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

Lincoln A. Mullen, America’s Public Bible: A Commentary (Stanford University Press, 2023): https://americaspublicbible.org, https://doi.org/10.21627/2022apb.

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Analyzing Complexity: A Granular, Data-Driven Approach Developing an analysis of the complexity of the disorder requires reconstructing and interpreting the details of the events. This study employed a data-driven method to comprehensively examine all the events of the disorder rather than selectively focus on only some events. I created data about an event from a variety of sources and categorized it as one of eight types of event in order to find patterns. While many of those sources feature in other studies of racial disorder, they had not been used in previous studies of the disorder in Harlem in 1935: docket books that record cases before the Magistrates Court; case files from the District Attorney’s office for those sent to the grand jury; case files from the Probation Department for those convicted in the Court of General Sessions; transcripts of the public hearings held by the Mayor’s Commission on Conditions in Harlem (MCCH); records of the investigations undertaken by the MCCH contained not just in the records of Mayor La Guardia but also in the papers of E. Franklin Frazier, the Black sociologist who led the group's study of Harlem, and in the papers of Arthur Garfield Hays, the MCCH member who chaired the subcommittee responsible for studying the events of the disorder; photographs of every building in Harlem taken by the city’s Tax Department four to six years after the disorder; and twenty-two major newspapers available on microfilm or digitized and the photographs of the disorder that they published. Data-driven analysis typically employs computationally generated data, as Lincoln Mullen did in America’s Public Bible. By contrast, the data in this project was handcrafted, manually curated by cross referencing and reconciling information from a variety of different sources. All the data was included, not just what could be fitted to arguments made in the narrative: events without information on timing, so not in the chronology; events that have no location, so not on the map; and events that appear only as prosecutions in court, so neither in the chronology nor on the map. (The sources themselves are not part of the site; the published sources are still under copyright and access to the legal records and other archival sources is restricted).

The granular approach of this study allows it to counter the tendency of data to dehumanize its subjects. As Harmony Bench and Kate Elswit point out, “The process of manually curating data from archival materials draws us closely into the lived experiences they index, as we grapple with the multiple and conflicting stories behind each data point, and what each signifies.” Black digital practice, as exemplified by Jessica Marie Johnson, emphasizes the need to carry that engagement forward, to “infuse the drive for data with a corresponding concern with and for the humanity and souls of the people involved.” The attention to individual events of this study allowed all the men and women involved to be named, many to be identified, and a small group to have their experience in the disorder put in the context of a larger picture of their lives. The names of participants, where possible, appear in the labels for an event: the owner or staff member of a looted or damaged store; or the individual killed, injured, or arrested. Although fragmentary, such information offers some counterbalance to the reliance on aggregate numbers to describe the disorder in the existing literature on Harlem in 1935. In an additional effort to foreground the humanity of the data, charts visualizing those involved in the events of the disorder, and in the legal proceedings in its aftermath, were made using Wee People (https://github.com/propublica/weepeople), a typeface of people silhouettes developed by Alberto Cairo for ProPublica.

In line with the developing practices of humanities data analysis, the process of interpretation involved in creating data has been made transparent, taking advantage of the digital medium to include pages discussing each event. The goal is to focus on historians' interpretations, not sources; with ever more sources available online, it is important, as historian Karin Wulf captured in a tweet, that people “understand why history isn’t obvious, and why we know and understand new things about the past.” The individual event pages provide the data’s backstory, in greater detail than the summary traces of the process of data creation that can be left in a dataset. Each of the sources of information on an event are discussed in those pages, agreement and disagreement among sources are identified, and decisions about what information to use and why, and about how to categorize an event, are explained. The analysis on event pages also highlights gaps in the information, when the categorization, timing, or location of an event are uncertain, to counter the apparent certainty with which the event appeared in the chronological narrative and on the map.

To analyze patterns in the events of the disorder, they were classified into one of eight categories. Arrests are a separate category of event to counter the tendency to assume those arrested are guilty or at least involved in the related event. For Harlem in 1935, that is a particularly questionable assumption given the practices of the predominantly white police officers responsible for making those arrests. Events are grouped into additional subcategories based on different features of those categories, who was involved, and whether an arrest or prosecution followed. The Assaults page, for example, includes links to the fifty-four events grouped as assaults. It also features fifteen related tag pages for the subcategories into which those events are grouped. Six tags are forms of assault, six tags are based on the identities of the alleged victim, and two tags are based on the police response. There is also a tag for assaults by police, to highlight a gap in the data: the absence of specific incidents of violence by police notwithstanding widespread statements about police beating and shooting at people on the streets. Additional tags group those who were injured in alleged assaults, alleged assaults that resulted in arrests, and arrests that resulted in prosecutions. In combination, these subtags create a dense web of relationships between the events grouped as assaults. Employed in that way, categories bring patterns in the disorder into focus at multiple scales. While classifying data necessarily simplifies it, a more complex, disaggregated view of the events is accessible in the maps and in the layer of pages discussing individual events linked to each page analyzing a category.

