This page was created by Anonymous.

This site requires Javascript to be turned on. Please enable Javascript and reload the page.

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

"Police Shoot Into Rioters; Kill Negro in Harlem Mob. 3,000 Storm Store After Boy Knife Thief, 16, Is Reported Lynched-Several Shot - Many Felled by Stones," New York Times, March 20, 1935, 1.

This page has tags:

Contents of this tag:

This page is referenced by:

Lino Rivera grabbed & Charles Hurley and Steve Urban assaulted 151 plain 2022-11-15T19:26:08+00:00
When Charles Hurley, a floorwalker, and Kress' store detective confronted Lino Rivera, an unemployed sixteen-year-old Puerto Rican boy, about stealing a pocketknife in Kress’ store, and started pushing him out of the store, the boy bit the hands of Hurley and a white window dresser who came to their aid, Steve Urban. Although having initially indicated that they wanted Rivera charged with assault, the two men ultimately did not ask police to arrest him. The incident is treated here as an assault as the New York Evening Journal, New York Post, New York American and Daily News listed the two men among the injured.

As the incident between Rivera and the store staff triggered the disorder, it was widely reported in the press and a topic investigated by the MCCH. This analysis relies on testimony given in MCCH public hearings, by far the most complete and detailed evidence. Newspaper narratives varied in detail, consistently reporting only that a boy had been grabbed by store staff for taking merchandise, and later released, but omitting most other details. Several white newspapers also published separate stories based on statements made by Rivera at the West 123rd Station during the disorder or at his home the next day that included additional details of why he was in the store and his encounter with the store staff but not of subsequent events in the store.

Rivera had begun the day by taking the subway to Brooklyn, in pursuit of job as an errand boy, he told reporters for the New York American and New York Herald Tribune. Finding the job already filled, he returned to Harlem. Getting off the subway at West 125th Street, Rivera decided to go to a show or movie at one of the theaters that lined the street, perhaps at the Apollo Theater opposite Kress' store, as a story in the New York Evening Journal claimed. When the show ended, Rivera went into Kress' store, a detail also reported in the New York Sun. He said he did so because he had "nothing to do," according to the New York Post, "just to look around I guess," according to the New York World-Telegram, or "to walk through to 124th Street," according to the New York American, "to take a short cut home," according to the New York Herald Tribune. Testifying in a public hearing of the MCCH, Hurley, a twenty-eight-year-old white resident of the Bronx, said he was with the store manager Jackson Smith in an office overlooking the rear of the store when he saw Rivera take a pocketknife from a counter around 2.30 PM. Calling down to the store detective, he pointed out Rivera and then headed to the floor himself. Rivera later admitted to reporters that he did take the knife, after it "caught his eye," according to the New York Post or "attracted" him according to the New York World-Telegram and New York American, or because it "matched a fountain pen set he had," according to the New York Herald Tribune. (The New York Sun mistakenly reported that it was chocolate that Rivera had taken). When Rivera denied having the knife, Hurley took it from the boy’s pocket. Both Rivera and Hurley testified that the men started to push him out of the store. According to Hurley, near the front door Rivera became scared and started to lash out at them. Rivera reportedly told journalists from the New York World-Telegram, New York Post and New York Evening Journal that he had told the men he could walk out on his own, and tried to shake free of their hold, "really started fighting" when, as he also testified in a MCCH hearing, Hurley said, "Let's take him down the cellar and beat hell out of him.” Hurley denied making that statement; he told the MCCH hearing that he held Rivera around his shoulders while the store detective tried to calm the boy. As a struggle developed, another store employee, Steve Urban, a thirty-nine-year-old white window dresser, also grabbed hold of Rivera, according to Hurley. Once the group was through the front door and into the store's vestibule, a recessed area of the street surrounded by display windows, the store detective went to get a Crime Prevention Bureau officer. That police agency provided an alternative to having children arrested; its officers instead undertaking investigations of their conditions in order to refer them to social agencies to better prevent “juvenile delinquency.” Kress store staff turned most of the boys they caught shoplifting over to the Crime Prevention Bureau, according to Hurley, and had police arrest only one or two a week.

Sometime after the store detective left, Rivera bit both Hurley and Urban on the hands and wrist, "trying to get away," he told a public hearing, reportedly explaining to journalists from that New York World-Telegram and New York Post that "I didn't want a licking." The struggle in the vestibule attracted the attention of Patrolman Donahue, who was the nearest of several police officers on West 125th Street at the time (identified in some newspapers as a traffic officer and by Rivera in a MCCH hearing as a mounted patrolman). Donahue took Rivera back into the store, to near the candy counter at the front, to get away from a curious crowd gathering on 125th Street, and sent an officer to get an ambulance to provide treatment for Hurley and Urban. (He told the MCCH hearing that the officer was his partner Keel, or another patrolman named Walton; the call log records the man's name as Miller, who was later identified by the store manager as a Black officer). The telephone call to Headquarters was logged at 2:30 PM, followed by one from Police Headquarters to Harlem Hospital at 2:35 PM, with the ambulance bringing Dr. Sayet recorded in the hospital records as having arrived at 2:40 PM. Those records provide better evidence of the timing of the incident than Donahue’s testimony that he witnessed the struggle at 2:15 PM. Soon after the ambulance arrived, the manager, Jackson Smith came to the front of the store, he testified in a public hearing, after being told a crowd had gathered by a staff member. Informed that a Crime Prevention Bureau officer had been called, Smith decided there was “nothing further for him to do,” and he returned to his office. A few minutes later Alfred Eldridge, a Black Crime Prevention Bureau officer, arrived. Usually the store staff would have turned Rivera over to Eldridge, who would have taken Rivera with him. However, on this occasion Hurley and Urban told Eldridge they wanted the boy arrested and charged with assault. Hurley told a public hearing he had gone to the rear of the store before Eldridge arrived, and did not want Rivera arrested, but the officer was clear that he spoke with both Hurley and Urban. The store manager similarly told a later public hearing that “Hurley wants to press charges for biting.” Eldridge could not take Rivera with him if he was arrested: “The job and purpose of our bureau is not to arrest a child," the told the MCCH hearing. He telephoned his superior, and told him that “the 5 & 10 wanted the boy arrested.” In response that officer told him to “let the patrolman take care of it due to the fact that he was first on case.” So after about 25 minutes at Kress, around 3:15 PM, Eldridge left the store.

However, Eldridge testified he later found out that soon after he left, “the store officials changed their mind.” Donahue simplified those events in the public hearing, testifying that “The boy was not arrested, but was taken through the basement to 124th Street and sent home.” He did not mention Eldridge or who reversed the decision to arrest Rivera. Hurley’s self-interested statement that he did not want him arrested made Urban responsible. Urban himself was not among those who testified before a MCCH public hearing. It does seem that it was Urban who Donahue said was with him when he released Rivera; the officer referred to him not by name but as “the window dresser.” They took Rivera out the rear rather than on to 125th Street as there was a crowd in front of the store and Donahue “didn’t want to start something,” he told a public hearing. He was clearly anxious enough about the situation in the store to ignore another option that Eldridge had given him, “that in the event that Kress Store did not want to press charges, that the boy could be handed over to us for supervision,” according to the Crime Prevention Bureau officer’s testimony. After releasing Rivera on to 124th Street, Donahue left the store, at around 3.30 PM. Many of the fifty or so mostly black women shopping in the store observed these events, after their attention had been attracted by the struggle between the two men and Rivera, and the appearance of an ambulance. None of these women testified in a public hearing. A Black man named L. F. Cole told a MCCH public hearing that he saw Rivera being taken to the basement by two men. As they had not seen Rivera leave the store, groups of women concerned to find out what had become of him remained in the store until Smith closed it and police pushed them out sometime around 5:00 PM or 5:30 PM.

Bites are a relatively minor injury, and the hospital record indicates that both men received treatment at the scene and were not taken to the hospital. Hurley did still have a scar when he testified at a MCCH public hearing on April 20. Hays examined it, announcing that “I should say enough [of a scar] to indicate there was a bite,” adding in response to a question from the audience that he saw four teeth marks.” Only one other individual in the disorder is described as having been bitten, Arthur Block, a Black man. He appears among lists of the injured in only three publications, with no details provided of the circumstances in which he was assaulted.

The significantly less detailed narratives of what happened between Rivera and the store staff published in newspapers largely reflected what Inspector Di Martini told a journalist working for the Afro American and others in front of the store around 7.30 PM: "A boy stole some little article here this afternoon. The manager caught him, grabbed him by the arm, and was taking him in the back when a woman screamed. The crowd gathered. The manager did not press charges, and let the boy go home through the back.” (At the at time, Di Martini’s information came only from interviewing Jackson Smith and Hurley, as both Donahue and Eldridge were off duty and would not learn of the disorder until the next day). Missing from that narrative was Rivera biting the men, which was also missing from stories in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, New York World-Telegram and New York Evening Journal, and Daily Worker. However, the assault was mentioned in the New York American, Home News, New York Sun, New York Herald Tribune, New York Times, Daily News, New York Post, Atlanta World, New York Age, Philadelphia Tribune, Pittsburgh Courier, La Prensa and in Time magazine and the New Republic. Only the New York American, Daily News and New York Herald Tribune included language that gave a particular slant to the assault, with the New York American and Daily News describing Rivera as “hysterical” in his response to being grabbed by Hurley and the store detective, while the New York Herald Tribune labelled him pugnacious. The New York Age reported that “someone” had hit Rivera, the New York Herald Tribune and Brooklyn Daily Eagle that Hurley or Urban “slapped him", or “slugged him” according to the Pittsburgh Courier, with the New York Age mistakenly reporting that he was being treated at Harlem Hospital. That story was in a special edition of the New York Age published in the midst of the confusion early in the disorder. Two stories, in the New York American and New York Sun, had Rivera leave the store rather than being released. A story in The New Republic by white journalist Hamilton Basso included dialogue, almost certainly invented, between Rivera and the two men who grabbed him and comments from a crowd around him (Basso also mixed up the sequence of events inside and outside the store after Rivera's release).

Several newspapers also published statements by Rivera made either at the West 123rd Street station after Eldridge, awoken at 1.30 AM, had located him and brought him to a police station around 2:00 A.M, or in his home the next day that provided more details of what happened before and when he was grabbed than the broad narratives. The New York Evening Journal, New York Herald Tribune, Daily News, New York Post, New York Sun, Atlanta World, and Philadelphia Tribune quoted Rivera at the police station describing biting the men and the threat to beat him that had precipitated that struggle. In an ANS agency photograph of Rivera, standing with Lt. Battle taken at that time journalists can be seen taking notes. It’s not clear if they questioned Rivera directly, or recorded answers he gave to police officers: the Daily News reported his statements as told to Deputy Chief Inspector Frances Kear, the New York Evening Journal and New York Sun reported he talked to Captain Richard Oliver, and the New York Herald Tribune quoted Eldridge rather than Rivera. The New York Evening Journal story also mentioned the reporter speaking with Rivera. The New York World-Telegram, and New York Herald Tribune published stories quoting statements made by Rivera at this home later on March 20; a New York American story combined statements from the station and at his home. The information that before entering Kress' Rivera had gone to Brooklyn looking for work, having left high school six months earlier, that his mother needed help because his father was dead was reported in the interviews published in the New York American and New York Herald Tribune. His father's death was also reported in La Prensa and the Brooklyn Citizen. Only the New York Herald Tribune, New York Evening Journal and New York Sun reported that Rivera went to a show after returning from Brooklyn. Only La Prensa reported that Rivera had a job when he first left school. That interview with Rivera in his home focused on emphasizing his lack of responsibility for the disorder and willingness to try to pacify the crowds had he been asked, and contained no details of what had happened in the store as he did not want to talk about them. That focus was in line with La Prensa's concern to distance Puerto Rican residents from the disorder. Rivera gave an account of what happened in the store again when he appeared in the Adolescents Court on March 23 for inserting slugs in a subway turnstile before the disorder, in answer to questions from the Magistrate.

Until police found Rivera, newspapers described the boy caught shoplifting as a younger Black child, in line with the rumors and leaflets circulating in Harlem. Louise Thompson heard from the women she spoke to in Kress' store that a "colored boy" aged ten to twelve years had been beaten. The signs carried by the Young Liberators who picketed the store an hour or so later referred to a "Negro child," while the leaflets their organization distributed another hour later later described a "12 year old Negro boy." The first newspaper stories repeated those descriptions. The New York American mentioned a "colored boy" and a "10-year-old Negro boy," the Daily News a 12-year old "colored boy," the New York Evening Journal a 15-year-old "Negro boy," the Daily Mirror a "little colored boy," the Home News a "young colored boy," and the New York Sun a "Negro boy." Early stories in some Black newspapers featured similar descriptions, a "small Negro boy" in the Norfolk Journal and Guide and a 10-year-old "colored boy" in the Indianapolis Recorder on March 23, or simply referred to the boy's age not his race, a 16 year old boy in the Atlanta World on March 21, a 12-year-old boy in the New York Age, a 14-year-old boy in the Chicago Defender, and a 16 year old boy in the Afro-American and Pittsburgh Courier on March 23. Newspapers published on March 20 after police found Rivera identified him as a 16-year-old Puerto Rican, in the New York Post, New York World-Telegram and Brooklyn Daily Eagle or a "Puerto Rican youth" in the New York Herald Tribune, Times Union, Brooklyn Citizen (although later in that story Rivera was referred to as a "Negro")(The New York World-Telegram also pointed to the differences between Rivera and the boy of the rumors by putting Negro in quotation marks when reporting the rumors and the text of the Young Liberators leaflet.) By contrast, the New York Times referred to a 16-year-old "Negro boy" even after Rivera had been found, as did the New York Sun and New York Evening Journal. While the New York Times did eventually identify Rivera as Puerto Rican when he appeared in the Adolescents court after the disorder, the New York Evening Journal continued to describe Rivera as "Negro," while the New York Sun made no mention of his race. Those newspapers' persistent use of "Negro" may have been intended to convey that Rivera was dark-skinned; the New York American described him in those terms, as a "dark-skinned 16-year-old Porto Rican" in a story reporting an interview with the boy in his home, while the Brooklyn Daily Eagle described him as a "Negro born in Porto Rico." Editions of the other newspapers published after Rivera was found, including the Black newspapers, simply switched to identify him as Puerto Rican. (Historian Lorrin Thomas argued that the New York Amsterdam News "failed to identify Rivera as Puerto Rican, referring to him instead as a “young Negro boy,”" but did not provide a citation. The March 23 issue of that newspaper is missing the news sections, but the March 30 issue identified Rivera as a "16-year-old Puerto Rican youth.")

Stories in the New York Evening Journal, Home News, La Prensa and Daily Worker misidentified Hurley and Urban as store detectives. None mentioned the store detective, Smith, perhaps because he was not bitten and therefore not identified in any official records. He may also have been confused with Jackson Smith, the store manager. Many stories gave the manager a larger role than he played, involved in grabbing Rivera, and making the decision to release him with Rivera in this office. That expanded role came at the expense not only of the store detective but also the police. Only the Daily News, and a vague statement in the New York Post story of what Rivera said mentioned that officers were at the store. The Daily News included only Eldridge, misidentifying him as the officer who released Rivera. Rivera said “two policeman came in” after he bit the men, the New York Post reported. The New York Evening Journal, Daily News, Atlanta World, and Philadelphia Tribune stories quoting Rivera omitted that statement.

Several newspaper stories included a Black woman interceding or screaming when the store staff grabbed Rivera, which some accounts claimed precipitated broader disorder. The statements of those on the scene suggest any outcry came when Donohue and Urban took Rivera into the basement. Rivera testified in the public hearing that a woman screamed “They’re going to take him down the cellar and beat him up!” While Hurley made no mention of that scream, L. F. Cole, a thirty-year-old Black clerk, did testify that when he saw Donohue and Urban taking Rivera to the basement “a woman made a statement that the boy had been struck.” Cole's choice not to describe the woman as screaming suggests the possibility that the woman simply called out, with the gendered language of the press rendering any shouting by a woman as a scream. "They're beating that boy! They're killing him!" were the “screams” reported by the New York Evening Journal. Speeding up events, the New York American, New York Post and Atlanta World, and the New Republic, describe the woman as running into the street, screaming "Kress beat a colored boy! Kress Beat a colored boy!" according to the New York American. The New York Sun made this response collective: “Emotional Negro women shouted that the boy was being beaten and this information was quickly relayed to the curious crowds which had gathered in front of the store.” Rather than reacting, the woman intervened in the narrative presented in Home News and La Prensa, and was pushed aside by Hurley, after which she screamed.

Margaret Mitchell was identified as the woman who reacted to Rivera being grabbed in the New York Evening Journal, Home News, Philadelphia Tribune and La Prensa (and later in stories about those arrested in the New York Amsterdam News, Afro-American, New York Post and New York Times). Here journalists with a truncated timeline of events were assuming that as she was arrested in Kress’ store it must have been when Rivera was grabbed. However, Donahue told the public hearing he had not made an arrest, and none of the store staff mentioned an arrest at this time. The circumstances of Mitchell's arrest recorded by police, the testimony of Louise Thompson and the New York Sun story suggest that it took place after the store was closed, as police tried to clear out the women who remained inside, with an officer named Johnson making the arrest. Similarly, in describing customers struggling with Hurley and Urban or attacking displays as Rivera was taken away the narratives of the New York Sun, La Prensa and the Home News collapsed together events that took place at different times. Testimony in the public hearings identified that struggle as coming later, when Kress’ manager decided to close the store and police cleared out those inside.

The MCCH public hearings elicited more details of the assault, with Rivera, the two police officers, and Hurley all testifying, together with Jackson Smith, the store manager. Provided in five separate hearings spread over nearly six weeks, that testimony described the roles of Officers Donahue and Eldridge, which were missing from the initial newspaper reports. Few newspapers included these new details in their stories about the hearings. The most extensively reported hearing was the first, on March 30, in which Donahue testified. A majority of newspapers highlighted Donahue’s decision to release Rivera through the rear of the store rather than in view of concerned customers as a mistake, with several reporting that Donahue had admitted that mistake. However, the hearing transcript did not include such a statement. Instead, it was Edward Kuntz, one of the ILD lawyers in the audience, who offered that assessment while questioning the officer. After Donahue testified that crowds on 125th Street caused him to take Rivera into the store, Kuntz commented, “If you had let the boy go at that time there would not have been any excitement.” Eldridge and Hurley did not testify until three weeks later, and Jackson Smith until two weeks after that, when they were not given any attention in the briefer newspaper stories about those hearings.
- Lino Rivera grabbed & Charles Hurley and Steve Urban assaulted in MCCH Reports
- Lino Rivera grabbed & Charles Hurley and Steve Urban assaulted in secondary sources
Windows broken (72) A window in the S. H. Kress 5 & 10c store being hit by an object and breaking began the disorder. Objects thrown at the windows of stores, mostly those with white owners, was the most prevalent event in the following hours, with at least 300 businesses damaged. Such attacks were unfamiliar from the racial disorder of previous decades. Business and residential property had been the targets of violence, but that property had been Black-owned and damaged or destroyed by white crowds. However, white businesses in Harlem had been the focus of protests against their failure to hire Black workers in the years immediately prior to the disorder, culminating in a campaign by a coalition of Black organizations in 1934. Those efforts involved boycotts and pickets, not breaking store windows. A competing campaign by the Communist Party did extend to smashing windows in the Empire Cafeteria. The potential for picketing to lead to violence, and specifically to a “race riot” was one of the justifications given by the judge in the New York State Supreme Court who outlawed the tactic in 1934, effectively ending the boycott campaign for the hiring of Black workers. That sentiment was echoed after the disorder by Black columnist Theophilus Lewis in the New York Amsterdam News, a critic of the boycott movement: "There was a time, during the peak of the boycott movement, when a slight indiscretion by a policeman, a white salesgirl or a colored shopper who defied the boycott would have started an outburst quite as serious as the recent disorder. The feeling of race antipathy, perhaps not intended by the leaders of the boycott, has remained pent up in the community waiting for a spark to set it off." The turn to breaking windows as a final resort was captured by Gill Horton, a Black former cabaret owner quoted by Joseph Mitchell in the New York World-Telegram after the disorder. "I didn’t throw no rocks," he reportedly said. "I broke my last window when I was going on 10. Of course, if I was pushed a little I might let loose a few bottles and brickbats, but nobody pushed me yet.” Many others in Harlem clearly had been pushed. When James Hughes, a twenty-four-year-old Black shoe repairer returning home found himself in a crowd at 8th Avenue and West 125th Street, he heard people saying, "Let's break windows," he later testified in court.

Historians Cheryl Greenberg and Larry Greene have argued that decision had the opposite effect to what the judge intended, shutting off an outlet for discontent and protest, and leaving Harlem’s residents with fewer alternatives to violence. The events in front of Kress’ store before someone threw the object that broke one of its windows replicated/recapitulated those tensions. Three men had been protesting the store employees’ treatment of Lino Rivera by walking in front of the store with banners – picketing. Police officers arrested the group, shutting down those means of protest. On this occasion, unlike earlier protests, members of the crowd attacked the store.

The objects thrown at store windows were most often described as rocks or stones, and less often as bricks – the objects recovered from the windows of Herbert’s Blue Diamond jewelry store displayed by a clerk for a Daily News photographer the day after the disorder. All those objects could be found around Harlem. An employee of the Blackbird Inn told a reporter for the New York Post that much of that material came from the island that ran down the middle of 7th Avenue, where stones and debris left after the paving of the street had been dumped. Other larger objects found on the street were sometimes used: ashcans and trashcans. (The tailor’s dummy allegedly thrown through Sam Lefkowitz's store window likely came from another damaged store). In a handful of cases, the missiles were objects more likely brought from home -- bottles clubs, and hammers -- or items individuals happened to have with them, such as umbrellas (there was rain on the night of the disorder). At least two windows in looted stores were allegedly kicked in.

While newspaper reports routinely described store windows as “smashed,” the extent of the damage they suffered varied. A single object generally broke and created a hole in a window rather than shattering it entirely, as is evident in a photograph published in the Daily News that shows a white police officer and a white store manager speaking through a hole in an unidentified shoe store. To remove most or all of the glass from a display window took more than one object, which usually meant more than one person, depending obviously on the size of the window. Stores on West 125th Street, particularly the department stores and those that wrapped around the corners of the intersections with 8th, 7th and Lenox Avenues had far larger windows than the smaller businesses on the avenues themselves. More extensive damage to windows appears to have been associated with looting, and may have occurred when groups or individuals returned to stores with broken windows to take merchandise. A section of Lenox Avenue in a photograph published by the Daily News shows that variety of damage: closest to the camera is a rental agency with a hole in its window, which still contained the ashcan that created it, that does not appear to be looted; to its left are two grocery stores and a cigar store whose windows are almost entirely gone, and whose contents have been taken. The sources do not offer a clear picture of the extent of the damage to the stores identified as having broken windows but not as looted: the reporter for La Prensa who listed thirty-five businesses with broken windows on Lenox Avenue, West 125th Street and 8th Avenue, ended their list by alluding to an unspecified number of other stores not on the list that suffered relatively little damage compared with those listed. There are no details for just under half of those identified (33 of 69) in the sources; of the remainder, fragmentary information suggests fourteen businesses could have been suffered limited damage.

