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• 1 2020-03-11T21:54:28+00:00 Lino Rivera grabbed & Charles Hurley and Steve Urban assaulted 162 plain 2023-09-13T14:07:30+00:00 When Charles Hurley, a floorwalker, and a 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. After initially indicating 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 investigated by the MCCH. This analysis relies on testimony given in MCCH public hearings as that was 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 police 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, "to walk through to 124th Street," according to the New York American, and "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 while "trying to get away," he told a public hearing, reportedly explaining to journalists from the 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 was described as having been bitten, Arthur Block, a Black man. He appeared 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.” (Di Martini’s information at that time 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 his narrative was Rivera biting the men, a detail that 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. 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).
  • Lino Rivera grabbed & Charles Hurley and Steve Urban assaulted (Part 2)
  • Lino Rivera grabbed & Charles Hurley and Steve Urban assaulted in secondary sources
• 1 2020-02-25T18:03:35+00:00 Lloyd Hobbs killed 119 plain 2023-08-31T15:53:18+00:00 Lloyd Hobbs, a sixteen-year-old Black teenager, was shot and killed by Patrolman John McInerney, who claimed Hobbs had been looting an auto supply store.
  
  

  Around 7:30 PM, Hobbs and his fifteen-year-old brother Russell had made the short trip from their home on St Nicholas Ave to the Apollo Theater on 125th Street for a show, not emerging until 12.30 AM. When they stepped back onto 125th St, they saw crowds down the block at the intersection with 7th Ave, and went to investigate. They followed as police pushed the crowd north on 7th Ave. As people milled in front of a damaged auto parts store at 2150 7th Avenue near 128th Street, a police radio car pulled up, and one of the officers inside, Patrolman John McInerney got out. Fearing that they would be beaten by the police, the boys and the others in front of the store ran up 7th Avenue. Here the accounts of the boys and seven Black eye-witnesses and those of the two white patrolmen diverged.
  
  McInerney and his partner, Patrolman Watterson, claimed that as they were driving south their attention had been drawn to the auto parts store by the noise of breaking glass, and they had seen Lloyd in the window handing items out to those on the street. Three of the eye-witnesses, Howard Malloy, Arthur Moore and Marshall Pfifer, said all the windows of the store had been broken at least an hour earlier and nothing remained in the display by the time the Hobbs brothers arrived there. The patrolmen said that Lloyd climbed out of the window with items in his hands as they pulled up, and when McInerney pursued him up 7th Avenue and called on him to halt, continued to run. When those running from the patrolman got to 128th Street, Lloyd broke away from the group and turned west on to 128th Street. McInerney then shot the boy. Warren Wright, standing in the entrance of the apartments above 2150 7th Avenue, south of the store, Howard Malloy, Arthur Moore, and Samuel Pitts standing on the corner across 128th Street from the auto supply store, in front of Battle's Pharmacy, to which the crowd was running, John Bennett, in 201 West 128th Street toward which Lloyd turned and ran, and Marshall Pfifer, standing on the corner of West 128th Street on the other side of 7th Avenue, all testified that the boy had nothing in his hands as he ran and that McInerney did not call to him to halt before shooting him. After the bullet hit Hobbs and he fell to the ground, McInerney and Watterson, who had remained in the car, backing it into 128th Street, said Lloyd dropped a car horn and socket set, which McInerney picked up. Seven witnesses said that there was nothing on the ground next to the boy.
  
  The two patrolman loaded Lloyd Hobbs into their car and drove him to Harlem Hospital. Russell Hobbs had kept running up 7th Avenue and had not seen the shooting. He learned from the crowd at the scene that it was his brother who had been shot and driven away and immediately ran home to tell his parents, Lawyer and Mary Hobbs. The family rushed to Harlem Hospital. When they found Lloyd, he told them, “Mother, the officer shot me for nothing. I was not doing anything.” McInerney, guarding the boy, said "Why didn't you halt when I told you to?" Lloyd offered the same account when questioned in the hospital by Homicide Bureau detectives, in a statement recorded by a police stenographer.
  
  Lloyd Hobbs appeared in all seven published lists of those injured in the disorder, in the New York Evening Journal, New York Post, Daily News, New York American, Home News, New York Herald Tribune, and Brooklyn Daily Eagle.
  
  In the following days, Lawyer Hobbs went to the 28th Precinct several times trying to make a complaint against the officer who had shot his son. He also sought help from the New York Urban League, giving them a statement about what had happened to his son on March 28, which they sent to the MCCH. As a result, Hobbs and his family were among the witnesses asked to come to the MCCH's first public hearing on March 30. Only Russell testified that day, briefly describing how his brother had been shot. A few hours later, at 6:30 PM, Lloyd Hobbs died in Harlem Hospital, the fourth death resulting from the disorder. While the New York Times, Daily News, New York Age, New York Amsterdam News and Afro-American referred to Russell's testimony in reporting Hobbs' death, the New York Herald Tribune, Times Union, Home News, Daily Mirror, New York American and Chicago Defender reported only the boy's death in their stories.
  
  The next week, at the MCCH hearing, 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, 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. Assistant District Attorney Saul Price heard the testimony of the three eye-witnesses soon after the hearing and had them appear before the grand jury on April 10 so they could consider charges against Patrolman McInerney. The grand jury also heard from Russell Hobbs, both his parents, McInerney's partner Patrolman Watterson, the police stenographer, the detective who investigated the shooting, John O'Brien, and the owner of the automobile supply store. Patrolman McInerney also offered to testify, but the grand jury opted not to hear him. They dismissed the case.
  
  The MCCH nonetheless continued to investigate the boy's killing, hearing testimony from McInerney's partner, Patrolman Watterson and Detective O'Brien, who investigated the shooting, at a hearing on April 20 marked by angry interjections from the audience. Four additional witnesses to the shooting testified at a MCCH hearing on May 18. James Tartar, the MCCH investigator, also obtained information that McInerney had not turned in the items he claimed to have found next to Lloyd Hobbs until April 8, more than two weeks after he shot the boy. That interval raised the possibility that the patrolman had not found the items at the scene but had obtained them later, when he needed to justify the shooting. As a result of that information and the testimony of additional eye-witnesses, Assistant District Attorney Saul Price presented the case to the grand jury for a second time on June 10. After hearing from the new witnesses, and from Tartar about the absence of the allegedly stolen items from police records and the Police Property Department until April 8, the grand jury again dismissed the case without hearing testimony from McInerney.
  
  The Police Department had committed to an internal hearing on the case before ADA Price had decided to resubmit it to the grand jury. The hearing took place on June 14; in attendance were James Tartar and E. Franklin Frazier, the Howard University sociologist who had recently started work leading the MCCH's investigation of Harlem. It was the first time that anyone outside the Police Department and the District Attorney's office heard Patrolman McInerney's testimony. While Tartar and Frazier were unpersuaded, senior police officers found the shooting of Lloyd Hobbs was justified, reprimanding the patrolman only for his delay in handing in the items he claimed to have found at the scene.
  
  While two grand juries and a Police Department hearing exonerated McInerney, the MCCH and the Black press did not share that view. Arthur Garfield Hays and OScar Villard gave a central place to McInerney killing Hobbs in the Report of the Subcommittee submitted to Mayor La Guardia on June 11, 1935. The Report of the Subcommittee characterized the killing of Lloyd Hobbs as "inexcusable." E. Franklin Frazier included that material in the Final Report of the MCCH, framed in even harsher terms: the killing of the boy was "a brutal act on the part of the police." Police Commissioner Valentine was unmoved by that censure. He responded to both reports by asserting that Lloyd Hobbs had been looting the store and that two grand juries had exonerated McInerney.

  In assessing the case, the two reports gave significant weight to the character of Lloyd Hobbs and his family.  The Subcommittee argued that "the record of Lloyd Hobbs and that of his family are presumptive evidence that he was not the kind of boy who would engage in looting." The Final Report of the MCCH described the boy as "having a good record in school and in the community, and being a member of a family of good standing and character." Lloyd Hobbs had been born in Brunswick County, Virginia, in 1916, the second youngest of five children of Mary and Lawyer Hobbs. (The story published in the New York Amsterdam News on April 6, 1935, accompanied by a photograph of Mrs Hobbs, gave her first name as Carrie, but it was recorded as Mary in the census in 1930, 1940 and 1950). The boy's name was recorded as Lawyer in the 1930 census and as Lawyer, Jr in the "Social and Economical History" of the family written by James Tartar, but elsewhere in that document and in all other sources as Lloyd. The family farmed in Virginia until 1927, and still owned 83 acres there, when Lawyer's ill-health required him to get work "which would not necessitate his being in the son," according to his wife. He had worked previously in New York City, so the family relocated there. Lawyer found work first as a sexton at Union Baptist Church, then for a construction company. Mary Hobbs worked first as a domestic servant, the most common occupation for Black women, before becoming one of a much smaller group employed in factory work, in her case at a lamp shade company. That was her occupation in the 1930 census; Lawyer's occupation was recorded as chauffeur. At that time the family lived at 228 West 140th Street, their home since they arrived in New York City. By April, 1931 both parents had lost their jobs, and the family joined many in Harlem applying for work and relief from private and government agencies. Sometime in the intervening years Lawyer Hobbs found some work as a helper on a truck owned by Charles Bell (perhaps a brother-in-law; a sister-in-law named Senora Bell lived with the family in 1930).
  
