not been prominent in the initial violence. In later racial disorders, women would be a much larger presence among those arrested for looting and in images of theft. However, in 1935, while three women are among the sixty individuals arrested for looting, almost as many women were arrested for other offenses: two for breaking windows and another for inciting a crowd. Several newspapers reported that white men also joined the looting, but only two are identified in legal records. One of those men was arrested in circumstances that do not put him in the midst of the disorder: Jean Jacquelin, a thirty-three-year-old Canadian driver with a previous arrest for assault with a knife, arrested at 5:40 AM, after the crowds had left the streets, in possession of clothing stolen from a tailor down the block from his home. Louis Tonick, the second white man arrested, is not linked to a specific business, and lived outside Harlem (one additional white man, Leo Smith, was arrested for breaking windows).
  
  The feature of the looting that drew particular comment in the reports of newspapers and later the MCCH was the extent to which it targeted only white-owned businesses and spared Black-owned businesses. Newspaper stories and the final report of the MCCH allowed that a small number of Black-owned businesses did suffer damage, either before identifying themselves with signs, or after crowds became less discriminating. However, none of the instances of looting identified in the sources involved Black businesses. At the same time, Harlem’s racial landscape was more complex than these reports recognized. Among the “white-owned” businesses targeted were a number of Puerto Rican businesses around 116th Street and Chinese laundries scattered throughout the neighborhood.
  
  Police responded to looting with a greater degree of violence and more arrests than they did to crowds and attacks on stores. In their practices, theft justified firing at suspects, rather than in the air, as police claimed they did in confronting crowds and assaults. Police pursuing suspected looters shot and killed Lloyd Hobbs and James Thompson. Sixty of those arrested were alleged to have been looting, identified in the sources either because they were charged with burglary, an offense which involved breaking into a store and entering it to take merchandise or by details of what police officers alleged an individual had done that fit looting but that resulted in other charges. Those arrests far outnumbered those arrested for any other activity during the disorder. Officers generally claimed to have seen an individual stealing goods from a business. In their defense, at least some of those police arrested claimed to have simply been standing with crowds on the street when police approached. In one-third (9 of 27) of the cases where the circumstances are known, the arrest occurred away from the looted store when police apparently stopped and questioned individuals they encountered carrying goods.
  
  Courts also treated charges of looting more severely than other alleged offenses in the disorder. Magistrates held over half (28 of 50) of those who appeared before them for the grand jury compared to only one-third of those charged with assault. The grand jury did redirect a significant number to the Court of Special Sessions, casting them as having taken goods of insufficient value to warrant prosecution for a felony. District attorneys negotiated guilty pleas for lesser offenses with most of those individuals, so that only two prosecutions for looting went to trial. In doing so, they followed the same approach to such cases as was taken at other times in 1935.
  
  As those criminal prosecutions made their way through the legal system, Harlem's white business owners turned to the civil courts seeking compensation from the city for their losses. Those claims were based a nineteenth-century municipal law that held a city or county liable if property was destroyed or injured by a mob or riot. One hundred and six owners brought actions, twenty-six of whom were identified in newspaper stories. The first of those suits heard in the Municipal Court was brought by William Feinstein, the owner of a liquor store on Lenox Avenue. The jury awarded him damages, a verdict which two months later the judge decided to uphold. In the interim, the city also lost a second case in the Municipal Court, for damages to Anna Rosenberg's notion store, which had been set on fire, and seven actions in the Supreme Court, which heard cases for larger damages.

  Events

• 1 2020-02-24T22:38:05+00:00 Two men speak to a crowd & Patrolman Irwin Young assaulted 92 plain 2023-12-15T04:23:43+00:00 Harry Gordon, a twenty-year-old white man in his senior year at City College, was walking along West 125th Street between 7th and 8th Avenues about 6:00 PM, he told a public hearing of the MCCH, when he noticed groups of “excited” people “milling around the street.” While Gordon claimed to have been simply passing by, it seems likely he was one of the Communist Party members who came to Kress’ store in response to rumors a boy had been attacked. He did identify himself at the hearing as a member of the New York Students League, a Communist-led organization. Gordon gave his address as 699 Prospect Avenue in the Bronx.
  
  Gordon testified that he asked several people on the street what was happening, but he “couldn’t get anything at all from them.” He then saw a Black man, James Parton, set up a ladder in front of Kress' store and briefly speak to the crowd before Daniel Miller stepped up to speak. A window then smashed and police officers immediately seized Miller. Other officers chased Gordon and other people who had been listening to Miller across West 125th Street to the opposite sidewalk and then pushed them away from the store, east toward 7th Avenue. About 300 feet from Kress’ store, Gordon estimated, Parton climbed a lamppost and again spoke to those on the street, saying “that a boy had been killed and that a crowd should gather in protest,” according to Gordon’s testimony. Then he climbed the lamppost, intending, he told a public hearing, “to get a committee from the crowd” “to go to the police to find out if a child was killed.” He was only able to say “Friends” before Patrolman Irwin Young pulled him down from the lamppost. Gordon’s alleged assault on Young came when he “grabbed Patrolman Irwin Young’s nightstick and used it to hit the officer,” according to a story in the New York Times. That story was the only source that mentioned the nature of the assault in reporting Gordon’s second appearance in the Magistrates Court. After arresting Gordon, Young and other officers dragged him to a police radio car and drove him to the police station on West 123rd Street.
  
  Lists of the injured variously described the injuries Young suffered as “cuts on hands,” in the Daily News and New York Evening Journal, “lacerations of right hand” in the New York Herald Tribune, and "bruised on the hand" in the New York American. No version represented a sufficient injury to constitute a felony assault, which was the charge police initially made against Gordon. The New York Herald Tribune reported Young received medical treatment at the scene, but when Gordon’s lawyer cross-examined him in the Harlem Magistrates Court, Young testified that he did not go to a doctor or the hospital, Gordon told the public hearing. Young did not appear in the hospital records, as the other police officers injured around this time did, confirmation of those statements. Moreover, Young was back on the streets by 10:10 PM, when he arrested Leroy Gillard at 200 West 128th Street, allegedly for looting. He was the first police officer allegedly assaulted in the disorder; five others would be assaulted around 125th Street before 10:30 PM, after which time the crowds had moved to other parts of the neighborhood.
  
  
  
  Gordon denied he assaulted Young. He was grabbed from behind, he testified in a public hearing of the MCCH, and then “a rain of blows descended on me such that I have never experienced before" against which he could do nothing. Louise Thompson, part of the crowd on 125th Street, offered a more detailed account, although as a member of the Communist Party, she was not an entirely disinterested observer. She described to a public hearing of the MCCH how “a cop kicked him, another knocked him over the head with his billy and another slapped him in the face and punched him in the ribs.” Thompson more clearly stated that Gordon did not assault Young when interviewed earlier by a reporter for the Daily Worker for a story published on the same day she testified in the public hearing: "I was standing a few feet from Harry Gordon when he was arrested. He did not strike any policeman. He did nothing.” In the same story in the Daily Worker, Gordon denied committing assault, implying that Young made the charge to justify his violence: “I did not strike any policeman. He struck me over the head with his club before I even saw him. He said, 'So you'll hit a cop, will you?' as he struck me.”
  
  As was the case with events inside Kress’ store, testimony in the public hearings of the MCCH provided the most detailed evidence of the events outside the store in the early evening of March 19. Louise Thompson testified on March 30 and Harry Gordon on May 4. (Thompson only mentioned the first speaker, Miller, in her article in New Masses.) The MCCH subcommittee report and final report both describe a second person trying to speak in front of Kress who was arrested, without naming that person, but make no mention of his alleged assault on a police officer. More striking, Inspector Di Martini’s report names Gordon without mentioning an alleged assault on one of his officers. That report has no reference to Daniel Miller, presenting Gordon as the only person to speak in front of the store: “At about 7PM, one Harry Gordon, #699 Prospect Avenue arrived in front of Kress’ Store with a number of others carrying placards and made a speech to a group which was attracted and incited a number of colored persons to break windows of the store. He was immediately arrested by Ptl. Young #3203, 32nd Precinct.”
  
  No newspaper stories explicitly reported the narrative in the MCCH hearings and reports, as they truncated events outside the store and presented Gordon, Daniel Miller, and the three Young Liberators who picketed the store as a single group arriving and acting together. Only some described Gordon as speaking, and only three of the initial stories about the disorder describe him as assaulting Young, in different circumstances that were both unlike what was described in the MCCH public hearings. Even later stories about Gordon’s first appearance in the Harlem Magistrates Court do not all mention the assault charge, and several describe him as picketing Kress’ store, not trying to speak to the crowd. When Gordon testified in a public hearing of the MCCH, newspaper stories described him speaking, and being arrested by Young, but omitted the context he provided for those events as coming after Miller had tried to speak and been arrested.
  
  Only some newspapers described Gordon as speaking in front of the store. The New York Age accurately captured the event, if not its context: “Harry Gordon, white Communist, was arrested when Patrolman Young of the 123rd Street police station found him addressing a group. He was taken to the station house charged with inciting a riot.” The New York Post more briefly described Gordon, Miller, and the two other white men as having been arrested for “haranguing crowds, urging them to fight.” The Daily Mirror identified Gordon as a speaker, describing him as “a 'Red' orator,” but with no details of circumstances of his speaking or arrest. The New York World-Telegram included Gordon in a group obliquely described as being arrested for being “Communist agitators.”
  
  Only three of the initial stories about the disorder described Gordon assaulting Young, in different circumstances that were unlike what was described in the MCCH public hearings. Gordon came to Miller’s aid when he was arrested, joined by the three Young Liberators, and battled Patrolman Shannon and two other officers before also being arrested, according to the New York American and New York Evening Journal. That story also mistakenly had Gordon picketing the store. The New York Times relocated the encounter between Gordon and Young to the rear of Kress’ store on West 124th Street. In the struggle between police and a crowd that took place there, the story reported, Young “was cut on the right hand by a rock” thrown by Gordon. That clash occurred around thirty minutes after Gordon was arrested, and involved officers other than Young being injured.
  
  Later stories about Gordon’s first appearance in the Harlem Magistrates Court did not all mention the assault charge, and several described him as picketing Kress’ store, not trying to speak to the crowd. Gordon was described as charged with assault in the New York Sun, in a story about a line-up of those arrested, and in the New York American and New York Amsterdam News, which had him picketing the store. Four other papers did not mention the assault charge: the Daily Mirror described Gordon and the others grouped with him as “curb-stone orators who had deliberately incited the 125th St. mobs;” in the Home News, the charge was inciting a riot, for “making a speech in front of Kress’ store;” in the Daily News it was an unspecified “separate charge” from that made against the other men, which was inciting riot; and in the New York Evening Journal Gordon and three others were charged with “circulating false placards to the effect that a Negro boy had been beaten to death.” Gordon’s subsequent appearances in the Harlem Magistrates courts were generally not reported. Only the New York World-Telegram, Home News, and New York American mentioned his appearance on March 25, with no details of his alleged offense. The New York Times story of Gordon’s appearance on May 27 provided the only details of the assault, that he “grabbed Patrolman Irwin Young’s nightstick and used it to hit the officer.” The New York Herald Tribune story on the same hearing not only made no mention of those details, but omitted the assault entirely and instead made Gordon only indirectly responsible for Young’s injuries: his speech telling the crowd “that a Negro boy had been killed in the store… so excited the neighborhood that Patrolman Irving Young, of the West 123d Street station, and several others were hurt in the ensuing riot.”
  
  Stories about Gordon’s testimony in the MCCH public hearing on May 4 published in the New York Times, New York Age, and Associated Negro Press described him speaking, and being arrested by Young, but omitted the context he provided for those events as coming after Miller had tried to speak and been arrested. The New York American and Afro-American had an even narrower focus, mentioning only that Gordon alleged he had been beaten by police, with no description of the circumstances of his arrest. The only story about Gordon’s allegation published before the hearing was in the Daily Worker on March 30, reflecting his association with the Communist Party. Reporters for the New York Evening Journal had been unable to locate him. When the Daily Worker’s journalist spoke to Gordon, “his left eye [was] still black from the police beating more than a week ago.” However, in a Daily News photograph published on March 20 captioned as showing Gordon and the other men grouped with him by police, none of the men have visible injuries. As there are only three men, the image may be of the Miller and the Young Liberators without Gordon, perhaps around the time he was arraigned separately.
  
  Harry Gordon did not appear in the MCCH's transcription of the 28th Precinct police blotter; Claudio Viabolo, the Black Young Liberator, is the only one of the five speakers and picketers in that record. Gordon appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, shortly after the other white men arrested at the start of the disorder. Magistrate Renaud remanded him to reappear on March 25, and then again on March 27. While Miller and the three Young Liberators that police grouped with Gordon as the instigators of the riot were sent by the grand jury to the Court of Special Sessions, the ADA reduced the charge against Gordon to misdemeanor assault in the Magistrates Court, with his ILD lawyers claiming credit in the public hearing of the MCCH, as they had elicited testimony from Young that he had not needed medical treatment for his injury. Magistrate Renaud then transferred Gordon to the Court of Special Sessions. For some reason, the trial did not take place until November, when the judges convicted him.
  
  In the narratives of historians Mark Naison, Cheryl Greenberg, Marilynn Johnson, Lorrin Thomas, and Nicole Watson, Gordon and Miller are grouped together as “speakers” pulled down by police. Historian Thomas Kessner named Miller in his narrative as the only speaker in front of the store. None of those historians mention Gordon's alleged assault of Young. They all follow the narrative provided by police that presents the speakers as part of a single group protesting in front of Kress’ store, stepping up to speak to the crowd after picketing of the store had begun. That framing implicitly introduces the idea that the disorder was orchestrated by those men, while offering no details of how the crowds of women and men around them acted to weigh against that evidence. Weight is added to that implication by the failure to fully identify the men involved in the protests. While Greenberg and Thomas do not identify the men, Naison, Kessner, Johnson, and Watson describe them as members of the Young Liberators. None of those historians mention that four of the five, and both the speakers arrested, were white men. Naison did describe the Young Liberators as an interracial group; so too did Watson, however she did not identify the men in front of the store as members of the Young Liberators. Neglecting their race makes those men appear more representative of the crowd than they were, particularly in Greenberg and Watson’s narratives, which do not identify them as Young Liberators. Naison, Kessner, Greenberg, Thomas, Johnson, and Watson all follow the chronology that has the picketing begin before the speakers were arrested. Grouping the men places an organized Communist protest at the center of the outbreak of disorder, and makes the window being broken and the men’s arrest a response to the feeling they built in the crowd. Recognizing that the protests occurred in a less coordinated way highlights that police responded immediately to any sign of protest, not just to a window being broken. They may also have acted so quickly because they recognized the men as Communists; the men’s language and appeals would have given them away. Communist protest in Harlem, and across the city, drew violent responses from police in the months prior to the disorder. Recognition of the fragmented nature of the protests and the identity of those involved directs attention away from those events to the crowds of Black men and women around them. Crowd members gathered in groups, talked amongst themselves, sought answers from police about what had happened to the boy, and responded to police efforts to clear the street. Rather than organized or orchestrated by the Young Liberators, those behaviors appear more spontaneous, in line with the interpretation offered in the MCCH’s final report.
• 1 2022-06-16T19:24:46+00:00 Police establish perimeter around Kress' store 86 plain 2023-12-14T02:06:51+00:00 After Inspector Di Martini returned to 125th Street around 7:00 PM, he called for police reinforcements. A New York Evening Journal story celebrated the response as “the most remarkable 'military' feat in the history of the department.” That portrayal was certainly how the police department would have sought to present the deployment. However, the arrival of additional officers appears to have taken longer than the story allowed, and to have been focused on establishing a perimeter around Kress’ store. The piecemeal arrival of reinforcements made that a protracted process. As police struggled to keep crowds away from Kress' store, those clashes served to disperse crowds along the avenues rather than stopping the violence. Unable to prevent windows being broken in businesses on 125th Street, police had to guard damaged stores, limiting the officers who could be deployed on the avenues. Guards appear to have prevented looting; they did not stop additional windows being broken. After crowds broke through on to 125th Street around 10:30 PM, there are only two further incidents in that area during the remaining disorder, an alleged assault on a woman and a shooting, both at the intersection of 125th Street and 7th Avenue. Although other incidents whose timing is unknown may have occurred during that time, the evidence suggests that police perimeter held through that period.
  
  The New York Evening Journal story lauding the police response reported “a small army of 700 police was beating back the rioters” on 125th Street between 8th and 7th Avenues. That number likely reflected the total deployment rather than the force that set up the perimeter around Kress’ store. It was in line with the number Di Martini reported to the police commissioner were in Harlem after midnight and fell between the totals reported by newspapers, with the 1,000 officers mentioned by the Daily Mirror at one extreme, and the 500 officers reported by the Home News and New York Herald Tribune representing the other end of the range. While the officers coming from beyond the local precincts went initially to 125th Street, Lt. Battle later told Langston Hughes that the reserve officers from Harlem's precincts went to their stations, on West 123rd Street and West 135th Street. Some of those officers may have been sent directly to other areas of Harlem, particularly those who arrived later in the evening.
  
  The perimeter established by police extended from 8th to Lenox Avenues, and from 124th to 126th Streets, according to stories in the New York Times, Daily Mirror and Pittsburgh Courier, the only sources that described police deployments. While Inspector Di Martini had summoned the reinforcements, the newspapers credited that deployment to Deputy Chief Inspector McAuliffe, who commanded uniformed police in the borough of Manhattan, and would have taken over from Di Martini when he arrived around 9:00 PM. The department’s emergency trucks attracted the most attention in newspaper stories, presented as the anchors of the police cordon. Six emergency trucks were stationed at the intersection of West 125th Street and 7th Avenue in the strategy reported by the New York Times, Daily Mirror, and Pittsburgh Courier. Emergency trucks were more dispersed according to the New York Herald Tribune; two at West 125th and 7th Avenue, one at West 125th and Lenox Avenue, and one at West 127th and 7th Avenue.
  
  The Emergency Services Division had succeeded the police department’s Riot Battalion in 1925. Each truck had a crew of eight officers and, in addition to rescue equipment, carried a Thompson machine gun, three Winchester rifles, and a Remington shotgun, as well as a tear gas gun, for use against "disorderly crowds." The twenty-two trucks in the department in 1935 were dispersed throughout the city. While the two located closest to 125th Street arrived relatively quickly, additional trucks would have taken significantly longer. Squad #6 was based on East 122nd Street, and had been involved in clearing shoppers from Kress’ store earlier. Squad #5, based on Amsterdam Avenue, arrived around 7:15 PM, according to Patrolman Eppler. The New York Evening Journal identified trucks as coming from Kingsbridge in the Bronx and from Coney Island at the southern end of Brooklyn, the latter apparently arriving later: “It slithered perilously over wet streets but arrived in time for its crew to get into action.” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle identified another squad from Brooklyn, Squad #16 from Herbert Street, as having crashed returning from Harlem, at 1:00 AM (a time when there was still significant disorder). Thompson did not mention the trucks. Neither did trucks appear in any of the published photographs of the disorder. Some of their crew did, identifiable because the rifles they carried — described as “riot guns” in newspapers stories and photograph captions — caused them to stand out from other police. They did not, however, have a machine gun that needed to be “set up,” as the Afro-American reported: each truck instead carried a single hand-held "Tommy gun." Nor were the trucks equipped with enough of those weapons for all the crew to have one. And there are no reports that they used tear gas. Those weapons prompted several newspapers to use martial language in stories about the squads’ activities. The New York Evening Journal story on the police reinforcements described Harlem as a “seething battleground,” and the police as “beating back the rioters in a savage and organized attack.” An emergency truck from the Bronx “leaped off the machine and tore into a crowd of window smashers” (perhaps at Herbert’s jewelry store at 125th Street and 7th Avenue, where another New York Evening Journal story described a similar scene). The Daily Mirror described emergency trucks as "being sent to the battle zone."
  
  The other evidence of the presence of emergency trucks placed them in less warlike roles. Newspaper photographs show their crew among the officers who guarded damaged stores. A patrolman with a riot gun stands in front of Herbert’s jewelry store on northeast corner of 125th and 7th Avenue in a photograph published in the Burlington Free Press. Stories in the New York Evening Journal and New York Herald Tribune described police with riot guns guarding the store (the Daily News, New York American, and Home News described the officers simply as patrolmen). Another patrolman with a riot gun was photographed on the corner across 7th Avenue from the jewelry store. The image published in the New York Evening Journal is narrowly focused on the officer, whereas another version of that image published in the Daily Mirror shows a Black man walking past him, and the image published in the Daily News shows several Black men and women walking by on the sidewalk, evidence of the continued presence of people around 125th Street. Two additional patrolmen, one visibly carrying a rifle, stand in front of Sherloff’s jewelry store, just a few buildings north of the intersection, in an AP photograph published in the Los Angeles Times. Taken together, the images suggest that the crew of at least one Emergency Truck guarded stores at the intersection. Captain Rothengast, Patrolman Moran, and Patrolman Eppler told the MCCH that they also guarded other stores on 125th Street, including Kress’ store. A photograph published in the Daily News shows a patrolman talking through a broken window with a man inside a store on 125th Street. Again, Black men and women are visible in the background on the sidewalk in the background, their presence indicating that police had not closed the streets.
  
