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• 1 2020-03-11T21:54:28+00:00 Lino Rivera grabbed & Charles Hurley and Steve Urban assaulted 151 plain 2022-11-15T19:26:08+00:00 When Charles Hurley, a floorwalker, and Kress' store detective confronted Lino Rivera, an unemployed sixteen-year-old Puerto Rican boy, about stealing a pocketknife in Kress’ store, and started pushing him out of the store, the boy bit the hands of Hurley and a white window dresser who came to their aid, Steve Urban. Although having initially indicated that they wanted Rivera charged with assault, the two men ultimately did not ask police to arrest him. The incident is treated here as an assault as the New York Evening Journal, New York Post, New York American and Daily News listed the two men among the injured.
  
  As the incident between Rivera and the store staff triggered the disorder, it was widely reported in the press and a topic investigated by the MCCH. This analysis relies on testimony given in MCCH public hearings, by far the most complete and detailed evidence. Newspaper narratives varied in detail, consistently reporting only that a boy had been grabbed by store staff for taking merchandise, and later released, but omitting most other details. Several white newspapers also published separate stories based on statements made by Rivera at the West 123rd Station during the disorder or at his home the next day that included additional details of why he was in the store and his encounter with the store staff but not of subsequent events in the store.
  
  Rivera had begun the day by taking the subway to Brooklyn, in pursuit of job as an errand boy, he told reporters for the New York American and New York Herald Tribune. Finding the job already filled, he returned to Harlem. Getting off the subway at West 125th Street, Rivera decided to go to a show or movie at one of the theaters that lined the street, perhaps at the Apollo Theater opposite Kress' store, as a story in the New York Evening Journal claimed. When the show ended, Rivera went into Kress' store, a detail also reported in the New York Sun. He said he did so because he had "nothing to do," according to the New York Post, "just to look around I guess," according to the New York World-Telegram, or "to walk through to 124th Street," according to the New York American, "to take a short cut home," according to the New York Herald Tribune.  Testifying in a public hearing of the MCCH, Hurley, a twenty-eight-year-old white resident of the Bronx, said he was with the store manager Jackson Smith in an office overlooking the rear of the store when he saw Rivera take a pocketknife from a counter around 2.30 PM. Calling down to the store detective, he pointed out Rivera and then headed to the floor himself. Rivera later admitted to reporters that he did take the knife, after it "caught his eye," according to the New York Post or "attracted" him according to the New York World-Telegram and New York American, or because it "matched a fountain pen set he had," according to the New York Herald Tribune. (The New York Sun mistakenly reported that it was chocolate that Rivera had taken). When Rivera denied having the knife, Hurley took it from the boy’s pocket. Both Rivera and Hurley testified that the men started to push him out of the store. According to Hurley, near the front door Rivera became scared and started to lash out at them. Rivera reportedly told journalists from the New York World-Telegram, New York Post and New York Evening Journal that he had told the men he could walk out on his own, and tried to shake free of their hold, "really started fighting" when, as he also testified in a MCCH hearing, Hurley said, "Let's take him down the cellar and beat hell out of him.” Hurley denied making that statement; he told the MCCH hearing that he held Rivera around his shoulders while the store detective tried to calm the boy. As a struggle developed, another store employee, Steve Urban, a thirty-nine-year-old white window dresser, also grabbed hold of Rivera, according to Hurley. Once the group was through the front door and into the store's vestibule, a recessed area of the street surrounded by display windows, the store detective went to get a Crime Prevention Bureau officer. That police agency provided an alternative to having children arrested; its officers instead undertaking investigations of their conditions in order to refer them to social agencies to better prevent “juvenile delinquency.” Kress store staff turned most of the boys they caught shoplifting over to the Crime Prevention Bureau, according to Hurley, and had police arrest only one or two a week.
  
  Sometime after the store detective left, Rivera bit both Hurley and Urban on the hands and wrist, "trying to get away," he told a public hearing, reportedly explaining to journalists from that New York World-Telegram and New York Post that "I didn't want a licking." The struggle in the vestibule attracted the attention of Patrolman Donahue, who was the nearest of several police officers on West 125th Street at the time (identified in some newspapers as a traffic officer and by Rivera in a MCCH hearing as a mounted patrolman). Donahue took Rivera back into the store, to near the candy counter at the front, to get away from a curious crowd gathering on 125th Street, and sent an officer to get an ambulance to provide treatment for Hurley and Urban. (He told the MCCH hearing that the officer was his partner Keel, or another patrolman named Walton; the call log records the man's name as Miller, who was later identified by the store manager as a Black officer). The telephone call to Headquarters was logged at 2:30 PM, followed by one from Police Headquarters to Harlem Hospital at 2:35 PM, with the ambulance bringing Dr. Sayet recorded in the hospital records as having arrived at 2:40 PM. Those records provide better evidence of the timing of the incident than Donahue’s testimony that he witnessed the struggle at 2:15 PM. Soon after the ambulance arrived, the manager, Jackson Smith came to the front of the store, he testified in a public hearing, after being told a crowd had gathered by a staff member. Informed that a Crime Prevention Bureau officer had been called, Smith decided there was “nothing further for him to do,” and he returned to his office. A few minutes later Alfred Eldridge, a Black Crime Prevention Bureau officer, arrived. Usually the store staff would have turned Rivera over to Eldridge, who would have taken Rivera with him. However, on this occasion Hurley and Urban told Eldridge they wanted the boy arrested and charged with assault. Hurley told a public hearing he had gone to the rear of the store before Eldridge arrived, and did not want Rivera arrested, but the officer was clear that he spoke with both Hurley and Urban. The store manager similarly told a later public hearing that “Hurley wants to press charges for biting.” Eldridge could not take Rivera with him if he was arrested: “The job and purpose of our bureau is not to arrest a child," the told the MCCH hearing. He telephoned his superior, and told him that “the 5 & 10 wanted the boy arrested.” In response that officer told him to “let the patrolman take care of it due to the fact that he was first on case.” So after about 25 minutes at Kress, around 3:15 PM, Eldridge left the store.
  
  However, Eldridge testified he later found out that soon after he left, “the store officials changed their mind.” Donahue simplified those events in the public hearing, testifying that “The boy was not arrested, but was taken through the basement to 124th Street and sent home.” He did not mention Eldridge or who reversed the decision to arrest Rivera. Hurley’s self-interested statement that he did not want him arrested made Urban responsible. Urban himself was not among those who testified before a MCCH public hearing.  It does seem that it was Urban who Donahue said was with him when he released Rivera; the officer referred to him not by name but as “the window dresser.” They took Rivera out the rear rather than on to 125th Street as there was a crowd in front of the store and Donahue “didn’t want to start something,” he told a public hearing. He was clearly anxious enough about the situation in the store to ignore another option that Eldridge had given him, “that in the event that Kress Store did not want to press charges, that the boy could be handed over to us for supervision,” according to the Crime Prevention Bureau officer’s testimony. After releasing Rivera on to 124th Street, Donahue left the store, at around 3.30 PM. Many of the fifty or so mostly black women shopping in the store observed these events, after their attention had been attracted by the struggle between the two men and Rivera, and the appearance of an ambulance. None of these women testified in a public hearing. A Black man named L. F. Cole told a MCCH public hearing that he saw Rivera being taken to the basement by two men.  As they had not seen Rivera leave the store, groups of women concerned to find out what had become of him remained in the store until Smith closed it and police pushed them out sometime around 5:00 PM or 5:30 PM.
  
  Bites are a relatively minor injury, and the hospital record indicates that both men received treatment at the scene and were not taken to the hospital. Hurley did still have a scar when he testified at a MCCH public hearing on April 20. Hays examined it, announcing that “I should say enough [of a scar] to indicate there was a bite,” adding in response to a question from the audience that he saw four teeth marks.” Only one other individual in the disorder is described as having been bitten, Arthur Block, a Black man. He appears among lists of the injured in only three publications, with no details provided of the circumstances in which he was assaulted.
  
  The significantly less detailed narratives of what happened between Rivera and the store staff published in newspapers largely reflected what Inspector Di Martini told a journalist working for the Afro American and others in front of the store around 7.30 PM: "A boy stole some little article here this afternoon. The manager caught him, grabbed him by the arm, and was taking him in the back when a woman screamed. The crowd gathered. The manager did not press charges, and let the boy go home through the back.” (At the at time, Di Martini’s information came only from interviewing Jackson Smith and Hurley, as both Donahue and Eldridge were off duty and would not learn of the disorder until the next day). Missing from that narrative was Rivera biting the men, which was also missing from stories in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, New York World-Telegram and New York Evening Journal, and Daily Worker. However, the assault was mentioned in the New York American, Home News, New York Sun, New York Herald Tribune, New York Times, Daily News, New York Post, Atlanta World, New York Age, Philadelphia Tribune, Pittsburgh Courier, La Prensa and in Time magazine and the New Republic. Only the New York American, Daily News and New York Herald Tribune included language that gave a particular slant to the assault, with the New York American and Daily News describing Rivera as “hysterical” in his response to being grabbed by Hurley and the store detective, while the New York Herald Tribune labelled him pugnacious. The New York Age reported that “someone” had hit Rivera, the New York Herald Tribune and Brooklyn Daily Eagle that Hurley or Urban “slapped him", or “slugged him” according to the Pittsburgh Courier, with the New York Age mistakenly reporting that he was being treated at Harlem Hospital. That story was in a special edition of the New York Age published in the midst of the confusion early in the disorder. Two stories, in the New York American and New York Sun, had Rivera leave the store rather than being released. A story in The New Republic by white journalist Hamilton Basso included dialogue, almost certainly invented, between Rivera and the two men who grabbed him and comments from a crowd around him (Basso also mixed up the sequence of events inside and outside the store after Rivera's release).
  
  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 A.M, 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 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.
  
  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, 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 Donohue 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 Donohue 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.
  
  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 MCCH Reports
  • Lino Rivera grabbed & Charles Hurley and Steve Urban assaulted in secondary sources
• 1 2020-02-25T19:43:29+00:00 Looting (66) 122 plain 2022-09-26T15:12:58+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 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 do figure prominently in press photographs, highlighting 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-six looted businesses are identified in the surviving sources, twenty-nine linked to arrests, with nine stores linked to more than one arrest. An additional seventy-two businesses are identified as having 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 is 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 appear in photographs whose location cannot be determined are 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 providing food make up the largest group (24 of 55). Clothing was also a target (18 of 55), while the remaining businesses sold a variety of goods (13 of 55). Missing from this partial list of businesses attacked during the disorder are large stores and several enterprises prominent in the neighborhood: beauty shops, and barbers. There are sixteen individuals charged with looting unidentified businesses. Two looted businesses that appear in photographs whose location cannot be determined are 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 indicate 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, which appears 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 (AM, AA, Hobbs investigation).  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, but it is not clear how often that happened. Many of these businesses were still operating 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 identifying the business as Black-owned, which spared them from looting if not always from having windows broken. Around 10PM, as crowds began to move away from the block of 125th Street containing Kress’ store, where police were concentrated, assaults and attacks on stores 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, lasting until around 2 AM. This 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, some with their doors and windows protected by iron gates and grills. 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, having been looted first. Even the return of some businessowners, once they learned of the disorder, did little to prevent looting, with several reporting futile efforts to secure police assistance. The progression from violence and damage to looting also features in the later racial disorders, in Harlem and Detroit in 1943, and in Detroit in 1967. As Sydney Fine argues was the case in Detroit in 1967, that pattern locates looting as a consequence of the violence, not as the defining characteristic of the disorder, and as serving to prolong disorder.
  
  The progression from damage to looting also reflected time for additional groups to join the crowds of men most prominent in the initial violence. In later racial disorders, women would be 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 5.40AM, after the crowds had left the streets, in possession of clothing stolen from a tailor down the block from his home. Louis Tunick, 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, sparing Black-owned businesses. The press reports allowed that a small number of Black-owned businesses did suffer damage, either before identifying themselves with signs, or after crowds became less discriminating (MCCH). 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 Hispanic/Puerto Rican businesses around 116th Street, and Chinese laundries scattered throughout the neighborhood.
  
  Police responded to looting very differently than to crowds and attacks on stores, with a greater degree of violence and more arrests. Theft warranted 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 such as petit larceny or disorderly conduct. Those arrests far outnumbered those arrested for any other activity during the disorder (although what prompted the arrest of 30 of the 133 arrested is not known). Officers generally claimed to have seen an individual stealing goods from a business. 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, as 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 involving goods of too little value to warrant treatment as felonies. District attorneys followed the same pattern with those individuals as at other times in 1935, negotiating guilty pleas for lesser offenses with most, so that only two prosecutions for looting went to trial.
  
  As these 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 on the basis of a nineteenth-century municipal law that held a city or county liable if their property was destroyed or injured by a mob or riot. One hundred and six owners brought actions, twenty-five of who were identified in newspaper stories. The first of those suits heard in the Municipal Court was brought by William Feinstein, who owned 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 2020-10-01T00:07:06+00:00 Harry Gordon arrested 97 plain 2022-11-21T18:32:57+00:00 Around 6.30 PM, Patrolman Irwin Young arrested Harry Gordon, a twenty-year-old white student on the north sidewalk of West 125th Street near 7th Avenue. Gordon had climbed a lamppost to speak to the crowd that police had pushed east, away from Kress’s store; Young pulled him down. The Patrolman alleged that Gordon then grabbed his nightstick and hit him with it; Gordon denied doing anything. Young and other officers dragged Gordon thirty feet to a police radio car and drove him to the police station on West 123rd Street, he told a public hearing of the MCCH.
  
  As soon as the radio car reached 7th Avenue, out of sight of the crowd on 125th Street, Gordon told the MCCH hearing that the police officer driving “Go ahead and hit him’ to the officer next to him, and both men “poked him in the ribs and kicked him.” When the car got to the station, Young pushed him up against the wall of the station and clubbed him in the stomach. Police officers continued to beat and kick Gordon when he was put in a cell, taken upstairs for questioning and fingerprinted. As a result of these attacks, Gordon testified, “I had two black eyes. Had bumps on my head. My shins were bruised.” When he was bailed and released forty-eight hours after being arrested, his lawyer described Gordon’s face as “entirely discolored,” so much so that he took Gordon to his home so his mother would not see his injuries, he told the public hearing. The man identified as Gordon has no visible injuries in photographs taken a few seconds apart published in the Daily News and New York Evening Journal  that purported to show him and the three other white men police arrested in front of Kress’ store on their way to the Harlem Magistrates Court. However, one of the men was only partly visible, behind the other three, and could be injured. The caption to the Daily News photo suggests otherwise, labeling all the men "unmarked by the race riots."
  
  Gordon was among the group of around eighty-nine of those arrested put in a line-up and questioned by detectives in front of reporters downtown at Police Headquarters on the morning of March 20, before being loaded into patrol wagons and taken back uptown to the Harlem and Washington Heights Magistrates Courts. Gordon was brought to the platform together with Daniel Miller and the three Young Liberators arrested at other times protesting in front of Kress's store, a New York Herald Tribune story noted, with police presenting the group as acting and arrested together. However, Gordon's actions overshadowed the larger group in stories about the line-up. While Gordon stood on the "klieg-lit platform," Captain Edward Dillon questioned him about his role in the disorder in an exchange reported in three newspapers. The briefest mention appeared in the Daily Mirror, which reported the details of the setting, but only that "under the grilling conducted by Acting Capt. Edward Dillon" Gordon declared "I am a student at City College of New York" and "refused to answer further questions." The reporter described Gordon's manner as "defiant." Other reporters conveyed a similar judgment in their portrayals of Gordon. The New York Herald Tribune described him as "a tall, lanky youth [who] thrust one hand in his pocket and struck an orator's attitude" during the questioning; the New York Sun described his pose as "Napoleonic." Neither of those stories mention Gordon identifying himself as a student; they instead quote him as refusing to answer questions until he saw a lawyer; the New York Sun reported Gordon as saying:

  "I have no comment to make until I see my lawyer. I understand that anything I might say would be used against me."
  
  "If you are not guilty why do you want to see a lawyer?" he was asked.
  
  "I know all that," he replied with a wave of his hand "But I won't talk until I see my lawyer."

  The Daily Mirror concluded that Gordon, in responding as he did, "had practically declared himself the inciter of the night's rioting" and the leader of the four others arrested at the beginning of the disorder. Gordon himself, testifying at the MCCH hearing, set himself apart, as a passerby who had attempted to urge the crowd to go to the police for information. Inquiries by reporters from the New York Evening Journal found no evidence that Gordon was a City College Student, with the New York Herald Tribune reporting Dean Morton Gottschall did not find him in college records. The New York Evening Journal did confirm that he lived in the Bronx, at 699 Prospect Avenue.
  
  Gordon did not appear in the MCCH transcription of the 28th Precinct Blotter, nor did Miller and the two white Young Liberators arrested in front of Kress’ store. Margaret Mitchell, the Black woman arrested inside Kress' store before Miller's arrest and Claudio Viabolo, the Black Young Liberator arrested with two white companions soon after Miller, do appear in the transcription. That discrepancy suggests that the white men were omitted from the transcription, perhaps overlooked because they were somehow less readily identified as participants in the disorder among others arrested for unrelated activities at that time.
  
  Gordon appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, shortly after Daniel Miller and the three Young Liberators with who police had grouped him. The charge recorded in the Magistrates Court Docket book was assault, which was the charge reported by New York American, New York Evening Journal, New York Times and New York Herald Tribune. A second list in the New York Evening Journal, a later story in the New York Herald Tribune, and the New York Amsterdam News, Daily Mirror and New York Sun reported Gordon had been charged with both offenses. The Home News, New York Post, New York World-Telegram, New York Age, and the list published by the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, reported the charge against Gordon as inciting a riot.
  
  The mistaken information about the charge could result from police continuing to group Gordon with the Miller and the three Young Liberators when he appeared in court. the Am, HN, NYHT, and NYT all described the men as the "ringleaders" of the disorder, which was likely the term police used, in stories on the court appearances. However, while the DN, HT, and DM included all five men in that group, the Am, HN, and NYT omitted Gordon. That difference appears to have resulted from Gordon being arraigned separately from Miller and the other three men. That separation was likely because he was charged with assault, the other men with riot, and the officer listed as arresting Gordon was Patrolman Irwin Young not Patrolman Shannon, the arresting officer recorded in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book for Miller and the three other men.
  
  The Daily Mirror claimed Gordon was heard separately when he indicated that he would produce his own lawyers." While being held, Gordon testified, he had not been not allowed to contact a lawyer or his family and was not fed until he had been in custody for more than twenty-four hours and had been arraigned in the Magistrate's Court. In the courthouse on March 20, Gordon was able to make contact with an ILD lawyer, Isidore Englander. The attorney testified that while he was speaking with Frank Wells, who he had learned had been arrested, he saw Gordon, who he claimed not to know, and spoke with him after his arraignment. Gordon asked him to communicated with Edward Kuntz, another ILD lawyer, whose son Gordon testified was a friend. Kuntz would represent him in subsequent court appearances. After Gordon was taken away, Englander heard him scream, the result, Gordon claimed, of being beaten again by police officer. The attorney made no mention of the visible injuries on Gordon’s face that Gordon and Kuntz described in their testimony.
  
  Magistrate Renaud remanded Gordon to reappear on the March 25, on a bond of $1000; the magistrate also remanded the other four alleged Communists, but for them set the maximum bail of $2500. Around forty-eight hours after Gordon’s arrest, at 1 AM, Kuntz told a public hearing that he secured bail for Gordon, who was released from prison.
  
  Gordon returned to court on March 25, at the same time as Daniel Miller and the three Young Liberators, but there his treatment further diverged from them. While Renaud discharged the other four men as they had already appeared before the grand jury and been sent for trial, the magistrate again remanded Gordon, to appear on March 27, with the New York American and Home News reporting that police were planning to submit evidence to the grand jury seeking to have him indicted. (The only other newspaper to report this appearance was the New York World-Telegram). That effort was unsuccessful. When Gordon appeared again in the Magistrates Court, the ADA reduced the charge against him from felony assault to misdemeanor assault; in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book a clerk struck out Fel[ony] Ass[ault] and wrote "Red[uced] to Simple Assault misd[emeanor]." Kuntz claimed credit for the reduced charge when he questioned Gordon about this legal proceeding in a public hearing of the MCCH. While Gordon testified that the ADA had said he was doing Gordon a “favor” by withdrawing the assault charges, Kuntz drew out that his cross examination of Patrolman Young established that the officer did not go to a doctor or a hospital, so did not suffer injuries justifying a felony charge, or even simple assault. He also testified that a new charge of unlawful assembly, the misdemeanor form of riot, had been made against him at that hearing, information not mentioned in any other sources. Magistrate Renaud transferred Gordon to the Court of Special Sessions for trial on the reduced charge, a decision reported only in the New York Amsterdam News, New York Times and New York Herald Tribune.
  
  For some reason, the trial did not take place for almost eight months. Sometime in early November the judges convicted Gordon and sentenced him on November 15. Arthur Garfield Hays, who had chaired the MCCH hearing at which Gordon testified, wrote to the Chief Judge of the Court of Special Sessions on November 13 after hearing of the conviction, the only evidence of that outcome. Expressing surprise about the conviction, Hays  urged that Gordon be given a suspended sentence as he was "certainly not a criminal and was exercising what he deemed to be his right of free speech." Judge William Walling responded, telling Hays that he "did not have all the facts." As far as the judge was concerned, "There was not the slightest doubt but that Gordon assaulted the officer who was in uniform. Thereafter, of course, the officer hit back and subdued Gordon." That assessment made it unlikely Walling and his colleagues would have imposed the suspended sentence Hays favored. However, what sentence they imposed on Gordon is unknown.
• 1 2021-11-24T18:22:42+00:00 Kress 5, 10 & 25c store front windows broken 92 plain 2022-08-04T20:24:41+00:00 Around 6.15 PM, a step was set up on the sidewalk in front of the Kress 5, 10 & 25c store. A Black man climbed up, spoke briefly to the crowd of about 100 gathered there, and then had Daniel Miller, a twenty-four-year-old white man take his place on the step. As Miller began to speak, someone threw an object through one of the store windows. A second object quickly followed, smashing another window, according to the New York Times and New York Sun. Different objects are identified as having smashed the store window. A bottle was the most common, identified in the New York Times and Home News, and more precisely as a milk bottle in the New York Sun and a whiskey bottle in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and by a police inspector quoted in the Afro-American. The Daily News identified the object as a brick, as did the New York Sun in the case of the second object, while Louise Thompson described it as a stone. The MCCH report opted to simply say "a missile" hit the window. These are all everyday objects, likely to hand on 125th Street, other than the whiskey bottle. A whiskey bottle fitted with portrayals of those who attacked white businesses as hoodlums and played to racist stereotypes about African Americans, as was evident in the appearance of this detail in a list of brief items headlined "Highlights on the Harlem Front."  Picketing of white-owned businesses on 125th Street by Black organizations in 1934 had not resulted in any broken windows; concern about what had become of the boy arrested at Kress' may have caused this crowd to react differently. There may also have been members of groups affiliated with the Communist Party in the crowd; when those groups picketed the Empire Cafeteria in 1934, they did break windows.
  
  After the windows was broken, police officers moved in to arrest Miller and push people away from the store, most of who ran across 125th Street to the opposite sidewalk. No one was arrested for breaking the window. Harry Gordon was arrested soon after trying to speak to the crowd on 125th Street east of Kress' store. A few minutes later, around 6.45 PM, three men began picketing in front of Kress' store. They too were soon arrested by police. Three to five police radio cars, an emergency [riot] truck, and six mounted policemen struggled to keep people from the store. No further objects appear to have been thrown at Kress' store front windows at this time. Soon after West 125th Street was cleared, around 7 P.M., people pushed on to 8th Avenue saw a hearse stop behind the store on West 124th Street, triggering rumors it had come to pick up the body of the boy who had been arrested, and a rush to the rear of the store that saw windows there broken.
  
  Sustained and extensive attacks on stores on 125th Street came sometime after those rear windows were broken. Another brick hit Kress' front windows around 10:40 PM, allegedly thrown by William Ford, who then called for others on the street to attack police. Louise Thompson described a group breaking though the police cordon around 125th Street to break all but a few windows in the store, in the context of an exaggerated claim about the extent of smashed windows, and Kress' store does appear on the list of businesses with broken windows compiled by a La Prensa reporter who walked down 125th Street. But a reporter for the Afro-American wrote that the store "suffered very little loss on the front." The store manager, Jackson Smith, confirmed that later in a public hearing of the MCCH. Of the eighteen windows facing 125th Street and in the vestibule, only four were damaged. Repairs to the front of the store next day appear to have focused on only two sections of the store window, on the right side of the left entrance, in a photograph published in the New York American, and  on the left side of the right entrance, where a ladder can be seen in Universal newsreel footage. Those repairs cannot have taken long. A photograph of Kress' store published in the Daily News on March 21 showed intact store windows, guarded by two police officers. A sustained police presence during the disorder appears to have protected the front of the store. That was the opinion of Channing Tobias, the fifty-three-year-old Black secretary of the Colored Division of the National Council of the YMCA, who told E. Franklin Frazier that "I guess it was because police were on guard" that Kress' store "got only a small window smashed." Police established a cordon in front of the store after it closed. Officers were still there around 10 PM, when Detective Henry Roge was hit by a rock while standing in front of the store, and after a window was broken at 10:40 PM there were officers able to arrest William Ford. Later in the evening the police cordon extended to cover 125th Street from 8th Avenue to Lenox Avenue, with Kress' store remaining at its center, and as the base for police responding to the disorder.
  
  A window being smashed as a speaker began to address a crowd in front of Kress' store featured in narratives in the New York Times, New York Sun, and Home News. Only the New York Times and New York Sun mentioned the second object and smashed window. A broken window, without reference to a speaker, is reported by the Daily News, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, New York Age, and Pittsburgh Courier. No mention of a window in Kress' store being smashed at the beginning of the disorder appears in the narratives published in the New York Herald Tribune, New York Evening Journal, New York American, Daily Mirror and New York Post, and the Afro-American reported only the damage visible the next day. In the MCCH public hearings, Inspector Di Martini, Patrolman Moran, Jackson Smith, the store manager, and Louise Thompson (who also mentioned it in her account published in New Masses) all discussed how the window was broken. In the MCCH's final report, the arrests of Miller and Gordon police made in the aftermath of the window being broken are included as examples of "actions on the part of the police [that] only tended to arouse resentment in the crowd."
  
  The Kress 5, 10 & 25c store appears in the MCCH business survey taken in the second half of 1935 and was still visible in the Tax Department photograph from 1939-1941.
  
  
  
   
• 1 2020-02-26T14:48:08+00:00 Charles Alston arrested 76 plain 2022-11-13T20:55:50+00:00 Near the end of the disorder, at 5:00 AM on March 20, Patrolman Jerry Brennan arrested Charles Alston, Albert Yerber, Edward Loper and Ernest Johnson for allegedly shooting at police stationed at Lenox Avenue and West 138th Street. No police officers were reported injured, but Alston suffered a fractured skull as the men fled police. Trying to escape by leaping from the roof of a six-story-building to the adjoining building, Alston fell to a second-floor ledge. He was a twenty-one-year-old Black man, as was Loper, Johnson was twenty-two years of age, and Yerber twenty years of age. Alston lived northwest of the alleged shooting, on the edge of Harlem at 512 West 153rd Street. The other men also lived west of where they were arrested, within Harlem, Johnson at 206 West 140th St. Loper at 298 West 138th St., and Yerber at 106 Edgecombe Ave. Only a small proportion of those involved in the disorder lived above 135th Street.
  
  Newspaper stories contained few details of the shooting, even as they employed a range of dramatic and emotive language - for example, the New York World Telegram and Times Union reported a “nest” of snipers “trying to pick off” a "lone policeman." Stories in the New York World Telegram and Brooklyn Daily Eagle did offer the name of the officer allegedly targeted by Alston and his companions, Patrolman Jerry Brennan of the Morrisiana station, and the same dramatic account that a bullet whistled past his ear as he stood on post at Lenox Ave and 138th Street. Taking cover, he saw the 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. One other story, in the Home News, identified Brennan, but cast him not as the target of the shooters but as one of the police who responded. In a radio car assigned to the area with his partner Patrolman McGrady, Brennan “heard the shots and sped to the scene. At the radio car's approach the four snipers [standing in the doorway] ran to the roof of the building.” This story provides the key detail that no guns were found on Alston and his companions.
  
  Alston did not appear in court but on March 20 the other three men were charged with disorderly conduct, according to the Washington Heights Magistrates Court docket book. The clerk annotated that charge with the word "annoy." Under that section of the statute, a person was guilty if they acted "in such a manner as to annoy, disturb, interfere with, obstruct, or be offensive to others." A separate clause punished disorderly or threatening conduct or behavior, so based on that annotation, the men were not charged with attacking Brennan. That charge fits better with the circumstances described in the Home News. Whatever the patrolman alleged, Magistrate Ford did not find sufficient evidence of the men's guilt and acquitted the three men. Given that outcome, it is possible Brennan mistook some other noise for gunfire. Without any evidence of an assault in the sources, these events are treated here only as arrests. It was not until three weeks later that Alston appeared in court, on April 9. On that date he was discharged, an outcome recorded in the transcription of the 32nd Precinct blotter made by the MCCH's researchers. In releasing Alston without trial the Magistrate recognized the other men's acquittals. 
  
  Alston’s fall attracted more attention than the shooting. Again the Home News offers the most detail, noting that the leap that Alston had attempted was a distance of seven feet (the New York Post said 6 feet), and that after he landed on the ledge he managed to crawl through the window into an apartment and hid under a bed. His escape bid failed as the occupants of the apartment called police. The Home News report also made clear that Alston did not appear seriously injured at the time of his arrest. It was at the 135th Street police station that he collapsed and was found to have a fractured skull, the serious injury noted in less detailed stories and in lists of the injured. (The New York Evening Journal was the only other newspaper to report these details, although it mistakenly reported that the group arrested numbered three not four. The New York Post did report that Alston hid under a bed.)
  
  The Daily News published a photograph of Alston's arrest in which he is holding his head, suggesting he did appear injured at that time. The caption published with the photo drew attention to the “clubbed gun” held by the uniformed officer leading Alston a patrol wagon (seeming to suggest that the officer had used the gun butt to hit Alston). It concludes starkly, “He’s dying.” The photo published in the Norfolk Journal and Guide and New York World-Telegram credited to the International Photo agency and likely taken with the camera visible in the foreground of the Daily News photo a few seconds earlier, also clearly shows Alston clutching his head, with marks on his trousers and jacket that may be evidence of his fall. The officer’s clubbed gun is also again visible, together with the night stick of his partner. The full photograph from which the published image is cropped, part of the Bettman Collection digitized by Getty Images, provides a clearer view of those gathered around the building.
  Embed from Getty Images
  
  Visible to the right of this group are three black men obscured in the Daily News photo, which shows only white men. Given the location of this arrest in the heart of Harlem, at 5:00 AM, the only white men likely to be present would be police detectives in plainclothes and reporters. The photographs are some of the few taken beyond the area around 125th Street. By the time of Alston’s arrest the disorder was over, allowing white reporters to travel more freely in Harlem than they had earlier, when crowds had attacked them. The captions accompanying the published cropped versions of the photo in the Norfolk Journal and Guide and New York World Telegram misidentified Alston as a suspected looter.
  
  The New York American, New York Evening Journal and New York Post included Alston in their lists of the injured, as did the New York Herald Tribune on March 21, and the Black newspapers the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide several days later, all describing the nature of his injuries with no reference to the circumstances in which he suffered them. He was not listed among those arrested. A photograph published in the Daily News of four patrolmen carrying a stretcher containing an injured Black "victim of the rioting" out of the West 135th Street station may be an image of Alston being taken to the hospital. The photograph was not published until March 21, and caption identified it as as having been taken "early yesterday." As the location was the 135th Street station, the "victim" would have been injured above 130th Street, the southern boundary of that precinct. Most seriously injured individuals would have been taken directly to hospital.
   
• 1 2022-06-16T19:02:59+00:00 Police in front of Kress' store 73 plain 2022-08-05T18:12:05+00:00 Although Inspector Di Martini told a MCCH hearing that he saw no “indications of further trouble” when he left 125th Street at 6:00 PM, he did station some officers at Kress’ store -"Sergeant Bauer, two foot policeman, one mounted policeman in the rear to prevent a riot” according to his testimony, or “a Sergeant and four patrolmen” on the 125th Street side and “a mounted patrolman and a foot patrolman” on the 124th Street side according to his report to the Police Commissioner immediately after the disorder. A patrolman stationed in front of the store told an MCCH hearing that there were 10-15 officers there around 6:15 PM; that total may have included officers on regular assignment on 125th Street. However many police were present, one was Patrolman Shannon, who like Bauer, had been inside the store earlier.
  
  Patrolman Moran, who arrived after Kress' store was closed, described being instructed to “keep the crowd moving in front of the store.” He insisted he did so by requesting them to “move on;” the lawyers who questioned him at a hearing of the MCCH alleged he used force, pushing people and using his nightstick. By around 6:15 PM, Moran said the front of the store was “pretty clear” while a crowd walked up and down on the opposite side of the street. Louise Thompson told the MCCH that there “little knots of people” on the street (although she wrote in New Masses that the crowd in front of the store numbered in the hundreds, that across the street in the thousands). Two men set up a stepladder in front of the store, a Black man named James Parton speaking briefly and then as, Daniel Miller tried to speak to the crowd, a window in the store was broken and Patrolman Shannon arrested Miller. Outnumbered as they were by the crowd, police made the arrest following the practice of focusing on the leaders of crowds. Other officers then cleared the crowds from in front of the store, moving them first across West 125th Street and then towards 7th avenues. Thompson testified that “police got rough and would not let anyone stop on the street” and wrote “the cops who were becoming ugly in their attempts to break up the increasing throngs of people.” About fifteen minutes later Patrolman Irwin Young, assisted by several other officers arrested Harry Gordon when he climbed a lamppost to speak to the crowd. They bundled him into a radio car and took him to the 28th Precinct on West 123rd Street. Again, police were trying to control the crowd by arresting men they perceived to be leaders, possibly identifying them as Communists with whom they regularly clashed. They had not arrested Parton, the Black man who introduced both Miller and Gordon. A few minutes later, Patrolman Shannon, Sgt Bauer and Patrolman Moran were involved in arresting two white men and a Black man after they refused to stop picketing in front of Kress’ store. Those men carried placards that identified them as members of an organization associated with the Communist Party, which again likely contributed to the decision to arrest them.
  
  After the arrests, police continued to move on people who stopped on the sidewalks around Kress’ store – and perhaps clear some who had gone into the street itself, as the New York Herald Tribune reported the street reopened after being blocked to automobiles and streetcars. By 7:00 PM, the crowds had been pushed to the avenues (some of those on 8th Avenue for a short time moved to attack the rear entrance of Kress’ store, where two police officers were hit by objects thrown by those trying to get into the store). Additional officers who arrived seem to have been key to that success. “15 patrolmen, six mounted police and uniformed men of five radio cars” were on 125th Street by that time according to the New York Evening Journal. Inspector Di Martini also returned, around 7:15 PM.
  
  The Daily News published a photograph of the disorder that showed police officers engaging with crowds. The caption for the image, which captures the largest crowd to appear in a photograph of the disorder, described only the actions of one of the two uniformed patrolmen visible: "“The raincoated policeman swings in against the angry crowd as his comrade tries to hold the police line. One colored man is lifting his arm as if to restrain the cop.” The use of force captured here is at odds with Patrolman Moran's insistence that officers simply asked crowds to move. While uniformed patrolmen carried nightsticks as part of their standard equipment, detectives in plainclothes were issued them for riot duty, according to the New York Evening Journal. As well as hitting people with their batons, police officers used the butts of their revolvers and riot guns as clubs. The Times Union directly contradicted Moran's claim police did not use those weapons to move the crowds in front of the store: "Police night sticks swung and soon the mob was dispersed." Only the Daily News reported police fired their guns to move the crowd, describing with unlikely precision that five shots were fired in the air. Inspector Di Martini told a hearing of the MCCH that he heard no gunshots on 125th Street, so if those shots were fired it was before he arrived around 7:15 PM. The caption makes no mention of where the photograph was taken; the group appears to be on the sidewalk, perhaps near Kress’ store or later near 7th or 8th Avenue. Unmentioned is the horse’s head visible on the right side of image, indicating the presence of a mounted patrolman.
  
