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• 1 2020-02-24T21:19:53+00:00 Injured (74) 75 plain 2024-01-27T02:20:56+00:00 At least seventy-four people suffered injuries from assaults, flying debris, and unknown circumstances during the disorder. Some newspapers reported higher numbers of injuries, which is likely the case given inconsistencies in the records. The Mayor’s Commission gathered two sets of hospital records, one which lists individuals attended at locations in Harlem, presumably by ambulances, and a second list of individuals attended by physicians with no information on where the treatment took place, which may be emergency room attendances. In addition to the thirty-nine injured individuals identified in those records, another thirty-three are listed as injured in newspaper reports, some recorded as being taken to Harlem Hospital (that number does not include individuals mentioned as involved in violence in newspaper stories who do not appear in lists of the injured). A United Press International (UPI) story reported that “Many of the injured were treated by ambulance surgeons, thus making an exact check on their number impossible,” implying that those numbers did not even capture everyone who received medical treatment, let alone all those who suffered injuries. Although the story claimed that fewer than fifty people required hospital treatment, the reporter estimated that up to 100 had been injured — and several of the publications that ran the UPI story used that figure as a headline. The Associated Press reported Harlem Hospital officials “estimated they alone treated about 70 victims,” but the hospital records and newspaper reports identify only forty-seven people attended by physicians from that hospital.
  
  The injured include forty-nine victims of assault; four other assaults involved attacks on individuals in vehicles that damaged cars and smashed windows, but did not result in reported injuries, and Thomas Wijstem died three months after the attack on him led to a prosecution for assault. Four of the men charged with assault are also recorded as being injured: Paul Boyett shot by a policeman who alleged he was part of a group assaulting Timothy Murphy; Charles Alston, who fell from a building roof to a ledge several floors below while trying to escape police; Isaac Daniels, arrested for assaulting Herman Young; and James Smitten, arrested for assaulting William Kitlitz. An additional man arrested in the disorder for inciting a riot, Hashi Mohammed, also appears in lists of the injured. Another five individuals are identified as injured by flying glass, and Stanley Dondoro was accidentally shot by police pursuing James Thompson. The remaining fourteen are listed as injured with no information on the circumstances that produced their injuries.
  
  
  Few of the injured suffered wounds severe enough to require being admitted to the hospital. Information is available for forty-three of the seventy-two injured individuals: physicians sent only twelve (28%) to the hospital. Six of those were shot and wounded (two other shooting victims were not admitted to the hospital, while the three men shot and killed were admitted, although one does not appear in hospital records). The other six individuals injured severely enough to be sent to the hospital received their wounds in a variety of circumstances: head wounds when assaulted by a group, by an individual and in unknown circumstances; and injuries to the leg and nose. The highest proportion came in assaults on individuals, but the numbers are very small (1/4, with no information in three cases). In terms of injury, the highest proportion sent to hospital were of those with leg injuries (2/5). By the day after the riot, March 21, only eight men remained in the hospital, according to the New York Herald Tribune.
  
  That combination of a high proportion requiring treatment and a small number admitted is at odds with accounts that emphasize shooting during the disorder, particularly on March 20. The New York Evening Journal's picture of the extent of injuries resulting from the violence seems particularly sensationalized and exaggerated:

  Ambulances raced through the streets to care for the wounded as the casualty list grew until it resembled some wartime engagement. The accident wards of Harlem, Sydenham, Knickerbocker and Jewish Memorial hospitals were jammed with victims of the mob's wrath. At first the victims were those injured by rocks or clubs. But as the night wore on and the looting and violence increased to a point never before reached in New York City, the police were forced to use their guns - were forced to use them to protect helpless whites from being beaten and kicked and stamped to death under the feet of the stampeding blacks. And then the reports carried the words: "Gunshot wounds."

  
  Not even estimates reported in other newspapers suggest injuries on the level of “some wartime engagement,” let alone as many as would result from violence “at a point never before seen in New York City.” Nor do the handful of gunshot victims support claims of widespread gunshot wounds.
  