Efforts to damage stores may also have extended to destroying merchandise by throwing it into the street, on a night when it rained. The Afro-American most directly reported that practice, in which “the goods was dragged in the wet sidewalk and destroyed.” The New York Times and Atlanta World reported goods taken out of windows and “strewn” and “scattered” on the sidewalk without mention of the intention. So too did Betty Willcox, who told a New York Evening Journal that on West 125th Street, "I saw that the windows of all the stores around there had been shattered and the goods thrown all over the place." Merchandise on the street, however, could also have been a byproduct of looting rather than attacks on businesses, thrown or carried out of stores so they could be taken. Some of those arrested during the disorder denied "breaking the store windows" and instead insisted "that they had picked the articles up from the street after others had thrown them out of the stores," according to a story in the New York Sun (which dismissed those claims as an effort to avoid responsibility).

When objects broke windows, glass went flying, hitting individuals on at least five occasions. All those reported injuries came after 1:00 AM, so during the period when most of the reported looting took place, and in the areas where that looting was concentrated, on Lenox Avenue from 127th Street to 130th Street and on 7th Avenue and 116th Street. Evidence about the circumstances of those injuries is fragmentary, brief details in lists and hospital records rather than discussions in stories. One record explicitly linked the injuries to windows being broken in stores. In the 32nd Police Precinct book of aided cases Herbert Holderman was listed as “cut by flying glass when some unknown persons broke windows of stores.” "Flying glass” and “falling glass” were the reported causes of the four other injuries. That glass could have come from smashed windows in cars and buses driving on Harlem's streets, which also had objects thrown at them, although such attacks were reported only on 7th Avenue. Those injuries could also have been the result of throwing objects at windows or climbing or reaching into broken windows to take merchandise. However, crowds of bystanders were on Harlem's streets throughout the disorder, on sidewalks close enough to stores to be hit by glass when someone broke store windows. One storeowner, Herman Young, was also injured by glass from a window broken by a stone.

The seventy-two businesses identified in the sources as having broken windows, and the additional sixty stores looted as well as damaged, amount to around 30% of the total number estimated to have had windows broken. Newspaper stories offered a range of initial assessments of the damage. By noon on March 20 the New York Plate Glass Service Bureau, “whose member companies do 98 per cent of the glass insurance business in the city,” told a reporter for the New York Post that 110 clients had reported broken glass, a fraction of the expected total damage. Other newspapers published totals for the number of windows broken, not stores effected: “at least 130 costly plate gas windows,” according to the New York American; 200 plate-glass store windows according to the New York Times, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Chicago Defender and Norfolk Journal and Guide; and “more than 250 windows” according to the New York Herald Tribune, 300 windows in the Afro-American, and “more than 1,000 panes of glass” in the New York Post. Inspector Di Martino offered an "approximate number of windows broken" that totaled 624 in his "Report on Disorder" to the Police Commissioner on March 20, with the disclaimer that the "extent of property damage cannot be estimated at this time." A later survey of forty-seven insurance companies by the National Bureau of Casualty and Surety Underwriters, reported by the New York Times and Pittsburgh Courier, combined the two counts, reporting claims for 697 plate glass windows in 300 businesses, amounting to two-thirds of the broken windows. With the uninsured glass included, the total damage would have been just over 1000 windows in around 450 businesses.

“Breakages were most numerous on 125th street, near Seventh avenue,” according to that survey, but also occurred in an area that extended “from 114th to 143rd streets, between Fifth and Eighth Avenues. Several thousand businesses were located in that area, the MCCH business survey found, so attacks away from 125th Street were clearly less extensive. The "approximate number of windows broken" Inspector Di Martino reported to the Police Commissioner on March 20 was broken down by precincts, with almost all (86%, 538 of 624) located in the 28th Precinct, south of 130th Street. Newspapers stories consistently identified West 125th Street as the most damaged area, with New York Age specifying the two blocks from 8th to Lenox Avenues, and the New York Herald Tribune identifying the block between 8th and 7th Avenues, on which Kress’ store was located. Those general descriptions are in line with the events which are reported in the sources, which are concentrated on that block, with fewer on the block between 7th and Lenox Avenues. Those blocks were where the disorder originated, and the largest crowds gathered; where Harlem’s largest stores were located; and where all the businesses were white-owned. Beyond 125th Street, newspaper stories presented different pictures of the extent of the area in which windows were broken. As neither the Police Department nor the MCCH appear to have collected details of the damage, as would happen after the racial disorder in Harlem in 1943, that variation might reflect the limits of what individual reporters investigated or, in the case of very wide areas, a lack of investigation. Only the Daily News identified an area as extensive as the insurance survey, from 110th to 145th Streets. The New York Evening Journal and New York Herald Tribune only encompassed as far south as 120th Street, and as far north as 138th Street. Two newspapers focused only on 7th Avenue, the Pittsburgh Courier reporting smashed windows from 116th to 140th Streets, and the Daily Mirror only from 120th to 125th Streets. The Black newspaper’s area fits the reported events, and suggests an investigation throughout Harlem; the white newspaper included only a portion of that area, the blocks closest to 125th Street. Eighth Avenue attracted special attention in the New York Herald Tribune, which reported “windows broken in virtually every other store and glass covering the sidewalk” from 124th Street to 130th Street, and less damage in the blocks further north. Lenox Avenue, where the reported events are concentrated, drew particular attention only from the Afro-American, which offered the only specific count, that “In the three blocks from 125th to 128th Street, west side Lenox Avenue, there were twenty-two windows broken.” The Times Union offered the vaguest area, "for blocks around the five and ten cent store two-thirds of shop windows had been smashed." The tendency to draw the boundaries at 120th Street, together with inattention to West 116th Street by both the Black and white press, effectively left Spanish-speaking areas of Harlem out of discussions of the disorder.

The businesses reported with windows broken differed from those reported as targets of looting. (Of the seventy-two stores with broken windows, five are unknown, three were vacant, and five were later looted, leaving fifty-nine that are identified). Clothing stores of various types and businesses and businesses involving miscellaneous goods (which included department stores, which sold a variety of goods, including clothing but generally not food) were the largest groups; the food stores that made up the largest group of those looted were the smallest portion of those with broken windows. Those different patterns suggest that those who returned to damaged stores to take merchandise, or turned to looting, focused on what they needed, not on the wider range of stores that had been targets earlier in the disorder.

When objects were thrown at windows beyond Kress' store, their targets were initially other businesses on West 125th Street, where all the stores had white owners. As groups moved away from 125th Street, they continued to focus their attacks on white-owned businesses. Five Black-owned businesses were among those identified as having windows broken, a number far below their presence in the neighborhood. Posting signs that identified a business as Black-owned appears to have stopped attacks and prevented windows from being broken. No Black-owned businesses are among those later looted. In addition to Black businesses, there were two white-owned businesses specifically identified as not being damaged in the disorder. Koch's department store, was well-known for having hired Black staff. A group of Black boys reportedly protected the other store.

Arrests for allegedly breaking windows were reported for only 24% (17 of 72) of the businesses that suffered damage, a smaller proportion than for looted stores (as no one was arrested for the first broken window in Kress' store, the store appears among those cases in which no arrests were made even though an arrest was made for allegedly breaking a window after another attack over four hours later). The twenty-six individuals arrested for breaking windows were identified either because they were charged with malicious mischief, an offense involving damage to property, or by details of what police alleged they had done recorded in legal records or reported in the press. For five individuals arrested for breaking windows there is no information about their alleged targets; some of those four men and one woman may have been charged with breaking windows in stores for which there was no reported arrests. Three of those arrested were women, and one a white man, similar numbers as among those arrested for looting, but twice the proportion of those arrested. Police do not appear to have made arrests during the first hours of the disorder, when windows were broken on West 125th Street as they struggled to keep crowds from Kress' store and off the streets. The arrests that were made in that area came around 10:30 PM. Leroy Brown's arrest on 8th Avenue at 9.45 PM was during that early phase of violence. The handful of other arrests where the time is known occurred on 7th Avenue and Lenox Avenue when reported looting intensified, thirty minutes either side of midnight.

Courts treated breaking windows less severely than other activities during the disorder, in large part because the value of damaged windows was only sufficient to make a charge of malicious mischief a misdemeanor. Most store windows cost less than $100 to repair, well below the $250 required for the crime to be a felony. Only the five men also charged with inciting others to violence were sent to the grand jury, just over a third of the proportion of those arrested for looting, and the grand jury sent all those men to the Court of Special Sessions to be prosecuted for misdemeanors. Similarly, Magistrates transferred nine men and one woman directly to the Court of Special Sessions and adjudicated eleven cases, discharging Viola Woods, and convicting nine men and one woman of disorderly conduct.
Looting (66) The disorder resulted in damage to at least 300 Harlem businesses, perhaps as many as 450, many of which also had goods stolen. Such attacks on white businesses distinguished the events in 1935 from collective racial violence earlier in the twentieth-century, although the scale was far smaller than the disorders that would follow. When racial violence broke out in Harlem in 1943, four times as many businesses were targets of violence. The press labeled the theft as looting, a term that distinguished it on the basis of the context of violence and crisis in which it took place. Such theft often involved crowds publicly stealing goods, but those circumstances were not entirely out of the ordinary. Just over one in five (15 of 67) burglaries at other times in 1935 involved smashing street-front doors and windows, to steal goods before police responded, although not crowds of participants.

Although press reports and the MCCH gave prominence to attacks on property in characterizing the disorder as “not a race riot,” they offered only general descriptions of this violence, including fewer detailed incidents than was the case with assaults and none of the quantitative information that would be collected in subsequent racial disorders. However, damaged businesses do figure prominently in press photographs, highlighting that such damage represented a spectacle (one which also drew crowds to Harlem the day after the disorder to view the damage for themselves). Only sixty-six looted businesses are identified in the surviving sources, twenty-nine linked to arrests, with nine stores linked to more than one arrest. An additional seventy-two businesses are identified as having their windows damaged, which would have exposed them to theft. There were almost certainly more looted businesses than those identified in the sources. In the cases of sixteen of those arrested for looting there is no information on their alleged targets; while some of those stores may be among those identified in other sources, given the limited number of cases where multiple arrests were made for thefts from the same store, most are likely missing from this picture of the looting. (Two looted businesses that appear in photographs whose location cannot be determined are not included in these counts).

The stores identified in the sources as having stock stolen represented a cross-section of the small businesses in Harlem focused on needs more than luxuries, and on personal items rather than larger items like furniture. Businesses providing food make up the largest group (24 of 55). Clothing was also a target (18 of 55), while the remaining businesses sold a variety of goods (13 of 55). Missing from this partial list of businesses attacked during the disorder are large stores and several enterprises prominent in the neighborhood: beauty shops, and barbers. There are sixteen individuals charged with looting unidentified businesses. Two looted businesses that appear in photographs whose location cannot be determined are not included in these counts. At other times in 1935 the full range of stores were targets of burglaries.

However, newspaper reports and legal records indicate that in the initial hours of the disorder store windows were smashed without efforts to steal their contents. After police dispersed the crowd drawn to Kress’ store and set up a cordon on 125th Street protecting it, another clash at the rear of the store on 124th Street around 7.45PM saw windows broken. Around the same time, crowds smashed windows on 125th Street between 7th and 8th Avenue. Although the police present on this block lacked the numbers to protect the windows, in several cases they responded to damage by taking up positions in front of stores, which appears to have prevented much looting. While many of the large stores were identified as having windows smashed at this time, only the New York Evening Journal reported that thefts also took place. Around 8.45 PM, when police succeeded in pushing the crowds from 125th St on to 7th and 8th Avenues, the smaller businesses on those streets became targets. Windows were broken, and isolated looting reported in the blocks of 7th Avenue immediately north of 125th Street (AM, AA, Hobbs investigation). The New York Times and Afro-American reported goods were thrown into the street rather than taken, actions more akin to efforts to damage property, to ransack, than a turn to theft, but it is not clear how often that happened. Many of these businesses were still operating and staffed, but that did little to curtail theft. In some businesses staff removed goods from windows and shelves, but most hid or fled crowds and bombardment with rocks and stones. More effective were the Black storeowners and staff who put signs in their store windows identifying the business as Black-owned, which spared them from looting if not always from having windows broken. Around 10PM, as crowds began to move away from the block of 125th Street containing Kress’ store, where police were concentrated, assaults and attacks on stores spread through Harlem. Further isolated looting occurred on 7th Avenue north of 125th Street, and after 10.30PM, in the area of 116th Street to the south.

Around midnight, reporters from the New York Herald Tribune, Daily Mirror and Afro-American noted a change in the tenor of the disorder reflected in arrests: violence became overshadowed by looting, particularly on Lenox Avenue in the blocks north of 125th Street, lasting until around 2 AM. This turn to looting was helped by both earlier damage to windows that offered access to displays and store interiors and the lesser police presence in this area. By that late hour most undamaged businesses had closed, some with their doors and windows protected by iron gates and grills. However, those additional obstacles did not prevent looting, an indication of growing violence and limited police presence. At least three businesses in this area were also set on fire, having been looted first. Even the return of some businessowners, once they learned of the disorder, did little to prevent looting, with several reporting futile efforts to secure police assistance. The progression from violence and damage to looting also features in the later racial disorders, in Harlem and Detroit in 1943, and in Detroit in 1967. As Sydney Fine argues was the case in Detroit in 1967, that pattern locates looting as a consequence of the violence, not as the defining characteristic of the disorder, and as serving to prolong disorder.

The progression from damage to looting also reflected time for additional groups to join the crowds of men most prominent in the initial violence. In later racial disorders, women would be much larger presence among those arrested for looting, and in images of theft. However, in 1935, while three women are among the sixty individuals arrested for looting, almost as many women were arrested for other offenses: two for breaking windows and another for inciting a crowd. Several newspapers reported that white men also joined the looting, but only two are identified in legal records. One of those men was arrested in circumstances that do not put him in the midst of the disorder: Jean Jacquelin, a thirty-three-year-old Canadian driver with a previous arrest for assault with a knife, arrested at 5.40AM, after the crowds had left the streets, in possession of clothing stolen from a tailor down the block from his home. Louis Tunick, the second white man arrested, is not linked to a specific business, and lived outside Harlem (one additional white man, Leo Smith, was arrested for breaking windows).

The feature of the looting that drew particular comment in the reports of newspapers and later the MCCH was the extent to which it targeted only white-owned businesses, sparing Black-owned businesses. The press reports allowed that a small number of Black-owned businesses did suffer damage, either before identifying themselves with signs, or after crowds became less discriminating (MCCH). However, none of the instances of looting identified in the sources involved black businesses. At the same time, Harlem’s racial landscape was more complex than these reports recognized. Among the “white-owned” businesses targeted were a number of Hispanic/Puerto Rican businesses around 116th Street, and Chinese laundries scattered throughout the neighborhood.

Police responded to looting very differently than to crowds and attacks on stores, with a greater degree of violence and more arrests. Theft warranted firing at suspects, rather than in the air, as police claimed they did in confronting crowds and assaults. Police pursuing suspected looters shot and killed Lloyd Hobbs and James Thompson. Sixty of those arrested were alleged to have been looting, identified in the sources either because they were charged with burglary, an offense which involved breaking into a store and entering it to take merchandise, or by details of what police officers alleged an individual had done that fit looting but that resulted in other charges such as petit larceny or disorderly conduct. Those arrests far outnumbered those arrested for any other activity during the disorder (although what prompted the arrest of 30 of the 133 arrested is not known). Officers generally claimed to have seen an individual stealing goods from a business. At least some of those police arrested claimed to have simply been standing with crowds on the street when police approached. In one-third (9 of 27) of the cases where the circumstances are known, the arrest occurred away from the looted store, as police apparently stopped and questioned individuals they encountered carrying goods.

Courts also treated charges of looting more severely than other alleged offenses in the disorder. Magistrates held over half (28 of 50) of those who appeared before them for the grand jury, compared to only one third of those charged with assault. The grand jury did redirect a significant number to the Court of Special Sessions, casting them as involving goods of too little value to warrant treatment as felonies. District attorneys followed the same pattern with those individuals as at other times in 1935, negotiating guilty pleas for lesser offenses with most, so that only two prosecutions for looting went to trial.

As these criminal prosecutions made their way through the legal system, Harlem's white business-owners turned to the civil courts seeking compensation from the city for their losses on the basis of a nineteenth-century municipal law that held a city or county liable if their property was destroyed or injured by a mob or riot. One hundred and six owners brought actions, twenty-five of who were identified in newspaper stories. The first of those suits heard in the Municipal Court was brought by William Feinstein, who owned a liquor store on Lenox Avenue. The jury awarded him damages, a verdict which two months later the judge decided to uphold. In the interim, the city also lost a second case in the Municipal Court, for damages to Anna Rosenberg's notion store, which had been set on fire, and seven actions in the Supreme Court, which heard cases for larger damages.
Events
Harry Gordon arrested Around 6.30 PM, Patrolman Irwin Young arrested Harry Gordon, a twenty-year-old white student on the north sidewalk of West 125th Street near 7th Avenue. Gordon had climbed a lamppost to speak to the crowd that police had pushed east, away from Kress’s store; Young pulled him down. The Patrolman alleged that Gordon then grabbed his nightstick and hit him with it; Gordon denied doing anything. Young and other officers dragged Gordon thirty feet to a police radio car and drove him to the police station on West 123rd Street, he told a public hearing of the MCCH.

As soon as the radio car reached 7th Avenue, out of sight of the crowd on 125th Street, Gordon told the MCCH hearing that the police officer driving “Go ahead and hit him’ to the officer next to him, and both men “poked him in the ribs and kicked him.” When the car got to the station, Young pushed him up against the wall of the station and clubbed him in the stomach. Police officers continued to beat and kick Gordon when he was put in a cell, taken upstairs for questioning and fingerprinted. As a result of these attacks, Gordon testified, “I had two black eyes. Had bumps on my head. My shins were bruised.” When he was bailed and released forty-eight hours after being arrested, his lawyer described Gordon’s face as “entirely discolored,” so much so that he took Gordon to his home so his mother would not see his injuries, he told the public hearing. The man identified as Gordon has no visible injuries in photographs taken a few seconds apart published in the Daily News, New York American and New York Evening Journal that purported to show him and the three other white men police arrested in front of Kress’ store on their way to the Harlem Magistrates Court. However, one of the men was only partly visible, behind the other three, and could be injured. The caption to the Daily News photo suggests otherwise, labeling all the men "unmarked by the race riots."

Gordon was among the group of around ninety-six of those 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. Gordon was brought to the platform together with Daniel Miller and the three Young Liberators arrested at other times protesting in front of Kress's store, a New York Herald Tribune story noted, with police presenting the group as acting and arrested together. However, Gordon's actions overshadowed the larger group in stories about the line-up. While Gordon stood on the "klieg-lit platform," Captain Edward Dillon questioned him about his role in the disorder in 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 New York 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 Journal found 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 did not appear in the MCCH transcription of the 28th Precinct Blotter, nor did Miller and the two white Young Liberators arrested in front of Kress’ store. Margaret Mitchell, the Black woman arrested inside Kress' store before Miller's arrest and Claudio Viabolo, the Black Young Liberator arrested with two white companions soon after Miller, do appear in the transcription. That discrepancy suggests that the white men were omitted from the transcription, perhaps overlooked because they were somehow less readily identified as participants in the disorder among others arrested for unrelated activities at that time.

Gordon appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, shortly after Daniel Miller and the three Young Liberators with who police had grouped him. The charge recorded in the Magistrates Court Docket book was assault, which was the charge 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 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 Gordon as inciting a riot.

The mistaken information about the charge could result from police continuing to group Gordon with the Miller and the three Young Liberators when he appeared in court. the Am, HN, NYHT, and NYT all described the men as the "ringleaders" of the disorder, which was likely the term police used, in stories on the court appearances. However, while the DN, HT, and DM included all five men in that group, the Am, HN, and NYT omitted Gordon. That difference appears to have resulted from Gordon being arraigned separately from Miller and the other three men. That separation was likely because he was charged with assault, the other men with riot, and the officer listed as arresting Gordon was Patrolman Irwin Young not Patrolman Shannon, the arresting officer recorded in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book for Miller and the three other men.

The Daily Mirror claimed Gordon was heard separately when he indicated that he would produce his own lawyers." While being held, Gordon testified, he had not been 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. In the courthouse on March 20, Gordon was able to make contact with an ILD lawyer, Isidore Englander. The attorney testified that while he was speaking with Frank Wells, who he had learned had been arrested, he saw Gordon, who he claimed not to know, and spoke with him after his arraignment. Gordon asked him to communicated with Edward Kuntz, another ILD lawyer, whose son Gordon testified was a friend. Kuntz would represent him in subsequent court appearances. After Gordon was taken away, Englander heard him scream, the result, Gordon claimed, of being beaten again by police officer. The attorney made no mention of the visible injuries on Gordon’s face that Gordon and Kuntz described in their testimony.

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. Around forty-eight hours after Gordon’s arrest, at 1 AM, Kuntz told a public hearing that he secured bail for Gordon, who was released from prison.

Gordon returned to court on March 25, at the same time as Daniel Miller and the three Young Liberators, but there his treatment further diverged from them. While Renaud discharged the other four men as they had already appeared before the grand jury and been sent for trial, the magistrate again remanded Gordon, to appear on March 27, with the New York American and Home News reporting that police were planning to submit evidence to the grand jury seeking to have him indicted. (The only other newspaper to report this appearance was the New York World-Telegram). That effort was unsuccessful. When Gordon appeared again in the Magistrates Court, the ADA reduced the charge against him from felony assault to misdemeanor assault; in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book a clerk struck out Fel[ony] Ass[ault] and wrote "Red[uced] to Simple Assault misd[emeanor]." Kuntz claimed credit for the reduced charge when he questioned Gordon about this legal proceeding in a public hearing of the MCCH. While Gordon testified that the ADA had said he was doing Gordon a “favor” by withdrawing the assault charges, Kuntz drew out that his cross examination of Patrolman Young established that the officer did not go to a doctor or a hospital, so did not suffer injuries justifying a felony charge, or even simple assault. He also testified that a new charge of unlawful assembly, the misdemeanor form of riot, had been made against him at that hearing, information not mentioned in any other sources. Magistrate Renaud transferred Gordon to the Court of Special Sessions for trial on the reduced charge, a decision reported only in the New York Amsterdam News, New York Times and New York Herald Tribune.

For some reason, the trial did not take place for almost eight months. Sometime in early November the judges convicted Gordon and sentenced him on November 15. Arthur Garfield Hays, who had chaired the MCCH hearing at which Gordon testified, wrote to the Chief Judge of the Court of Special Sessions on November 13 after hearing of the conviction, the only evidence of that outcome. Expressing surprise about the conviction, Hays urged that Gordon be given a suspended sentence as he was "certainly not a criminal and was exercising what he deemed to be his right of free speech." Judge William Walling responded, telling Hays that he "did not have all the facts." As far as the judge was concerned, "There was not the slightest doubt but that Gordon assaulted the officer who was in uniform. Thereafter, of course, the officer hit back and subdued Gordon." That assessment made it unlikely Walling and his colleagues would have imposed the suspended sentence Hays favored. However, what sentence they imposed on Gordon is unknown.
Kress 5, 10 & 25c store front windows broken Around 6.15 PM, a step was set up on the sidewalk in front of the Kress 5, 10 & 25c store. A Black man climbed up, spoke briefly to the crowd of about 100 gathered there, and then had Daniel Miller, a twenty-four-year-old white man take his place on the step. As Miller began to speak, someone threw an object through one of the store windows. A second object quickly followed, smashing another window, according to the New York Times and New York Sun. Different objects are identified as having smashed the store window. A bottle was the most common, identified in the New York Times and Home News, and more precisely as a milk bottle in the New York Sun and a whiskey bottle in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and by a police inspector quoted in the Afro-American. The Daily News identified the object as a brick, as did the New York Sun in the case of the second object, while Louise Thompson described it as a stone. The MCCH report opted to simply say "a missile" hit the window. These are all everyday objects, likely to hand on 125th Street, other than the whiskey bottle. A whiskey bottle fitted with portrayals of those who attacked white businesses as hoodlums and played to racist stereotypes about African Americans, as was evident in the appearance of this detail in a list of brief items headlined "Highlights on the Harlem Front." Picketing of white-owned businesses on 125th Street by Black organizations in 1934 had not resulted in any broken windows; concern about what had become of the boy arrested at Kress' may have caused this crowd to react differently. There may also have been members of groups affiliated with the Communist Party in the crowd; when those groups picketed the Empire Cafeteria in 1934, they did break windows.