  
  Mounted patrolmen, part of the police crowd control force, were reportedly deployed “to ride people off the sidewalk,” Louise Thompson testified. Lt. Battle told Langston Hughes that "an officer on a horse can be more effective than twenty patrolmen on foot," as the horses are "trained to brush a crowd back without stepping on anyone." When a reporter for the Afro-American arrived around 7:30 PM “mounted police rode the sidewalk [in front of the store] keeping the crowd back.” Charles Romney likewise told a hearing of the MCCH that he saw "men on horseback were on the sidewalk to trample people." The New York Times and Daily News opted to describe the mounted police in more sensational terms as ‘charging’ the crowds. In the New Masses, Thompson presented a similar picture, juxtaposing the mounted officers with women protesting in terms echoing those used by other Communists: “Brigades of mounted police cantered down the street, breaking into a gallop where the crowds were thickest. Horses' hoofs shot sparks as they mounted on the glass-littered pavements. The crowds fighting doggedly, gave way. The women more stubborn even than the men, shouted to their companions, "What kind of men are you-drag them down off those horses." The women shook their fists at the police. "Cossacks! Cossacks!" they shouted here in Harlem on 125th Street.” Years later, interviewed for her autobiography, Thompson identified many of the mounted patrolmen as Black officers and described the women as actually fighting with them. Another Afro-American journalist simply described the mounted police as "somewhat rough" during the early hours of the disorder. Whatever approach they took, it was mounted police that the Afro-American credited with keeping large groups away from Kress and on the avenues.
  
  While police cleared 125th Street of large groups and stopped any more assembling there, they did not – or could not -- close it off. Instead, “they patrolled 124th and 125th Streets between Seventh and Eighth Avenues constantly to prevent more groups from assembling,” the New York Herald Tribune reported. Thompson testified that she walked up and down 125th Street after the arrests, but was only able to stop and speak with members of groups on the corner of 8th Avenue.  Charles Romney told a hearing of the MCCH that when he arrived on 125th Street around 7:30 PM, walking from Lenox to 7th Avenue, he “noticed a crowd of police with sticks on their hands telling the crowd to go on.” Given the small numbers of police, those patrols did not protect the stores on the block from attack: Thompson testified windows were broken in almost every store between 7:00 PM and 8:00 PM (although she was away from the area from 7:30 PM to 8:00 PM); and Romney likewise testified that at 7:30 PM "there were a lot of windows smashed." The New York Herald Tribune reported the same timeline, that “by 8 p.m. one or more windows in virtually every 125th Street store front in the block had been smashed.”  Around that time the situation began to change as additional officers arrived, reinforcements that made it possible for police to set up a perimeter around 125th Street and keep people away from the stores.
  
  As with other events at the beginning of the disorder, the most detailed and consistent evidence is the testimony of individuals present on 125th Street in hearings of the MCCH. Newspaper stories were generally vague and inconsistent about how many police were on the scene at what times and how they responded to the crowds, and tended to exaggerate the size of the crowds and the number of people on the street. It does seem that credible that several hundred -- and perhaps as many as 2000-3000 people -- were in the area during this time, although not gathered in a single group. This was a larger number than gathered in any one place later in the disorder, contributing to the different way that police responded.
   
• 1 2022-06-16T19:24:46+00:00 Police establish perimeter around Kress' store 73 plain 2022-08-05T18:22:40+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 1000 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 later 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 2021-11-29T22:35:16+00:00 Kress 5, 10 & 25c store rear windows broken 67 plain 2022-08-01T19:30:37+00:00 When police officers pushed people away from the front of S. H. Kress' store and off West 125th Street after someone threw objects that broke the store's front windows, some ended up on 8th Avenue and West 124th Street. Around 7.00 PM, a hearse stopped on 124th Street near the rear of the S. H. Kress' store, located about a third of the way along the block to the east, attracting the attention of members of the crowd. A woman saw the vehicle, according to reports in the New York Times, New York Sun and New York Herald Tribune. She called out "There’s the hearse come to take the boy’s body out of the store,” according to New York Times and New York Sun, and "It's come to get the dead child," according to the New York Herald Tribune. While there were many Black women inside and outside the store, singling out one fitted the emphasis in the narratives published by those newspapers on the hysterical nature of the crowds: the New York Herald Tribune described the woman who called out as "excitable;" the New York Times reported that she "shrilled;" while in the New York Sun "her piercing scream lifted itself above the hoarse shouts of the mob," with the result that other people were "Incited." The outcry is more generalized in the New York Evening Journal, in line with its more explicitly racist narrative. That story claimed that "the Negroes were worked up to such a frenzy that they did not realize [the arrival of the hearse] was simply a coincidence. The cry went up" "They've killed him! They've killed him! They're taking him away in a hearse!"" No one arrested during the disorder was identified as being charged with inciting the crowd.
  
  Whether they saw the hearse as evidence of the fate of the boy arrested in the S. H. Kress store or responded to shouts making that connection, people moved to the rear of the store. Those at the rear of the store may have found further reason to think the boy had come to harm when they found the store lights on and men moving around inside, workmen repairing displays and counters damaged earlier, according to the New York Herald Tribune and New York American. Or members of the crowd moved directly to renew the attack on the store begun on West 125th Street, as reported in the New York Times, New York Evening Journal, and Times Union. Or the crowd gathered at the rear of the store was joined by "a number of colored persons, believed to be inmates of the Salvation Army located on 124th Street, west of 7th Avenue,...[who] began throwing stones," as Inspector Di Martini wrote in a report to the Police Commissioner the next day. (The Salvation Army operated a hostel for  homeless men at that location). One result was that windows in the rear of S. H. Kress' store were broken.
  
  An "L" shaped building that spanned the width of the block between 125th and 124th Streets, S. H. Kress' store had twice as much storefront on West 124th Street as it had facing 125th Street. There were retail counters in the wider rear section of the store, and basement exits out on to West 124th Street (Lino Rivera had been released through one). Windows also faced 124th Street, but no images have been found that show their size and extent. Whatever their extent, more windows in the rear of the store appear to have been broken than in the front. Compared to the "very little loss on the front," a reporter for the Afro-American described "the windows in the rear showed signs of the stone and whiskey bottle barrage." Similarly, the New York Age reported "a plate glass window in the front of the store was smashed, while the back part of the building suffered several broken windows." Without the comparison, the Times Union reported similar damage, "the store's rear windows were smashed," as did the New York Times less precisely, noting "Stones were hurled through windows." With typical exaggeration, both the Home News and New York Herald Tribune claimed all the rear windows were shattered.
  
  Windows were possibly not the only target of objects thrown on West 124th Street. Police officers had been stationed at the store's rear entrance earlier in the evening. Together with officers who followed the crowds from 8th Avenue, police once again tried to clear them from the street. Two mounted patrolmen were part of that group, according to Joe Taylor, the leader of the Young Liberators. Unlike on West 125th Street earlier, objects struck police officers. At least two officers suffered injuries that required an ambulance. Patrolman Michael Kelly was hit on the right leg by a rock and Detective Charles Foley was hit on the shoulder by a stone. Officers trying to push crowds away from the rear of the store could have been hit by objects thrown at the windows, but white newspapers reported in sensational terms that police were the targets. "A barrage of missiles fell on the ranks of police," according to the New York Times, while the New York Herald Tribune described a more dramatic scene in which "Negroes showered [police] with miscellaneous missiles from roofs, hallways and other hiding places." News of the hearse's appearance and renewed police clashes with crowds on the street spread to people gathered on 8th Avenue, and windows in other stores on 125th Street began to be smashed. Despite these attacks, police appear to have cleared the crowd from 124th Street within a few minutes. When Emergency Truck #5 arrived on the block around 7:15 PM, Patrolman Henry Eppler told a MCCH hearing that "everything was quiet," which led to the truck relocating to 125th Street.
  
  Several newspapers made no mention of broken windows in the rear of S. H. Kress' store. A hearse appears in most of those narratives, provoking generalized reactions from the crowds on the street. It served to "fire the crowd" in the Afro-American's narrative, and in stories in the Home News and New York Post, although in the white newspapers crowds see the vehicle on West 124th Street before the speakers try to address the crowd, a different chronology. The New York Sun described the crowd moving directly to attacks on police and stores and looting. The hearse appears in front of the store, not at its rear, in the Daily Mirror. And it is mentioned as appearing in the area without mention of a specific location in the Atlanta World and in an ANP story published in both the Atlanta World and Pittsburgh Courier. Neither broken windows in the rear of Kress' store nor a hearse are features of the narratives in the Daily News, New York World-Telegram and the MCCH report, and are likewise missing from Louise Thompson's account (who was on 125th Street when the rear windows were broken).
• 1 2021-08-07T18:20:54+00:00 Charles Saunders arrested 61 plain 2022-08-16T21:00:48+00:00 Around 2 AM, as Detective Jeremiah Duross of the 6th Division drove a police car on 7th Avenue, the sound of breaking glass drew his attention to a group of people in front of Ralph Sirico's shoe repair store at 1985 7th Avenue, according to a Probation Department investigation report. The store windows had been damaged earlier, between 11.30 PM and midnight, the superintendent of the apartments above 1985 7th Avenue, Mr C. T. Berkeley, reported. As the detective pulled his car up next to the store, the crowd in front of it scattered. He leapt out of the car and claimed he saw Charles Saunders, a twenty-four-year-old Black unemployed elevator operator jump out of the store window and run down the street. Duross gave chase and arrested Saunders, who he claimed had been drinking and had a fresh cut on his hand, which he implied had resulted from breaking glass in the window.
  
  Saunders offered a different account than Duross, according to the Probation Department investigation report. He lived nearby, in a furnished room at 1967 7th Avenue a block south of the store, with his wife Anna Gregory. Around midnight, Saunders left home to buy cigarettes. Walking toward a crowd in front of Sirico's store, he saw shoes and hats being thrown through the broken window on to the street, where people in the crowd were picking them up. Saunders claimed he followed the lead of those around him, and picked up a pair of shoes, cutting his hand on glass on the street in the process, and headed home. At that point Duross arrested him. Saunders denied having been drinking; the detective said Saunders did not have a pair of shoes in his hands when arrested.
  
  In fact, it seems that Duross did not find anything from the store in Saunders' possession, as none of stolen goods were recovered, according to the Probation Department investigation report. Nonetheless, Saunders appears to have been charged with taking all the goods that the report recorded Sirico said had been stolen: "18 or 20 hats which had been cleaned and blocked by him; about 25 pair of shoes which he had repaired; 5 or 6 pairs of unfinished shoes; one dozen leather soles; two and a half dozen rubber heels and a quantity of polish and shoe laces," with a total value he estimated as $66.75. While the District Attorney's case file is missing, the Probation Department investigation report summarizes the indictment against Saunders as accusing him of taking merchandise worth $66.95. The two newspaper reports of the case are less specific, with both the Home News and Daily Worker reporting the charge as stealing "several pairs of shoes."
  
  Saunders is included in the lists of those charged with burglary published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the New York Evening Journal. He appeared in the Harlem Magistrate's Court on March 20, at which time Magistrate Renaud held him on $1000 bail to reappear, an outcome recorded in the docket book and reported only in the Home News. When Saunders was brought back to the court on March 22, detectives presented bench warrants indicating that the District Attorney had already filed an indictment against him. Magistrate Renaud consequently dismissed the charges against Saunders so the detectives could rearrest him, as happened with two other men, James Hughes and Isaac Daniels, an appearance reported in the Home News and New York Post. With the District Attorney's file missing, the date the grand jury indicted Saunders is unknown; it would have been several days prior to April 1, when Saunders appeared in the Court of General Sessions to plead guilty to petit larceny. That plea bargain is at odds with the statement in the report that none of the stolen property had been recovered. A district attorney generally offered it to those indicted for burglary after the disorder found with stolen goods in their possession; those found with nothing in their possession, as the Probation Department investigation report implied Saunders was, generally pled guilty to unlawful entry.
  
  Immediately prior to Saunders appearing for sentencing in the Court of General Sessions on April 12, the Probation Department notified the judge of a letter from the Savannah Juvenile Court stating that Saunders' older sister Vable Greatt had offered to provide a home for him in Savannah, Georgia, and the Juvenile Court Probation Department would assist in his supervision, should the judge place him on probation. After a delay, presumably to confirm those arrangements, Judge Nott gave Saunders a suspended sentence and placed him on "indefinite" probation on the condition he go to Savannah (the 28th Precinct Police Blotter recorded only the suspended sentence, not the probation). Of the nine other men sentenced in the Court of General Sessions, only Arnold Ford was also placed on probation. Both men remained under supervision for the maximum period of three years, until 1938.
  
  Saunders told a Probation officer that he had been born in Dublin, Georgia, the youngest of six children. His mother died when he was five years of age, and around that time he and his family moved to Savannah. After leaving school at age thirteen, Saunders did odd jobs and worked with his father, a carpenter. In 1929, his father remarried, and Saunders decided to go to New York City, where his brother Albert and sister Lola lived. After eighteen months living with Albert at 215 Edgecombe Avenue and working as a porter in a barber's shop at West 135th Street and 7th Avenue, ill-health forced him to return to live with his sister in Savannah for six months. Returning to New York City in 1931, Saunders lived with an aunt at 162 West 143rd Street until May 1933, when he met and then moved in with Anna Gregory. The Probation Department investigation report described her as "separated from her husband"; a letter in the file from the Brooklyn Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, to who the Family Court had referred Gregory in 1922, said her husband had abandoned her, leaving the state with funds provided by his mother. Saunders and Gregory were "known as man and wife," the Probation officer reported. In the fluid marriage patterns still practiced in working-class communities such informal relationships were not uncommon but the Probation Department did not recognize them, instead describing Gregory as Saunders' "mistress" and "sweetheart." Dr Charles Thompson of the Court's Psychiatric Clinic also saw a problem in Gregory being ten years older that Saunders, labeling him as immature for looking to her "for direction." In response to questions by a Probation officer, Gregory described Saunders as a good provider and their life as "harmonious."
  
  Gregory worked as a laundress, Saunders in a barber's shop at 142nd Street and 7th Avenue, then part-time for a moving company based at 143rd Street and 7th Avenue, and beginning in September 1934 as an elevator operator at 385 Edgecombe Ave. After living for two years at 268 West 146th Street, the couple moved to 1967 7th Avenue in December 1934. Two months later Saunders lost his job after a dispute with the new building superintendent; the management company fired the superintendent soon after, and told a Probation officer that they saw him not Saunders as at fault. That fitted with the opinions of Saunders' employers and co-workers, which the Probation officer summarized as considering him honest, industrious and dependable; he and Gregory were similarly "well regarded" by their neighbors. The Probation Department investigation report followed Dr Thompson's examination report in attributing his alleged looting to "mob spirit." Thompson explained that concept as being "in company with several others under the influence of prejudice and aggressiveness," in the case of events in Harlem against "a background of racial antagonism, occasioned largely by the present lack of employment." Saunders' sister Vable Greatt explained his alleged looting, according to a letter from the Savannah Juvenile Court, as probably a result of him becoming "pretty well discouraged in his search for work," a "spiritual condition [that] caused him to fall to the temptation to steal."
  
  While a good reputation and steady employment would have helped make Saunders a candidate for probation, Judge Nott's decision appears to have been largely a response to an offer from his sister and Savannah Juvenile Court Probation Department to supervise him. His sister Vable followed through on that offer, sending funds for Saunders' railway fare to Savannah; the Juvenile Court Probation Department did not do their part. Saunders' Probation officer's letters to his Georgia colleagues went unanswered for six months. During this time his only news of Saunders were reports he mailed weekly, using a form and stamps sent to him by the department. Soon after Saunders arrived in Savannah his sister became very sick, causing him to move in with his brother. In perfunctory answers to the questions on the form, he reported being unemployed, and involved in no education or social activities other than attending weekly services at a Protestant church.
  
  As an alternative to the Juvenile Court, the Probation Department secured the help of the Savannah Family Welfare Society. Their worker's investigation in February 1936 solicited a very different picture of Saunders' life in Savannah from his sister and sister-in-law than he provided in his reports. Both complained he "never stayed home at night," was "drunk most of the time" and had become "lazy and shiftless," not willing to "keep a job when given one." The caseworker did not interview Saunders himself. The Probation Department responded by writing directly to Saunders, warning that his behavior was in violation of the terms of his probation, and the judge could take "disciplinary action" against him unless he improved his conduct and made "diligent efforts to obtain employment." They also requested the Savannah Family Welfare Society let Saunders report to them in person. In August 1936, Mrs Mamie Belcher, a caseworker, began countersigning Saunders' reports. The Society reported "no further complaints" about his behavior, which the Probation Department took to unambiguously mean Saunders had changed his behavior. In June 1936, Saunders relocated to live again with his sister Vable. It took six more months before he found work, at a box manufacturing company. Nothing else changed in his answers on the report form until after a lapse in reporting in May 1937, when he wrote that he had moved to live with his sister Lois, who had returned from New York City.  Only in Saunders' Discharge from Probation did the Probation officer mention that this change in circumstances came after his sister Vable was killed in a car accident. By the end of 1937 Saunders had moved back in with his brother and begun working irregularly as a stevedore.
  
  Throughout his time in Savannah Saunders appears to have remained in contact with Anna Gregory. She came to the Probation Department at the end of 1935 concerned that he had been warned that his sentence could be reviewed if he failed to report regularly and seeking to have him return to the city. When Gregory applied for Home Relief, she described Saunders as her husband, prompting the Emergency Relief Bureau to contact the Probation Department in May 1937, who in turn sought information from Saunders about whether the couple had formally married. In the Discharge from Probation, the Probation officer described Saunders as "discontented as he missed New York, and Mrs Gregory, his mistress," information apparently passed on by the Savannah Welfare Society. Their caseworker also reported in January 1938 that Saunders' sister Lois "was anxious to have Charles return with her to New York."  The Probation Department wrote to the Society, to Saunders and to his brother immediately before the end of his probation in April 1938 urging that "his best interests will be served" by remaining in Savannah. They also asked Saunders to advise the department of his plans. He did not reply. There is no evidence of what Saunders chose to do.
• 1 2022-07-14T17:02:48+00:00 Police find Lino Rivera 56 plain 2022-11-16T16:11:11+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 suggests 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 St. 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 at the scene, Eldridge and Patrolman Donohue, 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, and 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 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, with New York World Telegram, New York Herald Tribune and La Prensa publishing separate stories based on those interviews, and the New York Times including it in a larger story.
  
  Inspector Di Martini took credit for having Battle appear in the images, telling a hearing of the MCCH that “It was my idea to get Lieut. Battle to pose with the boy and get the picture into the streets as soon as possible.” 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 is 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 Battles 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 in a different pose, 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,” and, in the image published in the New York Evening Journal, 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," while the leaflets their organization distributed another 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 Donohue 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, 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 and New York World-Telegram, or a "Puerto Rican youth" in the New York Herald Tribune and Times Union. 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.")
  
  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 Donohue 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 2020-12-04T16:50:32+00:00 Looting of food and drink (24) 52 plain 2022-09-30T02:39:17+00:00 Business stocking food and drink make up the largest group of those who had goods stolen (24 of 55). There are also photographs of a meat market, a grocery store and a liquor store that have been looted whose location is unknown, which be additional looted locations or images of already identified looting. Some of the looting of businesses categorized as selling miscellaneous consumer goods may also have involved taking food and drink. Both stationary stores and drug stores sometimes sold meals and drinks. So too apparently did 5 & 10c stores; among the items Arnold Ford allegedly took from Lash’s store was three packets of tea (but that business is not included as one looted for food and drink, but as one looted for miscellaneous goods, as those items made up the bulk of what was taken). The number of these types of business looted reflected in part that they comprised a large proportion of the stores in Black Harlem, with grocery stores the most frequently found business, and restaurants nearly as numerous. Food and drink being taken also fitted the portrayal of the disorder as motivated by economic grievances.
  
  Newspaper accounts of the merchandise taken from businesses featured food and drink featured alongside clothing. "The large grocery stores were looted," the Afro-American's correspondent reported, "and persons denied relief and discriminated against by the relief bureau authorities seized food fro their starving families."  The Daily Worker offered a similar picture: “When the shop windows were broken and wares of all sorts displayed, the starving and penniless Negroes in the crowd seized the opportunity to carry off food, clothes, articles of all sorts.” In his "Hectic Harlem" column in the New York Amsterdam News, Roi Ottley highlighted food in his description of looting, writing “As Negroes snatched choice hams from butchers stores…lifted suits from tailor shops…and carried out bags of rice and other edables…the feeling, “here’s our chance to have some of the things we should have,” was often evidenced.” So too did J. A. Rogers in his "Ruminations" column, also in the New York Amsterdam News, writing "From the ravenous manner in which I saw some of the rioters eating the looted food, it was clear that they hadn't had a decent meal in months." The New York Post, like Ottley, imputed motives while identifying food as a target, describing looting as “the glamorous opportunity of snatching food and coats and liquor and tobacco from behind the broken panes.” Food also featured in Louise Thompson’s memoir of what she saw during the disorder, as “People on the street were tossing up to [people...on the second floor of apartment buildings] groceries – flour – anything they could toss up.” She offered more detail writing in New Masses: "Many grocery stores windows were smashed; hungry Negroes scooped armloads of canned goods, loaves of bread, sacks of flour, vegetables, running to their homes with the food.
  
  Adam Clayton Powell described what he saw in the form of vignettes rather than a general picture of looting, in the first of three articles published by the New York Post; two of the three scenes involved food: “Witness a man, tall, strong and well built, carrying through the murkiness of the Harlem morning two pieces of the twelve-cents-a-pound salt pork that he had taken from a butcher's broken window. Witness two young lads one of them just finished high schools-furtively sneaking home as the noise of March 19 subsided, lugging two sacks of rice and sugar.” The Daily Worker also published a story by an “Eye Witness” that recounted police violence against a “young Negro boy” arrested with two cans of vegetables in his possession.
  
  Food also featured in stories about the police line-up the morning after the disorder. The New York Herald Tribune and New York Sun noted in general terms that many of those paraded before police and reporters admitted to stealing groceries. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle singled out one Black woman who “still had in her possession five milk bottles.” In addition, two men arrested for looting who appear in a New York Evening Journal photograph are carrying shopping bags labeled as coming from Rex Food Market at 348 Lenox Avenue.
  
  Legal records offer a similar mix of broad and individual pictures of the merchandise taken. Nine business-owners selling food and drink are among those identified who sued the city for damages, with losses of $14,000 for George Chronis’ restaurant,$2068 for Irving Stetkin's grocery store, $759.58 for Radio City Meat Market, $745 for Frank Dethomas' candy store, $721 for Manny Zipp's grocery store, $630 for William Feinstein's liquor store, $537 for Alfonso Avitable's Savoy Food Market, $453.90 for Alfonso Principe's saloon, and $146.75 for Michael D’Agostino’s market. Those losses, other than for Chronis, are lower than those claimed by the owners of stores selling clothing and miscellaneous other merchandise. (The nature of eleven of twenty-seven businesses identified in suits against city are unknown, so could include additional stores selling food and drink). Details of the losses of an additional eight businesses are identified in legal proceedings. The value of the merchandise in those cases is less than the losses of those who sued the city: $200 for Mario Pravia's candy store; $200 for J. P. Bulluroff's grocery store; $167.86 for Sol Weit and Isaac Popiel's grocery store, $100 for Jacob Solomon's grocery store; $50-75 for Sarah Refkin's delicatessen; $10-$12 for the San Antonio Market, and several bottle of liquor from the Mediavilla Liquor store. An indication of what items made up those totals is provided by the details Sol Weit gave to a Probation officer: the $167.86 of goods taken from the store he co-owned consisted of “126 pounds of butter, 90 dozen eggs, eight cartons of cigarettes, a ham and other food products, as well as $14 from the cash register.”
  
  The individuals arrested for looting food and drink allegedly only had a small proportion of that merchandise in their possession, as the vignettes offered by Powell and the Daily Worker’s eye witness suggest. The man charged with looting Weit’s store, Arthur Merritt, allegedly had only "two cans of beans, a can of milk and a can of tuna.” There are only records of what police claimed five of the other ten men arrested for looting businesses selling food and drink had in their possession. Lawrence Humphrey had a 50lb bag of rice, Amie Taylor  eighteen packets of gum, Louis Cobb two bottles of whiskey, Theodore Hughes two pieces of pork, and Hezekiel Wright four lamps and two jars of food.

  Looting (66)

• 1 2020-10-22T01:27:23+00:00 Thomas Jackson arrested 49 plain 2022-11-16T16:02:02+00:00 Around 1.45 AM, Patrolmen Kalsky and Holland of the 28th Precinct saw a group of people around Jack Garmise's cigar store at 1916 7th Avenue, and then a milk can thrown through the plate glass windows. In the Magistrate Court affidavit, Kalsky alleged that he saw Thomas Jackson, a thirty-four-year-old Black man throw the milkcan. Jackson denied throwing anything at the store, or being part of an attack on it, when question by a Probation officer. Instead, he claimed he was drunk and had been walking along West 116th Street on his way to visit a prizefighter named Leo Williams to collect money he was owed when he had become caught in a crowd moving toward the store. Someone in the crowd then pushed him through the smashed window. Throwing such a large object would have been more difficult for Jackson than most in the crowd; after an accident in 1930, his left arm had been amputated above the elbow. Kalsky claimed Jackson was sober. He also alleged he saw him reach his hand through the smashed window and take merchandise from the display. He later told a Probation officer that as he approached, Jackson threw “some of the merchandise” back in the window. That phrasing suggests Jackson may not have had any merchandise on him when Kalsky arrested him, as does the district attorney's decision to offer to let him plead guilty to unlawful entry, rather than petit larceny, as others arrested for looting who made plea bargains did. The other officer, Holland, arrested Raymond Easley, a twenty-one-year-old Black man. He allegedly took cigars from the store window, according to a report in the Home News, wording that suggests the officers reported seeing him reaching into the window and found cigars in his possession. Holland also found a razor in Easley's possession. (Easley is not mentioned in the affidavit in the District Attorney’s case file in which he and Jackson are co-defendants, nor does the file include an examination of him. The only document in the case file referring to Easley is a criminal record; he had no previous prosecutions). Two arrests at the same incident of alleged looting was unusual during the disorder, suggesting that the officers were closer to the store than in other instances, perhaps only having to cross West 116th Street rather than 7th Avenue.
  
  In addition to legal records, Jackson appeared in newspaper reports of different stages of the legal process, few of which offered any details. His name was listed among those arrested in the Afro-American, Atlanta World and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the New York Evening Journal. Only the Home News reported his arraignment in the Magistrates Court, and his reappearance to have his bail continued four days later was reported in only the New York Sun. Jackson's appearance in the Court of General Sessions a few days later to plead guilty attracted more coverage, in the Daily News, New York Herald Tribune, New York Post, New York Times, and New York Amsterdam News. The New York Times, New York Evening Journal,  Daily News and Times Union reported his sentencing to six months in the Workhouse two weeks later, information also published in the New York Amsterdam News, New York Age and Afro-American, and recorded in the 28th Precinct Police blotter.
  
  The Probation Department investigation conducted prior to Jackson's sentencing offers information on his life before his arrest. Born in Manhasset, Long Island, Thomas Dean was five years old when his mother left his father to live with Jonah Jackson. When they married, Thomas took Jackson as his last name. At age ten, Jackson's truancy resulted in his committal to a juvenile asylum in Chauncy for two years. After his release, he returned to live with his mother and finish his schooling in Corona. Soon after leaving school at age sixteen, around 1917, Jackson moved to Manhattan. He found work first for a moving company, and then as a driver for a bottle company on West 35th Street for eight years, before switching to driving a taxi. He told a Probation officer he was twice fined for speeding in 1923, and in 1928 served two days in prison for another traffic offense, offenses that did not appear in his criminal record and did not prevent his ongoing employment. During this time, from around 1920 until 1932, Jackson lived with Rose Repologo, an Italian woman, who the Probation Officer claimed was "an unwed mother who had been a former inmate of St Barnabas House," and who Jackson's sister described as "too good" for him. The couple lived downtown, at 414 West 36th Street, likely when Jackson worked nearby, information only in a second Probation Department investigation in 1940. He also reported being stabbed with a butcher's knife in a fight on West 36th Street in 1924, a detail in the Probation Officer's preliminary investigation not included in the report.
  
  In 1930, Jackson was injured in a street car accident that required the amputation of his left arm below the elbow. Unable to find a job after the injury, Jackson, Repologo and her son were briefly on relief in 1932, by then living at 247 West 115th Street, until the New York Railway paid him $7800 in compensation for his injury. Sometime soon after, Repologo left Jackson. His sister told a Probation officer that after receiving the compensation Jackson "completely ignored" his family and "mistreated" Repologo, as a result of which Repologo left him for another man. The Home Relief Bureau reported Jackson told them that he had deposited $2500 in a bank account in the name of Rose Jackson, and that she had taken the money and disappeared. Early in 1933, Jackson invested $1200 in opening Tom's Confectionary Store in the basement of 270 West 115th Street, down the block from his residence. Setting up a small business was a strategy followed by many other residents of black neighborhoods in the 1930s when faced with unemployment. Jackson also joined many other small business owners in taking the opportunity to participate in Harlem's largest business, numbers gambling. In August 1933 he was convicted for collecting bets on numbers, the result he told a Probation officer in 1940 of having been found in his store with fourteen slips in his possession, sufficient only to result in a fine of $50.  By the end of 1933, Jackson's business had failed. A Probation Officer reported the cause as Jackson's "neglect," recording in the preliminary investigation that Jackson claimed his "employees robbed him." The preliminary investigation also notes that the balance of Jackson's compensation payment had been spent on merchandise for the store. Jackson also said "he 'clowned' his way through life and spent most of his money having a 'big time'" in poolrooms, according to the Probation Department Investigation Report.
  
  Soon after being forced to sell his store, Jackson moved in with his half-sister Beatrice Cooper and her family, and applied for Home Relief as part of that household. In 1934 the family lived in a series of apartments on West 118th Street, West 121st Street, and finally outside Harlem on West 99th Street. At the beginning of March 1935, Beatrice's husband John obtained a Work Relief job, and according to the Home Relief Bureau, refused to support Jackson. Jackson and his sister did not get on; a Probation Officer reported that he said that she was "too strict," while she described him as having "treated them with scorn." Relocating back to Harlem, Jackson moved into a furnished room in an apartment at 217 West 121st Street, and then, a day before the disorder, relocated to another at 253 West 121st Street. Unusually for the men arrested for involvement in the disorder, the report from the Psychiatric Clinic offered no explanation for Jackson's participation. Dr Sylvan Keiser described him as a "talkative, cheerful pleasant type of person" "of Average Intelligence."
  
  Information survives on Jackson's life in the five years after his release from the workhouse in 1935 as a result of a subsequent conviction in 1940, which led to him again being investigated by the Probation Department, and that report being added to the file created in 1935. A few days after his release from the workhouse, in October 1935, Jackson was assigned work as a laborer by the Works Progress Administration. That job lasted almost three years, during which time Jackson lived in a furnished room in 154 West 121st Street and then in a rooming house at 2053 7th Avenue. He had little contact with his family; his sister told a Probation Officer that "he has always desired to live alone without restriction." Around 1937 Jackson contracted syphilis, he claimed from a prostitute. In August 1938 Jackson lost his WPA position, according to the Probation Department report, after he returned drunk having left the project without permission and swore at his supervisors and coworkers. A few weeks later, Jackson was arrested for slashing the tire of a taxi, and sentenced to a month in the workhouse. A year later he was back in workhouse, for 90 days, after pleading guilty to perjury and election fraud after being paid to fill in false affidavits related to a primary election. Following his release he worked briefly as an office cleaner and later as a watchman, while receiving relief payments, except for a period when an agent discontinued payments because Jackson supplied false information about his residence. He had left the rooming house for a furnished room in 135 West 119th Street. In October 1940, Jackson was charged with rape. He and two other men allegedly abducted a twenty-nine-year-old Black woman from a bar at West 119th Street and 8th Avenue and took her to his room at 152 West 119th Street, where they assaulted and robbed her. Jackson pled guilty to third degree assault. Examined again in the Psychiatric Clinic, this time Dr. John Cassity found Jackson still an "adjusted personality," although "on a low cultural level in recent months," but also "quite an aggressive individual [who] reacts with violence upon provocation." Judge Jacob Gould Schurman sentenced Jackson to the Penitentiary. He had been released by April 1943, when he registered for the draft, and was living with his sister Dorothy at 37 West 99th Street.
• 1 2020-02-25T18:07:14+00:00 Andrew Lyons killed 42 plain 2022-07-02T21:58:53+00:00 Andrew Lyons, a thirty-seven-year-old Black man, died as a result of injuries "sustained during the thick of a melee at 125th street and Seventh Avenue," according to a story in the New York Amsterdam News. A story in the Times Union, the only other source that mentioned a location, put the site of his injury a block to the east, at 125th Street and Lenox Avenue. There is no information on when he was injured or by who. The medical records obtained by the MCCH provided an explanation for that lack of details. Lyons did not receive medical attention until the evening after the disorder; an ambulance was called to his home, 147 West 117th Street, at 5:10 PM on March 20, by a friend, George Harris, according to the death record issued by Harlem Hospital. When he arrived at the hospital, he was was described as "stuporous," too groggy to tell doctors what had happened to him. The doctor who completed the death record, Emanuel Hauer, wrote that Lyons was "said to have been hit on the head during riot on 3-19-35." When Hauer testified before a MCCH hearing, he gave the same information. Arthur Garfield Hays, chairman of the hearing, responded, "That is not in my report." Hauer then read the ambulance man's report, which simply recorded that Lyons had been "Struck over the head," not that he had been hit during the disorder. If the ambulance man did not provide information that Lyons had been injured in the disorder, neither did his friend Harris. Hauer testified that Harris told him Lyons "came home stuporous but doesn't know how it happened." When he returned home on the night of March 19 Lyons had gone to bed. The autopsy report completed on March 24 did not describe Lyons as injured during the disorder: "Deceased was injured in some unknown manner."  Lyons died three days after being admitted to hospital, on March 23rd; the recorded cause of death was a "fractured skull, laceration of the brain, terminal pneumonia." Lyons brother James, a resident of Stem, North Carolina, is recorded in the autopsy as identifying his body on March 25.
  
  Lyons' delayed admission to hospital explains why he was not in any lists of the injured published in newspapers on March 20 and March 21. The first mentions of Lyons in the press are mentions of his death in the New York Post and Daily News on March 23, in the Times Union, New York Times and an AP story on March 24, and in the Atlanta World on March 27. Lyons also appeared in lists of those killed in the weekly Black newspapers, the New York Age, Pittsburgh Courier, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide as well as the New York Amsterdam News, on March 30. The only source that provided any details of the circumstances of Lyons' fatal injury was the Times Union, which described him as having been "beaten over the head with a blunt instrument during the rioting on Tuesday night." That story was the only newspaper to follow the death record in describing his injury as a fractured skull. However, neither the death record nor the autopsy mentioned a blunt instrument as the cause of Lyons' injuries.
  
  There is no indication where the reporters for New York Amsterdam News and Times Union obtained information on where Lyons was attacked. No such evidence was produced for the MCCH. If the reporters were correct, Lyons would have been in the midst of police efforts to establish a perimeter around Kress' store, and his injuries likely the product of a police nightstick. One of Communist Party-affiliated lawyers who questioned Captain Rothengast during a MCCH hearing did claim that "Andrew Lyons died of injuries inflicted by clubs of the police." Rothengast replied, "I'd have to consult records to be exact." The MCCH had its investigators gather information on those killed during the disorder. In Lyons case, the only material in their files are the death and autopsy records. The autopsy recorded "Detectives investigating." Given that Hauer told the MCCH hearing that Harris knew nothing about how Lyons had been injured, there are no avenues for investigation in those records. Likely as a result, Lyons death appears to have remained unexplained. Notwithstanding the claim made by the lawyer in the MCCH hearing that police were responsible for the death, the information accompanying Lyons name in a list of "Workers Killed in the Past Six Months" published in New Masses in July 1935: "Died of internal injuries received during the Harlem events of March 19."
   