  The police perimeter appears to have focused on keeping crowds off 125th Street, not individuals and small groups. In addition to those visible in photographs, Captain Rothengast described seeing "groups of people in 125th Street – no more than 250" when he arrived at Kress’ store around 8:30 PM. A story in the Home News also reported that “In an effort to keep traffic moving, police permitted pedestrians to walk through 125th St. The sidewalks on both sides of the street were crowded.” Patrolmen Moran and Eppler testified that at least some of those people approached police guarding Kress' store asking about the boy beaten in the store, encounters also described by a reporter for the Afro-American. Allowing individuals to walk along 125th Street was not incident-free: around 8:30 PM, a white man was allegedly beaten in front of Kress’ store, with police arresting James Smitten for committing the assault. About twenty minutes later, police arrested Frank Wells for breaking a window in the Willow Cafeteria. Just before 10:00 PM, Detective Roge was hit by a rock in front of Kress’ store and another patrolman injured at 124th Street and 7th Avenue. At the same time, Louise Thompson described larger groups being pushed back by police. She told a MCCH hearing she saw "one policeman throw his billy into the crowds while the mounted police were riding them down” at the corner of 125th Street and 7th Avenue between 8:00 PM and 9:00 PM, a scene similar to that captured by a photograph published in the Daily News. There is no evidence of where that photograph was taken, but a second photograph of police dispersing a group of Black men and women, the most widely reproduced photograph of the disorder, was taken at 125th Street and 7th Avenue according to the caption. It shows the island that that divided the north and south lanes on the roadway, which contained trees and were surrounded by the barriers like those visible in the photograph. A group of men and women are scattering in response to a uniformed patrolman moving toward them. One man is bent over; the caption describes him as falling down. He may also have been pushed down or hit by the patrolman; another man obstructs the view of what has happened between the two men. (One version of the caption claimed that the photographer was hit by a rock soon after taking the image, which might explain why the patrolman was trying to move the crowd.)
  
  One of the Black men killed during the disorder, Andrew Lyons, sustained a fractured skull "during the thick of a melee at 125th street and Seventh avenue," according to the New York Amsterdam News, or a block further west at 125th Street and Lenox Avenue according to the Times Union. Police clubs may have been responsible for those injuries, but the doctors who treated Lyons recorded that had been too groggy to tell his roommate or anyone else how he had been injured. No sources mentioned police firing revolvers or rifles to try to disperse the crowds.
  
  On at least two occasions large crowds appear to have broken through the police perimeter. Louise Thompson told a MCCH hearing that around 9:00 PM a crowd broke through on to 125th Street. The Home News also reported that incident. Store windows were broken, Young's hat store looted, and two white men and a white police detective allegedly assaulted around that time. A second crowd broke through around 10:30 PM, resulting in more windows being broken and a white man allegedly being assaulted, and police arresting four Black men.
  
  Most of the incidents on 125th Street before 10:30 PM did not result in arrests, likely because police were heavily outnumbered by crowds and constrained by the responsibility of guarding stores. Only at Kress’ store it seems were enough officers stationed to make arrests: there arrests were made not just around 10:30 PM but also just before 10:00 PM and at 8:30 PM. There are no arrests among those with known times in the period between the arrest of the picketers in front of Kress’ store at 6:45 PM and arrests on 125th Street between 8:30 PM and 9:00 PM. There are approximately a dozen arrests made at unknown times and places that might have occurred during this time, but it is more likely that police were too outnumbered to make arrests, as Lt. Battle later told Langston Hughes. While an arrest for breaking windows was made just before 9:00 PM, police made no arrests for the assaults and broken windows reported when a crowd broke through soon after.
  
  The police perimeter appears to have held after 10:30 PM. Sometime before then, no later than 10:00 PM, and likely as early as between 8:30 PM and 9:00 PM, groups had moved on from 125th Street to attack businesses on 8th Avenue and 7th Avenue, and later, Lenox Avenue. In response, police began to disperse across Harlem, driving along those streets in radio cars and taking up positions on street corners and guarding damaged stores. Exactly when the first police were sent beyond 125th Street is not clear. The first arrest made away from 125th Street, on West 127th Street between St. Nicholas and 8th Avenues around 9:00 PM, appears to have been made by a patrolman on his way to 125th Street rather than being deployed elsewhere in Harlem. The arrest of Leroy Brown around 9:45 PM on 7th Avenue between 127th and 128th Streets is clearer evidence of a spreading police presence.
  
  With the MCCH giving limited attention to this period of the disorder, witnesses who testified at their hearings did not provide the details they do of the earlier police response. Newspaper reporters and photographers were on 125th Street during this time, so would have seen some of these events and been able to obtain information from police. Inspector Di Martini spoke with a group of reporters, including one from the Afro-American during this time. At the same time, those reporters would have had a limited view. The block was too long for those at one intersection to see the details of what was happening at the other intersection, or even for those at Kress' store to clearly see the nearby intersection with 8th Avenue. At the corner of 125th Street and 7th Avenue the Afro-American's reporter saw only "little knots of people on the corner"; "once he walked on, however, he found high police officials and the first detail of 500 extra policemen rushed to the area" and "a large number of people between Seventh and Eighth Avenues." It is unsurprising then that newspaper stories offer only general and fragmented accounts of this period of the disorder. Information on specific events comes from legal records, which are limited largely to the period around 10:00 PM when police made arrests, and narrowly focused on the actions of a single arresting officer.
   
• 1 2022-06-22T13:13:29+00:00 Police deploy beyond 125th Street 76 plain 2023-11-09T03:23:58+00:00 “As they arrived, the police were distributed through 125th Street from Lenox to St. Nicholas Avenues from 125th to 135th Streets,” the New York Herald Tribune reported. Disorder spread beyond 125th Street sometime before police were deployed in those areas. Windows were reported broken on 7th Avenue north of 127th Street not long after 8:30 PM with no indication that police were present until around 9:45 PM, when an officer from the 40th Precinct in the Bronx arrested Leroy Brown at 7th Avenue and 127th Street. After 10:00 PM police began to appear on 7th Avenue south of 125th Street. There is no evidence of when police deployed on 8th Avenue, but it seems likely it occurred around the time they moved on to 7th Avenue as officers were concentrated on that block of 125th Street. It was over an hour later that the sources mention police on Lenox Avenue north of 125th Street, an area east of where they had been concentrated. Crowds had been attacking stores on Lenox Avenue since at least 10:30 PM. Those crowds were not concentrated as they had been on 125th Street between 7th and 8th Avenues. Officers attempted to guard damaged stores that might be looted or patrolled blocks and intersections on foot as they had on 125th Street to respond to any crowds that gathered. Between twenty and thirty radio cars patrolled larger sections of the avenues, pulling over when they encountered incidents of disorder. It is not clear if Emergency trucks also patrolled the avenues; they are mentioned in the press only taking up fixed positions. There is no mention of mounted police anywhere but 125th Street. The New York Times, Home News, and New York Sun also reported that patrolling police saved white men and women from assault, with the New York Evening Journal and New York American reporting specific incidents that might have occurred in this time period, although no arrests were made in such circumstances to provide evidence to confirm either the general or specific claims.
  
  The area over which disorder spread was too large to occupy or cordon off, and officers appear to have spent much of their time reacting to attacks on property. They succeeded in stopping those attacks only for as long as they were present. And even then, the range of their protection was limited to one side of the street. In Harlem, 7th Avenue and Lenox Avenue were major roadways, with two lanes of traffic in each direction, and an island planted with trees in the middle of 7th Avenue. The time it took officers to cross that distance often gave crowds times to disperse and avoid arrest. Unlike on 125th Street, police were not involved in the clashes with large crowds that saw officers injured; three police suffered injuries, one making an arrest and two driving on 8th Avenue. As they deployed across Harlem, police appear to have more often fired their guns than they had when establishing a perimeter around 125th Street. Newspaper reports of that shooting generally attributed it to the outbreak of looting, a legally more serious crime that police practice treated as justifying firing at suspects. The two Black men killed by police gunfire were both alleged to have been looting. However, five unattributed shootings of Black men suggest that police fired more indiscriminately at crowds. Police also appear to have continued to have hit those they arrested with their nightsticks and revolver and rifle butts. Police also appear to have made more arrests during this period of the disorder than earlier; almost half of the arrests with information on timing occurred between 11:00 PM and 2:00 AM. Arrests for looting are a large part of that total; as a more serious crime, police may have been more likely to make arrests for looting than for breaking windows or other activities.
  
  The timing of arrests provides one source of evidence of when police began to deploy beyond 125th Street. However, Lt. Battle later told his biographer Langston Hughes that arrests were not an option early in the disorder as police were too outnumbered. An arrest required officers leaving the street to take their prisoner to a station house. Stories in the New York Evening Journal pointed to the need to guard damaged stores as an additional constraint on police. Furthermore, information on timing and location was available for only forty-seven of the 128 arrests (37%), with information on location but not timing for an additional thirty-two arrests (so 62%, 79 of 128, of arrests can be mapped). Consequently, the lack of arrests, particularly before 11:00 PM, was uncertain evidence of the absence of police.
  
  
  
  The first recorded arrest away from 125th Street does not appear to result from the dispersal of officers across Harlem. The patrolman who intervened in an attack on a white man by a group of Black men on St. Nicholas Avenue and West 127th Street around 9:00 PM and arrested Paul Boyett was likely in a radio car going to 125th Street from the 30th Precinct not sent from where police were gathered. The next arrest, of Leroy Brown on 7th Avenue and 127th Street at 9:45 PM, offers clearer evidence of police deploying. Patrolman Edward Doran came from the 40th Precinct, directly across the river from Harlem in the Bronx. He testified to seeing a crowd gather in front of the store, and Brown then throw a tailor’s dummy through the window. While Doran arrested Brown, the other members of the group he heard and saw break windows further up 7th Avenue were not arrested. Twenty-five minutes later, Patrolman Irwin Young, who had earlier arrested Harry Gordon on 125th Street, made the second arrest on the same block of 7th Avenue, across the street. Although the first arrests south of 125th Street did not occur until after 11:00 PM, officers were reported to have clashed with crowds at 121st Street around 10:30 PM. That those officers made no arrests likely indicates that there were too few of them to control the crowd. A New York Evening Journal story sensationalized the incident in those terms: “Policemen attached to the West 123rd st. station were surrounded by men and women. Guns were drawn but the mob refused to disband and in the ensuing exchange of shots Lyman Quarterman, 34, 306 W. 146th St., was shot in the abdomen,” almost certainly by police. By 12:30 AM when Fred Campbell drove by, there were “an unusual number of patrolmen and policemen out with riot guns” at that intersection. Officers made arrests as far south as West 116th Street after midnight, but the number of damaged and looted businesses suggests a limited presence and concern with the Puerto Rican neighborhood centered on 116th Street.
  
  Police likely deployed along 8th Avenue around the same time as they did along 7th Avenue as police had gathered at that intersection with 125th Street as they had at the other end of the block. There was no evidence of the timing of any of the arrests made on that street, which took place both north and south of 125th Street, although there are no arrests north of 135th Street as there were on 7th Avenue.
  
  The first arrests on Lenox Avenue north of 125th Street came after 11:00 PM, but in that area there was not any indication of a police deployment earlier. Most of the arrests after midnight occurred on those blocks of Lenox Avenue, where police took people into custody as far north as 135th Street. Those blocks also saw the most extensive looting, a combination that suggests that the number of arrests reflected the scale and changed character of the disorder rather than indicating that police more effectively controlled the people on the streets. There was only one arrest recorded on Lenox Avenue south of 125th Street, an area with relatively few businesses, and not until 2 AM. That arrest was of a man carrying goods allegedly stolen from a hardware store, not damaging or looting a store. Around the same time police made arrests on the same sections of 7th Avenue.
  
  After 3:00 AM there is a lull in both arrests and reported events. Earlier, when Deputy Chief Inspector McAuliffe, in charge of uniformed police in the borough of Manhattan, had been driven through Harlem just before midnight, he told a reporter from the New York Herald Tribune that “thousands of persons were staying in the streets late,” although he judged that “most of them appeared to be spectators.” Although Lt. Battle told a hearing of the MCCH that “there was no excitement” when he went on to Harlem streets at 2:00 AM, there was evidence of violence and arrests on Lenox and 7th Avenues on both sides of 125th Street at that time. However, when McAuliffe toured the neighborhood again at 4:00 AM, he “reported that all was quiet,” according to a story in the New York World Telegram. That assessment was likely why police called from precincts outside Harlem were sent home at that time, according to the New York Evening Journal. By that time it appears that police were relying on radio cars to patrol the avenues. The final arrests of the disorder came around 5:00 AM, made by officers in radio cars patrolling 8th Avenue and Lenox Avenue.
  
  The combination of arrest and continued violence in the first arrest beyond 125th Street prefigured the results of police activity for the remainder of the disorder. The MCCH report summarized the situation as one in which “Crowds constantly changed their make-up. When bricks thrown through store windows brought the police, the crowds would often dissolve, only to gather again and continue their assaults upon property.” The New York World Telegram offered a similar picture: "Whenever the police succeeded in scattering them, the mobs reformed to continue their outbreaks." Predictably, the New York Evening Journal offered a sensationalized version of that narrative, in which "[mobs] disappeared, though, only to turn up at some other corner to wreak vengeance again on all whites and the police." In the Times Union's narrative, the violence, while not ephemeral, was as discontinuous as those newspapers, with "sporadic and small riots [breaking] out in various parts of Harlem." The Daily News focused on the dispersal of the crowds, describing how "armed bands of colored and white guerillas, swinging crowbars and clubs, roamed through barricaded Harlem," "too scattered for police to corral." So too did the New York Herald Tribune's narrative, in which "outbreaks spread to other parts of Harlem, with smaller groups here and there." In the New York Times "roving bands of Negro men and women" forcibly resisting "500 policemen patrolling streets in an area of more than a square mile," later becoming "marauding bands." In the New York Sun it was "small roving mobs which prowled through the city throughout the night," although most of its narrative attributed the violence to a single "frenzied and race-crazed mob...who tore through the streets." The dispersed nature of the violence is less clear in the narratives of other publications. The New York Post described a "tidal wave of rioting" that "surged through the district," and "recurring waves" of rioting. The Home News offered little sense of the location of the disorder, noting only that "the disorder spread to adjoining streets," and making one mention of "roving bands of colored men." So too did the New York American, which mentioned only that the outbreak "spread with disastrous results over an area of several blocks," and the Daily Mirror, in which the description was more dramatic and vaguer: "It was a wild night of melee with mob violence spreading as the night wore on.... The “battlefield” was no longer W. 125th St. It was spreading. It was Harlem."
  
  Storeowners seeking police to protect their businesses reported that telephone calls and visits to the stationhouses failed to bring officers. Even when they arrived, police could often offer limited protection. After officers who fired their pistols in the air to disperse a crowd near Lenox Avenue and 132nd Street succeeding only in moving them from one side of the street to the other without interrupting their attacks on business, the frightened staff of William Feinstein’s liquor store locked up and fled. Several hours later police failed to stop the store from being looted, only arriving in time to arrest one of a group who took bottles of liquor. After the disorder, Feinstein joined more than a hundred business owners who successfully sued the city for failing to protect their property. Representing approximately a third of the businesses reported damaged or looted during the disorder, that number suggests a widespread scenario. However, the litigants and evidence of looting are concentrated on Lenox Avenue between 125th and 135th Streets. Those blocks also saw significant numbers of arrests. By contrast, 7th Avenue north of 129th Street saw very few reported incidents and only two arrests, although at least half of the eighteen arrests for which they are no details could have been in that area.
  
  The gunfire that frightened Feinstein’s staff was a more frequent feature of the police response beyond 125th Street. The New York Times attributed that shooting to officers who “fired their pistols into the air, frightening away various groups of would-be disturbers,” as occurred around Feinstein’s liquor store. So too did the New York Herald Tribune, until midnight, when “as looting developed, the police began shooting.” That account fitted claims in the New York Times, New York Evening Journal, and New York Post that officers were under orders not to fire at crowds, or only “in the greatest emergency,” according to the New York Post. Inspector Di Martini told a hearing of the MCCH that he "gave instructions to police not to do any shooting." Instead, they used the butts of their guns as clubs (as can be seen in photographs of the arrest of Charles Alston and of an arrest on Lenox Avenue). As well as looting, it was violence directed against white men and women that led officers to use their guns, according to the New York Evening Journal: “But as the night wore on and the looting and violence increased to a point never before reached in New York City, the police were forced to use their guns—were forced to use them to protect helpless whites from being beaten and kicked and stamped to death under the feet of the stampeding blacks.” Sensationalized stories of violence against white men and women was the focus of that white newspaper's narrative of the disorder. In another story the New York Evening Journal presented police as using guns in response to crowds starting two fires on Lenox Avenue. (While firefighters extinguished those blazes, the claim in the Daily Mirror that they were “also pressed into the work of taming the mob"” appears to be an invention. There is no other evidence that “Fire engines were placed at advantageous positions in the side streets of the riot zone prepared to 'wet down' the more heated.” To the contrary, Inspector Di Martini told an MCCH hearing that he did not "call upon the fire department" as the crowds on 125th Street were not large enough to require them.)
  
  Both the incidents in which police shot and killed Black men, Lloyd Hobbs on 7th Avenue and James Thompson on 8th Avenue, involved alleged looting. No one was identified as responsible for shooting and wounding an additional five Black men; all those incidents took place after 1:00 AM, in the areas where at that time looting was most prevalent. The New York Sun somewhat obliquely linked those shootings to the police, presenting police as using their guns in response to the increasing “fury of the mob": ”The crack of revolver shot bit into the din. Seven men reeled under the impact of the bullets.” Eunice Carter asked Captain Rothnengast for details of those shootings during an MCCH hearing, suggesting that they had been shot by police: “Officer, you stated that other people were shot but who shot them? Was there any effort to find out who shot them? Was any check made on the bullets to ascertain whether they came from police guns?” He replied simply that “No bullets were recovered.” Rothengast had earlier told the hearing that "several shots were fired from roofs and windows at us. I saw the fire from a pistol as it was shot from a roof on 129th Street.” Several white newspapers reported incidents of police being shot at that other evidence suggests did not happen. The New York American, Home News, New York Herald Tribune, and New York Post reported James Thompson shot at the detectives trying to arrest him, while the New York Evening Journal sensationally reported an even larger gunfight in which "other rioters" returned the officer's shots. However, police records make clear that only the detectives fired weapons, hitting Thompson and a white passerby, while one also shot himself in the hand. Similarly, a sniper attack on police reported by New York World Telegram, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Times Union, and Home News appears not to have happened. The four men police arrested were charged with disorderly conduct for “annoying,” a charge that would not have been made had they actually shot at police. If anyone did shoot at police, they failed to hit their targets.
  
  Only two police officers were injured away from 125th Street, in large part because the situations in which officers had been injured around Kress’ store did not occur when the disorder was not concentrated on a single location. Patrolman Whittington of Emergency Squad #9 was reportedly hit by a rock on a truck at 8th Avenue at 123rd Street around midnight. That location was close enough to the perimeter which police established around Kress’ store and 125th Street that the truck may have been part of that response to the disorder rather than involved in efforts to control crowds in the wider neighborhood. (A car driven by Detective Lt. Frank Lenahan on 8th Avenue was also hit by rocks, perhaps also away from 125th Street. Cars and buses driving on 7th Avenue were also attacked with rocks, including one with a Black driver, so Lenahan may not have been targeted as a policeman.) The second officer, Detective Nicholas Campo, was shot with his own revolver while trying to make an arrest; Irwin Young allegedly had also allegedly been assaulted during an arrest at the beginning of the disorder. Otherwise, the clashes between police and crowds that occurred around 125th Street did not happen when the disorder was not concentrated on Kress store: rather than attacking police guarding stores, crowds drew them away or waited until they moved away; and rather than resisting police efforts to disperse them, crowds scattered and reformed when police moved on.
  
