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

In civil court (September 1935-March 1936)

On April 23, as the criminal courts resolved the final cases arising from the disorder, Attorney Barney Rosenstein filed claims on behalf of twenty white business owners seeking damages from the city government for losses they suffered as a result of the disorder. The legal basis for those claims was section 71 of the General Municipal Law, dating from 1855, which read, “A city or county shall be liable to a person whose property is destroyed or injured therein by a mob or riot for the damages sustained thereby” provided that person did not contribute to the damage, had used all reasonable diligence to prevent damage, and brought the action within three months. Many other states had similar laws, at least four of which extended to deaths and injuries as well as property damage, with the result that claims for damages were common in the aftermath of racial disorders. However, historians typically have made only passing mention of damage claims - or no mention at all in the case of those resulting from the disorder in Harlem.

Those municipal liability laws originated in the nineteenth century in response to losses suffered by wealthy property owners. Linked to principles of community responsibility for preventing disorder and paying its costs in England's Riot Act of 1714, the laws were promoted as holding local authorities responsible for maintaining order and making compensation for losses more accessible, as Perry Blatz has shown in the case of Pennsylvania and Adam Malka in the case of Maryland. The Illinois law, upheld by the United States Supreme Court in 1911, was put to use in the aftermath of the three major racial disorders that occurred in the state in the early decades of the twentieth century.  In 1908, after the Springfield riot, Black and white residents filed property claims that amounted to at least $120,000, historian Roberta Senechal de la Roche briefly noted, approximately two thirds coming from Black residents. A story that appeared in several newspapers on September 16, 1909, after the last day for filing claims, reported additional suits by relatives of six of those killed seeking an additional $35,000. To pay those claims, the city had to issue special bonds, which saw it paying out $45,000 in "judgements, costs and interest" in August 1913, and paying for the bonds for many years after that. Nine years later, the riot in East St Louis resulted in a flood of claims from Black residents that ultimately forced that city government to also resort to a bond issue, as Malcolm McLaughlin briefly noted in his study. In 1921, five years after the riot, the city issued $454,000 of bonds, which resulted in taxpayers paying the costs of the violence until 1941. The Chicago riot in 1919 produced claims for loss of life as well as property. The claims related to death are mentioned in David Krugler's study: he attributes the decision of the city to pay $4500 to the family of each person killed in the disorder to the work of Black attorney Augustus Wilson. When the city agreed to that settlement in eighteen cases in December 1922, it had already paid out $20,800 in five cases resolved in court with fifteen more cases unresolved, the Chicago Tribune reported, and thirty-three additional suits for injuries expected to result in payments of $1000 each. Unmentioned by Krugler are the claims for property damage, which came from both white and Black residents. The amount of those claims was not available to the Chicago Tribune reporter in 1922, but earlier stories had reported that only around $100,000 of the more than $1 million of claims filed were for death or injury, with more than 600 suits for property damage making up the rest of that total. As would be the case in 1935, a handful of law firms filed large numbers of claims; ninety-five from one firm, according to one story, more than eighty claims from another firm mentioned in another story.

Despite the awareness of the Chicago riot evident in the aftermath of the disorder in 1935, there was no anticipation in the press of such claims being filed in New York City. When claims were filed, the New York Times reported them as the first suits brought under the law in the city. In fact,  the New York law had been employed after an earlier disorder marked by violence against Black residents, the Draft Riot in 1865. Nearly two thousand men and women filed claims; 416 claims were rejected by a special committee of the New York County Board of Supervisors, who then made their own assessment of the value claimants put on stolen or destroyed items. Although, as historian Joanna Cohen has shown, they reduced the value of the claims by $214,000, the city still paid out $1,122,805. Coincidentally, Mayor La Guardia claimed that a similar sum, $1 million, was at stake in claims against the city in 1935.

By July 1935, 106 claims had been filed, with 65 more rejected because they came after the three-month window allowed by the statute. While those suits came from just over a third of the 450 businesses estimated as having been damaged by the riot, there was no evidence of any filed by Black business-owners. In 1935, as in 1865, the city government's initial response to damage claims was to see if they could be resolved without resort to the courts. [NYT story]  initially to city agency not to courts -  city government devoted considerable resources to responding to claims for damages, tried to settle without going to court [NYT story] - but went to court in response to riot claims (described as test cases in press??). Insurance companies also appeared as parties in this litigation. They had no liability if the events of March 19 and March 20 were a riot, which their policies excluded. However, the outcome of the cases taken to court could change that situation, if the city's lawyers established that a riot had not occurred and the Municipal law thus did not apply.



 

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