• 1 2020-10-21T01:41:36+00:00 Hezekiah Wright arrested 42 plain 2022-11-16T15:54:25+00:00 Around 12.30 AM, Acting Captain Conrad Rothengast of the 6th Detective Division arrested Hezekiah Wright, a thirty-six-year-old Black janitor in front of a delicatessen at 2067 7th Avenue. Rothengast claimed that shots being fired on 7th Avenue near 123rd Street drew his attention to a group of men standing in front of the delicatessen at 2067 7th Avenue, owned by Sarah Refkin and managed by Nathan Pavlowitz, according to a Probation Department investigation report. As he approached the group, he allegedly saw Wright kick and smash the store's plate glass window, reach in and take four lamps and two jars of food. Wright then saw him coming towards him, dropped those items and held his hands above his head. The detective somehow interpreted that stance as indicating that Wright was about to attack him, so struck him with his baton before arresting him.
  
  Wright denied any involvement in the looting of the store when interviewed by a Probation officer. Instead he said he was returning to his home at 155 West 123rd Street, around the corner from the delicatessen, having gone out to buy cigarettes, when he saw the crowd in front of the store. Those men ran when they saw Rothengast approaching; Wright said he stayed where he was as he was not involved in attacking the store. Others arrested in the disorder similarly claimed to have been out on errands and mistaken for participants in acts of violence. In Wright's case it was not unusual to be on the streets late at night. He told the Probation Officer that he occasionally went on walks in the late evening, as the long hours of his job kept him occupied until then. The Probation Officer reported nothing that indicated he would have chosen to participate in looting, characterizing him instead as "a quiet, inoffensive type of individual." Dr Walter Bromberg used a similar phrase in the report of his examination of Wright in the Court's Psychiatric Clinic, describing him as "a quiet, cooperative individual," who showed "no evidence of any emotional upset" or "of any aggressive, antisocial personality characteristics." The Probation officer did report that Wright's "moral standards are lax," apparently because his "greatest outlet [was] playing the policy numbers in the hope he will "become lucky" and "hit the numbers." That very widespread activity in Harlem reflected the limited economic opportunities available to the neighborhood's residents at least as much as their morality. Missing from the Probation Department investigation report is the explanation that the Probation officer wrote at the end of the Preliminary Investigation: that Wright was "A victim of mob hysteria who [?] advantages during a tense situation to enrich himself at others expense and by a criminal act." Other psychiatrists had invoked the influence of the mob in reporting their examinations of men arrested in the disorder, and it may be that this Probation officer had been anticipating that it would also appear in Wright's report. When it did not, he may have chosen to omit his comment. 
  
  The Magistrate Court affidavit included few of those details. In that account, Rothengast simply saw Wright kick in the window and take a quantity of groceries. A Home News report of Wright's arraignment in that court put the value of the goods he allegedly stole at $100. The Probation Department investigation report specified that the items Rothegast alleged Wright tried to steal had a combined value of $11.10, the lamps 90 cents each and the jars of food $3.75 each. Stories in the New York Age and New York Times reporting later stages of his prosecution included the details that he had allegedly stolen "four lamps and a quantity of food," with the latter story misstating the value of those items as "about $8 in all." As Pavlowitz, the store manager, told a Probation officer, others had taken the other missing merchandise, which he valued at between $50 and $75, rather than $100.
  
  The lists of those arrested published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Gazette, and in the New York Evening Journal included Wright among those charged with burglary. He appeared in the Harlem Magistrate's Court on March 20, with the docket book and the Home News recording that Magistrate Renaud held him for the grand jury on $1000 bail. The grand jury indicted Wright on March 22, according to his District Attorney's case file; three days later Judge Morris Koenig of the Court of General Sessions continued his bail, a step in the legal process documented only by the New York Sun. It took only two more days for Wright to agree to a plea bargain offered by a district attorney; his appearance in court to plead guilty to unlawful entry was reported in the New York Post on March 27, and New York Herald Tribune, New York Daily News and New York Times on March 28, and the New York Amsterdam News on March 30. Wright told a Probation officer he pled guilty on the advice of his lawyer, denying he attacked the store. His sentencing on April 8 was recorded in 28th Precinct Police blotter and again widely reported, in the Times Union on April 8, in the New York Evening News, New York Times and Daily News on April 9, and in the New York Amsterdam News, New York Age and Afro-American on April 13. Judge Donnellan sent Wright to the Workhouse for three months.
  
  Wright told a Probation officer he had been in New York City for eight years. Born in Kingston, North Carolina, his family moved at some point to Suffolk, Virginia, and from there to Boston in 1906. Around 1909, his mother became ill with tuberculosis and sought treatment at the Rutland Sanitarium. When she was released after two years, Wright and his five younger siblings returned with her to Suffolk, where her sister helped Wright look after the younger children. His father rejoined the family a year later, Wright worked with him making baskets. When Wright was fourteen years old, his mother died. The Probation investigation included no information about Wright's subsequent life in Virginia other than his statement that he had spent thirty days in jail in 1917 after a fight with a railway detective when a circus arrived in town, and his marriage to Odel Burns in 1923. His World War One Draft registration lists his employment in 1918 as a soda foundation clerk in the Colored YMCA in Hopewell, Virginia.
  
  Around 1927, Wright moved to New York City, likely with his family, as his father and three of his surviving siblings lived in Harlem in 1935, and the other sibling nearby in Newark, New Jersey. His father Charles, who in 1935 lived with his second wife and one of his daughters at 510 Manhattan Avenue, was a Baptist minister at Jerusalem Church. Wright worked for his first five years in the city as a chauffeur for Dr Bernard Zaglin. That work was "irregular," which might explain why the Preliminary Investigation in Wright's Probation Department file also records him working in Haverstraw, sixty miles north of the city on the Hudson River, as a driver hauling bricks for the Excelsior Brick Company in the busy season, the summer of 1931, and sometime prior to that as a painter and in a poolroom, and as a laborer in nearby Iona Island. The Probation Department investigation report presents all Wright's work in Haverstraw as prior to his employment by Zaglin even thought the Preliminary Investigation records the length of his work hauling bricks as May-October 1931. It may be that he lived and worked in Haverstraw prior to moving to Harlem, and returned there periodically.
  
  It was to Haverstraw that his wife Odel went when she left him in 1932, with a man named Charlie Phillips, information in the Preliminary Investigation that the Probation officer omitted from the Investigation Report. Instead, the report explained the couple's "separation" as a result of Wright's "infidelity with Marion Harris," with who he was living at the time of his arrest. As was the case with others whose relationships followed the more fluid marriage patterns of working-class communities, the Probation Department investigation report described the twenty-two-year-old Harris as Wright's "mistress," ignoring the information in the Preliminary Investigation that they had married in April 1933, again in Haverstraw. At that time they were living with one of Wright's cousins at 860 Hunts Point Avenue in the Bronx, rent free as Wright was unemployed after Zaglin decided in October 1932 that he no longer needed a chauffeur.
  
  Wright remained unemployed until July 1933, when he and Harris were employed as janitors at 155 West 123rd Street, a job that came with an apartment in the basement. They still held that position at the time of his arrest, and his employer told a Probation officer he would reemploy Wright when he was released. However, if that happened, Wright did not live in the building. A census enumerator found him at 143 West 113th Street in 1940, where he told her he had been in 1935 (a question in that census), and was employed as the superintendent of an apartment building. He also told the enumerator he was married, but Harris is not recorded in the census schedule. Two years later, when Wright registered for the draft, he was living and working in another building, at 216 West 114th Street. He left blank the line for "Name and Address of Person Who Will Always Know Your address," where men typically included their wife or a parent. His home address is struck out and updated several months later to 143 West 113th Street, his home in 1940.
• 1 2020-02-24T20:37:35+00:00 William Kitlitz assaulted & James Smitten injured 40 plain 2022-08-19T20:43:14+00:00 William Kitlitz, a twenty-year-old white mail clerk standing in front of Kress’ store, was allegedly attacked by a twenty-six-year-old Black man named James Smitten. Dr Russell of Harlem Hospital attended Smitten at 8.45 PM at the 28th Precinct, after his arrest, a Medical Attendance record indicated, so the alleged assault took place before that, likely around 8.30 PM. Attacks by individuals represented a very small proportion of both the assaults reported in the riot (7 of 53) and the assaults on whites (3 of 29). There are no details of the alleged violence other than the men's injuries: Kitlitz was described as "beaten on head" in a list in the New York American and having “bruises on face" in the Daily News. There is no record of an ambulance being called to attend him, so those injuries were likely minor. An ambulance was called to attend Smitten, who had "lacerations of scalp." Given that he was treated at the police station, he may have suffered those injuries at the hands of police, as had allegedly happened to Harry Gordon two hours earlier, rather than Kitlitz,
  
  Both men lived only a few blocks from the site of the assault – Smitten at 158 West 123rd Street between 7th and Lenox Avenues, southeast of Kress, and Kitlitz on St Nicholas Avenue between 125th and 124th Streets just a block west of the store. The proximity of their homes to 125th Street likely contributed to them being present early in the disorder. This was the first reported assault on a white man or woman, occurring as clashes between black crowds and white police and attacks by blacks on white-owned stores began, intertwining all those forms of racial violence. Three other white men were allegedly assaulted shortly after Kitlitz. Morris Spellman reported being attacked by group of Black men a few buildings to the west at 125th Street and 8th Avenue at 9.00 PM and Timothy Murphy a few blocks further west by a group of Black men at around the same time. Half an hour later, another group of Black men allegedly attacked Morris Werner at 125th St and 7th Avenue, the eastern end of the block on which Kress’ stood. 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.
  
  With police concentrated on 125th Street, and on protecting Kress' store, at this time it is not surprising that Kitlitz’s alleged assailant was one of only thirteen men arrested for assault, with 85% (46 of 54) of reports not producing an arrest. Patrolman Gross of the 23rd Precinct made the arrest, the Medical Attendance record detailed.
  
  Only two sources directly connected Smitten and Kitlitz. The Medical Attendance record identified Smitten as having been arrested for assaulting Kitlitz. A story in New York Herald Tribune described the assault. In addition, Smitten appeared in lists of those arrested for assault in the Afro-American, Atlanta World, Norfolk Journal and Guide, New York Evening Journal, and Daily News, while Kitlitz appeared in lists of the injured in the New York Evening Journal, Daily News, New York American (on March 20), and Home News.
  
  Smitten’s arrest occurred early enough on March 19 that he was arraigned that evening, in the Night Court, the New York Herald Tribune reported, one of three who appeared in that court mentioned in the story. Magistrate Capshaw remanded Smitten for investigation until Saturday, March 23, the New York Herald Tribune reported, but there is no evidence of the outcome of his legal proceedings. One of the other men the story identified as appearing in the Night Court, an eighteen-year-old white man named Leo Smith, appeared in the Magistrates Court on March 20. The other man, Claudius Jones, was convicted and sentenced by Magistrate Capshaw in the Night Court on March 19.
   
• 1 2020-09-30T19:34:09+00:00 James Hughes arrested 40 plain 2022-11-13T20:49:28+00:00 Detective Raymond Gill arrested James Hughes just before 10PM, not far from Kress' store on West 125th Street. The detective claimed he had seen the twenty-four-year-old Black man appear from behind the cars parked on the street, look around, and throw the rock that hit his partner, Detective Henry Roge. Gill frisked the twenty-four-year-old man, 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.
  
  Instead, Hughes claimed he had been caught up in the crowd on 8th Avenue as he tried to return to his furnished room on 7th Avenue near 115th Street from 126th St and 8th Avenue. He’d begun his evening with a trip to a barber’s shop on 7th Avenue, before returning home for supper, and then heading out again at 9.30pm to go drinking, details in the Probation officer's Preliminary Investigation that were not included in the Report to the Court. When Hughes set out on 8th Avenue for home, and saw the broken glass and stones on the streets, and heard people saying “Let’s break windows,” he picked up some rocks for protection. Hughes knew 125th Street well. He worked in Koch’s Department store, a block east of Kress’, as a shoe repairer, a trade he had learned in Atlanta. He told the Probation officer who interviewed him that he followed the crowd to 125th Street to prevent them breaking the windows in the store in which he worked; in the Preliminary Report, the Probation officer noted that Hughes said that those around him were breaking windows "where no colored were employed." While several newspapers reported that businesses that employed Black staff were not spared from attack, Koch's department store did not have windows broken.
  
  The prosecution of Hughes took a somewhat erratic path through the legal system. Hughes appears in lists of the arrested and charged with assault in the Afro-American, Atlanta World and Norfolk Journal and Gazette, and in Home News and New York Evening Journal. After he appeared in the Magistrates Court early on March 20, the New York Post and Home News reported he was back in the court two days later, joining Isaac Daniels and Charles Saunders in being discharged as they had already been indicted by the Grand Jury and then rearrested and held for trial. (The 28th Precinct Police blotter recorded only that Hughes had been discharged, not that he had been rearrested). Hughes subsequently pled guilty to misdemeanor assault on March 28, as was reported in the New York Evening Journal, New York Times, and New York American.
  
  When Hughes appeared for sentencing the judge allowed him to withdraw the plea as a result of letter from minister named Haynes received by Mayor’s office and forwarded to the judge. A week later Hughes was tried and quickly 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. A report in the New York Times mentioned other witnesses, that "several" detectives identified Hughes. Against that evidence Hughes could offer only his denial and a series of character witnesses. In response, the prosecutor argued that Hughes “saw plenty of trouble – went right into it.”
  
  Like all those convicted in the Court of General Sessions, Hughes was then investigated by the court’s Probation Department, which compiled a three-page report detailing his family, education, leisure, religious practice and residential and employment histories. Based on his steady employment in both Atlanta and New York City, the quality of his living arrangements, and his lack of a criminal record, the probation officer J. T. Sloane determined Hughes participation in the disorder to be “apparently attributable to the effects of mob psychology upon an ordinarily well-behaved individual of suggestible disposition.” At the sentencing hearing, the judge, perhaps influenced by the Probation Department report, 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.
  
  Born in Macon, Georgia, Hughes had only been in the city for fourteen months when arrested. He was 5ft 6 inches, and weighed 145 pounds when arrested. He told the Probation officer J. T. Sloane that he had been raised by a single mother, one of two children she had with a married man, and completed third grade. After Hughes' mother died when he was twelve years old, he went to live with a cousin, a shoemaker, to who he became apprenticed. The Probation officer wrote to another cousin of Hughes in Macon, Fannie Holt, who confirmed those details, and added others that the officer did not include in the report: Both Hughes' father and grandfather were also shoemakers. Hughes moved to Atlanta after his sixteenth birthday, where he found work in the employ of Mr Maslia, at 399 Moreland Street, making $22 a week by 1933. Sometime that year he told his employer that he wanted to go north. By February 1934, Hughes was in New York City, working for French Shoe Repairing Company on 118th Street and Lenox Avenue and living nearby in a furnished room at 101 West 117th Street. After six months, Hughes found a better paying job at Koch's Department Store, increasing his wages from $12 a week to $18 a week. A few months later he moved residences, from 117th Street to another furnished room at 1890 Seventh Avenue, paying $4 a week. His landlady described him as quiet and unobtrusive.
  
  Hughes admitted to a conviction for gambling in Macon, when he was aged fifteen years, which resulted in a fine. He continued to gamble occasionally in Harlem, otherwise spending his time going to the movies. The report from the Court Psychiatric Clinic concluded Hughes was "an average type of individual," who did not show "any abnormal, aggressive or antisocial traits as far as can be ascertained by the interview." In regards to the disorder, the psychiatrist recorded that Hughes gave "a rather rational explanation of his offense."
• 1 2020-02-26T18:59:50+00:00 Isaac Daniels arrested 39 plain 2022-11-13T21:03:50+00:00

  Isaac Daniels, a twenty-nine-year old Black man, was arrested for assaulting Herman Young, in his hardware store at 346 Lenox Avenue. After hearing glass smashing, Young and his wife Rose had come downstairs from their apartment to the store, whose windows had been looted and encountered a man on the stoop, trying to come through the door. The man cursed at Young - "You Goddam Jew I am going to kill you if you don’t get out of here” - and then threw a stone that smashed the glass in the door. Both the stone and flying glass hit Young. Taken to Harlem Hospital, Young was being stitched by a doctor when Daniels entered to receive treatment. Young identified him as the man who had assaulted him, and an officer at the hospital arrested Daniels. (Another man, James Williams, was later arrested for looting the store; the affidavit in his case makes no mention of Young being assaulted by a man, instead recording that he had come downstairs to find four men in the store stealing merchandise)
  
  Questioned in a lineup at the Manhattan Police HQ, Daniels denied throwing the stone at Young, and said he had been in the area because he was on his way home. Daniels, a native of Georgia who had come to New York City in 1928, lived with his wife only a few blocks from Young's store, at 73 W. 130th St. Later, at his trial, he added the detail that he had gone out to buy cigarettes. His wife said that he had gone to the movies, and was listening to the radio at home at 1 AM, when Young was attacked.

  The report of the arrest in the Home News linked Daniels and Young, with the detail that Young had been cut by flying glass. Daniels also appears in lists of those who arrested and charged with assault published in the Afro-American, Atlanta World, Norfolk Journal and Gazette, and New York Evening Journal, none of which include the circumstances which led to his arrest. He also appears in lists of the injured published in the Home News and New York Post, one of four men arrested for assault with injuries. In Daniels' case, the list identifies him as having "contusions" on his left arm.
  
  Daniels was one of the first of those arrested to appear in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, charged with felonious assault. The Home News and New York Post reported he was back in the court two days later, joining James Hughes and Charles Saunders in being discharged as they had already been indicted by the Grand Jury and then rearrested and held for trial (which is likely why Daniels appears in the 28th Precinct Police Blotter as having been discharged, as did James Hughes). The indictment in the District Attorney's case file has a charge of first degree assault, with intent to kill, struck out, leaving a charge of second degree assault, with intent to cause bodily harm. That change suggests that prosecutors reduced the charge after obtaining details of what happened (Young's wife had mentioned that the man who assaulted him had used a piece of pipe, but later reports mention only him throwing a stone). Indicted for assault, Daniels was one of the handful of individuals tried for alleged offenses during the disorder. On April 9, the District Attorney's case file recorded that a jury acquitted Daniels, likely because of questions over Young's identification of him.
• 1 2020-10-01T19:30:34+00:00 Paul Boyett arrested 39 plain 2022-11-13T21:08:47+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 Afro-American, Atlanta World, 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. Unusually, Boyett did not appear in any of the newspaper stories about the legal proceedings after the disorder. Over a month later, on April 23, Boyett appeared before the grand jury, 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 fitted 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 2021-04-28T20:40:49+00:00 Leroy Brown arrested 39 plain 2022-11-13T22:39:11+00:00 Around 9.45 PM, Officer Edward Doran watched a group assemble in front of Sam Lefkowitz's store at 2147 7th Avenue. In in his affidavit in the Harlem Magistrates Court, Doran alleged Leroy Brown threw a tailor's dummy through the window of the store, after which Doran heard him say to the rest of the group, "Go right along and get the other windows." As Doran arrested Brown, he saw the group continue north up 7th Avenue, and "heard the crash of glass and later observed other windows broken." The unclaimed laundry store at 2145 7th Avenue, on the south side of the Lefkowitz's store, also had its window broken.
  
  Leroy Brown was a twenty-two-year-old Black man who identified himself as a bootblack in his examination in the Harlem Magistrates Court. He lived at 2493 8th Avenue, near West 133rd Street, some distance northwest of Lefkowitz's store, which was just north of West 127th Street. That address had been his home since 1932, he told the clerk in the Harlem Magistrates Court. Brown had been in the Magistrates Court once before 1935, charged with disorderly conduct in September 1934, and discharged by a Magistrate, according to his criminal record. When Brown appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, he was charged with both malicious mischief, for allegedly breaking the window, and inciting a riot, for his alleged call for the group to break other windows. He appeared in list of those arrested published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide, as one of those charged with inciting a riot. That was the most serious of the charges Brown faced in the Magistrates Court, so likely the one that would have been emphasized in a list of those arrested. The charge against Brown in a list published in the New York Daily News was malicious mischief (like four other men in this list he was misidentified as white). In lists published in the New York Evening Journal and the New York American the charge against Brown is disorderly conduct (and his first name mistakenly recorded as Eli). That information is almost certainly a mistake, as it was a less serious offense than either of those charged in the Magistrates Court and would only make sense if there was no evidence of him either breaking a window or inciting others. The two charges against Brown are reported in the Home News story about his appearance in the Magistrates Court.
  
  Brown was held in custody by Magistrate Renaud on March 20, and then returned to the court on March 25, March 27, and again on April 1, appearances recorded only in the docket book. There is no information on why prosecutors needed this much time to investigate the case. On the last occasion, Magistrate Stern held Brown for the grand jury on the riot charge, and sent him to the Court of Special Sessions to be tried on the charge of malicious mischief (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). Two weeks later, on April 15, Brown was brought before the grand jury, who sent him to the Court of Special Sessions to be tried for the lesser, misdemeanor form of the offense of riot. The outcome of Brown's two trials in the Court of Special Sessions are unknown. As he was charged in the Harlem Magistrates Court, he should have been in the 28th Precinct Police blotter, but he does not appear in the transcript in the MCCH records. Bernard Smith was also charged with both riot and malicious mischief, alleged, like Brown to have both broken a store window and urged others to do the same. In Smith's case, the grand jury dismissed the riot charge, and the malicious mischief charge was reduced to one of disorderly conduct, of which the Magistrate found him guilty and sentenced him to five days in the Workhouse.
• 1 2020-09-29T17:41:09+00:00 Hashi Mohammed arrested 37 plain 2022-11-14T03:47:14+00:00 Officer Brown of the 40th Precinct arrested Hashi Mohammed, a twenty-two-year-old Black man, for inciting a riot and possession of a knife. Mohammed had allegedly smashed windows "along Lenox Avenue," according to a story in the Home News, the source of details of the charges made against him. Born in Abyssinia, according to the New York American and New York Evening Journal and Washington Heights Magistrate's Court docket book, he lived at 4 West 128th Street, a block east of an area of Lenox Avenue that saw extensive disorder from late on March 19 and into the early hours of March 20, and may have been drawn to join the crowds on that street at some point. The combination of charges suggest that after Mohammed's arrest the police officer searched him and found the knife, "a large bread knife" according to Home News. Mohammed also appeared in lists of the injured published in the New York Evening Journal, New York Post and New York American as having "internal injuries." While he was listed among those "Less Seriously Injured" in the New York American and New York Evening Journal, he was also identified as in Harlem Hospital (however, he does not appear in any of the records the MCCH obtained from the hospital). It is possible that Brown or other police officers involved in his arrest may have been responsible for those injuries.
  
  Mohammed was included in the list of those arrested published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide as charged with inciting a riot and "also charged with, violation of Sullivan law (possession of firearms)." When Mohammed appeared in the Washington Heights Magistrate's Court he faced both charges, but the weapon he was recorded in the docket book as possessing was a knife not a gun.
  
  Mohammed did not appear in the Washington Heights Magistrate's Court until March 22, whereas most of those arrested in the disorder had been in court on March 20. That delay may have been the result of his injury. On the charge of carrying a dangerous weapon, Magistrate Ford held him on bail of $2500 to appear in the Court of Special Sessions, significantly more than the typical bail of $500. Mohammed pled guilty, according to the docket book, but that must have been to a lesser charge of disorderly conduct, as the Magistrate could not adjudicate a charge of riot. Ford sentenced him to thirty days in the Workhouse. The only reports of Mohammed's court appearance were in the Daily Worker, which mentioned only the sentence and misreported the charge against him as burglary, and the Home News, which reported he had been convicted not pled guilty. Three weeks later, on April 17, the Magistrates in the Court of Special Sessions acquitted Mohammed of possessing a weapon, an outcome that appears only in the records of the 32nd Precinct.
  
  The sources differ in how they record Mohammed's name. In the list published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide he appears as Sashi Mohammed, as Hashi Mohammed in the New York Evening Journal, New York Post and New York American, as Hashi Mohamed in the Home News and as Hashi Mohamid in the Washington Heights Magistrate's Court docket book.The records of the 32nd Precinct record his name as "Koko Mohammed."
   
• 1 2020-02-25T17:19:47+00:00 Lyman Quarterman shot 36 plain 2022-07-19T15:14:02+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. Around the same time, 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 (in the same area as two of the other Black men shot, Clarence London and Wilmont Hendricks)
  
  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 who the police officer struggled, James Thompson, was shot and killed by police).
   
• 1 2020-02-25T18:06:03+00:00 August Miller killed 35 plain 2022-08-17T01:31:37+00:00 Around midnight, August Miller, a fifty-six-year-old white man, suffered a head injury in the midst of a crowd at 126th Street and Lenox Avenue. A cab driver took him to the Joint Disease Hospital, according to the police complaint report. It was 12.30 AM when Dr. Millbank attended Miller, so likely around midnight when he collapsed in the crowd. Millbank diagnosed him as suffering a possible skull fracture "received in some unknown manner during disorder," according to hospital records, and admitted him for treatment. Miller appeared in three of the seven newspaper lists of the injured published on March 20, those of the New York Evening Journal, New York Post and New York American, and among those the New York Herald Tribune reported still in hospital on March 21, and those listed as injured in the Atlanta World on March 27.
  
  Miller himself never described the circumstances of his injury, dying on March 22 without regaining consciousness. His death was widely reported on March 23, in some cases with information on the how he had been killed. The most direct explanations came in stories published in the New York Herald Tribune, New York Evening Journal, and Times Union, and in the Associated Press story, which reported Miller had been "beaten by rioters." The Home News offered additional details, that Miller was "struck by several bricks, knocked down and kicked around by the mob." The New York Times and New York Sun did not attribute Miller's death to anyone, only going as far as saying Miller was "in the midst of rioters" when injured, while the Brooklyn Daily Eagle even more obliquely said his death came "during the height of the disorders." The New York Post implied he had been assaulted in a different way, noting where he had been injured, and adding "He was one of the half a dozen white men seriously hurt during the disturbance." Lists of those killed in the Daily News and stories in Black newspapers the New York Age and New York Amsterdam News, as well as the lists of those killed published in the Afro-American, Norfolk Journal and Guide and Pittsburgh Courier simply listed Miller's injuries, a fractured skull.
  
  Police investigating the case in the aftermath of the disorder could find no witnesses to establish the circumstances in which he was injured. There is also no information on why he traveled to the neighborhood. Miller lived in the Bronx, some distance from Harlem. His employers did report Miller had been “acting peculiar for some months previous.”
  
  An autopsy performed at the City Morgue on March 23 determined that the cause of death was a cerebral hemorrhage, “a natural cause, nothing suspicious.” Miller was included in lists of those killed in the disorder published on March 23 and 24, and in Black weekly newspapers on March 30, without mention of the autopsy. On March 31 the Home News also included him in its count of those killed in the disorder even while noting that Miller's death "was later found to have been due to heart disease, probably aggravated by exertion and excitement." The Daily News, New York American, Daily Mirror, Times Union, the Associated Press, Afro American, and Chicago Defender reported the death of Lloyd Hobbs on March 30 as the fourth death resulting from the disorder without specifying the other three individuals killed. None of those newspapers included Edward Laurie among those killed, so they also still included Miller after the autopsy, along with James Thompson and Andrew Lyons. So too did the New York Herald Tribune, which identified Hobbs as the fifth death resulting from the riot. (The Daily Worker initially reported Hobbs as the fourth death, on April 1, but a week later referred to him as the third death, while the New York Times reported his death without reference to how many others had been killed).
• 1 2020-02-25T03:21:30+00:00 Thomas Wijstem assaulted & killed 31 plain 2022-08-16T20:01:51+00:00 Around 10.30 PM, Thomas Wijstem, a thirty-four-year-old white carpenter, was struck on the head by a rock and knocked unconscious in front of the W. T. Grant store at 226 West 125th Street.There is no information on why Wijstem was on West 125th Street at that time. He lived across town to the east, at 16 East 127th Street, a racially mixed section likely too far away for him to have heard the noise of the disorder. By 10:30 PM police had established a perimeter around 125th Street and the large crowds that had been concentrated there earlier had broken into smaller groups, many of which scattered north and south up the avenues. However, around 10:30 PM, crowds broke through the police cordon on to this block of 125th Street. Three of the four brief newspaper accounts of the assault reported that a group of Black men attacked Wijstem. At the same time, a rock was thrown through the window of Blumstein's department store, the building immediately to the west of where Wijstem was struck, and ten minutes later, a rock was thrown that broke windows in Kress' store. In both those cases police alleged that the men responsible urged people on the street to attack police, causing large crowds to gather. With police reinforcements having arrived, unlike earlier in the disorder, police made arrests in all three of those incidents, albeit of only one individual at each location. Douglas Cornelius, a twenty-four-year-old Black man, was arrested for allegedly throwing a rock that struck Wijstem. Given the objects being thrown at nearby store windows at this time, it is possible that the rock that hit Wijstem may have been meant for the windows of the W. T. Grant store, which were broken during the disorder
  
  While many of those injured in the disorder suffered head injuries, Wijstem’s injury was one of the most severe, a fractured skull that rendered him unconscious. As a result, he appears in stories of the disorder and lists of the injured in the New York Evening Journal, Daily News, New York American, Home News, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide as a seriously injured "unidentified white man." The Home News, New York Post and New York World-Telegram did eventually name him, on March 22, with the Home News and New York World-Telegram reporting that his brother had identified him and the New York Post that his neighbors had identified him (the Home News misreported his name as "Thor Wigstrom"). Three months later, a brief story in New York Herald Tribune reported Wijstem had died in Bellevue Hospital without regaining consciousness. However, as the attack on Wijstem led to an arrest and prosecution for assault, he is included among both those assaulted and killed (but not among those injured in assaults).
  
  Like the man he targeted, Cornelius lived in East Harlem, at 52 East 118th Street, a mixed black and Puerto Rican section. He appeared in lists of those arrested for assault in nine newspapers, but only five of those reports link him to the unidentified man with the fractured skull. After appearing in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, charged with felonious assault, he was remanded in custody. He appeared in court again on March 25, when Magistrate Ford dismissed the charge against him as he had been indicted by the grand jury. The 28th Precinct Police blotter simply listed the charges as "Dism[issed]," as it did with other men dismissed in the Magistrates Court because they had been indicted already. However, there is no case file for Cornelius in the District Attorney's records, and no other information on the outcome of his prosecution.
• 1 2021-05-27T20:08:18+00:00 Louis Cobb arrested 31 plain 2022-10-26T18:30:12+00:00 Around 1.20 AM, Officer Nathaniel Carter allegedly saw several men leaving William Feinstein's liquor store at 452 Lenox Avenue carrying bottles, according to the Magistrate's Court affidavit. He arrested one of those men, Louis Cobb, a thirty-eight-year-old Black laborer, with one bottle of gin and two bottles of whiskey in his possession. A crowd of thirty to forty people had attacked the closed store a few minutes earlier, according to witness testimony in the Municipal Court reported in the New York Times and New York Herald Tribune, breaking down the iron gate protecting it, then smashing the windows, taking bottles of liquor and damaging the storefront. Feinstein put his losses at $627.40 when he sued the city for failing to protect his business. The three bottles allegedly taken by Cobb amounted to just over one percent of that total, $7.
  
  Louis Cobb appeared in the Washington Heights Magistrate's Court on March 20. However, the affidavit making the complaint against him was not taken until March 25. In the interim, Magistrate Ford held Cobb without bail. An annotation in the docket book dated March 21 records "no bail in absence of record," suggesting police had not been able to produce his criminal record. Magistrates reaffirmed the denial of bail when Cobb appeared repeatedly in court, on March 25, 26 and April 2, when he was finally sent to the grand jury. Those decisions reflected the criminal record eventually produced for him: six charges in New York City since 1920, for burglary, robbery, drug possession, homicide, procuring and possession of a firearm, resulting in two sentences to the State Prison at Sing Sing, two terms in the Penitentiary and a sentence in the workhouse, and two sentences for violating parole. Cobb appears in the list of those arrested and charged with burglary published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Gazette, and the list published in the New York Evening Journal. There are no newspaper reports of his prosecution.
  
  The grand jury did not indict Cobb; on April 10 they instead transferred him to the Court of Special Sessions to be tried for petit larceny. That decision likely reflected the lack of evidence of him breaking into the store required for a charge of burglary, and the value of the three bottles of liquor Officer Carter allegedly found on him, $7, according to the Magistrate's Court affidavit, well below the $100 threshold for a felony charge for larceny. Less than a week later, on April 15, the Magistrates in the Court of Special Sessions convicted Cobb and sentenced him to the Penitentary, an outcome recorded only in the records of the 32nd Precinct.
  
  Born in Georgia in 1897, Louis Cobb had made his way to New York City some time before January 10, 1920, when a census enumerator found him boarding at 334 53rd Street, in San Juan Hill, the city's major Black neighborhood before the rise of Harlem, and working as a porter. A series of criminal convictions though the 1920s and 1930s offer fragmentary glimpses of Cobb's life in Harlem. Just over two months after the census, his criminal record indicates that police charged Cobb with attempted burglary; he was convicted and sentenced to an indefinite term in the Blackwell Island Penitentiary. He was on parole by February 1921, when police arrested him again for violating the terms of that parole and returned him to the Penitentiary. Released again later that year, within a few months Cobb was in court, charged with robbery. Convicted of second-degree assault, the judge sentenced him to five years in Sing Sing, the state prison. The prison admissions register recorded that Cobb was unemployed at the time of the alleged crime, now living in Harlem at 30 West 135th Street; in a subsequent admission register entry he would attribute his "first crime" to being out of work. According to the admissions register, Cobb was eligible for parole in May 1925. He likely was released around this time, as in November 1925 police arrested him again, this time for a drugs offense, according to his criminal record. The judge sentenced him to another indefinite term in the Penitentiary, but the conviction violated his parole, so Cobb was returned to Sing Sing Prison to serve out his previous sentence.
  
  Likely released in early 1926, Cobb later that year began living with Martha Nelson, who was about ten years his junior. The couple made their home at 8 West 137th Street, in the heart of Harlem. In 1930, Cobb gave his occupation as longshoreman in the 1930 census, but indicated he had not been employed in 1929. He may have been supporting himself in other ways. In May 1929, his criminal record indicates that a magistrate convicted Cobb as a procurer, supplying prostitutes, and sentenced him to sixty days in the workhouse. About five months after his release, in December 1929, police again arrested Cobb, for the murder of Bert Moore, a Black store manger, during a robbery of the candy store at 23 West 138th Street that he managed. The New York Amsterdam News and New York Age published very different accounts of the crime, neither of which explain why Cobb's criminal record indicated he was discharged in 1931 and charged instead with gun possession. The robbery of the store was the third in as many weeks.  According to the New York Age, in a story accompanied by a photograph of Moore, Cobb was involved in all those robberies; on the first two occasions, he had an accomplice, John Boyle, who was arrested after the second robbery when Moore managed to subdue him with a baseball bat until police arrived. Cobb then returned on his own to rob the store again and shot Moore as he left. A customer in the store at the time identified Cobb. The New York Amsterdam News reported Doyle [Boyle] as acting alone and captured by Moore and three customers, and did not link Cobb to either previous robbery. After the third robbery, the New York Amsterdam News reported less evidence linking Cobb to the murder: Moore gave police a description before he died, based on which officers arrested Cobb on West 138th Street close by the candy store. The story also reported that police found a gun when they searched Cobb's home, but that his wife claimed it belonged to her, leading to her arrest for gun possession. The New York Amsterdam News a week later reported Cobb's arraignment and his wife's arraignment in separate stories. Neither paper published anything further about the case.
  
  In April 1930, the census recorded that Cobb was in the Tombs Prison; a Magistrate had ordered him held without bail on the murder charge. However, at some point before early 1931 he was released; beginning in February, he worked as a laborer for a coal company, according to the Sing Sing Prison admission register. In April, police arrested him for possession of a revolver; the prison admission register recorded the date of that crime as December 13, 1929, when Cobb was arrested for Moore's murder. Police must have found a way to link Cobb to the gun found in his home that day, but not to Moore's murder; it does not seem that Martha had changed her story, as Cobb still listed her as his wife in the prison admission register. Convicted of gun possession, Cobb was sentenced to seven years in Sing Sing Prison.
  
  Paroled in 1939, rather than returning to Harlem, Cobb settled in Albany, New York, and found work as a presser. He identifies himself as single, and his mother, rather than Martha Nelson, as his next of kin, in the Clinton Prison admission ledger in 1939. In July that year police arrested Cobb for burglary, charging him with stealing a $15 radio, a coat and a vest. The admission ledger recorded that he asserted his innocence, saying he took the property from a friend not knowing it was stolen. Nonetheless, he was found guilty and sentenced to a term of ten to twenty years. The 1940 census records him as an inmate of Clinton Prison. He was not eligible for parole until 1948.
   
