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1. 1 2020-09-24T17:03:34+00:00 Anonymous In the Daily News Anonymous 2 plain 2022-01-12T18:06:44+00:00 Anonymous

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• 1 2020-10-01T00:07:06+00:00 Harry Gordon arrested 67 plain 2022-02-17T04:03:41+00:00 Around 6 PM, Harry Gordon, a twenty-year-old white man was arrested in front of Kress' store on West 125th Street for assaulting Patrolman Irwin Young. Newspaper reports offer a wide variety of contradictory accounts of the circumstances of Gordon's arrest; some identified him as speaking to the crowd, others as caught up when police moved in to arrest the man who was speaking, another white man identified as Daniel Miller. Gordon was charged with grabbing Young's nightstick and hitting him with it. He denied assaulting Young, charging instead that the officer had hit him from behind with the night stick. A witness to the arrest, Louise Thompson, told the MCCH that Gordon did “nothing” while being “brutally beaten by two large Policemen.” Police arrested Miller, two other white men, Samuel Jamison and Murray Samuels, and a black man, Claudio Diabolo at the same time, charging them with inciting the crowd.
  
  After police arrested Gordon, they threw him in a patrol car and drove him to a police station. Interviewed by a Daily Worker journalist a week after the riot, Gordon alleged he was "kicked on the legs and knocked around" before being put in a cell. Police later put four Black men in the cell with him, one who Gordon described as "very badly beaten, his whole face and head swollen terribly, and covered with blood." When police took the group upstairs for questioning, and later fingerprinting, the beatings continued, with police officers calling them "vile, unprintable names" and threatening to shoot them. At the MCCH hearing on May 4, Gordon alleged that police officers continued to beat him around the shins as was being booked. After placing Gordon in a cell, Young allegedly later returned and took him to a room upstairs for a further beating with a club. While being held, Gordon testified, he was not allowed to contact a lawyer or his family and was not fed until he had been in custody for more than twenty-four hours and had been arraigned in the Magistrate's Court. [Does the transcript record him testifying with the same details as reported in the DW?]
  
  Gordon was among the group of around eighty-nine arrested put in a line-up and questioned by detectives in front of reporters downtown at Police Headquarters on the morning of March 20, before being loaded into patrol wagons and taken back uptown to the Harlem and Washington Heights Magistrates Courts. While Gordon stood on the "klieg-lit platform," Captain Edward Dillon questioned him about his role in the disorder, an exchange reported in three newspapers. The briefest mention appeared in the Daily Mirror, which reported the details of the setting, but only that "under the grilling conducted by Acting Capt. Edward Dillon" Gordon 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." Other reporters 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 mention Gordon identifying himself as a student; they instead quote him as refusing to answer questions until he saw a lawyer; the Sun reported Gordon as saying:

  "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. Gordon himself, testifying at the MCCH hearing, set himself apart, as a passerby who had attempted to urge the crowd to go to the police for information. Inquiries by reporters from the New York Evening Journalfound no evidence that Gordon was a City College Student, with the New York Herald Tribune reporting Dean Morton Gottschall did not find him in college records. The New York Evening Journal did confirm that he lived in the Bronx, at 699 Prospect Avenue.
  
  Gordon appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, shortly after the four alleged Communists arrested at the start of the disorder. Only the Daily Mirror included the detail that Gordon said he would produce his own lawyer rather than be represented by the International Labor Defense lawyers who appeared on behalf of the other men. Although the Home News, New York Post, New York World-Telegram, New York Age, and the list published by the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, reported the charge against him as inciting a riot, the charge recorded in the Magistrates Court Docket book was assault; initially felonious assault, but the clerk struck that out and wrote "Red[uced] to Simple Assault misd[emeanor]." The charge of assault was reported by New York American, New York Evening Journal, New York Times and New York Herald Tribune. A second list in the New York Evening Journal, a later story in the New York Herald Tribune, and the New York Amsterdam News, Daily Mirror and New York Sun reported Gordon had been charged with both offenses. The inconsistent reporting may have resulted from confusion about whether Gordon was included alongside the other four alleged Communists in informations charging inciting a riot that the DA obtained from the grand jury (an information was a charge for an offense less serious than a felony, whereas an indictment charged a felony offense). According to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, after being arraigned, Gordon and the three white men, Miller, Jamison and Samuels, had been "taken to the District Attorney's office for questioning on possible charges of indictment to riot." The New York Evening Journal and New York Sun announced the first grand jury charges without naming those charged; the New York Herald Tribune and New York Daily News stories distinguished "two informations charging five persons with inciting riot." The Daily Mirror named Gordon and the four other men as those charged. However, Gordon's case proceeded in a different way than those of the men charged with inciting a riot.
  