  Lawyer Hobbs' income allowed the family to settle in a fourth-floor apartment at 321 St. Nicholas Avenue in 1932, having moved twice in the preceding year, as many in Harlem did during the Depression. A lodger helped pay the rent in 1935. James Tartar, the MCCH investigator, described the residence as "a comfortable apartment, clean, nicely arranged, nicely furnished and well ventilated."
  
  Throughout their time in the city, the Hobbs children attended school. By 1935 the eldest, twenty-year-old Cassie, was working, but her twin sisters Hazel and Zenobia remained students at the Textile High School, Lloyd was a student at Haaren High School and his younger brother Russell a student at Frederick Douglas Junior High School. Lloyd would have graduated in June, according to a story in the New York Amsterdam News.
  
  After Lloyd's death, the family continued to live at 321 St Nicholas Avenue until at least 1950. All the family members resided there in 1940. Fifty-six-year-old Mary, who provided the information to the census enumerator, did not identify an occupation. Lawyer was working as a laborer in a sugar refinery, Cassie and Zenobia as seamstresses in a dress factory, Hazel in a lampshade factory, and Russell as a clerk in a food store. All but Zenobia were still living in the apartment in 1950, although as Cassie was recorded as divorced she had likely not resided there for all of the intervening ten years. Neither Lawyer nor Mary, who was listed as sixty-years-old, were working by that time. Hazel had joined Cassie working as a seamstress, while Russell now worked as a driver for a construction company.
   
• 1 2020-02-24T22:38:05+00:00 Two men speak to a crowd & Patrolman Irwin Young assaulted 88 plain 2023-08-26T01:51:29+00:00 Harry Gordon, a twenty-year-old white man in his senior year at City College, was walking along West 125th Street between 7th and 8th Avenues about 6:00 PM, he told a public hearing of the MCCH, when he noticed groups of “excited” people “milling around the street.” While Gordon claimed to have been simply passing by, it seems likely he was one of the Communist Party members who came to Kress’ store in response to rumors a boy had been attacked. He did identify himself at the hearing as a member of the New York Students League, a Communist-led organization. Gordon gave his address as 699 Prospect Avenue in the Bronx.
  
  Gordon testified that he asked several people on the street what was happening, but he “couldn’t get anything at all from them.” He then saw a Black man, James Parton, set up a ladder in front of Kress; store, briefly speak to the crowd, and then Daniel Miller step up to speak. A window then smashed and police officers immediately seized Miller. Other officers chased Gordon and other people who had been listening to Miller across West 125th Street to the opposite sidewalk and then pushed them away from the store, east toward 7th Avenue. About 300 feet from Kress’ store, Gordon estimated, Parton climbed a lamppost and again spoke to those on the street, saying “that a boy had been killed and that a crowd should gather in protest,” according to Gordon’s testimony. Then he climbed the lamppost, intending, he told a public hearing, “to get a committee from the crowd” “to go to the police to find out if a child was killed.” He was only able to say “Friends” before Patrolman Irwin Young pulled him down from the lamppost. Gordon’s alleged assault on Young came when he “grabbed Patrolman Irwin Young’s nightstick and used it to hit the officer,” according to a story in the New York Times. That story was the only source that mentioned the nature of the assault in reporting Gordon’s second appearance in the Magistrates Court. After arresting Gordon, Young and other officers dragged him to a police radio car and drove him to the police station on West 123rd Street.
  
  Lists of the injured variously described the injuries Young suffered as “cuts on hands,” in the Daily News and New York Evening Journal “lacerations of right hand” in the New York Herald Tribune, and "bruised on the hand" in the New York American. No version represented a sufficient injury to constitute a felony assault, which was the charge police initially made against Gordon. The New York Herald Tribune reported Young received medical treatment at the scene, but when Gordon’s lawyer cross-examined him in the Harlem Magistrates Court, Young testified that he did not go to a doctor or the hospital, Gordon told the public hearing. Young did not appear in the hospital records, as the other police officers injured around this time did, confirmation of those statements. Moreover, Young was back on the streets by 10:10 PM, when he arrested Leroy Gillard at 200 West 128th Street allegedly for looting. He was the first police officer allegedly assaulted in the disorder; five others would be assaulted around 125th Street before 10:30 PM, after which time the crowds had moved to other parts of the neighborhood.
  
  Gordon denied he assaulted Young. He was grabbed from behind, he testified in a public hearing of the MCCH, and then “a rain of blows descended on me such that I have never experienced before" against which he could do nothing. Louise Thompson, part of the crowd on 125th Street, offered a more detailed account, although as a member of the Communist Party she was not an entirely disinterested observer. She described to a public hearing of the MCCH how “a cop kicked him, another knocked him over the head with his billy and another slapped him in the face and punched him in the ribs.” Thompson more clearly stated that Gordon did not assault Young when interviewed earlier by a reporter for the Daily Worker for a story published on the same day she testified in the public hearing: "I was standing a few feet from Harry Gordon when he was arrested. He did not strike any policeman. He did nothing.” In the same story in the Daily Worker, Gordon denied committing assault, implying that Young made the charge to justify his violence: “"I did not strike any policeman. He struck me over the head with his club before I even saw him. He said, 'So you'll hit a cop, will you?' as he struck me.”
  
  As was the case with events inside Kress’ store, testimony in the public hearings of the MCCH provided the most detailed evidence of the events outside the store in the early evening of March 19. Louise Thompson testified on March 30 and Harry Gordon on May 4 (Thompson only mentioned the first speaker, Miller, in her article in New Masses). The MCCH subcommittee report and final report both describe a second person trying to speak in front of Kress who was arrested, without naming that person, but make no mention of his alleged assault on a police officer. More striking, Inspector Di Martini’s report names Gordon without mentioning an alleged assault on one of his officers. That report has no reference to Daniel Miller, presenting Gordon as the only person to speak in front of the store: “At about 7PM, one Harry Gordon, #699 Prospect Avenue arrived in front of Kress’ Store with a number of others carrying placards and made a speech to a group which was attracted and incited a number of colored persons to break windows of the store. He was immediately arrested by Ptl. Young #3203, 32nd Precinct.”
  
  No newspaper stories explicitly reported the narrative in the MCCH hearings and reports, as they truncated events outside the store and presented Gordon, Daniel Miller and the three Young Liberators who picketed the store as a single group arriving and acting together. Only some described Gordon as speaking, and only three of the initial stories about the disorder describe him as assaulting Young, in different circumstances that were both unlike what was described in the MCCH public hearings. Even later stories about Gordon’s first appearance in the Harlem Magistrates Court do not all mention the assault charge, and several describe him as picketing Kress’ store not trying to speak to the crowd. When Gordon testified in a public hearing of the MCCH, newspaper stories described him speaking, and being arrested by Young, but omitted the context he provided for those events as coming after Miller had tried to speak and been arrested.
  
  Only some newspapers described Gordon as speaking in front of the store. The New York Age accurately captured the event, if not its context: “Harry Gordon, white Communist, was arrested when Patrolman Young of the 123rd street police station found him addressing a group. He was taken to the station house charged with inciting a riot.” The New York Post more briefly described Gordon, Miller and the two other white men as having been arrested for “haranguing crowds, urging them to fight.” The Daily Mirror identified Gordon as a speaker, describing him as “a “Red” orator,” but with no details of circumstances of his speaking or arrest. The New York World-Telegram included Gordon in a group obliquely described as being arrested for being “Communist agitators.”
  
  Only three of the initial stories about the disorder described Gordon assaulting Young, in different circumstances that were unlike what was described in the MCCH public hearings. Gordon came to Miller’s aid when he was arrested, joined by the three Young Liberators, and battled Patrolman Shannon and two other officers before also being arrested, according to the New York American and New York Evening Journal. That story also mistakenly had Gordon picketing the store. The New York Times relocated the encounter between Gordon and Young to the rear of Kress’ store on West 124th Street. In the struggle between police and a crowd that took place there, the story reported, Young “was cut on the right hand by a rock” thrown by Gordon. That clash occurred around thirty minutes after Gordon was arrested, and involved officers other than Young being injured.
  
  Later stories about Gordon’s first appearance in the Harlem Magistrates Court did not all mention the assault charge, and several described him as picketing Kress’ store not trying to speak to the crowd. Gordon was described as charged with assault in the New York Sun, in a story about a line-up of those arrested, New York American, and New York Amsterdam News, which had him picketing the store. Four other papers did not mention the assault charge: the Daily Mirror described Gordon and the others grouped with him as “curb-stone orators who had deliberately incited the 125th St. mobs;” in the Home News the charge was inciting a riot, for “making a speech in front of Kress’ store;” in the Daily News it was an unspecified “separate charge” from that made against the other men, which was inciting riot; and in the New York Evening Journal Gordon and three others were charged with “circulating false placards to the effect that a Negro boy had been beaten to death.” Gordon’s subsequent appearances in the Harlem Magistrates were generally not reported. Only the New York World-Telegram, Home News and New York American mentioned his appearance on March 25, with no details of his alleged offense. The New York Times story of Gordon’s appearance on May 27 provided the only details of the assault, that he “grabbed Patrolman Irwin Young’s nightstick and used it to hit the officer.” The New York Herald Tribune story on the same hearing not only made no mention of those details, but omitted the assault entirely and instead made Gordon only indirectly responsible for Young’s injuries: his speech telling the crowd “that a Negro boy had been killed in the store… so excited the neighborhood that Patrolman Irving Young, of the West 123d Street station, and several others were hurt in the ensuing riot.”
  
