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

"High Rentals, Landlords Hit at Riot Probe," New York Amsterdam News, April 13, 1935, 1, 2.

In the New York Amsterdam News

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The public hearing of the MCCH's subcommittee on crime (April 6) Twenty witnesses testified at the hearing on April 6, the largest group at any of the hearings. Their testimony covered a wider range of events than the previous week. Three witnesses added to the picture of events in the store. Charles Hurley, one of the Kress staff who grabbed Lino Rivera, testified about both about what happened to the boy and subsequent events in the store. Officer Eldridge, the Crime Prevention Bureau officer summoned to take custody of the boy, testified about how Rivera came to be left with Patrolman Donahue. Patrolman Shannon testified about efforts to disperse the crowds after the boy had been released. Three women staff from the store testified they knew nothing about what had happened to Rivera. Rivera himself testified again in response to persistent questions about whether he was actually the boy who had been in the Kress store. No newspapers covered the testimony in the detail they had the first hearing. The nature of the hearing would have made that difficult as "scores of witnesses presented different angles of the rioting," as the correspondent for the Afro-American described it. Or as the more critical assessment of the New York Herald Tribune journalist put it, "Additional facts as to the actual riot were elicited in a wordy, sometimes redundant question and answer session guided by Arthur Garfield Hays." Several publications devoted as much or more space to the reactions of the audience as to the testimony as Black residents and Communists asserted their view of the events and the situation in Harlem. All the MCCH members other than Judge Toney were in attendance to hear from both the audience and the witnesses, although Morris Ernst and Rev. Robinson were only present in the afternoon as in the morning they presided over a public hearing on housing in a courtroom on another floor.

Hurley’s testimony described the circumstances that led to Rivera being caught. He and the store manager had seen Rivera take a knife, after which he and the store detective grabbed the boy and took him out the front of the store. The store detective then left to get a Crime Prevention Bureau officer to take the boy into custody, which Hurley testified was the store’s practice with shoplifters rather than having them arrested. When Rivera continued to struggle with Hurley, Steve Urban came to help. They were the two men Donahue saw the boy bite. Once Officer Eldridge, the Crime Prevention Bureau officer, arrived, Hurley claimed he went to the back of the store. He insisted that he played no further part in the events in the store, merely observing the exchanges between police and women shoppers. Neither Rivera nor Donahue had mentioned Eldridge’s presence in their testimony the previous week. The officer testified he arrived at the store when the ambulance doctor Donahue had summoned was treating Hurley and Urban for their bite wounds. That Eldridge did not leave with Rivera was due to Hurley wanting him arrested for assault for biting him. It was Hurley later changing his mind that left Donahue having to decide what to do with Rivera. (Hurley himself insisted that it was Urban, not him, who wanted to charge Rivera.) Few journalists saw anything sufficiently new in the details these witnesses provided to make them worth including in their stories. Only the New York Sun and Home News mentioned Hurley’s testimony, reporting just his denials that Rivera had been beaten. The Afro-American listed Hurley and Eldridge among a group of witnesses who “testified to clinch the contention that Rivera is the boy who stole the ten-cent Kress knife,” a question which neither was asked.