  Magistrate Renaud remanded Gordon to reappear on the March 25, on a bond of $1000; the magistrate also remanded the other four alleged Communists, but for them set the maximum bail of $2500. Gordon returned to court, at the same time as the other four alleged Communists; while they were discharged so they could be indicted, Renaud remanded Gordon again to appear on March 27, with the New York American reporting "his case, it was said, is being investigated by the Grand Jury." (The only other newspaper to report this appearance was the New York World-Telegram). When Gordon did appear again, Renaud instead transferred him to the Court of Special Sessions, a decision only reported in the New York Amsterdam News,  New York Times and New York Herald Tribune. That court had jurisdiction over misdemeanors such as the charge against Gordon. The outcome of his trial is unknown.
• 1 2020-03-11T21:10:35+00:00 Sam Jamison, Murray Samuels and Claudio Diabolo arrested 39 plain 2022-02-19T02:48:15+00:00 Around 6.30 PM, three men arrived at the front of Kress’ store and began picketing. Two of the men, ? year-old Sam Jamison and ?-year-old Murray Samuels were white; Claudio Diabolo was a ?-year-old Black.
  
  
  
  The charges against the men were widely reported. [Which papers identified which] men identified as college students (?) with addresses in the Bronx (?). Diabolo resided at an address in Harlem. The New York Evening Journal sought out Miller and Jamison (and Gordon - but not Viabolo) after their release on bail, and reported that that Miller's address did not exist and that no one knew Jamison at the address he gave. [which lists are they in, note Diabolo vs Viabolo spelling]. Reporters also inquired at City College, which found only Murray Samuels in its records - although the New York Evening Journal reported on March 28 that that Murray Samuels was not the man involved in the disorder.
  
  
  The three men were arraigned in the Harlem Magistrates Court the next day, charged with inciting a riot [together with Miller?]. [Note Hearst papers that anticipate violence at their arraignment]. When their names were called, two lawyers from the International Labor Defense Fund rose to represent them, identified by the Daily Mirror as "Miss Yetta M. Aronsky and I. Englander." The Daily Mirror reported that Magistrate Stanley Renaud "demand[ed]" that the men's case be assigned to Richard E. Carey, a Black ADA, but the New York Daily News reported the appointment as coming at the opening of the court, when Renaud announced "that at his request Assistant District Attorney Richard E. Carey, who is colored, had been assigned to prosecute the accused rioters so that "there can be no charge of discrimination."" Carey requested the men be held for a hearing on Friday on the maximum bail of $2500, a sum that drew protests from the ILD lawyers. Renaud dismissed those protests, and complaints by one of the lawyers, reported by the New York Daily News, that the men "had not been fed by police following their arrest."
  
  When the three men returned to court with Miller, the Magistrate dismissed the charges against them because they had been, or so they could be, indicted. The Magistrates Court docket book records the deposition of the men's cases as "Dism[issed], def[endant] indicted." Reports in the [Daily Mirror, New York Amsterdam News] more explicitly said they had been indicted by the Grand Jury. However, while the grand jury did send the men for trial, it was for a misdemeanor not a felony, so an information not an indictment, and to the Court of Special Sessions not the Court of General Sessions. Few reports included that distinction. The New York American reported that after being discharged the men were "turned over to detectives with bench warrants based on the Grand Jury informations voted last week charging inciting to riot." The New York Herald Tribune also reported "two informations charging five persons with inciting riot" without naming them; so too did the New York Daily News, which alone specified that an information charged a misdemeanor and that the men were sent for trial in the Court of Special Sessions.
  
  That charge hardly matched District Attorney Dodge's rhetoric about the threat Communists posed, which is perhaps why he focused on cases being sent to the grand jury rather than their outcomes. The Grand Jury similarly sent all the other cases of inciting a riot that appeared before it to the Court of Special Sessions for prosecution as misdemeanors. While New York's riot statute specified one form of the crime that carried a punishment of imprisonment for not more than one year that could be considered a misdemeanor, the New York Appellate Court had held in 1920 that the crime of riot was always a felony, and so should have been prosecuted in the Court of General Sessions. If the men were being prosecuted for the form of the crime punishable as a misdemeanor, their crime was being treated as not involving efforts to prevent the enforcement of the law or incite force or violence, leaving only the broader offense of disturbing the peace.
  
