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• 1 2020-02-24T21:19:53+00:00 Injured (74) 79 plain 2024-03-01T17:58:37+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 2022-12-02T18:37:22+00:00 In Harlem court on March 20 (76) 57 plain 2024-01-25T21:35:19+00:00 Seventy-six of those arrested in the 28th Precinct, south of West 130th Street, during the disorder appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20. Magistrate Renaud decided just over half of those prosecutions. He rendered verdicts in only nine cases, convicting five men and one woman and discharging three men. That was far fewer cases than Magistrate Ford decided in the Washington Heights Court that day in large part because those arraigned in Harlem faced more serious charges. Renaud sent twelve others for trial on misdemeanor charges in the Court of Special Sessions and eighteen more charged with felonies to the grand jury. The remaining thirty-seven people he remanded in custody on bail. Those hearings were reported in all of Harlem’s white newspapers, but not in Black newspapers, which did not report the disorder until March 30, when they reported later court appearances. The newspaper stories varied in detail, with most only offering general accounts.
  
  Descriptions of the scene at the court emphasized the number of police present and how they kept onlookers at a distance. The Home News put the number of police at fifty, the New York Post at sixty-five. The New York Times reported “Heavy police guards composed of men on foot, mounted and on motorcycles, surrounded the courts,” the Home News reported “cordons," and later that “Heavy police guards surrounded the courts and held back many colored persons who attempted to enter the buildings,” the New York Sun “lines of policemen formed in the street” that stopped anyone from going “west of Third Avenue or east of Sylvan Place," the Daily News that “Spectators were kept a block away from the buildings," and the New York American that the court was "heavily guarded,” with the "crowd gathered in the vicinity but was not permitted near the courthouse.” Only the Daily News noted the police presence in the crowd itself, that “plainclothesmen prowled through the crowds.”
  
  The New York Sun also reported an additional 25 officers in the court building, ten on the stairs leading up to the courtroom and 15 in the courtroom itself, the Daily News more generally that “police lined the corridors of the courts.” Despite police restricting access to the courthouse, newspaper stories did mention the presence of spectators in the courtroom. That crowd had arrived early according to the New York Post, which reported that by 9:30 AM the space had become so crowded that the doors were closed. The Times Union described those present as Black, while the New York Evening Journal said the courtroom was crowded with participants in the disorder, prisoners awaiting arraignment.
  
  Newspapers offered only slightly more details about the crowd outside the courthouse. Only the New York American put a number on those present, 1,500 people, which is likely an exaggeration given the sensational style of that publication. The New York Post described the crowd as lining the curbs outside the courthouse rather than giving its size. The New York Sun, New York Times, and Daily News mentioned crowds without describing their size. Those stories focused on the composition and behavior of the people, about which they offered contradictory pictures. Most of the spectators, inside and out, were Negroes, according to the New York Post, while the New York Times described them as “Negro friends of the prisoners assembled to attend the arraignments.” To the contrary, the Daily News portrayed them as “evenly distributed between white and colored.” Descriptions of how they behaved ran the gamut, with the New York Post portraying them as showing “clearly that they were there just to see the sights," to the Daily News insisting that they were “entirely orderly,” and the New York Sun and New York Times highlighting moments of anger, “a storm of boos and jeers from the crowd” as a wagon loaded with prisoners drove by in the New York Sun, and “considerable grumbling, some shouting of threats, but no violence” recounted in the New York Times.
  
  Two photographs published in the Daily News captured the arrival of prisoners at the Harlem courthouse. In a photograph that appeared on the front page on March 21, shot from street level, a crowd can be seen in the background, held back by a uniformed patrolman, the elevated railway line indicating that they were on 3rd Avenue. An injured man is visible in the photograph; unlike the photograph published in the same newspaper of men being loaded into a wagon at the 28th Precinct, the caption to that image made no mention of the man’s injury. However, a second photograph published in the Daily News of a different group of men exiting a wagon and entering the court, shot from above, did draw attention to prisoners’ injuries, in both the headline and caption attached to it. “Casualties of Race War,” was the headline given to the image, which was captioned, “Prisoners of War! Wounded in the battle of Harlem, these prisoners arrive at Harlem Court in police wagon.” (It is difficult to determine which of the men shown in the photograph are injured as the only available image is scanned from microfilm and is of poor quality. One of the men in the foreground may have a bandaged head.) A third photograph of prisoners arriving at the courthouse, found in the Getty Images collection, is not attributed to a newspaper or agency and did not appear in any of the publications examined for this study. Taken from a similar elevated angle to the first of the Daily News images, it showed a different group of prisoners being taken into the courthouse. The different arrangement of vehicles indicates that the photographs are of two different groups of prisoners. None of the men in that image have visible injuries, nor did the caption reference any. It simply noted, “Members of the press as well as police officers watch as police vans escort the arrested to the courthouse the day after rioting in the Harlem neighbourhood in the Manhattan borough of New York City, New York, 20th March 1935.”
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  As was the case in reports of the police line-up, several newspaper stories included incidental mentions of the visible injuries of many of those under arrest. The New York World-Telegram merely noted “many battered and sore” among the prisoners. The Daily News mentioned that “numerous minor defendants appeared in court with bandaged and plastered heads” but only to contrast them with the group of alleged Communists, none of whom was “hurt.” Alone among the mentions of injured prisoners, the New York Sun story explicitly stated what would have been widely understood to be the source of their injuries, describing “Groups of prisoners battered and bruised after their furious battles with the police.” The implicit acceptance of police violence against Black New Yorkers by the white press stood in stark contrast to the attention and criticism it attracted in the Black press.
  