• 1 2020-02-26T15:11:31+00:00 Richard Jackson arrested 31 plain 2022-11-13T21:12:07+00:00 Officer Connelly of the 32nd Precinct arrested Richard Jackson, a twenty-seven-year-old Black man who lived at 102 West 119th Street, on March 20, perhaps for assaulting Vito Capozzio, a man of unknown race and age. Jackson appeared in the list of those arrested for assault published in the Afro-American, Atlanta World and Norfolk Journal and Guide, with no information on the events that led to his arrest. However, the information in the Washington Heights Magistrates Court docket book suggests Jackson may have been involved in a fight not in the disorder. When he appeared in court on March 20 charged the charge against him was the lesser offense of disorderly conduct, not assault, and was annotated "fight." That violence cannot have resulted in significant injury if the charge was disorderly conduct: the applicable section of the statute applied only to a person who used "offensive, disorderly, threatening, abusive or insulting language, conduct or behavior." The complainant was Vito Capozzio, whose address was recorded as "3764 Boulevard," perhaps in the Bronx. He was also the complainant against the man recorded after Jackson in the docket book, Salathel Smith, a forty-seven-year-old Black man also charged with disorderly conduct. Both Jackson and Smith were arrested by the same police officer. Given that evidence, Jackson and Smith may have got into a fight in a business which Capozzio either owned or worked in rather than assaulting him. Their appearance in the Washington Heights Court, and arrest by an officer from the 32nd Precinct, indicate that they were arrested north of 130th Street, an area that saw fewer incidents and arrests during the disorder. Jackson and Smith would not have been the only men who appeared in court that day not arrested as part of the disorder; eleven of the forty-four recorded in the docket book on March 20 faced charges unrelated to the disorder, such as offenses against the Sabbath Law.
  
  Disorderly conduct was a charge that could be adjudicated in the Magistrates Court. Magistrate Ford convicted Jackson, and Smith. He sentenced both to just two days in the workhouse or a $5 fine; neither paid the fine, so would have served the time. The New York Age reported Jackson's conviction, while the New York Herald Tribune also reported the charge and sentence, in stories on legal proceedings related to the disorder. The New York Age also reported Smith's conviction, the only mention of his name in a newspaper story. The inconsistent appearance of Jackson in newspaper lists and reports of court proceedings likely reflects confusion of reporters about whether his arrest related to the disorder.
• 1 2021-12-20T20:08:38+00:00 Frank Wells arrested 31 plain 2022-11-14T19:46:27+00:00 Around 8.50 PM, Officer Henry Eppler of the 48th Precinct arrested Frank Wells, a twenty-six-year-old Black man, for allegedly "hurling an automobile hub through a cafeteria window on 125th Street," according to a story in the New York Herald Tribune. Eppler was stationed in front of 207 West 125th Street, he testified in a public hearing of the MCCH; that was the address of the Willow Cafeteria, which appeared in several newspaper lists of damaged businesses. Eppler had arrived on Emergency Truck #5 about 7.15 PM, and initially was stationed on 124th Street between 7th and 8th Avenues, at the rear of Kress' store. By that time the crowds that broke the store's rear windows were gone and he testified that the street was quiet, so the truck drove on to West 125th Street. At that time, police were establishing a cordon around Kress' store; around the time Eppler arrested Wells a crowd reportedly broke through that cordon on to this block of 125th Street. Wells lived near 125th Street at 155 West 123rd Street, near the corner of 7th Avenue, so could have been drawn to the noise and crowds around Kress' store early in the disorder, when store windows on 125th Street were broken.
  
  A New York Herald Tribune story reported Wells was "locked up at West 123rd Street station," the charge against him "to depend on value of the window." That determination was necessary as malicious mischief, the offense involving damage to property that was the charge most often made against those alleged to have broken windows, was a felony if the damage was more than $25. Only the Daily News list of those arrested reported that charge against Wells. The charge was inciting a riot in the list published in the Afro-American, Atlanta World, Norfolk Journal and Guide, assault in the list published in the New York Evening Journal, and disorderly conduct in the list published in the New York American. Wells did not appear in the 28th Precinct Police blotter, perhaps because of how early in the disorder he was arrested. On March 20, when Wells appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court, one of the last arraigned after being one of the first arrested, the charge recorded in the docket book was disorderly conduct. He appears to have been one of a small number of those arrested to be represented by a lawyer: "Ed Kuntz, 100 5th Ave." was the attorney recorded in the docket book. Edward Kuntz, a lawyer with the International Labor Defense, also represented Daniel Miller, Sam Jamison, Murray Samuels and Claudio Viabolo, the men arrested for picketing in front of Kress's store immediately before the disorder began, in the Court of Special Sessions, and questioned witnesses in hearings of the MCCH commission. That representation indicated that Wells was associated with the Communist Party. So too did the involvement of another ILD lawyer, Isidore Englander, and the inclusion of Wells in a list of possible witnesses that the CP gave to Arthur Garfield Hays of the MCCH. At the Harlem Magistrates Court Englander "found out Frank Wells was arrested," he testified in a public hearing of the MCCH. When he got access to Wells, he claimed he found "his head was bandaged, his shirt was red with blood, he could not stand on his feet." At an earlier hearing, Kuntz had tried to ask Patrolman Eppler about the claim that police had beaten Wells "on the streets," but had been prevented by the District Attorney's instruction that police officers testifying in the hearings could not reveal any evidence they would give in a pending case.
  
  Investigating the case against Wells took an unusually long time. He returned to court on March 26, at which time his bail was set at $500. A note on the docket book appears to indicate that someone put up that bail, likely a Communist Party organization. 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 2022-03-11T22:00:36+00:00 Leaflets distributed 30 plain 2022-11-11T02:26:05+00:00 The Young Liberators printed a one-page mimeographed leaflet in the early evening of March 19. Just where they distributed the leaflet is uncertain. "Some white youngsters were passing out handbills" when a reporter for the Afro-American arrived at 125th Street and 7th Avenue at 7:14 PM; Louise Thompson saw people with the leaflet on that corner just after 8:00 PM, suggesting a focus on 125th Street. “They were hurriedly passed put among the throngs of Negro idlers up and down teeming 125th Street,” according to the sensationalized story in Time magazine. The New York American claimed, “These papers received wide circulation throughout Harlem.” The leaflet was also pasted on building walls, according to the New York Evening Journal. Reading its text incited the crowds that had gathered on 125th Street, the police and District Attorney William Dodge claimed, making the Young Liberators, who they considered Communists, responsible for the disorder. The MCCH did not agree. Based on testimony from Louise Thompson that the leaflet did not appear on 125th Street until sometime between 7.30 PM and 8.00 PM, the MCCH final report concluded that the Young Liberators “were not responsible for the disorder and attacks on property which were already in full swing.” By 7.30 PM, “Already a tabloid in screaming headlines was telling the city that a riot was going on in Harlem,” the MCCH report also noted. Louise Thompson identified that newspaper as the Daily Mirror. Later on March 19, the CP distributed a leaflet, after the Young Liberators approached them concerned about the growing disorder, according to James Ford’s testimony in a MCCH public hearing. He said that leaflet was “written and distributed” about “9 or 10 o’clock.” Leaflets were still in circulation on Harlem’s streets around 2 AM. Sgt Samuel Battle told a public hearing of the MCCH he came into possession of two or three at that time, without specifying to which of the two leaflets he was referring.
  
  Both leaflets identified Kress store staff as responsible for the violence against Rivera, with only passing mention of police. That narrative focused protests on the store, and white businesses, Bosses, more generally, rather than police, or the white population. In terms of that framework, attacks on Kress’ store, and on other white businesses later in the disorder, appear not straightforwardly attacks on property and economic power, but also as retaliation against violence by those who owned and worked in those businesses
  
  A mimeographed page, the Young Liberators’ leaflet combined handwritten and typewritten text. At the top, the handwritten text read, “Child Brutally Beaten. Woman attacked by Boss and Cops = Child near DEATH.” The remaining typewritten text read:

  ONE HOUR AGO A TWELVE-YEAR-OLD NEGRO BOY WAS BRUTALLY BEATEN BY THE MANAGEMENT OF KRESS FIVE-AND-TEN-CENT STORE.
  THE BOY IS NEAR DEATH
  HE WAS MERCILESSLY BEATEN BECAUSE THEY THOUGHT HE HAD ‘STOLEN’ A FIVE CENT KNIFE.
  A NEGRO WOMAN WHO SPRANG TO THE DEFENSE OF THE BOY HAD HER ARMS BROKEN BY THESE THUGS AND WAS THEN ARRESTED.
  WORKERS, NEGROES AND WHITE, PROTEST AGAINST THIS LYNCH ATTACK ON INNOCENT NEGRO PEOPLE. DEMAND THE RELEASE OF THE BOY AND WOMAN.
  DEMAND THE IMMEDIATE ARREST OF THE MANAGER RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS LYNCH ATTACK.
  DON'T BUY AT KRESS'S. STOP POLICE BRUTALITY IN NEGRO HARLEM.
  JOIN THE PICKET LINE
  ISSUED BY YOUNG LIBERATORS.

  
  Predictably, the anti-Communist Hearst newspaper the New York Evening Journal gave the greatest space to the leaflet, publishing both the full text of the Young Liberators' leaflet and photographs of it (and the YCP leaflet and two placards carried by pickets, under the headline "Insidious Propaganda That Started Harlem Riot," and a front-page photograph of the men arrested protesting in front of Kress’ store). A portion of the Young Liberators' leaflet appeared in a combination of AP photographs published in several newspapers. In addition to the New York Evening Journal, the HN, WT and the New Republic published the text of the leaflet. The NYHT quoted only about half of the leaflet, stopping after the first use of “lynch attack.” None of those published versions of the circular included the final line, “JOIN THE PICKET.” That line did appear in the version published by the Norfolk Journal and Guide, the only Black publication in which the leaflets appeared. That line is visible in the photograph published in the NYEJ, was in the version of the leaflet in the MCCH’s final report, and was raised by Hays in the public hearing of the MCCH (Taylor answered that he did not know to what it referred [31]). The text published in the HN omitted the line DON'T BUY AT KRESS'S. STOP POLICE BRUTALITY IN NEGRO HARLEM, substituting instead “Demand the hiring of Negro workers in Harlem department stores. Boycott the store." That phrase transposed the call not to buy in the store into the terms of boycott the campaigns of the previous year, effectively treating the tactic as having a single goal. The NYP quoted only the handwritten headline of the leaflet, the characterization of the incident as “this lynch attack,” and the call for protest. Time quoted only the headline, and the AA only the first two phrases from the headline, omitting “boss” so that the charge of violence was only against police. Quotations in the NYS were garbled versions of the actual leaflet text, including words and phrases that appeared but in the wrong form: "A Child Brutally Beaten." "A Twelve-Year-Old Child Was Brutally Beaten for Stealing a Knife from a Five and Ten Cent Store." "Workers Protest Against This Lynch Attack." The DN misreported the leaflet as making the more provocative charge that the boy had been beaten to death. Initial stories about the disorder published by the NYT and Am did not mention the leaflet, but added them to their narrative the next day, 3/21.
  
  The CP leaflet, also a mimeographed page, similarly began with handwritten text that read, “FOR UNITY OF NEGRO AND WHITE WORKERS! DON'T LET THE BOSSES START RACE RIOTS IN HARLEM!”. The typewritten portion went on:

  The brutal beating of the 12-year-old boy, Riviera, by Kress's special guard, for taking a piece of candy, again proves the increasing terror against the Negro people of Harlem. Bosses, who deny the most immediate necessities from workers' children, who throw workers out of employment, who pay not even enough to live on, are protecting their so-called property rights by brutal beatings, as in the case of the boy Riviera. They shoot both Negro and white workers in strikes all over the country. They lynch Negro people in the South on framed-up charges.
  The bosses and police are trying to bring the lynch spirit right here to Harlem. The bosses would welcome nothing more than a fight between the white and Negro workers of our community, so that they may be able to continue to rule over both the Negro and white workers.
  Our answer to the brutal beating of this boy, by one of the flunkies of Mr. Kress, must be an organized and determined resistance against the brutal attacks of the bosses and the police.
  WORKERS, NEGRO AND WHITE: DEMAND THE IMMEDIATE DISMISSAL AND ARREST AND PROSECUTION OF THE SPECIAL GUARD AND THE MANAGER OF THE STORE.
  DEMAND THE RELEASE OF THE NEGRO AND WHITE WORKERS ARRESTED.
  DEMAND THE HIRING OF NEGRO WORKERS IN ALL DEPARTMENT STORES IN HARLEM
  DON'T LET BOSSES START ANY RACE RIOTS IN HARLEM.
  DON'T TRADE IN KRESSES.
  
  Issued by
  Communist Party
  Young Communist League

  
  The Daily Worker published the CP leaflet text, while not publishing the Young Liberators' leaflet, perhaps because the public position of the Young Liberators was that the organization was not affiliated with the CP. The handwritten headline of that leaflet appeared at the end of a WT story, after the full-text of the Young Liberators' leaflet: “In another manifesto, signed by the Communist party and the Young Peoples’ League, a plea was made “for unity of Negro and white workers—don’t let the bosses start race riots in Harlem!” While the New York Evening Journal published a photograph of the leaflet, no other white newspapers reproduced the text, nor did it appear in the MCCH final report. The Norfolk Journal and Guide was the only Black publication in which the leaflet text appeared.
  
  Initial newspaper stories reported that police said that the leaflets were responsible for moving the crowds on 125th Street to violence. The sensationalized version of that story employed metaphors of fire that placed the leaflets at the start of the disorder: leaflets were the “match which ignited Harlem and pitted its teeming thousands against the police and white spectators and shopkeepers” in the Daily News, “inflammatory handbills, the spark that fired the tinder” in Newsweek, and "inflame the populace" in a New York Age editorial; and in the NYS and DM leaflets fanned the crowd’s fury. The NYEJ opted for a more racist image evoking slavery, in which the leaflet was “largely responsible for whipping the Negroes to a frenzy.” The New York Age columnist the "Flying Cavalier," described the leaflets as as an example of the Communist "technique in the making up of their messages which would incite a lamb to jump on a tiger—if the lamb didn’t think first." Other newspapers framed the leaflets in terms of rumors: as having started the rumor in the NYHT, as “the chief agency which spread the rumor in the HN; and as having “helped spread resentment” in the NYP. (The WT described the leaflet without giving it a specific role; the “tinder for the destructive conflict” was the rumor that a boy had been beaten and killed, “assiduously spread by Communists.”) Writing in the New Republic, white journalist Hamilton Basso devoted two paragraphs to weighing the role the leaflet played in the disorder. He concluded that it “helped to rouse the crowds to violence,” but rejected the idea that the leaflet’s purpose “was deliberately to provoke a race riot” as requiring belief in “the stupid Red Scare of the Hearst press.”
  
  The only direct evidence of when the Young Liberators' leaflet was distributed came from Louise Thompson. She told a public hearing of the MCCH that the leaflets were not in circulation when she left 125th Street around 7.30 PM. It was when Thompson returned around 8.00 PM that she “first saw the leaflet” in the hands of several people, but not anyone handing them out. Thompson was not a disinterested witness; as a member of the Communist Party she would not have wanted to see them held responsible for the disorder. L. T. Cole, who like Thompson had been inside Kress’ store after Rivera was grabbed but was not a Communist, told the MCCH he saw pamphlets in the crowd around 8.00 PM (the number is smudged in the transcript so that time is uncertain). Inspector Di Martini’s report supported that timeline, locating the appearance of “a number of pamphlets under the heading of the YL and YCP” after the crowd that gathered the rear of Kress’ store around 7.00 PM had been dispersed. Presumably that timing was based on the statements of officers on 125th Street -- but not Patrolman Moran, who told the MCCH he was on duty in front of Kress’ store from 6.00 PM throughout the night and did not see leaflets passed out. Copies of the leaflets were attached to the report. They may have been the copies that Sgt Battle told the MCCH public hearing that he had gathered near the end of the disorder, around 2 AM.
  
  Newspaper stories presented a different timeline that had the leaflet appear earlier, around 6.00 PM, for which there was no direct evidence. The NYEJ and HN, the New York Post the next day, and the New Republic, reported that the Young Liberators' leaflet appeared about an hour after Kress’ staff grabbed Rivera, which would have been around 3.30 PM. When DA William Dodge spoke to reporters on March 20, the DN and WT (and Am 3/22) reported him as saying that the leaflets appeared within two hours of the incident in the store. No one at the scene described that timeline. It was likely based on the text of the leaflet, which read “One hour ago a twelve-year-old boy was brutally beaten by the management of Kress five-and-ten-cent store.” At that time, however, the Young Liberators were unaware of what had happened in the store. It was not until around 5.00 PM, as police were clearing people from Kress’ store, a black man brought news to the offices of the Young Liberators, James Taylor testified. Taylor, the leader of the Young Liberators, was asked about the timing referred to in the leaflet; he replied that he did not know whether that was correct.[29] The NYT story reporting Dodge’s comments had the “first of the Communist handbills” appear at 6:00 PM. That timeline is at least plausible; it would have been around an hour after the Young Liberators learned of an incident in Kress’ store. It was not, however, a timeframe that fitted with Di Martini’s report. The DN had the Young Liberators distributing the leaflets as they picketed Kress’ store, at a time not specified in the story. However, that detail is part of the truncated timeline police provided that had all five men they arrested arriving at Kress’ store at the same time, rather than separately over a period of forty-five minutes starting around 6.00 PM as testimony from those at the scene indicated. The pickets were the final protesters to arrive at Kress’ store, around 6.45 PM. Thompson saw them, so would have seen leaflets being distributed at that time.
  
  William Ford’s testimony in a MCCH public hearing is the only evidence related to the origins and timing of the CP pamphlet. The CP leaflet appeared after members of the Young Liberators visited Ford, about an hour after distributing their leaflet, he testified. They “were very much disturbed” that “these leaflets had not been able to allay mass resentment in Harlem,” and instead “a rumor had got around that a race riot had started in Harlem.” The CP immediately produced a leaflet intended “to stop race rioting,” Ford testified, and he went to Harlem around 8 PM. The leaflet arrived an hour or two later, about “9 or 10 o’clock.” The MCCH report stated that that CP leaflet was issued “about the same time” as the YL’s leaflet. None of the newspapers mentioned the time that the leaflet was distributed.
  
  District Attorney William Dodge and Police Commissioner Valentine both amplified the police narrative when they spoke to reporters on March 20 after Dodge appeared before the grand jury to seek indictments against alleged participants in the disorder. The leaflets remained central to that charge, and to the evidence that the authorities presented in an effort to substantiate it. Valentine summarized Di Martini’s “departmental report on the cause of the rioting” as detailing “that a Negro youth had been caught stealing, that a woman had screamed, that the "Young Liberators" had met, that they had thereafter disseminated "untruthful deceptive and inflammatory literature" and that all these events had been climaxed by the appearance of a hearse in the vicinity,” the NYS reported, a chronology also reported in the Am (3/22), WT, TU [3/21_LaG] and BDE. (The hearse is not the final element in Di Martini’s report; it is mentioned before the YLs). Two days later Dodge showed the grand jury a typewriter and mimeograph machine. The fruits of police raids on the offices of several organizations affiliated with the Communist Party, the machines were used to produce the YL’s leaflet, he told the grand jury, according to stories in HT, NYP, Am, DN, NYT. (The mimeograph machine was taken from the Nurses and Hospital Workers League, the organization which employed one of the men arrested for trying to speak in front of Kress’ store, Daniel Miller, the NYP and Am reported). According to the DN, after the grand jury examined that material, “Dodge said arrests might be expected momentarily.” There are no reports of any arrests related to the leaflets.
  
  Mayor La Guardia did not echo the DA and Police Commissioner in directly blaming Communists for the disorder. While the statement he issued that was distributed and displayed in Harlem the evening after the disorder followed the same police narrative, and mentioned the leaflets, it did not present them as triggering the disorder. Instead, they were used to characterize those responsible: “The maliciousness and viciousness of the instigators are betrayed by the false statements contained in mimeographed handbills and placards.”  That statement indirectly implicated the Young Liberators and Communist Party, who had signed the leaflets (as the DW noted, 3/21). However, the circular presented the disorder as “instigated and artificially stimulated by a few irresponsible individuals,” who went unnamed. Questioned by journalists, La Guardia "would not say whether he agreed with the police that the instigators were Communists," the New York Herald Tribune reported.
  
  Newspaper stories about the MCCH public hearing treated the testimony regarding the time at which the leaflets appeared in a variety of ways. The HT and an editorial in the AN highlighted how that testimony undermined what police said in the aftermath of the disorder. “Reds' Handbills Are Cleared As 'Chief Cause' of Harlem Riot” was the headline of the HT story [3/31, 1], which reported that “The committee learned that the circulars did not appear on the streets until 8:30 p. m., fully two hours after the worst of the rioting was over. Therefore, the committee was asked by Communist lawyers to conclude that the literature could not have been a cause of much loss of property or life.” The title of the AN editorial, “The Road is Clear,” described the testimony that “The much-publicized Young Liberator pamphlets, carrying the false reports, did not appear on the streets until two hours after the worst rioting was over” as “one important fact” established by the MCCH. “With the red herring out of the way,” the editorial went on, “the investigating body can set out to probe the basic factors which really precipitated the riots - the discrimination, exploitation and oppression of 204,000 American citizens in the most liberal city in America. The NYA, HN, and NYT reported the testimony on when the leaflets appeared without addressing the implications of that evidence for the police narrative of the disorder. The Am and Daily News  mentioned other aspects of Taylor’s testimony about the leaflet, but not when it was distributed, with the Daily News continuing to describe the leaflet as having "brought the riot into being." No mention of testimony about the leaflet appeared in stories about the hearing in the WT, TU, NYP, and NYEJ. In other words, the anti-communist Hearst newspapers that had given the most attention to the leaflets did not respond to the testimony at odds with their narrative.
   
• 1 2020-09-28T20:32:00+00:00 Douglas Cornelius arrested 30 plain 2022-11-13T21:01:37+00:00 Around 10.30 PM, Patrolman Walter MacKenzie arrested Douglas Cornelius, a twenty-two-year old Black man, for allegedly using a rock to hit Thomas Wijstem, a thirty-year-old white carpenter, in front of the W. T. Grant store at 226 West 125th Street. Newspapers reported that a group of men had attacked Wijstem, but police arrested only Cornelius. Patrolman Walter Mackenzie appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court as the arresting officer of two other men arrested in the same area of West 125th Street around the same time: Claude Jones, also at 10.30 PM at Blumstein's department store at 230 West 125th Street, immediately west of where Cornelius was arrested; and William Ford, ten minutes later, at Kress' store at 256 West 125th Street, several buildings further west. It is not clear he actually made the arrests. There are no details of what MacKenzie said in regards to the assault on Wijstem, but in the other two incidents, which resulted in the arrests of Claude Jones and William Ford, he stated he had witnessed the men breaking windows and inciting the crowd, but made no mention of arresting them. Police had established a headquarters in front of Kress' store, and officers from throughout the city had begun arriving there before 10.30 PM, so there were likely other officers in the area who could have made the arrests.
  
  Like the man he allegedly assaulted, Cornelius lived in East Harlem, at 52 East 118th Street, a mixed black and Puerto Rican section. He appears in the list of those arrested for assault published in the Afro-American, Atlanta World, Norfolk Journal and Guide, but he is linked to the unidentified man with the fractured skull only in a story in the New York Times, a list of the arrested in the New York Evening Journal, and lists of the injured in the New York Herald Tribune, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and Home News. (Wijstem was named as the unidentified man in stories published by the New York Post and New York World-Telegram on March 22).
  
  After being one of the last of those arrested in the disorder to appear in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, Cornelius was charged with felonious assault. He was one of only [eight] of those arrested in the disorder to have a lawyer representing him listed in court docket book, in his case Pope Billings, a former state assemblyman and prominent member of the Elks Lodge with an office at 211 West 135th Street (both the other men arrested at same time, Claude Jones and William Ford, also had prominent Black lawyers representing them). Magistrate Renaud held him until March 25 on bail of $1000, according to the docket book. When he appeared again, Magistrate Ford dismissed the charge against him as he had been indicted by the grand jury. The 28th Precinct Police blotter simply listed the charges as "Dism[issed]," as it did with other men dismissed in the Magistrates Court so they could be indicted. However, there is no case file for Cornelius in the District Attorney's records, and no other information on the outcome of his prosecution. Wijstem's condition may have delayed the legal process. A brief story in New York Herald Tribune in June 1935 reported Wijstem had died in Bellevue Hospital without regaining consciousness.
• 1 2021-09-06T19:20:25+00:00 Arthur Davis arrested 28 plain 2022-08-17T18:02:09+00:00 Sometime during the disorder, Detective Phillips of the 28th Precinct arrested Arthur Davis, a thirty-six-year-old Black resident of 42 West 126th Street, for allegedly stealing groceries from a grocery store at 340 Lenox Avenue. He may not have broken the store windows, as a story in the Home News specified that Davis' alleged offense occurred "after the windows had been smashed." The store's address is mentioned only in that story; both that story in the Home News and one in the Daily Worker reported the Davis had allegedly taken groceries. At the same time Detective Phillips also arrested Elizabeth Tai, a twenty-eight-year-old Black women, for allegedly taking groceries from the store.
  
  Davis appeared in the list of those charged with burglary published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and the list published in the New York Evening Journal. The 28th Precinct Police Blotter also recorded the charge against Davis as burglary, with the note "Burglarised store during riot."
  
  Davis was arraigned in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20 with Tai and another individual arrested by Detective Phillips, Herbert Hunter, also charged with burglary, and arrested with them according to the Home News. However, that story did not directly state that Hunter was charged with looting the same store. Magistrate Renaud remanded all three to appear again in court (he sent two others arrested by Phillips who appeared at the same time charged with malicious mischief, Charles Wright and William Norris, to the Court of Special Sessions). The docket book recorded only Phillips' name and precinct; the stories in the Home News and Daily Worker identified him as a detective.. Both the docket book and 28th Precinct Police Blotter gave Davis' age as thirty-six years; both lists and all the newspaper stories gave his age as thirty-two-years.
  
  When Davis appeared in court again, on March 22, the docket book recorded no change in the charge against him, but a story in the Home News reported that "the Court" had reduced the charge from burglary to disorderly conduct, as it had for both Tai and Hunter. In Tai's case, the docket book did record that the charge had been reduced to disorderly conduct. Had the police presented evidence Davis had stolen merchandise he would have been charged with either burglary or larceny; had they presented evidence that he had broken windows, the charge would have been malicious mischief. The charge of disorderly conduct suggests he may only have been part of a crowd near the store. Magistrate Renaud found Davis guilty, an outcome reported in the stories in the Daily News and New York Evening Journal as well as the Home News. He also found Tai and Hunter guilty.
  
  Renaud sentenced Davis to pay a fine of $25 or serve five days in the Workhouse, according to the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book, the same sentence he gave Tai. He gave Hunter a longer sentence of ten days without the alternative of a fine. Davis was unable to pay the fine, according to the Home News, so was sent to the Workhouse, a sentence also recorded in the 28th Precinct Police Blotter and stories in the Daily News, New York Evening Journal and Daily Worker.
• 1 2021-09-06T19:34:04+00:00 Elizabeth Tai arrested 28 plain 2022-11-14T00:33:04+00:00 Sometime during the disorder, Detective Phillips of the 28th Precinct arrested Elizabeth Tai, a twenty-eight-year-old Black resident of 1654 3rd Avenue for allegedly stealing groceries from a grocery store at 340 Lenox Avenue. She may not have broken the store windows, as a story in the Home News specified that Tai's alleged offense occurred "after the windows had been smashed." The store's address is mentioned only in that story; both that story in the Home News and one in the Daily Worker reported the Tai had allegedly taken groceries. At the same time Detective Phillips also arrested Arthur Davis, a thirty-six-year-old Black man for allegedly taking groceries from the store.
  
  Tai appeared in the list of those charged with burglary published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and the list published in the New York Evening Journal. The 28th Precinct Police Blotter also recorded the charge against Tai as burglary, with the note "Burglarised store during riot." Her home was some way from Harlem, on the east side of Central Park between 92nd and 93rd Streets.
  
  Tai was arraigned in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20 with Arthur Davis and another individual arrested by Detective Phillips, Herbert Hunter, also charged with burglary, and arrested with them according to the Home News. However, that story did not directly state that Hunter was charged with looting the same store. Magistrate Renaud remanded all three to appear again in court (he sent two others arrested by Phillips who appeared at the same time charged with malicious mischief, Charles Wright and William Norris, to the Court of Special Sessions). The docket book recorded only Phillips' name and precinct; the stories in the Home News and Daily Worker identified him as a detective.
  
  When Tai appeared in court again, on March 22, the docket book recorded that the charge had been reduced to disorderly conduct, the original charge crossed out. The "Court" reduced the charge, according to the Home News, doing the same in the cases of Davis and Hunter. Had the police presented evidence Tai had stolen merchandise she would have been charged with either burglary or larceny; had they presented evidence that she had broken windows, the charge would have been malicious mischief. The charge of disorderly conduct suggests she may only have been part of a crowd near the store. Magistrate Renaud found Tai guilty, an outcome reported in the stories in the Daily News and New York Evening Journal as well as the Home News. He also found Davis and Hunter guilty. Tai was one of only three women charged with looting in the disorder.
  
  Renaud sentenced Tai to pay a fine of $25 or serve five days in the Workhouse, according to the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book, as was Davis. He gave Hunter a longer sentence of ten days without the alternative of a fine. Tai was unable to pay the fine, according to the Home News, so was sent to the Workhouse, a sentence also recorded in the 28th Precinct Police Blotter and stories in the Daily News, New York Evening Journal and Daily Worker.
  
  Tai is the name recorded in the docket book, and in the lists published in Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and the New York Evening Journal. It is recorded differently in other sources less reliable than the legal record: as Tae in the Home News and 28th Precinct Police Blotter, as Pae in the Daily News and New York Evening Journal and as Cay in the Daily Worker. If it was recorded correctly by the court clerk, Tai is a common last name among Chinese living overseas, suggesting that Elizabeth was married to a Chinese man. Given it was an unusual last name for a resident of Harlem, the arrested woman may be the Elizabeth Tai who died in Harlem Hospital on April 20, 1945. She had been born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1905, and was a widow at the time of her death, with her husband's name transcribed as "Hawley Tai." That Elizabeth Tai had been a domestic worker, who lived at 124 West 135th Street at the time of her death.
• 1 2021-12-20T17:37:03+00:00 Leo Smith arrested 27 plain 2022-11-17T20:37:26+00:00 Sometime during the disorder, Officer Williams of the 6th Detective Division arrested Leo Smith, an eighteen-year-old white man, for allegedly "throwing a stone through a Seventh Avenue window," according to a story in the New York Herald Tribune. The specific location of the damaged store is not given. However, Smith was one of three men arrested during the disorder arraigned in the Night Court, during the disorder on March 19, the New York Herald Tribune reported, so was likely arrested near 125th Street, where the initial events were concentrated. In reporting that Smith was "accused of smashing a store window," a story in the Home News gave the address as 3180 7th Avenue, a non-existent address. He lived well to the east of Harlem, at 305 East 118th Street, between Second and First Avenues, an area with only white residents.
  
  Smith is included in lists of those arrested in the disorder charged with disorderly conduct published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide, in the New York Evening Journal, and in the New York American, and without a charge in a list published in the Daily News. He is not included, however, in the transcript of the 28th Precinct Police blotter, likely because he was arrested and sent to the Night Court on March 19 (although one of the two other men arraigned in the Night Court, Claudius Jones, is in the transcript). There Magistrate Capshaw held him for the Magistrates Court, on bail of $500. On March 20, Smith appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court, charged with disorderly conduct. Magistrate Renaud tried and convicted him that day, holding him for sentence, according to the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book and a story in the Home News. According to the Daily News, Smith had a white lawyer. He attracted the reporter's attention when he "sought to inject a question of race while a colored patrolman was testifying against" Smith. That effort earned a rebuke from the Magistrate: "The patrolman in this case happens to be colored, the Judge happens to be white and the prosecutor is colored." said Renaud. "We recognize no race, color or creed here. We are looking for justice and law and order."" When Smith returned to court on March 23, it was for sentencing, stories in the Afro-American, New York Age, Daily News and New York Times reported. Magistrate Renaud sent him to the Workhouse for one month.
  
  Smith is recorded as white in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book, and in stories about his sentencing in the Afro-American, New York Age, Daily News and New York Times. Only the lists published in the New York Evening Journal  and Daily News did likewise. Neither story about his first appearance in court, in the New York Herald Tribune and the Home News, mentioned his race. His address, well east of the areas of Black residences in Harlem, fitted with his recorded race (although the New York Evening Journal, New York Herald Tribune and Daily News mistakenly recorded his address as West 118th Street). None of the newspaper reporting offered any comment regarding Smith's race.
• 1 2020-09-29T20:47:10+00:00 James Smitten arrested 26 plain 2022-11-17T20:38:38+00:00 Patrolman Gross of the 23rd Precinct arrested James Smitten, a twenty-five-year-old Black man, for allegedly beating William Kitlitz, a white mail clerk, in front of Kress' store on 125th Street. Dr Russell of Harlem Hospital attended Smitten at 8.45 PM at the 28th Precinct on West 123rd Street, after his arrest, a Medical Attendance record indicated, so the alleged assault took place before that, likely around 8.30 PM. Smitten’s arrest occurred early enough on March 19 that he was arraigned that evening, in the Night Court, the New York Herald Tribune reported, one of three who appeared in that court mentioned in the story. The story did not mention when the men were arrested. There are no details of the alleged violence other than the men's injuries: Kitlitz was described as "beaten on head" in a list in the New York American and having “bruises on face" in the Daily News. There is no record of an ambulance being called to attend him, so those injuries were likely minor. An ambulance was called to attend Smitten, who had "lacerations of scalp." Given that he was treated at the police station, he may have suffered those injuries at the hands of police, as had allegedly happened to Harry Gordon two hours earlier, rather than Kitlitz. The Medical Attendance record described Smitten's injuries as "lacerations of scalp which he received in some unknown manner."  Other than that record there was no other evidence of his injury; he did not appear in any newspaper's list of the injured.
  
  Only two sources connect Smitten and Kitlitz. The hospital record identified Smitten as having been arrested for assaulting Kitlitz. Only the story in the New York Herald Tribune described the assault. In addition, Smitten appeared in lists of those arrested for assault in the Afro-American, Atlanta World, Norfolk Journal and Guide, New York Evening Journal, and Daily News. His name was misspelled as Smith in the New York Herald Tribune and as Smithner in the Daily News. (Another man named James Smith was arrested during the disorder, for robbery. Smith lived at a different address than Smitten, and was younger, but was confused with Smitten and given Smitten’s address in reports in the New York American and Daily News).
  
  Smitten’s arrest occurred early enough on March 19 that he was charged with assault and arraigned that evening, in the Night Court. The New York Herald Tribune reported Magistrate Capshaw remanded him for investigation until Saturday, March 23, but he was not in the Magistrates Court docket book on that day, and there is no record of the outcome of his prosecution. One of the two other men mentioned in the New York Herald Tribune as arraigned with Smitten, an eighteen-year-old white man named Leo Smith, did appear in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20. Magistrate Capshaw convicted and sentenced the other man, Claudius Jones, in the Night Court on March 19.
  
   
• 1 2020-02-25T01:54:44+00:00 Detective Henry Roge assaulted 24 plain 2022-09-30T01:43:58+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 St 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. A New York Evening Journal photographer captured several images of a uniformed officer helping a bleeding Roge from the scene (the only images of an injured police officer published). 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 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 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 2021-04-13T17:45:18+00:00 John Henry arrested 22 plain 2022-08-16T20:14:20+00:00 Patrolman Astel of the 28th Precinct arrested John Henry, a sixteen-year-old Black student, together with Oscar Leacock, a twenty-year-old Brazilian laborer, around 2.15 AM, at Lenox Avenue and 126th Street. There is no mention of what prompted Officer Astel to stop the men; the blocks of Lenox Avenue north of 125th Street had been the site of attacks on stores for around two hours before he stopped Henry and Leacock. He reported that he found on them "a quantity of jewelry," which when questioned they admitted taking from Benjamin Zelvin's store at 372 Lenox Avenue. The officer then had the men take him to the store, which was only three blocks north, where they found all the windows broken - and perhaps boarded up, as a Home News story about one of the men's court appearances reported that they "pushed away one of the boards" in order to take "several articles of merchandise." Zelvin had locked his jewelry store at 372 Lenox Avenue around 11.30 PM, and did not return from his home in Brooklyn until opening time the next day. Given that there was extensive disorder in Harlem by the time Zelvin left, he may have boarded up the store as well as locking it.
  