  With police killing Lloyd Hobbs the only incident beyond 125th Street to which the MCCH gave attention, information on the police response came from newspaper stories and legal records. When the disorder spread beyond 125th Street, reporters appear to have remained there, where police were concentrated, at the police stations on West 123rd Street and West 135th Street, and at Harlem Hospital. In reporting this period of the disorder they relied on police accounts of the incidents in which they made arrests. The narrow focus of arrest reports, which mentioned only the arresting officer, obscured the details of the police deployment. In a small number of cases, arrests by officers patrolling in radio cars were identified; however, radio cars were likely involved in additional arrests.
• 1 2020-12-03T17:21:15+00:00 Black women arrested for looting (3) 75 plain 2023-12-10T21:12:57+00:00 Three Black women were among the sixty individuals arrested for looting. They represent just under half of the women arrested, with three women arrested for breaking windows and another woman for inciting a crowd. (No women identified as white are among those reported as arrested during the disorder.) Few details of their arrests and alleged actions are recorded. Loyola Williams appeared only in the lists of those arrested for burglary; there was no evidence that she was prosecuted. Elizabeth Tai and Elva Jacobs were both charged with taking groceries, although the outcomes of their prosecutions suggest that neither actually had any merchandise in their possession. A district attorney reduced the charge against Tai to disorderly conduct, which suggested a lack of evidence of breaking in to a business or taking items. In Jacobs' case, a district attorney reduced the charge to unlawful entry, which suggested she had been arrested in a store, but without any items in her possession. Those reduced charges indicated that police could only provide evidence that the women were part of crowds on the streets not that they participated in looting.
  
  The presence of Black women in the crowds on Harlem’s streets was recorded in most accounts of the disorder, but they are only rarely mentioned as participants in attacks on stores or looting. The Daily News, New York Evening Journal, New York Times, and Norfolk Journal and Guide all included women and men in their general descriptions of the crowds. (The Daily News highlighted their presence among those who broke windows in a headline, “Women Join Mob of 4,000 In Battering Stores,” without mentioning women breaking windows in the story itself.) Other papers such as the New York American, Home News, New York Sun, New York World-Telegram, and the Black newspapers the Afro-American and Chicago Defender included women only in the initial crowds inside and outside Kress’ store. Their presence at the outbreak of violence distinguishes the disorder in Harlem from those that followed in subsequent decades, in which Marilynn Johnson argues women became involved after men had initiated the violence. Women's early involvement in Harlem resulted from the disorder beginning in a store, at a time when only women were present to witness what happened to Lino Rivera. (Women are not mentioned in stories about the events of the disorder published in the New York Herald Tribune, New York Post, or New York Age.)
  
  Women were specifically reported as participants in looting in only four newspapers. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle's general description of the disorder included "looting stores" among other activities of "Bands of men and women, in some cases joined by whites." When the Daily Mirror’s narrative reached the time when “Looters began to clean out the goods on display in the stores whose windows had been broken,” it noted “Both men and women were doing the looting.” In the Black press, the Atlanta World broadly included women in crowds that looted in a similar manner: “the members of the mob needed little provocation to start on the rampage. Using whatever weapons that were to hand, men, women and children in the mob broke hundreds of plate glass windows in stores belonging to white merchants, scattered and stole merchandise and destroyed fixtures.” Rather than a general presence among looters, women appeared just in a crowd looting Herbert's Blue Diamond Jewelry store in the New York Evening Journal: “The emergency squad police swept into the mob with riot guns, drove the yelling, threatening men and women from their loot and then guarded the store until armored trucks could remove the valuables.” However, other sources indicated that Herbert’s was not looted, but only had its windows broken, by the crowds that had gathered early in the disorder across the street around Kress’s store — crowds that multiple sources record included women. (The New York Evening Journal story also presented women as participating in an attack on a white man, B.Z. Kondoul, and in efforts to prevent firefighters from extinguishing a fire in a store on Lenox Avenue.)
  
  Rather than participants, women were presented as instigators by Roi Ottley in his column in the New York Amsterdam News: “LENOX AVENUE was the scene of much of the disorder during that riotous fracas...From every shattered window rioters would emerge laden down with spoils...Women stood on the fringes of the mobs and dictated their choice to their men folk, who willingly obliged by bringing forth the desired article.” (Ottley also cast women as inciting the disorder more generally, also from greater distance, in an earlier column: “Women hanging out of windows screamed applause to the reign of terror...and prodded their men-folk on with screeching invectives.”) Those images are somewhat at odds with the agency displayed by the women shopping in Kress' store and may reflect Ottley's attitudes to women as much as their behavior during the disorder.
  
  While these stories, and the photographs that accompanied them, indicated that women were part of the crowds on March 19, it remains unclear whether those women did not participate in looting or did and were not recorded by reporters or arrested by police focused on men they likely considered more threatening. From a broader perspective more removed from the events of the disorder, the MCCH appears to have concluded that women did participate, noting in its report: "Even some grown-up men and women who had probably never committed a criminal act before, but bad suffered years of privations, seized the opportunity to express their resentment against discrimination in employment and the exclusive rights of property." However, this section of the report was part of an effort to frame looting as less violent and threatening than it appeared in the initial newspaper stories. While noting that "it seems indisputable that the criminal element took advantage of the disorders," the previous sentence argued, "it seems equally true that many youngsters who could not be classed as criminals joined the looting crowds in a spirit of pure adventure." An earlier discussion of crowds in the disorder made a similar claim, that "Some of the destruction was carried on in a playful spirit. Even the looting, which has furnished many an amusing tale, was sometimes done in the spirit of children taking preserves from a closet to which they have accidentally found the key." Including women as participants in "playful" behavior did not run counter to gender roles and stereotypes in the way that their participation in violence did. The only other place women appeared in the MCCH report's discussion of the events of the disorder was as shoppers in Kress' store.
  
  By the time disorder broke out again in Harlem in 1943, when the police recorded attacks on businesses and looting systematically in a way that they had not been in 1935, the press associated looting with Black women, a representation that would intensify in subsequent decades. Harold Orlans' contemporary study of newspaper stories about the 1943 racial disorder and Laurie Leach's more recent analysis both note the attention given to Black women. Photographs of women participating in attacks on stores and being arrested for looting appeared on the front pages of both of Harlem's Black newspapers, the New York Amsterdam News and the New York Age, when they first reported the disorder in 1943. One striking image on the front page of the New York Amsterdam News a week later, which also appeared in Life magazine, could be seen as in line with the reading of women's behavior as playful advanced in 1935. Historian Sara Blair described the image as featuring "an attractive young woman [who] smiles openly at the camera, part of a group of style-conscious women balancing boxes of hosiery and other consumer goods (one shopping bag is emblazoned with the logo “Modesse”) as they are escorted by police." She explains the woman's unselfconscious engagement with the camera as reflecting a participation in a social spectacle, a performative response to being photographed, that marked the new visual culture emerging in this period. The figure of the Black woman looter would take a more threatening form in white reporting and photography of the 1967 riots, as "greedy" and "criminal and culpable," as Kevin Mumford insightfully unpacked in his study of Newark in 1967.
• 1 2020-02-24T22:40:34+00:00 Assaults on police (9) 70 plain 2024-01-17T17:55:50+00:00 Nine police officers were among those reported as injured, six hit by objects thrown at them. One was attacked by an individual likely from the same crowds that threw objects at police. Two officers were injured making arrests, one hit by a shot from his own gun while attempting to apprehend a suspected looter, the other allegedly hit by a man who grabbed his baton. Assaults of police making arrests also occurred at other times in 1935; police being hit by objects did not. Six of the assaults occurred early in the disorder, two in front of Kress' store, two at the store's rear entrance, and two when police tried to establish a perimeter around Kress’ store. Only two assaults occurred after 10:00 PM, when the crowd broke up and smaller groups spread north and south on Harlem’s avenues, suggesting that the later disorder did not involve the same violence directed at police. There is no evidence of when the other assault, rocks thrown at a detective's car as he drove along 8th Avenue, took place. (This total excludes an incident in which newspapers reported four men allegedly shot at an unidentified police officer on Lenox Avenue and 138th Street as the men were charged merely with "annoying," not any form of violence, and acquitted of even that charge.)
  
  Most of the assaults on police occurred when the disorder was focused on Kress’ store and 125th Street, where large crowds gathered and police struggled to disperse them. Although police several times succeeded in moving crowds away from Kress’ and off the roadway of 125th Street, there were too few officers to hold and control the crowds until after 10:00 PM. As 125th Street and 7th and 8th Avenues were major thoroughfares accommodating buses and streetcars, they had wide roadways, with two lanes of traffic traveling in each direction, as well as wide pavements. That created significant distances between police and crowds when officers set up cordons in front of Kress’ store and at the intersections of 125th Street and the avenues. As a result, much of the violence directed against police came in the form of objects thrown at them. Patrolman Michael Kelly was hit on the right leg by a stone around 7:00 PM behind Kress’ store, where police had followed a crowd drawn there by the appearance of a hearse. Kelly's injury was serious enough that he was taken to Harlem Hospital for an x-ray and observation. Detective Charles Foley was hit on the left shoulder, possibly suffering a fracture, a few minutes after the assault on Kelly, also at the rear of Kress’ store on 124th Street. This incident was the only time police and crowds clashed away from a major thoroughfare, on a narrower cross street that exposed officers to objects thrown from roofs as well as from the street level. Two hours later, around 9:00 PM, Detective William Boyle was treated on 125th Street for injuries “received while attempting to rescue an unknown white man being assaulted at scene of riot.” None of these officers suffered the head injuries that predominated among the civilians who sought medical treatment during the disorder.
  
  Two other officers were assaulted several hours later, around 10:00 PM, after additional reinforcements arrived and police tried to establish a cordon and disperse crowds on 7th Avenue and 8th Avenue. Detective Henry Roge was hit by a rock allegedly thrown by James Hughes as he stood in front of Kress' store just after police had cleared 125th Street. Unusually, Roge’s partner claimed that as there were no other objects being thrown at the time, he was able to see who threw the rock and apprehend the man, James Hughes. Roge himself had been hit in the head and was bleeding profusely. The New York Evening Journal published two different photographs of a bleeding Roge being helped by a uniformed officer, one on the scene at 125th Street and the other somewhere inside, the only images of injured police published. While Hughes later pled guilty to misdemeanor assault, the presiding judge believed his target had been the store windows, not the police officer, and sentenced him to only three months in the Workhouse.
  
  Around the same time, someone hit Patrolman Charles Robbins over the head with an iron bar, or a brick in some accounts. Being hit by a weapon, not a thrown object, involved an assailant in close proximity. Treated at 124th Street and 7th Avenue, Robbins had likely been involved in efforts to keep crowds from 125th Street. Images of police trying to hold back crowds show officers moving into the midst of groups of people, potentially exposing themselves to attacks such as Robbins suffered — and allowing their assailants to disappear into the crowd before they could be apprehended. However, it should be noted that in both the images, it is police officers who are wielding weapons or moving against the crowd, not the other way around. The caption to one photo also indicates that objects were thrown from the crowd at such moments: a Daily News photographer was hit on the head soon after taking the photo.
  
  One of the two arrests in which a police officer was allegedly assaulted came at the very beginning of the disorder. When Patrolman Irwin Young and several other officers arrested Harry Gordon, a twenty-year-old white man, after he tried to speak to the crowds in front of Kress' store, Young alleged Gordon grabbed his nightstick and hit him with it. Gordon denied he assaulted Young, claiming instead that Young beat him; Louise Thompson also told a hearing of the MCCH she saw Young beat Gordon. Gordon also told the MCCH that Young beat him on the journey to the station and again later while he was in custody. Violence during arrests was nothing out of the ordinary in 1935. The outcome of Gordon's prosecution is unknown. The second officer allegedly assaulted during an arrest was also injured with his own weapon, in that case a revolver, at the very end of the disorder. According to the arrest report and police blotter, as James Thompson fled a grocery store where he had allegedly been discovered looting, he knocked into Detective Nicholas Campo, causing the officer's revolver to go off and a bullet to hit him in the hand.
  
  Once the crowds broke up and spread, the police response changed and officers do not appear to have been targets of violence to the extent they had been. While police maintained a cordon around 125th Street and guarded some stores their presence in other parts of the neighborhood took the form of mobile patrols in radio cars or emergency trucks. On one occasion, a police vehicle was targeted in the same way that other vehicles driven by whites were, with the Daily Mirror reporting “Harry Whittington, an emergency policeman, was 'sniped' off of the emergency truck he was riding at 8th Ave. and 123rd St. by a rock that felled him unconscious.” Cars driven by whites were frequent targets of rocks and stones. The attack on Detective Lt. Frank Lenahan as he drove his car along 8th Avenue may also have occurred away from 125th Street; there is no evidence of its timing. According to the New York Herald Tribune, which provided the only description of the incident, Lenahan’s car “was badly battered by rocks and most of its glass shattered.” Apparently the officer himself was unscathed, as he does not appear in lists of the injured.
  
  A widely reported incident of alleged “sniping” at police at the very end of the disorder was not included in the count of assaults on police as there is little evidence that police were actually targets of a shooting. Stories in the New York World Telegram and Brooklyn Daily Eagle did report that a bullet whistled past the air of Patrolman Jerry Brennan of the Morrisiana station as he stood on post at Lenox Ave and 138th Street, after which he saw four men on the roof of the six-story building at 101 West 138th. Soon after police reinforcements arrived and rushed to the roof to arrest the men. But in the Home News story, Brennan is not the target of the shooters but one of the police who responded after hearing shots. He appeared as the arresting officer in the Magistrates Court. This story provided the key detail that no guns were found on the men arrested, explaining both why police charged them with the lesser charge of disorderly conduct (annotated in the docket book as "annoy") and their acquittal, giving the story more credibility than other accounts.
  
  More officers may have been assaulted during the disorder. The New York Evening Journal reported bandaged officers as well as prisoners in court the next day. However, while news photographs confirm the presence of bandaged prisoners, no injured officers appear in those images.
• 1 2022-07-14T17:02:48+00:00 Police find Lino Rivera 69 plain 2023-12-17T18:57:12+00:00 Sometime during the disorder, police tried to locate Lino Rivera so they could show that he had not been killed or beaten. Chief Inspector Seely ordered the boy be located, according to the New York Times, which indicated that those efforts started after 9:00 PM when senior officers took charge of the police response. However, the Daily News, New York Herald Tribune, Home News, New York Times, Times Union, and Afro-American newspapers simply reported that police searched for Rivera throughout the night. They were unable to find him because the home address they had was incorrect: 272 Morningside Avenue rather than 272 Manhattan Avenue. (The New York Age story written early in the disorder included the incorrect address.) The Daily News reported that “the mistake was made” when Eldridge gave the address to an officer at the West 123rd Street station over the telephone — not that he had misrecorded the address as the New York Herald Tribune reported or that Rivera had given a false address as the Home News reported. According to Louise Thompson, a group of women who had tried to locate Rivera at the beginning of the disorder also had the wrong address, although one on the correct street: 410 Manhattan Avenue. Joe Taylor, the leader of the Young Liberators, also heard a rumor that Rivera lived at 410 Manhattan Avenue and went to investigate around 7:30 PM.
  
  At 1:30 AM, Officer Eldridge was woken at his home on Whitlock Avenue in the Bronx by a telephone call telling him to report to the Chief Inspector at the West 123rd Street station, he told a hearing of the MCCH. The police officers who had been at the Kress store, Eldridge and Patrolman Donahue, had gone off duty at 4:00 PM. Until he was woken, Eldridge thought Rivera had been arrested and was unaware of what was happening in Harlem. He was able to go directly to Rivera’s home, arriving around 2:00 AM. He found him asleep, according to his testimony. The boy had not been there all night, as initially reported in the New York Evening Journal and New York Sun, but had gone out around 9:00 PM. Rivera had a cup of coffee and returned home after about twenty-five minutes because he "saw there was a lot of trouble around,” the New York World Telegram and Times Union reported. Rivera said Eldridge told him people thought he was dead, the New York World Telegram and New York Herald Tribune reported.
  
  Eldridge took Rivera to the West 123rd Street station. Only the New York Sun described Rivera as “blubbering and frightened.” Rivera told a reporter for the New York World Telegram that he was at the station for about half an hour. During that time, police questioned him, he spoke with reporters and was photographed with Lt. Battle and Officer Eldridge. Newspaper stories that quoted his statements mentioned that he spoke to two different officers, Kear, according to the Daily News, and Captain Oliver, according to the New York Evening Journal and New York Sun. Battle told the MCCH that he asked Rivera “if he had been hurt by anyone and had he been arrested.” The New York Evening Journal, New York Post, New York Sun, and New York American published separate stories about Rivera’s statements. The Daily News, New York Herald Tribune, and Atlanta World appended his statements to larger stories on the disorder. Reporters also interviewed and photographed Rivera at his home later on March 20. The New York World Telegram, New York Herald Tribune, and La Prensa published separate stories based on those interviews, while the New York Times included Rivera in a larger story.
  
  Inspector Di Martini took credit for having Battle appear in the images. “It was my idea to get Lieut. Battle to pose with the boy and get the picture into the streets as soon as possible,” he told a hearing of the MCCH. Battle said the reason Rivera posed with him was “for the moral effect.” Not made explicit in either statement was that having the boy photographed with a Black police officer added to the credibility of the image and cut across the racial divisions expressed in the disorder. “A lot” of pictures were taken, Rivera told a MCCH hearing, but only six different published images have been identified. An Associated Press photo that showed Battle seated with his arm around Rivera, who was standing, was published in the New York Times, New York Post, New York Herald Tribune, and New York Sun. Rivera was only 4 feet 8 inches tall according to the New York Herald Tribune, so that pose put the two on the same level. Their height difference was visible in an image of them standing in the same pose taken by an International Photo Agency photographer. That difference was further emphasized in the photograph of this pose published in the Daily Mirror in which Battle is looking down at Rivera. (The Daily Worker took offense at Battle having "his arm protectively around" Rivera as the "Harlem masses...know that Battles would kill a worker on the slightest excuse.") Photographs taken by the International Photo Agency and Daily News revealed that Eldridge was on the other side of Rivera in both poses. Eldridge did not have an arm around Rivera, as Battle did, so was detached from their grouping. A second Black officer added to message Di Martini wanted to send. However, Battle was in uniform and well known as the senior Black police officer in New York City, while Eldridge was in plainclothes, a suit and tie, and not a public figure. It was likely on that basis that some photographers and editors decided not to include Eldridge. An ANS photo showed Rivera and Battle standing surrounded by white reporters, looking at a camera to their left. Where the other photographs showed Rivera unharmed, in contradiction of the rumors circulating in Harlem, the ANS image presented him as telling his story. Rivera, dressed in a leather jacket, is smiling in all the photographs. Photographed at home later that day, Rivera wore a suit and tie because he said his mother suggested he “dress for the picture." In the image published in the New York Evening Journal, he shows a pensive expression rather than smiling. (The New York Times reporter who visited Rivera at home described him as "a dejected figure," "overwhelmed by the fact that his desire for a ten-cent knife had precipitated the riot and resultant bloodshed.")
  
  If the primary purpose of finding Rivera was to show that he was alive and unharmed, his appearance at the police station also brought some consistency to reports about the identity of the boy who had been in Kress' store. Louise Thompson heard from the women she spoke to in Kress' store that a "colored boy" aged ten to twelve years had been beaten. The signs carried by the Young Liberators who picketed the store an hour or so later referred to a "Negro child" and the leaflets their organization distributed an hour later later described a "12 year old Negro boy." The first newspaper stories published appear to have relied on those rumors and leaflets in describing the boy; with neither Eldridge nor Donahue still on duty, police apparently did not have more precise information until Rivera was found. The New York American mentioned a "colored boy" and a "10-year-old Negro boy," the Daily News a 12-year old "colored boy," the New York Evening Journal a 15-year-old "Negro boy," the Daily Mirror a "little colored boy," the Home News a "young colored boy," and the New York Sun a "Negro boy." Early stories in some Black newspapers featured similar descriptions, a "small Negro boy" in the Norfolk Journal and Guide and a 10-year-old "colored boy" in the Indianapolis Recorder on March 23. Other stories in Black newspapers simply referred to the boy's age not his race: a 16 year old boy in the Atlanta World on March 21, a 12-year-old boy in the New York Age, a 14-year-old boy in the Chicago Defender, and a 16 year old boy in the Afro-American and Pittsburgh Courier on March 23. Newspapers published on March 20 after police found Rivera identified him as a 16-year-old Puerto Rican, in the New York Post and New York World-Telegram, or a "Puerto Rican youth" in the New York Herald Tribune and Times Union. The New York World-Telegram pointed to the differences between Rivera and the boy of the rumors by putting Negro in quotation marks when reporting the rumors and the text of the Young Liberators leaflet. By contrast, the New York Times referred to a 16-year-old "Negro boy" even after Rivera had been found, as did the New York Sun and New York Evening Journal. While the New York Times did eventually identify Rivera as Puerto Rican when he appeared in the Adolescents court after the disorder, the New York Evening Journal continued to describe Rivera as "Negro," while the New York Sun made no mention of his race. Those newspapers' persistent use of "Negro" may have been intended to convey that Rivera was dark-skinned; the New York American described him in those terms, as a "dark-skinned 16-year-old Porto Rican" in a story reporting an interview with the boy in his home, while the Brooklyn Daily Eagle described him as a "Negro born in Porto Rico." Editions of the other newspapers published after Rivera was found, including the Black newspapers, simply switched to identify him as Puerto Rican. (Historian Lorrin Thomas argued that the New York Amsterdam News "failed to identify Rivera as Puerto Rican, referring to him instead as a 'young Negro boy,'" but did not provide a citation. The March 23 issue of that newspaper is missing the news sections, but the March 30 issue identified Rivera as a "16-year-old Puerto Rican youth.")
  