After the windows was broken, police officers moved in to arrest Miller and push people away from the store, most of who ran across 125th Street to the opposite sidewalk. No one was arrested for breaking the window. Harry Gordon was arrested soon after trying to speak to the crowd on 125th Street east of Kress' store. A few minutes later, around 6.45 PM, three men began picketing in front of Kress' store. They too were soon arrested by police. Three to five police radio cars, an emergency [riot] truck, and six mounted policemen struggled to keep people from the store. No further objects appear to have been thrown at Kress' store front windows at this time. Soon after West 125th Street was cleared, around 7 P.M., people pushed on to 8th Avenue saw a hearse stop behind the store on West 124th Street, triggering rumors it had come to pick up the body of the boy who had been arrested, and a rush to the rear of the store that saw windows there broken.

Sustained and extensive attacks on stores on 125th Street came sometime after those rear windows were broken. Another brick hit Kress' front windows around 10:40 PM, allegedly thrown by William Ford, who then called for others on the street to attack police. Louise Thompson described a group breaking though the police cordon around 125th Street to break all but a few windows in the store, in the context of an exaggerated claim about the extent of smashed windows, and Kress' store does appear on the list of businesses with broken windows compiled by a La Prensa reporter who walked down 125th Street. But a reporter for the Afro-American wrote that the store "suffered very little loss on the front." The store manager, Jackson Smith, confirmed that later in a public hearing of the MCCH. Of the eighteen windows facing 125th Street and in the vestibule, only four were damaged. Repairs to the front of the store next day appear to have focused on only two sections of the store window, on the right side of the left entrance, in a photograph published in the New York American, and on the left side of the right entrance, where a ladder can be seen in Universal newsreel footage. Those repairs cannot have taken long. A photograph of Kress' store published in the Daily News on March 21 showed intact store windows, guarded by two police officers. A sustained police presence during the disorder appears to have protected the front of the store. That was the opinion of Channing Tobias, the fifty-three-year-old Black secretary of the Colored Division of the National Council of the YMCA, who told E. Franklin Frazier that "I guess it was because police were on guard" that Kress' store "got only a small window smashed." Police established a cordon in front of the store after it closed. Officers were still there around 10 PM, when Detective Henry Roge was hit by a rock while standing in front of the store, and after a window was broken at 10:40 PM there were officers able to arrest William Ford. Later in the evening the police cordon extended to cover 125th Street from 8th Avenue to Lenox Avenue, with Kress' store remaining at its center, and as the base for police responding to the disorder.

A window being smashed as a speaker began to address a crowd in front of Kress' store featured in narratives in the New York Times, New York Sun, and Home News. Only the New York Times and New York Sun mentioned the second object and smashed window. A broken window, without reference to a speaker, is reported by the Daily News, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, New York Age, and Pittsburgh Courier. No mention of a window in Kress' store being smashed at the beginning of the disorder appears in the narratives published in the New York Herald Tribune, New York Evening Journal, New York American, Daily Mirror and New York Post, and the Afro-American reported only the damage visible the next day. In the MCCH public hearings, Inspector Di Martini, Patrolman Moran, Jackson Smith, the store manager, and Louise Thompson (who also mentioned it in her account published in New Masses) all discussed how the window was broken. In the MCCH's final report, the arrests of Miller and Gordon police made in the aftermath of the window being broken are included as examples of "actions on the part of the police [that] only tended to arouse resentment in the crowd."

The Kress 5, 10 & 25c store appears in the MCCH business survey taken in the second half of 1935 and was still visible in the Tax Department photograph from 1939-1941.
Looting without arrest (37) No one was identified as being arrested for looting just over half of the businesses identified in the sources. There are eighteen individuals arrested for looting for who there is no information about their alleged targets; some of those men may have been charged with taking goods from stores for which there was no reported arrests. There are also twenty-one men charged with disorderly conduct in the Magistrates Court for which there is no information about their alleged actions, although only 6% (3 of 50) of those accused of looting were charged with that offense (the charges brought against ten of those arrested for looting are unknown).

That evidence supports the claim that police were unable to protect businesses made in multiple newspaper stories and by business-owners who sued the city for damages, as well as in the MCCH report. Once the crowd around Kress’ store broke into smaller groups sometime after 9.00 PM, police were unable to clear the streets or contain all those groups. Irving Stetkin told the City Comptroller that the two police officers who eventually responded to his call to protect his store "couldn't do anything. The mob was too big for them," according to a report in the New York World-Telegram. When police did disperse crowds, they simply reformed, according to the New York Herald Tribune, New York World-Telegram, Norfolk Journal and Guide and the MCCH Report. A more pointed image of that futility, in which police dispersed crowds only to see them gather again on the opposite side of the street, was described in the Afro-American and by business-owners who testified in the Municipal Court. An alternative account in the Daily News presented crowds not as elusive but as "too scattered" to be controlled. As a result, rather than being ineffective, police were absent from the scene of some attacks on businesses. Business-owners who sued the city for damages made that complaint. No police officers came to protect the stores of Harry Piskin, Estelle Cohen, and George Chronis despite Piskin approaching police officers on the street, and them all visiting or calling the local stationhouse.

The absence of police from some parts of Harlem resulted in part from a decision to concentrate them elsewhere. Reported police deployments focused on West 125th Street. Inspector McAuliffe used the reserves sent to Harlem after 9.00 PM to establish a perimeter around the main business blocks of the street, from 8th to Lenox Avenues, from 124th to 126th Streets, according to stories in the New York Times, Daily Mirror and Pittsburgh Courier, the only stories that described police deployments. Six emergency trucks were stationed at the intersection of West 125th Street and 7th Avenue in that strategy. Each truck had a “crew of 40 men and [was] equipped with tear gas and riot guns,” according to the Daily Mirror. Emergency trucks were more dispersed according to the New York Herald Tribune; two at West 125th and 7th Avenue, one at West 125th and Lenox Avenue, and one at West 127th and 7th Avenue. Armed patrolmen guarded Herbert’s Blue Diamond Jewelry store on the northeast corner of that intersection as well as other businesses with broken windows in this area. The Daily News noted that guarding “windowless stores” handicapped police without referring to which stores received that protection. This scale of police presence is likely why only one business on West 125th Street – Young’s hat store -- was among those reported looted despite at least twenty-three other stores having their windows broken. (The New York Evening Journal did report that "the rioting Negroes swarmed into stores. First the Woolworth "five and ten" then McCrory's and then the department store right and left in both sides of the street,” but as no other sources reported such looting that claim was apparently a product of the sensationalization and exaggeration that marked that publication's stories about the disorder).

Beyond West 125th Street, the police relied on radio cars patrolling the avenues and limited numbers of uniformed police and detectives in plainclothes moving through the streets. The New York Times reported that an emergency truck was stationed at West 130th Street and Lenox Avenue, in the heart of the blocks that saw the most reported looting. Police made eighteen arrests on Lenox Avenue between 125th and 135th, but clearly lacked the numbers to guard damaged stores or prevent crowds from forming that they did around West 125th Street. Similarly, police arrested three men for looting Jack Garmise's cigar store on 7th Avenue near West 116th Street, indicating the presence of uniformed officers and detectives, but their activity apparently did not extend to the blocks of West 116th Street to the east or the adjacent blocks of Lenox Avenue where Hispanic-owned businesses predominated. Two stores were reported looted in that area and at least another eleven had windows broken, a reporter from La Prensa found, without an arrest being made during the disorder. The police were not alone in their inattention to that area. Several newspapers drew the boundary of the disorder north of West 116th Street: crowds only went as far south as 120th Street according to the New York World-Telegram, New York Herald Tribune, New York Evening Journal and Daily Mirror; and as far south as 118th Street according to the Home News. (The Daily News and Afro-American did report crowds as far south as 110th Street).
Police in front of Kress' store Although Inspector Di Martini told a MCCH hearing that he saw no “indications of further trouble” when he left 125th Street at 6:00 PM, he did station some officers at Kress’ store -"Sergeant Bauer, two foot policeman, one mounted policeman in the rear to prevent a riot” according to his testimony, or “a Sergeant and four patrolmen” on the 125th Street side and “a mounted patrolman and a foot patrolman” on the 124th Street side according to his report to the Police Commissioner immediately after the disorder. A patrolman stationed in front of the store told an MCCH hearing that there were 10-15 officers there around 6:15 PM; that total may have included officers on regular assignment on 125th Street. However many police were present, one was Patrolman Shannon, who like Bauer, had been inside the store earlier.

Patrolman Moran, who arrived after Kress' store was closed, described being instructed to “keep the crowd moving in front of the store.” He insisted he did so by requesting them to “move on;” the lawyers who questioned him at a hearing of the MCCH alleged he used force, pushing people and using his nightstick. By around 6:15 PM, Moran said the front of the store was “pretty clear” while a crowd walked up and down on the opposite side of the street. Louise Thompson told the MCCH that there “little knots of people” on the street (although she wrote in New Masses that the crowd in front of the store numbered in the hundreds, that across the street in the thousands). Two men set up a stepladder in front of the store, a Black man named James Parton speaking briefly and then as, Daniel Miller tried to speak to the crowd, a window in the store was broken and Patrolman Shannon arrested Miller. Outnumbered as they were by the crowd, police made the arrest following the practice of focusing on the leaders of crowds. Other officers then cleared the crowds from in front of the store, moving them first across West 125th Street and then towards 7th avenues. Thompson testified that “police got rough and would not let anyone stop on the street” and wrote “the cops who were becoming ugly in their attempts to break up the increasing throngs of people.” About fifteen minutes later Patrolman Irwin Young, assisted by several other officers arrested Harry Gordon when he climbed a lamppost to speak to the crowd. They bundled him into a radio car and took him to the 28th Precinct on West 123rd Street. Again, police were trying to control the crowd by arresting men they perceived to be leaders, possibly identifying them as Communists with whom they regularly clashed. They had not arrested Parton, the Black man who introduced both Miller and Gordon. A few minutes later, Patrolman Shannon, Sgt Bauer and Patrolman Moran were involved in arresting two white men and a Black man after they refused to stop picketing in front of Kress’ store. Those men carried placards that identified them as members of an organization associated with the Communist Party, which again likely contributed to the decision to arrest them.

After the arrests, police continued to move on people who stopped on the sidewalks around Kress’ store – and perhaps clear some who had gone into the street itself, as the New York Herald Tribune reported the street reopened after being blocked to automobiles and streetcars. By 7:00 PM, the crowds had been pushed to the avenues (some of those on 8th Avenue for a short time moved to attack the rear entrance of Kress’ store, where two police officers were hit by objects thrown by those trying to get into the store). Additional officers who arrived seem to have been key to that success. “15 patrolmen, six mounted police and uniformed men of five radio cars” were on 125th Street by that time according to the New York Evening Journal. Inspector Di Martini also returned, around 7:15 PM.

The Daily News published a photograph of the disorder that showed police officers engaging with crowds. The caption for the image, which captures the largest crowd to appear in a photograph of the disorder, described only the actions of one of the two uniformed patrolmen visible: "“The raincoated policeman swings in against the angry crowd as his comrade tries to hold the police line. One colored man is lifting his arm as if to restrain the cop.” The use of force captured here is at odds with Patrolman Moran's insistence that officers simply asked crowds to move. While uniformed patrolmen carried nightsticks as part of their standard equipment, detectives in plainclothes were issued them for riot duty, according to the New York Evening Journal. As well as hitting people with their batons, police officers used the butts of their revolvers and riot guns as clubs. The Times Union directly contradicted Moran's claim police did not use those weapons to move the crowds in front of the store: "Police night sticks swung and soon the mob was dispersed." Only the Daily News reported police fired their guns to move the crowd, describing with unlikely precision that five shots were fired in the air. Inspector Di Martini told a hearing of the MCCH that he heard no gunshots on 125th Street, so if those shots were fired it was before he arrived around 7:15 PM. The caption makes no mention of where the photograph was taken; the group appears to be on the sidewalk, perhaps near Kress’ store or later near 7th or 8th Avenue. Unmentioned is the horse’s head visible on the right side of image, indicating the presence of a mounted patrolman.

Mounted patrolmen, part of the police crowd control force, were reportedly deployed “to ride people off the sidewalk,” Louise Thompson testified. Lt. Battle told Langston Hughes that "an officer on a horse can be more effective than twenty patrolmen on foot," as the horses are "trained to brush a crowd back without stepping on anyone." When a reporter for the Afro-American arrived around 7:30 PM “mounted police rode the sidewalk [in front of the store] keeping the crowd back.” Charles Romney likewise told a hearing of the MCCH that he saw "men on horseback were on the sidewalk to trample people." The New York Times and Daily News opted to describe the mounted police in more sensational terms as ‘charging’ the crowds. In the New Masses, Thompson presented a similar picture, juxtaposing the mounted officers with women protesting in terms echoing those used by other Communists: “Brigades of mounted police cantered down the street, breaking into a gallop where the crowds were thickest. Horses' hoofs shot sparks as they mounted on the glass-littered pavements. The crowds fighting doggedly, gave way. The women more stubborn even than the men, shouted to their companions, "What kind of men are you-drag them down off those horses." The women shook their fists at the police. "Cossacks! Cossacks!" they shouted here in Harlem on 125th Street.” Years later, interviewed for her autobiography, Thompson identified many of the mounted patrolmen as Black officers and described the women as actually fighting with them. Another Afro-American journalist simply described the mounted police as "somewhat rough" during the early hours of the disorder. Whatever approach they took, it was mounted police that the Afro-American credited with keeping large groups away from Kress and on the avenues.

While police cleared 125th Street of large groups and stopped any more assembling there, they did not – or could not -- close it off. Instead, “they patrolled 124th and 125th Streets between Seventh and Eighth Avenues constantly to prevent more groups from assembling,” the New York Herald Tribune reported. Thompson testified that she walked up and down 125th Street after the arrests, but was only able to stop and speak with members of groups on the corner of 8th Avenue. Charles Romney told a hearing of the MCCH that when he arrived on 125th Street around 7:30 PM, walking from Lenox to 7th Avenue, he “noticed a crowd of police with sticks on their hands telling the crowd to go on.” Given the small numbers of police, those patrols did not protect the stores on the block from attack: Thompson testified windows were broken in almost every store between 7:00 PM and 8:00 PM (although she was away from the area from 7:30 PM to 8:00 PM); and Romney likewise testified that at 7:30 PM "there were a lot of windows smashed." The New York Herald Tribune reported the same timeline, that “by 8 p.m. one or more windows in virtually every 125th Street store front in the block had been smashed.” Around that time the situation began to change as additional officers arrived, reinforcements that made it possible for police to set up a perimeter around 125th Street and keep people away from the stores.

As with other events at the beginning of the disorder, the most detailed and consistent evidence is the testimony of individuals present on 125th Street in hearings of the MCCH. Newspaper stories were generally vague and inconsistent about how many police were on the scene at what times and how they responded to the crowds, and tended to exaggerate the size of the crowds and the number of people on the street. It does seem that credible that several hundred -- and perhaps as many as 2000-3000 people -- were in the area during this time, although not gathered in a single group. This was a larger number than gathered in any one place later in the disorder, contributing to the different way that police responded.
Police establish perimeter around Kress' store After Inspector Di Martini returned to 125th Street around 7:00 PM, he called for police reinforcements. A New York Evening Journal story celebrated the response as “the most remarkable “military” feat in the history of the department.” That portrayal was certainly how the police department would have sought to present the deployment. However, the arrival of additional officers appears to have taken longer than the story allowed, and to have been focused on establishing a perimeter around Kress’ store. The piecemeal arrival of reinforcements made that a protracted process. As police struggled to keep crowds away from Kress' store, those clashes served to disperse crowds along the avenues rather than stopping the violence. Unable to prevent windows being broken in businesses on 125th Street, police had to guard damaged stores, limiting the officers who could be deployed on the avenues. Guards appear to have prevented looting; they did not stop additional windows being broken. After crowds broke through on to 125th Street around 10:30 PM, there are only two further incidents in that area during the remaining disorder, an alleged assault on a woman and a shooting, both at the intersection of 125th Street and 7th Avenue. Although other incidents whose timing is unknown may have occurred during that time, the evidence suggests that police perimeter held through that period.

The New York Evening Journal story lauding the police response reported “a small army of 700 police was beating back the rioters” on 125th Street between 8th and 7th Avenues. That number likely reflected the total deployment rather than the force that set up the perimeter around Kress’ store. It was in line with the number Di Martini reported to the Police Commissioner were in Harlem after midnight and fell between the totals reported by newspapers, with the 1000 officers mentioned by the Daily Mirror at one extreme, and the 500 officers reported by the Home News and New York Herald Tribune representing the other end of the range. While the officers coming from beyond the local precincts went initially to 125th Street, Lt. Battle later told Langston Hughes that the reserve officers from Harlem's precincts went to their stations, on West 123rd Street and West 135th Street. Some of those officers may have been sent directly to other areas of Harlem, particularly those who arrived later in the evening.

The perimeter established by police extended from 8th to Lenox Avenues, and from 124th to 126th Streets, according to stories in the New York Times, Daily Mirror and Pittsburgh Courier, the only sources that described police deployments. While Inspector Di Martini had summoned the reinforcements, the newspapers credited that deployment to Deputy Chief Inspector McAuliffe, who commanded uniformed police in the borough of Manhattan, and would have taken over from Di Martini when he arrived around 9:00 PM. The department’s Emergency trucks attracted the most attention in newspaper stories, presented as the anchors of the police cordon. Six emergency trucks were stationed at the intersection of West 125th Street and 7th Avenue in the strategy reported by the New York Times, Daily Mirror and Pittsburgh Courier. Emergency trucks were more dispersed according to the New York Herald Tribune; two at West 125th and 7th Avenue, one at West 125th and Lenox Avenue, and one at West 127th and 7th Avenue.

The Emergency Services Division had succeeded the Police department’s Riot Battalion in 1925. Each truck had a crew of eight officers and, in addition to rescue equipment, carried a Thompson machine gun, three Winchester rifles and a Remington shotgun, as well as a tear gas gun, for use against "disorderly crowds." The twenty-two trucks in the department in 1935 were dispersed throughout the city. While the two located closest to 125th Street arrived relatively quickly, additional trucks would have taken significantly longer. Squad #6 was based on East 122nd Street, and had been involved in clearing shoppers from Kress’ store earlier. Squad #5, based on Amsterdam Avenue, arrived around 7:15 PM, according to Patrolman Eppler. The New York Evening Journal identified trucks as coming from Kingsbridge in the Bronx and from Coney Island at the southern end of Brooklyn, the later apparently arriving later: “It slithered perilously over wet streets but arrived in time for its crew to get into action.” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle identified another squad from Brooklyn, Squad #16 from Herbert Street, as having crashed returning from Harlem, at 1:00 AM (a time when there was still significant disorder). Thompson did not mention the trucks. Neither did trucks appear in any of the published photographs of the disorder. Some of their crew did, identifiable because the rifles they carried - described as “riot guns” in newspapers stories and photograph captions - caused them to stand out from other police. They did not, however, have a machine gun that needed to be “set up,” as the Afro-American reported: each truck instead carried a single hand held ‘Tommy gun.’ Nor were the trucks equipped with enough of those weapons for all the crew to have one. And there are no reports that they used tear gas. Those weapons prompted several newspapers to use martial language in stories about the squads’ activities. The New York Evening Journal story on the police reinforcements described Harlem as a “seething battleground,” and the police as “beating back the rioters in a savage and organized attack.” An Emergency truck from the Bronx “leaped off the machine and tore into a crowd of window smashers” (perhaps at Herbert’s jewelry store at 125th Street and 7th Avenue, where another New York Evening Journal story described a similar scene). The Daily Mirror described Emergency trucks as "being sent to the battle zone."

The other evidence of the presence of Emergency trucks placed them in less warlike roles. Newspaper photographs show their crew among the officers who guarded damaged stores. A patrolman with a riot gun stands in front of Herbert’s jewelry store on northeast corner of 125th and 7th Avenue in a photograph published in the Burlington Free Press. Stories in the New York Evening Journal and New York Herald Tribune described police with riot guns guarding the store (the Daily News, New York American and Home News described the officers simply as patrolmen). Another patrolman with a riot gun was photographed on the corner across 7th Avenue from the jewelry store. The image published in the New York Evening Journal is narrowly focused on the officer, whereas another version of that image published in the Daily Mirror shows a Black man walking past him, and the image published in the Daily News shows several Black men and women walking by on the sidewalk, evidence of the continued presence of people around 125th Street. Two additional patrolmen, one visibly carrying a rifle, stand in front of Sherloff’s jewelry store, just a few buildings north of the intersection, in an AP photograph published in the Los Angeles Times. Taken together, the images suggest that the crew of at least one Emergency Truck guarded stores at the intersection. Captain Rothengast, Patrolman Moran and Patrolman Eppler told the MCCH that they also guarded other stores on 125th Street, including Kress’ store. A photograph published in the Daily News shows a patrolman talking through a broken window with a man inside a store on 125th Street. Again, Black men and women are visible in the background on the sidewalk in the background, their presence indicating that police had not closed the streets.

The police perimeter appears to have focused on keeping crowds off 125th Street, not individuals and small groups. In addition to those visible in photographs, Captain Rothengast described seeing "groups of people in 125th Street – no more than 250" when he arrived at Kress’ store around 8:30 PM. A story in the Home News also reported that “In an effort to keep traffic moving, police permitted pedestrians to walk through 125th St. The sidewalks on both sides of the street were crowded.” Patrolmen Moran and Eppler testified that at least some of those people approached police guarding Kress' store asking about the boy beaten in the store, encounters also described by a reporter for the Afro-American. Allowing individuals to walk along 125th Street was not incident-free: around 8:30 PM, a white man was allegedly beaten in front of Kress’ store, with police arresting James Smitten for committing the assault. About twenty minutes later, police arrested Frank Wells for breaking a window in the Willow Cafeteria. Just before 10:00 PM, Detective Roge was hit by a rock in front of Kress’ store and another patrolman injured at 124th Street and 7th Avenue. At the same time, Louise Thompson described larger groups being pushed back by police. She told a MCCH hearing she saw "one policeman throw his billy into the crowds while the mounted police were riding them down” at the corner of 125th Street and 7th Avenue between 8:00 PM and 9:00 PM, a scene similar to that captured by a photograph published in the Daily News. There is no evidence of where that photograph was taken, but a second photograph of police dispersing a group of Black men and women, the most widely reproduced photograph of the disorder, was taken at 125th Street and 7th Avenue according to the caption. It shows the island that that divided the north and south lanes on the roadway, which contained trees and were surrounded by the barriers like those visible in the photograph. A group of men and women are scattering in response to a uniformed patrolman moving toward them. One man is bent over; the caption describes him as falling down. He may also have been pushed down or hit by the patrolman; another man obstructs the view of what has happened between the two men. (One version of the caption claimed that the photographer was hit by a rock soon after taking the image, which might explain why the patrolman was trying to move the crowd).