  Stories about Gordon’s testimony in the MCCH public hearing on May 4 published in the New York Times, New York Age and Associated Negro Press described him speaking, and being arrested by Young, but omitted the context he provided for those events as coming after Miller had tried to speak and been arrested. The New York American and Afro-American had an even narrower focus, mentioning only that Gordon alleged he had been beaten by police, with no description of the circumstances of his arrest. The only story about Gordon’s allegation published before the hearing was in the Daily Worker on March 30, reflecting his association with the Communist Party. Reporters for the New York Evening Journal had been unable to locate him. When the Daily Worker’s journalist spoke to Gordon, “his left eye still black from the police beating more than a week ago.” However, in a Daily News photograph published on March 20 captioned as showing Gordon and the other men grouped with him by police, none of the men have visible injuries. As there are only three men, the image may be of the Miller and the Young Liberators without Gordon, perhaps around the time he was arraigned separately.
  
  Harry Gordon did not appear in the MCCH's transcription of the 28th Precinct Police Blotter; Claudio Viabolo, the Black Young Liberator, is the only one of the five speakers and picketers in that record. Gordon appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, shortly after the other white men arrested at the start of the disorder. Magistrate Renaud remanded him to reappear on the March 25, and then again to March 27. While Miller and the three Young Liberators that police grouped with Gordon as the instigators of the riot were sent by the grand jury to the Court of Special Sessions, the ADA reduced the charge against Gordon to misdemeanor assault in the Magistrates Court, with his ILD lawyers claiming credit in the public hearing of the MCCH, as they had elicited testimony from Young that he had not needed medical treatment for his injury. Magistrate Renaud then transferred Gordon to the Court of Special Sessions. For some reason the trial did not take place until November, when the judges convicted him.
  
  In the narratives of historians Mark Naison, Cheryl Greenberg, Marilynn Johnson, Lorrin Thomas and Nicole Watson Gordon and Miller are grouped together as “speakers” pulled down by police. Historian Thomas Kessner named Miller in his narrative as the only speaker in front of the store. None of those historians mention Gordon's alleged assault of Young. They all follow the narrative provided by police that presents the speakers as part of a single group protesting in front of Kress’ store, stepping up to speak to the crowd after picketing of the store had begun. That framing implicitly introduces the idea that the disorder was orchestrated by those men, while offering no details of how the crowds of women and men around them acted to weigh against that evidence. Weight is added to that implication by the failure to fully identify the men involved in the protests. While Greenberg and Thomas do not identify the men, Naison, Kessner, Johnson and Watson describe them as members of the Young Liberators. None of those historians mention that four of the five, and both the speakers arrested, were white men. Naison did describe the Young Liberators as an interracial group; so too did Watson, however she did not identify the men in front of the store as members of the Young Liberators. Neglecting their race makes those men appear more representative of the crowd than they were, particularly in Greenberg and Watson’s narratives, which do not identify they as Young Liberators. Naison, Kessner, Greenberg, Thomas, Johnson and Watson all follow the chronology that has the picketing begin before the speakers were arrested. Grouping the men places an organized Communist protest at the center of the outbreak of disorder, and makes the window being broken and the men’s arrest a response to the feeling they built in the crowd. Recognizing that the protests occurred in a less coordinated way highlights that police responded immediately to any sign of protest, not just to a window being broken. They may also have acted so quickly because they recognized the men as Communists; the men’s language and appeals would have given them away. Communist protest in Harlem, and across the city, drew violent responses from police in the months prior to the disorder. Recognition of the fragmented nature of the protests and the identity of those involved directs attention away from those events to the crowds of Black men and women around them. Crowd members gathered in groups, talked among themselves, sought answers from police about what had happened to the boy, and responded to police efforts to clear the street. Rather than organized or orchestrated by the Young Liberators, those behaviors appear more spontaneous, in line with the interpretation offered in the MCCH’s final report.
• 1 2020-02-25T02:58:46+00:00 Timothy Murphy assaulted & Paul Boyett shot 60 plain 2023-09-03T04:09:59+00:00 Around 9:00 PM, as police reinforcements tried to disperse the large crowds that had gathered on 7th and 8th Avenues around 125th Street, a few blocks northwest on West 127th Street between 8th Avenue and St Nicholas Avenue, a group of around Black men allegedly attacked Timothy Murphy, a twenty-nine-year-old white rock driller on his way to his home at 44 Moylan Place. Murphy alleged that the men knocked him to the ground and then hit and kicked him. The men told him “they were beating me because I was a white man,” the Daily Mirror reported Murphy as saying. What they actually said was “You white son-of-a-bitch, take it now," according to his affidavit in the Magistrates Court. As a result of the beating Murphy suffered “lacerations, contusions [about his head, face and body], a broken nose and loss of hearing in his left ear.” Press reports simply said he received a broken nose.
  
  
  
  The men beating Murphy allegedly attracted the attention of Patrolman George Conn from the 30th Precinct, immediately west of Harlem. He may have been in a radio car on his way to 125th Street as the New York Amsterdam News reported "police drove up." His Magistrate's Court affidavit described the crowd as numbering around ten men, a number reported by the New York Herald Tribune, Home News, and Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Other newspapers described larger crowds, twelve men according to the Daily Mirror, twenty men according to the Associated Press, and forty to fifty men in the sensationalized narrative published in the New York Evening Journal. The New York Times and New York Sun simply reported that several men had attacked Murphy. As Conn ran toward Murphy, newspaper stories and legal records agreed that he shot Paul Boyett, a twenty-year-old Black garage worker who lived only a few buildings away, at 310 West 127th Street. The New York Sun and New York Times reported Conn's statement that he had first fired a shot in the air to disperse the crowd and then ordered Boyett to halt and shot him only when he continued running. The Daily Mirror and Home News reported those details without making clear that Conn was the source of that information. The New York Evening Journal reported Conn fired two shots, one "in the air and then a second shot which struck Boyett in the back." A brief account in the New York Herald Tribune and Associated Press simply had Conn shooting Boyett, one of the group attacking Murphy. Several other newspapers did not mention that anyone else but Boyett had allegedly been involved in attacking Murphy: the New York American had Conn shooting Boyett "when he tried to flee," the Daily News "as he was about to strike" Murphy, and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle simply reported that Conn had shot Boyett. This incident was the most widely reported assault in the disorder, both because it occurred early in the evening, and because it fitted the sensationalized narrative of racial violence which the Hearst newspapers and white tabloids employed.
  
  Boyett testified at his trial that he had been “an innocent onlooker” drawn to the “disturbance,” and “struck no one at that time,” the New York Amsterdam News reported. In the confusion as the crowd rushed to leave as police appeared, a bullet hit him. While the newspaper stories on March 20 give the impression that Conn arrested Boyett where Murphy had been assaulted, testimony at the trial revealed that Boyett continued running back to his home, apparently pursued by Conn, who arrested him in the building's hallway. A trial jury accepted Boyett's account and acquitted him of assaulting Murphy. The only source on the trial, the story in the New York Amsterdam News, did not mention what evidence was presented. One issue may have been how Conn claimed he picked Boyett out of the crowd; only Daily News explicitly mentioned that he saw Boyett beating Murphy, although the 28th Precinct Police blotter recorded the charge against him as "kicked complainant." A likely alternative scenario to that offered by Conn was that he simply fired at the crowd rather than singling out Boyett and calling on him to halt, and that his shot hit Boyett, whose injury consequently led Conn to arrest him.
  
  The New York Herald Tribune, Daily News, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and Associated Press reported Boyett had been shot in the right shoulder, 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. Hospital records indicate that a doctor from Knickerbocker Hospital treated a wound to Boyett's right shoulder before he was placed in a cell. 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. Both Murphy and Boyett appear in lists of the injured published in the New York Evening Journal, New York Post, Daily News, and New York American. Only Murphy appears in the list of injured published in the Home News and New York Post and only Boyett, in a list of those shot, in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and New York Herald Tribune.
  
  Groups of Black men allegedly targeted at least three other white men around this time, all, unlike Murphy, in the area where crowds were clashing with police. William Kitlitz reported being attacked by James Smitten in front of Kress’ store, Maurice Spellman being assaulted at 125th St and 8th Avenue, and Morris Werner at 125th Street and 7th Avenue. 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. The area around 125th St and 7th Avenue would continue to be the location of alleged assaults on white men and women for at least the next three hours, with three men and two women targeted. However, the assault on Murphy represented the western boundary of the disorder, the only event west of 8th Avenue. That section of Harlem was still an area of Black residents.
  