  As other prosecutions resulting from the riot made their way through the courts there were no reports mentioning Miller, Jamison, Samuels and Diabolo. Finally, on June 20, the four men appeared in the Court of Special Sessions -- the New York Amsterdam News reported an additional defendant, a "young sympathizer," Dave Mencher, not mentioned in any other sources, or in the Daily Worker story, the only other report of this trial [so far - have to check other papers]. Only one prosecution witness testified before the court's three judges, Sergeant Bauer of the West 123rd Street station (likely the sergeant who testified at the public hearings that he was involved in the arrest, although his name was recorded as Bowe in the transcript). It is not clear why Patrolman Timothy Shannon, the arresting officer, did not appear as a witness. International Labor Defence lawyers again represented the men, but not the same attorneys as the day after the disorder. Instead, Joseph Tauber and Edward Kuntz, who played prominent roles in the MCCH public hearings, represented the men. After cross-examining Bauer to establish that a crowd had collected in front of Kress' prior to the men arriving, they moved to have the charges of inciting a riot dismissed. The judges agreed, and freed all four men.
  
   
• 1 2022-02-04T19:39:37+00:00 Daniel Miller speaks to a crowd 15 plain 2022-02-19T02:51:46+00:00 Around 5.30 PM, Daniel Miller, a twenty-four-year-old white man who identified himself as a member of the Nurses and Hospital League, left the Empire Cafeteria at 306 Lenox Avenue, just north of 125th Street, he testified in a public hearing of the MCCH. Walking along 125th Street toward his home at 35 Morningside Avenue, a man he knew named James Parton approached him, carrying a ladder and an American flag. Although Miller did not mention it, other witnesses identified Parton as a Black man. He told Miller, “there had been a little trouble and would you mind calling the Negroes and whites to boycott Kress store.” Parton then set up the ladder at 125th Street and 7th Avenue, “a corner frequently used for such purposes” according to the report of the MCCH Subcommittee. However, on this occasion when he started speaking the traffic officer at the intersection allegedly told him to “take that ladder in front of Kress’ store.”
  
  By the time the two men arrived in front of the store it was around 6.15 PM. Inspector Di Martini told a public hearing of the MCCH that he had left Kress’ store about fifteen minutes earlier, when the area seemed quiet to him. He left a Sergeant and four patrolmen stationed in front of Kress’ store, according to his report on the disorder. Patrolman Moran testified in a MCCH hearing he was stationed across 125th Street opposite Kress’ store. Patrolman Timothy Shannon, who had been in the store since 4 PM, must have been one of the officers stationed directly in front of the store, given his later involvement in arresting MIller, along with Sergeant Bowe, who testified he was a witness to that arrest.
  
  Climbing the ladder, Parton said “there had been some trouble in Harlem and [he?] would like to have the Negroes and whites come together,” Miller told a MCCH public hearing. Louise Thompson wrote in New Masses that she heard him speak of "'Negro and white solidarity against police-provoked race-rioting." Other witnesses and newspaper stories simply reported that Parton introduced Miller. About 150-200 people were in 125th Street around Kress when he climbed the ladder, according to Miller. As he began speaking, someone in the crowd threw an object that broke a window in Kress’ store, behind Miller. At that moment Patrolman Shannon pulled Miller down from the ladder and arrested him. (Although Shannon testified in the public hearing, he did not provide details about the arrest of Miller). Other police officers then "cleared the crowd from the front of the Kress store," Patrolman Moran testified in a MCCH hearing. The people who had been listening to Miller scattered, many moving across 125th Street to the opposite sidewalk. There James Parton attempted to again speak to the crowd, but was moved on by police. Further east on 125th Street, he was able to climb a lamppost and speak, after which he introduced another white man, twenty-year-old Harry Gordon. He too would be dragged down and arrested by police around 6.30 PM.
  
  As was the case with events inside Kress’ store, testimony in the public hearings of the MCCH provide the most detailed evidence of the events outside the store in the early evening of March 19. Louise Thompson testified on March 30, Patrolmen Shannon and Moran testified on April 6, and Miller and Harry Gordon testified on May 4. (Thompson’s article in New Masses mentioned only Miller speaking, without naming him). The MCCH Subcommittee report summarized that testimony briefly, a paragraph that appeared revised and slightly expanded in the final report. Neither narrative named the speakers.
  
  By contrast, newspaper stories truncated the events and presented Miller as arriving and acting together with the three members of the Young Liberators, two white men and one Black man, arrested about half an hour later picketing in front of Kress, and in some cases with Gordon. In those stories, the men’s speeches and actions were responsible for moving the crowd to violence. That portrayal reflected what police told reporters. (The MCCH final report argued that “It was probably due in some measure to the activities of these racial leaders, both white and black, that the crowds attacked property rather than persons.”).
  