One of the Black men killed during the disorder, Andrew Lyons, sustained a fractured skull "during the thick of a melee at 125th street and Seventh avenue," according to the New York Amsterdam News, or a block further west at 125th Street and Lenox Avenue according to the Times Union. Police clubs may have been responsible for those injuries, but the doctors who treated Lyons recorded that had been too groggy to tell his roommate or anyone else how he had been injured. No sources mentioned police firing revolvers or rifles to try to disperse the crowds.

On at least two occasions large crowds appear to have broken through the police perimeter. Louise Thompson told a MCCH hearing that around 9:00 PM a crowd broke through on to 125th Street. The Home News also reported that incident. Store windows were broken, Young's hat store looted, and two white men and a white police detective allegedly assaulted around that time. A second crowd broke through around 10:30 PM, resulting in more windows being broken and a white man allegedly being assaulted, and police arresting four Black men.

Most of the incidents on 125th Street before 10:30 PM did not result in arrests, likely because police were heavily outnumbered by crowds and constrained by the responsibility of guarding stores. Only at Kress’ store it seems were enough officers stationed to make arrests: there arrests were made not just around 10:30 PM but also just before 10:00 PM and at 8:30 PM. There are no arrests among those with known times in the period between the arrest of the picketers in front of Kress’ store at 6.45 PM and arrests on 125th Street between 8:30 PM and 9:00 PM. There are approximately a dozen arrests made at unknown times and places that might have occurred during this time, but it is more likely that police were too outnumbered to make arrests, as Lt. Battle later told Langston Hughes. While an arrest for breaking windows was made just before 9:00 PM, police made no arrests for the assaults and broken windows reported when a crowd broke through soon after.

The police perimeter appears to have held after 10:30 PM. Sometime before then, no later than 10:00 PM, and likely as early as between 8:30 PM and 9:00 PM, groups had moved on from 125th Street to attack businesses on 8th Avenue and 7th Avenue, and later, Lenox Avenue. In response, police began to disperse across Harlem, driving along those streets in radio cars and taking up positions on street corners and guarding damaged stores. Exactly when the first police were sent beyond 125th Street is not clear. The first arrest made away from 125th Street, on West 127th Street between St Nicholas and 8th Avenues around 9:00 PM, appears to have been made by a patrolman on his way to 125th Street rather than being deployed elsewhere in Harlem. The arrest of Leroy Brown around 9:45 PM on 7th Avenue between 127th and 128th Streets is clearer evidence of a spreading police presence.

With the MCCH giving limited attention to this period of the disorder, witnesses who testified at their hearings did not provide the details they do of the earlier police response. Newspaper reporters and photographers were on 125th Street during this time, so would have seen some of these events and been able to obtain information from police. Inspector Di Martini spoke with a group of reporters including one from the Afro-American during this time. At the same time, those reporters would have had a limited view. The block was too long for those at one intersection to see the details of what was happening at the other intersection, or even for those at Kress' store to clearly see the nearby intersection with 8th Avenue. At the corner of 125th Street and 7th Avenue the Afro-American's reporter saw only "little knots of people on the corner;" "once he walked on, however, he found high police officials and the first detail of 500 extra policemen rushed to the area" and "a large number of people between Seventh and Eighth Avenues." It is unsurprising then that newspaper stories offer only general and fragmented accounts of this period of the disorder. Information on specific events comes from legal records, which are limited largely to the period around 10:00 PM when police made arrests, and narrowly focused on the actions of a single arresting officer.
Fires (4) Fires broke out in three stores during the disorder, all located on the two blocks of Lenox Avenue between West 130th Street and West 132nd Street. Two of those stores were adjacent, Anna Rosenberg’s notion shop at 429 Lenox Avenue and a hardware store at 431 Lenox Avenue. The third store, Lash's 5 & 10c store, was a block to the south, at 400 Lenox Avenue. That area of Lenox Avenue saw extensive looting, attacks on stores and violence. An additional fire was allegedly set on the roof of 5 West 131st Street, a block to the east, an area that saw few reported events during the disorder.

The fires broke out within a period of around an hour, beginning with the notion and hardware stores after 11 PM followed soon after midnight by Lash's store. All three stores were also looted. Only the New York Daily News captions for the photographs discussed below linked the fires to looting: "Fire was set by rioters after they looted place" in the case of Lash's store; and a more elaborate account for the image of the other stores: "It is but a step from looting to incendiarism. Here's a fireman tacking a blazing tailor shop at 420 Lexington Ave., fired after it was looted." Looting and damaging a business by setting it on fire were not necessarily as continuous as the caption presented: alleged looters generally took items they needed, such as food and clothing; setting fire to a store offered no similar benefit. Instead fires fitted with breaking windows and other attacks that targeted white-owned businesses.

The New York Evening Journal reported fires in two buildings (it is likely that its story treated the fires in the adjacent stores as a single fire, but as two different businesses were effected it is treated here as two fires), the New York Herald Tribune and Daily Worker a fire in one building, and the Home News, New York Daily News, New York Times, and New York World-Telegram referred generally to fires in several stores, offering no details. The Black-owned Philadelphia Tribune appears to have repackaged the New York Evening Journal account, and the Afro-American published photographs of fire-damaged stores not referred to in its stories about the disorder. Other Black newspapers made no reference to fires. Nor did the MCCH report. The roof-top fire was mentioned only in the Home News and the Daily Worker, perhaps because it occurred on the margins of the disorder. These stories attributed the fires to members of the crowds on the street during the disorder, but only the New York Herald Tribune described how one of the fires started.

Firefighters quickly attended the fires, likely because the nearest firehouse was only a few blocks to the north, at 104 West 135th Street, one building west of Lenox Avenue. Their efforts to extinguish the fires were captured by press photographers. A New York Daily News photograph showed smoke coming out of the hardware store window and doors at 431 Lenox Avenue, and firefighters on the scene fighting the fire. One is swinging an axe at the display window, while a second firefighter stands behind him. A third firefighter is just inside the store, his boots visible beneath the smoke. In the original photograph, cropped from the published version, a hose runs across the photograph to the left, in the direction of Rosenberg's notion store at 429 Lenox Avenue. An Acme agency photograph also published in the New York Daily News and in the New York Herald Tribune showed flames in the last section of the Harry Lash’s 5 & 10c store window on West 130th Street. Firefighters can be seen crouched in front of the window (they were cropped out of the version published in the New York Daily News). No other people are visible in the photographs, which are focused on the burning stores.

Fighting the fires was not straightforward, according to the New York Herald Tribune, New York Evening Journal, and Afro-American, which described clashes between crowds and police and firefighters. “A gang of thirty-five Negroes” set fire to Lash's 5 & 10c store in the New York Herald Tribune story. A crowd then “tried to prevent a policeman from sounding an alarm. "Let it burn!" they shouted. When the firemen came they hindered them, too, bustling about the hydrants and shoving hose lines about. At last the firemen threatened to turn the water on them instead of the fire and they dispersed.” Some of those details also appear in the New York Evening Journal, but its story collapsed the two fires together: “As detectives and uniformed men closed in on crowds surrounding the burning buildings, they met with resistance. "Let them burn. Let them burn." The shout was taken up by hundreds, and it was not until firemen threatened to turn hoselines on the rioting men and women that they dispersed.” An entire block separated the two locations, too far for a single crowd to be involved. Both the number of police and the size of the crowd are larger in the New York Evening Journal story, which repeats the crowd's alleged chant, “Let them burn," giving it more prominence. Where the New York Herald Tribune characterized the crowd as having "hindered" firefighters, with actions that seem to involve individuals pressing forward to see the fire getting in their way, the New York Evening Journal characterized the crowd's behavior as "resistance." Those differences and characterizations are in keeping with how that publication sensationalized and exaggerated the actions of Black crowds. The brief photograph caption in the Afro-American mixed elements of the two stories: it followed the New York Herald Tribune in characterizing the crowd as having "hindered" firefighters, but coupled it with the struggle presented by the New York Evening Journal in claiming that "rioters" "fought them away.”

The New York Evening Journal story goes on to link the fires to increased police violence, with the decision to fire bullets at crowds being made in response to fires being set: "The police, working under directions of their highest commanders, were under orders to withhold fire unless necessary, but when the two incendiary fires were started, one at 429 Lenox Ave. and the other at Lenox Ave. and 130th St., bullets flew." The Black-owned Philadelphia Tribune repeated that claim as part of its repackaging of the information in the New York Evening Journal. Multiple other reports instead link police beginning to shoot at crowds rather than in the air to the outbreak of looting rather than to the fires.

Photographs taken the next day showed the damage resulting from the fire. The exteriors of Anna Rosenberg’s notion store and the hardware appear in an Associated Press photograph and a photograph published in the Daily Mirror. No glass remained in its display window, partially visible in the left side of the photograph, which has been emptied of merchandise. Damage to the exterior wall below the window could be the result of the fire. Inside the store is an L-shaped counter on which a range of different goods are stacked; there may be some damaged items on the ground, but neither the ceiling nor the shelves and counter show the fire damage visible in the hardware store to the right. A fire adjuster for Rosenberg’s insurance company, Royal Insurance, put the damage to her store at $980.13, according to the New York Herald Tribune. As the insurance policy did not cover losses from riots, Rosenberg was among the business-owners who sued the city to recover their losses. A jury in the Municipal Court awarded Rosenberg $804, confirming the extent of the damage done by the fire.

No such details exist regarding damage to the hardware store, only the images of its exterior, and three photographs of its interior, one in the Afro-American mistakenly identified as the notion store, a second also in the Afro-American identified as the hardware store, and the third in the New York Daily News. All three images feature the table in the center of the store visible in photographs of the exterior, which distinguished it from the notion store, and show damaged merchandise strewn throughout the store, material hanging from the ceiling visible in the foreground that is likely damage produced by the fire, as well as the burned out display window visible in the photograph of the firefighters at work. Burned shelves, merchandise and fire damage to the table in the center of the store are visible on the left of the photograph in the Afro-American that identified the business as a hardware store. A pile of debris in front of the store visible in the Associated Press photograph appears to be a combination of material from the ceiling and the display windows. The second exterior image shows a white man boarding up the damaged display window.

Fire damage to Lash’s store appears less extensive, better fitting the Home News reporter’s assessment that “damage from the fires was not great.” Only one small section at the rear of the store, on West 130th Street furthest from Lenox Avenue, looked to be burned in an Associated Press photograph. However, the rest of the store appears significantly damaged. Display windows that ran the length of the side of the store on West 130th Street, as well as those facing Lenox Avenue, can be seen smashed. In addition to the damage, Lash reported the loss of $1000 of merchandise. His insurers too refused to pay, he told a Probation Department investigator. He is not among the twenty-five business-owners named as suing the city seeking damages for what their insurance did not cover, but may have been one of the eighty-nine not named.

The fire on the roof of 5 West 131st Street received less mention in the press, with no reference to any damage it did. A Home News reporter explained that fire as “one method by which the mobs stirred up excitement." It was produced, the story claimed by stacking "great heaps of newspapers on the roofs of buildings," which, "when ignited, led those in the streets to believe spectacular fires were in progress and many fire alarms were sounded.” An eyewitness offered a different explanation to the Daily Worker, that the fire was a distraction not an incitement: “This was done, I suppose, to draw the attention of the police force and riot squads from Lenox Avenue where they had concentrated their forces and were attacking the Negroes.” False alarms and the sounds of fire engines are mentioned in [several newspapers], which might indicate that other roof fires were lit, or simply that calls were made to the Fire Department.

Fire-damaged stores attracted press attention out of proportion with their numbers, given that only three of approximately 300 buildings damaged in the disorder caught fire. A mention in the New York World-Telegram highlighted the impact of that emphasis: “The charred interiors of several shops in which fires broke out added to the appearance of a war-ravaged town.” Burned buildings offered a dramatic, ultimately atypical, picture of damage resulting from the disorder. Fires became more prominent in subsequent racial disorders. More were set in Harlem in 1943, but not the dramatic fires given prominence in coverage of the disorder in Watts in 1965. Harlem’s built environment ultimately meant setting fires could harm residents as much, if not more, than white business-owners. Beyond West 125th Street, multiple floors of apartments sat above businesses. Fatalities reported in four fires in Harlem at other times in 1935 made clear the risks of setting fires in stores in such buildings.
Events
Police deploy beyond 125th Street “As they arrived, the police were distributed through 125th Street from Lenox to St. Nicholas Avenues from 125th to 135th Streets,” the New York Herald Tribune reported. Disorder spread beyond 125th Street sometime before police were deployed in those areas. Windows were reported broken on 7th Avenue north of 127th Street not long after 8:30 PM with no indication that police were present until around 9:45 PM, when an officer from the 40th Precinct in the Bronx arrested Leroy Brown at 7th Avenue and 127th Street. After 10:00 PM police began to appear on 7th Avenue south of 125th Street. There is no evidence of when police deployed on 8th Avenue, but it seems likely it occurred around the time they moved on to 7th Avenue as officers were concentrated on that block of 125th Street. It was over an hour later that the sources mention police on Lenox Avenue north of 125th Street, an area east of where they had been concentrated. Crowds had been attacking stores on Lenox Avenue since at least 10:30 PM. Those crowds were not concentrated as they had been on 125th Street between 7th and 8th Avenues. Officers attempted to guard damaged stores that might be looted or patrolled blocks and intersections on foot as they had on 125th Street to respond to any crowds that gathered. Between twenty and thirty radio cars patrolled larger sections of the avenues, pulling over when they encountered incidents of disorder. It is not clear if Emergency trucks also patrolled the avenues; they are mentioned in the press only taking up fixed positions. There is no mention of mounted police anywhere but 125th Street. The New York Times, Home News, and New York Sun also reported that patrolling police saved white men and women from assault, with the New York Evening Journal and New York American reporting specific incidents that might have occurred in this time period, although no arrests were made in such circumstances to provide evidence to confirm either the general or specific claims.

The area over which disorder spread was too large to occupy or cordon off, and officers appear to have spent much of their time reacting to attacks on property. They succeeded in stopping those attacks only for as long as they were present. And even then, the range of their protection was limited to one side of the street. In Harlem, 7th Avenue and Lenox Avenue were major roadways, with two lanes of traffic in each direction, and an island planted with trees in the middle of 7th Avenue. The time it took officers to cross that distance often gave crowds times to disperse and avoid arrest. Unlike on 125th Street, police were not involved in the clashes with large crowds that saw officers injured; three police suffered injuries, one making an arrest and two driving on 8th Avenue. As they deployed across Harlem, police appear to have more often fired their guns than they had when establishing a perimeter around 125th Street. Newspaper reports of that shooting generally attributed it to the outbreak of looting, a legally more serious crime that police practice treated as justifying firing at suspects. The two Black men killed by police gunfire were both alleged to have been looting. However, five unattributed shootings of Black men suggest that police fired more indiscriminately at crowds. Police also appear to have continued to have hit those they arrested with their nightsticks and revolver and rifle butts. Police also appear to have made more arrests during this period of the disorder than earlier; almost half of the arrests with information on timing occurred between 11:00 PM and 2:00 AM. Arrests for looting are a large part of that total; as a more serious crime, police may have been more likely to make arrests for looting than for breaking windows or other activities.

The timing of arrests provides one source of evidence of when police began to deploy beyond 125th Street. However, Lt. Battle later told his biographer Langston Hughes that arrests were not an option early in the disorder as police were too outnumbered. An arrest required officers leaving the street to take their prisoner to a stationhouse. Stories in the New York Evening Journal pointed to the need to guard damaged stores as an additional constraint on police. Furthermore, information on timing and location is available for only forty-seven of the 128 arrests (37%), with information on location but not timing for an additional thirty-two arrests (so 62%, 79 of 128, of arrests can be mapped). Consequently, the lack of arrests, particularly before 11:00 PM, is uncertain evidence of the absence of police.

The first recorded arrest away from 125th Street does not appear to result from the dispersal of officers across Harlem. The patrolman who intervened in an attack on a white man by a group of Black men on St Nicholas Avenue and West 127th Street around 9:00 PM and arrested Paul Boyett, was likely in a radio car going to 125th Street from the 30th Precinct not sent from where police were gathered. The next arrest, of Leroy Brown on 7th Avenue and 127th Street at 9.45 PM, offers clearer evidence of police deploying. Patrolman Edward Doran came from the 40th Precinct, directly across the river from Harlem in the Bronx. He testified to seeing crowd gather in front of the store, and Brown then throw a tailor’s dummy through the window. While Doran arrested Brown, the other members of the group he heard and saw break windows further up 7th Avenue were not arrested. Twenty-five minutes later, Patrolman Irwin Young, who had earlier arrested Harry Gordon on 125th Street, made the second arrest on the same block of 7th Avenue, across the street. Although the first arrests south of 125th Street did not occur until after 11:00 PM, officers were reported to have clashed with crowds at 121st Street around 10:30 PM. That those officers made no arrests likely indicates that there were too few of them to control the crowd. A New York Evening Journal story sensationalized the incident in those terms: “Policemen attached to the West 123rd st. station were surrounded by men and women. Guns were drawn but the mob refused to disband and in the ensuing exchange of shots Lyman Quarterman, 34, 306 W. 146th st., was shot in the abdomen,” almost certainly by police. By 12:30 AM when Fred Campbell drove by, there were “an unusual number of patrolmen and policemen out with riot guns” at that intersection. Officers made arrests as far south as West 116th Street after midnight, but the number of damaged and looted businesses suggests a limited presence and concern with the Puerto Rican neighborhood centered on 116th Street.

Police likely deployed along 8th Avenue around the same time as they did along 7th Avenue as police had gathered at that intersection with 125th Street as they had at the other end of the block. There is no evidence of the timing of any of the arrests made on that street, which took place both north and south of 125th Street, although there are no arrests north of 135th Street as there were on 7th Avenue.

The first arrests on Lenox Avenue north of 125th Street came after 11:00 PM, but in that area there was not any indication of a police deployment earlier. Most of the arrests after midnight occurred on those blocks of Lenox Avenue, where police took people into custody as far north as 135th Street. Those blocks also saw the most extensive looting, a combination that suggests that the number of arrests reflected the scale and changed character of the disorder rather than indicating that police more effectively controlled the people on the streets. There was only one arrest recorded on Lenox Avenue south of 125th Street, an area with relatively few businesses, and not until 2 AM. That arrest was of a man carrying goods allegedly stolen from a hardware store, not damaging or looting a store. Around the same time police made arrests on the same sections of 7th Avenue.

After 3:00 AM there is a lull in both arrests and reported events. Earlier, when Deputy Chief Inspector McAuliffe, in charge of uniformed police in the borough of Manhattan, had been driven through Harlem just before midnight, he told a reporter from the New York Herald Tribune that “thousands of persons were staying in the streets late,” although he judged that “most of them appeared to be spectators.” Although Lt. Battle told a hearing of the MCCH that “there was no excitement” when he went on to Harlem streets at 2:00 AM, there is evidence of violence and arrests on Lenox and 7th Avenues on both sides of 125th Street at that time. However, when McAuliffe toured the neighborhood again at 4:00 AM, he “reported that all was quiet,” according to a story in the New York World Telegram. That assessment was likely why police called from precincts outside Harlem were sent home at that time, according to the New York Evening Journal. By that time it appears that police were relying on radio cars to patrol the avenues. The final arrests of the disorder came around 5:00 AM, made by officers in radio cars patrolling 8th Avenue and Lenox Avenue.

The combination of arrest and continued violence in the first arrest beyond 125th Street prefigured the results of police activity for the remainder of the disorder. The MCCH Report summarized the situation as one in which “Crowds constantly changed their make-up. When bricks thrown through store windows brought the police, the crowds would often dissolve, only to gather again and continue their assaults upon property.” The New York World Telegram offered a similar picture: "Whenever the police succeeded in scattering them, the mobs reformed to continue their outbreaks." Predictably, the New York Evening Journal offered a sensationalized version of that narrative, in which "[mobs] disappeared, though, only to turn up at some other corner to wreak vengeance again on all whites and the police." In the Times Union's narrative, the violence while not ephemeral was as discontinuous as those newspapers, with "sporadic and small riots [breaking] out in various parts of Harlem." The Daily News focused on the dispersal of the crowds, describing how "armed bands of colored and white guerillas, swinging crowbars and clubs, roamed through barricaded Harlem," "too scattered for police to corral." So too did the New York Herald Tribune's narrative, in which "outbreaks spread to other parts of Harlem, with smaller groups here and there." In the New York Times "roving bands of Negro men and women" forcibly resisting "500 policemen patrolling streets in an area of more than a square mile," later becoming "marauding bands." In the New York Sun it was "small roving mobs which prowled through the city throughout the night," although most of its narrative attributed the violence to a single "frenzied and race-crazed mob...who tore through the streets." The dispersed nature of the violence is less clear in the narratives of other publications. The New York Post described a "tidal wave of rioting" that "surged through the district," and "recurring waves" of rioting. The Home News offered little sense of the location of the disorder, noting only that "the disorder spread to adjoining streets," and making one mention of "roving bands of colored men." So too did the New York American, which mentioned only that the outbreak "spread with disastrous results over an area of several blocks," and the Daily Mirror, in which the description was more dramatic and vaguer: "It was a wild night of melee with mob violence spreading as the night wore on.... The “battlefield” was no longer W. 125th St. It was spreading. It was Harlem."

Storeowners seeking police to protect their businesses reported that telephone calls and visits to the stationhouses failed to bring officers. Even when they arrived, police could often offer limited protection. After officers who fired their pistols in the air to disperse a crowd near Lenox Avenue and 132nd Street succeeding only in moving them from one side of the street to the other without interrupting their attacks on business, the frightened staff of William Feinstein’s liquor store locked up and fled. Several hours later police failed to stop the store from being looted, only arriving in time to arrest one of a group who took bottles of liquor. After the disorder, Feinstein joined more than a hundred businessowners who successfully sued the city for failing to protect their property. Representing approximately a third of the businesses reported damaged or looted during the disorder, that number suggests a widespread scenario. However, the litigants and evidence of looting are concentrated on Lenox Avenue between 125th and 135th Streets. Those blocks also saw significant numbers of arrests. By contrast, 7th Avenue north of 129th Street saw very few reported incidents and only two arrests, although at least half of the eighteen arrests for which they are no details could have been in that area.

The gunfire that frightened Feinstein’s staff was a more frequent feature of the police response beyond 125th Street. The New York Times attributed that shooting to officers who “fired their pistols into the air, frightening away various groups of would-be disturbers,” as occurred around Feinstein’s liquor store. So too did the New York Herald Tribune, until midnight, when “as looting developed, the police began shooting.” That account fitted claims in the New York Times, New York Evening Journal and New York Post that officers were under orders not to fire at crowds, or only “in the greatest emergency,” according to the New York Post. Inspector Di Martini told a hearing of the MCCH that he "gave instructions to police not to do any shooting." Instead, they used the butts of their guns as clubs (as can be seen in photographs of the arrest of Charles Alston and of an arrest on Lenox Avenue). As well as looting, it was violence directed against white men and women that led officers to use their guns according to the New York Evening Journal: “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.” Sensationalized stories of violence against white men and women was the focus of that white newspaper's narrative of the disorder. In another story the New York Evening Journal presented police as using guns in response to crowds starting two fires on Lenox Avenue. (While firefighters extinguished those blazes, the claim in the Daily Mirror that they were “also pressed into the work of "taming the mob"” appears to be an invention. There is no other evidence that “Fire engines were placed at advantageous positions in the side streets of the riot zone prepared to "wet down" the more heated.” To the contrary, Inspector Di Martini told a MCCH hearing that he did not "call upon the Fire Department" as the crowds on 125th Street were not large enough to require them.)