  Police found Rivera too late for his appearance to impact the disorder, although it may have contributed to the violence not continuing the next evening. However, the delays in locating him fed rumors that he was not in fact the boy grabbed in Kress’ store. Reflecting questions raised in hearings, the MCCH report noted that, “The final dramatic attempt on the part of police to placate the populace by having the unharmed Lino Rivera photographed with the Negro police lieutenant Samuel Battle only furnished the basis for the rumor that Rivera, who was on probation for having placed a slug in a subway turnstile, was being used as a substitute to deceive people.” After members of the MCCH met with Mayor La Guardia soon after their appointment, on March 22, the New York Herald Tribune and New York Sun both reported that “some” of them said that many in Harlem did not believe that Lino Rivera was the boy who had been caught in the Kress store. (Stories about the meeting in the New York Times, New York Post, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and Daily Worker included no mention of those comments.) An Afro-American journalist reported the rumors before the first hearing of the MCCH: “At the present time Harlem is divided into those who has been presented by the police as the boy in the case, is not the boy who was beaten in the store. They declare that Lino is being paid off to be the scapegoat and a camouflage....The AFRO reporter has run scores of tips about the boy who actually stole the knife, or a bag of jelly-beans, as it was first given out. Everything so far has run up a blind alley. One clue to the real boy is that all during the riot he was referred to as a 12-year-old boy, but became a 16-year-old one with the finding of Lino Riviera." The New York Age hinted at those rumors when it described Rivera as “believed to have been the cause of the whole affair.” Writing in The New Masses, Louise Thompson reported that a man and woman who had been in the store said Rivera was older and taller than the boy they saw. Other publications did not raise the issue. However, as the Afro-American journalist predicted, questions about Rivera were raised in a hearing of the MCCH. In the first hearing, Police Lieutenant Battle was asked, "Is there any evidence that would indicate that Rivera is not the boy? There has been such rumor." He simply answered, "No." L. F. Cole, a thirty-year-old Black clerk who had been in the Kress store, also testified that he had "no doubt" that Rivera was the boy he had seen taken away by police. The question was raised again at the third hearing on April 20. Mention that he had been on parole after being caught putting slugs in a subway turnstile prompted an interjection from "Mrs. Burrows": "My impression is that this boy is not the boy. We have testimony here that he got into trouble before March 19th, 1935. They had a boy under supervision. This is not the boy. They got a boy through these people and this is the boy they presented." Hays, chairing the hearing, pushed the ILD lawyers for evidence that another boy was beaten in the store. They had found none nor could they establish that Rivera had received lenient treatment. A month later, Jackson Smith, the store manager, confirmed in the subcommittee's final hearing that Rivera was the boy he saw from the office, with Donahue and again outside the grand jury room after the disorder. After listening to several questions trying to undermine the certainty of that identification, Hays announced "there is no question about it." Given the lack of evidence to the contrary, there is no reason to think Rivera was not person grabbed in the store. The shoppers who saw him in the store could have assumed he was younger, given his height. Similarly, seeing that he was dark-skinned, they could have assumed he was a Black rather than Puerto Rican.
   
• 1 2020-02-25T02:58:46+00:00 Timothy Murphy assaulted & Paul Boyett shot 61 plain 2023-11-09T16:28:48+00:00 Around 9:00 PM, as police reinforcements tried to disperse the large crowds that had gathered on 7th and 8th Avenues around 125th Street, a few blocks northwest on West 127th Street between 8th Avenue and St Nicholas Avenue, a group of around Black men allegedly attacked Timothy Murphy, a twenty-nine-year-old white rock driller, on his way to his home at 44 Moylan Place. Murphy alleged that the men knocked him to the ground and then hit and kicked him. The men told him “they were beating me because I was a white man,” the Daily Mirror reported Murphy as saying. What they actually said was “You white son-of-a-bitch, take it now," according to his affidavit in the Magistrates Court. As a result of the beating Murphy suffered “lacerations, contusions [about his head, face and body], a broken nose and loss of hearing in his left ear.” Press reports simply said he received a broken nose.
  
  
  
  The men beating Murphy allegedly attracted the attention of Patrolman George Conn from the 30th Precinct, immediately west of Harlem. He may have been in a radio car on his way to 125th Street, as the New York Amsterdam News reported "police drove up." His Magistrates Court affidavit described the crowd as numbering around ten men, a number reported by the New York Herald Tribune, Home News, and Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Other newspapers described larger crowds, twelve men according to the Daily Mirror, twenty men according to the Associated Press, and forty to fifty men in the sensationalized narrative published in the New York Evening Journal. The New York Times and New York Sun simply reported that several men had attacked Murphy. As Conn ran toward Murphy, newspaper stories and legal records agreed that he shot Paul Boyett, a twenty-year-old Black garage worker who lived only a few buildings away, at 310 West 127th Street. The New York Sun and New York Times reported Conn's statement that he had first fired a shot in the air to disperse the crowd and then ordered Boyett to halt and shot him only when he continued running. The Daily Mirror and Home News reported those details without making clear that Conn was the source of that information. The New York Evening Journal reported Conn fired two shots, one "in the air and then a second shot which struck Boyett in the back." A brief account in the New York Herald Tribune and Associated Press simply had Conn shooting Boyett, one of the group attacking Murphy. Several other newspapers did not mention that anyone else but Boyett had allegedly been involved in attacking Murphy: the New York American had Conn shooting Boyett "when he tried to flee," the Daily News "as he was about to strike" Murphy, and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle simply reported that Conn had shot Boyett. This incident was the most widely reported assault in the disorder, both because it occurred early in the evening, and because it fit the sensationalized narrative of racial violence which the Hearst newspapers and white tabloids employed.
  
  Boyett testified at his trial that he had been “an innocent onlooker” drawn to the “disturbance,” and “struck no one at that time,” the New York Amsterdam News reported. In the confusion as the crowd rushed to leave as police appeared, a bullet hit him. While the newspaper stories on March 20 give the impression that Conn arrested Boyett where Murphy had been assaulted, testimony at the trial revealed that Boyett continued running back to his home, apparently pursued by Conn, who arrested him in the building's hallway. A trial jury accepted Boyett's account and acquitted him of assaulting Murphy. The only source on the trial, the story in the New York Amsterdam News, did not mention what evidence was presented. One issue may have been how Conn claimed he picked Boyett out of the crowd; only the Daily News explicitly mentioned that he saw Boyett beating Murphy, although the 28th Precinct police blotter recorded the charge against him as "kicked complainant." A likely alternative scenario to that offered by Conn was that he simply fired at the crowd rather than singling out Boyett and calling on him to halt, and that his shot hit Boyett, whose injury consequently led Conn to arrest him.
  
  The New York Herald Tribune, Daily News, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and Associated Press reported Boyett had been shot in the right shoulder, the Daily Mirror in the left shoulder, the New York American and Home News in the shoulder, and the New York Times, New York Sun, and New York Evening Journal reported the wound was in his back. Hospital records indicate that a doctor from Knickerbocker Hospital treated a wound to Boyett's right shoulder before he was placed in a cell. Conn was based at the 30th Precinct; St. Nicholas Avenue was the boundary between that precinct and the 28th Precinct. Rather than taking Boyett to his own precinct, Conn took him to the 28th Precinct station on West 123rd Street, as Boyett appeared in that precinct's police blotter. Both Murphy and Boyett appear in lists of the injured published in the New York Evening Journal, New York Post, Daily News, and New York American. Only Murphy appears in the list of injured published in the Home News and New York Post and only Boyett, in a list of those shot, in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and New York Herald Tribune.
  
  Groups of Black men allegedly targeted at least three other white men around this time, all, unlike Murphy, in the area where crowds were clashing with police. William Kitlitz reported being attacked by James Smitten in front of Kress’ store, Maurice Spellman being assaulted at 125th Street and 8th Avenue, and Morris Werner at 125th Street and 7th Avenue. All those white 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, on this evening caught up in the disorder. The area around 125th Street and 7th Avenue would continue to be the location of alleged assaults on white men and women for at least the next three hours, with three men and two women targeted. However, the assault on Murphy represented the western boundary of the disorder, the only event west of 8th Avenue. That section of Harlem was still an area of Black residents.
  
  Murphy was one of four white men and women allegedly rescued from assaults by the intervention of police officers (with some press reports suggesting that this happened more frequently). Only in this case did police also make an arrest. In one of those other cases, an officer also fired shots at the crowd, but in that instance no one was reported as being injured. Police did shoot and kill two Black men, Lloyd Hobbs and James Thompson, in the latter case also injuring two white bystanders.
• 1 2020-02-24T23:08:33+00:00 Hit by objects (18) 60 plain 2023-12-10T22:43:27+00:00 The most common assault involved throwing a stone, rock, or bottle. Such attacks made up 33% of the assaults in the sources (18 of 54); however, that proportion is somewhat distorted by six instances of assaults on police officers. Throwing objects made up 30% (12 of 45) of assaults not targeted at police. Most of those attacked in this way were white men, but five were Black men (and one man of unknown race); by contrast, all of those shot and wounded were Black men, and all of those assaulted by groups of people were white men. Two of the attacks on Black men involved objects thrown at a car; there were no details of the circumstances of the other three assaults. Only one of those hit by an object was a woman, struck by glass when a rock shattered a window in a moving car.
  
  Almost all (10 of 12) of the civilians hit by objects appeared either only in reports of hospital admissions (4 of 12) or only in newspaper reports (6 of 12); only two appeared in both sources (one whose assault led to an arrest). That discrepancy did not result from reporters ignoring the hospital, as five photographs taken there appeared in the Daily News, showing both inside and outside the facility. But reporters did not appear to have been able to systematically gather the names of those being treated, notwithstanding newspapers' practice of publishing lists that had the appearance of being comprehensive. Clearly the hospital records did not include everyone treated for an injury. Patricia O’Rourke appeared in a photograph published in the Daily News leaving the hospital bandaged, but was not in the hospital’s admission records. Likewise, lists of the injured in newspapers recorded numerous individuals as having been treated at Harlem Hospital who do not appear in the admission records. Journalists also noted that ambulances called during the disorder treated more people than made it into their records. Of the six police officers, four appeared in hospital records and in newspaper lists of the injured, while the remaining two appeared only in newspaper reports.
  
  Patricia O’Rourke’s injuries are typical of those resulting from these assaults — cuts to the eye, forehead, and cheek, which most of the papers described as “lacerations” rather than cuts, as hospital records did. Cuts produced by rocks, stones, bottles, and shattered glass produced significant bleeding, as photos show. The impact of being hit by an object also knocked at least some individuals off their feet, a detail missing from reports but evident in photographs. The white man being helped up by a police patrolman in this image published in the Daily News had been hit in the head with a bottle (a piece of which was visible in the published photograph, highlighted with an arrow). Several cars traveling along the street are visible in the uncropped version of the image available in the Daily News archive. Another Daily News photograph taken sometime earlier from in the street showed the man down on the ground with a bloodied face. Two police officers suffered injuries to their legs rather than heads, and one to his hands. However, three attacks on individuals in cars did not result in reported injuries, two on Fred Campbell as he drove up 7th Avenue, and one on Detective Frank Lenahan.
  
  It was not always clear that those hit by objects were actually their intended targets. Rocks, stones, and bottles were also being thrown at store windows. The Home News account of Isaac Daniel’s alleged assault on Herman Young explicitly identified a store window as Daniel’s target; Young, the storeowner, was not injured by the stone Daniel’s threw but by the glass sent flying when it hit and shattered a window. Others hit by objects were standing in front of windows, potentially between those throwing them and their targets. That was the case with Detective Henry Roge, who was in front of Kress' store when hit by a rock allegedly thrown by James Hughes. Police witnesses were certain that Roge was the target, although two newspaper reports said the rock hit the store window after striking Roge. Hughes denied throwing the rock, and although convicted, received a sentence of only three months in the Workhouse, which the assistant district attorney explained reflected the judge’s belief that the store window, not Roge, was his target.
  
  In other cases, there was evidence that those throwing objects hit their targets. The Daily News photographer Ebbs Breuer and his assistant made their identity obvious by setting up to take images, prompting some members of the crowd to bombard them with rocks. Breuer suffered cuts to the head and Martin a broken nose, injuries that required a trip to Harlem Hospital. None of the Black journalists on 125th Street reported being attacked.
  
  Similarly, cars and buses traveling along Harlem’s streets were clearly the targets of the objects that hit them. Lenox and 7th Avenues were major traffic routes, with almost all of the vehicles, private and commercial, driven by whites. One Black driver, Fred Campbell, was caught up in the disorder. A brick smashed the rear window of Campbell’s car as he drove up 7th Avenue at the same time as windows smashed on both sides of the street — but the width of Harlem’s avenues made it unlikely he had been hit by someone trying to throw from one side of the street at a window on the other side. In the streets rather than on the sidewalks, vehicles represented targets similarly distant from the crowd as bystanders in front of stores, police and reporters. Campbell reported being hit by more bricks before he reached his destination, and seeing cars driven by whites with broken windows, but on finishing his errand to pick up the day’s receipts from his two barber’s shops, he returned home without reporting being attacked. Likely so too did the drivers of the other cars Campbell saw. Two buses likewise were bombarded with stones as they drove through the disorder on 7th Avenue, one part of the local service, one on its way out of the city to Boston. Both continued on to their destination. Only the injured were drawn into the historical record. Joseph Rinaldi, a passenger on the bus traveling to Boston, was hit by flying glass; the bus stopped at a drug store outside Harlem so he could treat his injuries. Patricia O’Rourke was also in a car hit by bricks while traveling on 7th Avenue, toward her home in the West Bronx, but in her case the front window smashed, leaving her with cuts to her eyes, forehead, and cheeks. The Daily News put a photograph of O’Rourke leaving Harlem Hospital with bandages obscuring much of her face on its front page (the caption which highlighted the fur coat and wealthy father made her entirely unrepresentative of those caught up in the disorder.)
  
  Police riding on riot trucks were more exposed than passengers inside cars; at least one officer, Henry Whittington, was hit by an object. According to the Daily Mirror, he “was “sniped” off of the emergency truck he was riding at 8th Ave and 123rd St.” No such details appeared in other newspapers, which simply included Whittington in lists of the injured, with a head wound. Police in cars did not seem to have been subject to the same attacks as other whites driving through Harlem. The only reported instance of such an attack appears only in the New York Herald Tribune, a brief note that “The automobile of Detective Lieutenant Frank Lenahan was badly battered by rocks and most of its glass shattered when Lenahan drove through a riotous section of Eighth Avenue” in the early hours of the disorder.

  Assaults (54)

• 1 2020-10-01T19:30:34+00:00 Paul Boyett arrested 46 plain 2023-11-09T06:46:26+00:00 Around 9:00 PM, Patrolman George Conn arrested Paul Boyett, a twenty-eight-year-old Black garage worker, for assaulting Timothy Murphy, a twenty-nine-year-old white rock driller. Conn testified in the Magistrates Court that he had come upon a crowd attacking Murphy on West 127th Street between 8th Avenue and St. Nicholas Avenue. He may have been in a radio car as the New York Amsterdam News reported "police drove up." After firing his pistol into the air to scatter the crowd, he then called on Boyett to halt, and when he did not, shot him. Although the bullet struck Boyett in his back or shoulder, he was able to continue running toward his home, only a few buildings away at 310 West 127th Street. Conn pursued him, eventually catching him in the building hallway. Boyett denied assaulting Murphy, testifying that he had been “an innocent onlooker” drawn to the “disturbance," the New York Amsterdam News reported, and “struck no one at that time.” In the confusion as the crowd rushed to leave when police appeared, a bullet hit him.
  
  
  
  Conn was based at the 30th Precinct; St. Nicholas Avenue was the boundary between that precinct and the 28th Precinct. Rather than taking Boyett to his own precinct, Conn took him to the 28th Precinct station on West 123rd Street, as Boyett appeared in that precinct's police blotter. Hospital records indicate that a doctor from Knickerbocker Hospital treated Boyett's wound before he was placed in a cell. That hospital record and New York Herald Tribune, Daily News, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and Associated Press reported Boyett had been shot in the right shoulder. Several newspapers reported other locations for the injury: the Daily Mirror in the left shoulder, the New York American and Home News in the shoulder, and the New York Times, New York Sun, and New York Evening Journal reported the wound was in his back.
  
  Boyett appear in lists of the injured published in the New York Evening Journal, New York Post, Daily News, and New York American, and in a list of those shot in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and New York Herald Tribune. He also appears in the lists of the arrested published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, the Daily News, New York American, and New York Evening Journal.
  
  Boyett appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, charged with felonious assault. The docket book indicates that he was remanded until March 22, and then again on March 25 and April 1, before Magistrate Renaud sent him to the grand jury on April 9. Unusually, Boyett did not appear in any of the newspaper stories about the legal proceedings after the disorder. On April 23, the grand jury heard the case against Boyett, according to the district attorney's case file records; they indicted him for first degree assault. His trial in the Court of General Sessions occurred just over a month later, on May 29, where his lawyer was William T. Andrews, a prominent member of Harlem's elite elected to the New York State Assembly in 1934. Boyett testified he had been “an innocent onlooker” drawn to the “disturbance," the New York Amsterdam News reported, and “struck no one at that time.” In the confusion as the crowd rushed to leave as police appeared, a bullet hit him. There is no mention in that story of what evidence was presented at Boyett's trial. Whatever it was, the jury acquitted Boyett, an outcome that indicated they accepted his account.
  
  The 28th Precinct police blotter recorded the outcome of that trial but the only source for details is that brief story in the New York Amsterdam News. Headlined "Wins Acquittal in Disturbance Charge," the story only summarized Boyett's testimony and included no details of the alleged assault on Murphy or Conn's account of the shooting. In that way it fit with the approach Black newspapers took of not reporting alleged violence against whites during the disorder. The story mistakenly identified the complainant as Kennedy Murphy rather than Timothy Murphy, and mispelled Boyett's last name as Boyette.
• 1 2020-02-25T17:19:47+00:00 Lyman Quarterman shot 42 plain 2023-11-28T20:59:34+00:00 At around 10:30 PM, Lyman Quarterman, a thirty-four-year-old Black man, was part of a crowd at 121st Street and 7th Avenue that police were struggling to disperse when he was shot in the abdomen. A few minutes earlier, Anthony Cados, a thirty-four-year-old white man, reported being assaulted nearby by "some unknown colored person or persons." While Cados lived approximately ten blocks to the south, Quarterman lived at the other end of Black Harlem, at 306 West 146th Street.
  
  
  
  Hospital records of the ambulance called to attend Quarterman simply recorded he had a "gunshot wound of the abdomen received when shot by some unknown person at the scene of riot." The New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, New York American, Brooklyn Citizen, and Daily Mirror, and the Associated Press, reported on March 20, and the Chicago Defender on March 23, that Quarterman had died, a mistake the Home News attributed to "many conflicting reports during the night," and the New York Evening Journal attributed more specifically to a "report having been sent out on the police teletype." By late on March 20 the New York Evening Journal, New York Post, and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle listed Quarterman among the injured, as did the Atlanta World on March 27 and the Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide on March 30. He was one of eight men still in hospital on March 21, the New York Herald Tribune reported, and still there as late as April 8 according to the New York Age, but there are no reports that he died.
  
  The New York Times headlined the story it published on March 20, "Police Shoot Into Rioters; Kill Negro in Harlem Mob." However, the story itself was less definitive, saying only that the "police launched an investigation to determine who fired the fatal shot." However, other white newspaper stories discounted in various ways the possibility police shot Quarterman. The New York Herald Tribune, reported that no policeman in the vicinity could remember discharging his revolver, whereas the Times Union said many had, but “only into the air to frighten the mob.” The New York Evening Journal story made an oblique reference to shots being fired into the crowd, as the culmination of a narrative justifying police actions as a response to escalating violence, in which officers from the 123rd Street station surrounded by a crowd, first drew their nightsticks “to save their own lives,” and when the crowd armed themselves with baseball bats and clubs, drew their guns and exchanged shots with the crowd. No other newspapers reproduced this narrative. The New York American simply said Quarterman had been shot by an unknown assailant, the Daily Mirror by a “stray bullet,” and the Daily News reported his assailant had escaped, stories which all implicitly assumed the police were not responsible for his death. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle explicitly expressed such an assumption in reporting Quarterman had been shot “presumably by rioters.” Only the Brooklyn Citizen stated directly that “Whether he had been shot by police or other rioters could not be determined.”
  