  The New York American focused on Miller’s arrest by Shannon, triggered not by the broken window but after he refused an order to move on, and adding an episode that other evidence indicates did not happen: the two white Young Liberators and Gordon came to Miller’s aid when he was arrested, and battled Shannon and two other patrolmen before also being arrested. (That story, relying on information from the police, misidentified Gordon as picketing the store and portrayed the Black man who did picket, Viabolo, as a bystander “who had offered the boys help.”) A briefer version of that inaccurate narrative appeared in the NYEJ, without the names of the other officers involved, and omitting Viabolo. Both publications were Hearst newspapers, which shared an anti-Communist stance and a sensational style.
  
  The NYS identified Miller as speaker, but described an extended speech that aroused a crowd: “Miller's exhortations played upon their credulity until whispers that the boy had been murdered began to creep around the fringe of the restive mob.” Only after being “harangued” by Miller did someone in the crowd break a window (harangue was also the word used by the NYT, NYP, AA, NYEJ). The story did not mention the circumstances of his arrest. The NYT more briefly described a similar scene, while also mentioned Miller’s arrest. Neither newspaper included Gordon in the group of men. The NYP more briefly described Miller, Gordon and the two other white men as having been arrested for “haranguing crowds, urging them to fight.” The NYA reported the arrest of the four men in front of the store without details of what police alleged they had done. The HT, HN DN and AA initially reported only the presence of unnamed speakers, who the DN, AA, and HN gave an inflated role in moving those on the street to act, and did not mention that police arrested them.
  
  Additional stories featuring Miller appeared when he was arraigned in the Magistrates Court on March 20, including in the papers who the previous day had not named him and the others who spoke and picketed. Again, Miller was grouped with the three Young Liberators who picketed, following police presenting them as a group in court, with Patrolman as the arresting officer of all four men. In court, Gordon appeared separately, and charged with assaulting the police officer who arrested him. Gordon was also alone in speaking out in the police line-up, attracting attention from reporters. The DM reported Gordon identified himself as a college student, apparently leading that reporter to assume that Miller and the other men were also students. The NYT and NYS instead recorded Miller as unemployed, while other newspapers did not list an occupation. Police told reporters that Miller and the other men were all members of the Young Liberators and Communists, according to the NYS, a label also employed by the DN and NYA, and unsurprisingly, the three Hearst newspapers, the AM, DM and NYEJ. Lawyers from the ILD appearing in the Harlem Magistrates Court to represent them provided further confirmation of that association (Gordon refused that representation in favor of getting himself a lawyer, but that man was also an ILD attorney, Gordon revealed in the public hearing, who he claimed he knew through his son not political activities).
  
  In the public hearing, Miller testified he was a member not of the Young Liberators but of the Nurses and Hospital League. Nonetheless the goal of that organization, “to fight for Negro workers and Hospitals” still associated him with the Communist Party. So too did his choice of restaurant in Harlem. The Empire Cafeteria had been the target of a Communist Party campaign six months earlier, after which it became a regular advertiser in the Daily Worker. That Communist Party newspaper would report that the Empire Cafeteria was one of the businesses not damaged during the disorder.
  
  On March 29, several days after Miller and the other men appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court, and before the first public hearing of the MCCH, the DW published a detailed narrative of the events in and outside Kress at the beginning of the disorder. It was the only newspaper to revisit these events after the initial reporting. Police dragging Miller down and arresting him are included in that narrative. However, before the arrest, the story described an “orderly” meeting in which the “speakers urged unity of black and white workers in the fight against Negro oppression. They pointed out the discrimination in jobs, in housing, in relief. They referred to Scottsboro. They urged particularly that the workers guard against boss incitement to race riot, which would be the opposite of workers' solidarity in the struggle for Negro rights and for working class rights in general.” While that is likely what the Communist speakers would have said, Miller testified a little over a month later that no such meeting took place. “Fellow Workers” was all he said before a window was broken and police arrested him. The DW did not publish a story about the MCCH hearing in which Miller appeared. The newspapers that did publish stories on that hearing did not mention Miller. At the same hearing Gordon testified about how police beat him while he was in custody, and denied him food and access to a lawyer. That testimony was reported in stories in the NYT, Am, AA, NYA and an ANP story published in IR and AW, effectively overshadowing what Miller said. (AN for this week is missing). The WT, NYEJ focused on the upheaval in the audience, and the NYP on another police brutality case.
  
