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

Joanna Cohen, "Reckoning with the Riots: Property, Belongings, and the Challenge to Value in Civil War America," Journal of American History, 109.1 (2022), 80.

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In civil court (September 1935-March 1936) On April 23, as the criminal courts resolved the final prosecutions arising from the disorder, Attorney Barney Rosenstein filed claims on behalf of twenty white business owners seeking damages from the city government for losses they suffered as a result of the disorder. The legal basis for those claims was section 71 of the General Municipal Law, dating from 1855, which read, “A city or county shall be liable to a person whose property is destroyed or injured therein by a mob or riot for the damages sustained thereby” provided that person did not contribute to the damage, had used all reasonable diligence to prevent damage, notified the authorities of the threat to their property, and brought the action within three months. Many other states had similar laws, at least four of which extended to deaths and injuries as well as property damage, with the result that claims for damages were common in the aftermath of racial disorders. However, historians typically have made only passing mention of damage claims — or no mention at all in the case of those resulting from the disorder in Harlem. That neglect is particularly striking given the emphasis on violence targeting property as the defining feature of the events in 1935 and the racial disorders in subsequent decades. The scale of the property losses reported in the claims, and the failures of police that contributed to the damage and made the city liable for it brought into focus how the disorder had challenged white economic and political power and the racial order that they imposed on Harlem.

Those municipal liability laws originated in the nineteenth century in response to losses suffered by wealthy property owners. Linked to principles of community responsibility for preventing disorder and paying its costs in England's Riot Act of 1714, the laws were promoted as holding local authorities responsible for maintaining order and making compensation for losses more accessible, as Perry Blatz has shown in the case of Pennsylvania and Adam Malka in the case of Maryland. The Illinois law, upheld by the United States Supreme Court in 1911, was put to use in the aftermath of the three major racial disorders that occurred in the state in the early decades of the twentieth century. In 1908, after the Springfield riot, Black and white residents filed property claims that amounted to at least $120,000, historian Roberta Senechal de la Roche briefly noted, approximately two-thirds from Black residents. A story that appeared in several newspapers on September 16, 1909, after the deadline for the submission of claims, reported additional suits by relatives of six of those killed seeking an additional $35,000. To pay those damages, the city had to issue special bonds, which funded $45,000 in "judgements, costs, and interest" in August 1913, and to pay for the bonds for many years after that. Nine years later, the riot in East St Louis resulted in a flood of claims from Black residents that ultimately forced that city government to also resort to a bond issue, as Malcolm McLaughlin briefly noted in his study. In 1921, five years after the riot, the city issued $454,000 of bonds, which resulted in taxpayers paying the costs of the violence until 1941. The Chicago riot in 1919 produced claims for loss of life as well as property. The claims related to death are mentioned in studies by David Krugler and Elizabeth Dale: Krugler attributes the decision of the city in 1922 to pay $4,500 to the family of each person killed in the disorder to the work of Black attorney Augustus Wilson, while Dale identifies several different Black lawyers, including those working with the NAACP's Joint Emergency Committee, who also represented Black defendants in the criminal courts. When the city agreed to that settlement in eighteen cases in December 1922, it had already paid out $20,800 in five cases resolved in court with fifteen more cases unresolved, the Chicago Tribune reported, and thirty-three additional suits for injuries expected to result in payments of $1,000 each. Unmentioned by Krugler are the claims for property damage, which came from both white and Black residents. The amount of those claims was not available to the Chicago Tribune reporter in 1922, but earlier stories had reported that only around $100,000 of the more than $1 million of claims filed were for death or injury, with more than 600 suits for property damage making up the rest of that total. As would be the case in 1935, a handful of law firms filed large numbers of claims; ninety-five from one firm, according to one story, more than eighty claims from a second firm mentioned in another story.

Despite the awareness of the Chicago riot evident in the aftermath of the disorder in 1935, there was no anticipation in the press of such claims being filed in New York City. When claims were filed, the New York Times reported them as the first suits brought under the law in the city. The New York law had provided the basis for the payment of damages after an earlier disorder marked by violence against Black residents, the Draft Riot in 1863, apparently without litigation. Nearly two thousand men and women filed claims; 416 claims were rejected by a special committee of the New York County Board of Supervisors, who then made their own assessment of the value claimants put on stolen or destroyed items. Although, as historian Joanna Cohen has shown, they reduced the value of the claims by $214,000, the city still paid out $1,122,805. Coincidentally, Mayor La Guardia claimed that a similar sum, $1 million, was at stake in claims against the city in 1935 — although the total of the claims filed had earlier been reported as only $116,000. That figure, and the details of the handful of cases mentioned in the press, revealed more of the scale of the violence of the disorder than the proceedings in the criminal courts, with each claim aggregating the damage done by multiple attacks and thefts.

By July 1935, 106 claims had been filed, with sixty-five more rejected because they came after the three-month window allowed by the statute. While those suits came from just over a third of the 450 businesses estimated as having been damaged by the riot, there was no evidence of any filed by Black business owners. At the time of the disorder the city faced record numbers of claims for damages: the New York Times reported that the Division of Torts disposed of 2,084 cases in 1934, a 93% increase over the preceding year. In 1935, as in 1863, the city government's initial response to damage claims was to have the corporation counsel assess whether they could be resolved without resort to the courts. Few claims were settled in that way, according to the New York Times story, and the scale of those from the disorder in Harlem apparently led the city to contest them in court. Insurance companies also appeared as parties in this litigation. They had no liability if the events of March 19 and March 20 were a riot, as their policies excluded that situation. However, if the city's lawyers established that a riot had not occurred and the Municipal law thus did not apply, some liability would shift to the insurance companies.

As the city lost repeatedly in court, its lawyers and Mayor La Guardia insisted those decisions would be appealed and each case would be tried on its merits. However, no appeals appeared in the legal record nor were any trials reported in the press after the third case the city lost. The damages awarded in that final trial were significantly less than the sums claimed, as appears to have been typical for other lawsuits against the city: $24,450,640 of claims in 1934 had resulted in only $544,275 of payments, the New York Times reported. Given the failure of the defenses offered by the corporation counsel, the awards in the Supreme Court may have provided a basis for the city to settle the remaining claims for amounts that it considered reasonable. Fifty claims for $102,448 had been settled for $25,000 by late October 1937, according to a brief story in the Chicago Defender. At that time, the cost of settling all the claims filed was estimated at $100,000. The claims filed after a subsequent outbreak of racial disorder in Harlem in 1943 offered further evidence that damages were paid in 1935. However, on that later occasion, the city would avoid paying similar claims as a provision of the New York State War Emergency Act passed in 1942 made section 71 inoperative. While that legislation was ostensibly concerned with the consequences of war, city officials recognized the benefits in regards to racial violence. In prompting such measures, the civil suits brought into focus how the disorder challenged white economic and political power and the racial order that they imposed on Harlem. The MCCH investigation, by contrast, would report few details of the nature and scale of the violence against people and property even as it directed attention to the broader issue of police violence targeted at Black residents of Harlem.