  Murphy was one of four white men and women allegedly rescued from assaults by the intervention of police officers (with some press reports suggesting that this happened more frequently). Only in this case did police also make an arrest. In one of those other cases, an officer also fired shots at the crowd, but in that instance no one was reported as being injured. Police did shoot and kill two Black men, Lloyd Hobbs and James Thompson, in the later case also injuring two white bystanders.
• 1 2020-02-24T21:39:32+00:00 Injured [not in assaults] (21) 51 plain 2022-11-03T19:26:59+00:00 The twenty-one injured individuals that are not linked to an assault or arrest are a mix of those reported as being hurt by flying glass and those reported without any explanation of the circumstances in which they were hurt. The injured had similar conditions to those assaulted. Head wounds made up the largest group, as was the case with those assaulted. Relatively more of the injured suffered wounds to the hands and legs than those assaulted, and relatively fewer wounds to the face. Nonetheless, the severity of their wounds is similar to those assaulted. The information is partial, available for only forty of the seventy-three injured (29 of 53 assaulted, 11 of 21 injured), and on first glance suggests relatively fewer severe wounds among the injured, with only 18% (2 of 11) sent to hospital after being attended by physicians compared with 31% (9 of 29) of those assaulted. However, five of those assaulted sent to hospital had gunshot wounds; of the remaining group, only 20% (4 of 20) were sent to hospital (these numbers exclude the two arrested men who were injured).
  
  Five injuries are reported as lacerations caused by glass, terms that made clear they had not occurred in assaults. Those who threw objects at stores and passing cars and buses often emerged from the crowds that filled the sidewalks and streets during the disorder, leaving bystanders little opportunity to distance themselves from the windows and the shattered glass produced by those attacks. On the other hand, this group of injured could have been involved in those attacks, or in subsequent looting, which required moving through broken glass, or could have received the lacerations in assaults.
  
  Similarly, two others of those counted here as injured appear in some sources as victims of assault, but the weight of evidence is against that picture. The New York Evening Journal and New York American reported that eighteen-year-old Nathaniel Powell had his nose cut off, with the New York American specifying that a razor had been used. However, as the New York Post, Daily News, and most importantly the hospital record all simply reported cuts to his nose and face, those stories of an attack are likely another example of the white press falling back on tropes of racial violence rather than a reliable account of what happened to Powell. Similarly, Stanley Dondoro suffered a gunshot wound, but there is clear evidence that police shot him accidentally when pursuing James Thompson.
  
  For the remaining thirteen counted as injured, there is no information as to cause or the circumstances of the injury. Some of these individuals could have been injured when knocked off their feet in the crowds on Harlem’s streets, a circumstance captured in several photographs of the disorder, including the most widely circulated.
   
  Most of this group of injured received their wounds around the heart of the disorder, in the blocks around 125th Street, but there are a cluster along Lenox Avenue up as far north as 132nd Street. This area saw the most extensive attacks on stores and looting; it was also relatively close to Harlem Hospital, which was located on Lenox Avenue between 136th and 137th Streets. The two injuries outside this area, Giles Jackson hurt by flying glass at West 116th Street and 7th Avenue and Nathaniel Powell cut on the nose on Lenox Avenue between 116th and 117th Streets, also occurred in an area that saw significant amounts of looting and broken windows. The map also reveals that the injured lived relatively close to where they got hurt; only Clara Crowder came from as far away as some of those arrested for looting (although that group also included some from close to the site of their arrest). That proximity could indicate that this group of the injured were bystanders, parts of the crowds drawn to the streets from their homes by the disorder but not participating in it.
   

  Three woman are among the twenty injured. One, Clara Crowder, is anomalous. A white clerk at Kress’ store, Crowder fainted when the crowd inside Kress' store knocked merchandise off displays as police cleared the store so it could be closed. The other injured women, of unknown race, appear to have been part of the crowds on Harlem’s streets. Photographs of the crowds show women scattered among the men. Most of those injured are not identified by race; of the five that are, the white individuals were injured in anomalous situations. In addition to Crowder fainting in a store, Dondoro was accidentally shot by police, while the third white individual, Salvatore Nicolette, suffered a fractured skull in unspecified circumstances.
  
  The evidence of these events is very fragmentary. Twelve of the twenty-one cases are mentioned in only one source: six cases appear only in hospital records; and four cases appear only in a single list in the New York Post. Given the inconsistency of the details the newspapers published about individuals, this limited evidence likely contains errors.

  Injured

  Events

• 1 2020-10-01T19:30:34+00:00 Paul Boyett arrested 45 plain 2023-08-26T14:54:13+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 Atlanta World, Afro-American 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, and then again on March 25 and April 1, before Magistrate Renaud sent him to the grand jury on April 9. Unusually, Boyett did not appear in any of the newspaper stories about the legal proceedings after the disorder. On April 23, the grand jury heard the case against Boyett, 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 2020-02-24T20:37:35+00:00 William Kitlitz assaulted & James Smitten injured 43 plain 2023-09-03T04:25:39+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 Atlanta World, Afro-American and 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 2020-02-25T03:21:30+00:00 Thomas Wijstem assaulted & killed 34 plain 2023-09-03T03:19:51+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 2020-02-25T01:54:44+00:00 Detective Henry Roge assaulted 30 plain 2022-12-17T21:20:24+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. New York Evening Journal photographers captured two images of a uniformed officer helping a bleeding Roge from the scene (the only images of an injured police officer published). One photograph was taken at the scene shows Roge and the officer from the side. The officer is in the foreground, supporting Roge, who is leaning forward, his left hand over his eyes and forehead. A store display window is in the background, with what appears to be broken glass in front of it.  In a photograph that may have been taken somewhere inside, Roge is in the foreground of the image, with a handkerchief covering his forehead and eyes. Next to him white uniformed patrolman has one arm behind Roge's back, guiding him, and is holding the lapel of Roge's jacket with his other hand, in which he has his baton. Over the patrolman's left shoulder is a Black man. The Daily Mirror also published an image of Roge and the uniformed officer, which may have been taken on the street, There are two Black men in the image, one behind the officer and one to right of the detective holding a handkerchief he appears to be offereing the officer. This image was not published until April 3, when the newspaper miscaptioned it as showing a white man, "One of the Casualties in the Riot. The man was struck over the eyes with a stick. The policeman holds him until an ambulance arrives. But the victim was only one of many white persons injured in the mad Harlem riot."
  
  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 2020-09-29T20:47:10+00:00 James Smitten arrested 29 plain 2023-08-26T14:48:14+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 men who appeared in that court mentioned in the story. The story did not mention when the men were arrested. There were 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 was 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. Smitten lived close to the location of the alleged assault, at 158 West 123rd Street, so could have heard about the events in the Kress store early in the disorder or have been on 125th Street for some other reason and been drawn into the crowds around the store.
  
  
  
  Only two sources connected 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 Atlanta World, Afro-American and 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).
  
  The New York Herald Tribune reported that at the Night Court Magistrate Capshaw remanded Smitten for investigation until Saturday, March 23. However, he was not in the Magistrates Court docket book on that day and there was 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 2020-08-20T20:50:26+00:00 Clara Crowder injured 25 plain 2023-08-25T02:47:10+00:00 Around 5.00 PM, during the struggles inside Kress' store as police tried to clear out the customers who had remained after Patrolman Raymond Donahue took Lino Rivera into the basement, Clara Crowder, a twenty-year-old white woman employed as a clerk in the store fainted. According to the Medical Attendance record of the ambulance that arrived at the store at 5.05 PM, she had been aiding another store employee at the time.
  
  Jackson Smith, Kress' manager, had decided sometime after 4.30 PM that efforts to convince those in the store that Rivera had been released unharmed were failing, and had called for additional police to help him close the store. When those officers began to move customers from the rear of the store, "they began to get rough," Louise Thompson wrote in the account of what she witnessed published in New Masses. Displays of pots and pans and glasses were knocked over and women screamed. Crowder and the unnamed colleague she tried to help were likely behind counters in the store, where the sales staff worked, perhaps counters whose displays were knocked to the ground. The noise and shouting led many customers to rush to leave the store, Thompson and Jackson Smith testified in the MCCH public hearings, so could also have led Crowder to faint. Neither Smith nor Thompson mentioned Crowder when describing what they saw happen in Kress' at that time.
  