  Henry and Leacock were two of nine men known to have been arrested away from the stores they allegedly looted, one third (9/27) of the arrests for which that information is known (27/60).
  
  Henry lived at 313 West 118th Street, near 8th Avenue. Leacock lived at the opposite end of the same street, at 39 West 118th Street, near 5th Avenue. Henry was one of the youngest people arrested during the disorder; James Hayes was also sixteen years of age (two seventeen-year-old men were also arrested, one of who, Robert Tanner, was the only other identified as a student). There is no indication how the he and Leacock came to be together on March 19.
  
  Zelvin later identified the jewelry found on the men as coming from his store. In the charge against Henry and Leacock the value of the jewelry is initially typed as $100, but then struck out and $75 handwritten in its place. The grand jury reduced the felony burglary charge against the men to a misdemeanor, a decision that likely reflected the lack of evidence that the men had broken into the store that a charge of burglary required. Given that they had been arrested with merchandise in their possession, the grand jury likely charged them with petit larceny; a felony larceny charge was not an option as the jewelry they had allegedly taken was worth less than $100. Zelvin appears in the Harlem Magistrate's Court on March 21 to charge one additional man, a thirty-one-year-old Black man named Henry Goodwin, with burglary. That charge was reduced to petit larceny, suggesting he too had only allegedly taken jewelry worth less than $100.
  
  There is no newspaper coverage of the looting; Henry and Leacock appear only in the four most comprehensive lists of those arrested, published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Gazette, and the New York Evening Journal. The details come from the District Attorney's case file; as the grand jury sent the cases to the Court of Special Sessions, the only information is from the Magistrate Court affidavit. Although arrested together, the men appeared in the Harlem Magistrate Court at different times, Leacock on March 20 with most of those arrested during the disorder, and Henry not until the next day. Despite Patrolman Astel's report that the men had confessed at the time of their arrest, they pled not guilty in court. Both men appeared again on March 22, when the Magistrate sent them to the grand jury charged with burglary. The Home News reported that appearance in court. It was not until April 2 that the grand jury heard their case, sending them to the Court of Special Sessions not the Court of General Sessions. The 28th Precinct Police Blotter recorded that the judges convicted both men. Although they likely were tried and convicted together, Leacock and Henry appeared separately for sentencing. On April 17, Henry was sent to the House of Refuge, a juvenile reformatory on Randalls Island (which would close less than a month later, on May 11). The next day Leacock received a suspended sentence.
• 1 2021-09-17T00:24:45+00:00 Albert Yerber arrested 22 plain 2022-11-13T20:52:25+00:00 Near the end of the disorder, at 5:00 AM on March 20, Patrolman Jerry Brennan arrested Albert Yerber, Charles Alston, Edward Loper and Ernest Johnson for allegedly shooting at police stationed at Lenox Avenue and West 138th Street. No police officers were reported injured, but Alston suffered a fractured skull as the men fled police. Trying to escape by leaping from the roof of a six-story-building to the adjoining building, Alston fell to a second-floor ledge. He was a twenty-one-year-old Black man, as was Loper, Yerber was twenty years of age, and Johnson was twenty-two years of age. Yerber lived on the other side of Harlem at 106 Edgecombe Ave, as did Loper, at 298 West 138th Street and, even further west, Alston at 512 West 153rd Street, while Johnson lived close to where they were arrested, at 206 West 140th Street. Only a small proportion of those involved in the disorder lived above 135th Street.
  
  Newspaper stories contained few details of the shooting, even as they employed a range of dramatic and emotive language - for example, the New York World Telegram and Times Union reported a “nest” of snipers “trying to pick off” a "lone policeman." Stories in the New York World Telegram and Brooklyn Daily Eagle did offer the name of the officer allegedly targeted by Yerber and his companions, Patrolman Jerry Brennan of the Morrisiana station, and the same dramatic account that a bullet whistled past his ear as he stood on post at Lenox Ave and 138th Street. Taking cover, he saw the men on the roof of the six-story building at 101 West 138th Street. Soon after police reinforcements arrived and rushed to the roof to arrest the men. One other story, in the Home News, identified Brennan, but cast him not as the target of the shooters but as one of the police who responded. In a radio car assigned to the area with his partner Patrolman McGrady, Brennan “heard the shots and sped to the scene. At the radio car's approach the four snipers [standing in the doorway] ran to the roof of the building.” This story provides the key detail that no guns were found on Yerber and his companions.
  
  On March 20 Yerber, Loper and Johnson were charged with disorderly conduct, according to the Washington Heights Magistrates Court docket book, which identified Brennan as the arresting officer for all three men. (Alston did not appear in court, likely because of his injury). The clerk annotated that charge with the word "annoy." Under that section of the statute, a person is guilty if they act "in such a manner as to annoy, disturb, interfere with, obstruct, or be offensive to others." A separate clause punishes disorderly or threatening conduct or behavior, so based on that annotation, the men were not charged with attacking Brennan. That charge fits better with the circumstances described in the Home News. Whatever the patrolman alleged, Magistrate Ford did not find sufficient evidence of the men's guilt and acquitted Yerber and his two companions. Given that outcome, it is possible Brennan mistook some other noise for gunfire. Without any evidence of an assault in the sources, these events are treated here only as arrests.
  
  Yerber, and Loper and Johnson, are among those charged with disorderly conduct in the list of the arrested published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide. They are not mentioned in stories about the proceedings in the Washington Heights Magistrates Court on March 20 in the New York Age and New York Herald Tribune, which listed only those convicted.
• 1 2021-12-07T17:37:45+00:00 John Kennedy Jones arrested 22 plain 2022-11-13T23:06:12+00:00 Around 12.30 AM, Patrolman James Lamattina of the 66th Division allegedly saw "large number" of people gather in front of William's Shoe Store at 333 Lenox Avenue. Then John Kennedy Jones "motioning with his hand, said to the others "come on," and threw a rock that "broke the plate glass window" of the store. Other people in the crowd also threw "stones and sticks" at the window, Lamattina alleged in his Magistrates Court affidavit. At some point Lamattina arrested Jones, a twenty-four-year-old Black laborer; the affidavit made no mention of the circumstances of the arrest. No other members of the crowd were arrested. The shoe store had been attacked at least twice earlier in the disorder. A display window had been smashed and merchandise stolen sometime between 9.45 PM and 11.20 PM, and another window allegedly kicked in and three shoes taken at 11.20 PM, when a patrolman arrested Julian Rogers. In the half hour before Lamattina arrested Jones, other police officers arrested three men for breaking windows near West 126th Street and Lenox Avenue, Leon Mauraine and David Smith at 318 Lenox Avenue and Bernard Smith at 317 Lenox Avenue. Multiple arrests by different officers indicates that a number of police were stationed at the intersection at that time. All three of the arresting officers came from precincts outside Harlem.
  
  Jones lived at 135 West 119th Street according to the information he gave in his examination in the Harlem Magistrates Court. Some distance from the shoe store, this block between Lenox and 7th Avenue was in an area south of 125th Street with a mix of Black and white residents.
  
  Jones appears in the lists of those arrested and charged with "inciting to riot" published in Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the New York Evening Journal. Similarly, the 28th Precinct Police Blotter recorded the charge against him as "inciting to riot. When Jones was arraigned in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, the docket book recorded the charge against him as riot, for leading others in the crowd to attack the store. Crossed out is an additional charge of malicious mischief, for damage to the store window. That charge does appear on the Magistrate Court affidavit, in a handwritten note that also listed the forms of riot being charged. Reporting the proceeding in the Magistrates Court, a story in the Home News mixed the two charges together, describing Jones as having "urged the crowd to smash windows," but being held for the Grand Jury "on a charge of malicious mischief," an offense for which urging a crowd was not relevant. That garbled account likely indicates that Jones faced both charges, as did the six other men who allegedly both urged crowds to break windows and broke windows themselves, although only two of those men, Leroy Brown and Bernard Smith, had both charges recorded in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book.
  
  On March 20, Magistrate Renaud held Jones for the grand jury and set bail at $1000. A week later, Jones appeared before the grand jury, which transferred him to the Court of Special Sessions for trial on misdemeanor forms of the charges (as the malicious mischief charge is not recorded in the docket book Jones is not categorized as being charged with that offense). The judges convicted Jones and on April 1 gave him a suspended sentence, recorded in the 28th Precinct Police Blotter.
• 1 2021-08-12T23:53:03+00:00 James Pringle arrested 22 plain 2022-11-14T02:44:48+00:00 Around 11.15 PM, Detective Peter Naton of the 28th Precinct was watching a crowd of twenty-five to thirty people at West 123rd Street and 7th Avenue when that he allegedly heard James Pringle, a shout to the group, “Let's go cross the way and scale rocks at the cops, they are coming down our side of the street.”  Naton's affidavit in the Harlem Magistrates Court then records that the detective arrested Pringle, a twenty-eight-year-old Black laborer, and found a rock in his right hip pocket. His statement held Pringle responsible for what the other members of the crowd did after his arrest, "acts of force and violence committed to several persons and the property of others, in said vicinity." A handwritten note below the typewritten charge presents a different narrative, in which "Deft led others who smashed windows." The windows of the grocery store on the northwest corner of West 123rd Street and 7th Avenue were broken sometime during the disorder. A patrolman from the 28th Precinct arrested David Bragg for breaking that window; he may have been part of the crowd on the corner around 11.15 PM. The shoe repair store directly across 7th Avenue from the grocery store was also looted sometime during the disorder. But that looting likely came an hour or more after Naton arrested Pringle, the time when two other looted stores near the intersection were looted, Sarah Refkin's delicatessen at 2067 7th Avenue at 12:30 AM, and then Nicholas Peet's tailors store at 2063 7th Avenue at 1:30 AM. (Naton made two other arrests around this time, of John Vivien fifteen minutes earlier, and John King, forty-five minutes earlier, at 10.30 PM, both at the intersection of 7th Avenue and West 125th Street).
  
  Pringle's address was recorded in his examination in the Harlem Magistrates Court as 101 West 115th Street, southeast of where Naton arrested him, in an area with a mix of Hispanic and Black residents. The 28th Precinct Police blotter recorded the charge against Pringle as burglary, with the note "Burglarized store during riot." He appeared only in the list of those arrested published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide, among those charged with riot. That was the charge recorded in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book when Pringle appeared in court on March 20. Magistrate Renaud held until March 27, when he returned to court and was sent to the grand jury, on bail of $1000, by Magistrate Ford. That court appearance was mentioned in stories in the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune, with the later newspaper reporting the charge against Pringle as malicious mischief.  Although not recorded in the docket book, the handwritten note on the affidavit listed that charge, as well as riot, suggesting it was a secondary charge related to what the crowd did rather than what Pringle himself did, that he "led others who smashed windows." Almost two weeks later, on April 8, Pringle appeared before the grand jury, which transferred his case to the Court of Special Sessions, reducing the charges against him from felonies to misdemeanors. A week later the judges in that court convicted Pringle and suspended his sentence, according to the 28th Precinct Police blotter.
• 1 2021-12-09T01:50:22+00:00 Claude Jones arrested 21 plain 2022-11-13T22:59:17+00:00 At about 10.30 PM, Patrolman Walter MacKenzie told the Harlem Magistrates Court, he saw Claude Jones, a twenty-four-year-old Black musician, throw a brick that broke a window in Blumstein's department store at 230 West 125th Street. Then Jones allegedly shouted "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, but some groups remained. 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 store, allegedly while being attacked by a group of Black men. Police arrested one man, Douglas Cornelius.
  
  Patrolman MacKenzie appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court as the arresting officer of not just Jones but also the two other men arrested nearby around the same time, William Ford and Douglas Cornelius. It is not clear he actually made the arrests. In court MacKenzie stated that he had witnessed Ford and Jones breaking windows and inciting the crowd, but made no mention of arresting them (there are no details of the circumstances of the arrest of Cornelius). Police had established a headquarters in front of Kress' store, and officers from throughout the city had begun arriving there before 10.30 PM, so there were likely other officers in the area who could have made the arrests.
  
  The address Jones gave when examined in the Harlem Magistrates Court, 170 West 121st Street, his home for only about two weeks, was four blocks south of Blumstein's store, at close enough to where the disorder began for him to have been among those drawn to 125th Street by the noise, crowds or rumors. After reporting that police had identified Jones as "an ace trombonist in Fletcher Henderson's orchestra," the New York Amsterdam News published a story on April 6 in which the trombonist denied he was man arrested. The trombonist, now "connected with Cab Calloway's Band," had been out of the city on tour at the time of the disorder.
  
  Jones appeared among those charged with inciting a riot in the list of those arrested during the disorder published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide and in the list published in the New York Evening Journal. The same charge is recorded in the 28th Precinct Police blotter and the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book, a consistency unusual for the men reported as both breaking windows and inciting crowds. When Jones appeared in court on March 20, Magistrate Renaud remanded him in custody. He was one of only [eight] of those arrested in the disorder to have a lawyer representing him listed in the court docket book. Only the lawyer's first name and initial, James W., are legible, together with his address, 200 West 135th Street, an office building in the heart of Harlem that housed the offices of many Black lawyers (both the other men arrested at same time, William Ford and Douglas Cornelius, had prominent Black lawyers recorded as representing them).
  
  Returned to court a week later, Jones was held for the grand jury on bail of $1000 by Magistrate Ford, an appearance reported in the New York Herald Tribune and New York Times. Jones was to have appeared before the grand jury on April 8, the same day as William Ford, but Patrolman MacKenzie was not present. It was not until April 12 that the grand jury heard the case against Jones, deciding then to transfer him to the Court of Special Sessions, 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 (as the malicious mischief charge was not recorded in the docket book Jones is not categorized as being charged with that offense). Convicted, Jones received a suspended sentence on April 16, according to the 28th Precinct Police blotter.
  
  Three days after his release, on April 19, Jones obtained a license to marry twenty-one-year-old Erma (or Emma) Harris, a marriage reported in the New York Age on May 4, 1935.
• 1 2021-06-02T20:59:41+00:00 Arthur Merritt arrested 20 plain 2022-08-16T21:17:33+00:00 About 1.30 AM, Officer George Nelson of the 15th Precinct was “on duty” near Sol Weit and Isaac Popiel's grocery store at 343 Lenox Avenue when he saw a group of about five people gathered around the store, he later told a Probation officer. As he watched, Arthur Merritt, a forty-two-year-old Black painter, allegedly broke the store window with a hammer. The group then climbed through the windows and took 126 pounds of butter, 90 dozen eggs, eight cartons of cigarettes, a ham and other food products, as well as $14 from the cash register. By the time Nelson got to the store, the group had run back out, according to the Magistrate's Court affidavit; he told a Probation officer he arrested Merritt “a short distance away.” He found two cans of beans, a can of mile and a can of tuna in Merritt's possession, as well as a hammer. Those details of what was allegedly found on Merritt are not included in the affidavit, although that evidence is crucial to the charge made against him. Notes on the affidavit do record the total stock lost, with calculations that seem to be an effort to establish the value of that stock.
  
  Merritt denied looting the store or participating in the disorder, telling a Probation officer he was on his way home after visiting his sister, Pauline. She lived at 108 West 130th Street; he lived at 134 West 121st Street. Both address were between 7th and Lenox Avenues, so his route home could have taken him down Lenox Avenue. He would been walking through the blocks north of 125th street that saw the most extensive reported looting of the disorder, much of which occurred around the time Nelson arrested him. As Merritt was the only one of the group Officer Nelson claimed he saw that was arrested, it is likely he was on his own or with another officer. That Nelson saw the attack on the store without being able to prevent it suggests he was some distance away, most likely on one of the corners of Lenox Avenue and West 127th Street, allowing some possibility that he misidentified Merritt among the crowds milling about.
  
  Arthur Merritt appeared in the Harlem Magistrate’s Court on March 20. He appears in the list of those arrested in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and the list in the New York Evening Journal. His criminal record showed an arrest for grand larceny in 1920, which resulted in a suspended sentence, so he was held without bail. Returned to the court on March 22, he was held for the grand jury, an appearance reported in the Home News, Daily Worker, New York Daily News, and New York Evening Journal. After being indicted on April 9, he agreed to plead guilty to Petit Larceny on April 12. Ten days later, Judge James Garrett Wallace sentenced him to three months in the workhouse, an outcome recorded in the 28th Precinct Police Blotter as well as the Probation Department case file.
  
  Born in New Jersey, Merritt had lived in Harlem for fifteen years, likely arriving after his discharge from the US Army in 1919. His Probation Department case file provides fragmentary information on his life. He had married twenty-one-year-old Blanche Morris two months before arriving in the city, in Newport News, Virginia, where he was stationed. Blanche had a six-year-old son, Charles. At the beginning of 1920, Merritt started work as a porter for Weingarten Bros., at 151 West 30th Street, living at 434 Lenox Avenue. After nine months he lost that job after being caught stealing dresses from his employers; twenty-four dresses worth $700 were found in a trunk in his apartment, but he allegedly stole clothing worth $2000. No other details of the circumstances are recorded by the Probation officer, but Merritt and his wife pled guilty to Petit Larceny and received a suspended sentence, a lenient punishment for a theft of that scale. The Probation Investigation records May 1922 as the date of arrest, but based on the criminal record that appears to be the date the couple were discharged from Probation. There is no mention that they had jobs during those years, but their first daughter was born in 1922.
  
  Around 1923, Merritt began working as a painter, and as a janitor at 1027 Avenue St John in the Bronx until 1926, living in the building, according to the Probation Department case file. However, the family appears in the 1925 New York State census living at 906 Intervale Avenue, in a large household that now included three children, and also Arthur's sister and brother-in-law, and two of Blanche's brothers, aged nineteen and twenty years. After the janitorial job ended, Merritt, his wife and children relocated first to 200 West 128th Street, and then to 109 West 144th Street, where a census enumerator found them in 1930.
  
  Later in 1930, Arthur and Blanche separated, a result of his heavy drinking, according to the Probation Department investigation. For three years, the three children lived with Merritt, in apartments at 2170 7th Avenue for two years and then 34 West 132nd Street. He worked sporadically as a painter for a contractor based at 160 East 116th Street. However, in 1932 he was discharged as they had insufficient work for him. Several months later Merritt found work for a real estate agent, but it was seasonal. By the beginning of 1934 he was evicted from his apartment after falling two months behind in the rent, and became unable to support his children. Found to be neglected children, they were put in their mother's care, after which Merritt appears to have had limited contact with them and did not contribute to their support. He moved to a furnished room at 112 West 113th Street, leaving after a year for the room at 134 West 121st where he lived at the time of the disorder. Merritt remained in Harlem, and estranged from his family, after the disorder. When he registered for the draft, he gave his sister's address as his home, and an employer in the Bronx.
• 1 2021-12-08T18:54:47+00:00 Leon Mauraine arrested 20 plain 2022-11-13T23:08:51+00:00 At 12:05 A.M., Officer Anthony Barbaro of the 25th Precinct arrested Leon Mauraine, a twenty-two-year-old Black window washer, and David Smith, a twenty-two-year-old Black clerk, in front of 322 Lenox Avenue. Barbaro had been standing on the corner of Lenox Avenue and 126th Street when he saw a group of people gather in front of the Rex Drug store at 318 Lenox Avenue, according to the statement he gave in the Harlem Magistrates Court. He then allegedly heard two of the men, Mauraine and Smith, say, "Com[e] on gang, here's two more windows, let's break them." Those men then threw stones at the store windows, breaking them, after which they ran north on Lenox Avenue. Barbaro chased them, catching and arresting both men two buildings north of the drug store. As the drug store was on the northeast corner of Lenox Avenue and West 126th Street, Barbaro must have been standing across 126th Street, on the southeast corner, as he would not have been able to hear the men or catch them so quickly from across the much wider Lenox Avenue. In the half hour after Barbaro arrested Mauraine and Smith, other police officers arrested two men for breaking windows near West 126th Street and Lenox Avenue, John Kennedy Jones at 333 Lenox Avenue and Bernard Smith at 317 Lenox Avenue. Multiple arrests by different officers indicates that a number of police were stationed at the intersection at that time. All three of the arresting officers came from precincts outside Harlem.
  
  Mauraine had lived for the last nine months at 52 West 128th Street, two blocks north and a block east of the store, according to his examination in the Magistrates Court. He may have been drawn to Lenox Avenue by the noise of windows being broken earlier in the disorder. While both he and Smith could have thrown stone at the windows, as Barbaro stated, it is unlikely they said exactly the same words. It may be that only one of the them urged on the group, or that they expressed similar sentiments that the officer chose to report in the same words (The Home News story about the proceedings in the Harlem Magistrates Court reported they had said "Come on. Let's bust some more windows," a difference in wording from the affidavit likely produced by a reporter's difficulty hearing what was said in the courtroom). The list of those arrested in the disorder published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and the list in the New York Evening Journal, did distinguish the men in a way Barbaro's affidavit did not. Mauraine was listed among those charged with inciting a riot and Smith among those charged with malicious mischief, an offense which involved damaging property used in other cases involving broken windows. However, that distinction is not replicated in the 28th Precinct Police Blotter or in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book, which recorded both men as charged with inciting a riot. So too did the story in the Home News about the proceedings in the court, which did not mention that Mauraine or Smith had broken the store windows, only what they had been "overheard saying to companions." A note on the Magistrates Court affidavit did, however, include malicious mischief alongside three sections of the riot law, indicating that both men faced both charges at some point in their prosecution.
  
  When Mauraine, and Smith, appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, Magistrate Renaud held them for the grand jury, on bail of $1000. A week later both men appeared before the grand jury, which transferred them to the Court of Special Sessions for trial. It is likely that the note on the Magistrates Court affidavit was the charges they faced in that court, malicious mischief (as the malicious mischief charge is not recorded in the docket book Mauraine is not categorized as being charged with that offense) and the three misdemeanor forms of inciting a riot. Convicted in that court, on April 2, Mauraine, and Smith, received suspended sentences, according to the 28th Precinct Police Blotter.
• 1 2020-12-05T17:58:29+00:00 Jean Jacquelin arrested 20 plain 2022-11-14T02:07:32+00:00 At 5.40 AM, in one of the final events of the disorder, Officer Di Maio arrested a twenty-eight-year-old white chauffeur named Jean Jacquelin at the corner of West 128th Street and 8th Avenue. Jacquelin allegedly was carrying two ladies coats, values at $20 each, and two pairs of trousers, valued at $5 each. There is no mention of what caused Dimao to arrest him, but the clothing was likely bulky enough that it attracted the officer's attention; Morris Sankin later identified it as coming from his tailor's store at 200 West 128th Street, the opposite end of the block from where Dimao arrested Jacquelin.
  
  Jacquelin was one of nine men known to have been arrested away from the stores they allegedly looted, one third (9/27) of the arrests for which that information is known (27/60).
  
  Jacquelin would not have had to travel far to Sankin's store. He lived at 222 West 128th Street, a four story apartment building ten buildings west of the store. He had only lived there for a month. That block was home to Black residents, making it an unusual address for Jacquelin, one of only ten white men arrested in the disorder. There were areas occupied by white residents nearby, on West 126th Street and several blocks south of West 125th Street between 7th and 8th Avenues.
  
  The evidence that Jacquelin was white comes from the Harlem Magistrate's Court docket book. It is the only legal record that collected information on an individual's race. The Magistrate's Court examination recorded only birthplace. So too did the Police Blotter. Jacquelin may have been Canadian. His birthplace is recorded as Nova Scotia in the Magistrate's Court examination, but as the United States in both the docket book and the 28th Precinct Police Blotter (although the blotter also mistakenly identifies Jacquelin as a woman). He had been in New York City since at least 1932, when his criminal record shows he was arrested for assault with a knife, an incident that does not seem to have involved significant violence as the charge was reduced to disorderly conduct, for which the Magistrate convicted him but gave him a suspended sentence. No newspapers reported Jacquelin's race. He appears in the list of those arrested published by the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide and the list published by the New York Evening Journal (both of which misspelled his first name as Kean). He also appears in the Home News story on hearings in the Magistrate Court, his first name reported as Gene, with Leroy Gillard, a forty-six-year old Black man also charged with burglary of Sankin's store, but arrested earlier, at 10.10PM, at the store. The story reported that they stole all $800 of clothes taken from Sankin's store, rather than the clothing allegedly found on them.
  
  Jacquelin appeared in the Harlem Magistrate's Court on March 20, immediately after Gillard. The Magistrate sent Jacquelin to the grand jury, along with Gillard. On April 5, the grand jury determined that both men should only be charged with a misdemeanor not felony burglary, likely petit larceny in Jacquelin's case as the clothing he had allegedly taken had a value of less than $100, so too little for a charge of grand larceny. Sent to the Court of Special Sessions, he appeared before the judges on April 11, according to the 28th Precinct Police Blotter, when they dismissed the charges against him.
  
   
• 1 2021-05-24T00:20:09+00:00 Joseph Wade arrested 20 plain 2022-11-16T15:58:54+00:00
  At about 2.45 AM, Officer William Leahy of the 28th Precinct allegedly saw Joseph Wade, a twenty-four-year-old Black "candy boy" coming out of Frank De Thomas' candy store at 101 West 127th Street. Leahy noted that store's windows were broken, but not that he had seen Wade break them. When Leahy arrested Wade, he found several toy pistols worth sixty cents in Wade's possession, according to the Magistrate's Court affidavit, or $70 of goods, according to later reports of Wade's sentencing in the New York Age and New York Times. For the last month, Wade had lived near the other end of the same block of West 127th Street as the store was located, at 148 West 127th Street.
  
  Wade was clearly not the only person to have looted the store, as DeThomas claimed $745.25 in losses. He was among the twenty white store-owners to bring the first suits against the city for failing to protect their businesses identified in the New York Sun.
  
  Wade appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, when Magistrate Renaud ordered him held for the grand jury without bail. While only ? of those charged after the disorder were denied bail, Wade's criminal record featured three convictions since 1926, including one for unlawful entry resulting from a charge of burglary. That conviction in December 1926 was followed by a second arrest for burglary in April 1931 for which Wade was discharged. Two months later he was convicted of gun possession. Finally, in October 1933, Wade pled guilty to attempted second degree assault, having been charged with rape. As a result, he spent around two years in prison in the nine years before the disorder: two indeterminate terms for the first two convictions, and a year in Sing Sing Prison for the final conviction. The New York Age reported Wade had been paroled in December 1934, only three months before the disorder (a detail not mentioned by any other newspaper).
  
  The grand jury indicted Wade for burglary on March 22, and five days later he appeared in the Court of General Sessions having agreed to plead guilty to the lesser offense of petit larceny. The Probation Department would have conducted an investigation before Wade's sentencing, but as he had been convicted previously in the Court of General Sessions, that report would have been put in the file created then, likely in 1926. On April 8, Judge Donnellan sentenced him to six months in the workhouse, a decision reported in the press as well as recorded in the 28th Precinct Police Blotter.
  
  There are more reports of the progress of Wade’s prosecution than most looting cases. He appears not only in the lists of those arrested published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the New York Evening Journal, and the Home News story on proceedings in the Harlem Magistrates Court. The New York Sun also reported his return to the Magistrates Court on March 25 to have his bail decision continued. At least five papers - New York Amsterdam News, New York Herald Tribune, New York Daily News, New York Post, New York Times - reported Wade’s appearance in the Court of General Sessions to plead guilty. The New York Times , New York Evening News, Daily News and Times Union, and three Black newspapers, the Afro-American, New York Amsterdam News and New York Age, also reported his sentencing eleven days later.
  
  Wade had lived in New York City since at least 1920, when he and his mother Marie appear in the federal census, living with his father's brother at 262 West 124th Street. According to the census, he was born in New York City, but the Sing Sing Prison Inmate Admission Register recorded Charleston, South Carolina as his birthplace, and that of both his parents. Exactly when the family moved to New York City is uncertain; the register entry recorded Wade as having lived there for eleven years, so since around 1922, but the census indicates he had been in the city at least two years earlier.  The Admission Register contains other fragmentary details of Wade’s life before the disorder. His father apparently died around 1923, when Wade was thirteen years old. He remained in school until he was sixteen years old; his first arrest and conviction must have occurred around the time he left school. He was born in according to the register, and he gave his age as twenty-four years in the Magistrate’s Court, but the census schedule records his age as ten years in 1920, putting his birthday in 1910. He must have given that earlier date when arrested in 1926, as he was not prosecuted in the juvenile court as he would have been if under sixteen years of age. As a youthful first offender, he was sent to the New York City Reformatory in January 1927. Released later that year, he began working as a porter at the Alhambra Theater. It appears that Wade’s arrest and conviction for gun possession in June 1931 cost him that job.  Now aged around twenty-one-years old, he was sentenced to another indeterminate sentence, this time in the Penitentiary.
  
  Wade served no more than eighteen months, as he started work as a porter for Sam Rosen of 216 West 125th Street around January 1933, according to the Sing Sing Prison Inmate Admission Register. By October, 1933, he lived at 109 West 129th Street; his mother Marie lived at 226 West 124th Street. That month Wade was charged with rape. The Admissions Register includes a section to record “Criminal Acts attributed to;” Wade’s entry is “Lived with girl,” suggesting that the charge may have been statutory rape, for sexual acts with a girl under eighteen years of age, the age of consent in New York in 1933. (Both the plea bargain and the sentence are in line with how courts handled such cases). Although sentenced to a minimum term of fifteen months, the Admissions Register recorded that he was eligible for parole after one year, on December 28, 1934. The report of his sentencing in the New York Age indicates he was released at the time.
• 1 2021-09-08T14:53:39+00:00 Aubrey Patterson arrested 20 plain 2022-11-21T18:30:01+00:00 Sometime during the disorder, Officer Baumann of the 11th Precinct arrested Aubrey Patterson, a twenty-one-year-old Black man who lived at 81 East 113th Street. Baumann charged him with burglary, with a note in the 28th Precinct Police Blotter recording that Patterson "Burglarised store during riot." Patterson is named in the list of those arrested for burglary published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Gazette, and in the list in the New York Evening Journal. No one was recorded as the complainant against him in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book, and there was no evidence of the location of the business that he allegedly looted.
  
  Police transported Patterson and eighty-nine others to Police Headquarters on the morning of March 20 after the disorder, according to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. That group was then put in a line-up and questioned by detectives in front of reporters before police put them back into patrol wagons and drove them uptown to the Harlem and Washington Heights Magistrates Courts. Three of the four newspaper stories about the line-up mentioned Patterson. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle did so to make fun of him: ""I don't want to extricate myself from any guilt," said Aubery Patterson, colored, of 83 E. 113th St. Manhattan, in explaining (amid laughter) why he didn't want to discuss the charge of burglary against him." The New York Herald Tribune and New York Sun by contrast, quoted Patterson answering questions, although only the New York Sun reported the questions:  ""Are you a citizen?" Capt. Dillon asked this prisoner, who had identified himself as Aubrey Patterson, of 83 East 113th Street. "I am a citizen of this great metropolis," replied Patterson. I was born in this metropolis on 132d Street." "What do you do for a living?" "I do laboring in the daytime and I go to school at nighttime."" The story framed that exchange by denigrating Patterson as having "assumed a pompous air when questioned by Acting Capt. Dillon and gave off oratory to reply to most of the questions." The New York Herald Tribune did not offer any similar judgement but did add that Patterson was "a light-skinned Negro." (The only other individual quoted in stories about the line-up was Harry Gordon, one of the white men arrested at the start of the disorder).
  
  In the Harlem Magistrates Court, prosecutors charged Patterson with disorderly conduct, not burglary. That charge likely indicates that police had no evidence that he had either entered a store or taken merchandise, so could not charge him with burglary or even attempted burglary, or with larceny. Patterson was one of a small number of those arrested during the disorder who was recorded as having had an attorney appear for him, in his case "T. French." He told a MCCH investigator that French was "a friend," and that the ILD had also offered to defend him. Magistrate Renaud remanded Patterson in custody on $100 bail. When he appeared in court again, on March 25, Magistrate Ford discharged Patterson, an outcome also recorded in the 28th Precinct Police Blotter.
  
  Patterson was later interviewed by a MCCH investigator, identified as "A Militant Negro Student of the Harlem Evening High School, 116th St & Lenox Avenue." The questions focused on the existence of a united front and any interracial campaigns being carried on by the National Student League or others, as part of MCCH research into radical groups in Harlem. Patterson told the interviewer he had been a student at the evening high since 1932. "Studying" was the occupation he gave when he registered for the draft five years after the disorder, in 1940. In April of that year a census enumerator recorded Patterson and his widowed mother still living at 83 East 113th Street; by October, when he registered for the draft, their address was several buildings further east, 110 East 113th Street.
• 1 2021-04-16T19:59:19+00:00 Leroy Gillard arrested 19 plain 2022-07-12T17:37:36+00:00 Patrolman Irwin Young alleged that around 10.10 PM, he "saw the window of the [Morris Sankin's tailor's] store being broken" and then saw a forty-six-year-old unemployed Black man named Leroy Gillard go into the store through the broken window and emerge with two suits of clothing, each valued at $25. The phrasing of the affidavit implies that Gillard did not break the window, suggesting there may have been others there at the time who escaped arrest. Certainly more clothing was stolen, to the value of $800, than Gillard allegedly had in his possession. The affidavit left those possibilities open by including the stock phrasing that Gillard's alleged crime was committed "while acting in concert with a number of others not yet arrested."
  
  Sankin's store was set back from 7th Avenue and the crowds that moved up it around 9 PM, in a single story structure located between the rear of the five story building on the corner of West 128th Street and 7th Avenue and the first of a block of eight three story brownstone apartment buildings that stretched for roughly a quarter of the block. Gillard may not have come to the store from 7th Avenue as he lived at 208 West 128th Street, just four buildings west of the store. It is likely Officer Young was on the corner of 7th Avenue and West 128th Street, as police tended to take up positions on intersections. Young had been one of the officers in front of Kress' store four hours earlier, during which he was allegedly assaulted by Harry Gordon as he arrested him for trying to speak to the crowd.
  
  Leroy Gillard appeared in the Harlem Magistrate's Court on March 20, immediately before Jean Jacquelin, a twenty-eight-year-old white chauffeur arrested near the end of the disorder, at 5.40 AM, allegedly in possession of two ladies coats, values at $20 each, and two pairs of trousers, valued at $5 each, identified by Morris Sankin as also coming from his store. As Sankin had not returned to his store until 8.00 AM that morning, its contents would have been accessible through the broken window throughout the disorder. Jacquelin had been arrested away from the store, at the 8th Avenue end of West 128th Street, and like Gillard, lived on the same block as the store. A story in the Home News reported that the two men stole all $800 of clothing taken from Sankin's store, rather than the items worth $100 allegedly found on them.
  
  Gillard appears in more newspapers than most of those arrested for looting. That is likely because police arrested him early in the disorder, so would have been able to provide his name to reporters for several hours. The New York Herald Tribune singled out Gillard as "the first arrest for alleged looting" during the disorder, describing the arrest as taking place inside the store (misspelling his last name as Gilliard as all the newspapers but the Home News did). As well as appearing in the Home News story, the list of those arrested and charged with burglary published by the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide and the list published by the New York Evening Journal, he was included in a list in an earlier edition of the New York Evening Journal (which mistakenly listed the charge against him as disorderly conduct), a list in the New York American, and a list in the Daily News (which mistakenly identified him as a white man in one edition).
  
  The Magistrate sent both Gillard and Jacquelin to the grand jury. On April 5, the grand jury determined that Gillard should only be charged with a misdemeanor not felony burglary, sending him to the Court of Special Sessions. The grand jury disposed of Jacquelin's case in the same way. Those decisions indicate a lack of evidence that the men had broken into the store, a requirement for a charge of burglary. That likely left a charge of larceny for taking the clothing; as those items were valued at less than $100, the men could only be charged with petit larceny. According to the 28th Precinct Police Blotter, on April 11, the judges dismissed the charges against Jacquelin. It took almost two more weeks before Gillard was tried, on April 23, when the judges convicted him and sentenced him to the workhouse for three months.
  