Shannon arrived at the Kress store at 4:00 PM, so his testimony filled in what had happened in the store between Donahue’s departure and the arrival of Louise Thompson. Going “from one crowd to another,” the patrolman told the shoppers that there was not a boy in the store basement, “but they would not listen.” Shannon claimed that he formed a committee of three shoppers, two men and one woman, whom he took to the basement to see that Rivera was not there. As he could not identify its members and no other witness mentioned it, that may not have happened. It was his decision to call for additional police at 4:20 PM. Still among the officers in the store trying to “reason” with shoppers when a second group of police reinforcements arrived, Shannon also heard the woman scream and pots and pans hitting the floor that Thompson had described. It was Hays' response to this testimony that attracted the attention of many of the journalists present. He twice suggested that police should have brought Rivera back to the store so that the crowds could see him. “That was up to my superiors,” Shannon replied on both occasions. Hays’ pointed rejoinder to that answer was also quoted in exactly the same language in the Home News, Daily News, New York Sun, New York Herald Tribune, New York Age, and New York Amsterdam News. "'I am not blaming you personally,' Hays said. 'You see this whole thing started from a false rumor, and it could have been stifled at the start, if it had been handled properly by the police.'" That statement was not included in the transcript of the hearing. It continued the criticism of police handling of Rivera’s release targeted at Patrolman Donahue in the previous hearing. The transcript and the press had differed then too about what had been said and by whom, reflecting how the audience inserted their reactions and questions into the MCCH’s agenda. However, given the consistent language of the quotation in white and Black publications, it was clear that Hays had picked up the audience's criticisms and more directly blamed police than he had in the first hearing. That did not mean that the press shared the same sense of the importance of this testimony. No mention of it appeared in New York Times, New York Post, or the Hearst papers the New York American and Daily Mirror. By contrast, the Home News and Daily News made Hays' statement the headline of their stories. The reactions of the Black press spanned the New York Amsterdam News identifying Hays criticism as one of three highlights in the hearing, the New York Age placing it near the end of its story, on an inside page, and the Afro-American not mentioning it (but focusing on criticism of police shooting Lloyd Hobbs).

Testimony about events on West 125th Street outside the store was given by three police officers. The MCCH had requested their presence so they could testify about events that had resulted in arrests, but District Attorney Dodge’s instructions prevented that testimony. Despite that injunction, Hays did question Sergeant Bowe, Patrolman Moran, and Patrolman Eppler about events around the arrests they made. Moran described Daniel Miller’s attempt to speak in front of the Kress store, the store window being broken, and Miller's subsequent arrest, in line with what Louise Thompson had described, and the later arrest of the three Young Liberators for picketing, which Thompson had not mentioned. Moran spent the rest of the evening moving crowds away from the front of the Kress store, in keeping with Thompson’s account. Bowe testified only that he witnessed the arrest of the Young Liberators. Eppler described what he saw on 124th Street, where his emergency truck first arrived to find nothing happening, and then on 125th Street, where he saw crowds and heard windows broken. None of that testimony was reported in the press. The New York Sun did mention Eppler and Moran, but mistakenly reported that “they told of the trouble in the store which preceded the riot." Dodge's restriction on police officers testifying attracted more attention than what those officers said. The New York Sun and New York Post made it the headline of their stories, and it featured prominently in the New York Times, Daily News, New York Age, and New York Amsterdam News, and less so in the New York Herald Tribune and Home News. Rather than elaborating details of the events of the disorder, the public record of the hearing focused on the politics of the investigation.

Details of Patrolman McInerney’s killing of Lloyd Hobbs were provided by eight witnesses. Lawyer, Mary, and Russell Hobbs testified, together with three Black men who had witnessed the shooting, Howard Malloy, Arthur Moore, and Samuel Pitts, Dr. Arthur Logan, one of the physicians who treated Lloyd Hobbs, Detective Thomas McCormick, the police stenographer who had recorded a statement from the boy soon after he arrived at Harlem Hospital, and James Tartar, a Black investigator for the MCCH. Russell's testimony was more in line with his statement than the previous week. Having continued to run up 7th Avenue fearing a beating by police, he had not, however, seen his brother shot. Malloy, Moore, and Pitts all described Hobbs breaking from the crowd to turn on West 128th Street and McInerney firing at him without calling on him to stop. Lawyer and Mary Hobbs testified that in the hospital their son had said “the officer shot me for nothing. I was not doing anything.” According to their testimony, McInerney, guarding the boy, responded, "Why didn't you halt when I told you to?" The boy's statement taken by Detective McCormick echoed what his parents said the Lloyd had told them. Dr. Arthur Logan’s testimony only described the nature of the boy's injuries; Lloyd had not said anything in the doctor's presence and no items had been found in his clothing. Tartar provided details of a report from the precinct commander about the shooting that was at odds with what the testimony of the eyewitnesses. The Afro-American made the killing of Hobbs the focus of its story, but the two New York City Black newspapers gave it less attention. It was the final item in the New York Age story and surprisingly not mentioned at all in the New York Amsterdam News, which had reported it extensively the previous week. While the radical Daily Worker and New Masses gave Hobbs prominence in reporting the hearing, only the New York Times and Home News among the mainstream white press even mentioned his killing.