  Only the New York Evening Journal and Home News published lists of those being arraigned, neither of which was complete. The Home News identified thirty-seven of the seventy-six individuals, including their name, address, charge, the magistrate’s decision, the amount he set for bail, and also brief descriptions of their alleged offense. (In several cases those descriptions provide the only details of those events.) Three of those omitted were discharged; those discharged were also omitted from the publication's list of those arraigned in the Washington Heights court. There is no obvious reason why the other thirty-six were not listed. As discussed below, the New York Post, Daily News, and Daily Worker did note the speed with which cases were processed, which might have made it difficult for reporters to hear or otherwise gather information about them. The list in the New York Evening Journal also included the name, address, charge, the magistrate’s decision, and the amount he set for bail, without any information on the alleged offense. (My copy of this story is incomplete, so I do not know how many of those arraigned the newspaper identified; sixteen names are visible, but there were more in the list.)
  
  The appearances of the four alleged Communists, Daniel Miller, Murray Samuels, Sam Jamison, and Claudio Viabolo, and in some cases Harry Gordon, also arrested at the beginning of the disorder were the only widely reported arraignments, with the Daily News, New York American and New York Evening Journal, also publishing photographs of the men leaving the 28th Precinct station for court. While the Daily News, New York Herald Tribune, New York World-Telegram, and Daily Mirror included all five men in that group, the New York American, Home News, and New York Times omitted Gordon. And the New York Sun mentioned four white men but identified only Gordon. That difference appears to have resulted from Gordon being arraigned separately from the three Young Liberators and Miller. That separation would have resulted from Gordon being arrested by a different police officer. The Daily News claimed Gordon "was heard separately when he indicated that he would produce his own lawyers." The New York World-Telegram simply reported that “The fifth [man] was to be arraigned later in Harlem Court.”
  
  These men drew reporters’ attention at least in part because police identified them as the instigators of the disorder, a claim that the Daily Worker reported that ADA Carey also made during the men’s arraignment. The New York American, Home News, New York Herald Tribune, and New York Times all described the men as the "ringleaders" of the disorder, which was likely the term police used. The Daily Mirror elaborated that description in more sensational terms, describing them as “the curb-stone orators who had deliberately incited the 125th St. mobs to looting frenzy,” while the Daily News and New York World-Telegram used less sensational variations, with the Daily News describing them as those “whose propaganda is blamed for the riot” and the New York World-Telegram describing them as “accused of store picketing activities alleged to have been the direct causes of the riot.”
  
  The stories also labeled the men Communists, with the New York World-Telegram and New York Sun directly attributing that information to police. The Daily Worker obliquely confirmed that source, reporting “Authorities declared that they 'would prove they were Reds.'” The anti-Communist Daily Mirror claimed the men identified themselves, that they were “all admitted Communists.” While the other stories did not explicitly label the men Communists, they identified the lawyers who represented them, details which would have conveyed to their readers that they were Communists. The Home News, New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, and Daily News all described the lawyers as from the ILD, well known in the 1930s as the legal arm of the Communist Party. The Daily Mirror explicitly made the connection in its story, stating that the men's "Communistic affiliations were declared" by the identity of their attorneys. The Daily Mirror and Daily Worker named the lawyers as Miss Yetta M. Aronsky and I[sidore] Englander, while the Daily News named only Aronsky, and the New York Herald Tribune and New York Times reported only "a woman lawyer" who would not give her name to their reporters. (Englander later testified about being present in the court in a public hearing of the MCCH.)
  
  The other element of the men’s arraignment that drew attention was the bail of $2,500 that Magistrate Renaud set for Miller and the three Young Liberators (but not for Gordon). While the New York Herald Tribune, New York American, New York World-Telegram, Home News, and New York Times simply noted the amount of the bail, the Daily Mirror noted that sum was the “maximum bonds,” and was requested by the prosecutor, Carey. Without noting the high level of the bail, the Daily News reported that the men’s ILD lawyers “protested vehemently against the amount of bail.” That story also reported that one of those lawyers, Aronsky also complained that the men "had not been fed by police following their arrest," a detail that only the Daily Worker also reported. Magistrate Renaud responded to that complaint with a “retort,” the Daily News reported obliquely, and by saying “that he had no responsibility in the matter,” according to the Daily Worker.
  