  Louise Thompson, on West 125th Street after being cleared from the store by police, did mention seeing the ambulance arrive, but testified in a public hearing of the MCCH that "we never knew whom he was going to treat." L. F. Coles, who like Thompson had been in the store, likewise told a MCCH hearing that none of those he asked knew why the ambulance was there, with a police officer telling them "it wasn't any of our business." In fact, only three narratives of the events in Kress store mention Crowder. The New York Herald Tribune had her faint as Hurley and Urban grabbed Rivera: "[Rivera] bit two Kress employees on the hand when they hauled him from the counter and this, in turn, caused a woman clerk to faint." The story returned later to Crowder, in describing customers being cleared from the story, reporting “As police beat the crowd back it was discovered that Miss Clara Browder [sic], twenty, a clerk, of 473 West 158th Street, had fainted.” The story went on to say she was attended by the ambulance attending the two store employees bitten by Rivera. Had Crowder fainted when Rivera was grabbed, she could have been attended by that ambulance, but police did not clear the store until two hours after it had returned to Harlem Hospital. The Medical Attendances records indicate it was a second ambulance, carrying a different intern physician, that attended Crowder. That timing makes the clearing of the store, not Rivera being grabbed, the context in which the woman fainted. The Daily News did report that a second ambulance came to Kress, but offered a vaguer account of the circumstances, noting only that Crowder “fainted after the boy had been released.” The Daily Mirror mentioned Crowder without making clear whether she was in the store or on the street outside, but did sensationalize the circumstances, reporting she “fainted in that crush and was trampled upon until rescued, by a football wedge of police.”
  
  While not including Crowder in their narratives, the New York American, New York Evening Journal and New York Post did list her among the injured. As in the narratives and the hospital record, her injury was recording as fainting, other than by the New York Evening Journal, which listed her as “treated for shock,” which was also her injury in the Daily News list. Crowder, one of three women among those injured (14%, 3 of 21) is the only individual reported as having fainted. After being attended by the physician, Crowder left for home, 473 West 158th Street. Beyond Harlem to the north, that address was emblematic of the distance between Kress’ largely white staff and its Black customers.
  
  
   
• 1 2020-04-09T18:04:11+00:00 De Soto Windgate shot 22 plain 2023-09-01T04:30:35+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. The shooting was one of only two reported incidents associates with the disorder north of West 138th Street, and one of only a handful of events that might have occurred away from the avenues on residential cross streets.
  
  There was no information on the circumstances of the shooting. There was no evidence of any disorder in which he might have participated, that might have attracted his attention or have brought police into the area. Windgate lived at the opposite end of Harlem at 7 East 114th Street, a section mostly occupied by Puerto Rican and white residents. 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. Given the location and limited evidence, there was some question about whether this shooting was part of the disorder.
  
  
  
  Windgate appeared in 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 alleged assault on a white man named Julius Narditch by a group of Black men at 8th Avenue and West 147th Street, the assault on Thomas Suarez on West 134th Street near Lenox Avenue and the injury of Herbert Holderman near Lenox Avenue and West 132nd Street. Police appeared to have included his name in the list of those injured during the disorder they released to the press. Windgate was included in the list of those “near death” in the New York American, Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in 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.” Those reports said the bullet hit Windgate in the abdomen causing a wound serious enough for him to be admitted to Harlem Hospital. However, he did not appear in the hospital records gathered by the MCCH.
  
  The police record did not identify Windgate’s race, but the newspaper stories did. The New York American, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Home News, New York Daily News, New York Post, New York Times and New York Sun all included information abouthis race; the New York Herald Tribune and New York Evening Journal did 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 2020-03-11T21:18:25+00:00 Detective William Boyle assaulted 20 plain 2022-07-12T18:49:21+00:00 Detective William Boyle, a twenty-nine-year-old white officer, was allegedly assaulted "while attempting to rescue an unknown white man being assaulted at scene of riot,” according to the record of the ambulance that attended him. Dr Sayet of Harlem Hospital treated Boyle at the 28th Precinct on West 123rd Street, where he was based, at 9.15 PM, indicating that that assault took place sometime earlier, around 9.00 PM. The "scene of riot" where the alleged assault occurred was likely the block of 125th Street between 8th and 7th Avenues, where the disorder was concentrated around 9.00 PM. Two alleged assaults on white men on 125th Street around that time could be the incident in which Boyle was assaulted. Both men are described as being assaulted by groups of "unknown colored men" in Hospital Admission records, Maurice Spellman on the corner of 8th Avenue and Morris Werner on the corner of 7th Avenue. Those locations fit the details in Boyle's Medical Attendance record better than the location at which a story in the New York Times put the assault, the rear of Kress' store on West 124th Street. Boyle is one of three officers listed as injured after "a barrage of missiles fell on the ranks of the police who had caught up with the crowd" after it moved from the front of the store. However, that clash occurred around two hours before Boyle attended by an ambulance. Ambulances treated the two other officers on that list, Patrolman Michael Kelly and Detective Charles Foley, around two hours before Boyle was treated, although they received treatment at the scene, while Boyle was attended at the 28th Precinct. The story also mistakenly located Harry Gordon's alleged assault on Patrolman Young at the rear of this store around the same time, rather than in front of the store around forty-five minutes before police clashed with crowds at the rear of the store. No sources mention an attack on a white man at the rear of Kress' store.
  
  The Medical Attendance record described Boyle's injury as "contusions and abrasions of left ankle." He also appeared on lists of the injured published by the New York American, Daily News, New York Post, New York Herald Tribune and New York Evening Journal, in addition to the story in the New York Times and a story in the Daily Mirror. All but the Daily Mirror reported Boyle's injury as cuts to the left ankle, or "deep cuts" in the case of the New York Herald Tribune and New York Post. Both those lists and the stories in the New York Times and Daily Mirror included the information that Boyle had been hit by an object, a "rock," "hurled stone," "flying brick" and "thrown rock" respectively. The injury was not serious enough for Boyle to be taken to hospital; he "remained on duty," according to the Medical Attendance record. The Daily Mirror alone mistakenly reported that Boyle had "received a fracture of the left leg" and been "removed to Harlem Hospital." It seems likely given Boyle's injury that the unknown white man that he intervened to protect was the target of missiles rather than being beaten. As a detective, Boyle would not have been in uniform at the time.
   
• 1 2020-03-11T21:25:32+00:00 Everett Breuer and Joseph Martin assaulted 20 plain 2023-07-31T21:11:40+00:00 Everett Breuer, a twenty-eight-year-old white photographer working for the Daily News, was taking images of the crowd at 7th Avenue and 125th Street when a rock hit him in the head. It was likely one of several objects thrown in Breuer’s direction as the office boy carrying his plates, Joseph Martin, was also hit on the face. Breuer’s own publication reported he was “beaten” not hit by a rock, as did the New York American, but the Daily Mirror, Home News, New York Herald Tribune and New York Times all reported him being hit by an object. The New York Evening Journal and New York Post reported only the resulting cuts. According to all the publications but the New York Evening Journal, Breuer’s cuts were bad enough to require a trip to the hospital. The stories disagreed on where he received treatment. The New York American, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, New York Times and Daily Mirror reported it was at Harlem Hospital, the Home News at Sydenham Hospital on Manhattan Avenue and West 124th Street, and the Daily News at the Hospital for the Ruptured and Crippled on 42nd St and Lexington Avenue.
  
  James Martin attracted less attention than Breuer. Other than a mention in the story and an appearance in the list of the injured in the Daily News, Martin appeared only in the list of injured published by the New York Evening Journal. Both sources described him as having cuts on his face, with the later recording that an ambulance treated Martin.
  
  The area around 7th Avenue and 125th Street saw a cluster of assaults during the disorder, with six other assaults reported there, including the beating of another reporter, Harry Johnson of the New York American. It was also at this location that Andrew Lyons was killed. All those events occurred despite police being deployed at the intersection.
  
  A photograph Breuer took immediately before the rock struck him became the most widely reproduced image of the disorder. When it initially appeared in the Daily News, the caption noted “After making this picture, The News photographer was struck down and went to hospital. He suffered lacerations to the scalp.” In later editions that information was omitted, and it did not appear in the caption of the photograph when it was reprinted by other publications. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle list of the injured did report Breuer was "hit by a rock while taking pictures of a riotous group." The scene the photographer captured shows two black men apparently trying to move away from a uniformed police officer; one man has fallen, while the officer is trying to hold the other. Neither they nor the three men and two women in the background look poised to throw anything at the photographer.
   
• 1 2020-04-09T17:59:07+00:00 Clarence London shot 20 plain 2023-08-30T03:21:12+00:00 Sometime shortly before 1:00 AM, Clarence London, a thirty-four-year-old Black man was shot in the leg while walking on the street near West 122nd Street and 7th Avenue. London lived in north Harlem, at 676 St Nicholas Avenue, so was far from home when the bullet hit him. Dr Payne attended London at Harlem Hospital at 1:00 AM.
  
  
  
  The location of the shooting was recorded in hospital admission records as West 122nd Street and 7th Avenue. That record was a more reliable source than the stories in the New York Times and New York Herald Tribune that located the shooting three blocks north, at 125th Street and 7th Avenue. An ambulance from Harlem Hospital also attended a white man, John Eigler, who reported being hit by an object thrown by a Black assailant at 122nd Street and 7th Avenue around the time London was shot. Fred Campbell's car was hit by a brick at the same intersection a few minutes earlier. He saw police officers with riot guns and heard shots being fired as he drove by. The New York American reported London had been “shot by an unidentified man” but offered no other details. Other newspapers simply listed him as “shot.” The hospital records further obscured the circumstances by describing London as “wounded.” His wound was consistently reported as in the right leg, although the Home News did report it was in the left leg. Given the evidence of both looting and the police response to it at the time, and the lack of any evidence that Black individuals on the streets during the disorder used guns, London was likely hit by shots fired by police – as were the other men reported as shot and wounded during the disorder.
  