  Four of the six others shot and wounded during the disorder were Black men like Quarterman, one of unknown race, and one white police officer. As in his case, no one was arrested for any of those shootings (the man with whom the police officer struggled, James Thompson, was shot and killed by police).
   
• 1 2020-02-25T01:54:44+00:00 Detective Henry Roge assaulted 36 plain 2024-01-22T21:23:25+00:00 Just before 10 PM, police on 125th Street succeeded in dispersing the crowd in front of Kress’ store, moving them across the street and west on to 8th Avenue. Detective Henry Roge of the West 123rd Street Precinct and his partner, Raymond Gill, were among the police standing in front of the store, watching the crowd, backlit by the lighted store. A rock thrown from the crowd then struck Roge in the head, causing deep cuts to his eye and face. Gill claimed he saw a man appear from behind the cars parked on the street, look around, and throw the rock that hit Roge. At that moment there were no other objects being thrown at stores or police, so Gill was certain that it was that rock that hit his partner, and he was able to keep his eyes on the man who threw it. After chasing him through the crowd, he trapped him among the parked cars. Gill frisked the man, twenty-four-year-old James Hughes, and found five stones in his pockets; Hughes insisted the stones were to defend himself, and he had not thrown the rock that struck Roge.
  
  
  
  As Hughes was being arrested, Roge's injuries were bleeding profusely. A call for medical assistance brought Dr. Fabian of the Joint Disease Hospital to attend to the detective. New York Evening Journal photographers captured two images of a uniformed officer helping a bleeding Roge from the scene (the only images of an injured police officer published). One photograph taken at the scene shows Roge and the officer from the side. The officer is in the foreground, supporting Roge, who is leaning forward, his left hand over his eyes and forehead. A store display window is in the background, with what appears to be broken glass in front of it. In a photograph that may have been taken somewhere inside, Roge is in the foreground of the image, with a handkerchief covering his forehead and eyes. Next to him, a white uniformed patrolman has one arm behind Roge's back, guiding him, and is holding the lapel of Roge's jacket with his other hand, in which he has his baton. Over the patrolman's left shoulder is a Black man. The Daily Mirror also published an image of Roge and the uniformed officer, which may have been taken on the street, There are two Black men in the image, one behind the officer and one to right of the detective holding a handkerchief he appears to be offering the officer. This image was not published until April 3, when the newspaper miscaptioned it as showing a white man rather than a police officer, "One of the casualties in the Riot. The man was struck over the eyes with a stick. The policeman holds him until an ambulance arrives. But the victim was only one of many white persons injured in the mad Harlem riot."
  
  According to the record of medical attendances, Roge remained on duty after being attended by the doctor, but other sources reported that his injury required two stitches, which involved Roge being taken to Harlem Hospital. The Probation Department report recorded that Roge was on sick leave for ten days after his injury, making it more likely his injury required him to leave the scene for treatment.
  
  Hughes was tried and convicted of misdemeanor assault. The prosecutor’s notes on the trial suggest that Gill’s testimony stressed that he was certain of his identification of Hughes as the man who threw the rock, against which Hughes offered his denial and a series of character witnesses. In response, the prosecutor argued that Hughes “saw plenty of trouble – went right into it.” At the sentencing hearing, the judge expressed belief that Hughes had thrown the rock at the store window, not Roge, so sentenced him to a term of only three months in the Workhouse.
  
  As with other assaults, the press coverage of this case was fragmented. Roge appeared on the lists of those injured published by white newspapers the New York American (on both March 20 & 21), New York Evening Journal, Home News, Daily News, New York Herald Tribune, and New York Post, and in stories in the Daily Mirror. Hughes appeared in lists of those arrested published in the Black newspapers the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and the white New York Evening Journal. The two were linked in only three stories, in the New York Times, Home News, and Daily Worker. Even when Hughes was tried, producing additional coverage, only two of the five stories mentioned Roge. But that legal process did generate case files in both the DA’s office and the Probation Department, which provided details that are available for only a handful of the events of the disorder.
  
   
• 1 2021-11-10T20:44:32+00:00 United Cigar store windows broken 31 plain 2023-12-17T20:11:31+00:00 The United Cigar store on the northwest corner of West 125th Street and 7th Avenue had its windows broken during the disorder. All the businesses to the west of the store on West 125th Street in that building had windows broken; the Minks Haberdashery, Young's Hats, Savon Clothes store, General Stationery & Supplies store and the Willow Cafeteria. Only Young's Hats was reported looted. Businesses on the other corners had windows broken during the disorder; Regal Shoes on the southeast corner was also reported looted, while Herbert's Blue Diamond Jewelry store and the branch of the Chock Full O'Nuts restaurant chain on the southwest corner only had windows broken. Police trying to clear people from West 125th Street around Kress' store to the west had pushed the crowd toward this intersection, creating large crowds, some of whom broke away and threw objects at the windows of stores on 7th Avenue. After 9:00 PM, emergency trucks were stationed at the intersection, as part of the perimeter Inspector McAuliffe ordered police to establish around the main business blocks of the street, from 8th to Lenox Avenues, from 124th to 126th Streets, according to stories in the New York Times, Daily Mirror, New York Herald Tribune, and Pittsburgh Courier. The presence of such large numbers of police does appear to have resulted in only isolated looting of stores on the corners even if it came too late to protect store windows. With attacks on stores beginning with businesses closer to the Kress store, attacks on this store likely began around 9:00 PM, with more windows broken around 10:00 PM, and further damage possibly done around 10:30 PM.
  
  
  
  Across 7th Avenue from the United Cigar store, police officers armed with rifles stood guard in front of Herbert's Blue Diamond Jewelry store after the display windows were smashed. Patrolmen may also have guarded the cigar store; while there is no mention of their presence in newspaper stories, the Daily News published a photograph of an officer with a rifle guarding a store on West 125th and 7th Avenue with stock visible in the window that fits a cigar store but not any of the businesses on the other corners. One of the captions refers to the business as a drug store, but none of the business identified on the corners of the intersection are drug stores. Damage to the store window is visible to the left of the patrolman, two holes in the glass, in the original version of the image in Getty Images. Only a small section of the window is visible, so there may be more damage.
  
  The New York Herald Tribune, Daily Mirror, and the New York American included the cigar store among the seven businesses on West 125th Street between 8th Avenue and 7th Avenue that they identified as having windows broken, without giving the store's address. The store is also one of the businesses in a list of those with broken windows made by a reporter for La Prensa who walked along West 116th Street, up Lenox Avenue, and then west on West 125th Street on the day after the disorder. They gave the store's address as 2100 7th Avenue.
  
  No one arrested during the disorder is identified as breaking the business' windows. The MCCH business survey taken between June and December 1935 did record the white-owned store at 2100 7th Avenue, and it is visible in the Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941.
• 1 2021-11-10T21:45:03+00:00 Wise Shoe store windows broken 30 plain 2023-12-17T20:06:40+00:00 Wise Shoe store at 202 West 125th Street is one of the businesses in a list of those with broken windows made by a reporter for La Prensa who walked along West 116th Street, Lenox Avenue, and West 125th Street on the day after the disorder. After walking north on Lenox Avenue from West 116th Street, the reporter turned left on West 125th Street, walking west toward Kress' store where the disorder originated. The shoe store was one storefront to the west of the corner of 7th Avenue, on the block of West 125th Street where police clashed with crowds gathered in front of Kress' store.
  
  Windows were broken in large numbers of businesses on this block of West 125th Street. Two newspapers reported very extensive damage. Attacks on this store likely began around 7:30 PM or 8:00 PM, with more windows likely broken around 9:00 PM and further damage possibly done around 10:30 PM. "Practically every store window on the block had been shattered by 10 PM," according to the Home News; that damage was both less extensive and took longer in the New York Herald Tribune story: "By midnight one or more windows had been smashed in almost every storefront" on that block between 7th and 8th Avenues (although in another mention of that damage in the story it had been done by 8 PM). The New York Herald Tribune also listed seven specific stores with broken windows, all of which were also identified by the New York American, and six of which were reported in the Daily Mirror. Another business was identified by both the New York American and the Daily Mirror. No reason is given in those stories for why that mix of businesses were singled out. The reporter for La Prensa identified a total of nineteen businesses with broken windows between 7th and 8th Avenues, not including four identified by the other newspapers. Where the other newspapers mentioned only stores between 7th Avenue and Kress' store at 256 West 125th Street, the La Prensa reporter walked all the way to 8th Avenue. It is possible that other stores in this block suffered only minor damage; the La Prensa reporter concluded his list by noting he had not included others as they had only suffered minor damage ("y otras mas que por ser los danos ocasionados relativamente pequeños no creimus de interes catalogar entre los establecimientos ya mencionados").
  
  
  
  No other sources mention the Wise Shoe store, and no one arrested during the disorder is identified as breaking the business' windows. The MCCH business survey taken between June and December 1935 does record the white-owned business, giving its address as 200 West 125th Street not 202 West 125th Street. The shoe store is also visible in the Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941, with another storefront visible on the corner, which would have been the Chock Full O'Nuts luncheonette also recorded in the survey at 200 West 125th Street.
• 1 2021-11-14T20:35:53+00:00 Andy Florist store window broken 29 plain 2024-01-12T02:13:05+00:00 The Andy Florist store on the "corner of Eighth Ave" is one of the businesses in a list of those with broken windows made by a reporter for La Prensa who walked along West 116th Street, Lenox Avenue, and West 125th Street on the day after the disorder. After walking north on Lenox Avenue from West 116th Street, the reporter turned left on West 125th Street, walking west toward 8th Avenue. Based on the route the reporter took and the addresses of the other businesses in the list around the florist, the corner referred to is 8th Avenue and West 125th Street, and likely the southeast corner as there is evidence for businesses on the other corners, and all the damaged stores mentioned in La Prensa are on the eastern side of 8th Avenue. The Liggett drug store on the northeast corner of 8th Avenue and West 125th is also in the reporter's list. The Lazar department store is on the southwest corner, at 300 West 125th Street. The other corners are neither mentioned in reporting on the disorder nor appear in the MCCH business survey. There is a Tax Department photograph of the northwest corner, 2329 8th Avenue, taken between 1939 and 1941, that shows a cigar store, a business likely to have been present in 1935. Two vacant stores in the same building as the florist on the southeast corner of 8th Avenue are also listed by the reporter as having broken windows, 2324 8th Avenue and 2320 8th Avenue. It is possible that other stores around this corner suffered only minor damage; the La Prensa reporter concluded his list by noting he had not included others as they had only suffered minor damage ("y otras mas que por ser los danos ocasionados relativamente pequeños no creimus de interes catalogar entre los establecimientos ya mencionados").
  
  
  
  In the first hours of the disorder, crowds around Kress' store on West 125th Street moved down 8th Avenue to 124th Street, to the rear of the store. However, windows in the florist do not seem to have been broken then. Smashing glass was reported in the area around 8:00 PM and then again around 9:30 PM, and groups of people began moving south on 8th Avenue around 10:00 PM. The establishment of a police perimeter around the corners of 8th Avenue and West 125th Street beginning after 7:00 PM appears to have prevented merchandise from being taken from the store, even if it could not protect store windows. Only the Danbury Hat store north of 125th Street, next to the Liggett's drug store, was reported as being looted.
  
  No other newspapers mention the florist or identify stores with broken windows at this intersection. The businesses identified in the New York Herald Tribune, New York American, and Daily Mirror as having windows broken were east of Kress' store, near the intersection with 7th Avenue rather than 8th Avenue. No reason is given in those stories for why that mix of businesses were singled out. No one arrested during the disorder is identified as breaking the business' windows.
• 1 2021-11-14T21:49:24+00:00 Child's restaurant windows broken 28 plain 2024-01-18T22:26:21+00:00 The branch of the Child's restaurant chain at 272 West 125th Street had windows broken during the disorder. Spectators told a reporter from the Afro-American that they "watched a crowd of men break the windows and destroy food." The restaurant was "one of the first marks for rioters," according to that story. Located only three buildings west of Kress' store, the restaurant would have been in the path of crowds pushed toward 8th Avenue by police in their early attempts to clear West 125th Street. One witness on 125th Street at that time, Channing Tobias, then secretary of the Colored Division of the National Council of the YMCA, told E. Franklin Frazier, the head of the MCCH investigation, that Child's windows were "smashed up" after crowds "went all the way down the line," although the damage was "not much of a smash." More than location caused the windows to be broken, according to those quoted in the Afro-American. Child's was "a lily-white restaurant," so those watching "approved this vandalism because of the refusal of Child's to serve them." Along the same lines, Carlton Moss, a Black playwright, heard someone at 125th Street and 7th Avenue during the disorder claim, “We got Childs – Bastards don’t ‘llow Niggahs in dare, we got ‘em.” L. F. Cole expressed the same opinion in a letter to Arthur Garfield Hays during the MCCH investigation of the disorder, noting "Of course they do not tell us that they will not serve us, they just refuse to serve us." A New York Age reporter echoed that perception of the restaurant in reporting a survey of businesses on 125th Street a month after the disorder, noting "For a long time the opinion has prevailed in Harlem that this restaurant does not desire the patronage of Negroes." A manager's response did little to contradict that view. Noting that "colored people were welcomed as customers" as required by the Civil Rights law, he went on to say that "no effort was made to cater to their trade." Channing Tobias was confused by charges that Child's did not serve Black customers, as he had been served there, suggesting to Frazier that those who made that allegation were "too chicken hearted and assumed they would not serve colored people.”
  
  
  
  Windows were broken in large numbers of businesses on this block of West 125th Street between 7th and 8th Avenues, where police clashed with crowds gathered in front of Kress' store. Two newspapers reported very extensive damage. "Practically every store window on the block had been shattered by 10 PM," according to the Home News; that damage was both less extensive and took longer in the New York Herald Tribune story: "By midnight one or more windows had been smashed in almost every storefront" on that block between 7th and 8th Avenues (although in another mention of that damage in the story it had been done by 8 PM). However, the businesses identified in the New York Herald Tribune, New York American, and Daily Mirror as having windows broken were east of Kress' store, near the intersection with 7th Avenue rather than 8th Avenue. No reason is given in those stories for why that mix of businesses were singled out. The reporter for La Prensa who walked along 125th Street from Lenox Avenue to 8th Avenue listed only one business west of Kress' store, the branch of London Shoes at 276 West 125th Street. The scale of damage described in the Afro-American should have warranted inclusion in that list; it may have been repaired before the reporter walked by.
  
  No other sources mentioned broken windows in Child's restaurant. No one among those arrested during the disorder was identified as having broken windows in the restaurant. The restaurant does not appear in the MCCH business survey. It was no longer at this location by the time that the Tax department photograph was taken between 1939 and 1941, which instead showed Gonshaks department store, opened in August 1938, in a new building on the site. The restaurant closed in late May 1935, according to a story in the Pittsburgh Courier, which reported that it had been subject to a boycott over its refusal to serve Black customers, a change that had been made by "several other white restaurants in the same block, which had formerly discriminated against Negroes." Channing Tobias told Frazier the restaurant went out of business because it was "not getting enough business from whites to keep it open and Negroes did not go there — It was just losing all the time. It went out very suddenly.”
• 1 2020-03-11T21:25:32+00:00 Everett Breuer and Joseph Martin assaulted 25 plain 2024-01-24T01:28:07+00:00 Everett Breuer, a twenty-eight-year-old white photographer working for the Daily News, was taking images of the crowd at 7th Avenue and 125th Street when a rock hit him in the head. It was likely one of several objects thrown in Breuer’s direction as the office boy carrying his plates, Joseph Martin, was also hit on the face. Breuer’s own publication reported he was “beaten,” not hit by a rock, as did the New York American, but the Daily Mirror, Home News, New York Herald Tribune, and New York Times all reported him being hit by an object. The New York Evening Journal and New York Post reported only the resulting cuts. According to all the publications but the New York Evening Journal, Breuer’s cuts were bad enough to require a trip to the hospital. The stories disagreed on where he received treatment. The New York American, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, New York Times, and Daily Mirror reported it was at Harlem Hospital, the Home News at Sydenham Hospital on Manhattan Avenue and West 124th Street, and the Daily News at the Hospital for the Ruptured and Crippled on 42nd St and Lexington Avenue.
  
  James Martin attracted less attention than Breuer. Other than a mention in the story and an appearance in the list of the injured in the Daily News, Martin appeared only in the list of injured published by the New York Evening Journal. Both sources described him as having cuts on his face, with the latfter recording that an ambulance treated Martin.
  
  The area around 7th Avenue and 125th Street saw a cluster of assaults during the disorder, with six other assaults reported there, including the beating of another reporter, Harry Johnson of the New York American. It was also at this location that Andrew Lyons was killed. All those events occurred despite police being deployed at the intersection. The attack on Breuer and Martin may have occurred during violence around 8:00 PM or when several other white men were assaulted around 9:00 PM.
  
  
  
  A photograph Breuer took immediately before the rock struck him became the most widely reproduced image of the disorder. When it initially appeared in the Daily News, the caption noted “After making this picture, The News photographer was struck down and went to hospital. He suffered lacerations to the scalp.” In later editions that information was omitted, and it did not appear in the caption of the photograph when it was reprinted by other publications. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle list of the injured did report Breuer was "hit by a rock while taking pictures of a riotous group." The scene the photographer captured shows two black men apparently trying to move away from a uniformed police officer; one man has fallen, while the officer is trying to hold the other. Neither they nor the three men and two women in the background look poised to throw anything at the photographer.
   
• 1 2021-12-15T20:01:46+00:00 Henry Stewart arrested 24 plain 2023-11-28T22:14:42+00:00 Sometime during the disorder, Officer Libman of the 32nd Precinct arrested Henry Stewart, a thirty-three-year-old Black man, for allegedly having thrown a bottle through a window in the meat market at 2422 8th Avenue, a story in the Home News reported. There was no information on the time or circumstances of the arrest. The arrest may have taken place around 10:30 PM, when the disorder intensified and crowds spread from 125th Street along 8th Avenue, but more likely occurred later, around 11:00 PM, given how far north the store was located. Libman also appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court as the arresting officer of another man, Warren Johnson, and two women, Louise Brown and Rose Murrell, who, with Stewart, had all been arrested at 8th Avenue and West 127th Street, according to a story in the Daily Mirror. The broken window in 2422 8th Avenue was the northern-most report of disorder on 8th Avenue, on the block between 130th and 131st Streets, two and half blocks north of where the story reported Stewart's arrest. While the grocery store whose window Murell allegedly broke was located at that intersection, on the southeast corner of 127th Street, the location of Brown and Johnson's alleged offenses are not mentioned in any sources. The intersection may have been where police were stationed and where those arrested were initially brought, rather than the site of their arrest. The other reported broken windows and looting on 8th Avenue were south of 128th Street. Stewart lived at 268 West 132nd Street, east of 8th Avenue a block and a half north of the meat market, so may have been drawn to the noise and crowds on the avenue in the early evening of March 19. All six of the men and women arrested by police on 8th Avenue lived either west of the avenue or in the block between 8th and 7th Avenues.
  
  
  
  Henry Stewart was recorded in the 28th Precinct police blotter as charged with inciting a riot. That charge was reported in the lists published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, in the New York Evening Journal and the Daily News, and in a story in the Daily Mirror. However, malicious mischief was the charge recorded in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book on March 20, when Stewart appeared in court, and reported in the Home News story about those proceedings. Police appeared to have initially charged many of those arrested during the riot with inciting a riot and then revised those charges to fit the specific act that an individual was alleged to have committed before their arraignment in court. The others arrested by Libman were all charged with malicious mischief, although Brown and Johnson later had that charge reduced to disorderly conduct, indicating a lack of evidence they had broken windows. Magistrate Renaud transferred Stewart to the Court of Special Sessions and set bail at $500. That decision meant that the value of the damage to the building was not more than $250, the level required for the charge to be a felony. On March 25, the judges in that court discharged Stewart, according to the 28th Precinct police blotter. He was the only one of the six individuals tried for malicious mischief known to have been released (the outcome of three trials is unknown). Evidently police could not prove that Stewart had been a participant in the disorder rather than a spectator.
• 1 2021-12-15T20:00:50+00:00 Rose Murrell arrested 23 plain 2023-11-28T02:40:42+00:00 Sometime during the disorder, Officer Libman of the 32nd Precinct arrested Rose Murrell, a nineteen-year-old Black woman, for allegedly having "stoned a store window," in the grocery store at 2366 8th Avenue, a story in the Home News reported. There is no information on the time or circumstances of the arrest. Libman also appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court as the arresting officer of another woman, Louise Brown, and two men, Henry Stewart and Warren Johnson, who, with Murrell, had all been arrested at 8th Avenue and West 127th Street, according to a story in the Daily Mirror. While the grocery store was located at this intersection, on the southeast corner of 127th Street, the location of Brown and Johnson's alleged offenses are not mentioned in any sources, and the store in which Stewart allegedly broke a window was two and half blocks north of where the story reported his arrest. It is possible that the intersection was where police were stationed, where those arrested were initially brought, rather than the site of their arrest.
  