  The injured attracted the attention of photographers from the Daily News, New York Evening Journal, and Daily Mirror, and appear in almost a quarter of the published images of the disorder. Those images span the experience of injury from wound to treatment to recuperation, and feature men and women, Blacks and whites, and police and medical staff: an unidentified white man knocked to the ground; an injured white police detective, Henry Roge, being helped by another officer (on the street in the New York Evening Journal and Daily Mirror and inside in a second photograph in the New York Evening Journal); an unidentified man waiting for an ambulance (likely in a police precinct); Dr. Sayet of Harlem Hospital treating an unidentified Black man in a police precinct; police officers carrying an unidentified Black individual on stretcher (likely Charles Alston); police officers picking up an unidentified injured man outside Harlem Hospital; doctors treating an unidentified Black man and an unidentified Black woman in Harlem Hospital; a room of people recuperating in hospital beds; a bandaged white woman, Patricia O'Rourke, leaving Harlem Hospital (on the front page of the Daily News); and an injured white woman, Elizabeth Nadish, at home. The presence of three Black individuals in these images is out of proportion with the number of Black men and women identified as injured in the sources, suggesting that those lists did not include all those injured during the disorder. Black men with bandaged heads also appeared among the men arrested during the disorder photographed being transported to court the next day, in photographs published in the Daily News, one on the front page, and in the Acme Photo Agency image below.
  
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• 1 2022-12-06T03:25:51+00:00 Before court on March 20 46 plain 2024-01-17T21:02:53+00:00 For eighty-six of the Black men, six of the white men, and four of the Black women police arrested during the disorder, the legal process began with a trip in police wagons from Harlem to Police Headquarters downtown at 240 Center Street for a line-up. At least at the 28th Precinct station on West 123rd Street, where most of those arrested were held, they were led out on the front doors on to the street to be loaded into the wagons. On that walk the men and women had to pass by a gauntlet of white press photographers and cameramen. Many of those under arrest showed signs of police violence during the disorder, bandages over wounds to their heads and hands, visible bruises, and torn clothing. The attention these men drew from reporters indicated that there were many more injured than the five arrested men identified in newspaper stories and medical records. Some of the twenty-nine men and women who had been arrested missing from the line-up had more serious injuries that kept them in Harlem's hospitals. Police officials were clearly still trying to establish exactly how many arrests had been made as they gave different totals to reporters, ranging from 113 reported by the New York Post to 121 reported by both the Home News and New York Times and 127 reported by the New York American. Three of those arrested during the disorder had already appeared in the Night Court the previous evening; Magistrate Capshaw had found Claudius Jones guilty of disorderly conduct for "refusing to obey police order to move away from a Harlem corner" and given him a suspended sentence, remanded James Smitten, charged with assault, and held Leo Smith on bail to appear in the Harlem court.
  
  While the morning line-up was part of police practice, the number of prisoners coming from Harlem made it anything but routine. Police diverted traffic and cleared parked cars from the blocks surrounding the headquarters building to ensure access for the collection of patrol wagons. Even after crowding the prisoners disembarking those wagons into cells, there was not space for all those brought to police headquarters. Most were instead put in the photographic gallery.
  
  Police then took groups of three to five prisoners to a floodlit stage, where detectives questioned them. "Did you throw that stone," a detective asked Isaac Daniels, a twenty-nine-year-old Black man arrested for allegedly throwing a stone that smashed glass in the window of Herman Young's hardware store and went on to hit Young . "No sir, I didn't have any," Young replied. The detective then changed tack and asked Daniels, "Are you working now?" That question may have been for the benefit of representatives of the Department of Public Welfare and the Aldermanic Welfare Committee, who attended the line-up and took notes. Daniels answered, yes, for the C.W.A. Twenty-one others in the line-up identified themselves as unemployed and on public relief, with three more on relief until recently, circumstances that reporters for the New York Herald, New York Sun and Daily Mirror highlighted, implying that they thought it helped explain their alleged offenses.
  