  The New York American, New York Post, Home News, New York Herald Tribune, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and New York Times all identified London as a Black man; only the Daily News and New York Evening Journal did not specify his race. Four of the six other individuals shot and wounded in the disorder were Black men; the others were one man of unknown race, and one white police officer.
  
  No one was arrested for shooting London, as was the case with all of those shot and wounded (Detective Campo’s alleged assailant was shot and killed).
   
• 1 2020-08-20T20:56:13+00:00 Nathaniel Powell injured 19 plain 2023-08-30T19:48:56+00:00 Nathaniel Powell, a nineteen-year-old Black man, suffered cuts to his nose and left wrist on Lenox Avenue between 116th and 117th Streets “in some unknown manner,” his hospital admission recorded. Dr Payne attended Powell at Harlem Hospital, twenty blocks north on Lenox Avenue, at 1:00 AM, so Powell was injured sometime after 12:30 AM. Just after midnight, windows were broken in the San Antonio Market on West 116th Street just east of Lenox Avenue and groceries valued at around $10 taken. A restaurant on Lenox Avenue near West 117th Street and three businesses around West 118th Street also had windows broken some time during the disorder. Like many of those injured, Powell was close to home when hurt. He lived only two blocks to the north at 69 West 118th Street so may have been a spectator attracted by the noise and crowds rather than a participant in that violence.
  
  
  If the phrasing of the hospital record indicated that Powell did not provide the medical staff with any details of the circumstances in which he had been injured, the context makes it likely he had been injured by glass flying from smashed windows. While he could have been watching as others broke windows, the severity of his wounds would suggest he was closer than that and involved in smashing the glass. While others treated by hospital staff did tell them they had been hit by glass, Powell would have had little incentive to reveal if that was the cause of his injuries. Police officers were stationed at Harlem Hospital during the disorder, where they arrested at least one Black man, Isaac Daniels, while he was being treated after a white storeowner identified him as the man who had assaulted him. Another possibility was that Powell had been beaten by police officers as they sought to disperse crowds on the street. While police violence intensified after midnight, Powell's injuries include more extensive lacerations than were seen in those hit with batons and gun butts. There was also no evidence of police in the area of Lenox Avenue where he was injured until more than an hour later when James Williams was arrested.
  
  While the hospital record recorded Powell’s injuries as "laceration of nose and left wrist," the Daily News described them more broadly as cuts about the face and the New York Post shifted the injury to his foot. The New York Evening Journal and New York American reported a more dramatic wound, that Powell’s nose had been cut off, with the New York American sensationally describing his nose as “severed by [a] razor.” That account cast Powell as having been assaulted with a weapon that whites associated with Black New Yorkers. While the hospital record provided no details of the circumstances of the injury, given that none of the other newspapers mentioned a weapon, the information in the New York American was likely an example of the Hearst press falling back on tropes of racial violence rather than a reliable account of what happened to Powell. Descriptions of his nose being cut off likely stemmed from the seriousness of the cuts. After Payne attended Powell, he was admitted to the hospital, one of only eleven among the injured known to have needed that additional care (11 of 42, 26%).
   
• 1 2020-03-11T21:51:31+00:00 Patrolman Michael Kelly assaulted 17 plain 2022-06-08T17:02:00+00:00 Patrolman Michael Kelly, a thirty-year-old white officer, was hit on the leg "by a stone thrown by an unknown person" at the rear of Kress’ store on 124th Street, according to the record of the ambulance that attended him. Dr Russell of Harlem Hospital treated Kelly at 7.15 PM, so the assault likely took place around 7.00 PM. That was the time newspaper stories reported that the crowd pushed from the front of Kress' store on 125th Street moved to the store's rear in response to the appearance of a hearse they assumed had come for the body of the boy rumored to have been killed in the store and began breaking windows. Kelly was one of the officers listed in a story in the New York Times as injured after "a barrage of missiles fell on the ranks of the police who had caught up with the crowd" after it moved from the front of the store. A similar account appeared in the New York Age, which described police arriving at the rear of the store as being "greeted with a fusillade of stone hurled by the crowd," as a result of which Kelly was one of two patrolmen "forced to undergo treatment for injuries." He was assigned to a radio car, the Medical Attendance record detailed, which may have allowed him to get to the rear of the store faster than other officers. The street had a narrower roadway and pavements than 125th Street, making officers easier to target with objects thrown from roofs as well as the street level. One other officer, Detective Charles Foley, was seriously injured enough to be attended by an ambulance after being hit by a stone thrown at him at the rear of the store around the same time as Kelly.
  
  The Medical Attendance report described Kelly's injury as "contusion of muscle and right leg," serious enough that he was taken to Harlem Hospital for an x-ray and "surgical observation." The lists of the injured in the New York American on both March 20 and 21 and in the New York Herald Tribune, as well as the story in the New York Times echoed that information, while the lists in the Home News and New York Evening Journal reported the injury as a sprain without noting that Kelly was taken to the hospital. A story in the Daily Mirror, and lists in the Daily News and New York Post replaced the injury to the leg with a more dramatic head injury. The New York Age did not specify the nature of Kelly's injury.
  
  No one was arrested for assaulting Kelly, as was the case in seven of the nine assaults on police.
  
  
   
• 1 2020-03-11T21:14:02+00:00 Detective Charles Foley assaulted 17 plain 2022-06-08T17:05:48+00:00 Detective Charles Foley, a thirty-two-year-old white officer from the 28th Precinct on West 123rd Street, was "struck by a stone thrown by some unknown person while at scene of riot in rear of Kress’ Store" on 124th Street, according to the Medical Attendance record of the ambulance that attended him. Dr Sayet of Harlem Hospital treated Foley in front of Blumstein's department store, on 125th Street, at 7.30 PM, so the assault likely took place around 7.15 PM. Around the same time a second officer, Patrolman Michael Kelly, was hit by an object at the rear of the store, where police had followed a crowd drawn to 124th Street around 7.00 PM by the appearance of a hearse they assumed had come for the body of the boy rumored to have been killed. Foley was one of the officers listed in a story in the New York Times as injured after "a barrage of missiles fell on the ranks of the police who had caught up with the crowd" after it moved from the front of the store. The street had a narrower roadway and pavements than 125th Street, making officers easier to target with objects thrown from roofs as well as the street level.
  
  The Medical Attendance record described Foley's injury as a "possible fracture of left shoulder." Lists in the Home News, New York Herald Tribune, Daily News, New York Evening Journal, and a story in the New York Times identified him as having a shoulder injury. Three other papers, the New York American on March 20 and 21, Daily Mirror, and New York Post, instead listed a head injury, the most common injury resulting from being hit by objects. According to the New York Times, Foley "refused medical attention." Given that an ambulance attended him that claim is likely a misstatement of the fact that he was not taken back to Harlem Hospital, as Kelly was, but treated at the scene.
  
  No one was arrested for assaulting Foley, as was the case in seven of the nine assaults on police.
  
   
• 1 2020-08-20T20:55:23+00:00 Alice Mitchell injured 17 plain 2023-09-01T01:17:59+00:00 Alice Mitchell was at the intersection of Lenox Avenue and West 129th Street when she was “cut by falling glass,” according to a hospital admission record. The twenty-one-year-old woman of unknown race lived only a few buildings west on 129th Street, an area of Black residents, so may have been a bystander drawn by the noise on Lenox Avenue at this time. Dr Payne attended Mitchell at Harlem Hospital, half a dozen blocks north on Lenox Avenue, at 1:30 AM according to a hospital record, so she was likely injured sometime around 1:00 AM. Another person, Hugh Young, was also injured by flying glass at the same place, and attended by Payne at the same time. They may have been transported in the same ambulance.
  
  
  
  The hospital record described Mitchell's injury as a "laceration of wrist." Mitchell appeared in only two lists of the injured, those published by the Daily News and New York Evening Journal. Both reported different injuries, lacerations to the face and neck in the Daily News, and to the head in the New York Evening Journal. Others injured by flying class suffered wounds to their legs (2), hands (1), and in the case of Hugh Young, to the head. After being seen by the physician, Mitchell went home, her injury evidently not serious enough for her to be sent to the hospital. None of the sources recorded Mitchell's race. Her residence in an area almost entirely populated by Black New Yorkers was strong evidence that she was a Black woman.
   
• 1 2020-02-25T03:33:10+00:00 James Wrigley assaulted 16 plain 2023-08-30T19:41:10+00:00 At 12:45 AM, 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.
  
  
  
  The conflicting press accounts of how he came to be injured 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 here 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, was the only other publication to report Wrigley was found unconscious in an alley. The Associated reporter’s brief summary opted for this second narrative 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 Atlanta World, Afro-American 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 was still in hospital on March 21.
  
  The area around the intersection of 7th Avenue and West 125th Street where Wrigley was struck down saw a cluster of assaults on white men and women 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 were reported as having been knocked unconscious.
   