   
• 1 2021-08-05T19:48:50+00:00 Carl Jones arrested 19 plain 2022-08-17T01:49:28+00:00 Around 1.45 AM, Officer Raymond Early arrested eighteen-year-old Carl Jones in front of 391 Lenox Avenue. From across the street he had allegedly seen Jones pick up an object and throw it through the window of the stationary store owned by Harry and Morris Farber located at that address. Early must also have alleged that Jones reached into the window or trying to climb through it, as he charged Jones with attempted burglary, rather than the offense employed when windows were smashed, disorderly conduct. Jones, who lived several blocks to the north, in a furnished room at 84 West 134th Street, admitted that he smashed the window, but denied trying to steal any merchandise from the window. However, given that Early had some distance to cover (across the four lanes of Lenox Avenue), Jones evidently did not immediately flee after the window smashed. The Probation Officer investigating Jones appears to have sought another motive for Jones attack other than theft, recording that Jones "had been a regular customer of the complainant's store, but denies that he had any personal grievance against the complainant." The explanation to Probation Officer settled on was that Jones had become "imbued with the mob psychology prevalent at the moment," echoing the conclusion of Dr. Charles Thompson after examining Jones in the Court Psychiatric Clinic.
  
  Morris Farber told the Probation officer that he wanted "the leniency of the Court be extended to [Jones]." The District Attorney's case file for Jones is missing, producing some confusion about his prosecution. Jones appears in the lists of those arrested during the disorder, as charged with burglary, published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Gazette, and in the New York Evening Journal. The docket book records that Jones appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, charged with attempted burglary. Magistrate Renaud held him on bail of $1000 and then on discharged him on March 25, an outcome also recorded in the 28th Precinct Police blotter, evidently because he had already been indicted, which the Home News reported. On March 29, he pled guilty to unlawful entry, the Probation Department investigation report recorded, and was sentenced to the workhouse for four months on April 9. The plea bargain the district attorney offered Jones is in line with that offered to others not allegedly found with stolen goods in their possession, as is the sentence. Other offenders around eighteen years of age were sentenced to institutions for youthful offenders, but the Probation Department investigation raised questions about Jones' age that seem likely to worked against such an outcome in his case. While noting that Jones "claims to be 18 years, four months of age," a Probation officer wrote that he "appears to be several years older than he claims." The department was unable to obtain any evidence of his date of birth in the eleven days it spent investigating Jones.
  
  It was not only Jones' statement about his age that the Probation Officer considered unreliable. Jones said he had been born in St Louis, Missouri, leaving at age fourteen to travel to New York City. The only response to the department's inquiries about Jones that appears in his file is a letter dated April 5 from the St Louis Juvenile Court, reporting that the court could find no mention of Jones in its files, nor anyone at the address Jones gave for his father who knew him or his family. A Probation officer was able to confirm that Jones had lived at a furnished room at 84 West 134th Street for six months prior to his arrest, with eighteen-year-old Black woman named Georgia Harris. Jones' statements about his employment proved less reliable. The bakery on East 103rd Street that Jones named as his employer at the time of his arrest did not exist. Prior to that he said he worked for a year at a shoe repair store at 395 Lenox Ave, in the same building as the Farber's store; the owner said Jones had been employed only for several months, about three years earlier. The neckwear manufacturer Jones identified as his employer for nine months had no recollection of him. The Probation officer's frustration with Jones is evident in his conclusion that "the manner in which he has lived during this time is decidedly questionable." He was more direct in the preliminary investigation, scrawling "Liar" across the section of the form relating to manner and "etiology of maladjustment." Dr Charles Thompson's psychiatric examination report did not offer similar assessments. He found Jones neither psychotic nor mentally defective, but merely "an immature youth" of "low average intelligence." The explanation of his alleged crime lay in outside forces: "he seems to have acted together with other individuals under the influence of mob spirit, with no purpose in his action."
• 1 2020-10-01T19:25:21+00:00 Rivers Wright arrested 19 plain 2022-11-13T21:14:12+00:00 Detective Doyle of the 5th Division arrested Rivers Wright, a twenty-one-year-old Black man for allegedly being part of a group of men who attacked an unnamed white man at 125th St and Lenox Avenue at some point in the disorder. Wright lived at 2137 7th Avenue, a block west and two blocks north of the site of the alleged assault, and in the heart of the disorder.
  
  Only one source provided any details of the circumstances of his arrest. The Home News reported on March 21 that Wright was arrested "after he and a number of others are said to have attacked a white man at 125th St and Lenox Ave." Wright appeared in lists of those arrested during the disorder in the Afro-American, Atlanta World, Norfolk Journal and Guide, the New York American, New York Evening Journal, and Daily News. His sentencing several days later is also reported in the Afro-American, New York Age, Daily News, and New York Times.
  
  Among the first arraigned in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, Wright was charged with disorderly conduct, not assault, as was the case with half of those arrested for assault. The attack cannot have resulted in significant injury if the charge was disorderly conduct: the applicable section of the statute applied only to a person who used "offensive, disorderly, threatening, abusive or insulting language, conduct or behavior." Disorderly conduct was also a charge that could be adjudicated in the Magistrates Court. Magistrate Renaud convicted Wright and remanded him for sentence on March 23. On that date, Magistrate Renaud sent him to the Workhouse for 10 days.
• 1 2021-09-07T21:35:13+00:00 Viola Woods arrested 19 plain 2022-11-13T21:32:31+00:00 Officer St. Louis of the 28th Precinct arrested Viola Woods, a twenty-eight-year-old Black woman, for allegedly smashing the window of a vacant store at 2314 8th Avenue with an umbrella sometime during the disorder. There is no information on when during the disorder the arrest took place. Only a New York Amsterdam News story identified the store as vacant; a list in the New York American and stories in the Home News and New York Times provided only the address. The vacant store was in the block between 125th and 124th Streets, where four other stores had windows broken, including two other empty stores at 2320 8th Avenue and 2324 8th Avenue, the Arrow Sales 5 & 10c store at 2318 8th Avenue and Andy's Florist on the southeast corner of 125th Street. Those other damaged stores were all included in a list of those with broken windows made by a reporter for La Prensa who walked west along 125th Street and and up and down 8th Avenue a block north and south of the intersection on the day after the disorder. It is possible the store whose window Woods allegedly broke was not on that list because it suffered only minor damage; the La Prensa reporter concluded their list by noting they 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").
  
  Woods name is misrecorded in the 28th Precinct Police blotter as Viola Williams, a mistake repeated in the list of those arrested during the disorder published in in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and the list in the New York Evening Journal. The New York American misreported Woods' name as Loyola Williams. Another woman named Loyola Williams was arrested during the disorder and charged with burglary. Both women were recorded as being twenty-eight-years of age and living at 301 West 130th Street. While these overlapping details might indicate the reports refer to a single woman, both Loyola Williams and Viola Williams [Woods] appear in the list published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and the list in the New York Evening Journal, with Viola Williams [Woods] charged with malicious mischief, an offense involving the destruction of property used in the prosecution of those alleged to have broken windows during the disorder. That is the charge recorded in the 28th Precinct Police blotter, with a note reading "Broke window with umbrella." However, when that woman appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court, the docket book, and stories about her two appearances in court in the New York Amsterdam News, Home News and New York Times, recorded her name as Viola Woods.
  
  When Woods appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20 the charge against her was disorderly conduct, a lesser offense than malicious mischief, and one that could be adjudicated in the Magistrates Court. Woods was ordered held on bail of $100 by Magistrate Renaud, an appearance reported in the Home News. Unusually, she was represented by a lawyer, whose name recorded in the docket book is only partly legible, "Eushu Devcly" [?] of 207 West 125th Street. When Woods was returned to the court on March 28, Magistrate Ford discharged her, the New York Amsterdam News reporting that she "was freed for lack of evidence." The New York Times story simply reported that she had been discharged, the outcome recorded in the 28th Precinct Police blotter.
  
  The woman arrested may be the Viola Woods a census enumerator found at 123 West 133rd Street on April 16, 1940. She was the same age and had been in Harlem in 1935. Born in South Carolina, in Hilton Head she gave birth to a son, William, in 1923, and a second son, Samuel, in 1925, according to their draft registrations. At that time her last name was Bligen. She arrived in Harlem sometime between 1925 and 1930, when she was recorded in the census living at 255 West 143rd Street, with a cousin, working as a domestic servant (both her sons are recorded as living with their father, William Bligen and his wife in Hilton Head until at least 1940). In 1931, she married Chester Woods, a West Indian longshoreman. At the time of the 1940 census, they had four children, aged between ten and two years. When her sons William and Samuel registered for the draft in 1942, Viola Woods was living at 49 West 133rd Street.
• 1 2022-01-05T21:44:26+00:00 John King arrested 19 plain 2022-11-14T02:41:55+00:00 Around 10:30 PM, Detective Peter Naton of the 28th Precinct allegedly saw a crowd of twenty-five to thirty people gathered at the 7th Avenue and West 125th Street, he stated in an affidavit in the Harlem Magistrates Court. Crowds had been gathering at the intersection for several hours, with police stationed there to control and disperse them since around 9 PM as part of the perimeter around the block of 125th Street from 7th to 8th Avenues on which Kress's store. In response to this group, Naton "announced himself as a police officer," necessary as he would have been in plainclothes not in uniform, and told the group to "move on." John King, a twenty-eight-year-old Black fish and ice dealer, allegedly responded by yelling "I won't move for you this is my Harlem, and we will put that Kress store out of business and punish that man that injured the child." He then allegedly grabbed hold of the billy club in Naton's hand and broke its strap. As well as arresting King, Naton made two other arrests around this time, of John Vivien thirty minutes later at the same intersection, and James Pringle another fifteen minutes later, two blocks south at West 123rd Street and 7th Avenue.
  
  The affidavit is the only source that includes details of King's arrest. The 28th Precinct Police blotter recorded the charge against King as inciting riot. He appeared in the list of those arrested published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide, among those charged with riot, and in a story in the Home News that only mentioned the charge against him. Riot was the charge recorded in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book when King appeared in court on March 20. Magistrate Renaud sent him to the grand jury, on bail of $1000. A handwritten note on the affidavit listed an additional charge not recorded in the docket book, "simple assault," likely in response to Detective Naton's allegation that King had grabbed his billy club. That charge may have been added by the grand jury after King appeared before them on March 27, when they transferred him to the Court of Special Sessions, reducing the riot charge against him from a felony to a misdemeanor. King did not appear before the judges in that court for almost two months; there is no information on the reason for that delay. The judges convicted King and suspended his sentence, according to the 28th Precinct Police blotter.
  
  King's address was recorded in his examination in the Harlem Magistrates Court as 2905 8th Avenue, on the northern boundary of Harlem just south of West 154th Street. Born in Wilmington, North Carolina, he had lived at that address for five years, likely since he arrived in New York City sometime after April in 1930. At the time of the 1930 Census, King lived in Philadelphia, where he worked as a porter for a theater company, and lived with his wife Inez and their four-month-old son. He was still at the same address, 2905 8th Avenue, when the census enumerator called on April 2, 1940, by then working as the superintendent of the building, while Inez owned a candy store. The couple had two more children by that date, an eight-year-old daughter and a six-year-old son. King listed the same address and occupation when he registered for the draft two years later.
• 1 2021-12-09T01:50:40+00:00 William Ford arrested 18 plain 2022-11-13T22:58:43+00:00 At 10:40 PM, Patrolman Walter MacKenzie told the Harlem Magistrates Court, he saw William Ford, a seventeen-year-old Black laborer throw a brick through a large display window in Kress' 5, 10 & 25c store at 256 West 125th Street. Ford then allegedly shouted, "in a loud tone of voice "Shed white blood, kill the cops, there has been enough black blood shed now." A "very large and threatening crowd" gathered in response to Ford's shouts, according to MacKenzie. 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, but some groups remained. Ten minutes before windows were broken in Kress' store, Claude Jones allegedly threw a rock that broke a window at Blumstein's department store several buildings to to the east, 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 Blumsteins, allegedly while being attacked by a group of Black men. Douglas Cornelius was arrested for allegedly throwing the rock.
  
  Patrolman MacKenzie appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court as the arresting officer of not just Ford but also the two other men arrested nearby around the same time, Claude Jones and Douglas Cornelius. It is not clear he actually made the arrests. In court MacKenzie stated that he had witnessed Ford and Jones breaking windows and inciting the crowd, but made no mention of arresting them (there are no details of the circumstances of the arrest of Cornelius). Police had established a headquarters in front of Kress' store, and officers from throughout the city had begun arriving there before 10.30 PM, so there were likely other officers in the area who could have made the arrests.
  
  William Ford gave his address as 263 West 130th Street in his examination in the Harlem Magistrates Court, saying he had lived there for about four years. That address was five blocks directly north of Kress' store, just east of the intersection with 8th Avenue, so Ford could have been among those drawn to 125th Street by the noise and rumors circulating after the store closed. He was one of only four individuals under the age of eighteen years arrested during the disorder. Ford appeared in lists of those arrested in the disorder, but the charge made against him is different in each list: in the list published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide he appeared among those charged with inciting a riot; in the list published in the New York Evening Journal the charge is disorderly conduct; and in a list published in the New York Daily News, Ford is charged with assault. On March 20, when he appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court, the docket book records the charge as inciting a riot, although the arresting officer's affidavit describes Ford breaking a window and calling on the crowd to attack police. Magistrate Renaud remanded him in custody.
  
  Ford was returned to the Harlem Magistrates Court a week later and held on bail of $1000. He was one of only [eight] of those arrested in the disorder to have a lawyer representing him listed in the court docket book, in his case West-Indian born Hutson Lovell, prominent in the Phi Beta Sigma fraternity and the Elks Lodge, with an office at 240 Broadway (both the other men arrested at same time, Claude Jones and Douglas Cornelius, also had prominent Black lawyers representing them). Two days later Ford appeared again, when Magistrate Ford sent him to the grand jury. After MacKenzie was not present for Ford's first schedule appearance on April 8, it would be two weeks before he appeared before the grand jury. On April 12 the grand jury transferred Ford to the Court of Special Sessions, with a note on the Magistrates Court affidavit recording 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 (as the malicious mischief charge is not recorded in the docket book Ford is not categorized as being charged with that offense). There is no information on the outcome of that trial. Ford does not appear in the transcript of the 28th Police Precinct blotter that provides outcomes for most of those prosecuted in the Harlem Magistrates Court. No newspapers reported his appearances in court.
• 1 2020-10-22T01:35:16+00:00 Raymond Easley arrested 18 plain 2022-11-14T03:34:35+00:00 Around 1.45 AM, Patrolmen Kalsky and Holland of the 28th Precinct allegedly saw a group of people around the cigar store at 1916 7th Avenue, and then a milk can thrown through the plate glass windows. The officers got to the store in time for Kalsky to arrest Thomas Jackson, a thirty-four-year-old Black driver who he charged had thrown the milk can, and Holland to arrest Raymond Easley, a twenty-one-year-old Black man, he charged had taken cigars from the store window, according to a story in the Home News. Holland also found that Easley was carrying a razor. Two arrests at the same incident of alleged looting was unusual during the disorder, suggesting that the officers were closer to the store than in other instances, perhaps only having to cross West 116th Street rather than 7th Avenue.
  
  Easley is not mentioned in the affidavit in the District Attorney’s case file in which he and Jackson are co-defendants, nor does the file contain an examination of him. The only document in the case file referring to Easley is a criminal record; he had no previous prosecutions. Other than the story about his arraignment in the Magistrates Court in the Home News, Easley only appears in the list of those arrested published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and the list published in the New York Evening Journal, and a report on his return to the Magistrates Court in the New York Herald Tribune.
  
  Easley and Jackson (whose real name was Thomas Dean) both appeared in the Harlem Magistrate's Court on March 20, but took different paths through the legal system. Magistrate Renaud held both for the grand jury on charges of burglary; he also sent Easley to the Court of Special Sessions on the charge of carrying a dangerous weapon, a misdemeanor offense, for having the razor in his possession. Both appeared in court again on March 27, but while Jackson pled guilty to unlawful entry in the Court of General Sessions, Easley was back in the Magistrate's Court, having the burglary charges against him dismissed as he had already been indicted. The New York Herald Tribune, the only newspaper to report on those proceedings, noted that Easley was rearrested. The 28th Precinct Police Blotter and the District Attorney’s case file, both recorded that the indictment was dismissed on April 12.
• 1 2021-12-20T20:47:07+00:00 Claudius Jones arrested 18 plain 2022-11-17T19:26:50+00:00 Sometime early in the disorder, Claudius Jones, a twenty-four-year-old Black man who lived at 306 West 120th Street, was arrested. The two sources that mention Jones' alleged offense provide different descriptions. The note on the 28th Precinct Police Blotter described his offense as "Threw ash can in store window," whereas a story in the New York Herald Tribune that mentions his arraignment in the Night Court described Jones as "refusing to obey police order to move away from a Harlem corner.”
  
  Neither the charge brought against Jones nor the outcome of his prosecution help resolve that contradiction. Both the 28th Precinct Police Blotter and the story in the New York Herald Tribune, as well as lists of those arrested during the disorder in the Afro-American, Atlanta World, Norfolk Journal and Guide, and New York Evening Journal and the New York American agree that he was charged with disorderly conduct (the Daily News did not include a charge). Only the 28th Precinct Police Blotter and the New York Herald Tribune mention the outcome of the prosecution, agreeing that Magistrate Capshaw found Jones guilty and gave him a suspended sentence. Both the charge and the outcome were common for those arrested for breaking windows and refusing to move on.
  
  Arraignment in the Night Court, which opened at 8.00 PM and closed no earlier than 1.00 AM, suggests that Jones was arrested early in the disorder, and certainly before midnight, as the 28th Precinct Police Blotter recorded the arraignment as occurring on March 19, and likely before 10.00 PM given when the others arraigned on March 19 were arrested. Five individuals recorded in the 28th Precinct Police Blotter as arraigned on March 19 were arrested before 10.10 PM: Margaret Mitchell, arrested around 5.00 PM; Claudio Diabolo, arrested around 6.45 PM; Paul Boyett, arrested around 9.00 PM; James Hughes, arrested around 10.00 PM; and Leroy Gilliard, arrested around 10.10 PM. For four others, like Claudius Jones, there was no information on the time of their arrest: Louise Brown, William Jones, Rose Murrell and Viola Williams. Six other men that other sources show were arrested before 10.00 PM, Sam Jameson and Murray Samuels, arrested with Diabolo, the two speakers arrested before that group, Daniel Miller and Harry Gordon, Frank Wells and Leroy Brown, are missing from the transcript of the 28th Precinct Police Blotter.
• 1 2020-04-09T18:04:11+00:00 De Soto Windgate shot 17 plain 2022-04-18T17:41:20+00:00 At 1. 15 AM “some unknown person” shot a twenty-four-year-old black man named De Soto Windgate as he walked along West 144th Street between Lenox and 7th Avenues. Only five other events in the disorder occurred north of 135th Street, none within six blocks of this shooting. Three of those events were also assaults, two on white men on 8th Avenue north of 145th Street before midnight, and shots fired at police at 138th Street and Lenox Avenue at 5 AM. An equally small number of events occurred off the avenues, on cross streets, as this shooting did. Aside from assaults in front and behind Kress’ store, there are only two assaults, south of 125th Street.
  
  There is no information on the circumstances of the shooting. Windgate lived at the opposite end of Harlem at 7 East 114th Street, a section mostly occupied by Puerto Ricans and whites. He may have come north to frequent one of the theaters on West 145th Street; the Roosevelt was on the corner of 7th Avenue. Or he may have been visiting friends. There is no evidence of any disorder nearby that might have attracted his attention or brought police into the area. So while the other black men shot and wounded in the disorder seem likely to have been hit by police shooting in response to looting that does not seem to have been the case with Windgate. Given the location and limited evidence, there is some question about whether this shooting is part of the disorder.
  
  The shot hit Windgate in the abdomen (only the New York Post located the wound elsewhere, in his right shoulder), and was serious enough for him to be admitted to Harlem Hospital – and be included in the list of those “near death” in the New York American, Afro-American, Atlanta World, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and the New York Evening Journal’s list of the “dying.” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and New York Herald Tribune simply described his condition as “serious.” His injury is different from others shot in the disorder; only one is hit in the abdomen, with the remainder suffering injuries to the legs or hands.
  
  Being admitted to Harlem Hospital might explain Windgate’s consistent appearance in newspaper lists. However, he does not appear in the hospital records provided to the MCCH.
  
  Windgate does appear in another record gathered by the MCCH, information extracted from the Aided Cases book of the 32nd Precinct, based on West 135th Street. Procedure required police to record all incidents reported to them in that book. Only three other cases appear in the 32nd Precinct book for the period of the disorder, the assault on a white man, Julius Narditch, by a group pf black men at 8th Avenue and 147th Street, the assault on Thomas Suarez on 134th Street and the injury of Herbert Holderman on 132nd Street.
  
  The police record does not identify Windgate’s race, but newspapers do. The New York American, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Home News, New York Daily News, New York Post, New York Times and New York Sun all include his race; the New York Herald Tribune and New York Evening Journal do not. Four of the six others shot and wounded in the disorder were Black men, one of unknown race, and one white police officer.
  
  No one was arrested for shooting Windgate, as was the case with all of those shot and wounded (Detective Campo’s alleged assailant was shot and killed).
   
• 1 2021-12-02T20:47:06+00:00 Arthur Killen arrested 17 plain 2022-11-14T04:04:39+00:00 Officer Platt of the 40th Precinct arrested Arthur Killen, a forty-three-year-old Black man, allegedly "after he threw a stone through the window" of the Truss Shop at 2136 7th Avenue, according to a Home News story. After the arrest, that story went on, police found an "open knife" in his possession. Just south of the intersection with West 127th Street, the store was in the midst of the three-block section of 7th Avenue north of West 125th Street that saw multiple reported broken windows and looting, and three assaults on whites, including both James Wrigley and a Fifth Avenue Coach Company bus being hit by objects, but no other arrests.
  
  Killen lived at 277 West 127th Street, at the western end of the block that intersected with 7th Avenue near the Truss Shop. He appeared in the Harlem Magistrate's Court on March 20, charged with both malicious mischief and possession of a knife. Magistrate Renaud transferred Killen to the Court of Special Sessions, and held him on bail of $500, for each charge. Renaud's decision indicated that the value of the damage to the window was not more than $250, the level required for the charge of malicious mischief to be a felony, and that Killen did not have a previous conviction, which would have made possession of the knife a felony. The outcome of his prosecutions are unknown.
  
  A story in the Home News about Killen's appearance in the Magistrates Court is the only evidence connecting him to 2136 7th Avenue. Killen appeared in lists of those arrested during the disorder, with the charges against him variously recorded as inciting a riot in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide, disorderly conduct in the New York American, "concealed weapons" in the Daily News, and disorderly conduct and possession of a weapon in the list in the New York Evening Journal. That Killen was one of a small number of those arrested charged with more than one offense likely produced that inconsistent reporting. Given that he appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court, Killen should have been in the 28th Precinct Police blotter, which would have included information on the outcome of his prosecution. However, Killen was missing from that record.
  
  The Daily News identified Killen as a white man, but the Harlem Magistrate's Court docket book recorded him as a Black man. The Daily News misidentified several of those arrested as white.
• 1 2021-09-01T12:00:29+00:00 Elva Jacobs arrested 17 plain 2022-11-18T21:11:52+00:00 Sometime in the disorder, Officer L. W. Adamie of the 46th Precinct arrested Elva Jacobs, an eighteen-year-old Black woman, and charged her with burglary for allegedly having "broken a store window at 1 W. 137th St. and taken groceries," according to a story in the Home News. At a subsequent court appearance the prosecutor reduced the charge against Jacobs to unlawful entry, an offense used when there was not evidence that she had taken any merchandise. However, that charge did suggest that Jacobs had done more than break a window, as the charge in that circumstance would likely have been disorderly conduct. Most likely, Adamie had allegedly seen or found her in the grocery store. Like almost all of those arrested for looting on the eastern boundary of Harlem north of 130th Street, Jacobs lived relatively near the store. Her home was at 56 West 142nd Street, between 5th Avenue and Lenox Avenues, five blocks north of the store, which was just off 5th Avenue.
  
  The only information on the circumstances of the arrest was the statement in the Home News, reporting Jacobs' arraignment in the Washington Heights Magistrates Court on March 20. It is possible that Adamie arrested a second person for looting the store, and that Jacobs had been part of a larger group. He was recorded in the docket book as the officer who arrested Courtney March, a thirty-nine-year-old Black man who appeared in court immediately after Jacobs, facing the same charge of burglary. Like her, he lived north of the store, but further away, at 263 West 152nd Street,  Based on other cases recorded in the docket book that indicated that Marsh was also arrested for looting the grocery store, but he was not mentioned in the Home News story on the arraignments in the court, nor did he appear in the list of those arrested in the disorder published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide in which Jacobs appeared (neither of them are in the list published in the New York Evening Journal). Given that absence, and without a complainant recorded in the docket book to confirm a link between the two, Marsh was not included among those arrested during the disorder.
  
  Magistrate Ford remanded Jacobs in custody. When she returned to court the next day, the docket book records that Ford set her bail at $1500. Two days later, on March 23, Jacobs was back in court. This was likely when the charge against her was reduced from burglary to unlawful entry; in the docket book the original charge is crossed out and "Red. to unl. entry" written in its place, in a different handwriting than the original charge. The same handwriting records that on this date Ford sent her to the Court of Special Sessions, which adjudicated misdemeanors such as unlawful entry, reducing her bail to $50. It took a month before Jacobs was tried in the that court. On May 3, the Magistrates convicted here, suspended her sentence and put Jacobs on probation, an outcome found only in the 32nd Precinct records. (The prosecution of Marsh followed the same process until March 23, when Magistrate Ford discharged him rather than sending him for trial as he did Jacobs).
• 1 2021-05-24T21:29:44+00:00 Julian Rogers arrested 16 plain 2022-04-17T21:40:24+00:00 Around 11:20 PM, Patrolman Nador Herrman allegedly saw Julian Rogers, a thirty-seven-year-old Black auto washer, kick in a display window in William Gindin's shoe store at 333 Lenox Avenue. Rogers then took three odd women's shoes worth $1 each and put them under his jacket. Herrman arrested Rogers about 100 feet from the store, and recovered the shoes, according to the Magistrates Court affidavit. Gindin had closed his store around 9.45 PM. Not long after, crowds gathered on Lenox Avenue north of West 125th Street and began to smash store windows, and around 10.30 PM a group of men looted Towbin's haberdashery at Lenox Avenue and West 125th Street. By the time Rogers allegedly stole from Gindin's store the other display window had already been smashed and "a large quantity of merchandise stolen," the patrolman told the Probation officer investigating the case. Just over an hour later, another officer arrested John Kennedy Jones, alleging he had been part of a large group that threw objects that smashed more of the store windows. Gindin claimed $1273.89 in damages, well above the median reported claim of $733, as part of a group of twenty white businessowners who sued the city for failing to protect their stores identified by the New York Sun.
  
  Rogers was arraigned in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, charged with burglary. Magistrate Renaud held him for the grand jury and set bail at $1000. He appears in the lists of those arrested published in Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the New York Evening Journal. None of Rogers' other appearances in court are reported in the press. After being indicted by the grand jury on April 5, the District Attorney's case file indicates that he agreed to plead guilty to petit larceny, and appeared in the Court of General Sessions to do so on April 16. Returned to court for sentencing on April 25, Judge Allen gave Rogers a suspended sentence, recorded in the 28th Precinct Police Blotter. A consideration in that decision was may have been the Probation officer's conclusion that there was "no evidence that [Rogers] was a member of any group which participated in the riot;" instead "he was swayed by the behavior of the mob and that when he saw a general invasion of stores, he resorted to the same practice."  Unusually, the Probation Department file indicated that Rogers was not placed on probation, as was generally the case for those given a suspended sentence.
  
  The Probation Department's investigation gathered few details of Rogers' life. He did not provide the information they required for their analysis of his history and personality. Born in Atlanta, Georgia, around 1898, Rogers claimed no recollection of his parents as he had been raised by various relatives since he was infant; nor could he give the Probation officer the name of the school he attended. When Rogers was sixteen years old, he left the uncle with who he had been living, and traveled around the country. In 1917 he said he enlisted in the US Army, but was diagnosed with syphilis and discharged after six months. Around 1926, he arrived in New York City. During his nine years in the city, Rogers claimed to have lived in various furnished rooms and lodging houses, but gave no specific addresses, and likely spent at least some of the time homeless, as he was at the time of the disorder. For two months before his arrest, he slept in a garage at 332 East 122nd Street, without the owner being aware. For around a year Rogers had worked roughly one day a week washing cars at the same garage.
  
  Almost a year before the disorder, police arrested Rogers for failing to leave a street corner when directed to by an officer. Convicted in the Magistrates Court, he received a suspended sentence. The Probation officer reported that Rogers spent considerable time on street corners, congregating with "neighborhood idlers," and "engag[ing] in petty gambling, with chance acquaintances."
  
  The decision not to place Rogers on probation could have resulted from difficulty of supervising a man without a job, home or family in the city. There is also a possibility that Rogers deliberately withheld information to keep the white authorities at arms length. The Probation officer investigating him could not decide: "he is either unable or unwilling to give definite information concerning his antecedents, and the facts of his domestic life are unobtainable,...and his means of subsistence, for the most part, is open to question."
  
   
• 1 2021-08-18T21:11:39+00:00 James Hayes arrested 16 plain 2022-07-05T17:35:25+00:00 Some time during the disorder, Detective Balkin of the 5th Division arrested James Hayes, a sixteen-year-old Black youth, for allegedly taking a baseball bat from the window of a store at 2334 8th Avenue, according to a report of his appearance in the Magistrates Court in the Home News. The name of the store is provided by the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book, which recorded the complainant against Hayes as Wilbur Montgomery, living at 951 Woodycrest Avenue. Montgomery is identified in the 1933 City Directory as the manager of Danbury Shoes. He is also the complainant against another man arrested by Detective Balkin, likely at the same time, David Terry. There are no details of the circumstances of Terry's arrest, but the charge against him in the Harlem Magistrates Court, malicious mischief, was made against those arrested in the disorder who had allegedly broken windows. The nearby intersection of 8th Avenue and West 125th Street, only a few buildings from Kress' store, saw some of the earliest crowds and violence of the disorder, and a concentration of police, who sought to clear West 125th Street by pushing people on to the avenue. Windows were also broken in stores either side of Danbury shoes, the branch of the Liggett drug store chain on the corner of West 125th Street and a seafood restaurant at 2338 8th Avenue.
  
  James Hayes is named among those charged with burglary in the lists published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Gazette, and in the New York Evening Journal. He appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, where the charge was recorded as petit larceny not burglary. That charge did not require evidence that Hayes had entered the store to take the bat, as a charge of burglary did. While the 28th Precinct Police Blotter, which misspelled his name as Hazel, included a note that he "Broke store window," the different charge in court indicates that that information had been reassessed by the time of his arraignment. The Home News story reporting the court proceeding mentioned only that "he is said to have stolen a baseball bat from a store window." Magistrate Renaud transferred Hayes to the Court of Special Sessions and held him on $500 bail. The 28th Precinct Police Blotter is the only source for the outcome of that proceeding: a conviction and suspended sentence on April 1.
  
  The Home News story gave Hayes' age as seventeen years, while the blotter and the list in the New York Evening Journal gave his age as sixteen years (the list published in the Black newspapers did not include age or home address). The age in the Magistrates Court docket book is difficult to decipher, appearing to be "10," but is likely a hastily written "16." Hayes was one of the youngest arrested during the disorder, together with John Henry, also aged sixteen years. Hayes lived at 476 West 141st Street, on Black Harlem's northwest boundary, further from the location of his arrest than most of those caught in the disorder, most of whom lived south of 125th Street or near Lenox Avenue south of 135th Street. 
• 1 2021-04-27T19:22:05+00:00 Amie Taylor arrested 16 plain 2022-08-16T21:24:32+00:00 Officer Harmon of the 18th Division arrested Amie Taylor, a twenty-one-year-old Black butcher, near Mario Pravia's candy store at 1953 7th Avenue around 11.30 PM. Harmon and at least one other police officer, Detective Harry Wolf of the 28th Precinct, reported seeing Taylor throw a stone at the store window and take merchandise from the window display. Wolf appears as a witness on the Magistrates Court affidavit and an arresting officer with Harmon on Taylor's criminal record. Taylor was also not alone; "about 5 others" threw stones at the store and took merchandise at the same time, while Pravia and his wife watched from inside, but police managed to arrest only Taylor. Harmon allegedly found eighteen packets of chewing gum, valued at three cents each, in his possession. The Home News reported that a total of $200 of merchandise was taken from the store.
  
  The New York Evening Journal identified a different officer as making the arrest, Deputy Chief Inspector John Ryan, in a vignette within the paper’s narrative of the disorder:

  Deputy Chief Inspector John Ryan, in charge of all Manhattan detectives, figured in another incident in which police were forced to draw their revolvers, although no shot was fired. While speeding to the trouble zone, Ryan saw a group of men looting a store at 1952 Seventh ave. The detective chief, with his chauffeur, swung into action and attempted to round up the thieves. there was a terrific battle, but Ryan emerged from it with Amie Taylor, 21, as his prisoner.

  No other sources support that account. The story's framing of the incident in relation to the force used by police does direct attention to the unremarked upon means by which police made arrests. The New York Evening Journal was one of several white newspapers that claimed that police showed restraint in responding to the disorder, and did not shoot at crowds until the after midnight, when looting became widespread. If police drew their revolvers but did not fire them in this "terrific battle," they likely used the gun butts as clubs, as they are in several photographs taken during the disorder.
  
  Crowds had moved down 7th Avenue from West 125th Street around 10 PM. This event was the first this far south on the avenue. Taylor may have come from the opposite direction. He lived south of the store, at 1800 7th Avenue, next to Central Park, in an area home to Black, white and Spanish speaking residents. Taylor's first name caused confusion about his identity. In the 28th Precinct Police Blotter the name is "Annie," and he is identified as female, information likely responsible for Annie also being used in the list of those arrested in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and the list in the New York Evening Journal. While the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book identifies Taylor as male, the clerk recorded the name as Annie on his examination, and on the back of the Magistrates Court affidavit, where it is struck out and Amie written underneath.
  
  When Taylor appeared in Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20 charged with burglary, Magistrate Renaud remanded him to appear again on March 22. Reporters from the Home News, New York Daily News, New York Evening Journal and Daily Worker were in court when Taylor appeared again; the Daily Worker somehow misreported his name as Annie. Renaud sent Taylor to the grand jury, who on April 3 transferred him to the Court of Special Sessions, which as it adjudicated misdemeanors, means they must have reduced the charge from burglary to an offense such as unlawful entry, petit larceny or disorderly conduct. Two weeks later, on April 17, the judges acquitted Taylor, according to the Police Blotter. Given the low value of the what Taylor allegedly stole – a total of 54c – it would not have been surprising to see him receive a minor punishment; but to acquit him the judges would have had to find fault with the evidence against him provided by Officer Harmon and Detective Wolf. The sources are silent on what alternative account of events Taylor offered, but others arrested in the disorder claimed to have been bystanders mistakenly grabbed by police trying to pick offenders out of crowds. It could also be that prosecutors could not prove that the chewing gum found on Taylor had been taken from the store; it was a common enough item, in a large but not inexplicable quantity, that he could have obtained it legitimately elsewhere.
• 1 2021-12-15T20:00:50+00:00 Rose Murrell arrested 16 plain 2022-11-13T21:27:14+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 in 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, book, and the Daily News, 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 2021-12-10T21:34:11+00:00 Emmet Williams arrested 16 plain 2022-11-18T17:23:20+00:00 Sometime during the disorder, Officer Carrington of the 32nd Precinct arrested Emmet Williams, a twenty-eight-year-old Black man, for allegedly breaking a window in Frendel's meat market at 2360 8th Avenue. There are no sources that clearly describe what Williams allegedly did. He is identified as "breaking window" in a list in the New York American, which fits the charge made against him in the Harlem Magistrates Court, malicious mischief. That offense involved damage to property, and all those arrested during the disorder who faced that charge had allegedly broken windows. Leo Halberg, a butcher employed in the meat market is recorded as the complainant against Williams in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book, by " marks that refer to his details in the row above, the record of the appearance of Theodore Hughes. The clerk used the same marks to identify Carrington as the arresting officer. He arrested Hughes, a twenty-two-year-old Black man, for allegedly taking two pieces of salt pork from the broken window of the meat market, according to a story in the New York Herald Tribune and a list in the New York American. The later source specified that Hughes had taken the pork from an already broken window; Williams likely allegedly broke the window.
  