Event data also provided the basis for a spatial analysis of the disorder. For 315 events there was information on location that allowed a map of where the disorder happened to be created. Identifying the individuals involved in those events made it possible to map the residences of many of them, providing a sense of where those on Harlem's streets that night had come from. However, the maps are a partial picture, including only a portion of the events of the disorder. For forty-nine of the 128 arrests, 38% of the total, no information on location was found. Of the seventy-nine that can be mapped, information on the timing of only forty-seven could be found. Overall, the timing of only half of the events (158 of 315) that can be mapped was known. With those qualifications, the map allowed a spatial analysis that explores how the disorder changed in character, intensity and concentration over time, and compares the spatial patterns of different categories of events.

To analyze the central role that businesses played in the disorder, the spatial data was visualized on a map that represents the footprints of the buildings in Harlem. The historical map layer was created from the Atlas of the City of New York, Borough of Manhattan, Volume 4, published by G. W. Bromley & Co. in 1932. Included on the atlas maps are information on the material from which buildings were constructed, the number of floors and whether they included a basement and stores, and information on the width of streets, presence of elevated railroad and subway lines, and stations and trolley lines. This granular attention to Harlem's business landscape was extended using the 1940s Tax Department photograph collection. Intended as the basis for a more equitable property tax assessment, the images offer frontal views of over 720,000 properties in the five boroughs of New York City taken between 1939 and 1941. As photographic historian Gabrielle Esperdy puts it, the images serve as a "visual parallel to census data." Although the photographs were taken four to six years after the disorder, many of the businesses involved in the events of the disorder appear in them. Even when the businesses have closed or the photographs were taken from too great a distance for individual businesses to be identified, the buildings and storefronts in which they were located are pictured, providing a street-level view of the varying physical environment of the disorder. What the photographs do not convey is a sense of the crowds of people on Harlem's streets during the disorder. The photographers tended to work at times when few people were on the street or to wait until there were no people in the frame to take a photo, unsurprisingly given that their task was to capture images of the structures.
A (Digital) Form for the Argument The form of this publication was developed to fit the argument by taking advantage of features of the digital medium to extent the form of a monograph. Fitting the argument to the print form of the historical monograph would have required reducing the detail and the relationships between its elements with the effect of simplifying the complexity of the disorder. The digital medium allowed for a multi-layered, hyperlinked narrative that connects different scales of analysis: individual events, aggregated patterns, and a chronological narrative. As a long-form study that makes a sustained argument based on in-depth research, this publication fits how historians characterize the form of a monograph. The label which best captures this combination of features is digital monograph.

Where a print book forces the use of only a selection of sources, the immersive and interactive digital medium offers the capacity to store and present quantities of information. That evidence can be directly connected to narrative rather than presented only as fragmentary quotations and citations that provide directions for locating information as it is in print books. In that way, a digital form fits the different research practices of digital historians that Edward Ayers highlighted in 2001:
“In conventional practice, historians obscure choices and compromises as we winnow evidence through finer and finer grids of note-taking, narrative, and analysis, as the abstracted patterns take on a fixity of their own. A digital archive, on the other hand, reminds us of the connections we are not making, of the complications of the past, every time we look at it."

It is not simply the scale of its content that makes a digital form of publication different. It is how, as Janet Murray pointed out, that material can be used “to tell stories from multiple vantage points and to offer intersecting stories that form a dense and wide-spreading web.” Murray’s description of that opportunity employs metaphors that invoke the spatial property of the digital medium, a web with threads of linked elements to be navigated and intersections that pose choices in contrast to the single linear path offered by a print book. For historians, those properties offer an opportunity to present an argument that, by linking multiple threads together “as layered or branching or interweaving narratives,” conveys the complexity of the past more directly than the form of a print book. Some readers of early experiments of what was initially called hypertext history, expecting the flow of argument associated with the book, found navigating that complex form difficult and struggled to find and follow the argument. However, for data-driven digital history, that disruption to reading is a feature not a bug. Links can call attention to the analytic and interpretive processes and decisions that create the data from which arguments derive. As Johanna Drucker has advocated; they contribute to “an interface that is meant to expose and support the activity of interpretation.”