• 1 2020-04-09T17:35:02+00:00 Victor Fain shot 16 plain 2023-09-02T02:49:50+00:00 Victor Fain, a nineteen-year-old Black man born in South Carolina, was shot in “some unknown manner during [the] disorder” at 128th Street and 7th Avenue, according to a hospital admission record. Dr Payne attended Mitchell at Harlem Hospital at 2:30 AM, so he was likely shot sometime after 2:00 AM. The bullet almost certainly came a police gun. The noise of police gunfire had been one of the sounds of the disorder from early on, with many of those shots fired in the air in an attempt to disperse groups who gathered on the street. Around midnight, police had begun shooting more indiscriminantly, aiming at those on the street and shooting sufficient rounds to prodice many stray shots.
  
  Fain was shot some distance from his home fifteen blocks to the south, at 315 West 113th Street, in a section on the southern margins of Harlem mostly occupied by whites and Puerto Ricans. Sometime later in 1935 he relocated to section of Black Harlem, lodging at 208 West 141st Street. Fain was still at that address when a census enumerator called on April 30, 1940.
  
  
  
  The hospital record described Fain as having been shot in the left ankle. All the newspaper lists of the injured, in the New York American, Home News, Daily News, New York Post and New York Evening Journal, and a story in the New York Times, reported the same injury. That unusual consistency might result from him being admitted to the hospital after being attended.
  
  The hospital record did not identify Fain’s race, but the newspapers did. The lists of the injured in the New York American, Home News and the story in the New York Times identified him as a Black man. The lists of injured in the Daily News, New York Post and New York Evening Journal did not. Four Black men were among the six men shot and wounded in the disorder, with one man unknown race, and one white police officer.
  
  No one was arrested for shooting Fain, as was the case with all of those shot and wounded (Detective Campo’s alleged assailant was shot and killed).
  
   
• 1 2020-03-09T19:39:02+00:00 B. Z. Kondoul assaulted 16 plain 2023-09-03T18:22:24+00:00 B. Z. Kondoul, a thirty-five year-old white man who lived at 55 West 110th Street, was allegedly assaulted by a crowd of "40-50" Black men and women on 7th Avenue near 122nd Street. Kondoul fled from the crowd until he saw a police officer guarding a grocery store, part of the James Butler chain, at West 123rd St and Lenox Avenue, according to a report in the New York Evening Journal. The officer, Patrolman William Clements, drew his revolver and fired at the crowd to hold them back. After he fired two shots, the crowd backed away from the two white men, and began to throw objects at them: stones, fruit, garbage can lids. When the crowd closed in again, Clements "emptied his gun." The shots kept the crowd at bay long enough for a police radio car to arrive and "rescue" Clements and Kondoul. The New York Evening Journal reported the event in the sensational language it favored for alleged attacks by Black men and women on white men and women: Clement's "heroism" saved Kondoul from "probable death" at the hands of a "gang" crying "Kill him."
  
  
  
  A brief report in the New York American was more to the point. It simply stated that Kondoul was "rescued by a patrolman who fired several shots at his assailants without hitting anyone." Police officers commonly fired shots in the air to attempt to disperse crowds. In this case, however, the reports suggested that Clements fired at the crowd. It was not clear when the event took place. Crowds likely came down Lenox Avenue from 125th Street sometime after 10:30 PM, when the first reported disorder in the area occurred at the intersection. Police did not arrive until sometime later. There were no police at the West 123rd Street and Lenox Avenue when Mrs Salefas' delicatessan had windows broken and merchandise taken. Those attacks likely began sometime around 11:00 PM. The alleged assault on Kondoul would have been sometime after that, once the presence of police led crowds to disperse, so likely after midnight. Clement's use of his firearm was evidence that police shooting at residents might have been responsible for the unattributed injuries from gunfire during the disorder.
  
  Although neither story mentioned any injury suffered by Kondoul, he did appear in lists of the injured in the New York Evening Journal and New York Daily News. They described him as having bruises to the face for which he was treated at Harlem Hospital. The Home News reported that Kondoul was "among the white persons injured by rocks, flying glass or in personal encounters," with "lacerations and bruises." He did not appear in the list of the injured in the New York American.
  
  The spelling of Kondoul's name was different in all the stories: Kondoul and Kendul in the New York Evening Journal and Daily News, Kendel in the Home News, and Aambel in the New York American.
• 1 2020-04-09T17:57:19+00:00 Wilmont Hendricks shot 15 plain 2023-09-01T00:40:35+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 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 survived 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 violence on the blocks of Lenox Avenue north of 125th Street around this time, including other assaults and looting. Police had begun shooting more indiscriminately after midnight than earlier in the disorder, and it is likely that Hendricks was shot by police. 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).
  
  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 reported 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.
  
  
  
   
• 1 2020-08-20T20:53:49+00:00 Herbert Holderman injured 15 plain 2023-09-01T02:11:40+00:00 Around 1:20 AM, Herbert Holderman was “cut by flying glass when some unknown persons broke windows of stores” on Lenox Avenue at 132nd Street. Alice Mitchell and Hugh Young were also injured by flying glass three blocks south around 1:00 AM, as part of an outbreak of violence on the blocks of Lenox Avenue from West 125th Street as far north as West 134th Street.
  
  Holderman, like Mitchell and Young, was treated by Dr. Payne at Harlem Hospital. He did not appear in the hospital records, only in the 32nd Police Precinct book of aided cases. Three newspaper lists of the injured also included Holderman, but the only information that they provided on his identity was his home address, 73 East 128th Street, an area of mixed black and white residences on the eastern boundary of Harlem. The police record did not specify where Holderman was cut. The lists disagreed on where he had been cut. The New York Post reported it as his hands, while the Daily News and New York Evening Journal reported it was his face. He was one of four of those injured with wounds to the hands (20%). After being attended by a physician, Holderman went home, indicating the wound was not serious enough to require him to be admitted to hospital.
  
  
  
   
• 1 2020-03-11T21:46:38+00:00 Patrolman Charles Robbins assaulted 14 plain 2023-07-31T22:14:27+00:00 Patrolman Charles Robbins, a member of the 6th Emergency Squad (a riot squad), was "struck over head with an iron bar by some unknown person,” according to the record of the ambulance that attended him. Dr Russell of Harlem Hospital treated Robbins at 124th Street and 7th Avenue, at 10.15 PM, indicating that that assault took place sometime earlier, around 10.00 PM. The location of the assault was the "scene of the riot," in the Medical Attendance record, likely where Robbins was treated. By 10.00 PM time police had established a perimeter around the block of 125th Street between 7th and 8th Avenues on which Kress' store was located. As a result crowds trying to get to the Kress store were stuck on those corners, leading some to leave in frustration and instead go up or down 7th Avenue. Emergency trucks were part of the police perimeter. While newspaper stories differed over precisely where the vehicles were stationed, both the New York Times and New York Herald Tribune located at least one truck on 125th Street between 7th and 8th Avenues. (The New York Times put the others on 124th Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, 126th Street between Lenox and Seventh Avenues, and at 130th Street and Lenox Avenue, while the New York Herald Tribune had them at Lenox Avenue and 125th Street, and 7th Avenue and 127th Street).
  
  Robbins was included in lists of the injured published in the press. Four of those lists provided details of the circumstances in which he was injured. The Home News and the New York American on March 20 described the injury as caused by an iron bar, following the Medical Attendance record. The New York Herald Tribune and Brooklyn Daily Eagle, which listed the injured policemen separately, included the detail that Robbins had been hit by a brick. An iron bar was not a typical weapon during the disorder; bricks, however, were frequently used as weapons. The New York Evening Journal, New York Post, New York American (on March 21) and Daily News all listed Robbins among the injured without details of the circumstances. His injury was listed as a “possible fractured skull,” but the Medical Attendance record described Robbins' injury as only a "laceration of scalp." Nonetheless, it noted that Robbins was "removed" to Harlem Hospital for further treatment, which may be why newspapers identified him as having suffered a more serious injury.
  
  No one was arrested for assaulting Robins, as was the case in seven of the nine alleged assaults on police.
• 1 2020-03-11T21:19:54+00:00 Edward Genest assaulted 13 plain 2023-08-01T18:11:59+00:00 Edward Genest, a thirty-two-year-old white sailor from the S.S. Virginia, was stabbed in the left arm on 7th Avenue at 123rd Street. Lists of the injured in two newspapers, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and the New York Herald Tribune, added the detail that he had been stabbed by Black assailants. Five newspapers noted only that he had been stabbed, the New York American (on both March 20 and 21), Daily News, New York Evening Journal, New York Post, and Home News.
  
  Genest was likely a visitor to Harlem seeking entertainment on 125th Street who became caught up in the disorder. He could have travelled by subway, unaware of what was happening until he arrived. There was no information on when Genest was assaulted. The area around 125th Street and 7th Avenue was the site of clashes between Black crowds and police from early in the disorder, and reported attacks on white men and women around 9:30 PM, 10:00 PM, 11:00 PM, 12:30 AM and 1:00 AM. The attack on Genest could have occurred at any of those times.
  