  The home address recorded for Williams in the docket book, 242 West 127th Street, was only half a block west of 8th Avenue. The meat market was midway between 127th and 126th Streets, on the east side of 8th Avenue. He was likely drawn to the area by the multiple incidents of attacks on windows, looting, and violence reported there 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 Rose Murrell for breaking windows in a grocery store three buildings to the north, on the corner of 127th Street; the arrest of Thomas Babbitt for taking soap from Thomas Drug store a block north; and at the very end of the disorder, the arrest of Jean Jacquelin at 128th Street for looting and police shooting and killing James Thompson across the street from the store.
  
  Williams appears in the list of those charged with inciting a riot published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide. A list published in the New York Daily News,  which misreported his name as "Emmet Hughes" and his race as white, listed the charge against him as disorderly conduct. In the court docket book, Williams was recorded as Black. Arraigned in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, directly after Hughes, the charge against Williams was malicious mischief. Several of the other people arrested during the disorder charged with breaking windows likewise were reported as charged with inciting a riot or disorderly conduct, but were then charged with malicious mischief in court. Like Theodore Hughes, Magistrate Renaud sent him to the Court of Special Sessions and held him on bail of $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). There is also no evidence of the outcome of his trial. Williams, and Hughes, are two of the few of those who appeared in the Harlem Magistrate's Court not mentioned in the Home News story on March 21 that provides brief details of the charges against those arrested in the disorder. Given the location of the market, Williams, and Hughes, should have been taken to the 28th Precinct and appear in their blotter, but they do not. Carrington may have instead taken them to his own precinct, the 32nd, on West 135th Street.
  
   
• 1 2021-12-05T21:00:05+00:00 Bernard Smith arrested 15 plain 2022-11-13T23:15:40+00:00 Officer Alfred Tait of the 42nd Precinct testified in the Harlem Magistrates Court that he saw a group of about thirty people assemble in front of the Temple Grill & Restaurant at 317 Lenox Avenue. Then, about 12:15 AM, he allegedly heard Bernard Smith, a thirty-nine-year-old Black man shout to the group, "We will get this two windows here," and saw him then throw two stones at the restaurant windows, breaking them. Smith then allegedly shouted to the others, "You fellows get the others." Tait presumably arrested Smith in front of the store, although his statement did not mention the circumstances, but according to the officer, members of the group in front of the restaurant acted on Smith's urging, as "thereafter there were several acts of force and violence committed in said vicinity to other persons and property of others." In the minutes around when Tait arrested Smith, other police officers arrested three men near West 126th Street and Lenox Avenue, Leon Mauraine and David Smith at 318 Lenox Avenue ten minutes earlier, and John Kennedy Jones at 333 Lenox Avenue fifteen minutes later. Multiple arrests by different officers indicates that a number of police were stationed at the intersection at that time. All three of the arresting officers came from precincts outside Harlem.
  
  Bernard Smith gave his occupation as interior decorator when examined in the Harlem Magistrates Court, and his home, for the last eight years, as 116 West 126th Street. That building was close to the bar and restaurant, around the nearby southwest corner of West 126th Street and four buildings west. Smith appeared in the lists of those arrested published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the New York Evening Journal as one of those charged with inciting a riot. The 28th Precinct Police Blotter also recorded the charge made against Smith as "Inciting riot."
  
  The last person to appear in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, Smith was charged with both malicious mischief, for allegedly breaking the window, and inciting a riot, for his alleged call for the group to break other windows. Held in custody by Magistrate Renaud, Smith returned to court on March 25, when bail was set at $500 for the first charge and $1000 for the second, and then again on March 26, when Magistrate Ford held him for grand jury on the charge of riot. Prosecutors reduced the charge of malicious mischief to disorderly conduct, likely indicating a lack of evidence that he had broken the window. Magistrate Ford found him guilty of that charge and sentenced him to five days in the Workhouse. Misleadingly, the 28th Precinct Police Blotter also recorded that sentence, but neither the charges of malicious mischief or disorderly conduct, only the charge of riot.
  
  A week later Smith appeared before the grand jury, which dismissed the riot charge. That outcome indicates a lack of evidence of the calls to others in the crowd alleged by Officer Tait. While the grand jury did not indict any of those arrested during the disorder charged with inciting a riot, it did send all the others who appeared before it to the Court of Special Sessions rather than dismissing the charges.
• 1 2021-09-07T19:32:37+00:00 Louis Tonick arrested 15 plain 2022-11-14T02:12:54+00:00 Sometime during the disorder, Officer Cusberita [?] of the 28th Precinct arrested Louis Tunick, an eighteen-year-old white man who lived at 1052 Bryant Avenue in the Bronx. The charge against Tunick recorded in the 28th Precinct Police blotter is robbery, with the note "Robbed store during riot," while he is named as one of those charged with burglary in the list published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and the list in the New York Evening Journal. Robbery required taking merchandise from someone, while burglary required taking merchandise from an unoccupied store. Tunick is also recorded as charged with robbery in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book, with John Masdaym of 237 West 111st Street as the complainant and likely victim of the robbery. In this case the address does appear to be Masdaym's residence, as there are no business identified on the street in the MCCH Business survey. There is no evidence of the location of the store in which the robbery took place.
  
  Tunick is one of only ten men identified as white arrested during the disorder; he and Jean Jacquelin were the only members of that group arrested for looting. His identity is recorded as white in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book and in the list published in the New York Evening Journal. Neither the 28th Precinct Police blotter nor the the list published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide  include information on an individual's race. While Jacquelin lived in Harlem, at 222 West 128th Street on the same block as the business he allegedly looted, Tunick lived in the Bronx, well beyond the neighborhood's boundaries.
  
  Tunick appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20. Like Edward Larry, the only other person charged with robbery after the disorder, Tunick was held without bail by Magistrate Renaud. The Magistrate continued that custody when Tunick returned to court on March 25, and again on March 28. When Tunick appeared in a court on April 1, Renaud dismissed the charges against him, an outcome also recorded in the 28th Precinct Police blotter. That the Magistrate released Tunick indicates a lack of evidence rather than evidence only of taking merchandise or damaging a store, which would have resulted in reduced charges. In other cases it was the inability to locate a complainant that led to the discharge of defendants.
  
  While the docket book records the name as Tonick, the newspaper lists record it as Tunick, and the 28th Precinct Police blotter as Tonisle (the later an error made when the blotter was transcribed for the MCCH). A man named Louis Tonick of the correct age appears in census schedules in 1930 and 1940 living at different addresses in the Bronx. The child of Russian immigrants who worked as a fruit peddler, he lived with his parents and four siblings in 1930. By 1940 his three older sisters are no longer recorded in the household, which includes only his parents, Louis and his (twin?) brother, and an uncle who also worked as a peddler. Tonick was unemployed at the time of that census and also when he registered for the draft in 1943.
• 1 2022-01-07T19:57:38+00:00 John Hawkins arrested 15 plain 2022-11-14T02:34:29+00:00 Detective George Booker of the 28th Precinct arrested John Hawkins, a thirty-year-old Black man, for allegedly inciting a riot. There are no details of his alleged offenses or where or when Hawkins was arrested. Booker also arrested Horace Fowler during the disorder, for allegedly looting Nicholas Peet's tailor's shop at 2063 7th Avenue. Booker made no mention of a crowd or anyone else being involved in that alleged looting, so he likely arrested Hawkins at some other time and place. Hawkins lived at 2357 8th Avenue, between West 126th and West 127th Streets. He could have been part of the crowds around that block of 8th Avenue, where Theodore Hughes was arrested for allegedly looting the store directly opposite the building where Hawkins lived, Emmet Williams for breaking the window of that store, and Rose Murrell for breaking a window in the store at 2366 8th Avenue.
  
  In the 28th Precinct Police blotter, the charge against Hawkins is recorded as inciting riot, which is also the charge against in the list of those arrested during the disorder published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide. When he appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, that was also the charge recorded in the docket book. Magistrate Renaud held him for the case to be investigated. Hawkins returned to court on March 23, when the charged against him was reduced to disorderly conduct: the charge is crossed out in the docket "DISORDERLY CONDUCT" stamped in its place. That offense could be dealt with in the Magistrates Court; Magistrate Renaud convicted Hawkins and sentenced him to thirty days in the Workhouse. Stories in the New York Daily News, New York Times, New York Age and Afro-American reported the sentencing. Three other men sentenced at the same time had broken windows; the three newspapers other than the New York Times reported that Hawkins had also committed that offense, while that newspaper merely reported his sentence.
• 1 2021-09-07T21:04:31+00:00 Loyola Williams arrested 15 plain 2022-11-14T02:58:49+00:00 Sometime during the disorder, Loyola Williams, a twenty-eight-year-old Black woman who lived at 301 West 130th Street was arrested and charged with burglary. Williams' name appears among those charged with burglary in the list published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide and the list in the New York Evening Journal, which also included her age, race and address. However, Williams does not appear in 28th Precinct Police Blotter, the docket book of either Magistrates Court or any newspaper stories, and there is no evidence of the location of the business that she allegedly looted. That is also the case with nine men who appear only in the list published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide. The absence of this group from the blotter could mean they were arrested in the 32nd Precinct, whose blotter records do not appear to have been obtained by the MCCH. That they did not appear in court could mean that police released them after questioning them the next day.
  
  In the case of Loyola Williams, it is also possible that whoever compiled the list had confused her with another Black woman arrested during the disorder, Viola Woods, who was identified as Viola Williams in several sources. Both women were recorded as being twenty-eight-years of age and living at 301 West 130th Street. However, both Loyola Williams and Viola Williams appear in the list published in Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and the list in the New York Evening Journal, with Viola Williams charged with malicious mischief. Viola Williams also appears in the 28th Precinct Police blotter with the same age and address, where a note records her alleged offense as using her umbrella to break a store window. However, when that woman appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court, the docket book, and stories about her two appearances in court in the New York Amsterdam News, Home News and New York Times, recorded her name as Viola Woods.
• 1 2021-12-15T20:01:46+00:00 Henry Stewart arrested 15 plain 2022-11-14T15:54:25+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 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 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. 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 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 is recorded in the 28th Precinct Police blotter as charged with inciting a riot. That charge is 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 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 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. The others arrested by Libman were all charged with malicious mischief, although Brown and Johnson later had that charge reduced to disorderly conduct. Magistrate Renaud transferred Stewart 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. On March 25, the judges in that court discharged Stewart, according to the 28th Precinct Police blotter.
• 1 2021-08-30T21:01:15+00:00 Milton Ackerman arrested 14 plain 2022-08-17T01:53:16+00:00 Officer Brown of the 40th Precinct arrested Milton Ackerman, a twenty-four year old Black man, some time during the disorder. According to the New York Times, Ackerman was charged with "taking two rolls of paper, worth 5 cents, and 8 cents' worth of napkins from a Lenox Avenue store." Harry Lash is recorded as the complainant in the Harlem Magistrate's Court docket book, so it seems likely Lash's store at 400 Lenox Avenue was the location referred to in the story. Ackerman lived at 33 West 130th Street, only a few buildings east of that store and Lash's other store in Harlem was at 2530 8th Avenue, near the corner of West 135th Street, not on Lenox Avenue. There is no mention of where or when police arrested Ackerman.
  
  Ackerman appears in the lists of those charged with burglary published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Gazette, and in the New York Evening Journal. He appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, and was held until March 25. When he returned to the Magistrate's Court he was discharged as he had been indicted by the grand jury, reported only in a story in the Home News, rearrested and held on $1000 Bail. Three days later he appeared in the Court of General Sessions, an appearance reported only in the New York Times. Judge Donnellan dismissed the indictment and released him. Neither that story nor the 28th Precinct Police blotter provided any explanation for the judge's decision.
• 1 2021-04-29T18:55:09+00:00 Businesses that survived (40) 14 plain 2022-08-17T19:01:29+00:00 Both the white-owned newspapers the New York Sun and the New York Evening Journal and the Black-owned Afro- American reported that businesses in Harlem might close as a result of the disorder. The New York Sun implied that racial conflict motivated such decisions: "It is reported that many white merchants of the Harlem district have signified their intention of leaving the neighborhood just as soon as they can arrange for the disposition of their stocks." The statement in the New York Evening Journal was speculation linked to the losses suffered: "The looting of stores reached such proportions that small merchants feared they would be thrown into bankruptcy." The Afro-American's correspondent offered a similar assessment: "[Many businesses] probably will never open again because their owners are bankrupt as a result of the looting of stores and lack of insurance to cover the losses."
  
  There is little direct evidence that businesses actually closed as a result of the disorder. Indirect evidence of which businesses continued to operate in Harlem after the disorder is provided by the business survey undertaken by the MCCH between June and December 1935. While the survey identified more than 10,000 businesses, other sources do indicate that it did miss some businesses and sometimes incorrectly recorded  addresses. In most cases, the owner and the business name were also not recorded, so they cannot be matched to looted businesses with certainty. In addition, some of the Tax Department building photographs taken between 1939 and 1941 are taken from close enough to allow individual businesses to be identified. In other cases the photographs are taken from a distance or angle that does not show the address of the business that was looted.
  
  Forty-six of the sixty-six addresses reported as having being looted can be identified in those sources; forty-one stores continued in business after the disorder. Among that group are seven of the businesses whose owners sued the city for damages after the disorder; five of those owners did go out of business, and in fourteen cases there is no evidence to establish what happened (an additional eighty owners who filed suits are not identified in the sources).
   
• 1 2021-09-17T00:28:51+00:00 Ernest Johnson arrested 14 plain 2022-11-18T21:06:11+00:00 Near the end of the disorder, at 5:00 AM on March 20, Patrolman Jerry Brennan arrested Ernest Johnson, Albert Yerber, Charles Alston, and Edward Loper for allegedly shooting at police stationed at Lenox Avenue and West 138th Street. No police officers were reported injured, but Alston suffered a fractured skull as the men fled police. Trying to escape by leaping from the roof of a six-story-building to the adjoining building, Alston fell to a second-floor ledge. He was a twenty-one-year-old Black man, as was Loper, Yerber was twenty years of age, and Johnson was twenty-two years of age. Johnson lived close to where they were arrested, at 206 West 140th Street. Yerber lived on the other side of Harlem at 106 Edgecombe Ave, as did Loper, at 298 West 138th Street and, even further west, Alston at 512 West 153rd Street. Only a small proportion of those involved in the disorder lived above 135th Street.
  
  Newspaper stories contained few details of the shooting, even as they employed a range of dramatic and emotive language - for example, the New York World Telegram and Times Union reported a “nest” of snipers “trying to pick off” a "lone policeman." Stories in the New York World Telegram and Brooklyn Daily Eagle did offer the name of the officer allegedly targeted by Johnson and his companions, Patrolman Jerry Brennan of the Morrisiana station, and the same dramatic account that a bullet whistled past his ear as he stood on post at Lenox Ave and 138th Street. Taking cover, he saw the 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. One other story, in the Home News, identified Brennan, but cast him not as the target of the shooters but as one of the police who responded. In a radio car assigned to the area with his partner Patrolman McGrady, Brennan “heard the shots and sped to the scene. At the radio car's approach the four snipers [standing in the doorway] ran to the roof of the building.” This story provides the key detail that no guns were found on Alston and his companions.
  
  On March 20, Johnson, Yerber, and Loper were charged with disorderly conduct, according to the Washington Heights Magistrates Court docket book, which identified Brennan as the arresting officer for all three men. (Alston did not appear in court, likely because of his injury). The clerk annotated that charge with the word "annoy." Under that section of the statute, a person is guilty if they act "in such a manner as to annoy, disturb, interfere with, obstruct, or be offensive to others." A separate clause punishes disorderly or threatening conduct or behavior, so based on that annotation, the men were not charged with attacking Brennan. That charge fits better with the circumstances described in the Home News. Whatever the patrolman alleged, Magistrate Ford did not find sufficient evidence of the men's guilt and acquitted Johnson and his two companions (Alston was later discharged when he appeared in court on April 9, presumably after he recovered from his injuries). Given that outcome, it is possible Brennan mistook some other noise for gunfire. Without any evidence of an assault in the sources, these events are treated here only as arrests.
  
  Johnson, and Loper and Yerber, are among those charged with disorderly conduct in the list of the arrested published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide. They are not mentioned in stories about the proceedings in the Washington Heights Magistrates Court on March 20 in the New York Age and New York Herald Tribune, which listed only those convicted.
• 1 2021-12-08T22:06:03+00:00 Kress 5, 10 & 25c store front windows broken (10:40 PM) 13 plain 2022-03-10T16:49:32+00:00 At 10:40 PM, a large display window in Kress' store at 256 West 125th Street broke after being hit by a brick. Patrolman Walter MacKenzie told the Harlem Magistrates Court that he saw William Ford, a seventeen-year-old Black laborer throw the brick, and them allegedly shout, "in a loud tone of voice "Shed white blood, kill the cops, there has been enough black blood shed now." A "very large and threatening crowd" gathered in response to Ford's shouts. By that time the large crowds on 125th Street had been cleared from the street and had broken into smaller groups, many of which scattered north and south up the avenues, but some groups remained. Ten minutes before windows were broken in Kress' store, Claude Jones allegedly threw a rock that broke a window at Blumstein's department store several buildings to to the east, 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 Blumsteins, allegedly while being attacked by a group of Black men. Those incidents are likely what Louise Thompson was referring to when she told a public hearing of the MCCH that, "At a certain time the crowd broke through to the Kress store and broke more windows. The police tried to drive them back. They didn’t want to be driven back. They felt they wanted to be there. There was one young fellow yelling and screaming at the top of his voice.”
  
  One or two display windows at the front of Kress' store had been broken earlier, at the beginning of the disorder, as well as more windows at the rear of the store not long after. However, a reporter for the Afro-American wrote that the store "suffered very little loss on the front." Repairs to the front of the store next day appear to have focused on only two sections of the store window, on the right side of the left entrance, in a photograph published in the New York American, and on the left side of the right entrance, where a ladder can be seen in Universal newsreel footage. Those repairs cannot have taken long. A photograph of Kress' store published in the Daily News on March 21 showed intact store windows, guarded by two police officers. A sustained police presence during the disorder appears to have protected the front of the store. Police established a cordon in front of Kress' store from the time it closed; officers were still there around 10 PM, when Detective Henry Roge was hit by a rock while standing in front of the store, and after the windows was broken at 10:40 PM, there were officers able to arrest William Ford. Later in the evening the police cordon extended to cover 125th Street from 8th Avenue to Lenox Avenue, with Kress' store remaining at its center, and as the base for police responding to the disorder. It was also the case that Ford was not alleged to have been trying to incite others to break more windows, as most of the other men arrested for inciting crowds allegedly did, but to attack police.
  
  There is no mention of this specific incident in any newspapers reporting on the disorder. William Ford did appear in lists of those arrested in the disorder, but the charge made against him is different in each list: in the list published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide he appeared among those charged with inciting a riot; in the list published in the New York Evening Journal the charge is disorderly conduct; and in a list published in the Daily News, Ford is charged with assault. On March 20, when he appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court, the docket book records the charge as inciting a riot, although the arresting officer's affidavit describes Ford breaking a window and calling on the crowd to attack police. Eventually sent to the grand jury, Ford was transferred to the Court of Special Sessions to be tried for 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. There is no information on the outcome of that trial; Ford does not appear in the transcript of the 28th Police Precinct blotter that provides outcomes for most of those prosecuted in the Harlem Magistrates Court.
  
  The Kress 5, 10 & 25c store appears in the MCCH business survey taken in the second half of 1935 and was still visible in the Tax Department photograph from 1939-1941.
  
   
• 1 2021-12-15T20:01:28+00:00 Louise Brown arrested 13 plain 2022-11-13T21:23:15+00:00 Sometime during the riot, Officer Libman of the 32nd Precinct arrested Louise Brown, a twenty-three-year-old Black woman. There is no information on Brown's alleged offense, or the time or circumstances of the arrest. 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, at 2366 8th Avenue and 2422 8th Avenue. Brown, and Johnson, likely also allegedly broke store windows, based on the charges made against them in the Harlem Magistrates Court. All four faced the charge of 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, so Brown has been treated as having been arrested on 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 were alleged to have 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 is possible that the intersection was where police were stationed, 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 is recorded in the 28th Precinct Police blotter as charged with inciting a riot. That charge is 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 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. Disorderly conduct was also an offense that could be adjudicated by a Magistrate. 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 2022-01-09T21:45:26+00:00 Jose Perez arrested 13 plain 2022-11-14T03:50:49+00:00 Officer Ramos of the Alien Squad arrested Jose Perez, a twenty-three-year-old white man born in Cuba, for allegedly having a gun in his possession. There are no details of the circumstances that led to the arrest or where or when Perez was arrested. The only sources which connected him to the disorder are the list of those arrested published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide and the list published in the New York Evening Journal. In both lists the charge against Perez was identified as "Sullivan Law," the name by which the offense of possession of a weapon was known. The Harlem Magistrates Court docket book recorded the weapon alleged to be in his possession as a "gun."
  
  Notwithstanding the appearance of Perez in newspaper lists, it is not certain that he was involved in the disorder. His name was not in the transcript of the 28th Precinct Police blotter. While Perez did appear in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, among those arrested during the disorder, so too did a handful of individuals charged with offenses unrelated to the disorder. His address is recorded as 25 South Street, on the southern end of Manhattan, far from Harlem, although he may have come to the Puerto Rican neighborhood around West 116th Street at the time of the disorder. The three other men arrested during the disorder charged with possession of a weapon had been arrested for riot, breaking windows or looting, after which a police officer allegedly found a weapon on them.
  
  Perez pled guilty, according to the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book, and Magistrate Renaud transferred him to the Court of Special Sessions for sentencing. There is no information on the decision of the judges in that court.
  
  Both lists and the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book recorded Perez's race as "white;" unlike most of those recorded as white, he was likely Hispanic rather than European in ethnicity.
• 1 2020-10-22T02:20:21+00:00 Joseph Moore arrested 13 plain 2022-11-16T23:16:14+00:00 Around 1.50 AM, Patrolman Louis Frikser arrested Joseph Moore, a forty-six-year-old West Indian carpenter, on the Third Avenue Bridge, which connected the eastern end of West 130th Street in Harlem with the Bronx. Frikser charged that Moore had been part of a group of men who had entered Harry Lash's 5 & 10c store at 400 Lenox Avenue, five blocks west of the bridge on the corner of West 130th Street, and stolen goods. None of the reports of this case detail what caused Frikser to stop Moore or what he found in his possession. Moore was likely returning home; he lived just three blocks beyond the bridge, at 248 East 136th Street in the Bronx.
  
  "A few minutes" earlier Frikser had observed Arnold Ford, a nineteen-year-old Black man "walking across the bridge with a package," according to the details provided in the Probation Department investigation of Ford. Ford was also likely going home; he lived in a building next to Moore's residence, at 246 East 136th Street in the Bronx. The package he carried cannot have been large; it contained "soap, garters, thread and notions" with a value of $1.15. According to Frikser, Ford admitted he had stolen goods from Harry Lash's 5 & 10c store, joining others entering the store and "helping himself to some merchandise," but denying breaking the store windows. But Ford did not know Moore, according to a note in the Preliminary Investigation in his Probation Department file.
  
  Only seven other men are identified in the sources as having been arrested away from the stores they allegedly looted, a group making up one third (9/27) of the arrests for which that information is known (27/60).
  
  While the 28th Precinct Police Blotter recorded the charge against Moore as "Acc'd stolen goods during the riot" not "Burglarized store during riot" as in Ford's case, police charged both Moore and Ford with burglary in the Harlem Magistrate Court. The first charge suggested Moore had not obtained whatever goods he had allegedly stolen directly from the store, a version of events not mentioned anywhere else. Subsequently they were indicted by the grand jury and tried together in the Court of General Sessions. During the trial on April 1, Moore was acquitted at the direction of the judge, an outcome for which the Daily Worker gave credit to the International Labor Defense lawyers who appeared for him (that story made no mention of Ford, who pled guilty to petit larceny). The story gave no indication of the basis of the successful defense, noting only that the attorneys "had riddled the framed-up case against the worker." The involvement of the ILD suggests Moore may have had ties to the Communist party; the only others arrested during the disorder they represented were the men who picketed Kress' store.
  
  Moore (and Ford) appear in newspaper reports only in the list of those charged with burglary published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Gazette, a list published in the New York Evening Journal, and stories in the Home News and New York Sun. The Home News story included brief summaries of the charges made in the Magistrates Court; in this case, it grouped Moore and Ford together, arrested at the same time for looting the same store, but confused the $1000 of goods stolen reported by Lash in his affidavit before the Magistrates Court for what the men were found carrying, also mistakenly identifying it as clothing. The New York Sun likewise mistakenly alleged the men had stolen $1000 of property, but did correctly identify those goods as "general merchandise," in reporting the men's pleas in the Court of General Sessions, and those of four others charged with third degree burglary, on March 25, after their indictment by the grand jury on March 22.
  
  Moore had arrived in the United States from Barbados in 1917, perhaps initially living in Pennsylvania, as the 1930 Census reported his eldest daughter had been born there around 1920. By around 1926, he and his family were in New York City as another daughter is listed as having been born there. In 1930 the census enumerator recorded Moore living in an apartment at 213 West 142nd Street with his wife Olive, three daughters and a son, working as a carpenter for building contractors, but unemployed at that time, April 3. At some point between 1930 and his arrest in 1935 the family relocated to the Bronx, and were still at the same address when a census enumerator called on April 2, 1940. Moore's eldest daughter, twenty years old by this time, is not part of the household, but Moore and his wife had two more children, both boys. Still working as a carpenter, Moore was now employed by the Parks Department.
• 1 2020-02-25T03:33:10+00:00 James Wrigley assaulted 12 At some point during the disorder, forty-nine-year-old James Wrigley, a white security guard from Teaneck, New Jersey, suffered a serious head injury. plain 2022-04-18T20:55:14+00:00 At 12.45am, forty-nine-year-old James Wrigley, a white security guard from Teaneck, New Jersey, suffered a serious head injury. Several newspaper reports identified Wrigley as an employee of the Holmes Protective Agency, which apparently provided private police officers (security guards) for one or more of the stores on 125th Street.
  
  Press reports offered conflicting accounts of how he came to be injured that put the case in different categories of assault. As only the New York Times provided a specific time for the assault on Wrigley, and a detailed account of his injuries, Wrigley has been categorized as having been hit by rocks. The newspaper’s story included Wrigley among the victims of “stone-throwers,” “struck by a stone at 126th Street and Seventh Avenue, receiving cuts about both eyes and a serious head injury, possibly a concussion of the brain.” The Home News likewise cast him as “another victim of the rock hurlers,” but then proceeded to report Wrigley was “set upon by several colored men [and] beaten into unconsciousness before he was able to draw his gun.” The New York Evening Journal also reported Wrigley had been “seized and beaten,” an attack that apparently did not draw attention as the story went on recount that “Radio patrol cars found him lying on the pavement, unconscious, suffering from concussion of the brain.” The Daily News, which published no details of the assault, is the only other publication to report Wrigley was found unconscious in an alley. The AP reporter’s brief summary opted for this second narrative, reporting that Wrigley had been attacked by a gang. The New York American, Daily News, New York Post, New York Evening Journal, and Home News only included Wrigley in their lists of the injured. He also appeared in lists of the injured in the Afro-American, Atlanta World, and Norfolk Journal and Guide. Wrigley's injury was apparently serious enough that he was one of the eight men that the New York Herald Tribune reported as still in hospital on March 21.
  
  The area where Wrigley was struck down saw a cluster of assaults on whites throughout the disorder, including other civilians and police hit by rocks, as well as crowds breaking windows and looting. Those hit by objects commonly suffered head injuries, as Wrigley did, although no others are reported as having been knocked unconscious.
   
• 1 2021-09-17T00:25:21+00:00 Edward Loper arrested 12 plain 2022-07-04T21:19:31+00:00 Near the end of the disorder, at 5:00 AM on March 20, Patrolman Jerry Brennan arrested Edward Loper,  Charles Alston, Albert Yerber and Ernest Johnson for allegedly shooting at police stationed at Lenox Avenue and West 138th Street. No police officers were reported injured, but Alston suffered a fractured skull as the men fled police. Trying to escape by leaping from the roof of a six-story-building to the adjoining building, Alston fell to a second-floor ledge. He was a twenty-one-year-old Black man, as was Loper, Yerber was twenty years of age, and Johnson was twenty-two years of age. Loper lived on the other side of Harlem at at 298 West 138th Street, as did Yerber, 106 Edgecombe Aveand, even further west, Alston at 512 West 153rd Street, while Johnson lived close to where they were arrested, at 206 West 140th Street. Only a small proportion of those involved in the disorder lived above 135th Street.
  
  Newspaper stories contained few details of the shooting, even as they employed a range of dramatic and emotive language - for example, the New York World Telegram and Times Union reported a “nest” of snipers “trying to pick off” a "lone policeman." Stories in the New York World Telegram and Brooklyn Daily Eagle did offer the name of the officer allegedly targeted by Alston and his companions, Patrolman Jerry Brennan of the Morrisiana station, and the same dramatic account that a bullet whistled past his ear as he stood on post at Lenox Ave and 138th Street. Taking cover, he saw the 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. One other story, in the Home News, identified Brennan, but cast him not as the target of the shooters but as one of the police who responded. In a radio car assigned to the area with his partner Patrolman McGrady, Brennan “heard the shots and sped to the scene. At the radio car's approach the four snipers [standing in the doorway] ran to the roof of the building.” This story provides the key detail that no guns were found on Alston and his companions.
  
  On March 20 Loper, Yerber, and Johnson were charged with disorderly conduct, according to the Washington Heights Magistrates Court docket book, which identified Brennan as the arresting officer for all three men. (Alston did not appear in court, likely because of his injury). The clerk annotated that charge with the word "annoy." Under that section of the statute, a person is guilty if they act "in such a manner as to annoy, disturb, interfere with, obstruct, or be offensive to others." A separate clause punishes disorderly or threatening conduct or behavior, so based on that annotation, the men were not charged with attacking Brennan. That charge fits better with the circumstances described in the Home News. Whatever the patrolman alleged, Magistrate Ford did not find sufficient evidence of the men's guilt and acquitted Loper and his two companions. Given that outcome, it is possible Brennan mistook some other noise for gunfire. Without any evidence of an assault in the sources, these events are treated here only as arrests.
  
  Loper, and Yerber and Johnson, are among those charged with disorderly conduct in the list of the arrested published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide. They are not mentioned in stories about the proceedings in the Washington Heights Magistrates Court on March 20 in the New York Age and New York Herald Tribune, which listed only those convicted.
   
• 1 2020-04-09T17:57:19+00:00 Wilmont Hendricks shot 11 plain 2022-04-19T16:10:54+00:00 Wilmont Hendricks, a twenty-five-year-old Black man, was shot on Lenox Avenue near 128th Street. Dr Payne attended Hendricks at Harlem Hospital, eight blocks north on Lenox Avenue, at 1.30 AM, the hospital staff recorded, so he was likely injured sometime around 1.00 AM, not around 2.00 AM, as a New York Times story reported. No details survive of the circumstances of Hendricks’ injury: the hospital record noted that he had been shot in “in some unknown manner,” while newspapers only reported he had been shot. There was considerable disorder on the blocks of Lenox Avenue north of 125th Street around this time, including other assaults and looting. The outbreak of looting led police to begin shooting more indiscriminately than earlier in the disorder, and it is likely that Hendricks was shot by police.
  
  After being seen by Dr Payne, Hendricks' injury was sufficiently serious for him to be admitted to the hospital, and to still be there a day later, according to the New York Herald Tribune. While the hospital recorded his wound as being in his left shoulder, only the list of injured in the Home News echoed that report. The lists in the New York American, New York Post, Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide instead locating the gunshot in his chest, and the lists in the Daily News and New York Evening Journal, and story in the New York Times reporting it was in in his back.
  
  The hospital record did not identify Hendricks' race, but the newspaper lists in the New York Post, Home News, New York American and New York Evening Journal did. Four of the six other men shot and wounded in the disorder were black, one of unknown race, and one white police officer. When he was shot Hendricks was some distance from his home at 214 West 146th Street, which was almost twenty blocks to the north on 146th Street.
  
  No one was arrested for shooting Hendricks, as was the case with all of those shot and wounded (Detective Campo’s alleged assailant was shot and killed).
   
• 1 2021-12-08T18:55:05+00:00 David Smith arrested 11 plain 2022-11-13T23:11:19+00:00 At 12:05 A.M., Officer Anthony Barbaro of the 25th Precinct arrested David Smith, a twenty-two-year-old Black clerk, and Leon Mauraine, a twenty-two-year-old Black window washer in front of 322 Lenox Avenue. Barbaro had been standing on the corner of Lenox Avenue and 126th Street when he saw a group of people gather in front of the Rex Drug store at 318 Lenox Avenue, according to the statement he gave in the Harlem Magistrates Court. He then allegedly heard two of the men, Smith and Mauraine, say, "Com[e] on gang, here's two more windows, let's break them." Those men then threw stones at the store windows, breaking them, after which they ran north on Lenox Avenue. Barbaro chased them, catching and arresting both men two buildings north of the drug store. As the drug store was on the northeast corner of Lenox Avenue and West 126th Street, Barbaro must have been standing across 126th Street, on the southeast corner, as he would not have been able to hear the men or catch them so quickly from across the much wider Lenox Avenue. In the half hour after Barbaro arrested Smith and Mauraine, other police officers arrested two men for breaking windows near West 126th Street and Lenox Avenue, John Kennedy Jones at 333 Lenox Avenue and Bernard Smith at 317 Lenox Avenue. Multiple arrests by different officers indicates that a number of police were stationed at the intersection at that time. All three of the arresting officers came from precincts outside Harlem.
  
  Smith had lived for the last fourteen months at 2094 5th Avenue, three blocks north and a block east of the store, according to his examination in the Magistrates Court. He may have been drawn to Lenox Avenue by the noise of windows being broken earlier in the disorder. While both he and Mauraine could have thrown stone at the windows, as Barbaro stated, it is unlikely they said exactly the same words. It may be that only one of the them urged on the group, or that they expressed similar sentiments that the officer chose to report in the same words (The Home News story about the proceedings in the Harlem Magistrates Court reported they had said "Come on. Let's bust some more windows," a difference in wording from the affidavit likely produced by a reporter's difficulty hearing what was said in the courtroom). The list of those arrested in the disorder published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and the list in the New York Evening Journal, did distinguish the men in a way Barbaro's affidavit did not. Smith was listed among those charged with malicious mischief, an offense which involved damaging property used in other cases involving broken windows, and Mauraine among those charged with inciting a riot. However, that distinction is not replicated in the 28th Precinct Police Blotter or in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book, which recorded both men as charged with inciting a riot. So too did the story in the Home News about the proceedings in the court, which did not mention that Smith or Mauraine had broken the store windows, only what they had been "overheard saying to companions." A note on the Magistrates Court affidavit did, however, include malicious mischief alongside three sections of the riot law, indicating that both men faced both charges at some point in their prosecution.
  
  When Smith, and Mauraine, appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, Magistrate Renaud held them for the grand jury, on bail of $1000. A week later both men appeared before the grand jury, which transferred them to the Court of Special Sessions for trial. It is likely that the note on the Magistrates Court affidavit was the charges they faced in that court, malicious mischief (as the malicious mischief charge is not recorded in the docket book Smith was not categorized as being charged with that offense) and the three misdemeanor forms of inciting a riot. Convicted in that court, on April 2, Smith, and Mauraine, received suspended sentences, according to the 28th Precinct Police Blotter.
• 1 2021-08-20T19:16:43+00:00 Lamter Jackson arrested 10 plain 2022-10-26T18:39:55+00:00 Sometime during the disorder, Officer Jackson of the 32nd Precinct arrested Lamter Jackson, a twenty-four-year-old Black man, for allegedly throwing a rock that shattered the window of a store selling unclaimed laundry at 1 West 131st Street, and then taking a bag of laundry from the store. The only source of details of the event is the report of Jackson's appearance in the Magistrates' Court published by the Home News. Officer Jackson is identified as the arresting officer in Magistrates Court docket book. Lamter Jackson lived at 78 West 135th Street. There are multiple lootings and assaults on the stretch of Lenox Avenue between his home and the laundry store, noise and crowds which could have brought Jackson on to the streets. Several other men arrested in this area - Lawrence Humphrey, Carl Jones, Raymond Taylor, and Preston White, likewise lived in the blocks of 135th-132nd Streets between Lenox and 5th Avenues.
  
