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

Isaac Daniels arraigned

"Isaac Daniels, 29, 73 W. 130th St., accused of throwing a stone through the store window at 346 Lenox Ave. resulting in Herman Young, the proprietor, being cut on the head by flying glass, was held in $1,000 bail for hearing tomorrow on a charge of felonious assault."

Source: "Police Guard Against New Uprising as Mayor Acts to Probe Race Riot," Home News, March 21, 1935 (La Guardia Papers, Scrapbooks)

Daniels also appears in six other lists of those who appeared in the Magistrates Court published in newspapers, none of which include the circumstances which led to his arrest.

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Herman Young assaulted Around 1.30AM, Herman Young, a fifty-three-year-old Austrian-born white man was cut on the head by flying glass after a stone was thrown through his Lenox Avenue hardware store window. Young had come from his apartment above the store after hearing voices in the premises to find a window broken and four men inside stealing merchandise. After chasing those men out, Young was likely trying to keep others from coming in when he was hit by the stone. Young appears in lists of the injured published by the New York Post (mistakenly identified as a Patrolman) and the Home News, and among those recorded as attended by physicians from Harlem Hospital, likely in the emergency room. All three sources describe the injury as a laceration of the scalp, with the hospital record adding the detail that it resulted from being hit with a stone, and the report of the arrest adding that Young had been cut by flying glass.

Isaac Daniels, a twenty-nine-year-old black man was arrested and charged with throwing the rock. How Daniels came to be arrested is not clear. The only details of the case are a single sentence of description in a list of individuals who appeared in the Magistrates Court published in the Home News. Information on the earlier looting comes from the arrest and prosecution of another man, James Williams, for theft. There was likely a crowd outside Young’s store as it was in the midst of the blocks on Lenox Avenue where looting was concentrated, making it difficult to identify who threw the stone. Just how difficult would depend on the location of the arresting officers: given the amount of looting going on in the area at the time, they are unlikely to have been out front guarding the store, so would have been traveling on the street in a radio car or coming along the pavement from the police positions north at 130th St or south at 125th street. In the darkness neither perspective would necessarily have given them a clear view.

However police identified Daniels, they did not convince the jury at his trial that he threw the stone: they acquitted him.