  
  
  The grocery store at 2336 8th Avenue was in the midst of the blocks of 8th Avenue on which there are reports of violence and police making arrests during the disorder: the arrest of James Hayes for allegedly looting the Danbury Hat store at 2334 8th Avenue near 125th Street; the arrest of Emmett Williams and Theodore Hughes for allegedly breaking windows and looting Frendel's meat market three buildings south at 2360 8th Avenue; the arrest of Thomas Babbitt for allegedly taking soap from Thomas Drug store at 2374 8th Avenue, across 127th Street; and at the very end of the disorder, the arrest of Jean Jacquelin at 128th Street for allegedly looting and police shooting and killing James Thompson across 8th Avenue from the store. Murrell lived at 260 West 126th Street, just east of 8th Avenue a block south of the grocery store, so may have been drawn to the noise and crowds on the avenue in the early evening of March 19. All six of the men and women arrested by police on 8th Avenue lived either west of the avenue or in the block between 8th and 7th Avenues.
  
  Rose Murrell is recorded in the 28th Precinct police blotter as charged with inciting a riot. That charge is reported in a list in the Daily News and a story in the Daily Mirror. However, the list of those arrested in the disorder published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and the list published in the New York Evening Journal include her among those charged with malicious mischief, an offense involving damage to property used in the prosecution of individuals arrested for allegedly breaking windows during the disorder. That was the charge recorded in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book on March 20, when Murrell appeared in court, and reported in the Home News story about those proceedings. Police appear to have initially charged many of those arrested during the riot with inciting a riot, and then revised those charges to fit the specific act that an individual was alleged to have committed before their arraignment in court. Magistrate Renaud transferred Murrell to the Court of Special Sessions, and set bail at $500, indicating that the value of the damage to the building was not more than $250, the level required for the charge to be a felony. Almost two weeks later, on April 1st, the judges in that court convicted Murrell and sentenced her to one month in the Workhouse, according to the 28th Precinct police blotter.
  
  Murell's name is spelled in different ways in the sources: as Murrell in the 28th Precinct police blotter and Harlem Magistrates Court docket and book and the Daily News and New York Evening Journal; as Murelle in the Daily Mirror; as Murell in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide; and as Morrell in the Home News.
• 1 2021-11-13T19:11:50+00:00 Blumstein department store windows broken 22 plain 2024-01-18T18:55:51+00:00 At about 10:30 PM, a brick broke a window of the Blumstein department store at 230 West 125th Street, likely a large display window, as it caused $200 damage. Patrolman Walter MacKenzie told the Harlem Magistrates Court that he saw Claude Jones, a twenty-four-year-old Black musician, throw the brick, and then shout "in a loud voice, 'Kill the cops, the dirty mother-fucking sons of bitches,' causing a large crowd to gather." By that time the large crowds that had been focused on 125th Street had broken into smaller groups, many of which scattered north and south up the avenues, as police established a perimeter around the block between 8th and 7th Avenues. Ten minutes after windows were broken in Blumstein's store, William Ford allegedly threw a rock that broke a window at Kress' store several buildings to to the west and then called on the people on the street to attack police, drawing a large crowd. Around the same time, a white man named Thomas Wijstem was hit by a rock in front of the W. T. Grant store immediately east of Blumstein's, allegedly while being attacked by a group of Black men. Jones lived four blocks south, at 170 West 121st Street, close enough to where the disorder began to have been among those drawn to 125th Street by the noise, crowds, or rumors.
  
  
  
  Windows were broken in large numbers of businesses on this block of West 125th Street. Two newspapers reported very extensive damage. "Practically every store window on the block had been shattered by 10 PM," according to the Home News; that damage was both less extensive and took longer in the New York Herald Tribune story: "By midnight one or more windows had been smashed in almost every storefront" on that block between 7th and 8th Avenues (although in another mention of that damage in the story it had been done by 8 PM). Blumstein's department store was one of seven businesses identified as having broken windows by the New York Herald Tribune, New York American, and Daily Mirror. No reason is given in those stories for why that mix of businesses were singled out. They were not just the largest stores, although the W. T. Grant and McCrory's department stores were also included. The United Cigar store spanned several storefronts on the corner on West 125th Street and 7th Avenue, but the other stores, Scheer's clothing store, Young's Hats, Willow Cafeteria, and the Conrad Schmidt music shop identified in the New York American and New York Herald Tribune, did not have similarly large displays. All the stores identified by these newspapers were located between Kress' store at 256 West 125th Street and 7th Avenue, so may have been the damaged stores that reporters could see. The Blumstein department store was also one of the nineteen businesses on this block with broken windows listed by a reporter for La Prensa who walked along West 125th Street on the day after the disorder. That list included businesses west of Kress' store.
  
  Only the New York American included the address of the department store, which was one of the best-known businesses in Harlem. The Blumstein department store was included in the MCCH business survey taken between June and December 1935 and is visible in the Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941.
  
  Claude Jones appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, charged with inciting a riot. Remanded in custody, he was returned to the court a week later, when Magistrate Ford held him on $1,000 bail for the grand jury. On April 12, they sent Jones to the Court of Special Sessions for trial, likely to be tried for the offenses written in a note on the Magistrates Court affidavit, both the misdemeanor forms of inciting a riot and malicious mischief, an offense involving damage to property used in the prosecution of those who allegedly broke windows during the disorder. Convicted by the judges in that court, Jones received a suspended sentence on April 16, according to the 28th Precinct police blotter.
• 1 2020-03-11T21:14:02+00:00 Detective Charles Foley assaulted 21 plain 2024-01-22T21:13:00+00:00 Detective Charles Foley, a thirty-two-year-old white officer from the 28th Precinct on West 123rd Street, was "struck by a stone thrown by some unknown person while at scene of riot in rear of Kress’ Store" on 124th Street, according to the Medical Attendance record of the ambulance that attended him. Dr. Sayet of Harlem Hospital treated Foley in front of Blumstein's department store, on 125th Street, at 7:30 PM, so the assault likely took place around 7:15 PM. Around the same time, a second officer, Patrolman Michael Kelly, was hit by an object at the rear of the store, where police had followed a crowd drawn to 124th Street around 7:00 PM by the appearance of a hearse they assumed had come for the body of the boy rumored to have been killed. Foley was one of the officers listed in a story in the New York Times as injured after "a barrage of missiles fell on the ranks of the police who had caught up with the crowd" after it moved from the front of the store. The street had a narrower roadway and pavements than 125th Street, making officers easier to target with objects thrown from roofs as well as the street level.
  
  
  
  The Medical Attendance record described Foley's injury as a "possible fracture of left shoulder." Lists in the Home News, New York Herald Tribune, Daily News, and New York Evening Journal, and a story in the New York Times identified him as having a shoulder injury. Three other papers, the New York American on March 20 and 21, the Daily Mirror, and the New York Post, instead listed a head injury, the most common injury resulting from being hit by objects. According to the New York Times, Foley "refused medical attention." Given that an ambulance attended him, that claim is likely a misstatement of the fact that he was not taken back to Harlem Hospital, as Kelly was, but treated at the scene.
  
  No one was arrested for assaulting Foley, as was the case in seven of the nine assaults on police.
  
   
• 1 2021-11-12T21:22:43+00:00 Willow Cafeteria windows broken 21 plain 2023-12-17T19:54:05+00:00 Around 8:50 PM, Officer Henry Eppler was stationed in front of the Willow Cafeteria at 207 West 125th Street, he told a public hearing of the MCCH, where he would have been part of the cordon police established around Kress' store. He allegedly saw Frank Wells, a twenty-six-year-old Black man, throw a automobile hubcap at the window and break it. Opposite the McCrory department store, the restaurant was at the western end of the building at the intersection of West 125th Street and 7th Avenue. All the businesses in the building to the east of the store had windows broken; the General Stationery & Supplies store, Savon Clothes store, Young's Hats, Minks Haberdashery, and the United Cigar store on the corner. Only Young's Hats was reported looted.
  
  Windows were broken in large numbers of businesses on this block of West 125th Street, where police clashed with crowds gathered in front of Kress' store. Two newspapers reported very extensive damage. "Practically every store window on the block had been shattered by 10 PM," according to the Home News; that damage was both less extensive and took longer in the New York Herald Tribune story: "By midnight one or more windows had been smashed in almost every storefront" on that block between 7th and 8th Avenues (although in another mention of that damage in the story it had been done by 8 PM). The Willow Cafeteria was one of seven businesses identified as having broken windows by the New York Herald Tribune, New York American, and Daily Mirror. No reason is given in those stories for why that mix of businesses were singled out. They were not just the largest stores, although the Blumstein and McCrory's department stores were included, together with the W. T Grant 5 & 10c store in the New York American and Daily Mirror. The United Cigar store spanned several storefronts on the corner on West 125th Street and 7th Avenue, but the other stores, Scheer's clothing store, Young's Hats, and the Conrad Schmidt music shop identified in the New York American and New York Herald Tribune, did not have similarly large displays. All the stores identified by these newspapers were located between Kress' store at 256 West 125th Street and 7th Avenue, so may have been the damaged stores that reporters could see. Willow Cafeteria store was also one of the nineteen businesses on this block with broken windows listed by a reporter for La Prensa who walked along West 125th Street on the day after the disorder. That list included businesses west of Kress' store.
  
  
  
  Only the New York American provided an address for Willow Cafeteria, 207 West 125th Street. The MCCH business survey taken between June and December 1935 located the white-owned business at 209 West 125th Street. However, the Tax Department photograph of that building taken between 1939 and 1941 shows that the cafeteria was one building further east, its sign partly visible beyond the canopy over the entrance to the Harlem Opera House. The cafeteria sign is also partly visible on the left in the Tax Department photograph of 2100-2106 7th Avenue.
  
  Eppler's testimony in the public hearing is the only evidence that specifically associates Wells with the Willow Cafeteria, which he identified by address, not name. A story in the New York Herald Tribune did say Wells had been arrested for allegedly "hurling an automobile hub through a cafeteria window on 125th Street," but did not name the cafeteria. On March 20, Wells appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court, one of the last arraigned after being one of the first arrested. The docket book recorded the charge against him as disorderly conduct, not malicious mischief, the offense involving damage to property that was the charge most often made against those alleged to have broken windows. That charge suggests that Wells did only limited damage to the window. He returned to court on March 26, at which time his bail was set at $500. Wells returned to court a further five times, according to the docket book, on April 9, 12, 17, 18, and finally on April 20, when he was convicted and sentenced to thirty days in the Workhouse.
• 1 2021-12-15T19:44:40+00:00 Grocery store window broken 21 plain 2024-01-24T21:46:39+00:00 Sometime during the disorder, the windows of the grocery store at 2366 8th Avenue, on the southeast corner of 127th Street, were broken. Officer Libman of the 32nd Precinct arrested Rose Murrell, a nineteen-year-old Black woman, for allegedly having "stoned a store window," a story in the Home News reported. There is no information on the time or circumstances of the arrest. Libman also appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court as the arresting officer of another woman, Louise Brown, and two men, Henry Stewart and Warren Johnson, who, with Murrell, had all been arrested at 8th Avenue and West 127th Street, according to a story in the Daily Mirror. The store was in the midst of the blocks of 8th Avenue on which there are reports of violence and police making arrests during the disorder: the arrest of James Hayes for allegedly looting the Danbury Hat store at 2334 8th Avenue near 125th Street; the arrest of Emmett Williams and Theodore Hughes for allegedly breaking windows and looting Frendel's meat market three buildings south at 2360 8th Avenue; the arrest of Thomas Babbitt for allegedly taking soap from Thomas Drug store at 2374 8th Avenue, just across 127th Street; and at the very end of the disorder, the arrest of Jean Jacquelin at 128th Street for allegedly looting and police shooting and killing James Thompson across 8th Avenue from the store.
  
  
  
  Rose Murrell appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, charged with malicious mischief, an offense involving damage to property used in the prosecution of individuals arrested for allegedly breaking windows during the disorder. Magistrate Renaud transferred her to the Court of Special Sessions, and set bail at $500. Almost two weeks later, on April 1st, the judges in that court convicted Murrell, and sentenced her to one month in the Workhouse, according to the 28th Precinct police blotter.
  
  A white-owned grocery store was recorded at 2366 8th Avenue in the MCCH business survey taken in the second half of 1935. The Tax Department photograph from 1939–1941 shows a grocery store at that address.
• 1 2021-11-13T21:12:16+00:00 General Stationery & Supplies store windows broken 20 plain 2023-12-17T20:08:30+00:00 The General Stationery & Supplies store at 205 West 125th Street is one of the businesses in a list of those with broken windows made by a reporter for La Prensa who walked along West 116th Street, Lenox Avenue, and West 125th Street on the day after the disorder. After walking north on Lenox Avenue from West 116th Street, the reporter turned left on West 125th Street, walking west toward Kress' store where the disorder originated. The stationery store was at the western end of the building on the corner of 7th Avenue, on the block of West 125th Street where police clashed with crowds gathered in front of Kress' store. All the stores in that building facing West 125th Street had windows broken; to the east, the Savon Clothes store, Young's Hats, Minks Haberdashery, and the United Cigar store on the corner; and to the west, the Willow Cafeteria. Only Young's Hats was reported looted.
  
  
  
  Windows were broken in large numbers of businesses on this block of West 125th Street. Two newspapers reported very extensive damage. Attacks on this store likely began around 7:30 PM or 8:00 PM, with more windows likely broken around 9:00 PM. "Practically every store window on the block had been shattered by 10 PM," according to the Home News; that damage was both less extensive and took longer in the New York Herald Tribune story: "By midnight one or more windows had been smashed in almost every storefront" on that block between 7th and 8th Avenues (although in another mention of that damage in the story it had been done by 8 PM). The New York Herald Tribune also listed seven specific stores with broken windows, all of which were also identified by the New York American, and six of which were reported in the Daily Mirror. Another business was identified by both the New York American and the Daily Mirror. No reason is given in those stories for why that mix of businesses were singled out. The reporter for La Prensa identified a larger group of nineteen businesses with broken windows between 7th and 8th Avenues, not including four identified by the other newspapers. It is possible that other stores in this block suffered only minor damage; the La Prensa reporter concluded his list by noting he had not included others as they had only suffered minor damage ("y otras mas que por ser los danos ocasionados relativamente pequeños no creimus de interes catalogar entre los establecimientos ya mencionados").
  
  No other sources mention the stationery store, and no one arrested during the disorder is identified as breaking the business' windows. The MCCH business survey taken between June and December 1935 does record the white-owned business. The stationery store was no longer at that address when the Tax Department photograph was taken between 1939 and 1941, a Crawford clothing store having opened there in December 1936.
• 1 2021-11-11T20:21:09+00:00 Scheer's Capitol clothing store windows broken 20 plain 2023-12-17T19:48:50+00:00 The Scheer's Capitol clothing store at 217 West 125th Street had windows broken during the disorder. Opposite the W. T. Grant and Blumstein department stores, the clothing store was four buildings from the intersection of West 125th Street and 7th Avenue, on the block of West 125th Street where police clashed with crowds gathered in front of Kress' store.
  
  Windows were broken in large numbers of businesses on this block of West 125th Street. Two newspapers reported very extensive damage. Attacks on this store likely began around 7:30 PM or 8:00 PM, with more windows likely broken around 9:00 PM and further damage possibly done around 10:30 PM. "Practically every store window on the block had been shattered by 10 PM," according to the Home News; that damage was both less extensive and took longer in the New York Herald Tribune story: "By midnight one or more windows had been smashed in almost every storefront" on that block between 7th and 8th Avenues (although in another mention of that damage in the story it had been done by 8 PM). Scheer's Capitol clothing store was one of seven businesses identified as having broken windows by the New York Herald Tribune, New York American, and Daily Mirror. No reason is given in those stories for why that mix of businesses were singled out. They were not just the largest stores, although the Blumstein and McCrory's department stores were included, together with the W. T Grant 5 & 10c store in the New York American and Daily Mirror. The United Cigar store spanned several storefronts on the corner on West 125th Street and 7th Avenue, but the other stores, the Willow Cafeteria, and Young's Hats, and Conrad Schmidt Music Shop identified in the New York American and New York Herald Tribune, did not have similarly large displays. Scheer's clothing store, which the New York Herald Tribune described as "a small clothing store," appears to have had an unusually narrow storefront, the space occupied by Westin Clothes in the Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941. All the stores identified by these newspapers were located between Kress' store at 256 West 125th Street and 7th Avenue, so may have been the damaged stores that reporters could see. Scheer's Capitol clothing store is not one of the nineteen businesses on this block with broken windows listed by a reporter for La Prensa who walked along West 125th Street on the day after the disorder. That list included businesses west of Kress' store. It may have been omitted because it had only minor damage; the La Prensa reporter concluded his list by noting he had not included others as they had only suffered minor damage ("y otras mas que por ser los danos ocasionados relativamente pequeños no creimus de interes catalogar entre los establecimientos ya mencionados").
  
  
  
  Only the New York American provided an address for Scheer's clothing store, 213 West 125th Street. The business is not recorded at that address in the MCCH business survey taken between June and December 1935. The store's location at 217 West 125th Street appeared in an advertisement in the New York Amsterdam News on March 24, 1934. That address is missing from the MCCH business survey. A second branch of the store appears in the advertisement, at 109 West 125th Street. That address may be a mistake, as the MCCH business survey records a Scheer's Capitol clothing store at 139 West 125th Street, an address that also appears in a advertisement in the New York Amsterdam News on March 30, 1940. The store at 217 West 125th Street does not appear in the Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941, indicating it closed sometime between 1935 and 1940.
• 1 2021-11-14T18:06:36+00:00 London shoe store windows broken 19 plain 2023-11-28T01:39:43+00:00 A branch of the London shoe store chain at 276 West 125th Street is one of the businesses in a list of those with broken windows made by a reporter for La Prensa who walked along West 116th Street, Lenox Avenue, and West 125th Street on the day after the disorder. After walking north on Lenox Avenue from West 116th Street, the reporter turned left on West 125th Street, walking west toward Kress' store where the disorder originated. The shoe store was two storefronts from the southeast corner of West 125th Street and 8th Avenue.
  
  
  
  Windows were broken in large numbers of businesses on this block of West 125th Street, on the block of West 125th Street where police clashed with crowds gathered in front of Kress' store. Two newspapers reported very extensive damage. "Practically every store window on the block had been shattered by 10 PM, according to the Home News; that damage was both less extensive and took longer in the New York Herald Tribune story: "By midnight one or more windows had been smashed in almost every storefront" on that block between 7th and 8th Avenues (although in another mention of that damage in the story it had been done by 8 PM). However, the businesses identified in the New York Herald Tribune, New York American, and Daily Mirror as having windows broken were all east of Kress' store, near the intersection with 7th Avenue rather than 8th Avenue. No reason is given in those stories for why that mix of businesses were singled out. The only mention of broken windows west of Kress' store came from the reporter for La Prensa, who walked West 125th Street all the way to 8th Avenue, and an anecdote regarding the Child's restaurant at 272 West 125th Street in the Afro-American. However, the shoe store is the only one of the nineteen businesses with broken windows between 7th and 8th Avenues the reporter identified that was west of Kress', together with five around the eastern corners of 8th Avenue. It is possible that other stores in this block suffered only minor damage; the La Prensa reporter concluded his list by noting he had not included others as they had only suffered minor damage ("y otras mas que por ser los danos ocasionados relativamente pequeños no creimus de interes catalogar entre los establecimientos ya mencionados").
  
  No other sources mention the London shoe store, and no one arrested during the disorder is identified as breaking the business' windows. The white-owned store is included in the MCCH business survey taken between June and December 1935. By the time the Tax Department photographs were taken between 1939 and 1941, a new department store had replaced the buildings at this address in 1935. (London shoes had relocated by January 8, 1938, when an advertisement gave its new address as 252 West 125th Street; a sign for London shoes can be seen at that address, left of Kress' store, in the Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941.)
• 1 2021-12-15T20:01:28+00:00 Louise Brown arrested 19 plain 2023-11-14T21:52:44+00:00 Sometime during the riot, Officer Libman of the 32nd Precinct arrested Louise Brown, a twenty-three-year-old Black woman. There was no information on Brown's alleged offense, or the time or circumstances of the arrest. The arrest likely took place around 10:30 PM or 11:00 PM, when the disorder intensified and crowds spread from 125th Street along 8th Avenue. Libman also appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court as the arresting officer of another woman, Rose Murrell, and two men, Henry Stewart and Warren Johnson, who, with Brown, had all been arrested at 8th Avenue and West 127th Street, according to a story in the Daily Mirror. Murrell and Stewart were alleged to have broken windows in two different stores, Murrell at 2366 8th Avenue and Stewart at 2422 8th Avenue. Brown and Johnson were also arrested for breaking windows, based on the charge against them, malicious mischief according to the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book. An offense involving damage to property, malicious mischief was used by prosecutors after the disorder only against individuals arrested for allegedly breaking windows. Brown has been treated as having been arrested for breaking windows on the basis of that charge even though there are no details of her alleged act.
  