Both the incidents in which police shot and killed Black men, Lloyd Hobbs on 7th Avenue and James Thompson on 8th Avenue, involved alleged looting. No one was identified as responsible for shooting and wounding an additional five Black men; all those incidents took place after 1:00 AM, in the areas where at that time looting was most prevalent. The New York Sun somewhat obliquely linked those shootings to the police, presenting police as using their guns in response to the increasing “fury of the mob: ”The crack of revolver shot bit into the din. Seven men reeled under the impact of the bullets.” Eunice Carter asked Captain Rothnengast for details of those shootings during a MCCH hearing, suggesting that they had been shot by police: “Officer, you stated that other people were shot but who shot them? Was there any effort to find out who shot them? Was any check made on the bullets to ascertain whether they came from police guns?” He replied simply that “No bullets were recovered.” Rothengast had earlier told the hearing that "several shots were fired from roofs and windows at us. I saw the fire from a pistol as it was shot from a roof on 129th Street.” Several white newspapers reported incidents of police being shot at that other evidence suggests did not happen. The New York American, Home News, New York Herald Tribune, and New York Post reported James Thompson shot at the detectives trying to arrest him, with the New York Evening Journal sensationally reported an even larger gunfight in which "other rioters" returned the officers shots. However, police records make clear that only the detectives fired weapons, hitting Thompson and a white passerby, while one also shot himself in the hand. Similarly, a sniper attack on police reported by New York World Telegram, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Times Union and Home News appears not to have happened. The four men police arrested were charged with disorderly conduct for “annoying,” a charge that would not have been made had they actually shot at police. If anyone did shoot at police, they failed to hit their targets.

Only two police officers were injured away from 125th Street, in large part because the situations in which officers had been injured around Kress’ store did not occur when the disorder was not concentrated on a single location. Patrolman Whittington of Emergency Squad #9, was reportedly hit by a rock on a truck at 8th Avenue at 123rd Street around midnight. That location was close enough to the perimeter which police established around Kress’ store and 125th Street that the truck may have been part of that response to the disorder rather than involved in efforts to control crowds in the wider neighborhood. (A car driven by Detective Lt. Frank Lenahan on 8th Avenue was also hit by rocks, perhaps also away from 125th Street. Cars and buses driving on 7th Avenue were also attacked with rocks, including one with a Black driver, so Lenahan may not have been targeted as a policeman.) The second officer, Detective Nicholas Campo, was shot with his own revolver while trying to make an arrest; Irwin Young allegedly had also allegedly been assaulted during an arrest at the beginning of the disorder. Otherwise, the clashes between police and crowds that occurred around 125th Street did not happen when the disorder was not concentrated on Kress store: rather than attacking police guarding stores, crowds drew them away or waited until they moved away; and rather than resisting police efforts to disperse them, crowds scattered and reformed when police moved on.

With police killing Lloyd Hobbs the only incident beyond 125th Street to which the MCCH gave attention, information on the police response comes from newspaper stories and legal records. When the disorder spread beyond 125th Street, reporters appear to have remained there, where police were concentrated, and at the police stations on West 123rd Street and West 135th Street, and at Harlem Hospital. In reporting this period of the disorder they relied on police accounts of the incidents in which they made arrests [and, in the case of the NYEJ, other alleged assaults on whites, some described by police, others by the alleged victims]. The narrow focus of arrest reports, which mentioned only the arresting officer, obscure the details of the police deployment. In a small number of cases, arrests by officers patrolling in radio cars are identified; however, radio cars were likely involved in additional arrests.
Picketing in front of Kress' store Around 6.45 PM, three men arrived at the sidewalk of West 125th Street in front of Kress’ store carrying placards and began walking back and forth, picketing the store. A photograph published in the Daily News of the front of the store taken on March 21 below shows the area the men would have walked, and the wide sidewalk which would have allowed other people to still move past the store or gather in front of it.

About thirty minutes earlier a window in the store had been broken as Daniel Miller had tried to speak from a ladder on the same stretch of sidewalk, after which he been arrested by Patrolman Timothy Shannon. The three men who walked the picket line were nineteen-year-old Sam Jameson and nineteen-year-old Murray Samuels, both unemployed white men, and Claudio Viabolo, a thirty-nine-year-old Black man. "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," an unnamed Black man, presumably Viabolo, explained when questioned the next day during a police line-up of those arrested reported in the New York Sun. However the signs the men carried referred to a beating not a killing, reading “Kress Brutally Beats and Seriously Injures Negro Child and Negro Women. Negro and White Don’t Buy Here” and “Kress Brutally Beats Negro Child."

Jackson Smith, the manager of Kress’s store, summoned to the front door earlier when James Parton had set up the stepladder that Miller climbed to speak, told a public hearing of the MCCH that he was still there when the three men began to picket. Louise Thompson testified in an earlier public hearing that she encountered the pickets on her return to the front of the store after being pushed east by police after the arrest of Miller, and witnessing the arrest of Harry Gordon about 300 feet from the store. Patrolman Timothy Moran, who had been stationed across West 125th Street from the store when the window was broken and Miller arrested, told a public hearing that “three other men with placards draped over their shoulders” arrived a few minutes after those events, and began walking up and down in front of the store.

The police officers stationed at the store had been instructed to “keep the crowd moving in from of the store, Moran testified. They were likely standing in a similar location to those in the above photograph of Kress' store on March 21. An officer “told or asked [the men] to stop marching in front of Kress’” and when they did not leave “after about five minutes," police arrested them for unlawful assembly. Sgt Bauer testified he was involved in the arrest, as again was Patrolman Shannon, who had arrested Miller and was recorded as the arresting officer. “The police took the placards and pushed the people carrying them into the vestibule,” Jackson Smith told a public hearing. By 7:00 PM, crowds around Kress’s store had been pushed to 8th and 7th avenues.

A second version of the placard that read “Kress Brutally Beats Negro Child,” photographed for the Daily News in an image available at Getty Images, had “Young Liberators” added at the bottom. That organization, which had ties to the Communist party, had led a successful boycott campaign in 1934 to force the Empire Cafeteria to employ Black workers. The appeal not to shop at Kress’s store on one sign evoked that campaign and the more extensive boycott campaign undertaken by a coalition of Black organizations that had made pickets in front of stores on West 125th Street a familiar sight in 1934. More broadly, the Young Liberators were “a group of young people who are struggling for Negro rights,” Joe Taylor, the organization's president, told a public hearing of the MCCH, with about 140 black and white members. A Black man came to their nearby office, at 262 Lenox Ave near 126th Street, about 5 PM, and said “Did you know that a Negro boy had been beaten nearly to death in the Kress store?” [30] Taylor did not, and went to investigate, arriving after Kress’ store was closed. He then went to the police station on West 123rd Street before returning to West 124th Street. Later Taylor went to an address he heard was the home of Lino Rivera, but could find out nothing. Back at the office, other members of the Young Liberators produced a leaflet that was distributed on West 125th starting around 7.30 PM. Headed “Child Brutally Beaten. Woman Attacked By Boss and Cops = Child near Death,” the final line urged people to “Join the Picket Line.” That reference to a picket line provided further evidence that the men arrested for picketing came from the Young Liberators. The first public hearing of the MCCH devoted time to establishing who had produced that leaflet and when it was distributed. Since the leaflets did not appear on the streets before 7.30 PM, the MCCH Final Report concluded that the actions of the Young Liberators “were not responsible for the disorders and attacks on property which were already in full swing.” [5]

The place of the picketing in the sequence of events outside Kress’ was described most clearly in testimony given in the public hearings of the MCCH. However, those details did not become well known as neither the MCCH Subcommittee nor final reports mentioned the picketing. Those narratives included only the two men arrested for trying to speak in front of the store, Miller and Gordon, who were not named. Newspaper stories truncated and confused the events established in the public hearings, as police told reporters that Jameson, Samuels and Viabolo had arrived and acted together with Miller and Gordon to cause the disorder.

The most common version of that narrative had the group picketing the store before Daniel Miller attempted to speak. The New York Times, NYS, NYEJ, Am and DW all published stories with that chronology, with different descriptions of who was involved. The New York Times reported "Two white and two Negro pickets paraded back and forth in front of the store, bearing placards of the Young Liberators League with the inscription: “Kress Brutality Beats Negro Child” and “Kress Brutality Beats and Seriously Injures Negro Child.” The NYS used similar phrasing: “a group of agitators, two white and two Negroes, arrived in front of the establishment and took up picket posts carrying placards of the Young Liberators League, which shouted in type that "Kress brutally beats and seriously injures Negro child."” The Hearst newspapers, the NYEJ and New York American, identified Samuels, Jameson and Harry Gordon as picketing, and omitted Diabolo or any mention of Black men among those carrying placards. The DW more vaguely referred to an unspecified number of Young Liberators forming a picket line. The NYA [3/23] substituted Gordon for Miller but otherwise followed the same narrative in which “several Communist leaders gathered and began a picket movement before the store,” before Gordon was arrested for “addressing a group” and Samuels and Viabolo arrested for “acting in concert with Gordon.” The arrests of Jameson, and Miller, were reported separately without any details of the circumstances.

The consistent reporting of what was written on the placards likely resulted from police displaying them to reporters as well as photographers, with images published in the New York Evening Journal (and taken by the Daily News). The Daily Mirror did describe a placard that read, "Avenge the death of this little colored boy!" Given that the photographed placards, and the leaflet distributed by the Young Liberators soon after the picket, refer to a beaten boy, that placard is likely an invention that fitted the sensationalized tone of the tabloid's reporting. However, stories in the HN and NYA (3/30) about the men’s appearance in the Harlem Magistrates Court the next day, had them distributing placards not picketing, placards which read "Kress store is resorting to lynching.” Jackson Smith, the manager of Kress’ store, told a public hearing of the MCCH [8] that he saw a placard that read “Kess brutally beats Negro child.” Patrolman Moran’s testimony was less certain: “As I can recall, they referred to a child being beaten in Kress in earlier part of the afternoon.”[62].

Several of the narratives that mistakenly had the three Young Liberators picketing before Miller spoke also included inaccurate accounts of the circumstances of the men’s arrests. The New York American and the NYEJ had Jameson and Samuels, together with Gordon, going to Miller’s aid when Patrolman Shannon arrested him. Viabolo was missing from the NYEJ story and appeared in the Am’s narrative as a bystander who also obstructed Miller's arrest. The NYT simply reported that the arrest of Jameson, Samuels and Viabolo came “later,” after Miller spoke. The DW did not report specific arrests, but rather that “police broke up the picket line, arresting the leaders.”

Mentions of the picketing were vaguer and more fragmentary in the AA, HT, DN and NYP. The AA reporter who arrived in front of Kress store around 7.14 PM noted that before he “got on the spot, the screaming of the girl and the flying rumors had brought forth four youngsters, three white, with sandwich signs telling of '‘Boy Brutally Beaten.”” “[F]rom somewhere pickets had appeared," the NYHT reported, "bearing placards reading: "Kress Brutality Beats Negro Child.” Neither story mentioned the arrest of those picketing, although the HT story later noted that “Police Seized members of the mob who appeared to be its leaders as they drove it back.” Neither of the other two stories described picketing. The DN came closest, reporting “the Young Liberators marched through various streets with red and black smeared placards on which in tremendous letters was the legend: "CHILD BRUTALLY BEATEN: WOMAN ATTACKED BY BOSS AND COPS: CHILD NEAR DEATH." The NYP, while naming the three men among those arrested, described them only as speaking to the crowd.

Unlike those initial stories, newspaper stories about proceedings in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20 consistently grouped Viabolo with the four white men arrested in front of Kress’ store. Police presented the five men as a group first in a line-up before they were taken to court, the New York Herald Tribune reported, and then at the courthouse. In stories on the court appearances, the Am, HN, NYHT, and NYT all described the men as the "ringleaders" of the disorder, which was likely the term police used. When Jameson, Samuels and Diabolo were arraigned with Miller in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, the charge recorded in the docket book for all of them was riot. Assistant District Attorney Carey requested each man be held for a hearing on March 23, on the maximum bail of $2500. When the four 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 each of the men's cases as "Dism[issed], def[endant] indicted," the grand jury had actually voted informations against them not indictments, sending them for trial on misdemeanor charges in the Court of Special Sessions not felony charges in the Court of General Sessions. 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 men's ILD lawyers moved to have the charges dismissed, the New York Amsterdam News and Daily Worker reported. The judges granted that motion, and freed the four men.

Claudio Viabolo’s name was spelled in a variety of ways in these sources. Viabolo is used here as it was recorded in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book, and in stories about his appearances in the Harlem Magistrates Court published in the 1935_03_30_AA_12; 1935_03_21_NYDN_3; 1935_03_25_NYP_3; 1935_03_21_NYHT_2; 1935_03_21_American_2; 1935_03_21_HN; 1935_03_25_NYS_2; 1935_03_21_NYT_1; 1935_03_21_American; 1935_03_30_NYA_1; 1935_03_22_NYP_1. The name was spelled Diabolo in the list of those arrested in the disorder published in the AA, AW and NJG, and stories in 1935_03_20_WT; 1935_03_20_NYJ_1. In the edition the NYA rushed to print on March 23, the name was Bilo. In the DW on March 21, the name was Viano. Sam Jameson's name was also misspelled, but was not corrected over time as Viabolo's name was. Jameson is used here as it was recorded in the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book, and in stories published in 1935_03_20_NYJ_1; 1935_03_20_NYT_1; 1935_03_20_NYP_1; 1935_03_20_NYHT_1; and stores about court appearances published in the 1935_03_21_HN; and 1935_03_25_NYS_2. The name was spelled Jamieson in the 1935_03_20_NYDN_6; 1935_03_21_NYDN_3; 1935_03_27_AW_1; 1935_03_30_NJ&G_18; 1935_03_20_American_1;.

Historians’ descriptions of the protests outside Kress’ store follow the narrative provided by police, treating all those arrested as part of a single group. That framing implicitly introduces the idea that the disorder was orchestrated by those men, while offering no details of how the crowds of women and men around them acted to weigh against that evidence. Weight is added to that implication by the failure to fully identify the men involved in the protests. While Cheryl Greenberg and Lorrin Thomas do not identify the men, Mark Naison, Thomas Kessner, Marilynn Johnson and Nicole Watson describe them as members of the Young Liberators. None of those historians mention that four of the five, and both the speakers arrested, were white men. Naison did describe the Young Liberators as an interracial group; so too did Nicole Watson, however she did not identify the men in front of the store as members of the Young Liberators. Neglecting their race makes those men appear more representative of the crowd than they were, particularly in Greenberg and Watson’s narratives, which do not identify they as Young Liberators. Naison, Kessner, Greenberg, Thomas, Johnson and Watson all follow the chronology that has the picketing begin before the speakers were arrested. Grouping the men places an organized Communist protest at the center of the outbreak of disorder, and makes the window being broken and the men’s arrest a response to the feeling they built in the crowd. Recognizing that the protests occurred in a less coordinated way highlights that police responded immediately to any sign of protest, not just to a window being broken. They may also have acted so quickly because they recognized the men as Communists; the men’s language and appeals would have given them away. Communist protest in Harlem, and across the city, drew violent responses from police throughout the early 1930s. Recognition of the fragmented nature of the protests and the identity of those involved directs attention away from those events to the crowds of Black men and women around them. Crowd members gathered in groups, talked among themselves, sought answers from police about what had happened to the boy, and responded to police efforts to clear the street. Rather than organized or orchestrated by the Young Liberators, those behaviors appear more spontaneous, in line with the interpretation offered in the MCCH’s final report.
Black women arrested for looting (3) Three Black women are among the sixty individuals arrested for looting. They represent just under half of the women arrested, with three women arrested for breaking windows and another for inciting a crowd. (No women identified as white are among those reported as arrested during the disorder). Few details of their arrests and alleged actions are recorded. Loyola Williams appears only in the lists of those arrested for burglary; there is no evidence that she was prosecuted. Elizabeth Tai and Elva Jacobs are both charged with taking groceries, although the outcomes of their prosecutions suggest that neither actually had any merchandise in their possession. A district attorney reduced the charge against Tai to disorderly conduct, which suggested a lack of evidence of breaking in to a business or taking items. In Jacobs' case, a district attorney reduced the charge to unlawful entry, which suggested she had been arrested in a store, but without any items in her possession. Those reduced charges indicate that police could only provide evidence that the women were part of crowds on the streets not that they participated in looting.

The presence of Black women in the crowds on Harlem’s streets is recorded in most accounts of the disorder, but they are only rarely mentioned as participants in attacks on stores or looting. The Daily News, New York Evening Journal, New York Times and Norfolk Journal and Guide all included women and men in their general descriptions of the crowds. (The Daily News highlighted their presence among those who broke windows in a headline, “Women Join Mob of 4,000 In Battering Stores,” without mentioning women breaking windows in the story itself). Other papers such as the New York American, Home News, New York Sun, New York World-Telegram and the Black newspapers the Afro-American and Chicago Defender included women only in the initial crowds inside and outside Kress’ store. Their presence at the outbreak of violence distinguishes the disorder in Harlem from those that followed in subsequent decades, in which Marilynn Johnson argues women became involved after men had initiated the violence. Women's early involvement in Harlem resulted from the disorder beginning in a store, at a time when only women were present to witness what happened to Lino Rivera. (Women are not mentioned in stories about the events of the disorder published in the New York Herald Tribune, New York Post or New York Age).

Women are specifically reported as participants in looting in only four newspapers. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle's general description of the disorder included "looting stores" among other activities of "Bands of men and women, in some cases joined by whites." When the Daily Mirror’s narrative reached the time when “Looters began to clean out the goods on display in the stores whose windows had been broken,” it noted “Both men and women were doing the looting.” In the Black press, the Atlanta World broadly included women in crowds that looted in a similar manner: “the members of the mob needed little provocation to start on the rampage. Using whatever weapons that were to hand, men, women and children in the mob broke hundreds of plate glass windows in stores belonging to white merchants, scattered and stole merchandise and destroyed fixtures.” Rather than a general presence among looters, women appear in just a crowd looting Herbert's Blue Diamond Jewelry store in the New York Evening Journal: “The emergency squad police swept into the mob with riot guns, drove the yelling, threatening men and women from their loot and then guarded the store until armored trucks could remove the valuables.” However, other sources indicate that Herbert’s was not looted, but only had its windows broken, by the crowds that had gathered early in the disorder across the street around Kress’s store – crowds that multiple sources record included women. (The New York Evening Journal story also presented women as participating in an attack on a white man, B.Z. Kondoul, and in efforts to prevent firefighters from extinguishing a fire in a store on Lenox Avenue).

Rather than participants, women are presented as instigators in Roi Ottley's column in the New York Amsterdam News: “LENOX AVENUE was the scene of much of the disorder during that riotous fracas...From every shattered window rioters would emerge laden down with spoils...Women stood on the fringes of the mobs and dictated their choice to their men folk, who willingly obliged by bringing forth the desired article.” (Ottley also cast women as inciting the disorder more generally, also from greater distance, in an earlier column: “Women hanging out of windows screamed applause to the reign of terror...and prodded their men-folk on with screeching invectives.”) Those images are somewhat at odds with the agency displayed by the women shopping in Kress' store, and may reflect attitudes to women as much as their behavior during the disorder.

While these stories, and the photographs that accompanied them, indicate that women were part of the crowds on March 19, it remains unclear whether those women did not participate in looting or did and were not recorded by reporters or arrested by police focused on men they likely considered more threatening. From a broader perspective more removed from the events of the disorder, the MCCH appears to have concluded that women did participate, noting in its Report: "Even some grown-up men and women who had probably never committed a criminal act before, but bad suffered years of privations, seized the opportunity to express their resentment against discrimination in employment and the exclusive rights of property." However, this section of the report was part of an effort to frame looting as less violent and threatening than it appeared in the initial newspaper stories. While noting that "it seems indisputable that the criminal element took advantage of the disorders," the previous sentence argued, "it seems equally true that many youngsters who could not be classed as criminals joined the looting crowds in a spirit of pure adventure." An earlier discussion of crowds in the disorder made a similar claim, that "Some of the destruction was carried on in a playful spirit. Even the looting, which has furnished many an amusing tale, was sometimes done in the spirit of children taking preserves from a closet to which they have accidentally found the key." Including women as participants in 'playful' behavior did not run counter to gender roles and stereotypes in the way that their participation in violence did. The only other place women appear in the MCCH Report's discussion of the events of the disorder is as shoppers in Kress' store.

By the time disorder broke out again in Harlem in 1943, and the police recorded attacks on businesses and looting systematically in a way that they had not been in 1935, the press associated looting with Black women, a representation that would intensify in subsequent decades. Harold Orlans' contemporary study of newspaper stories about the 1943 racial disorder and Laurie Leach's more recent analysis both note the attention given to Black women. Photographs of women participating in attacks on stores and being arrested for looting appeared on the front pages of both of Harlem's Black Newspapers, the New York Amsterdam News and the New York Age when they first reported the disorder. One striking image on the front page of the New York Amsterdam News a week later, which also appeared in Life magazine, could be seen as fitting the reading of women's behavior as playful advanced in 1935. Historian Sara Blair described the image as featuring "an attractive young woman [who] smiles openly at the camera, part of a group of style-conscious women balancing boxes of hosiery and other consumer goods (one shopping bag is emblazoned with the logo “Modesse”) as they are escorted by police." She explains the woman's unselfconscious engagement with the camera as reflecting a participation in a social spectacle, a performative response to being photographed, that marked the new visual culture emerging in this period. The figure of the Black woman looter would take a more threatening form in white reporting and photography of the 1967 riots, as "greedy" and "criminal and culpable," as Kevin Mumford insightfully unpacked in his study of Newark.
Kress 5, 10 & 25c store rear windows broken When police officers pushed people away from the front of S. H. Kress' store and off West 125th Street after someone threw objects that broke the store's front windows, some ended up on 8th Avenue and West 124th Street. Around 7.00 PM, a hearse stopped on 124th Street near the rear of the S. H. Kress' store, located about a third of the way along the block to the east, attracting the attention of members of the crowd. A woman saw the vehicle, according to reports in the New York Times, New York Sun and New York Herald Tribune. She called out "There’s the hearse come to take the boy’s body out of the store,” according to New York Times and New York Sun, and "It's come to get the dead child," according to the New York Herald Tribune. While there were many Black women inside and outside the store, singling out one fitted the emphasis in the narratives published by those newspapers on the hysterical nature of the crowds: the New York Herald Tribune described the woman who called out as "excitable;" the New York Times reported that she "shrilled;" while in the New York Sun "her piercing scream lifted itself above the hoarse shouts of the mob," with the result that other people were "Incited." The outcry is more generalized in the New York Evening Journal, in line with its more explicitly racist narrative. That story claimed that "the Negroes were worked up to such a frenzy that they did not realize [the arrival of the hearse] was simply a coincidence. The cry went up" "They've killed him! They've killed him! They're taking him away in a hearse!"" No one arrested during the disorder was identified as being charged with inciting the crowd.

Whether they saw the hearse as evidence of the fate of the boy arrested in the S. H. Kress store or responded to shouts making that connection, people moved to the rear of the store. Those at the rear of the store may have found further reason to think the boy had come to harm when they found the store lights on and men moving around inside, workmen repairing displays and counters damaged earlier, according to the New York Herald Tribune and New York American. Or members of the crowd moved directly to renew the attack on the store begun on West 125th Street, as reported in the New York Times, New York Evening Journal, and Times Union. Or the crowd gathered at the rear of the store was joined by "a number of colored persons, believed to be inmates of the Salvation Army located on 124th Street, west of 7th Avenue,...[who] began throwing stones," as Inspector Di Martini wrote in a report to the Police Commissioner the next day. (The Salvation Army operated a hostel for homeless men at that location). One result was that windows in the rear of S. H. Kress' store were broken.