  The detective then returned to the circumstances of Daniels' arrest. "What were you doing around there?" "I was coming home," Daniels replied. That was all the explanation Daniels was allowed to offer at this point in the legal process. The detective moved on to establishing Daniels' identity. "How long in New York?" "Since 1928." "Are you married?" "Yes Sir." "Where did you come from?" "Georgia." With that information, which likely helped police find his criminal record, the detective moved on to the next person in the line-up. Aubrey Patterson answered somewhat more effusively when asked to identify himself. In response to being asked if he was a citizen, the twenty-one year-old Black man said "I am a citizen of this great metropolis. I was born in this metropolis in 132nd Street." "What do you do for a living?" "I do laboring in the daytime and I go to school at nighttime." In extending beyond the brief, deferential answers offered by Daniels, Patterson's statements drew the ire of some of the white reporters observing the line-up. They described him as having "assumed a pompous air" and that he "gave off oratory to reply to most of the questions."
  
  Those charged with looting faced questions about items found in their possession when they were arrested, which in some cases they were carrying at the line-up. Several insisted they had found goods ranging from toothbrushes and shirts to cigarettes and bottles of milk lying in the street, denying that they had reached through broken windows to take them from stores. White reporters at the line-up dismissed those statements, reporting them either as simply an admission of having stolen the items or defenses that lacked credibility
  
  Aubrey Patterson declined to answer questions about the looting with which he was charged. One white reporter made fun of the explanation he offered, claiming that it drew laughter from some of those observing the line-up: "I don't want to extricate myself from any guilt." Patterson may have misspoken; those in the room may also have misheard him, especially as the question posed to him about his citizenship suggests that he had an accent, likely West Indian. Either way, making fun of Patterson served to present him, and the others arrested during the disorder, as less threatening.
  
  At least one other prisoner also declined to answer questions. In his case, those in the room reacted differently. Harry Gordon was one of the white men arrested outside the Kress store at the very beginning of the disorder. He was grouped on the line-up stage with the three other white men and the Black man identified as members of Communist Party organizations arrested around the same time: Daniel Miller and Murray Samuels, Sam Jamison, and Claudio Viabolo. Gordon identified himself as "a student at City College of New York," and then refused to answer any further question. Standing with one hand in his pocket, he announced, "I have no comment to make until I see my lawyer. I understand that anything I might say would be used against me." Captain Edward Dillon tried again, asking "If you are not guilty why do you want to see a lawyer?" "I know all that, but I won't talk until I see my lawyer," Gordon responded with a wave of his hand. Journalists in the room described Gordon as "defiant," his stance as a "Napoleonic pose," his statement marking him out to Daily Mirror's reporter as "the inciter of the night's rioting." As was the case with the city's then stridently anti-Communist Hearst newspapers, that publication was far more interested in the radicals arrested during the disorder than the Black residents. The four avowed Communists did not appear to respond in the same way. Viabolo, at least, offered an answer to what he had been doing before his arrest: "We were picketing in front of the store. I heard that a child had been killed inside. I thought it ought to be called to the attention of the public, about the child being killed."
  
  After the line-up, the arrested men and women were loaded back into police wagons. Once again they encountered press photographers. Cameras followed them even into the wagons, capturing images of at least two groups not simply in police custody but contained in a cell-like space that conveyed that order had been restored in Harlem.
  
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  Escorted by police motorcycles, the wagons transported those under arrest uptown to be arraigned in the two courts whose jurisdictions encompassed the disorder, the Harlem court at 170 East 121st Street and the Washington Heights court at 455 West 151st Street.
• 1 2022-11-26T20:10:24+00:00 Line-up at Police Headquarters (96) 32 plain 2024-01-28T00:28:56+00:00 On the morning of March 20, police transported most of those arrested during the disorder from Harlem’s two police stations downtown to police headquarters for a line-up prior to their arraignment in the Magistrates courts. Only four white newspapers reported details of that line-up. The New York Herald Tribune and New York Sun devoted the most space to those events; the Daily Mirror offered an overview and a brief account of an exchange between Harry Gordon, one of the white men arrested in front of the Kress store at the beginning of the disorder, and Captain Dillon, one of the officers questioning prisoners. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle included a series of snippets in a list of “Highlights on the Harlem Front.” The Daily News, Daily Mirror, and Brooklyn Daily Eagle published photographs of prisoners being taken to the line-up and waiting in police headquarters.
  