  Jackson is listed among those charged with burglary in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Gazette, and the New York Evening Journal. Both those lists flip his name, identifying him as Jackson Lamter; the Home News and the docket book record him as Lamter Jackson. He appeared in the Washington Heights Magistrates Court on March 20, charged with petit larceny not burglary. That charge did not require the evidence of breaking in and entering a store to take merchandise that burglary did. Magistrate Ford sent him to the Court of Special Sessions and held him on $100 Bail. For some reason just over two months passed before Jackson's trial took place. On May 27, the Magistrates convicted him and sent him to the Workhouse for thirty days, an outcome found only in the 32nd Precinct records.
• 1 2021-12-02T17:24:56+00:00 Arthur Bennett arrested 10 plain 2022-11-14T15:38:32+00:00 Sometime during the disorder Detective Perretti of the 6th Division arrested Arthur Bennett, a twenty-eight-year-old Black man, for allegedly breaking windows in the drug store at 339 Lenox Avenue, on the northwest corner of 127th Street. Perretti likely arrested a second man, James Bright, also a twenty-eight-year-old Black man, at the same time, also for breaking the store's windows. There is no information on the circumstances of the arrests. While other stores in the surrounding blocks of Lenox Avenue had windows broken and goods taken, police made few arrests as they lacked the numbers to control the many crowds on the streets. However, other officers made arrests for alleged looting at Frank De Thomas' candy store next to the drug store on West 127th Street and at Sol Weit and Isaac Popiel's grocery store two buildings north on Lenox Avenue, suggesting that officers were stationed at this intersection.
  
  A story in the Home News is the only evidence that connects Bennett, and James Bright, to 339 Lenox Avenue. Bennett appeared in lists of those charged with disorderly conduct published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the New York Evening Journal. Inexplicably, the 28th Precinct Police blotter records "Annoyed pedestrians" as the charge against him; no one else arrested during the disorder other than Bright was charged with that offense. Bennett appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20 charged with disorderly conduct, with Detective Perretti recorded in the docket book as the arresting officer. He had allegedly thrown "stores through the window of the store at 339 Lenox Ave.," according to the Home News story on those proceedings. He did not live close to the store, but eight blocks south, at 48 West 119th Street. Magistrate Renaud convicted Bennett of disorderly conduct. He returned to the court for sentencing on March 23, and received a term of one month in the workhouse "for breaking windows" from Magistrate Renaud in proceedings reported in the Afro-American, New York Age, New York Daily News, and New York Times. None of those stories gave an address for the store whose windows Bennett had allegedly broken.
• 1 2021-12-10T19:49:14+00:00 David Bragg arrested 10 plain 2022-11-14T15:40:20+00:00 Sometime during the disorder, Patrolman Leahy of the 28th Precinct arrested David Bragg, a thirty-three-year-old Black man, for allegedly throwing a rock through the window of Ben Salcfas' grocery store at 2061 7th Avenue, according to a story in the Home News. The window could have been broken around 11.15 PM, when a group of twenty-five to thirty people gathered at the intersection. Another officer from the 28th Precinct, Patrolman Peter Naton, arrested one member of that group, James Pringle, for allegedly urging the others to cross the street so they could throw rocks at police. The group continued on despite the arrest, smashing store windows, according to Naton. Bragg may have been part of that group. Later, two stores close to the grocery store were looted. First, Sarah Refkin's delicatessen at 2067 7th Avenue at 12:30 AM, and then Nicholas Peet's tailors store at 2063 7th Avenue at 1:30 AM. The shoe repair store directly across 7th Avenue from the grocery store was also looted sometime during the disorder. Bragg lived at 235 West 135th Street, over ten blocks north of the store, between 7th and 8th Avenues.
  
  "Ben Salcfas" of 2061 7th Avenue is recorded as the complainant against David Bragg in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book. A story in the Home News is the only other source that links Bragg to 2061 7th Avenue. The information that Bragg through a rock at the store window is also only found in that story, a report of his appearance in the Harlem Magistrates Court. The charge made against Bragg when he was arraigned, malicious mischief, involves the destruction of property, and was used in other prosecutions involving broken windows. However, police initially charged him with inciting a riot, which is the charge recorded in the 28th Precinct Police blotter, and in the list of those arrested during the disorder published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and the list published in the New York Evening Journal. When Bragg appeared in court on March 20, Magistrate Renaud transferred him to the Court of Special Sessions and held him on bail of $1000. Convicted by the judges of that court, he was sentenced on April 1 to three months in the workhouse, according to the 28th Precinct Police blotter.
• 1 2021-12-21T20:46:19+00:00 William Jones arrested 10 plain 2022-11-14T15:47:52+00:00 Sometime during the disorder, Patrolman Murphy of the 28th Precinct arrested William Jones, a twenty-five-year-old Black man. There is no information on Jones' alleged offense, or the time or circumstances of the arrest. He was charged with 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, so Jones has been treated as having been arrested on that charge, even though there are no details of his alleged act.
  
  William Jones is recorded in the 28th Precinct Police blotter as charged with inciting a riot. That charge is reported in the lists published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide. 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 Jones to malicious mischief by the time he appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20. Magistrate Renaud held Brown in custody until March 22, on bail of $1000. When he was returned to court, the charge against Jones was reduced to a misdemeanor, "Red. to Misd." written above the original charge in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book. That change would have reflected information on the value of the window that Jones allegedly broke: it had to be more than $25 for Jones to be charged with felony malicious mischief. Magistrate Ford then transferred Jones to the Court of Special Sessions for trial. On March 28 the three judges of that court convicted Jones, and gave him a suspended sentence, according to the 28th Precinct Police blotter.
• 1 2021-12-03T21:46:21+00:00 William Norris arrested 10 plain 2022-11-14T15:49:25+00:00 Officer Phillips of the 28th Squad arrested William Norris, together with Charles Wright, for allegedly having "thrown an ashcan through the window" of the Lokos Clothes store at 2275 8th Avenue, according to a story in the Home News. Located just north of West 122nd Street, on the west side of 8th Avenue, the store was in an area with no other reported activity during the disorder other than rocks hitting Patrolman Harry Whittington as he traveled on an Emergency truck, and no other arrests. There are no details of the time or circumstances of the arrests.
  
  Norris, a twenty-two-year-old Black man, is recorded as residing at 201 West 122nd Street in all the records of his arrest, only a block east of the clothing store. He appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20 charged with malicious mischief. Magistrate Renaud transferred him to the Court of Special Sessions for trial, and held him on bail of $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. The judges convicted him, and on April 1st sentenced him to three months in the Workhouse. The prosecution of Wright followed the same process, with the same result. Phillips was also the arresting officer of three other individuals, Arthur Davis, Herbert Hunter and Elizabeth Tai.
  
  Pauline Lokos of 2275 8th Avenue was identified as the owner of the store whose windows Norris allegedly broke in the Home News and recorded as the complainant in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book when he appeared in court on March 20. Norris appeared in the lists of those arrested during the disorder published in Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the New York Evening Journal, but the two lists differed in the charge made against him. The Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide included him among those charged with burglary, while the New York Evening Journal listed the charge against Norris as inciting a riot. The charge recorded in the 28th Precinct Police blotter was inciting a riot. In the Magistrates Court the charge made was malicious mischief, recorded in the docket book and reported in the Home News. That charge involved damage to property not required for the charge of riot, so the change in charge in effect shifted from treating the men as part of a crowd to as having attacked the store. There is no information on why that change was made.
• 1 2021-12-12T03:19:41+00:00 David Terry arrested 10 plain 2022-11-14T15:56:46+00:00 Some time during the disorder, Detective Balkin of the 5th Division arrested David Terry, a twenty-four-year-old homeless Black man. Wilbur Montgomery, living at 951 Woodycrest Avenue, recorded as the complainant against Terry in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book, was identified in the 1933 City Directory as the manager of Danbury Shoes, at 2334 8th Avenue. The nearby intersection of 8th Avenue and West 125th Street, only a few buildings from Kress' store, saw some of the earliest crowds and violence of the disorder, and a concentration of police, who sought to clear West 125th Street by pushing people on to the avenue. Windows were also broken in stores either side of Danbury shoes, the branch of the Liggett drug store chain on the corner of West 125th Street and a seafood restaurant at 2338 8th Avenue. Montgomery was also the complainant against another man arrested by Detective Balkin, likely at the same time, James Hayes. There are no details of the circumstances of Terry's arrest, but the charge against him in the Harlem Magistrates Court, malicious mischief, was made against those arrested in the disorder who had allegedly broken windows. Hayes had allegedly taken a baseball bat from the hat store, according to a story about his appearance in the Magistrates Court in the Home News, which gave only the address of the store. Police appear to have initially charged Hayes with breaking a window as well as taking the bat. He appeared in the 28th Precinct Police Blotter, his name misrecorded as Hazel, with the note "Broke store window, burglarized store." In line with that entry, Hayes was among those charged with burglary in the lists published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the New York Evening Journal. However, when Hayes appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, the charge was recorded as petit larceny not burglary. That charge did not require evidence of breaking in and entering a store as burglary did, indicating a reassessment of the information in the blotter by the time of his arraignment.
  
  Instead, it appears that it was Terry who police alleged had broken the hat store windows, as he was charged in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20 with malicious mischief. Magistrate Renaud held Terry in custody so his case could be investigated. When he was returned to court on March 26, the charge against him was reduced to disorderly conduct, the previous charge crossed out in the docket book, "Red. to" written above it, and the new charge stamped in its place. That change likely indicates a lack of evidence that Terry had broken windows. It is that reduced charge of disorderly conduct that appeared as the charge against Terry in lists published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the New York Evening Journal. A different charge recorded against him in the 28th Precinct Police Blotter, inciting a riot, appears to have frequently been used by police as the initial charge against those arrested during the disorder, and was often replaced by other charges in the Magistrates Court. As disorderly conduct was a charge that Magistrates had the power to adjudicate, Magistrate Ford tried and convicted Terry and fined him $500 or five days in the workhouse. Terry served the time in the workhouse, according to the 28th Precinct Police blotter.
  
   
• 1 2021-12-03T21:46:41+00:00 Charles Wright arrested 10 plain 2022-11-14T16:00:15+00:00 Officer Phillips of the 28th Squad arrested Charles Wright, together with William Norris, for allegedly having "thrown an ashcan through the window" of the Lokos Clothes store at 2275 8th Avenue, according to a story in the Home News. Located just north of West 122nd Street, on the west side of 8th Avenue, the store was in an area with no other reported activity during the disorder other than rocks hitting Patrolman Harry Whittington as he traveled on an Emergency truck, and no other arrests. There are no details of the time or circumstances of the arrests.
  
  Wright, a twenty-two-year-old Black man, is recorded as having "no home" in the 28th Precinct Police blotter and the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book, but with an address in Philadelphia in the Home News. He appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20 charged with malicious mischief. Magistrate Renaud transferred him to the Court of Special Sessions for trial, and held him on bail of $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). The judges convicted him, and on April 1st sentenced him to three months in the Workhouse. The prosecution of Norris followed the same process, with the same result. Phillips was also the arresting officer of three other individuals, Arthur Davis, Herbert Hunter and Elizabeth Tai.
  
  Pauline Lokos of 2275 8th Avenue was identified as the owner of the store whose windows Wright allegedly broke in the Home News and recorded as the complainant in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book when he appeared in court on March 20. Wright appeared in the lists of those arrested during the disorder published in Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the New York Evening Journal, but the two lists differed in the charge made against him. The Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide included him among those charged with burglary, while the New York Evening Journal listed the charge against Wright as inciting a riot. The charge recorded in the 28th Precinct Police blotter was inciting a riot. In the Magistrates Court the charge made was malicious mischief, recorded in the docket book and reported in the Home News. That charge involved damage to property not required for the charge of riot, so the change in charge in effect shifted from treating the men as part of a crowd to as having attacked the store. There is no information on why that change was made.
• 1 2021-09-01T14:06:32+00:00 Earl Davis arrested 9 plain 2022-10-26T18:36:25+00:00 Sometime during the disorder, Officer William Butler of the 18th Precinct arrested Earl Davis, a twenty-six-year-old Black man. The arrest likely took place near 531 Lenox Avenue as that is the address listed for the complainant against him in the Washington Heights Magistrates Court, Philip Jaross. Although that column of the docket book was for the complainant's residence, clerks commonly instead recorded instead the address of looted or damaged stores. The address, on the block between West 135th and West 136th Streets, opposite Harlem Hospital, was the location of Jaross' Merchant Tailors, which the MCCH Business survey described as a "Store operated by two Jewish men. Carry a cheap line of tailor made clothes. Been here 3 1/2 years."
  
  Davis is among those named as charged with petit larceny in the list published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide (he is not in the list published in the New York Evening Journal). A charge of petit larceny suggests that Davis was not alleged to have broken the store window or otherwise gained entry to the building, but rather to have stolen merchandise of low value. There is no mention of this event in any other sources. It is the northernmost reported looting of the disorder, one of a small number of events north of West 135th Street. Davis lived at 110 West 127th Street, between Lenox and 7th Avenues, to the south of the store.
  
  When Davis appeared in Washington Heights Magistrates Court on March 20, Magistrate Ford held him for the Court of Special Sessions, on bail of $100. When he appeared in that court on March 22, the Magistrates convicted Davis and sentenced him to ten days in the Workhouse, an outcome found only in the 32nd Precinct records.
• 1 2021-08-31T01:42:33+00:00 Albert Allen arrested 9 plain 2022-11-14T02:18:33+00:00 Sometime during the disorder, Albert Allen was arrested and charged with Burglary. Allen's name appears among those charged with Burglary in the list published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Gazette. However, Allen does not appear in the list published in the New York Evening Journal (which included an person's age, race and address), the 28th Precinct Police Blotter, the docket book of either Magistrates Court or any newspaper stories, and there is no evidence of the location of the business that he allegedly looted.
  
  That lack of information is also the case with eight other men who appear only in the list published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide, seven of who were charged with Petit Larceny. The absence of this group from the blotter could mean they were arrested in the 32nd Precinct, whose blotter records do not appear to have been obtained by the MCCH. That they did not appear in court could mean that police questioned and released them the next day.
• 1 2020-10-29T15:01:55+00:00 Vito Capozzio assaulted 8 plain 2022-06-13T19:36:34+00:00 Vito Capozzio may have been assaulted somewhere north of West 130th Street during the disorder. He was recorded as the complainant in the prosecution of Richard Jackson, a twenty-seven-year-old Black man, and Salathel Smith, a forty-seven-year-old Black man, in the Washington Heights Magistrates Court on March 20. No details of the case appear in any sources, but the men's arraignment in that court indicated they had been arrested within its jurisdiction, which began above 130th Street. Jackson appeared in the list of those arrested for assault in the Afro-American, Atlanta World and Norfolk Journal and Guide, which included only his name and the charge. Smith was not included in that list. However, his name was recorded directly beneath Jackson in the docket book, with check marks indicating that the complainant, charge and arresting officer were the same in both cases. Although his name suggests Capozzio was likely a white man, there is no evidence of his race. The docket book recorded his address as "3764 Boulevard," which appears to be an incomplete address, perhaps referring to Southern Boulevard in the Bronx.
  
  Other evidence in the docket book, and Jackson and Smith's absence from most newspaper reports of those arrested during the disorder, suggest that this incident was not part of the disorder. When Jackson and Smith appeared in court on March 20 the charge against them was the lesser offense of disorderly conduct, not assault, annotated with the word "fight." The reduced charge could simply indicate that Capozzio's injuries did not warrant a charge of assault. However, this is the only instance in which the charge was annotated with "fight." Another possible interpretation is that Jackson and Smith may have got into a fight in a business which Capozzio either owned or worked in rather than assaulting him. The area north of 130th Street where the men were arrested saw fewer incidents and arrests during the disorder. Jackson and Smith would not have been the only men who appeared in the court that day not arrested as part of the disorder; eleven of the forty-four recorded in the docket book on March 20 faced charges unrelated to the disorder, such as offenses against the Sabbath Law. While stories in New York Age and New York Herald Tribune reported Jackson's appearance in court, only the New York Age also mentioned Smith, the only time he appeared in the newspapers. That inconsistency, and the absence of the men from other stories about the court proceedings, suggest at least some confusion about whether their arrests related to the disorder. Magistrate Ford did convict both Jackson and Smith, but sentenced them to just two days in the workhouse or a $5 fine.
• 1 2021-09-06T19:34:21+00:00 Herbert Hunter arrested 8 plain 2022-08-17T17:38:34+00:00 Sometime during the disorder, Detective Phillips of the 28th Precinct arrested Herbert Hunter, an eighteen-year-old Black resident of 56 West 126th Street. He was arrested at the same time as Phillips arrested Elizabeth Tai and Arthur Davis, who were charged with taking groceries from a store at 340 Lenox Avenue, according to a story in the Home News. However, that story did not directly state that Hunter was charged with looting the same store, so that is not identified here as the location he alleged looted.
  
  Hunter appeared in the list of those charged with burglary published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and the list published in the New York Evening Journal. The 28th Precinct Police Blotter also recorded the charge against Hunter as burglary, with the note "Burglarised store during riot." The Daily Worker more precisely described his alleged offense as "stealing groceries."
  
  Hunter was arraigned in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20 with Elizabeth Tai and Arthur Davis, also charged with burglary. Magistrate Renaud remanded all three to appear again in court (he sent two others arrested by Phillips who appeared at the same time charged with malicious mischief, Charles Wright and William Norris, to the Court of Special Sessions). The docket book recorded only Phillips name and precinct; the story in the Daily Worker identified him as a detective.
  
  When Hunter appeared in court again, on March 22, the docket book recorded no change in the charge against him, but a story in the Home News reported that "the Court" had reduced the charge from burglary to disorderly conduct, as it had for both Tai and Davis. In Tai's case, the docket book did record that the charge had been reduced to disorderly conduct. Had the police presented evidence Hunter had stolen merchandise he would have been charged with either burglary or larceny; had they presented evidence that he had broken windows, the charge would have been malicious mischief. The charge of disorderly conduct suggests he may only have been part of a crowd near the store. Magistrate Renaud found Hunter guilty, an outcome reported in the stories in the Daily News and New York Evening Journal as well as the Home News. He also found Tai and Davis guilty.
  
  Renaud sentenced Hunter to serve ten days in the Workhouse, according to the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book, 28th Precinct Police Blotter and stories in the Home News, Daily News, New York Evening Journal and Daily Worker. Renaud gave Tai and Davis a lesser sentence, a fine of $25 or five days in the Workhouse. Unable to pay the fine, according to a story in the Home News, both were sent to the Workhouse.
• 1 2021-12-02T17:25:14+00:00 James Bright arrested 7 plain 2022-11-14T15:41:55+00:00 Sometime during the disorder Detective Perretti of the 6th Division arrested James Bright, a twenty-eight-year-old Black man, for allegedly breaking windows in the drug store at 339 Lenox Avenue, on the northwest corner of 127th Street. Perretti likely arrested a second man, Arthur Bennett, also a twenty-eight-year-old Black man, at the same time, also for breaking the store's windows. There is no information on the circumstances of the arrests. While other stores in the surrounding blocks of Lenox Avenue had windows broken and goods taken, police made few arrests were made as they lacked the numbers to control the many crowds on the streets. However, other officers made arrests for alleged looting at Frank De Thomas' candy store next to the drug store on West 127th Street and at Sol Weit and Isaac Popiel's grocery store two buildings north on Lenox Avenue, suggesting that officers were stationed at this intersection.
  
  A story in the Home News is the only evidence that connects Bright, and Arthur Bennett, to 339 Lenox Avenue. Bright appeared in lists of those charged with disorderly conduct published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the New York Evening Journal. Inexplicably, the 28th Precinct Police blotter records "Annoyed pedestrians" as the charge against him; no one else arrested during the disorder other than Bennett was charged with that offense. Bright appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20 charged with disorderly conduct, with Detective Perretti recorded in the docket book as the arresting officer. He had allegedly thrown "stones through the window of the store at 339 Lenox Ave.," according to the Home News story on those proceedings. He did not live close to the store, but five blocks north, at 43 West 133rd Street. Magistrate Renaud convicted Bright of disorderly conduct. He returned to the court for sentencing on March 23, and received a term of one month in the workhouse "for breaking windows" from Magistrate Renaud in proceedings reported in the Afro-American, New York Age, New York Daily News, and New York Times. None of those stories gave an address for the store whose windows Bright had allegedly broken.
• 1 2021-12-13T16:22:07+00:00 Julius Hightower arrested 7 plain 2022-11-14T15:46:10+00:00 Patrolman Carter of the 32nd Precinct arrested Julius Hightower, an eighteen-year-old Black man, for allegedly throwing a brick through the window of Moskowitz's tailor shop at 2310 7th Avenue, according to a story in the New York Herald Tribune. The complainant recorded in the Washington Heights Magistrates Court docket book is L. Hackner, with the address 2310 7th Avenue, confirming the location of Hightower's alleged offense published in the New York Herald Tribune. The tailor shop was operated by a father and son, so Hackner was likely a manager or staff member. Located between 135th and 136th Streets, the shop was one of the northernmost businesses damaged during the disorder, in an area where most of the other businesses had Black owners.
  
  Hightower lived at 204 West 148th Street, more than ten blocks north of the tailor store. He appeared among those charged with disorderly conduct in the lists published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the New York Evening Journal. However, when Hightower appeared in the Washington Heights Magistrates Court on March 20 the charge recorded in the docket book was malicious mischief, an offense involving the destruction of property used in cases of individuals who allegedly broke windows during the disorder. During his arraignment, that charge was reduced to disorderly conduct, an offense that a Magistrate could adjudicate. Magistrate Ford convicted Hightower, and sentenced him to five days in the workhouse or a fine of $25. He served the time. That sentence was reported in the New York Herald Tribune, and the New York Age.
• 1 2021-09-08T00:07:32+00:00 Alonzo Greenridge arrested 7 plain 2022-11-17T16:44:40+00:00 Sometime during the disorder, Alonzo Greenridge, a forty-three-year-old West Indian, was arrested in the 32nd Precinct, which covered the area north of 130th Street. His name appears among those charged with Petit Larceny in the list published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide. However, the charge recorded in the 32nd Precinct "Police Reports" gathered by the MCCH was Disorderly Conduct. Those records, which appeared to be transcribed from the Police Blotter, provide his age, birthplace and address, 982 Union Avenue, together with a notation, "out of Harlem Area." Greenridge was not recorded in the docket book of the Washington Heights Magistrates Court or any newspaper stories, and there is no evidence of the location of the business that he allegedly looted.
  
  For the outcome of Greenridge's prosecution, the 32nd Precinct Police Report recorded "Final Disposition ?." That was the same outcome recorded in the Police Report cards for five other men who appeared only in the list published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide, all also charged with Petit Larceny. (One other man, Archie Niles, named only in that list as charged with Petit Larceny was not found in the Police Reports). Together with the men's absence from the court docket book, that evidence suggests that for some reason Greenridge and the others were not arraigned.
• 1 2022-06-13T16:54:29+00:00 Salathel Smith arrested 6 plain 2022-11-13T21:15:07+00:00 Officer Connelly of the 32nd Precinct arrested Salathel Smith, a forty-seven-year-old Black man somewhere north of West 130th Street some time during the disorder, perhaps for assaulting Vito Capozzio, a man of unknown race and age. Smith, who lived at 246 West 121st Street, appeared in a list published in the New York Age of those arrested during the disorder who were found guilty in the Washington Heights Magistrates Court and sentenced to the Workhouse on March 20. The story included no information on the events that led to his arrest. No other newspaper lists or stories mention Smith, including the other reports of those court proceedings. He did appear in the Washington Heights Magistrates Court docket book, where the charge against him was recorded as disorderly conduct.
  
  The other information in the docket book suggests Smith may have been involved in a fight not in the disorder. Check marks indicate that the charge, complainant and arresting officer in his case were the same as those of the man who appeared above him in the docket book, Richard Jackson, a twenty-seven-year-old Black man who lived at 102 West 119th Street. The charge was annotated "fight." That violence cannot have resulted in any injury if the charge was disorderly conduct: the applicable section of the statute applied only to a person who used "offensive, disorderly, threatening, abusive or insulting language, conduct or behavior." Vito Capozzio was the complainant, his address recorded as "3764 Boulevard," perhaps in the Bronx. Given that evidence, Smith and Jackson may have got into a fight in a business which Capozzio either owned or worked in. Their appearance in the Washington Heights Court, and arrest by an officer from the 32nd Precinct, indicate that they were arrested north of 130th Street, an area that saw fewer incidents and arrests during the disorder. Smith and Jackson would not have been the only men who appeared in court that day not arrested as part of the disorder; eleven of the forty-four recorded in the docket book on March 20 faced charges obviously unrelated to the disorder, such as offenses against the Sabbath Law.
  
  Disorderly conduct was a charge that could be adjudicated in the Magistrates Court. Magistrate Ford convicted Smith, and Jackson. He sentenced both to just two days in the workhouse or a $5 fine; neither paid the fine. Jackson did appear in two sources that Smith did not: the list of those arrested for assault published in the Afro-American, Atlanta World and Norfolk Journal and Guide; and a New York Herald Tribune story that reported the charge and sentence. However, he, like Smith, is missing from most sources that provided information on those arrested. The presence of Smith in the New York Age story likely reflects the reporter's confusion about whether his arrest related to the disorder, given that the charge against him was one made against others arrested in the disorder.
• 1 2021-09-08T00:02:47+00:00 Leo Cash arrested 6 plain 2022-11-14T03:02:34+00:00 Sometime during the disorder, Leo Cash, a twenty-five-year-old Black man who lived at 235 West 120th Street, was arrested and charged with Burglary. Cash's name appears among those charged with Burglary in the list published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the list published in the New York Evening Journal (which included his age, race and address). He does not appear the 28th Precinct Police Blotter, the docket book of either Magistrates Court or any newspaper stories, and there is no evidence of the location of the business that he allegedly looted.
  
  That lack of information is also the case with eight other men who appear only in the list published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide, seven charged with Petit Larceny, and one woman who appeared in that list and the list in the New York Evening Journal as Cash did. The absence of this group from the blotter could mean they were arrested in the 32nd Precinct, whose blotter records do not appear to have been obtained by the MCCH. That they did not appear in court could mean that police questioned and released them the next day.
• 1 2021-12-15T20:02:06+00:00 Warren Johnson arrested 6 plain 2022-11-14T15:28:58+00:00 Sometime during the riot, Officer Libman of the 32nd Precinct arrested Warren Johnson, an eighteen-year-old Black man. There is no information on Johnson's alleged offense, or the time or circumstances of the arrest. 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, at 2366 8th Avenue and 2422 8th Avenue. Johnson, and Brown, likely also allegedly broke store windows, based on the charges made against them in the Harlem Magistrates Court. All four faced the charge of 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, so Johnson has been treated as having been arrested on 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 is recorded in the 28th Precinct Police blotter as charged with inciting a riot. That charge is 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 New York 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. Disorderly conduct was also an offense that could be adjudicated by a Magistrate. 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 2021-08-23T20:04:27+00:00 Joseph Payne arrested 5 plain 2022-07-10T18:19:01+00:00 Officer Archbold of the 30th Precinct arrested fifty-year-old Joseph Payne some time during the disorder for smashing the store window and taking food from "a chain store at 135th St. and Lenox Ave," according to a story in the Home News. The store was likely the A & P grocery store at 510 Lenox Avenue, the only chain grocery store near that intersection in the MCCH Business survey. The only reference to the looting is a Home News report of the appearance in the Washington Heights Magistrates Court of Payne and two other Black men, twenty-eight-year-old Raymond Taylor and forty-two-year-old Preston White. Like Payne, White allegedly smashed the store window and took food, whereas Taylor was arrested for "stealing a quantity of groceries." All three men were arrested "in the store." While Officer Archbold also arrested White, Officer D. Conn of the 24th Precinct is recorded as having arrested Taylor in the Magistrates Court docket book. There is no mention of the value of the merchandise the men allegedly stole. Only one other reported event occurred on Lenox Avenue north of West 135th Street, the arrests of Charles Alston, Edward Loper, Albert Yergen and Ernest Johnston for allegedly shooting at police at 138th Street at the very end of the disorder. Payne lived at 28 East 128th Street, on Harlem's eastern boundary and far further from the grocery store than Taylor or White.
  
  Payne, White and Taylor appeared in the lists of those charged with burglary in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the New York Evening Journal. When they appeared in the Washington Heights Magistrates Court on March 20, the charge against them was originally recorded as burglary, with Payne and White denied bail, and Taylor held on bail of $1000. The Home News  mistakenly reported Payne as younger, twenty-three years-of-age, and different bail decisions for Payne and Taylor: $1500 for Payne and $500 for Taylor.
  
  The three men returned to the Magistrates Court on March 26, at which point all had the charge against them reduced from burglary to disorderly conduct. That change is recorded in the docket book in the same handwriting as the outcome of the case, a quite different hand than the original entry. One explanation for the reduced charge is that, although arrested in the store, there was no evidence that the men had broken windows to gain entry or taken any merchandise. Magistrate Ford convicted all three men, sending Payne and White to the Workhouse for five months and twenty-nine days, and suspending Taylor's sentence. There is no information on why Taylor received a different sentence.
• 1 2021-12-13T16:48:29+00:00 Robert Porter arrested 5 plain 2022-11-14T15:51:19+00:00 Patrolman Rappel of the 30th Precinct arrested Robert Porter, a forty-two-year-old Black man, for allegedly throwing an ashcan through the window of a shoe repair store at 2360 7th Avenue, according to a story in the New York Herald Tribune. That story is the only information on the location of Porter's alleged crime; there is no complainant recorded in the court docket book. Located on the northwest corner of West 138th Street, the shop was the northernmost business damaged during the disorder.
  
  Porter lived only three blocks north of the store, at 221 West 141st Street. He appeared among those charged with disorderly conduct in the lists published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the New York Evening Journal. That was also the charge recorded in the docket book when Porter appeared in the Washington Heights Magistrates Court on March 20. The offense of disorderly conduct was one that a Magistrate could adjudicate. Magistrate Ford convicted Porter, and sentenced him to five days in the workhouse or a fine of $25. "Porter went to jail," the New York Herald Tribune reported, an outcome also reported in the New York Age.
• 1 2021-09-07T21:42:08+00:00 Jack Williams arrested 5 plain 2022-11-17T17:01:10+00:00 Sometime during the disorder, Jack Williams, a thirty-two-year-old man, was arrested in the 32nd Precinct, which covered the area north of 130th Street. His name appears among those charged with Petit Larceny in the list published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide. However, the charge recorded in the 32nd Precinct "Police Reports" gathered by the MCCH was Disorderly Conduct. Those records, which appeared to be transcribed from the Police Blotter, provide his age, birthplace and address, 220 West 130th Street. Williams was not recorded in the docket book of the Washington Heights Magistrates Court or any newspaper stories, and there is no evidence of the location of the business that he allegedly looted.
  
  For the outcome of Williams' prosecution, the 32nd Precinct Police Report recorded "Final Disposition ?." That was the same outcome recorded in the Police Report cards for five other men who appeared only in the list published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide, all also charged with Petit Larceny. (One other man, Archie Niles, named only in that list as charged with Petit Larceny was not found in the Police Reports). Together with the men's absence from the court docket book, that evidence suggests that for some reason Williams and the others were not arraigned.
• 1 2021-09-08T00:14:02+00:00 Archie Niles arrested 3 plain 2022-11-17T16:38:54+00:00 Sometime during the disorder, Archie Niles was arrested and charged with Petit Larceny. Niles' name appeared among those charged with Petit Larceny only in the list published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide. There was no evidence of the location of the business that he allegedly looted.
  
  Six other men who appeared only in the list of those charged with Petit Larceny published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide were found in 32nd Precinct "Police Reports" gathered by the MCCH was Disorderly Conduct. Those index cards appeared to be transcribed from the Police Blotter. In the case of those other men, the outcome recorded was "Final Disposition ?." Together with the men's absence from the court docket book, that evidence suggests that for some reason Niles and the others were not arraigned.
• 1 2021-09-08T00:05:54+00:00 John Darby arrested 3 plain 2022-11-17T16:45:21+00:00 Sometime during the disorder, John Darby, a forty-eight-year-old man, was arrested in the 32nd Precinct, which covered the area north of 130th Street. His name appears among those charged with Petit Larceny in the list published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide. However, the charge recorded in the 32nd Precinct "Police Reports" gathered by the MCCH was Disorderly Conduct. Those records, which appeared to be transcribed from the Police Blotter, provide his age, birthplace and address, 11 West 137th Street. Darby was not recorded in the docket book of the Washington Heights Magistrates Court or any newspaper stories, and there was no evidence of the location of the business that he allegedly looted.
  
  For the outcome of Darby's prosecution, the 32nd Precinct Police Report recorded "Final Disposition ?." That was the same outcome recorded in the Police Report cards for five other men who appeared only in the list published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide, all also charged with Petit Larceny. (One other man, Archie Niles, named only in that list as charged with Petit Larceny was not found in the Police Reports). Together with the men's absence from the court docket book, that evidence suggests that for some reason Greenridge and the others were not arraigned.
• 1 2021-09-08T00:12:06+00:00 Merryman McAllister arrested 3 plain 2022-11-17T16:56:14+00:00 Sometime during the disorder, Merryman McAllister, a forty-five-year-old man, was arrested in the 32nd Precinct, which covered the area north of 130th Street. His name appears among those charged with Petit Larceny in the list published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide. However, the charge recorded in the 32nd Precinct "Police Reports" gathered by the MCCH was Disorderly Conduct. Those records, which appeared to be transcribed from the Police Blotter, provide his age, birthplace and address, 262 West 140th Street. McAllister was not recorded in the docket book of the Washington Heights Magistrates Court or any newspaper stories, and there is no evidence of the location of the business that he allegedly looted.
  
  For the outcome of McAllister's prosecution, the 32nd Precinct Police Report recorded "Final Disposition ?." That was the same outcome recorded in the Police Report cards for five other men who appeared only in the list published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide, all also charged with Petit Larceny. (One other man, Archie Niles, named only in that list as charged with Petit Larceny was not found in the Police Reports). Together with the men's absence from the court docket book, that evidence suggests that for some reason McAllister and the others were not arraigned.
• 1 2021-09-08T00:09:11+00:00 James Harris arrested 2 plain 2022-11-17T16:47:55+00:00 Sometime during the disorder, James Harris, a thirty-nine-year-old man, was arrested in the 32nd Precinct, which covered the area north of 130th Street. His name appears among those charged with Petit Larceny in the list published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide. However, the charge recorded in the 32nd Precinct "Police Reports" gathered by the MCCH was Disorderly Conduct. Those records, which appeared to be transcribed from the Police Blotter, provide his age and address, 117 West 135th Street. Harris was not recorded in the docket book of the Washington Heights Magistrates Court or any newspaper stories, and there was no evidence of the location of the business that he allegedly looted.
  
  For the outcome of Harris' prosecution, the 32nd Precinct Police Report recorded "Final Disposition ?." That was the same outcome recorded in the Police Report cards for five other men who appeared only in the list published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide, all also charged with Petit Larceny. (One other man, Archie Niles, named only in that list as charged with Petit Larceny was not found in the Police Reports). Together with the men's absence from the court docket book, that evidence suggests that for some reason Greenridge and the others were not arraigned.
• 1 2021-09-08T00:10:40+00:00 James Mason arrested 2 plain 2022-11-17T16:51:33+00:00 Sometime during the disorder, James Mason, a thirty-eight-year-old West Indian, was arrested in the 32nd Precinct, which covered the area north of 130th Street. His name appears among those charged with Petit Larceny in the list published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide. However, the charge recorded in the 32nd Precinct "Police Reports" gathered by the MCCH was Disorderly Conduct. Those records, which appeared to be transcribed from the Police Blotter, provide his age, birthplace and address, 312 West 137th Street. Mason was not recorded in the docket book of the Washington Heights Magistrates Court or any newspaper stories, and there is no evidence of the location of the business that he allegedly looted.
  
  For the outcome of Mason's prosecution, the 32nd Precinct Police Report recorded "Final Disposition ?." That was the same outcome recorded in the Police Report cards for five other men who appeared only in the list published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide, all also charged with Petit Larceny. (One other man, Archie Niles, named only in that list as charged with Petit Larceny was not found in the Police Reports). Together with the men's absence from the court docket book, that evidence suggests that for some reason Greenridge and the others were not arraigned.