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

Harry Gordon arrested

Around 6 PM, Harry Gordon, a twenty-year-old white City College student, was arrested in front of Kress' store on West 125th Street for assaulting Patrolman Irwin Young. Newspaper reports offer a wide variety of contradictory accounts of the circumstances of Gordon's arrest; some identified him as speaking to the crowd, others as caught up when police moved in to arrest the man who was speaking, another white man identified as Daniel Miller. Gordon was charged with grabbing Young's nightstick and hitting him with it. He denied assaulting Young, charging instead that the officer had hit him from behind with the night stick. A witness to the arrest, Louise Thompson, told the MCCH that Gordon did “nothing” while being “brutally beaten by two large Policemen.” Police arrested Miller, two other white men, Samuel Jamison and Murray Samuels, and a black man, Claudio Daibolo at the same time, charging them with inciting the crowd.

After police arrested Gordon, they threw him in a patrol car and drove him to a police station. Interviewed by a Daily Worker journalist a week after the riot, Gordon alleged he was "kicked on the legs and knocked around" before being put in a cell. Police later put four Black men in the cell with him, one who Gordon described as "very badly beaten, his whole face and head swollen terribly, and covered with blood." When police took the group upstairs for questioning, and later fingerprinting, the beatings continued, with police officers calling them "vile, unprintable names" and threatening to shoot them. At the MCCH hearing on May 4, Gordon alleged that police officers continued to beat him around the shins as was being booked. After placing Gordon in a cell, Young allegedly later returned and took him to a room upstairs for a further beating with a club. While being held, Gordon testified, he was 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. [Does the transcript record him testifying with the same details as reported in the DW?]

Gordon was among the group of around ninety-six 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. While Gordon stood on the "klieg-lit platform," Captain Edward Dillon questioned him about his role in the disorder, 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 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.

Gordon appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, shortly after the four alleged Communists arrested at the start of the disorder. Although the Home News, World Telegraph and the list published by the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and NJG reported the charge against him as inciting a riot, the charge recorded in the Magistrates Court Docket book was assault; initially felonious assault, but the clerk struck that out and wrote "Red[uced] to Simple Assault misd[emeanor]." The charge of assault was reported by New York American, New York Evening Journal, New York Daily News, New York Times and New York Herald Tribune. A second list in the New York Evening Journal, and the Amsterdam News, Daily Mirror and New York Sun reported Gordon had been charged with both offenses. The confusion may have resulted from Gordon being included alongside the other four alleged Communists in indictments charging inciting a riot that the DA obtained as "informations," from a superior court not a grand jury. According to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, after being arraigned, Gordon and the three white men, Miller, Jamison and Samuels, had been "taken to the District Attorney's office for questioning on possible charges of indictment to riot."  New York American, New York Daily News, Daily Mirror, New York Sun, New York Age lumped him with those men as a Communist, as charged with inciting a riot (New York Sun, Daily Mirror, Amsterdam News, Home News, New York Post), and as being represented by lawyers from the ILD (New York Herald Tribune). . However, the court clerk initially recorded the charge against him as felonious assault, but then struck that out and wrote "Red[uced] to Simple Assault misd[emeanor]." The New York Daily News noted that Gordon was not charged with inciting a riot as the Young Liberators were without making clear the charge against him. The Daily Mirror (in some reports), New York Sun, New York American and New York Times reported the charge as assault. Only the Daily Mirror included the detail that Gordon said he would produce his own lawyer rather than be represented by the ILD.

Magistrate Renaud remanded Gordon to reappear on the March 25, on a bond of $1000, a lesser bail than the $2500 required of the other four alleged Communists. He returned to court, at the same time as the other four alleged Communists; while they were discharged so the Grand Jury could indict them, Renaud remanded Gordon again to March 27, with the New York American reporting "his case, it was said, is being investigated by the Grand Jury." However, when Gordon appeared again, the New York Times reported Renaud instead transferred him to the Court of Special Sessions. [That court later discharged Gordon].

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