An "L" shaped building that spanned the width of the block between 125th and 124th Streets, S. H. Kress' store had twice as much storefront on West 124th Street as it had facing 125th Street. There were retail counters in the wider rear section of the store, and basement exits out on to West 124th Street (Lino Rivera had been released through one). Windows also faced 124th Street, but no images have been found that show their size and extent. Whatever their extent, more windows in the rear of the store appear to have been broken than in the front. Compared to the "very little loss on the front," a reporter for the Afro-American described "the windows in the rear showed signs of the stone and whiskey bottle barrage." Similarly, the New York Age reported "a plate glass window in the front of the store was smashed, while the back part of the building suffered several broken windows." Without the comparison, the Times Union reported similar damage, "the store's rear windows were smashed," as did the New York Times less precisely, noting "Stones were hurled through windows." With typical exaggeration, both the Home News and New York Herald Tribune claimed all the rear windows were shattered.

Windows were possibly not the only target of objects thrown on West 124th Street. Police officers had been stationed at the store's rear entrance earlier in the evening. Together with officers who followed the crowds from 8th Avenue, police once again tried to clear them from the street. Two mounted patrolmen were part of that group, according to Joe Taylor, the leader of the Young Liberators. Unlike on West 125th Street earlier, objects struck police officers. At least two officers suffered injuries that required an ambulance. Patrolman Michael Kelly was hit on the right leg by a rock and Detective Charles Foley was hit on the shoulder by a stone. Officers trying to push crowds away from the rear of the store could have been hit by objects thrown at the windows, but white newspapers reported in sensational terms that police were the targets. "A barrage of missiles fell on the ranks of police," according to the New York Times, while the New York Herald Tribune described a more dramatic scene in which "Negroes showered [police] with miscellaneous missiles from roofs, hallways and other hiding places." News of the hearse's appearance and renewed police clashes with crowds on the street spread to people gathered on 8th Avenue, and windows in other stores on 125th Street began to be smashed. Despite these attacks, police appear to have cleared the crowd from 124th Street within a few minutes. When Emergency Truck #5 arrived on the block around 7:15 PM, Patrolman Henry Eppler told a MCCH hearing that "everything was quiet," which led to the truck relocating to 125th Street.

Several newspapers made no mention of broken windows in the rear of S. H. Kress' store. A hearse appears in most of those narratives, provoking generalized reactions from the crowds on the street. It served to "fire the crowd" in the Afro-American's narrative, and in stories in the Home News and New York Post, although in the white newspapers crowds see the vehicle on West 124th Street before the speakers try to address the crowd, a different chronology. The New York Sun described the crowd moving directly to attacks on police and stores and looting. The hearse appears in front of the store, not at its rear, in the Daily Mirror. And it is mentioned as appearing in the area without mention of a specific location in the Atlanta World and in an ANP story published in both the Atlanta World and Pittsburgh Courier. Neither broken windows in the rear of Kress' store nor a hearse are features of the narratives in the Daily News, New York World-Telegram and the MCCH report, and are likewise missing from Louise Thompson's account (who was on 125th Street when the rear windows were broken).
Two men speak to a crowd & Patrolman Irwin Young assaulted Harry Gordon, a twenty-year-old white man in his senior year at City College, was walking along West 125th Street between 7th and 8th Avenues about 6 PM, he told a public hearing of the MCCH, when he noticed groups of “excited” people “milling around the street.” While Gordon claimed to have been simply passing by, it seems likely he was one of the Communist Party members who came to Kress’ store to in response to rumors a boy had been attacked. He did identify himself at the hearing as a member of the New York Students League, a Communist led organization. Gordon gave his address as 699 Prospect Avenue in the Bronx.

Gordon testified that he asked several people on the street what was happening, but he “couldn’t get anything at all from them.” He then saw a Black man, James Parton, set up a ladder in front of Kress; store, briefly speak to the crowd, and then Daniel Miller step up to speak. A window then smashed and police officers immediately seized Miller. Other officers chased Gordon and other people who had been listening to Miller across West 125th Street to the opposite sidewalk and then pushed them away from the store, east toward 7th Avenue. About 300 feet from Kress’ store, Gordon estimated, Parton climbed a lamppost and again spoke to those on the street, saying “that a boy had been killed and that a crowd should gather in protest,” according to Gordon’s testimony. Then he climbed the lamppost, intending, he told a public hearing, “to get a committee from the crowd” “to go to the police to find out if a child was killed.” He was only able to say “Friends” before Patrolman Irwin Young pulled him down from the lamppost. Gordon’s alleged assault on Young came when he “grabbed Patrolman Irwin Young’s nightstick and used it to hit the officer,” according to a story in the New York Times that is the only source that mentioned the nature of the assault, reporting Gordon’s second appearance in the Magistrates Court. After arresting Gordon, Young and other officers dragged him to a police radio car and drove him to the police station on West 123rd Street.

Lists of the injured variously described the injuries Young suffered as “cuts on hands,” in the Daily News and New York Evening Journal “lacerations of right hand” in the New York Herald Tribune, and "bruised on the hand" in the New York American. No version represented a sufficient injury to constitute a felony assault, which is the charge police initially made against Gordon. The New York Herald Tribune reported Young received medical treatment at the scene, but when Gordon’s lawyer cross-examined him in the Harlem Magistrates Court, Young testified that did not go to a doctor or the hospital, Gordon told the public hearing. Young did not appear in the hospital records, as the other police officers injured around this time did, offering confirmation of those statements. Moreover, Young was back on the streets by 10.10 PM, when he arrested Leroy Gillard at 200 West 128th Street, for allegedly looting. He was the first police officer allegedly assaulted in the disorder; five others would be assaulted around 125th Street before 10.30 PM, after which time the crowds had moved to other parts of the neighborhood.

Gordon denied he assaulted Young. He testified in a public hearing of the MCCH that he was grabbed from behind, and then “a rain of blows descended on me such that I have never experienced before," in response to which he was able to do nothing. Louise Thompson, part of the crowd on 125th Street, offered a more detailed account, although as a member of the Communist Party she was not an entirely disinterested observer. She described to a public hearing of the MCCH how “a cop kicked him, another knocked him over the head with his billy and another slapped him in the face and punched him in the ribs.” Thompson more clearly stated that Gordon did not assault Young when interviewed earlier by a reporter for the Daily Worker for a story published on the same day she testified in the public hearing: "I was standing a few feet from Harry Gordon when he was arrested. He did not strike any policeman. He did nothing.” In the same story in the Daily Worker, Gordon denied committing assault, implying that Young made the charge to justify his violence: “"I did not strike any policeman. He struck me over the head with his club before I even saw him. He said, 'So you'll hit a cop, will you?' as he struck me.”

As was the case with events inside Kress’ store, testimony in the public hearings of the MCCH provided the most detailed evidence of the events outside the store in the early evening of March 19. Louise Thompson testified on March 30 and Harry Gordon on May 4 (Thompson only mentioned the first speaker, Miller, in her article in New Masses). The MCCH subcommittee report and final report both describe a second person trying to speak in front of Kress who was arrested, without naming that person, but make no mention of his alleged assault on a police officer. More striking, Inspector Di Martini’s report names Gordon without mentioning an alleged assault on one of his officers. That report has no reference to Daniel Miller, presenting Gordon as the only person to speak in front of the store: “At about 7PM, one Harry Gordon, #699 Prospect Avenue arrived in front of Kress’ Store with a number of others carrying placards and made a speech to a group which was attracted and incited a number of colored persons to break windows of the store. He was immediately arrested by Ptl. Young #3203, 32nd Precinct.”

No newspaper stories explicitly reported the narrative in the MCCH hearings and reports, as they truncated events outside the store and presented Gordon, Daniel Miller and the three Young Liberators who picketed the store as a single group arriving and acting together. Only some described Gordon as speaking, and only three of the initial stories about the disorder describe him as assaulting Young, in different circumstances that were both unlike what was described in the MCCH public hearings. Even later stories about Gordon’s first appearance in the Harlem Magistrates Court do not all mention the assault charge, and several describe him as picketing Kress’ store not trying to speak to the crowd. When Gordon testified in a public hearing of the MCCH, newspaper stories described him speaking, and being arrested by Young, but omitted the context he provided for those events as coming after Miller had tried to speak and been arrested.

Only some newspapers described Gordon as speaking in front of the store. NYA (3/23?) accurately captured the event, if not its context: “Harry Gordon, white Communist, was arrested when Patrolman Young of the 123rd street police station found him addressing a group. He was taken to the station house charged with inciting a riot.” NYP more briefly described Gordon, Miller and the two other white men as having been arrested for “haranguing crowds, urging them to fight.” The DM identified Gordon as a speaker, describing him as “a “Red” orator,” but with no details of circumstances of his speaking or arrest. The WT included Gordon in a group obliquely described as being arrested for being “Communist agitators.” [AA, HN, DN mentioned speakers but did not name them, and the NYS did not mention Gordon]

Only three of the initial stories about the disorder described Gordon assaulting Young, in different circumstances that were unlike what was described in the MCCH public hearings. Gordon came to Miller’s aid when he was arrested, joined by the three YLs, and battled Patrolman Shannon and two other officers before also being arrested, according to the New York American and NYEJ. That story also mistakenly had Gordon picketing the store. The New York Times relocated the encounter between Gordon and Young to the rear of Kress’ store on West 124th Street. In the struggle between police and a crowd that took place there, the story reported, Young “was cut on the right hand by a rock” thrown by Gordon. That clash occurred around thirty minutes after Gordon was arrested, and involved officers other than Young being injured.

Later stories about Gordon’s first appearance in the Harlem Magistrates Court did not all mention the assault charge, and several described him as picketing Kress’ store not trying to speak to the crowd. Gordon was described as charged with assault in the NYS, in a story about a line-up of those arrested, Am, and AN, which had him picketing the store. Four other papers did not mention the assault charge: the DM described Gordon and the others grouped with him as “curb-stone orators who had deliberately incited the 125th St. mobs;” in the HN the charge was inciting a riot, for “making a speech in front of Kress’ store;” in the DN it was an unspecified “separate charge” from that made against the other men, which was inciting riot; and in the NYEJ Gordon and three others were charged with “circulating false placards to the effect that a Negro boy had been beaten to death.” Gordon’s subsequent appearances in the Harlem Magistrates were generally not reported. Only the WT and Am mentioned his appearance on March 25, with no details of his alleged offense. The NYT story of Gordon’s appearance on May 27 provided the only details of the assault, that he “grabbed Patrolman Irwin Young’s nightstick and used it to hit the officer.” The HT story on the same hearing not only made no mention of those details, but omitted the assault entirely and instead made Gordon only indirectly responsible for Young’s injuries: his speech telling the crowd “that a Negro boy had been killed in the store… so excited the neighborhood that Patrolman Irving Young, of the West 123d Street station, and several others were hurt in the ensuing riot.”

Stories about Gordon’s testimony in the MCCH public hearing on May 4 published in the NYT, NYA and ANP described him speaking, and being arrested by Young, but omitted the context he provided for those events as coming after Miller had tried to speak and been arrested. The Am and AA had an even narrower focus, mentioning only that Gordon alleged he had been beaten by police, with no description of the circumstances of his arrest. The only story about Gordon’s allegation published before the hearing was in the DW on March 30, reflecting his association with the CP. Reporters for the NYEJ had been unable to locate him. When the DW’s reporter spoke to Gordon, “his left eye still black from the police beating more than a week ago.” However, in a DN photograph published on March 20 captioned as showing Gordon and the other men grouped with him by police, none of the men have visible injuries. As there are only three men, the image may be of the Miller and the YL without Gordon, perhaps around the time he was arraigned separately.

Harry Gordon 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. Gordon appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, shortly after the other white men arrested at the start of the disorder. Magistrate Renaud remanded him to reappear on the March 25, and then again to March 27. While Miller and the three Young Liberators that police grouped with Gordon as the instigators of the riot appeared before the grand jury before being transferred to the Court of Special Sessions, the ADA reduced the charge against Gordon to misdemeanor assault in the Magistrates Court, with his IDL lawyers claiming credit in the public hearing of the MCCH, as they had elicited testimony from Young that he had not needed medical treatment for his injury. Magistrate Renaud then transferred Gordon to the Court of Special Sessions. There is no information of the outcome of his trial.

In the narratives of historians Mark Naison, Cheryl Greenberg, Marilynn Johnson, Lorrin Thomas and Nicole Watson Gordon and Miller are grouped together as “speakers” pulled down by police. Historian Thomas Kessner named Miller in his narrative as the only speaker in front of the store. None of those historians mention Gordon's alleged assault of Young. They all follow the narrative provided by police that presents the speakers as part of a single group protesting in front of Kress’ store, stepping up to speak to the crowd after picketing of the store had begun. That framing implicitly introduces the idea that the disorder was orchestrated by those men, while offering no details of how the crowds of women and men around them acted to weigh against that evidence. Weight is added to that implication by the failure to fully identify the men involved in the protests. While Greenberg and Thomas do not identify the men, Naison, Kessner, Johnson and Watson describe them as members of the Young Liberators. None of those historians mention that four of the five, and both the speakers arrested, were white men. Naison did describe the Young Liberators as an interracial group; so too did Watson, however she did not identify the men in front of the store as members of the Young Liberators. Neglecting their race makes those men appear more representative of the crowd than they were, particularly in Greenberg and Watson’s narratives, which do not identify they as Young Liberators. Naison, Kessner, Greenberg, Thomas, Johnson and Watson all follow the chronology that has the picketing begin before the speakers were arrested. Grouping the men places an organized Communist protest at the center of the outbreak of disorder, and makes the window being broken and the men’s arrest a response to the feeling they built in the crowd. Recognizing that the protests occurred in a less coordinated way highlights that police responded immediately to any sign of protest, not just to a window being broken. They may also have acted so quickly because they recognized the men as Communists; the men’s language and appeals would have given them away. Communist protest in Harlem, and across the city, drew violent responses from police in the months prior to the disorder. Recognition of the fragmented nature of the protests and the identity of those involved directs attention away from those events to the crowds of Black men and women around them. Crowd members gathered in groups, talked among themselves, sought answers from police about what had happened to the boy, and responded to police efforts to clear the street. Rather than organized or orchestrated by the Young Liberators, those behaviors appear more spontaneous, in line with the interpretation offered in the MCCH’s final report.
Timothy Murphy assaulted & Paul Boyett shot Around 9:00 PM, as police reinforcements tried to disperse the large crowds that had gathered on 7th and 8th Avenues around 125th Street, a few blocks northwest on West 127th Street between 8th Avenue and St Nicholas Avenue, a group of around Black men allegedly attacked Timothy Murphy, a twenty-nine-year-old white rock driller on his way home. Murphy alleged that the men knocked him to the ground and then hit and kicked him. The men told him “they were beating me because I was a white man,” the Daily Mirror reported Murphy as saying. What they actually said was “You white son-of-a-bitch, take it now," according to his affidavit in the Magistrates Court. As a result of the beating Murphy suffered “lacerations, contusions [about his head, face and body], a broken nose and loss of hearing in his left ear.” Press reports simply said he received a broken nose.

The men beating Murphy allegedly attracted the attention of Patrolman George Conn from the 30th Precinct, immediately west of Harlem. He may have been in a radio car on his way to 125th Street as the New York Amsterdam News reported "police drove up." His Magistrate's Court affidavit described the crowd as numbering around ten men, a number reported by the New York Herald Tribune, Home News, and Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Other newspapers described larger crowds, twelve men according to the Daily Mirror, twenty men according to the Associated Press, and forty to fifty men in the sensationalized narrative published in the New York Evening Journal. The New York Times and New York Sun simply reported that several men had attacked Murphy. As Conn ran toward Murphy, newspaper stories and legal records agreed that he shot Paul Boyett, a twenty-year-old Black garage worker who lived only a few buildings away, at 310 West 127th Street. The New York Sun and New York Times reported Conn's statement that he had first fired a shot in the air to disperse the crowd and then ordered Boyett to halt and shot him only when he continued running. The Daily Mirror and Home News reported those details without making clear that Conn was the source of that information. The New York Evening Journal reported Conn fired two shots, one "in the air and then a second shot which struck Boyett in the back." A brief account in the New York Herald Tribune and Associated Press simply had Conn shooting Boyett, one of the group attacking Murphy. Several other newspapers did not mention that anyone else but Boyett had allegedly been involved in attacking Murphy: the New York American had Conn shooting Boyett "when he tried to flee," the Daily News "as he was about to strike" Murphy, and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle simply reported that Conn had shot Boyett. This incident was the most widely reported assault in the disorder, both because it occurred early in the evening, and because it fitted the sensationalized narrative of racial violence which the Hearst newspapers and white tabloids employed.

Boyett testified at his trial that he had been “an innocent onlooker” drawn to the “disturbance,” and “struck no one at that time,” the New York Amsterdam News reported. In the confusion as the crowd rushed to leave as police appeared, a bullet hit him. While the newspaper stories on March 20 give the impression that Conn arrested Boyett where Murphy had been assaulted, testimony at the trial revealed that Boyett continued running back to his home, apparently pursued by Conn, who arrested him in the building's hallway. A trial jury accepted Boyett's account and acquitted him of assaulting Murphy. The only source on the trial, the story in the New York Amsterdam News, did not mention what evidence was presented. One issue may have been how Conn claimed he picked Boyett out of the crowd; only Daily News explicitly mentioned that he saw Boyett beating Murphy, although the 28th Precinct Police blotter recorded the charge against him as "kicked complainant." A likely alternative scenario to that offered by Conn was that he simply fired at the crowd rather than singling out Boyett and calling on him to halt, and that his shot hit Boyett, whose injury consequently led Conn to arrest him.

The New York Herald Tribune, Daily News, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and Associated Press reported Boyett had been shot in the right shoulder, the Daily Mirror in the left shoulder, the New York American and Home News in the shoulder, and the New York Times, New York Sun and New York Evening Journal reported the wound was in his back. Hospital records indicate that a doctor from Knickerbocker Hospital treated a wound to Boyett's right shoulder before he was placed in a cell. Conn was based at the 30th Precinct; St Nicholas Avenue was the boundary between that precinct and the 28th Precinct. Rather than taking Boyett to his own precinct, Conn took him to the 28th Precinct station on West 123rd Street, as Boyett appeared in that precinct's police blotter. Both Murphy and Boyett appear in lists of the injured published in the New York Evening Journal, New York Post, Daily News, and New York American. Only Murphy appears in the list of injured published in the Home News and New York Post and only Boyett, in a list of those shot, in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and New York Herald Tribune.

Groups of Black men allegedly targeted at least three other white men around this time, all, unlike Murphy, in the area where crowds were clashing with police. William Kitlitz reported being attacked by James Smitten in front of Kress’ store, Maurice Spellman being assaulted at 125th St and 8th Avenue, and Morris Werner at 125th Street and 7th Avenue. All those white men lived west of Harlem, relatively close to where they were attacked, so were likely regular visitors to 125th Street, to shop, seek entertainment or access public transport, on this evening caught up in the disorder. The area around 125th St and 7th Avenue would continue to be the location of alleged assaults on white men and women for at least the next three hours, with three men and two women targeted. However, the assault on Murphy represented the western boundary of the disorder, the only event west of 8th Avenue. That section of Harlem was still an area of Black residents.

Murphy was one of four white men and women allegedly rescued from assaults by the intervention of police officers (with some press reports suggesting that this happened more frequently). Only in this case did police also make an arrest. In one of those other cases, an officer also fired shots at the crowd, but in that instance no one was reported as being injured. Police did shoot and kill two Black men, Lloyd Hobbs and James Thompson, in the later case also injuring two white bystanders.
Police find Lino Rivera Sometime during the disorder, police tried to locate Lino Rivera so they could show that he had not been killed or beaten. Chief Inspector Seely ordered the boy be located, according to the New York Times, which suggests those efforts started after 9:00 PM, when senior officers took charge of the police response. However, the Daily News, New York Herald Tribune, Home News, New York Times, Times Union and Afro-American newspapers simply reported that police searched for Rivera throughout the night. They were unable to find him because the home address they had was incorrect, 272 Morningside Avenue rather than 272 Manhattan Avenue. (The New York Age story written early in the disorder included the incorrect address) The Daily News reported that “the mistake was made” when Eldridge gave the address to an officer at the West 123rd St. station over the telephone – not that he had misrecorded the address as the New York Herald Tribune reported or that Rivera had given a false address as the Home News reported. According to Louise Thompson, a group of women who had tried to locate Rivera at the beginning of the disorder also had the wrong address, although one on the correct street, 410 Manhattan Avenue. Joe Taylor, the leader of the Young Liberators, also heard a rumor that Rivera lived at 410 Manhattan Avenue and went to investigate around 7:30 PM.

At 1:30 AM, Officer Eldridge was woken at his home on Whitlock Avenue in the Bronx by a telephone call telling him to report to the Chief Inspector at the West 123rd Street station, he told a hearing of the MCCH. The police officers at the scene, Eldridge and Patrolman Donohue, had gone off duty at 4:00 PM. Until he was woken Eldridge thought Rivera had been arrested and was unaware of what was happening in Harlem. He was able to go directly to Rivera’s home, arriving around 2:00 AM, and found him asleep, according to his testimony. The boy had not been there all night, as initially reported in the New York Evening Journal and New York Sun, but had gone out around 9:00 PM. Rivera had a cup of coffee and returned home after about twenty-five minutes because he "saw there was a lot of trouble around,” the New York World Telegram and Times Union reported. Rivera said Eldridge told him people thought he was dead, the New York World Telegram and New York Herald Tribune reported.

Eldridge took Rivera to the West 123rd Street station. Only the New York Sun described Rivera as “blubbering and frightened.” Rivera told a reporter for the New York World Telegram that he was at the station about half an hour. During that time, police questioned him, he spoke with reporters, and was photographed with Lt. Battle and Officer Eldridge. Newspaper stories that quoted his statements mentioned that he spoke to two different officers, Kear, according to the Daily News, and Captain Oliver, according to the New York Evening Journal and New York Sun. Battle told the MCCH that he asked Rivera “if he had been hurt by anyone and had he been arrested.” The New York Evening Journal, New York Post, New York Sun, and New York American published separate stories about Rivera’s statements. The Daily News, New York Herald Tribune and Atlanta World appended his statements to larger stories on the disorder. Reporters also interviewed and photographed Rivera at his home later on March 20, with New York World Telegram, New York Herald Tribune and La Prensa publishing separate stories based on those interviews, and the New York Times including it in a larger story.

Inspector Di Martini took credit for having Battle appear in the images, telling a hearing of the MCCH that “It was my idea to get Lieut. Battle to pose with the boy and get the picture into the streets as soon as possible.” Battle said the reason Rivera posed with him was “for the moral effect.” Not made explicit in either statement was that having the boy photographed with a Black police officer added to the credibility of the image and cut across the racial divisions expressed in the disorder. “A lot” of pictures were taken, Rivera told a MCCH hearing, but only six different published images have been identified. An Associated Press photo that showed Battle seated with his arm around Rivera, who was standing, was published in the New York Times, New York Post, New York Herald Tribune and New York Sun. Rivera was only 4 feet 8 inches tall according to the New York Herald Tribune, so that pose put the two on the same level. Their height difference is visible in an image of them standing in the same pose taken by an International Photo agency photographer. That difference was further emphasized in the photograph of this pose published in the Daily Mirror, in which Battle is looking down at Rivera. (The Daily Worker took offense at Battles having "his arm protectively around" Rivera as the "Harlem masses...know that Battles would kill a worker on the slightest excuse.") Photographs taken by the International Photo agency and Daily News revealed that Eldridge was on the other side of Rivera in both poses. Eldridge did not have an arm around Rivera, as Battle did, so was detached from their grouping. A second Black officer added to message Di Martini wanted to send. However, Battle was in uniform and well-known as the senior Black police officer in New York City, while Eldridge was in plainclothes, a suit and tie, and not a public figure. It was likely on that basis that some photographers and editors decided not to include Eldridge. An ANS photo showed Rivera and Battle in a different pose, standing surrounded by white reporters, looking at a camera to their left. Where the other photographs showed Rivera unharmed, in contradiction of the rumors circulating in Harlem, the ANS image presented him as telling his story. Rivera, dressed in a leather jacket, is smiling in all the photographs. Photographed at home later that day, Rivera wore a suit and tie, because he said his mother suggested he “dress for the picture,” and, in the image published in the New York Evening Journal, a pensive expression rather than smiling. (The New York Times reporter who visited Rivera at home described him as "a dejected figure," "overwhelmed by the fact that his desire for a ten-cent knife had precipitated the riot and resultant bloodshed.")