  Newspapers reported the other arraignments with summary statements (The Daily Mirror and New York Herald Tribune reported only the arraignments of the alleged Communists). That most cases were not decided but instead held over for further hearings, was noted by the New York American, New York Times, Home News, and Daily Worker. The New York Post and Daily News specified that it was defendants facing the “more serious charges” that were held on bail, with the New York Post identifying those charges as burglary and inciting to riot. The New York Sun merely noted that “The more serious cases were brought before Magistrate Renaud in the Harlem Court.” Only the New York Post, New York Times, and Daily News also noted that Renaud did decide some cases. Where the New York Times simply reported that “several were sentenced immediately,” the Daily News specified that “In the cases of those charged with misdemeanors he invariably found them guilty and held them either without bail for investigation or in bail of $500 for sentence Friday" and the New York Post add the detail that these were “The relatively unimportant charges, disorderly conduct, simple assault and so on” in which “Small fines with alternative jail sentences were administered, with most of the prisoners taking the jail terms.” The summary details offered by the Daily News and New York Post mask the small number of cases Renaud decided: he convicted only five men and one woman, and actually acquitted three other men, of the total of seventy-six who appeared before him. He also did not sentence any of those he convicted, instead ordering them investigated and returned to court for sentencing three days later, on March 23. What the New York Post described happened in the Washington Heights court, not the Harlem court.
  
  The other feature of the hearings noted in those stories was the speed, the short time taken on each case. An early edition of the New York Post reported that “cases were handled with almost unprecedented speed.” A later edition elaborated that minor charges were “handled at a speed of ten minutes or less to a case” and more serious charges “also were jammed through rapidly.” The Daily Worker, which cast the work of the “capitalist courts” as “frame-up cases and grinding out convictions,” had case handled even faster: “30 cases of Negroes were disposed of in almost as many minutes.” The Daily News described the speed in terms of the activities involved rather than time: “As rapidly as overtaxed court clerks could draw the necessary papers Renaud heard defendants.”
  
  Newspaper stories had little to say about how those in the courtroom reacted to the proceedings. What they did mention suggested a wariness that the Black community might see racial discrimination at work that could prompt further disorder. Only the Daily News reported that Magistrate Renaud expressed such concerns at the beginning of the hearing, announcing that at his request Assistant District Attorney Richard E. Carey, who was Black, had been assigned to prosecute the accused rioters so that "there can be no charge of discrimination." Only the Brooklyn Daily Eagle also explicitly linked Carey’s role to racial tensions, pointed to him being the prosecutor in the Harlem Court to claim “it could hardly be said there was racial discrimination against the Negro Prisoners.” That story did not mention that Renaud had requested Carey. The Daily Mirror did note that Carey, whom the story described as “a colored attache of District attorney Dodge’s office,” was specially assigned at the demand of Renard without providing his explanation for that request. The New York Post and Daily Worker simply noted Carey’s involvement in the prosecutions. On at least one occasion, Carey’s involvement produced the racial tensions Renaud had sought to prevent, according to stories in the Daily News and Times Union. The fullest account was provided by the Daily News: “…when a white attorney, who refused to give his name to reporters, sought to inject a question of race while a colored patrolman was testifying against Leo Smith, 18, of 305 E. 118th St., who is white, Renaud denounced the attorney. 'The patrolman in this case happens to be colored, the Judge happens to be white and the prosecutor is colored.' said Renaud. 'We recognize no race, color or creed here. We are looking for justice and law and order.'" Missing from that story was the reaction in the courtroom, which is what the Times Union reported: “The tenseness lingering from the night was apparent in Harlem Court, where Negroes in the jammed room muttered disapprovingly as a lawyer for a white defendant hinted the trouble was started by Negroes and was racial in origin. Magistrate Renaud quickly reprimanded the attorney.” (Strikingly, that account, and mention of Margaret Mitchell’s reaction to be charged — that she "denied hysterically she participated in the rioting. She stood up from the witness chair screaming, then collapsed" — are the only references to the court proceedings in the Times Union story). Neither story made clear just what Smith’s lawyer had said. The Black officer who testifed against Smith was one of four Black patrolmen, together with a Black detective, that the Brooklyn Daily Eagle story referenced alongside Carey to refute the possibility of racial discrimination in the courts. The New York Herald Tribune was the only other newspaper to note that “Among the arresting officers were five Negro patrolmen and detectives.”
  
   
• 1 2022-11-26T20:10:24+00:00 Line-up at Police Headquarters (96) 33 plain 2024-02-15T20:51:59+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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