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

Herman Young assaulted

Around 1.00AM, Herman Young, a fifty-three-year-old Austrian-born white man who had lived in Harlem for twenty years was cut on the head by flying glass after a stone was thrown through the glass door of his Lenox Avenue hardware store. Young and his wife Rose had come from their apartment above the store after hearing smashing glass. Rose went to the store first, turning on the lights in the store and front windows. On the stoop, she encountered a man, who called her names and punched her on the shoulder. He then tried to push past her into the store, but encountered her husband on the other side of the door. According to Young, the man cursed at him - "You Goddam Jew I am going to kill you if you don’t get out of here” -- and then smashed the glass in the door. Rose testified that the man used a piece of pipe; Herman said he used "some instrument." Police later reported a stone had been thrown through the door. Rose said she saw glass hit Herman; the stone may also have hit him.

Young appears in lists of the injured published by the New York Post (mistakenly identified as a Patrolman) and the Home News, and among those recorded as attended by physicians from Harlem Hospital, likely in the emergency room. All three sources describe the injury as a laceration of the scalp, with the hospital record adding the detail that it resulted from being hit with a stone, and the report of the arrest adding that Young had been cut by flying glass. The other details appear in the District Attorney's case file, which includes notes on statements by Herman and Rose Young, an arresting officer, and the man arrested for the assault and his wife. (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).

Isaac Daniels, a twenty-nine-year-old black man was arrested and charged with throwing the rock. According to notes in the District Attorney's case file, when Young was having his wound stitched at Harlem Hospital around 1:30AM, Daniels came in for treatment. Young identified him as the man who assaulted him, and an officer at the hospital arrested him. Young said he could identify Daniels as he had stared at him through the glass in the store door for several minutes.

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 coming 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; notes in the District Attorneys case file say that neither statement was true without indicating the basis for that claim.

Daniels was one of the first of those arrested to appear in the Magistrates Court on March 20, charged with felonious assault. The Home News reported he was back in the court two days later, one of three men returned to have their original charges dismissed so they could be rearrested and new charges brought (which is likely why Daniels appears in the 28th Precinct Police Blotter as having been discharged). 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, suggesting that prosecutors reduced the charge after obtaining details of what happened. 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 him of the charge of assault, likely because of questions over Young's identification of him.
 

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