If the primary purpose of finding Rivera was to show that he was alive and unharmed, his appearance at the police station also brought some consistency to reports about the identity of the boy who had been in Kress' store. Louise Thompson heard from the women she spoke to in Kress' store that a "colored boy" aged ten to twelve years had been beaten. The signs carried by the Young Liberators who picketed the store an hour or so later referred to a "Negro child," while the leaflets their organization distributed another hour later later described a "12 year old Negro boy." The first newspaper stories published appear to have relied on those rumors and leaflets in describing the boy; with neither Eldridge nor Donohue still on duty, police apparently did not have more precise information until Rivera was found. The New York American mentioned a "colored boy" and a "10-year-old Negro boy," the Daily News a 12-year old "colored boy," the New York Evening Journal a 15-year-old "Negro boy," the Daily Mirror a "little colored boy," the Home News a "young colored boy," and the New York Sun a "Negro boy." Early stories in some Black newspapers featured similar descriptions, a "small Negro boy" in the Norfolk Journal and Guide and a 10-year-old "colored boy" in the Indianapolis Recorder on March 23, or simply referred to the boy's age not his race, a 16 year old boy in the Atlanta World on March 21, a 12-year-old boy in the New York Age, a 14-year-old boy in the Chicago Defender, and a 16 year old boy in the Afro-American and Pittsburgh Courier on March 23. Newspapers published on March 20 after police found Rivera identified him as a 16-year-old Puerto Rican, in the New York Post and New York World-Telegram, or a "Puerto Rican youth" in the New York Herald Tribune and Times Union. The New York World-Telegram also pointed to the differences between Rivera and the boy of the rumors by putting Negro in quotation marks when reporting the rumors and the text of the Young Liberators leaflet. By contrast, the New York Times referred to a 16-year-old "Negro boy" even after Rivera had been found, as did the New York Sun and New York Evening Journal. While the New York Times did eventually identify Rivera as Puerto Rican when he appeared in the Adolescents court after the disorder, the New York Evening Journal continued to describe Rivera as "Negro," while the New York Sun made no mention of his race. Those newspapers' persistent use of "Negro" may have been intended to convey that Rivera was dark-skinned; the New York American described him in those terms, as a "dark-skinned 16-year-old Porto Rican" in a story reporting an interview with the boy in his home, while the Brooklyn Daily Eagle described him as a "Negro born in Porto Rico." Editions of the other newspapers published after Rivera was found, including the Black newspapers, simply switched to identify him as Puerto Rican. (Historian Lorrin Thomas argued that the New York Amsterdam News "failed to identify Rivera as Puerto Rican, referring to him instead as a “young Negro boy,”" but did not provide a citation. The March 23 issue of that newspaper is missing the news sections, but the March 30 issue identified Rivera as a "16-year-old Puerto Rican youth.")

Police found Rivera too late for his appearance to impact the disorder, although it may have contributed to the violence not continuing the next evening. However, the delays in locating him fed rumors that he was not in fact the boy grabbed in Kress’ store. Reflecting questions raised in hearings, the MCCH report noted that, “The final dramatic attempt on the part of police to placate the populace by having the unharmed Lino Rivera photographed with the Negro police lieutenant Samuel Battle only furnished the basis for the rumor that Rivera, who was on probation for having placed a slug in a subway turnstile, was being used as a substitute to deceive people.” After members of the MCCH met with Mayor La Guardia soon after their appointment, on March 22, the New York Herald Tribune and New York Sun both reported that “some” of them said that many in Harlem did not believe that Lino Rivera was the boy who had been caught in the Kress store. (Stories about the meeting in the New York Times, New York Post, Brooklyn Daily Eagle and Daily Worker included no mention of those comments). An Afro-American journalist reported the rumors before the first hearing of the MCCH: “At the present time Harlem is divided into those who has been presented by the police as the boy in the case, is not the boy who was beaten in the store. They declare that Lino is being paid off to be the scapegoat and a camouflage....The AFRO reporter has run scores of tips about the boy who actually stole the knife, or a bag of jelly-beans, as it was first given out. Everything so far has run up a blind alley. One clue to the real boy is that all during the riot he was referred to as a 12-year-old boy, but became a 16-year-old one with the finding of Lino Riviera." The New York Age hinted at those rumors when it described Rivera as “believed to have been the cause of the whole affair.” Writing in The New Masses, Louise Thompson reported that a man and woman who had been in the store said Rivera was older and taller than the boy they saw. Other publications did not raise the issue. However, as the Afro-American journalist predicted, questions about Rivera were raised in a hearing of the MCCH. In the first hearing, Police Lieutenant Battle was asked, "Is there any evidence that would indicate that Rivera is not the boy? There has been such rumor." He simply answered, "No." L. F. Cole, a thirty-year-old Black clerk who had been in the Kress store, also testified that he had "no doubt" that Rivera was the boy he had seen taken away by police. The question was raised again at the third hearing on April 20. Mention that he had been on parole after being caught putting slugs in a subway turnstile prompted an interjection from "Mrs Burrows:" "My impression is that this boy is not the boy. We have testimony here that he got into trouble before March 19th, 1935. They had a boy under supervision. This is not the boy. They got a boy through these people and this is the boy they presented." Hays, chairing the hearing, pushed the ILD lawyers for evidence that another boy was beaten in the store. They had found none, nor could they establish that Rivera had received lenient treatment. A month later, Jackson Smith, the store manager, confirmed in the subcommittee's final hearing that Rivera was the boy he saw from the office, with Donohue and again outside the Grand Jury room after the disorder. After listening to several questions trying to undermine the certainty of that identification, Hays announced "there is no question about it." Given the lack of evidence to the contrary, there is no reason to think Rivera was not person grabbed in the store. The shoppers who saw him in the store could have assumed he was younger, given his height. Similarly, seeing that he was dark-skinned, they could have assumed he was a Black rather than Puerto Rican.
Shot & wounded (7) 45 plain 2022-07-19T15:25:42+00:00
Seven individuals were shot during the disorder, and two others shot and killed. The targets of five of the seven shootings were Black men, whereas those hit by objects were mostly white men and women. Few details exist of who shot the Black men or the man of unknown race. The police officer was shot by his own gun in a struggle with James Thompson, during his arrest and fatal shooting by police. No one was arrested for the other shootings. (Not included in that total is an incident in which four men allegedly shot at, but did not hit, a police officer. The men were not charged with assault, and were acquitted).

The shooting of Lyman Quarterman attracted the most attention, largely because newspapers initially reported that the thirty-four-year-old Black man had been killed, but also because his shooting occurred early in the riot, around 10.30PM, in the midst of a crowd at 7th Avenue and 121st Street. Hospital records indicated that twenty-five-year-old Wilmont Hendricks was shot on Lenox Ave between 128th and 129th Streets “in some unknown manner," as was Victor Fain, and Clarence London “while walking,” as was De Soto Windgate, according to the records of the 32nd Precinct. In Benjamin Bell’s case, the language of the hospital record is more specific if not more revealing; his wound was received “when fired upon by some unknown person.” Those shot and wounded in the disorder also appeared in the lists of the injured published by newspapers, their names accompanied only by brief descriptions of the nature of their wounds, about which different publications rarely agreed.

It is likely that police were responsible for most of these shootings. Officers assigned to control the disorder carried pistols and the crews of Emergency trucks carried “riot guns” -- rifles. Images of armed officers are a staple of the photographs that accompanied newspaper stories. That some police fired their guns in the air as part of their efforts to disperse crowds was widely reported. The New York Times reported officers who “fired their pistols into the air, frightening away various groups of would-be disturbers,” as did the New York Herald Tribune and Afro-American. That narrative fitted claims in the New York Times, New York Evening Journal and New York Post that officers were under orders not to fire at crowds, or only “in the greatest emergency,” according to the New York Post. Inspector Di Martini told a hearing of the MCCH that he "gave instructions to police not to do any shooting." Instead, they used the butts of their guns as clubs (as can be seen in photographs of the arrest of Charles Alston and of an arrest on Lenox Avenue). However, the shooting of Lyman Quarterman was an awkward fit with that narrative. Police were struggling with the crowd of which he was part, but the white press overwhelming chose to address the possibility that an officer had shot him only obliquely. Those stories offered conflicting details, with the New York Herald Tribune reporting that no officers fired their weapons, the Times Union that many had, but only into the air, and the New York Evening Journal that they had exchanged gunfire with the crowd. An exception was the headline the New York Times published for its story on the disorder on March 20, "Police Shoot Into Rioters; Kill Negro in Harlem Mob." However, the story itself only reported that the "police launched an investigation to determine who fired the fatal shot."

By later in the disorder, police were shooting at people on the streets according to a variety of sources. The New York Herald Tribune reported that around midnight, “as looting developed, the police began shooting.” As well as looting, it was violence directed against white men and women that led officers to use their guns according to the New York Evening Journal: “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.” That was the time period in which the other shootings, and the two additional fatal shootings by police, took place; after 1:00 AM, and with one exception, in areas where looting occurred, or in case of 125th and 7th Avenue, where police were stationed. The exception was De Soto Windgate, who was shot while walking on West 144th Street, six blocks from any other incident in the disorder. Details of his shooting appeared only in the 32nd Precinct records of individuals aided by officers; the only connection to the disorder was the timing of his shooting, so it may be unrelated. The New York Sun somewhat obliquely linked those shootings to the police, presenting police as using their guns in response to the increasing “fury of the mob: ”The crack of revolver shot bit into the din. Seven men reeled under the impact of the bullets.” Eunice Carter asked Captain Rothnengast for details of those shootings during a MCCH hearing, suggesting that they had been shot by police: “Officer, you stated that other people were shot but who shot them? Was there any effort to find out who shot them? Was any check made on the bullets to ascertain whether they came from police guns?” He replied simply that “No bullets were recovered.” If these Black men were hit by police bullets, they may not have been the targets of those shots. When officers shot at James Thompson as he fled a building on 8th Avenue, stray bullets hit two white men on the other side of the street. Police firing into crowds to disperse them could also have hit bystanders.

One incident of Black men firing guns was reported by white newspapers and the Associated Press as involving a group of men firing on police from a rooftop on 138th St. and Lenox Avenue at the very end of the disorder. But the fullest account of those events, in the Home News, did not offer clear evidence that a shooting took place: the officers who made the arrests responded to the sound of gunshots rather than seeing a shooting, and found no guns on the four men they arrested – “During the chase they are said to have thrown away their pistols.” Charged only with disorderly conduct, annotated as "annoy," three of the men, Albert Yerber, Edward Loper and Ernest Johnson, were tried and acquitted in the Magistrates Court – hardly lending credence to their involvement in shooting at police (the fourth man, Charles Alston fell trying to escape police, suffering injuries that appear to have prevented him from being arraigned in court). Similarly, while Inspector Di Martini did tell a hearing of the MCCH that he heard gunshots fired around 130th Street at some point in the disorder, he could not establish who fired them: "I tried to see where they came from. Apparently they came from some roof or window on the side streets." Those shots were more likely fired by police.

The only other evidence that members of the crowd were firing guns during the disorder is a report that a Boston-bound bus traveling through the neighborhood left with eleven bullet holes. In addition, two men arrested in the disorder were charged with possession of a firearm, one white and one black. No stories about the circumstances of their arrests appeared in the press, as you would expect had they been involved in shootings.

In two striking examples, white newspapers reported gun fights that did not happen. When Stanley Dondoro was hit by shots fired by two detectives pursuing James Thompson, an New York Evening Journal story reported Dondoro had been hit by “other rioters [who] returned the fire.” The Associated Press story had only (the unarmed) Thompson involved in a “gun battle” with the detectives that saw “ten persons” shot.
As Part of Related Categories:
Two men speak to a crowd in front of Kress' store 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,” Miller testified. While a traffic police officer might have been concerned to avoid having speakers attract a crowd that blocked traffic, it seems unlikely he would tell the men to instead go to the store, where the officers charged with guarding the store would have to deal with them. The men may instead have decided it would be more effective to speak in front of the location they were targeting.

By the time the Parton and Miller 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 4:00 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 Bauer, 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 was not asked to 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 again attempted to 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 Harry 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 to the contrary 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 a second 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 that other sources indicate did not happen: “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 New York Times 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 Shannon 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 his 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 who appeared 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 to force the owners to hire Black staff 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. It was at that hearing on May 4 that Gordon testified about how police beat him while he was in custody, and denied him food and access to a lawyer. His 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. (The AN for that week is missing). Neither man's testimony was reported in stories in the WT, NYEJ, which focused on the upheaval in the audience, or the NYP, which focused 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.

Only one historian, Thomas Kessner, names Miller in his narrative of the beginning of the disorder. He mentions him as speaking, at more length than he did, immediately before the window in Kress' store was broken. Miller's arrest was not part of Kessner's account, nor was Harry Gordon speaking. Mark Naison, Cheryl Greenberg, Marilynn Johnson, Lorrin Thomas and Nicole Watson group Miller and Gordon together as “speakers” pulled down by police. All these historians follow the narrative provided by police that presents the speakers as part of a single group protesting in front of Kress’ store, stepping up to speak to the crowd after picketing of the store had begun. That framing implicitly introduces the idea that the disorder was orchestrated by those men, while offering no details of how the crowds of women and men around them acted to weigh against that evidence. Weight is added to that implication by the failure to fully identify the men involved in the protests. While Greenberg and Thomas do not identify the men, Naison, Kessner, Johnson and Watson describe them as members of the Young Liberators. None of those historians mention that four of the five, and both the speakers arrested, were white men. Naison did describe the Young Liberators as an interracial group; so too did Watson, however she did not identify the men in front of the store as members of the Young Liberators. Neglecting their race makes those men appear more representative of the crowd than they were, particularly in Greenberg and Watson’s narratives, which do not identify they as Young Liberators. Naison, Kessner, Greenberg, Thomas, Johnson and Watson all follow the chronology that has the picketing begin before the speakers were arrested. Grouping the men places an organized Communist protest at the center of the outbreak of disorder, and makes the window being broken and the men’s arrest a response to the feeling they built in the crowd. Recognizing that the protests occurred in a less coordinated way highlights that police responded immediately to any sign of protest, not just to a window being broken. They may also have acted so quickly because they recognized the men as Communists; the men’s language and appeals would have given them away. Communist protest in Harlem, and across the city, drew violent responses from police in the months prior to the disorder. Recognition of the fragmented nature of the protests and the identity of those involved directs attention away from those events to the crowds of Black men and women around them. Crowd members gathered in groups, talked among themselves, sought answers from police about what had happened to the boy, and responded to police efforts to clear the street. Rather than organized or orchestrated by the Young Liberators, those behaviors appear more spontaneous, in line with the interpretation offered in the MCCH’s final report.
Paul Boyett arrested Around 9:00 PM, Patrolman George Conn arrested Paul Boyett, a twenty-eight-year-old Black garage worker, for assaulting Timothy Murphy, a twenty-nine-year-old white rock driller. Conn testified in the Magistrates Court that he had come upon a crowd attacking Murphy on West 127th Street between 8th Avenue and St Nicholas Avenue. He may have been in a radio car as the New York Amsterdam News reported "police drove up." After firing his pistol into the air to scatter the crowd, he then called on Boyett to halt, and when he did not, shot him. Although the bullet struck Boyett in his back or shoulder he was able to continue running toward his home, only a few buildings away at 310 West 127th Street. Conn pursued him, eventually catching him in the building hallway. Boyett denied assaulting Murphy, testifying that he had been “an innocent onlooker” drawn to the “disturbance," the New York Amsterdam News reported, and “struck no one at that time.” In the confusion as the crowd rushed to leave when police appeared, a bullet hit him.

Conn was based at the 30th Precinct; St Nicholas Avenue was the boundary between that precinct and the 28th Precinct. Rather than taking Boyett to his own precinct, Conn took him to the 28th Precinct station on West 123rd Street, as Boyett appeared in that precinct's Police blotter. Hospital records indicate that a doctor from Knickerbocker Hospital treated Boyett's wound before he was placed in a cell. That hospital record and New York Herald Tribune, Daily News, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and Associated Press reported Boyett had been shot in the right shoulder. Several newspapers reported other locations for the injury: the Daily Mirror in the left shoulder, the New York American and Home News in the shoulder, and the New York Times, New York Sun and New York Evening Journal reported the wound was in his back.

Boyett appear in lists of the injured published in the New York Evening Journal, New York Post, Daily News, and New York American, and in a list of those shot in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and New York Herald Tribune. He also appears in the lists of the arrested published in the Afro-American, Atlanta World, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, the Daily News, New York American, and New York Evening Journal.

Boyett appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, charged with felonious assault. The docket book indicates that he was remanded until March 22. Unusually, Boyett did not appear in any of the newspaper stories about the legal proceedings after the disorder. Over a month later, on April 23, Boyett appeared before the grand jury, according to the District Attorney's case file records; they indicted him for first degree assault. His trial in the Court of General Sessions occurred just over a month later, on May 29, where his lawyer was William T. Andrews, a prominent member of Harlem's elite elected to the New York State Assembly in 1934. Boyett testified he had been “an innocent onlooker” drawn to the “disturbance," the New York Amsterdam News reported, and “struck no one at that time.” In the confusion as the crowd rushed to leave as police appeared, a bullet hit him. There is no mention in that story of what evidence was presented at Boyett's trial. Whatever it was, the jury acquitted Boyett, an outcome that indicated they accepted his account.

The 28th Precinct Police blotter recorded the outcome of that trial but the only source for details is that brief story in the New York Amsterdam News. Headlined "Wins Acquittal in Disturbance Charge," the story only summarized Boyett's testimony and included no details of the alleged assault on Murphy or Conn's account of the shooting. In that way it fitted with the approach Black newspapers took of not reporting alleged violence against whites during the disorder. The story mistakenly identified the complainant as Kennedy Murphy rather than Timothy Murphy, and mispelled Boyett's last name as Boyette.
Lyman Quarterman shot At around 10.30 PM, Lyman Quarterman, a thirty-four-year-old Black man, was part of a crowd at 121st Street and 7th Avenue that police were struggling to disperse when he was shot in the abdomen. Around the same time, Anthony Cados, a thirty-four-year-old white man reported being assaulted nearby by "some unknown colored person or persons." While Cados lived approximately ten blocks to the south, Quarterman lived at the other end of Black Harlem, at 306 West 146th Street (in the same area as two of the other Black men shot, Clarence London and Wilmont Hendricks)

Hospital records of the ambulance called to attend Quarterman simply recorded he had a "gunshot wound of the abdomen received when shot by some unknown person at the scene of riot." The New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, New York American, Brooklyn Citizen and Daily Mirror, and the Associated Press reported on March 20, and the Chicago Defender on March 23, that Quarterman had died, a mistake the Home News attributed to "many conflicting reports during the night," and the New York Evening Journal attributed more specifically to a "report having been sent out on the police teletype." By late on March 20 the New York Evening Journal, New York Post and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle listed Quarterman among the injured, as did the Atlanta World on March 27 and the Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide on March 30. He was one of eight men still in hospital on March 21, the New York Herald Tribune reported, and still there as late as April 8 according to the New York Age, but there are no reports that he died.

The New York Times headlined the story it published on March 20, "Police Shoot Into Rioters; Kill Negro in Harlem Mob." However, the story itself was less definitive, saying only that the "police launched an investigation to determine who fired the fatal shot." However, other white newspaper stories discounted in various ways the possibility police shot Quarterman. The New York Herald Tribune, reported that no policeman in the vicinity could remember discharging his revolver, whereas the Times Union said many had, but “only into the air to frighten the mob.” The New York Evening Journal story made an oblique reference to shots being fired into the crowd, as the culmination of a narrative justifying police actions as a response to escalating violence, in which officers from the 123rd Street station surrounded by a crowd, first drew their nightsticks “to save their own lives,” and when the crowd armed themselves with baseball bats and clubs, drew their guns and exchanged shots with the crowd. No other newspapers reproduced this narrative. The New York American simply said Quarterman had been shot by an unknown assailant, the Daily Mirror by a “stray bullet,” and the Daily News reported his assailant had escaped, stories which all implicitly assumed the police were not responsible for his death. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle explicitly expressed such an assumption in reporting Quarterman had been shot “presumably by rioters.” Only the Brooklyn Citizen stated directly that “Whether he had been shot by police or other rioters could not be determined.”

Four of the six others shot and wounded during the disorder were Black men like Quarterman, one of unknown race, and one white police officer. As in his case, no one was arrested for any of those shootings (the man with who the police officer struggled, James Thompson, was shot and killed by police).
Douglas Cornelius arrested Around 10.30 PM, Patrolman Walter MacKenzie arrested Douglas Cornelius, a twenty-two-year old Black man, for allegedly using a rock to hit Thomas Wijstem, a thirty-year-old white carpenter, in front of the W. T. Grant store at 226 West 125th Street. Newspapers reported that a group of men had attacked Wijstem, but police arrested only Cornelius. Patrolman Walter Mackenzie appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court as the arresting officer of two other men arrested in the same area of West 125th Street around the same time: Claude Jones, also at 10.30 PM at Blumstein's department store at 230 West 125th Street, immediately west of where Cornelius was arrested; and William Ford, ten minutes later, at Kress' store at 256 West 125th Street, several buildings further west. It is not clear he actually made the arrests. There are no details of what MacKenzie said in regards to the assault on Wijstem, but in the other two incidents, which resulted in the arrests of Claude Jones and William Ford, he stated he had witnessed the men breaking windows and inciting the crowd, but made no mention of arresting them. Police had established a headquarters in front of Kress' store, and officers from throughout the city had begun arriving there before 10.30 PM, so there were likely other officers in the area who could have made the arrests.

Like the man he allegedly assaulted, Cornelius lived in East Harlem, at 52 East 118th Street, a mixed black and Puerto Rican section. He appears in the list of those arrested for assault published in the Afro-American, Atlanta World, Norfolk Journal and Guide, but he is linked to the unidentified man with the fractured skull only in a story in the New York Times, a list of the arrested in the New York Evening Journal, and lists of the injured in the New York Herald Tribune, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and Home News. (Wijstem was named as the unidentified man in stories published by the New York Post and New York World-Telegram on March 22).