  While the story in the Daily Mirror suggested Brown and Johnson had been arrested at the intersection, so likely had allegedly broken windows nearby, the store in which Stewart allegedly broke a window was two and half blocks north of where the story reported his arrest. It was possible that the intersection was where police were stationed, so where those arrested were initially brought, rather than the site of their arrest. Brown lived at 251 West 128th Street, just east of 8th Avenue, a block north of where she was reported arrested, so may have been drawn to the noise and crowds on the avenue in the early evening of March 19. All six of the men and women arrested by police on 8th Avenue lived either west of the avenue or in the block between 8th and 7th Avenues.
  
  
  
  Louise Brown was recorded in the 28th Precinct police blotter as charged with inciting a riot. That charge was reported in the lists published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, in the New York Evening Journal and in the Daily News, as well as in the story in the Daily Mirror. Police appeared to have initially charged many of those arrested during the riot with inciting a riot, and then revised those charges to fit the specific act that an individual was alleged to have committed before their arraignment in court. Prosecutors had changed the charge against Brown to malicious mischief by the time she appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20. Magistrate Renaud held Brown in custody until March 25, on bail of $500. When she was returned to court, the charge against Brown was reduced to disorderly conduct, malicious mischief crossed out in the docket book, "Red." written above it, and "DISORDERLY CONDUCT" stamped in its place. That change, to a lesser offense that did not involve damage to property, likely indicated a lack of evidence that Brown had broken a window. Instead, she was likely part of a crowd in the vicinity of the damaged store, arrested either by mistake or to get her off the street as part of police efforts to disperse the crowd. Disorderly conduct was an offense that could be adjudicated by a magistrate, unlike malicious mischief which would have been referred to another court. Magistrate Ford convicted Brown and gave her a suspended sentence. Warren Johnson, arrested with her and prosecuted in the same way, also received a suspended sentence.
• 1 2021-05-03T22:28:26+00:00 Young's Hat Store looted 17 plain 2023-12-02T03:35:24+00:00 Around 9:00 PM, rocks thrown from the crowd at 125th Street and 7th Avenue broke the windows of Young's Hat Store at 201 West 125th Street. That was the time of a crowd reportedly broke through the cordon police had established at the intersection on to 125th Street. All the other stores in the building on the northwest corner of West 125th Street and 7th Avenue that housed Young's Hat Store also had their windows broken sometime during the disorder; to the east, Minks Haberdashery and the United Cigar store on the corner; and to the west, the Savon Clothes store, the General Stationery & Supplies, store and the Willow Cafeteria. While the New York Herald Tribune, New York American, and Daily Mirror included the store as among those whose windows were broken around this time, a reporter from the New York Evening Journal, Joseph Mickler interviewed a clerk, Harry Krantz, who also described looting:

  About 9 o'clock last night the first gang began throwing ricks at my place and they broke the windows right out. Then they helped themselves to a new hat all around.
  They laughed when they did it and were having a great time--but they meant business.

  Mickler's story mistakenly gave the address as 201 West 126th Street, but the MCCH business survey located the store on 125th Street. The looting was later confirmed by a manager at the offices of the hat store chain, who told a MCCH investigator who visited on May 15, 1935 "that some stock was stolen from the window display." While numerous stores at this intersection, and all those in the building along 125th Street towards 8th Avenue had their windows broken during the disorder, only those on 7th Avenue were also looted — except Herbert's Blue Diamond jewelry store across 7th Avenue from Young's Hat Store, which police guarded. Police made only one arrest for looting in this area, at a shoe store on the southeast corner of the intersection diagonally across from the hat store. That arrest came around 11:00 PM, several hours after Krantz reported being attacked; in the interval more police had arrived and crowds had moved away from the area, providing an opportunity to make arrests lacking earlier.
  
  
  
  Krantz did not put a value on the stock taken during the disorder, but losses the store suffered did not cause it to go out of business, perhaps because only goods from the window display were stolen. The white-owned store appears in the MCCH business survey (although the location cannot be clearly seen in the Tax Department photographs of the corner from 1939–1941).

• 1 2020-03-11T21:31:45+00:00 Harry Johnson assaulted 15 plain 2023-11-18T03:29:16+00:00 Harry Johnson, a white reporter for the New York American, was walking on 125th Street at 7th Avenue, when a group of three Black men allegedly attacked him. The Daily Mirror published the most sensational account, describing a cry ringing out, “There’s a reporter. Get Him!” Where the New York American reported that the group then “severely” beat Johnson, the Daily Mirror had them “badly” kick him, implying he had been knocked to the ground. The New York Herald Tribune and Brooklyn Daily Eagle listed Johnson as the victim of a different form of assault, hit by a bottle, while the Times Union simply described him as "slugged unconscious." The New York Evening Journal, in listing him among the injured, mentioned only that he had "bruises of face," not how he came about those wounds. Given the lack of details in those reports, and that the New York American had direct access to Johnson, he is categorized as assaulted by a group.
  
  
  
  The Daily Mirror continued the drama of its narrative by reporting that Johnson "refused to go off duty and stuck to his job.” Another version of that story published in the Times Union had Johnson call his paper after being assaulted and "stay[ing] on the job until another man had been sent to relieve him." He then appears to have sought medical treatment. The New York American reported Johnson received treatment at Harlem Hospital, although he did not appear in those records, while the New York Evening Journal reported that he was treated by an ambulance surgeon. The sensational treatment of the assault on Johnson in the Daily Mirror might have owed something to Johnson's brother George working as a reporter for that newspaper, according to a Times Union story about Johnson's death following a car accident five months after the disorder.
  
  The area around 125th Street and 7th Avenue saw a cluster of assaults throughout the disorder, and a fatal shooting, including the other reported attacks on a member of the press, the New York Daily News photographer Everett Breuer and his assistant Joseph Martin. Reporters likely gathered in this area as police established their headquarters at the intersection and it was accessible by the subway at 125th Street and Lenox Avenue, and near to Kress’ store, the starting point for the riot. No time is given for the assault on Johnson, or on Breuer and Martin.
• 1 2021-11-13T22:48:20+00:00 Savon Clothes store windows broken 15 plain 2023-12-17T21:59:42+00:00 A branch of the Savon Clothes chain at 203 West 125th Street is one of the businesses in a list of those with broken windows made by a reporter for La Prensa who walked along West 116th Street, Lenox Avenue, and West 125th Street on the day after the disorder. After walking north on Lenox Avenue from West 116th Street, the reporter turned left on West 125th Street, walking west toward Kress' store where the disorder originated. The clothing store was in the building on the corner of 7th Avenue, on the block of West 125th Street, "two doors west of 7th Ave," according to an advertisement in 1934. All the businesses in that building facing West 125th Street had windows broken; to the east, Young's Hats, Minks Haberdashery and the United Cigar store on the corner; and to the west, General Stationery & Supplies and Willow Cafeteria. Only Young's Hats was reported looted.
  
  
  
  Windows were broken in large numbers of businesses on this block of West 125th Street, where police clashed with crowds gathered in front of Kress' store. Two newspapers reported very extensive damage. Attacks on this store likely began around 7:30 PM or 8:00 PM, with more windows likely broken around 9:00 PM and again around 10:30 PM. "Practically every store window on the block had been shattered by 10 PM," according to the Home News; that damage was both less extensive and took longer in the New York Herald Tribune story: "By midnight one or more windows had been smashed in almost every storefront" on that block between 7th and 8th Avenues (although in another mention of that damage in the story it had been done by 8 PM). The New York Herald Tribune also listed seven specific stores with broken windows, all of which were also identified by the New York American, and six of which were reported in the Daily Mirror. Another business was identified by both the New York American and the Daily Mirror. No reason is given in those stories for why that mix of businesses were singled out. The reporter for La Prensa identified a larger group of nineteen businesses with broken windows between 7th and 8th Avenues, not including four identified by the other newspapers. It is possible that other stores in this block suffered only minor damage; the La Prensa reporter concluded his list by noting he had not included others as they had only suffered minor damage ("y otras mas que por ser los danos ocasionados relativamente pequeños no creimus de interes catalogar entre los establecimientos ya mencionados").
  
  No other sources mention Savon Clothes, and no one arrested during the disorder is identified as breaking the business' windows. The MCCH business survey taken between June and December 1935 records the white-owned business. The details of the business at that address when the Tax Department photograph was taken between 1939 and 1941 are not visible.
• 1 2021-12-15T20:02:06+00:00 Warren Johnson arrested 13 plain 2023-12-02T02:54:56+00:00 Sometime during the riot, Officer Libman of the 32nd Precinct arrested Warren Johnson, an eighteen-year-old Black man. There was no information on Johnson's alleged offense, or the time or circumstances of the arrest. The arrest likely took place around 10:30 PM or 11:00 PM, when the disorder intensified and crowds spread from 125th Street along 8th Avenue. Libman also appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court as the arresting officer of two women, Rose Murrell and Louise Brown, and another man, Henry Stewart, who, with Johnson, had all been arrested at 8th Avenue and West 127th Street, according to a story in the Daily Mirror. Murrell and Stewart were alleged to have broken windows in two different stores, Murrell at 2366 8th Avenue and Stewart at 2422 8th Avenue. Johnson and Brown likely also allegedly broke store windows, based on the charge against all four of those Libman arrested, malicious mischief, according to the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book. An offense involving damage to property, malicious mischief was used by prosecutors after the disorder only against individuals arrested for allegedly breaking windows. Johnson has been treated as having been arrested for breaking windows on the basis of that charge even though there are no details of his alleged act.
  
  While the story in the Daily Mirror suggested Johnson and Brown had been arrested at the intersection, so likely were alleged to have broken windows nearby, the store in which Henry Stewart allegedly broke a window was two and half blocks north of where the story reported his arrest. It is possible that the intersection was where police were stationed, where those arrested were initially brought, rather than the site of their arrest. Johnson lived at 206 West 121st Street, a block east of 8th Avenue and six blocks north of where he was reported arrested. All six of the men and women arrested by police on 8th Avenue lived either west of the avenue or in the block between 8th and 7th Avenues, but the others lived north of 125th Street, considerably closer than Johnson.
  
  
  
  Warren Johnson was recorded in the 28th Precinct police blotter as charged with inciting a riot. That charge was reported in the lists published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, in the New York Evening Journal and in the Daily News, as well as in the story in the Daily Mirror. Police appear to have initially charged many of those arrested during the riot with inciting a riot, and then revised those charges to fit the specific act that an individual was alleged to have committed before their arraignment in court. Prosecutors had changed the charge against Johnson to malicious mischief by the time he appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20. Magistrate Renaud held Johnson in custody until March 25, on bail of $500. When he was returned to court, the charge against Johnson was reduced to disorderly conduct, malicious mischief crossed out in the docket book, "Red." written above it, and "DISORDERLY CONDUCT" stamped in its place. That change, to a lesser offense that did not involve damage to property, likely indicated a lack of evidence that Johnson had broken a window. Instead, he was likely part of a crowd in the vicinity of the damaged store, arrested either by mistake or to get him off the street as part of police efforts to disperse the crowd. Disorderly conduct was an offense that could be adjudicated by a magistrate, unlike malicious mischief, which would have been referred to another court. Magistrate Ford convicted Johnson and gave him a suspended sentence. Louise Brown, arrested with him and prosecuted in the same way, also received a suspended sentence.
• 1 2020-03-11T21:50:13+00:00 Patrolman Harry Whittington assaulted 13 plain 2023-12-15T04:17:44+00:00 Just after midnight, Patrolman Harry Whittington, a thirty-five-year-old white member of Emergency Squad 9 (a riot squad) was hit by a rock on 8th Avenue. The Daily Mirror provided the most details of the assault. The story reported that the attack came as the emergency truck on which Whittington rode passed West 123rd Street. Only Whittington and one other officer were reported as being assaulted after crowds moved away from 125th Street around 10:00 PM. The other seven reported assaults on police occurred in the initial disorder around Kress’ store.  
  
  
  
  After 10:00 PM, when the crowd moved away from 125th Street, police used patrolling radio cars and emergency trucks to respond to violence and to try to control crowds. Cars and buses driven by whites were also targets of rocks thrown by black crowds throughout the disorder. However, those attacks took place on 7th Avenue, the major route to the Bronx and northern neighborhoods, not the less traveled 8th Avenue. The one other police vehicle reported as being hit by rocks, a car driven by Detective Frank Lenahan, was also attacked on “a riotous section of Eighth Avenue” at an unspecified time. The windows of the car were smashed, but Lenahan was not injured. Whittington did not have windows to shield him from missiles. Most of the members of an emergency squad traveled on the outside of the vehicle.
  
  As well as the detail that Whittington was assaulted while riding on an emergency truck, the Daily Mirror described the attack as a “sniping,” a sensational term used to heighten the threat associated with the violence.
  
  Whittington appeared in lists of the injured published by the New York American (on March 20 & 21), Home News, New York Herald Tribune, Daily News, New York Evening Journal, and New York Post, as well as the story published in the Daily Mirror. Although the New York American and the New York Herald Tribune reported he was treated at Harlem Hospital, he did not appear in either the list of admissions or the ambulance call-outs. The Home News and New York Evening Journal described his injuries simply as lacerations; the other lists specified a head injury.
  
   
• 1 2021-11-13T20:44:08+00:00 Adler's shoe store windows broken 13 plain 2024-01-11T21:57:34+00:00 Adler's shoe store at 215 West 125th Street is one of the businesses in a list of those with broken windows made by a reporter for La Prensa on the day after the disorder. After walking north on Lenox Avenue from West 116th Street, the reporter turned left on West 125th Street, walking west toward Kress' store where the disorder originated. Opposite the W. T. Grant and Blumstein department stores, the shoe store was four buildings from the intersection of West 125th Street and 7th Avenue, on the block of West 125th Street where police clashed with crowds gathered in front of Kress' store.
  
  Windows were broken in large numbers of businesses on this block of West 125th Street. Two newspapers reported very extensive damage. Attacks on this store likely began around 7:30 PM or 8 PM, with more windows likely broken around 9 PM and further damage possibly done around 10:30 PM. "Practically every store window on the block had been shattered by 10 PM," according to the Home News; that damage was both less extensive and took longer in the New York Herald Tribune story: "By midnight one or more windows had been smashed in almost every storefront" on that block between 7th and 8th Avenues (although in another mention of that damage in the story it had been done by 8 PM). Two other stores in the building housing Adler's shoe store, Scheer's Capitol clothing store and the Conrad Schmidt music store, are among the seven mentioned as having broken windows by the New York Herald Tribune, New York American, and Daily Mirror. No reason is given in those stories for why that mix of businesses was singled out; Adler's may have been damaged less or later than those stores. The reporter for La Prensa identified a total of nineteen businesses with broken windows between 7th and 8th Avenues, not including four identified by the other newspapers. Where the other newspapers mentioned only stores between 7th Avenue and Kress' store at 256 West 125th Street, the La Prensa reporter walked all the way to 8th Avenue. It is possible that other stores in this block suffered only minor damage; the La Prensa reporter concluded his list by noting he had not included others as they had only suffered minor damage ("y otras mas que por ser los danos ocasionados relativamente pequeños no creimus de interes catalogar entre los establecimientos ya mencionados").
  
  
  
  No other sources mention Adler's shoe store, and no one arrested during the disorder is identified as breaking the business' windows. The MCCH business survey taken between June and December 1935 does record the white-owned business. The shoe store is also visible in the Tax Department photograph of 213-217 125th Street taken between 1939 and 1941.
• 1 2021-12-15T22:17:50+00:00 Meat market window broken 13 plain 2023-11-28T02:01:29+00:00 Sometime during the disorder, a store window in the meat market at 2422 8th Avenue was broken. Officer Libman of the 32nd Precinct arrested Henry Stewart, a thirty-three-year-old Black man, for allegedly having thrown a bottle through the window, a story in the Home News reported. There is no information on the time or circumstances of the arrest. Libman also appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court as the arresting officer of another man, Warren Johnson, and two women, Louise Brown and Rose Murrell, who, with Stewart, had all been arrested at 8th Avenue and West 127th Street, according to a story in the Daily Mirror. The broken window was the northernmost report of disorder on 8th Avenue, on the block between 130th and 131st Streets. The other reported broken windows and looting were south of 128th Street.
  
  Henry Stewart appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, charged with malicious mischief, an offense involving damage to property. Magistrate Renaud transferred him to the Court of Special Sessions, and set bail at $500. On March 25, the judges in that court discharged Stewart, according to the 28th Precinct police blotter. That outcome indicated that whatever evidence police had presented to the Magistrate did not indicate to those judges that Stewart was responsible for the broken window.
  
  
  
  A white-owned meat market is recorded at 2422 8th Avenue in the MCCH business survey taken in the second half of 1935. The nature of the business is not visible in the Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941.
• 1 2021-11-12T22:17:11+00:00 W. T. Grant department store windows broken 12 plain 2023-12-17T20:04:16+00:00 The W. T. Grant department store at 226 West 125th Street had windows broken during the disorder. Between the Blumstein department store to the west and the McCrory's department store to the east, the W. T. Grant store was close to the intersection of West 125th Street and 7th Avenue, on the block of West 125th Street where police clashed with crowds gathered in front of Kress' store. No one arrested during the disorder is identified as breaking the business' windows.
  
  Windows were broken in large numbers of businesses on this block of West 125th Street. Two newspapers reported very extensive damage. Attacks on this store likely began around 7:30 PM or 8:00 PM, with more windows likely broken around 9:00 PM and further damage possibly done around 10:30 PM. "Practically every store window on the block had been shattered by 10 PM," according to the Home News; that damage was both less extensive and took longer in the New York Herald Tribune story: "By midnight one or more windows had been smashed in almost every storefront" on that block between 7th and 8th Avenues (although in another mention of that damage in the story it had been done by 8 PM). The W. T. Grant store was one of seven businesses identified as having broken windows by the New York American, and Daily Mirror (but is missing from a list in the New York Herald Tribune that otherwise included the same stores). No reason is given in those stories for why that mix of businesses were singled out. They were not just the largest stores, although the Blumstein and McCrory's department stores were included. The United Cigar store spanned several storefronts on the corner on West 125th Street and 7th Avenue, but the other stores, Scheer's clothing store, Young's Hats, Willow Cafeteria, and the Conrad Schmidt music shop identified in the New York American and New York Herald Tribune, did not have similarly large displays. All the stores identified by these newspapers were located between Kress' store at 256 West 125th Street and 7th Avenue, so may have been the damaged stores that reporters could see. The W. T. Grant store was also not one of the nineteen businesses on this block with broken windows listed by a reporter for La Prensa who walked along West 125th Street on the day after the disorder. That list included businesses west of Kress' store.
  
  
  
  Neither newspaper included the address of the department store. W.T. Grant was included in the MCCH business survey taken between June and December 1935, and is visible in the Tax department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941.
• 1 2021-11-13T20:30:46+00:00 Mylady's store windows broken 11 plain 2023-12-17T20:05:59+00:00 Mylady's store at 206 West 125th Street is one of the businesses in a list of those with broken windows made by a reporter for La Prensa on the day after the disorder. After walking north on Lenox Avenue from West 116th Street, the reporter turned left on West 125th Street, walking west toward Kress' store, where the disorder originated. The store was three storefronts to the west of the corner of 7th Avenue, on the block of West 125th Street where police clashed with crowds gathered in front of Kress' store.
  
  Windows were broken in large numbers of businesses on this block of West 125th Street. Two newspapers reported very extensive damage. Attacks on this store likely began around 7:30 PM or 8:00 PM, with more windows likely broken around 9:00 PM and further damage possibly done around 10:30 PM. "Practically every store window on the block had been shattered by 10 PM," according to the Home News; that damage was both less extensive and took longer in the New York Herald Tribune story: "By midnight one or more windows had been smashed in almost every storefront" on that block between 7th and 8th Avenues (although in another mention of that damage in the story it had been done by 8 PM). The New York Herald Tribune also listed seven specific stores with broken windows, all of which were also identified by the New York American, and six of which were reported in the Daily Mirror. Another business was identified by both the New York American and the Daily Mirror. No reason is given in those stories for why that mix of businesses were singled out. The reporter for La Prensa identified a total of nineteen businesses with broken windows between 7th and 8th Avenues, not including four identified by the other newspapers. Where the other newspapers mentioned only stores between 7th Avenue and Kress' store at 256 West 125th Street, the La Prensa reporter walked all the way to 8th Avenue. It is possible that other stores in this block suffered only minor damage; the La Prensa reporter concluded his list by noting he had not included others as they had only suffered minor damage ("y otras mas que por ser los danos ocasionados relativamente pequeños no creimus de interes catalogar entre los establecimientos ya mencionados").
  