  The stories presented those arrested as a group, emphasizing the scale of the disorder, in contrast with subsequent stories about the appearance of those prisoners in court, which named multiple individuals. The focus of the stories was those charged with looting and on Harry Gordon. No mention was made of those charged with assault. The only suggestion of violence by those arrested came in a photograph published on the front page of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle of prisoners after the line-up in the back of a police wagon that would take them back uptown to the Magistrates courts. One of several images of the prisoners being transported, in this photograph, as the caption described it, “in the left foreground a policeman is holding a long knife taken from one of the rioters.” There was no reference to that weapon in the newspaper’s story. However, many of those arrested were injured, described as having “battered heads and hands” in the New York Herald Tribune and “bruised and beaten and their clothing was torn” according to the New York Sun. Prisoners with those injuries appeared in images taken by press photographers as they were being transported to police headquarters. A Black man in the foreground of a Daily News image of prisoners being led into the back of a police wagon in front of the 28th Precinct had a large bandage around his head. The caption to that image was the only one to draw attention to the injuries of those arrested in the disorder, noting "First man in line was badly banged up." The same man also appeared in a second Daily News photograph exiting a wagon at the Harlem court. Two other men with bandages around their heads appeared among a half dozen prisoners photographed sitting in the rear of a wagon, in an Acme agency photograph that has been insightfully analyzed by Sara Blair. The newspaper stories offered no comment on those injuries, which almost certainly indicated that the men had been subject to violence by police.
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  Photographs of those being transported to and from police headquarters likewise offered images of groups of prisoners, albeit of only part of the large group referenced in the stories. The Daily News published multiple photographs of prisoners being transported to police headquarters: two views of a group being loaded into police wagons in front of the 28th Precinct, one from across the street showing the crowd of press around the entrance and a newsreel crew filming from the top of a van and another from next to the wagon (discussed above). Both showed approximately half a dozen men. The Daily Mirror also published a similar close-up photograph of men being loaded into a police wagon, likely taken at the same time and place, although the details are difficult to make out in the microfilm copy. Two photographs of men in the back of police wagons, one published in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and the other an Acme agency photograph, showed eight to ten men.
  
  The New York Herald Tribune reported ninety-six prisoners were involved in the line-up, while the New York Sun and Daily Mirror reported only eighty-nine. As the New York Herald Tribune used its number in a headline, it is treated as the more reliable. All three stories agreed that there were six white men and four black women in the group; the remainder were Black men. They also agreed that twenty-one of those questioned by police were on relief, three had been until recently, and one was a CWA worker. That information was likely obtained for the benefit of “a representative of the Department of Public Welfare and a representative of the Aldermanic Welfare Committee,” who attended the line-up according to the New York Herald Tribune. “Both took notes, presumably in checking the number of prisoners on the home relief rolls.” However many prisoners were brought to police headquarters, the number was more than the building’s cells could accommodate, according to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and New York Post. The former reported, “There weren't enough cells to go around for the Harlem visitors at headquarters and many were herded in the photographic gallery,” with the later specifying that "All prisoners were placed together in the photograph gallery as the cell block at Headquarters only has capacity for thirty." A photograph published in the Daily Mirror seemed to confirm the overcrowding, showing prisoners packed together behind bars. Not all of those arrested during the disorder were in the line-up. One hundred and six people would appear in court on March 20. None of the stories mentioned that some of those arrested were missing. A passing mention in the New York Post provided a possible explanation, noting that during the disorder "prisoners were herded in police stations when they did not require hospital treatment, and were sent to Headquarters this morning." Some of those arrested could still have been in the hospital at the time of the line-up or at least had not been transported back to a police station.
  