The only other events in the disorder about which the hearing heard testimony were the deaths of Andrew Lyons, August Miller, and James Thompson. Physicians from Harlem Hospital testified to their injuries and treatment, but offered no information on the circumstances in which they died.

The audience of Black residents and Communists asserted their view of the events and the situation in Harlem and contested the testimony of some witnesses. It was their reactions to the testimony more than the questions asked by Communist lawyers that drew the attention of MCCH members and the press to issues. “Turbulent” was how the white newspapers the Home News, Daily Mirror, New York American, and New York Times described the hearing, with the later straying into racial stereotypes in adding “noisy and emotional.” A fuller picture of the proceedings was offered by the New York Herald Tribune: “persons in the crowded courtroom were asking questions as well as five attorneys representing a variety of Communist associations. The lawyers would quarrel from time to time, and when the din blotted out the shouted replies of witnesses Mr Hays would rap for order.” That story was also the only one to identify the audience, as mostly “Negro and Communistic.” Their boos, cheers, and outbursts highlighted the issues that mattered to them and the testimony which they contested: boos for Dodge’s ban on police testimony (Daily News, Daily Mirror) and the quality of care at Harlem Hospital (New York Herald Tribune, Home News, New York Amsterdam News); cheers for defense of the Communist pamphlets (New York Amsterdam News); accusations that Kress staff had been bribed to testify there had been no beating in the store; and calls for the arrest of Patrolman McInerney (Afro-American).

The audience joined with ILD lawyers to also force Hays to address the question of whether Rivera was the boy who had been in the Kress store, which consequently made its way into stories about the hearing. The New York Times’s reporting most clearly captured that process, with the challenges from the audience when Hays had Rivera testify again included in the narrative: “He’s a paid witness,” some of those in the room shouted. “He wasn’t the only boy in that store.” “The police are covering up,” another exclaimed.” They also booed Rivera, according to the New York Age. The Black press, the New York Age, New York Amsterdam News, and Afro-American, followed the lead of the audience and made debate over Rivera the headline in their stories about the hearing. The reactions would also make an impression on E. Franklin Frazier, the director of the MCCH's survey of Harlem. Although convinced by the evidence that Rivera was the boy in the store, he mentioned the debates in his final report to illustrate the "skeptical mood of the people in the audience who openly expressed a lack of confidence in the police and the representatives of established authority."

By contrast, several white newspapers ignored the audience interventions entirely. The Hearst newspapers, the New York American and the Daily Mirror, put the audience's complaints into the mouths of witnesses in stories devoted to sensationalized claims that another riot was imminent. The Daily Mirror also recast the audience’s concerns in the racial terms in which they portrayed the disorder: "The room was packed with colored people, openly hostile to any effort to justify the white participants in the riot.”
Thomas Jackson arrested 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 milk can. Jackson denied throwing anything at the store, or being part of an attack on it, when questioned 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 Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide and in the New York Evening Journal. Only the Home News reported his arraignment in the Magistrates Court, where the magistrate sent him to the grand jury. Indicted on March 22, his appearance in the Court of General Sessions to have his bail continued four days later was reported in only the New York Sun. Jackson's reappearance 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 $7,800 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 $2,500 in a bank account in the name of Rose Jackson, and that she had taken the money and disappeared. Early in 1933, Jackson invested $1,200 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 ninety 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.
Hezekiah Wright arrested 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 Guide, 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 $1,000 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 whom 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.
Joseph Wade arrested
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 at 148 West 127th Street near the other end of the block of West 127th Street on which the store was located.

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 few 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, he had likely had been investigated previously and that report would have been put in the file created then. 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 indicated he was released at the time.