  Daniel Miller did not appear in the MCCH's transcription of the 28th Precinct Police Blotter; Claudio Viabolo, the Black Young Liberator, is the only one of the five speakers and picketers in that record. When Miller appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, the charge recorded in the docket book was riot. Assistant District Attorney Carey requested Miller be held for a hearing on March 23, on the maximum bail of $2500, like the three Young Liberators arrested after Miller for picketing Kress' store. The police grouped the four men together, telling newspaper reporters they were the "ringleaders" of the disorder. When Miller and the three other men returned to court, the charges against them were dismissed as the grand jury had already sent them for trial. While the Magistrates Court docket book recorded the deposition of the men's cases as "Dism[issed], def[endant] indicted," the grand jury had actually voted informations against them, sending them for trial on misdemeanor charges in the Court of Special Sessions, rather than indictments for more serious felony charges, a distinction most clearly reported in the Daily News. The men's trial did not take place until June 20. After hearing evidence that that a crowd had collected in front of Kress' prior to the men arriving, the judges found the men not guilty of inciting a riot, the New York Amsterdam News reported.
  
   
• 1 2022-02-04T19:41:26+00:00 Daniel Miller arrested 10 plain 2022-02-19T02:06:27+00:00
  
  The three men were arraigned in the Harlem Magistrates Court the next day, charged with inciting a riot [together with Miller?]. [Note Hearst papers that anticipate violence at their arraignment]. When their names were called, two lawyers from the International Labor Defense Fund rose to represent them, identified by the Daily Mirror as "Miss Yetta M. Aronsky and I. Englander." The Daily Mirror reported that Magistrate Stanley Renaud "demand[ed]" that the men's case be assigned to Richard E. Carey, a Black ADA, but the New York Daily News reported the appointment as coming at the opening of the court, when Renaud announced "that at his request Assistant District Attorney Richard E. Carey, who is colored, had been assigned to prosecute the accused rioters so that "there can be no charge of discrimination."" Carey requested the men be held for a hearing on Friday on the maximum bail of $2500, a sum that drew protests from the ILD lawyers. Renaud dismissed those protests, and complaints by one of the lawyers, reported by the New York Daily News, that the men "had not been fed by police following their arrest."
  
  When the three men returned to court with Miller, the Magistrate dismissed the charges against them because they had been, or so they could be, indicted. The Magistrates Court docket book records the deposition of the men's cases as "Dism[issed], def[endant] indicted." Reports in the [Daily Mirror, New York Amsterdam News] more explicitly said they had been indicted by the Grand Jury. However, while the grand jury did send the men for trial, it was for a misdemeanor not a felony, so an information not an indictment, and to the Court of Special Sessions not the Court of General Sessions. Few reports included that distinction. The New York American reported that after being discharged the men were "turned over to detectives with bench warrants based on the Grand Jury informations voted last week charging inciting to riot." The New York Herald Tribune also reported "two informations charging five persons with inciting riot" without naming them; so too did the New York Daily News, which alone specified that an information charged a misdemeanor and that the men were sent for trial in the Court of Special Sessions.
  
  That charge hardly matched District Attorney Dodge's rhetoric about the threat Communists posed, which is perhaps why he focused on cases being sent to the grand jury rather than their outcomes. The Grand Jury similarly sent all the other cases of inciting a riot that appeared before it to the Court of Special Sessions for prosecution as misdemeanors. While New York's riot statute specified one form of the crime that carried a punishment of imprisonment for not more than one year that could be considered a misdemeanor, the New York Appellate Court had held in 1920 that the crime of riot was always a felony, and so should have been prosecuted in the Court of General Sessions. If the men were being prosecuted for the form of the crime punishable as a misdemeanor, their crime was being treated as not involving efforts to prevent the enforcement of the law or incite force or violence, leaving only the broader offense of disturbing the peace.
  
  As other prosecutions resulting from the riot made their way through the courts there were no reports mentioning Miller, or Jamison, Samuels and Diabolo. Finally, on June 20, the four men appeared in the Court of Special Sessions -- the New York Amsterdam News reported an additional defendant, a "young sympathizer," Dave Mencher, not mentioned in any other sources, or in the Daily Worker story, the only other report of this trial [so far - have to check other papers]. Only one prosecution witness testified before the court's three judges, Sergeant Bauer of the West 123rd Street station (likely the sergeant who testified at the public hearings that he was involved in the arrest, although his name was recorded as Bowe in the transcript). It is not clear why Patrolman Timothy Shannon, the arresting officer, did not appear as a witness. International Labor Defence lawyers again represented the men, but not the same attorneys as the day after the disorder. Instead, Joseph Tauber and Edward Kuntz, who played prominent roles in the MCCH public hearings, represented the men. After cross-examining Bauer to establish that a crowd had collected in front of Kress' prior to the men arriving, they moved to have the charges of inciting a riot dismissed. The judges agreed, and freed Miller and the three other men.