The particular form of this publication draws on the vision that Robert Darnton offered in 1999 of an electronic book structured “in layers arranged like a pyramid." Where Darnton conceived layers as augmentations of a top narrative layer, providing thematic accounts, documentation, historiography, suggestions for classroom uses, and commentary, as an elaboration of a print book rather than the basis for a different form or argument, I have reimagined the layers in terms of scale. The top layer of Harlem in Disorder is a three-part chronological description narrative, sections 3-6 in the table of contents, that cover the events of the night of March 19, 1935, the prosecutions that spanned the following several months, and the investigation undertaken by the Mayor's Commission on Conditions in Harlem (MCCH) that culminated in a report submitted to New York City’s Mayor more than a year later. Linked to those pages are an additional layer of pages that examine categories of events, stages and outcomes in the legal process, and the forms, process, and reporting of the investigation and aggregate those groupings at different scales. Pages on the individual events of the disorder, of the legal process and the investigation are a further layer, section 7 in the table of contents. The sources, section 8 in the table of contents, are the final layer, each a page to which all the notes citing that source are linked.

A useful comparison with this project is Lincoln Mullen’s America’s Public Bible: A Commentary, another publication of Stanford Digital Projects that also reimagined Darnton’s layers. In an explanation of “How to use this website,” he describes how “the different elements of the site form an interpretative pyramid, something like the e-books that Robert Darnton envisioned." Scale serves as the basis of Mullen's layers, reflecting the form and process of his argument; namely, “identifying, visualizing, and studying quotations in American newspapers." At the base is a dataset of millions of biblical quotations that appeared in newspapers, a selection of which are aggregated into trend lines showing the appearance of a verse over time in another layer. Two narrative layers offer interpretations of that data: verse histories for a selection of the data, and essays on broader questions in the history of the Bible in the United States and the most popular verses and genres of verses. Mullen captures the different balance between data and narrative in the forms of our arguments when he labels America’s Public Bible an “interactive scholarly work," presumably evoking William Thomas’ definition. As “hybrids of archival materials and tool components,” “interactive scholarly works have a limited set of relatively homogeneous data, and they might include a textual component on the scale of a brief academic journal article." The emphasis on narrative and the diversity of sources of Harlem in Disorder, by contrast, fit Thomas’ definition of a digital narrative: a “highly configured, deeply structured” “work of scholarly interpretation or argument embedded within layers of evidence and citation”, with “explicit hypertext structures” that situate evidence and interpretation in ways that allow readers to unpack the scholarly work."

The multi-layered, hyperlinked form for the argument of Harlem in Disorder was constructed using Scalar, an open-source digital authoring and publishing platform developed by the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture at the University of Southern California. Scalar is based on reconceiving the database in humanities terms: a “speculative remapping of rigidly logical structures toward more conceptual ones, creating possibilities for many-to-many relations of diverse and varied kinds,” to use the words of Tara McPherson, part of the team that developed Scalar. For this publication, the key feature is Scalar's flexible structure, which “allows you to model conceptual structures in a variety of ways, exploring the full capacity for various sequences and groupings.” Equally important, Scalar supports arguments that move across scales, “as scholars are able to move from the microlevel of a project (perhaps a single image or video annotation) to the structure of the entire project and its integrated media. The researcher can create careful readings within a project of many components that can also be instantly represented as a whole collection."

Scalar's paths and tags were used to create and link the elements of Harlem in Disorder. Paths are sets of sequential pages, which can contain subpaths, or branching narratives. The chronological narrative that spans sections 3-6 is constructed using paths. Tags create categorical groupings, which can also refer to other tags to create linked groupings. The tag is the key to creating relationships that group the elements of this publication into scales of analysis and link and interweave data, categories, and narrative. Tags appear at the bottom of a page, making individual events a visible part of the sections of the chronological narrative in which they occurred, and of the multiple categories of which they are a part. On pages for individual events, tags make visible contexts for an event, including how many events are in each of those groupings (e.g., “Assaults (54)”). In other platforms, clicking on a tag takes a user to links to all of the pages that have that tag; in Scalar, clicking on a tag takes you to a page. As a page, a tag can be not just a means of connection and collection, but also a site for analysis and interpretation that itself can have tags that are used to create subcategories and multiple connections between elements of the argument.

This interactive structure lets a reader start by following the chronological narrative, then depart from it at a point of interest to focus on a specific event and arrive at a page that contains tags that link to more information about events related to that event in some way and notes that link to sources. Clicking on a tag takes you to a different layer of argument, or an analysis of a category of events. The ability to move across individual events and different groupings of events embodies the complexity of the disorder while also highlighting how the shape of that argument is the product of choices about how to categorize events identified in the sources. Wherever you are in the project, Scalar’s menu provides multiple options for finding your way: under the compass menu, a list of recent pages on which to retrace your path; and under the list menu, a table of contents that provides a way to return to a section in the chronological narrative or category or event in the other layers of argument, or to the thematic introduction that lays out the overall argument. Navigating in this way, you can explore the argument through a process of weaving, drawing threads out of the narrative and interlacing them until they form a pattern that shows the complex mix of forms into which racial violence changed in 1935 to create a wide-ranging challenge to white economic and political power.