  The use of a knife in this assault was unusual; only one other of the 54 assaults in the disorder involved a stabbing, the attack on Morris Werner. In the rest of 1935, knives were a favored weapon of those committing acts of violence, used in two thirds of felony assault cases.   
   
• 1 2020-04-09T18:55:16+00:00 John Hademan assaulted 13 plain 2023-08-01T23:03:35+00:00 John Hademan, a twenty-six-year-old Black man suffered a fractured skull at 126th Street and 7th Avenue. The circumstances in which he was assaulted are uncertain. The New York Herald Tribune and New York Times, the two reports that gave a location for the assault on Hademan, suggested that other violence occurred at the same time: the New York Times described Hademan as being assaulted “in a melee,” while the New York Herald Tribune described the context as “rioting.” Neither included a time for the assault on Hademan. The only group with whom Black residents fought during the disorder were police, who wielded batons that produced head injuries. One possible time for police to have assaulted Hademan was around 9:30 PM, when officers began to deploy north on 7th Avenue from 125th Street. By 9:45 PM they were making an arrest a block further north, with another arrest in that area at 10:10 PM.
  
  An ambulance attended Hademan after he was assaulted and then took him to Harlem Hospital, according to the report in the New York Times and the lists of the injured in the New York Evening Journal, New York Herald Tribune, and New York American. However, he did not appear in the hospital records. Those lists, and that in the New York Post, noted that no address was given for Hademan. The Daily News identified him as a resident of Castle Point in the Bronx but that story was likely not reliable as it did not identify his race, was alone in not recording his injury as lacerations of his face and head, and spelled his name differently than the other reports. As with all the Black men assaulted during the disorder, no one was arrested or charged for assaulting Hademan.
   
• 1 2020-03-11T21:55:53+00:00 William Burkhard assaulted 11 plain 2023-08-23T20:27:15+00:00 Around 11.30 PM, William Burkhard, a forty-three-year-old white man, was “assaulted by some unknown colored persons," according to the record of ambulance attendances. An ambulance from Bellevue Hospital attended Burkhard in West 118th Street between Lenox and 7th Avenues at 11.45 PM, and Dr. Solomon proceeded to treat "contusion and laceration" of his right cheek. Burkhard then left for his home, 533 East 12th Street, at the opposite end of Manhattan.
  
  If the assault took place where the ambulance attended Burkhard, he was one of only two individuals assaulted off the avenues. However, he likely made his way to that location after being attacked on 7th Avenue. The assault on Burkhard was the part of a cluster of attacks on or near 7th Avenue in the blocks around West 116th Street beginning around 11:00 PM.
  
  Burkhard appeared in the record of hospital attendances, and in lists of the injured in four newspapers. The New York Herald Tribune unusually provided the same details as the hospital records that Burkhard had been “assaulted by some unknown colored persons.” The Daily News, New York Evening Journal and New York Post listed only his injuries to his cheek. Although the ambulance records did not include information on an individual's race, the description of his alleged attackers as "colored persons," together with his address, indicate that he was a white man.
   
• 1 2020-03-11T21:36:29+00:00 Julius Narditch assaulted 10 plain 2023-08-24T21:06:07+00:00 At 11.30pm, as Julius Narditch, a thirty-four-year-old white man, walked on 8th Avenue near 147th Street, three Black men allegedly "jumped" him. His struggle with the men left him with head injuries and lacerations to his face and hands. A doctor from Knickerbocker Hospital attended Narditch, who was then taken to Harlem Hospital (although he did not appear in the hospital records obtained by the MCCH). Narditch lived at 400 West 128th Street, west of Harlem. No explanation was provided for why he was in a Black neighborhood, although many of the businesses on the avenue were white-owned. He may have come from the elevated train station on 8th Avenue and 145th Street.
  
  The alleged assault on Narditch was the only event in the disorder north of 145th Street. Given that there were only four other events north of 135th Street (including a shooting), it was not certain that the assault was actually related to the events at the Kress store and to the south, in the sense that the assailants had been on 125th Street or been brought out on to the street by the disorder. Narditch was included in the one of the lists of the injured distributed to journalists, likely by police, published in the New York Evening Journal, New York Post, Daily News, New York American and New York Herald Tribune. He likely was on that list because as he had reported the assault to police it was recorded in the Aided Cases book of the 32nd Precinct. Procedures required police to record all incidents reported to them in that book. Those records were among the material gathered by MCCH investigators. The other three other cases that appeared in the book for the period of the disorder all occurred closer to the other events of the disorder: the shooting of De Soto Windgate on West 144th Street between 7th and Lenox Avenues; the assault on Thomas Suarez on 134th Street; and the injury of Herbert Holderman on 132nd Street.
  
  Only the New York Herald Tribune mentioned that multiple assailants attacked Narditch. The New York American attributed the cuts on his face to stabbing but there was no mention of weapons in the police record. Only two other assaults in the disorder involved knives, a striking contrast with the extensive use of knives in violence at other times in 1935. The mention in the New York American likely reflected assumptions from those larger patterns.
  
  No one was arrested for the assault on Narditch.
• 1 2020-03-11T21:50:13+00:00 Patrolman Harry Whittington assaulted 10 plain 2023-08-29T19:49:05+00:00 Just after midnight, Patrolman Harry Whittington, a thirty-five-year-old white member of Emergency Squad 9 (a riot squad) was hit by a rock on 8th Avenue. The Daily Mirror provided the most details of the assault. The story reported that the attack came as the emergency truck on which Whittington rode passed West 123rd Street. Only Whittington and one other officer were reported as being assaulted after crowds moved away from 125th Street around 10:00 PM. The other seven reported assaults on police occurred in the initial disorder around Kress’ store.  
  
  After 10:00 PM, when the crowd moved away from 125th Street, police used patrolling radio cars and emergency trucks to respond to violence and to try to control crowds. Cars and buses driven by whites were also targets of rocks thrown by black crowds throughout the disorder. However, those attacks took place on 7th Avenue, the major route to the Bronx and northern neighborhoods, not the less traveled 8th Avenue. The one other police vehicle reported as being hit by rocks, a car driven by Detective Frank Lenahan, was also attacked on “a riotous section of Eighth Avenue” at an unspecified time. The windows of the car were smashed but Lenahan was not injured. Whittington did not have windows to shield him from missiles. Most of the members of an emergency squad traveled on the outside of the vehicle.
  
  As well as the detail that Whittington was assaulted while riding on an emergency truck, the Daily Mirror described the attack as a “sniping,” a sensational term used to heighten the threat associated with the violence.
  
  Whittington appeared in lists of the injured published by the New York American (on March 20 & 21), Home News, New York Herald Tribune, Daily News, New York Evening Journal and New York Post, as well as the story published in the Daily Mirror. Although the New York American and the New York Herald Tribune reported he was treated at Harlem Hospital, he did not appear in either the list of admissions or the ambulance call-outs.  The Home News and New York Evening Journal described his injuries simply as lacerations; the other lists specified a head injury.
  
   
• 1 2020-04-09T18:44:38+00:00 Arthur Block assaulted 7 plain 2022-06-09T15:59:43+00:00 Arthur Block, a twenty-two-year-old Black resident of 14 West 127th Street, was allegedly bitten on the hands. Block’s name appears only in lists of the injured published by the New York Evening Journal, Daily News and New York Post. His injuries are different in each list, with the New York Evening Journal, reporting Block was bitten on his fingers, the Daily News on his left hand, and the New York Post on his right hand. No details of when or where the incident took place are included, but being bitten was not an injury that could have been suffered incidentally, so the event was an assault.
   
• 1 2020-08-20T20:52:32+00:00 Paul Freeman injured 6 plain 2020-09-29T22:50:15+00:00 Paul Freeman appears in lists of those injured published by the New York Daily News and the New York Evening Journal. Both newspapers identified him as fifty-year-old man living at 310 West 170th Street, well to the north of Harlem in the Washington Heights neighborhood.
  
  The Daily News described his injury as a “laceration of forehead,” the Evening Journal less elaborately as "cuts on head." Freeman was one of six of those injured with wounds to the head (30%).
   
• 1 2020-04-09T18:33:56+00:00 William Brook assaulted 5 plain 2020-09-23T21:19:35+00:00 William Brook a twenty-five-year-old resident of 157 West 130th Street, appeared only in lists of the injured published by five papers. The New York Herald Tribune, New York American and New York Post included that he was Black; the New York Evening Journal and New York Daily News did not. The reports all described Brook as having cuts to his head, with the Herald Tribune adding the detail that he had been “hit by rock.” None of the lists specified the location at which Brook was assaulted. The Herald Tribune and American listed him as having been treated at Harlem Hospital, but his name does not appear on the lists of those attended and treated.
   
• 1 2020-08-20T20:53:02+00:00 William Gross injured 4 plain 2020-09-29T22:55:15+00:00 William Gross appears in a list of those injured published by the New York Evening Journal and New York Daily News. Both newspapers identified Grossl as twenty-six years of age and living at 152 West 103rd Street, well to the south of Harlem.
  
  The Daily News described Gross's injury as a “laceration of head,” the Evening Journal more simply as cuts to the head. Gross was one of six of those injured with wounds to the head (30%).