  
  
  No other sources mention the Mylady's store, and no one arrested during the disorder is identified as breaking the business' windows. The store does not appear in the MCCH business survey taken between June and December 1935, but it is visible in the Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941.
• 1 2021-11-13T19:36:06+00:00 McCrory's 5 & 10c store windows broken 11 plain 2023-12-17T20:04:51+00:00 McCrory's 5 & 10c store at 216 West 125th Street had windows broken during the disorder. Between the W. T. Grant department store to the west and the Woolworth's 5 & 10c store to the east, the McCrory's store was close to the intersection of West 125th Street and 7th Avenue, on the block of West 125th Street where police clashed with crowds gathered in front of Kress' store. No one arrested during the disorder is identified as breaking the business' windows.
  
  Windows were broken in large numbers of businesses on this block of West 125th Street. Two newspapers reported very extensive damage. Attacks on this store likely began around 7:30 PM or 8:00 PM, with more windows likely broken around 9:00 PM and further damage possibly done around 10:30 PM. "Practically every store window on the block had been shattered by 10 PM," according to the Home News; that damage was both less extensive and took longer in the New York Herald Tribune story:  "By midnight one or more windows had been smashed in almost every storefront" on that block between 7th and 8th Avenues (although in another mention of that damage in the story it had been done by 8 PM). The McCrory's store was one of seven businesses identified as having broken windows by the New York Herald Tribune, New York American, and Daily Mirror. No reason is given in those stories for why that mix of businesses were singled out. They were not just the largest stores, although the Blumstein and W. T Grant's department stores were included. The United Cigar store spanned several storefronts on the corner on West 125th Street and 7th Avenue, but the other stores, Scheer's clothing store, Young's Hats, Willow Cafeteria, and the Conrad Schmidt music shop identified in the New York American and New York Herald Tribune, did not have similarly large displays. All the stores identified by these newspapers were located between Kress' store at 256 West 125th Street and 7th Avenue, so may have been the damaged stores that reporters could see. McCrory's store was also one of the nineteen businesses on this block with broken windows listed by a reporter for La Prensa who walked along West 125th Street on the day after the disorder. That list included businesses west of Kress' store.
  
  Only the New York American included the address of the department store. McCrory's store was included in the MCCH business survey taken between June and December 1935, and is visible in the Tax department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941.
  
  
• 1 2022-12-15T16:03:39+00:00 Lino Rivera grabbed & Charles Hurley and Steve Urban assaulted (Part 2) 10 plain 2023-12-17T18:50:45+00:00 Until police found Rivera, newspapers described the boy caught shoplifting as a younger Black child, in line with the rumors and leaflets circulating in Harlem. Louise Thompson heard from the women she spoke to in Kress' store that a "colored boy" aged ten to twelve years had been beaten. The signs carried by the Young Liberators who picketed the store an hour or so later referred to a "Negro child," while the leaflets their organization distributed another hour later later described a "12 year old Negro boy." The first newspaper stories repeated those descriptions. The New York American mentioned a "colored boy" and a "10-year-old Negro boy," the Daily News a 12-year-old "colored boy," the New York Evening Journal a 15-year-old "Negro boy," the Daily Mirror a "little colored boy," the Home News a "young colored boy," and the New York Sun a "Negro boy." Early stories in some Black newspapers featured similar descriptions, a "small Negro boy" in the Norfolk Journal and Guide and a 10-year-old "colored boy" in the Indianapolis Recorder on March 23, or simply referred to the boy's age, not his race, a 16-year-old boy in the Atlanta World on March 21, a 12-year-old boy in the New York Age, a 14-year-old boy in the Chicago Defender, and a 16-year-old boy in the Afro-American and Pittsburgh Courier on March 23. Newspapers published on March 20 after police found Rivera identified him as a 16-year-old Puerto Rican, in the New York Post, New York World-Telegram, and Brooklyn Daily Eagle or a "Puerto Rican youth" in the New York Herald Tribune, Times Union, and Brooklyn Citizen (although later in that story Rivera was referred to as a "Negro"). (The New York World-Telegram also pointed to the differences between Rivera and the boy of the rumors by putting Negro in quotation marks when reporting the rumors and the text of the Young Liberators leaflet.) By contrast, the New York Times referred to a 16-year-old "Negro boy" even after Rivera had been found, as did the New York Sun and New York Evening Journal. While the New York Times did eventually identify Rivera as Puerto Rican when he appeared in the Adolescents court after the disorder, the New York Evening Journal continued to describe Rivera as "Negro," while the New York Sun made no mention of his race. Those newspapers' persistent use of "Negro" may have been intended to convey that Rivera was dark-skinned; the New York American described him in those terms, as a "dark-skinned 16-year-old Porto Rican" in a story reporting an interview with the boy in his home, while the Brooklyn Daily Eagle described him as a "Negro born in Porto Rico." Editions of the other newspapers published after Rivera was found, including the Black newspapers, simply switched to identify him as Puerto Rican. (Historian Lorrin Thomas argued that the New York Amsterdam News "failed to identify Rivera as Puerto Rican, referring to him instead as a 'young Negro boy,'" but did not provide a citation. The March 23 issue of that newspaper is missing the news sections, but the March 30 issue identified Rivera as a "16-year-old Puerto Rican youth.")
  
  Stories in the New York Evening Journal, Home News, La Prensa, and Daily Worker misidentified Hurley and Urban as store detectives. None mentioned the store detective, Smith, perhaps because he was not bitten and therefore not identified in any official records. He may also have been confused with Jackson Smith, the store manager. Many stories gave the manager a larger role than he played, involved in grabbing Rivera and making the decision to release him with Rivera in this office. That expanded role came at the expense not only of the store detective but also the police. Only the Daily News, and a vague statement in the New York Post story of what Rivera said mentioned that officers were at the store. The Daily News included only Eldridge, misidentifying him as the officer who released Rivera. Rivera said “two policeman came in” after he bit the men, the New York Post reported. The New York Evening Journal, Daily News, Atlanta World, and Philadelphia Tribune stories quoting Rivera omitted that statement.
  
  Several newspaper stories included a Black woman interceding or screaming when the store staff grabbed Rivera, which some accounts claimed precipitated broader disorder. The statements of those on the scene suggest any outcry came when Donahue and Urban took Rivera into the basement. Rivera testified in the public hearing that a woman screamed “They’re going to take him down the cellar and beat him up!” While Hurley made no mention of that scream, L. F. Cole, a thirty-year-old Black clerk, did testify that when he saw Donahue and Urban taking Rivera to the basement “a woman made a statement that the boy had been struck.” Cole's choice not to describe the woman as screaming suggests the possibility that the woman simply called out, with the gendered language of the press rendering any shouting by a woman as a scream. "They're beating that boy! They're killing him!" were the “screams” reported by the New York Evening Journal. Speeding up events, the New York American, New York Post, and Atlanta World, and the New Republic, describe the woman as running into the street, screaming "Kress beat a colored boy! Kress Beat a colored boy!" according to the New York American. The New York Sun made this response collective: “Emotional Negro women shouted that the boy was being beaten and this information was quickly relayed to the curious crowds which had gathered in front of the store.” Rather than reacting, the woman intervened in the narrative presented in Home News and La Prensa, and was pushed aside by Hurley, after which she screamed.
  
  Margaret Mitchell was identified as the woman who reacted to Rivera being grabbed in the New York Evening Journal, Home News, Philadelphia Tribune, and La Prensa (and later in stories about those arrested in the New York Amsterdam News, Afro-American, New York Post, and New York Times). Here journalists with a truncated timeline of events were assuming that as she was arrested in Kress’ store it must have been when Rivera was grabbed. However, Donahue told the public hearing he had not made an arrest, and none of the store staff mentioned an arrest at this time. The circumstances of Mitchell's arrest recorded by police, the testimony of Louise Thompson, and the New York Sun story suggest that it took place after the store was closed, as police tried to clear out the women who remained inside, with an officer named Johnson making the arrest. Similarly, in describing customers struggling with Hurley and Urban or attacking displays as Rivera was taken away, the narratives of the New York Sun, La Prensa, and the Home News collapsed together events that took place at different times. Testimony in the public hearings identified that struggle as coming later, when Kress’ manager decided to close the store and police cleared out those inside.
  
  Several newspapers also published statements by Rivera made either at the West 123rd Street station after Eldridge, awoken at 1:30 AM, had located him and brought him to a police station around 2:00 AM, or in his home the next day that provided more details of what happened before and when he was grabbed than the broad narratives. The New York Evening Journal, New York Herald Tribune, Daily News, New York Post, New York Sun, Atlanta World, and Philadelphia Tribune quoted Rivera at the police station describing biting the men and the threat to beat him that had precipitated that struggle. In an ANS agency photograph of Rivera standing with Lt. Battle taken at that time, journalists can be seen taking notes. It’s not clear if they questioned Rivera directly, or recorded answers he gave to police officers: the Daily News reported his statements as told to Deputy Chief Inspector Frances Kear, the New York Evening Journal and New York Sun reported he talked to Captain Richard Oliver, and the New York Herald Tribune quoted Eldridge rather than Rivera. The New York Evening Journal story also mentioned the reporter speaking with Rivera. The New York World-Telegram and New York Herald Tribune published stories quoting statements made by Rivera at this home later on March 20; a New York American story combined statements from the station and at his home. The Daily News simply published a photograph of Rivera flexing his biceps, presumably to demonstrate that he was unharmed. The information that before entering Kress', Rivera had gone to Brooklyn looking for work, having left high school six months earlier, that his mother needed help because his father was dead, was reported in the interviews published in the New York American and New York Herald Tribune. His father's death was also reported in La Prensa and the Brooklyn Citizen. Only the New York Herald Tribune, New York Evening Journal, and New York Sun reported that Rivera went to a show after returning from Brooklyn. Only La Prensa reported that Rivera had a job when he first left school. That interview with Rivera in his home focused on emphasizing his lack of responsibility for the disorder and willingness to try to pacify the crowds had he been asked, and contained no details of what had happened in the store as he did not want to talk about them. That focus was in line with La Prensa's concern to distance Puerto Rican residents from the disorder. Rivera gave an account of what happened in the store again when he appeared in the Adolescents Court on March 23 for inserting slugs in a subway turnstile before the disorder, in answer to questions from the magistrate.
  
  The MCCH public hearings elicited more details of the assault, with Rivera, the two police officers, and Hurley all testifying, together with Jackson Smith, the store manager. Provided in five separate hearings spread over nearly six weeks, that testimony described the roles of Officers Donahue and Eldridge, which were missing from the initial newspaper reports. Few newspapers included these new details in their stories about the hearings. The most extensively reported hearing was the first, on March 30, in which Donahue testified. A majority of newspapers highlighted Donahue’s decision to release Rivera through the rear of the store rather than in view of concerned customers as a mistake, with several reporting that Donahue had admitted that mistake. However, the hearing transcript did not include such a statement. Instead, it was Edward Kuntz, one of the ILD lawyers in the audience, who offered that assessment while questioning the officer. After Donahue testified that crowds on 125th Street caused him to take Rivera into the store, Kuntz commented, “If you had let the boy go at that time there would not have been any excitement.” Eldridge and Hurley did not testify until three weeks later, and Jackson Smith until two weeks after that, when they were not given any attention in the briefer newspaper stories about those hearings.
  • Lino Rivera grabbed & Charles Hurley and Steve Urban assaulted in secondary sources
  • Lino Rivera grabbed & Charles Hurley and Steve Urban assaulted (Part 1)
• 1 2021-11-14T00:32:57+00:00 Minks Haberdashery store windows broken 10 plain 2023-12-18T03:14:50+00:00 Minks Haberdashery store at 201 West 125th Street is one of the businesses in a list of those with broken windows made by a reporter for La Prensa who walked along West 116th Street, Lenox Avenue, and West 125th Street on the day after the disorder. After walking north on Lenox Avenue from West 116th Street, the reporter turned left on West 125th Street, walking west toward Kress' store where the disorder originated. The store was in the building on the corner of 7th Avenue, on the block of West 125th Street. All the businesses in that building had windows broken; to the east, the United Cigar store on the corner; and to the west, Young's Hats, Savon Clothes, General Stationery & Supplies, and Willow Cafeteria. Only Young's Hats was reported looted.
  
  Windows were broken in large numbers of businesses on this block of West 125th Street, where police clashed with crowds gathered in front of Kress' store. Two newspapers reported very extensive damage. Attacks on this store likely began around 7:30 PM or 8:00 PM, with more windows likely broken around 9:00 PM and again around 10:30 PM. "Practically every store window on the block had been shattered by 10 PM, according to the Home News; that damage was both less extensive and took longer in the New York Herald Tribune story: "By midnight one or more windows had been smashed in almost every storefront" on that block between 7th and 8th Avenues (although in another mention of that damage in the story, it had been done by 8 PM). The New York Herald Tribune also listed seven specific stores with broken windows, all of which were also identified by the New York American, and six of which were reported in the Daily Mirror. Another business was identified by both the New York American and the Daily Mirror. No reason is given in those stories for why that mix of businesses were singled out. The reporter for La Prensa identified a larger group of nineteen businesses with broken windows between 7th and 8th Avenues, not including four identified by the other newspapers. It is possible that other stores in this block suffered only minor damage; the La Prensa reporter concluded his list by noting he had not included others as they had only suffered minor damage ("y otras mas que por ser los danos ocasionados relativamente pequeños no creimus de interes catalogar entre los establecimientos ya mencionados").
  
  
  
  No other sources mention Minks Haberdashery, and no one arrested during the disorder is identified as breaking the business' windows. The MCCH business survey taken between June and December 1935 records the white-owned business. The store sign is visible to the left of the United Cigar store in this Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941.
• 1 2021-11-14T04:00:47+00:00 Simco shoe store window broken 8 plain 2023-12-01T02:59:32+00:00 A branch of the Simco shoe store chain at 246 West 125th Street is one of the businesses in a list of those with broken windows made by a reporter for La Prensa who walked along West 116th Street, Lenox Avenue, and West 125th Street on the day after the disorder. After walking north on Lenox Avenue from West 116th Street, the reporter turned left on West 125th Street, walking west toward Kress' store where the disorder originated. The shoe store was on the west side of Blumstein's department store, in the middle of the block between 7th and 8th Avenues.
  
  Windows were broken in large numbers of businesses on this block of West 125th Street, on the block of West 125th Street where police clashed with crowds gathered in front of Kress' store. Two newspapers reported very extensive damage. "Practically every store window on the block had been shattered by 10 PM," according to the Home News; that damage was both less extensive and took longer in the New York Herald Tribune story: "By midnight one or more windows had been smashed in almost every storefront" on that block between 7th and 8th Avenues (although in another mention of that damage in the story it had been done by 8 PM). The New York Herald Tribune also listed seven specific stores with broken windows, all of which were also identified by the New York American, and six of which were reported in the Daily Mirror. Another business was identified by both the New York American and the Daily Mirror. No reason is given in those stories for why that mix of businesses were singled out. The reporter for La Prensa identified a total of nineteen businesses with broken windows between 7th and 8th Avenues, not including four identified by the other newspapers. Where the other newspapers mentioned only stores between 7th Avenue and Kress' store at 256 West 125th Street, the La Prensa reporter walked all the way to 8th Avenue. It is possible that other stores in this block suffered only minor damage; the La Prensa reporter concluded his list by noting he had not included others as they had only suffered minor damage ("y otras mas que por ser los danos ocasionados relativamente pequeños no creimus de interes catalogar entre los establecimientos ya mencionados").
  
  
  
  No other sources mention the Simco shoe store, and no one arrested during the disorder is identified as breaking the business' windows. The store is not included in the MCCH business survey taken between June and December 1935, but does appear in the Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941.
• 1 2021-11-13T19:50:33+00:00 Woolworth's 5 & 10c store windows broken 8 plain 2023-12-17T20:05:21+00:00 Woolworth's 5 & 10c store at 210 West 125th Street is one of the businesses in a list of those with broken windows made by a reporter for La Prensa who walked along West 116th Street, Lenox Avenue, and West 125th Street on the day after the disorder. After walking north on Lenox Avenue from West 116th Street, the reporter turned left on West 125th Street, walking west toward Kress' store where the disorder originated. The Woolworth's store was one building to the west of the corner of 7th Avenue, on the block of West 125th Street where police clashed with crowds gathered in front of Kress' store.
  
  Windows were broken in large numbers of businesses on this block of West 125th Street. Two newspapers reported very extensive damage. Attacks on this store likely began around 7:30 PM or 8:00 PM, with more windows likely broken around 9:00 PM and further damage possibly done around 10:30 PM. "Practically every store window on the block had been shattered by 10 PM," according to the Home News; that damage was both less extensive and took longer in the New York Herald Tribune story: "By midnight one or more windows had been smashed in almost every storefront" on that block between 7th and 8th Avenues (although in another mention of that damage in the story it had been done by 8 PM). The New York Herald Tribune also listed seven specific stores with broken windows, all of which were also identified by the New York American, and six of which were reported in the Daily Mirror. Another business was identified by both the New York American and the Daily Mirror. No reason is given in those stories for why that mix of businesses were singled out; the three department stores immediately west of Woolworth's store are included. The reporter for La Prensa identified a total of nineteen businesses with broken windows between 7th and 8th Avenues, not including four identified by the other newspapers. Where the other newspapers mentioned only stores between 7th Avenue and Kress' store at 256 West 125th Street, the La Prensa reporter walked all the way to 8th Avenue. It is possible that other stores in this block suffered only minor damage; the La Prensa reporter concluded his list by noting he had not included others as they had only suffered minor damage ("y otras mas que por ser los danos ocasionados relativamente pequeños no creimus de interes catalogar entre los establecimientos ya mencionados").
  
  
  
  The only other mention of windows broken in Woolworth's store is a passing reference in the New York Evening Journal: "Windows were smashed and the rioting Negroes swarmed into stores. First the Woolworth "five and ten" then McCrory's and then the department store right and left in both sides of the street.” (No other sources reported such looting, so that claim was apparently a product of the sensationalization and exaggeration that marked that publication's stories about the disorder.) No one arrested during the disorder is identified as breaking the business' windows. Woolworth's 5 & 10c store appears in the MCCH business survey and is visible in the Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941.
• 1 2021-11-12T19:37:52+00:00 Howard suits store windows broken 6 plain 2023-12-17T19:47:40+00:00 The Howard Suits store at 217 West 125th Street had windows broken during the disorder. Opposite the W. T. Grant and Blumstein department stores, the clothing store was four buildings from the intersection of West 125th Street and 7th Avenue, on the block of West 125th Street where police clashed with crowds gathered in front of Kress' store.
  
  Windows were broken in large numbers of businesses on this block of West 125th Street. Two newspapers reported very extensive damage. Attacks on this store likely began around 7:30 PM or 8:00 PM, with more windows likely broken around 9:00 PM and further damage possibly done around 10:30 PM. "Practically every store window on the block had been shattered by 10 PM, according to the Home News; that damage was both less extensive and took longer in the New York Herald Tribune story: "By midnight one or more windows had been smashed in almost every storefront" on that block between 7th and 8th Avenues (although in another mention of that damage in the story it had been done by 8 PM). Howard Suits was one of a small number of businesses identified as having broken windows by the Daily Mirror; the New York Herald Tribune and New York American mentioned the same seven businesses other than this clothing store. No reason is given in those stories for why that mix of businesses were singled out. They were not just the largest stores, although the Blumstein and McCrory's department stores were included, together with the W. T Grant 5 & 10c store in the New York American. The United Cigar store spanned several storefronts on the corner on West 125th Street and 7th Avenue, but the other stores, the Conrad Schmidt music shop, Willow Cafeteria, Young's Hats, and Scheer's clothing store, did not have similarly large displays. All the stores identified by these newspapers were located between Kress' store at 256 West 125th Street and 7th Avenue, so may have been the damaged stores that reporters could see. The music shop is not one of the nineteen businesses on this block with broken windows listed by a reporter for La Prensa who walked along West 125th Street on the day after the disorder. That list included businesses west of Kress' store. Other stores on the block might also have been damaged; the La Prensa reporter concluded his list by noting he had not included others as they had only suffered minor damage ("y otras mas que por ser los danos ocasionados relativamente pequeños no creimus de interes catalogar entre los establecimientos ya mencionados").
  
  
  
  The Daily Mirror did not give an address for the store, and mispelled the name "Coward suits." The store does not appear in the MCCH business survey, which did not record any businesses at 217 West 125th Street. Howard suits is visible in the Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941, between two other locations that had windows broken, Adler shoes at 215 West 125th Street, and the former location of Scheer's clothing store at 217 West 125th Street.