  Police led groups of three to five men and women on to a narrow, flood-lit stand to be questioned by detectives, according to both the New York Herald Tribune and Daily Mirror. A transcript of the exchange between a police officer and Isaac Daniels in the line-up contained in his district attorney's case file indicated the questions asked of those in the line-up: about an individual’s alleged offense, which elicited explanations; about details of that explanation; and about their identity in terms of time in New York City, marital status, and birthplace. Unfortunately, there are no records of the questioning of others police arrested during the disorder
  
  Other than the injuries suffered by many prisoners, the other detail that attracted the attention of the reporters was the goods that many of those in the line-up carried with them. The New York Herald Tribune simply reported that “Many admitted they had stolen articles such as clothing, groceries and toothbrushes in their possession when apprehended.” While the New York Herald Tribune simply presented those individuals as guilty of looting, the New York Sun added a sense of the answers they gave that complicated that picture: “Many admitted thefts from the stores damaged during the riot, stealing everything from toothbrushes to shirts and groceries, but all denied breaking the store windows, insisting that they had picked the articles up from the street after others had thrown them out of the stores.” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle also reported such responses only to make fun of them: “Many in the lineup still carried things they admitted picking up in the street but denied reaching into broken shop windows to secure. Cigarettes were the favorite item 'found.' One Negro woman still had in her possession five milk bottles. Police were doubtful that she drank as much milk as all that.”
  
  The Brooklyn Daily Eagle also made fun of some of the answers offered by Aubrey Patterson, a twenty-one-year-old Black man, statements also reported in the New York Herald Tribune and New York Sun. "'I don't want to extricate myself from any guilt,' said Aubert Patterson, colored, of 83 E. 113th St. Manhattan,” according to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, “in explaining (amid laughter) why he didn't want to discuss the charge of burglary against him." The New York Herald Tribune and New York Sun by contrast, quoted Patterson answering questions, although only the New York Sun reported the questions: "'Are you a citizen?' Capt. Dillon asked this prisoner, who had identified himself as Aubrey Patterson, of 83 East 113th Street. 'I am a citizen of this great metropolis,' replied Patterson. 'I was born in this metropolis on 132d Street.' 'What do you do for a living?' 'I do laboring in the daytime and I go to school at nighttime.'" The story framed that exchange by denigrating Patterson as having "assumed a pompous air when questioned by Acting Capt. Dillon and gave off oratory to reply to most of the questions." The New York Herald Tribune did not offer any similar judgement but did add that Patterson was "a light-skinned Negro"
  
  The other prisoner that reporters selected for attention was Harry Gordon, whom the New York Herald Tribune reported was grouped with Daniel Miller and the three Young Liberators in the line-up. Gordon’s response to being questioned was reported by the New York Herald Tribune, New York Sun, and Daily Mirror. The briefest mention appeared in the Daily Mirror, which reported only that "under the grilling conducted by Acting Capt. Edward Dillon" he declared "I am a student at City College of New York" and "refused to answer further questions." The reporter described Gordon's manner as "defiant." The other stories conveyed a similar judgment in their portrayals of Gordon. The New York Herald Tribune described him as "a tall, lanky youth [who] thrust one hand in his pocket and struck an orator's attitude" during the questioning; the New York Sun described his pose as "Napoleonic." Neither of those stories mentioned Gordon identifying himself as a student; they instead quoted him as refusing to answer questions until he saw a lawyer. The New York Sun quoted the exchange at the greatest length: 

  "I have no comment to make until I see my lawyer. I understand that anything I might say would be used against me."
  
  "If you are not guilty why do you want to see a lawyer?" he was asked.
  
  "I know all that," he replied with a wave of his hand "But I won't talk until I see my lawyer."

  The Daily Mirror concluded that Gordon, in responding as he did, "had practically declared himself the inciter of the night's rioting" and the leader of the four others arrested at the beginning of the disorder.
  
  The New York Sun alone included the response of Claudio Viabolo, who was in the same group as Gordon. The story did not name him, instead identifying him as “Another Negro, giving his version of the start of the trouble:”

  "We were picketing in front of the store. I heard that a child had been killed inside. I thought it ought to be called to the attention of the public, about the child being killed."
  
  Whereupon this Negro and his companions took turns on a soap box "informing the public," Capt. Dillon was told.”

  The inclusion of Viabolo’s answers was an unusual departure from reporting across the range of newspapers that consistently portrayed the Communists involved in the early part of the disorder as white. A striking example of that focus are the later photographs of this group taken in the 28th Precinct station house as they were being transported to the Harlem courthouse. Although Viabolo was visible in images published in the Daily News, New York American and New York Evening Journal, he was not identified as part of the group in the captions, and was cropped out of versions of the photograph published by several regional newspapers.

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