After being one of the last of those arrested in the disorder to appear in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, Cornelius was charged with felonious assault. He was one of only thirteen of those arrested in the disorder to have a lawyer representing him listed in court docket book, in his case Pope Billings, a former state assemblyman and prominent member of the Elks Lodge with an office at 211 West 135th Street (both the other men arrested at same time, Claude Jones and William Ford, also had prominent Black lawyers representing them). Magistrate Renaud held him until March 25 on bail of $1000, according to the docket book. When he appeared again, Magistrate Ford dismissed the charge against him as he had been indicted by the grand jury. The 28th Precinct Police blotter simply listed the charges as "Dism[issed]," as it did with other men dismissed in the Magistrates Court so they could be indicted. However, there is no case file for Cornelius in the District Attorney's records, and no other information on the outcome of his prosecution. Wijstem's condition may have delayed the legal process. A brief story in New York Herald Tribune in June 1935 reported Wijstem had died in Bellevue Hospital without regaining consciousness.
Windows broken without arrest (54) No one was identified as being arrested for breaking 75% (54 of 72) of the businesses identified in the sources (as no one was arrested for the first broken window in Kress' store, the store appears among those cases in which no arrests were made even though an arrest was made for allegedly breaking a window after another attack over four hours later). There are four individuals arrested for breaking windows for who there is no information about their alleged targets; some of those three men and one woman may have been charged with breaking windows in stores for which there was no reported arrests. So could the twenty-one men charged with disorderly conduct in the Magistrates Court for which there is no information about their alleged actions, although only just over one in four of those accused of breaking windows were charged with that offense.

There are significantly more businesses with broken windows for which no one was charged than businesses that were looted, 75% (54 of 72) compared with 55% (37 of 67). Most of those stores were on and around West 125th Street, the area where the disorder began, and likely suffered damage during the time when small numbers of police struggled to control crowds that had gathered in front of Kress' store. Three arrests on West 125th Street, of Frank Wells, Claude Jones and William Ford, came after police reinforcements arrived. The reported arrests on Lenox Avenue around West 125th Street for which there is information on timing, of John Kennedy Jones, Bernard Smith, and Leon Mauraine and David Smith, came after midnight, when businesses in that area began to be looted. Another cluster of businesses with broken windows for which no one was arrested was on West 116th Street and the blocks of Lenox Avenue around it. That lack of arrests could indicate the absence of police in that area, which also was ignored in the English-language press. Those damaged businesses were only reported in La Prensa, with the arrest of Jackie Ford two days after the disorder for allegedly breaking a window in a store at 142 Lenox Avenue also mentioned in the New York Post and New York World-Telegram. Several newspapers drew the boundary of the disorder north of West 116th Street: crowds only went as far south as 120th Street according to the New York World-Telegram, New York Herald Tribune, New York Evening Journal and Daily Mirror; and as far south as 118th Street according to the Home News. (The Daily News and Afro-American did report crowds as far south as 110th Street).

The low proportion of arrests supports the claim that police were unable to protect businesses made in multiple newspaper stories and by business-owners who sued the city for damages, as well as in the MCCH report. Once the crowd around Kress’ store broke into smaller groups sometime after 9.00 PM, police were unable to clear the streets or contain all those groups. When police did disperse crowds, they simply reformed, according to the New York Herald Tribune, New York World-Telegram, Norfolk Journal and Guide and the MCCH Report. An alternative account in the Daily News presented crowds not as elusive but as "too scattered" to be controlled. As a result, rather than being ineffective, police were absent from the scene of some attacks on businesses. Business-owners who sued the city for damages made that complaint. No police officers came to protect the stores of Harry Piskin, Estelle Cohen, and George Chronis despite Piskin approaching police officers on the street, and them all visiting or calling the local stationhouse.

The absence of police from some parts of Harlem resulted in part from a decision to concentrate them elsewhere. Reported police deployments focused on West 125th Street. Inspector McAuliffe used the reserves sent to Harlem after 9.00 PM to establish a perimeter around the main business blocks of the street, from 8th to Lenox Avenues, from 124th to 126th Streets, according to stories in the New York Times, Daily Mirror and Pittsburgh Courier, the only stories that described police deployments. Beyond West 125th Street, the police relied on radio cars patrolling the avenues and limited numbers of uniformed police and detectives in plainclothes moving through the streets.
United Cigar store windows broken The United Cigar store on the northwest corner of West 125th Street and 7th Avenue had its windows broken during the disorder. All the businesses to the west of the store on West 125th Street in that building had windows broken; the Minks Haberdashery, Young's Hats, Savon Clothes store, General Stationery & Supplies store and the Willow Cafeteria. Only Young's Hats was reported looted. Businesses on the other corners had windows broken during the disorder; Regal Shoes on the southeast corner was also reported looted, while Herbert's Blue Diamond Jewelry store and the branch of the Chock Full O'Nuts restaurant chain on the southwest corner only had windows broken. Police trying to clear people from West 125th Street around Kress' store to the west had pushed the crowd toward this intersection, creating large crowds, some of who broke away and threw objects at the windows of stores on 7th Avenue. After 9.00 PM, emergency trucks were stationed at the intersection, as part of the perimeter Inspector McAuliffe ordered police to establish around the main business blocks of the street, from 8th to Lenox Avenues, from 124th to 126th Streets, according to stories in the New York Times, Daily Mirror, New York Herald Tribune and Pittsburgh Courier. The presence of such large numbers of police does appear to have resulted in only isolated looting of stores on the corners even if it came too late to protect store windows.

Across 7th Avenue from the United Cigar store, police officers armed with rifles stood guard in front of Herbert's Blue Diamond Jewelry store after the display windows were smashed. Patrolmen may also have guarded the cigar store; while there is no mention of their presence in newspaper stories, the New York Daily News published a photograph of an officer with a rifle guarding a store on West 125th and 7th Avenue with stock visible in the window that fits a cigar store but not any of the businesses on the other corners. One of the captions refers to the business as a drug store, but none of the business identified on the corners of the intersection are drug stores. Damage to the store window is visible to the left of the patrolman, two holes in the glass, in the original version of the image in Getty Images. Only a small section of the window is visible, so there may be more damage.

The New York Herald Tribune, Daily Mirror and the New York American included the cigar store among the seven businesses on West 125th Street between 8th Avenue and 7th Avenue that they identified as having windows broken, without giving the store's address. The store is also one of the businesses in a list of those with broken windows made by a reporter for La Prensa who walked along West 116th Street, up Lenox Avenue and then west on West 125th Street on the day after the disorder. They gave the store's address as 2100 7th Avenue.

No one arrested during the disorder is identified as breaking the business' windows. The MCCH business survey taken between June and December 1935 did record the white-owned store at 2100 7th Avenue, and it is visible in the Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941.
Looting by crowds Police officers, storeowners and individuals arrested by police provided details of looting during the disorder that reveal both individuals doing what others immediately around them were doing, which involved crowds providing a context, and individuals collaborating, acting as a group. While the looting in the context of crowds involved entering already damaged stores, the activity given the most attention in newspaper reports, groups working together themselves broke into stores.

In one form of looting in the context of a crowd, individuals joined others in taking merchandise from damaged stores. Arnold Ford, pleading guilty, said he had joined others entering Harry Lash’s store, "helping himself to some merchandise." That brief description suggests a flow of people entering a store whose doors and windows had suffered significant damage, without the presence of police and threat of arrest. Ford was able to pick out a package of items, leave the store and walk more than five blocks towards his home before being stopped by a police officer. He gave no indication that he collaborated with others to enter and loot the store; instead, he followed what others were doing sometime after the store had been attacked. However, Leroy Gillard and Lawrence Humphrey, who likewise entered a damaged store with others, did encounter police as they left and were arrested.

Crowds also provided a context for picking up goods thrown into the street. Charles Saunders claimed he followed the lead of those in the crowd around him in front of Ralph Sirico’s store when he picked up a pair of shoes, and headed home. In this case, there is an element of collaboration, as Saunders described shoes and hats being thrown through the broken window of onto 7th Avenue as people in the crowd that gathered in front of the store picked them up. Saunders (Detective Jeremiah Duross alleged Saunders was actually at the center of this looting, jumping out of the window as he pulled up in his patrol car, making him responsible for throwing merchandise into the street – but not breaking the windows, which had been done hours earlier). Other sources suggest that goods were also thrown into the street as part of attacking a store more than looting it, and were not always picked up immediately. According to the Afro-American's reporter, "There was stealing from some of the store windows, especially having men’s wear but generally the goods was dragged on the wet sidewalk and destroyed." Similarly, the New York Times, in the only mention of looting in its story on the disorder, noted that "In many instances the merchandise of fruit and grocery and butchers’ shops was taken out of the broken windows and strewn on the sidewalks." Lying in the street, items had a somewhat liminal status, their distance from the store, outside its walls/boundaries, introducing some uncertainty about their ownership (although much of merchandise was near to a store). Picking up those items was not as clearly criminal, and attracted less attention, than entering a store.

More of the looting involving groups of people described by police officers and storeowners involved breaking and entering not taking goods from damaged stores. The noise of breaking windows attracted police attention, so the relatively greater prevalence of such cases does not necessarily indicate that most looting took this form, only that it attracted more police attention (the police officers who shot and killed Lloyd Hobbs also claimed that they had seen him throw a stone through a store window, although witnesses suggest that it was the crowd milling around on the street that attracted their attention). In most of those cases observers described groups larger enough to be called crowds; thirty or forty people looting Feinstein’s liquor store and groups larger enough not to have their size specified taking merchandise from Avitable’s food market, Piskin’s laundry, Chronis’ lunchroom, Jack Garmise’s cigar store, a chain grocery store, and Sarah Refkin’s delicatessen. The remaining cases involved smaller groups: five people at Sol Weit and Isaac Popiel's grocery store, four men at Young’s hardware store, and six men at Pravia’s candy store. In three cases, multiple people participated in breaking into a store, with thirty to forty at Feinstein’s liquor store, six people at Pravia’s candy store, and at least two men at a chain grocery store. Small groups indicate the fractured nature of the disorder after it left West 125th Street, the presence of many groups rather a large crowd moving together.

In five cases, in smaller groups, an individual is described as breaking a window, with the group then entering the store. A brick or stone was thrown through a window of Greenfield auto equipment store and Young’s hardware store, and a trashcan through the window of Jack Garmise’s cigar store. A hammer was used to break the window of Sol Weit and Isaac Popiel's grocery store; and someone kicked in the window of Sarah Refkin’s delicatessen. An individual who broke into a store risked harsher penalties than those who took advantage of that damage to enter a store, but police generally struggled to distinguish and arrest those individuals when they responded to attacks on stores.
Detective Henry Roge assaulted Just before 10 pm police on 125th Street succeeded in dispersing the crowd in front of Kress’ store, moving them across the street and west on to 8th Avenue. Detective Henry Roge of the West 123rd St Precinct and his partner Raymond Gill were among the police standing in front of the store, watching the crowd, backlit by the lighted store. A rock thrown from the crowd then struck Roge in the head, causing deep cuts to his eye and face. Gill claimed he saw a man appear from behind the cars parked on the street, look around, and throw the rock that hit Roge. At that moment there were no other objects being thrown at stores or police, so Gill was certain that it was that rock that hit his partner, and he was able to keep his eyes on the man who threw it. After chasing him through the crowd, he trapped him among the parked cars. Gill frisked the man, twenty-four-year-old James Hughes, and found five stones in his pockets; Hughes insisted the stones were to defend himself, and he had not thrown the rock that struck Roge.

As Hughes was being arrested, Roge's injuries were bleeding profusely. A call for medical assistance brought Dr Fabian of the Joint Disease Hospital to attend to the detective. A New York Evening Journal photographer captured several images of a uniformed officer helping a bleeding Roge from the scene (the only images of an injured police officer published). According to the record of medical attendances, Roge remained on duty after being attended by the doctor, but other sources reported that his injury required two stitches, which involved Roge being taken to Harlem Hospital. The Probation report recorded that Roge was on sick leave for ten days after his injury, making it more likely his injury required him to leave the scene for treatment.

Hughes was tried and convicted of misdemeanor assault. The prosecutor’s notes on the trial suggest that Gill’s testimony stressed that he was certain of his identification of Hughes as the man who threw the rock, against which Hughes offered his denial and a series of character witnesses. In response, the prosecutor argued that Hughes “saw plenty of trouble – went right into it.” At the sentencing hearing, the judge expressed belief that Hughes had thrown the rock at the store window, not Roge, so sentenced him to term of only three months in the workhouse.

As with other assaults, the press coverage of this case was fragmented. Roge appeared on the lists of those injured published by white newspapers the New York American (on both March 20 & 21), New York Evening Journal, Home News, Daily News, New York Herald Tribune, and New York Post, and in stories in the Daily Mirror. Hughes appeared in lists of those arrested published in the Black newspapers the Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and the white New York Evening Journal. The two were linked in only three stories, in the New York Times, Home News and Daily Worker. Even when Hughes was tried, producing additional coverage, only two of the five stories mentioned Roge. But that legal process did generate case files in both the DA’s office and the Probation Department which provided details that are available for only a handful of the events of the disorder.
Detective William Boyle assaulted Detective William Boyle, a twenty-nine-year-old white officer, was allegedly assaulted "while attempting to rescue an unknown white man being assaulted at scene of riot,” according to the record of the ambulance that attended him. Dr Sayet of Harlem Hospital treated Boyle at the 28th Precinct on West 123rd Street, where he was based, at 9.15 PM, indicating that that assault took place sometime earlier, around 9.00 PM. The "scene of riot" where the alleged assault occurred was likely the block of 125th Street between 8th and 7th Avenues, where the disorder was concentrated around 9.00 PM. Two alleged assaults on white men on 125th Street around that time could be the incident in which Boyle was assaulted. Both men are described as being assaulted by groups of "unknown colored men" in Hospital Admission records, Maurice Spellman on the corner of 8th Avenue and Morris Werner on the corner of 7th Avenue. Those locations fit the details in Boyle's Medical Attendance record better than the location at which a story in the New York Times put the assault, the rear of Kress' store on West 124th Street. Boyle is one of three officers listed as injured after "a barrage of missiles fell on the ranks of the police who had caught up with the crowd" after it moved from the front of the store. However, that clash occurred around two hours before Boyle attended by an ambulance. Ambulances treated the two other officers on that list, Patrolman Michael Kelly and Detective Charles Foley, around two hours before Boyle was treated, although they received treatment at the scene, while Boyle was attended at the 28th Precinct. The story also mistakenly located Harry Gordon's alleged assault on Patrolman Young at the rear of this store around the same time, rather than in front of the store around forty-five minutes before police clashed with crowds at the rear of the store. No sources mention an attack on a white man at the rear of Kress' store.

The Medical Attendance record described Boyle's injury as "contusions and abrasions of left ankle." He also appeared on lists of the injured published by the New York American, Daily News, New York Post, New York Herald Tribune and New York Evening Journal, in addition to the story in the New York Times and a story in the Daily Mirror. All but the Daily Mirror reported Boyle's injury as cuts to the left ankle, or "deep cuts" in the case of the New York Herald Tribune and New York Post. Both those lists and the stories in the New York Times and Daily Mirror included the information that Boyle had been hit by an object, a "rock," "hurled stone," "flying brick" and "thrown rock" respectively. The injury was not serious enough for Boyle to be taken to hospital; he "remained on duty," according to the Medical Attendance record. The Daily Mirror alone mistakenly reported that Boyle had "received a fracture of the left leg" and been "removed to Harlem Hospital." It seems likely given Boyle's injury that the unknown white man that he intervened to protect was the target of missiles rather than being beaten. As a detective, Boyle would not have been in uniform at the time.
Andy Florist store window broken The Andy Florist store on the "corner of Eighth Ave" is one of the businesses in a list of those with broken windows made by a reporter for La Prensa who walked along West 116th Street, Lenox Avenue and West 125th Street on the day after the disorder. After walking north on Lenox Avenue from West 116th Street, the reporter turned left on West 125th Street, walking west toward 8th Avenue. Based on the route the reporter took and the addresses of the other businesses in the list around the florist, the corner referred to is 8th Avenue and West 125th Street, and likely the southeast corner as there is evidence for businesses on the other corners and all the damaged stores mentioned in La Prensa are on the eastern side of 8th Avenue. The Liggett drug store drug store on the northeast corner of 8th Avenue and West 125th is also in the reporter's list. The Lazar department store is on the southwest corner, at 300 West 125th Street. The other corners are neither mentioned in reporting on the disorder nor appear in the MCCH business survey. There is a Tax photograph of the northwest corner, 2329 8th Avenue, taken between 1939 and 1941 that shows a cigar store, a business likely to have been present in 1935. Two vacant stores in the same building as the florist on the southeast corner of 8th Avenue are also listed by the reporter as having broken windows, 2324 8th Avenue and 2320 8th Avenue. It is possible that other stores around this corner suffered only minor damage; the La Prensa reporter concluded his list by noting he had not included others as they had only suffered minor damage ("y otras mas que por ser los danos ocasionados relativamente pequeños no creimus de interes catalogar entre los establecimientos ya mencionados").

In the first hours of the disorder, crowds around Kress' store on West 125th Street moved down 8th Avenue to 124th Street, to the rear of the store. Later, after 9.00 PM, Inspector McAuliffe ordered police to establish a perimeter around the main business blocks of the street, from 8th to Lenox Avenues, from 124th to 126th Streets, according to stories in the New York Times, Daily Mirror, New York Herald Tribune and Pittsburgh Courier. The presence of such large numbers of police does appear to have resulted in only isolated looting of stores around the corners of 8th Avenue and West 125th Street, even if it came too late to protect store windows. Only the Danbury Hat store north of 125th Street, next to the Liggett's drug store, was reported as being looted.

No other newspapers mention the florist or identify stores with broken windows at this intersection. The businesses identified in the New York Herald Tribune, New York American, and Daily Mirror as having windows broken were east of Kress' store, near the intersection with 7th Avenue rather than 8th Avenue. No reason is given in those stories for why that mix of businesses were singled out. No one arrested during the disorder is identified as breaking the business' windows.
Crowds incited by Black women (3) Women made up a large proportion of those inside Kress’ store when Charles Hurley and Steve Urban grabbed Lino Rivera, and in the crowd inside and outside the store in the hours immediately after. During that time, three woman allegedly incited crowds, but not by calling for action. Two unnamed women, one inside Kress' store and one on 124th Street, shouted that Rivera had been beaten or killed rather than the direct calls to act attributed to men. Knocking pans to the floor, as Margaret Mitchell allegedly did, was a similarly indirect way of causing a crowd to gather, different from the speeches and pickets attributed to men.

The prominent place of women in the events that began the disorder is unusual; men typically initiated outbreaks of violence, joined later by women. In this instance, however, the site was a store in a retail district, realms of shopping and consumption associated with women. However, the women were not presented calling for action, so not cast as leaders in the same way as the men alleged to have incited crowds. Some newspapers amplified that distinction by casting these women in stereotypical terms as not entirely in control of their actions, as “emotional” in the New York Sun, as “frantic” and “excitable” in the New York Herald Tribune, as “hysterical” in the New Republic, as screaming rather than shouting in the New York Evening Journal, New York American, New York Post and New York Sun, and the New Republic and Newsweek, as having “shrieked” in Time and “shrilled” in the New York Times, their cries as “gossip-mongering” in the New York Herald Tribune.

The women who alerted those around them to Rivera being beaten and the hearse arriving were effectively acting as protectors. Historian Marilynn Johnson has pointed that women's experiences in the racial disorders of the first half of the twentieth century included that role, as well as being victims of violence, and from mid-century, participants in looting. Where Johnson's examples are women acting who tried to protect family or loved ones from white violence, in 1935 Black women sought to protect a boy unrelated to them. Those actions were within societal expectations of women's roles, as Johnson noted, but by extending beyond family they echoed the extension of women's role in consumption to include the political act of picketing white businesses the previous year.

Away from the store where Rivera was apprehended, and from 125th Street, no women shouting or leading crowds are mentioned in newspaper stories or arrested by police, with one exception, Roi Ottley's column in the New York Amsterdam News. In one column Ottley described women as inciting men to looting: “Women stood on the fringes of the mobs and dictated their choice to their men folk, who willingly obliged by bringing forth the desired article.” Ottley also cast women as inciting violence without joining the crowds on the streets in an earlier column: “Women hanging out of windows screamed applause to the reign of terror...and prodded their men-folk on with screeching invectives.” No other source reported such scenes. Writing a column rather than a news story, Ottley’s account was impressionistic rather than specific, making it difficult to link to other evidence. He also casts women in secondary roles, with men acting on their behalf, which may echo attitudes toward women as much as their behavior. Certainly, the women in and around Kress’ store took action themselves. There were also a small number of women among those arrested for activities other than inciting crowds, three for looting and three for breaking windows. There are also three women among those reported as injured/treated for injuries during the disorder

The presence of Black women in the crowds beyond 125th Street indicated by those arrests was recorded in some accounts of the disorder. The Daily News, New York Evening Journal, New York Times and Norfolk Journal and Guide all included women and men in their general descriptions of the crowds. The Daily News highlighted their presence among those who broke windows in a headline, “Women Join Mob of 4,000 In Battering Stores,” without mentioning women breaking windows in the story itself.

Other papers, however, such as the New York American, Home News, New York Sun, New York World-Telegram and the Black newspapers the Afro-American and Chicago Defender included women only in the initial crowds inside and outside Kress’ store. Photographs also captured only the women’s presence on 125th Street, among a group being scattered by police, and knocked to the ground. Women are not mentioned in stories about the events of the disorder published in the New York Herald Tribune, New York Post or New York Age.
Chock Full O'Nuts restaurant windows broken A branch of the Chock Full O'Nuts restaurant chain at 200 West 125th Street is one of the businesses in a list of those with broken windows made by a reporter for La Prensa who walked along West 116th Street, Lenox Avenue and West 125th Street on the day after the disorder. After walking north on Lenox Avenue from West 116th Street, the reporter turned left on West 125th Street, walking west toward Kress' store where the disorder originated. They did not name this business, including it as a restaurant on the west corner of 125th Street and Seventh Avenue ("Restaurant, esquina oeste de la calle 125 y Séptima Ave."). The MCCH business survey taken between June and December 1935 identified a white-owned restaurant at 200 West 125th Street that was a branch of Chock Full O'Nuts. Louise Thompson mentioned the "Nut Store" on the southwest corner of 125th St and 7th Avenue in recounting her movements during the disorder to the MCCH hearing, as a landmark that located where her group was standing, and a business she went into later that evening. The reporter would not have been referring to the northwest of 7th Avenue; a branch of the United Cigar chain was on that corner.

The Businesses on the other three corners of the intersection also had windows broken during the disorder. The United Cigar store and Herbert's Blue Diamond Jewelry store on the northeast corner were guarded by police and protected from looting, while Regal Shoes on the southeast corner was reported looted. Police trying to clear people from West 125th Street around Kress' store to the west had pushed the crowd toward this intersection, creating large crowds, some of who broke away and threw objects at the windows of stores on 7th Avenue. After 9.00 PM, emergency trucks were stationed at the intersection, as part of the perimeter Inspector McAuliffe ordered police to establish around the main business blocks of the street, from 8th to Lenox Avenues, from 124th to 126th Streets, according to stories in the New York Times, Daily Mirror, New York Herald Tribune and Pittsburgh Courier. The presence of such large numbers of police does appear to have resulted in only isolated looting of stores on the corners and the two surrounding blocks of West 125th Street even if it came too late to protect store windows.

No one arrested during the disorder is identified as breaking the business' windows. There is no Tax Department photograph of the southwest corner of West 125th Street and 7th Avenue taken between 1939 and 1941. A store entrance with a triangular pediment (which may have been a feature of Chock Full O'Nuts luncheonettes, is visible in the photograph of 202 West 125th Street, but no details of the store can be made out.
De Soto Windgate shot At 1. 15 AM “some unknown person” shot a twenty-four-year-old black man named De Soto Windgate as he walked along West 144th Street between Lenox and 7th Avenues. Only five other events in the disorder occurred north of 135th Street, none within six blocks of this shooting. Three of those events were also assaults, two on white men on 8th Avenue north of 145th Street before midnight, and shots fired at police at 138th Street and Lenox Avenue at 5 AM. An equally small number of events occurred off the avenues, on cross streets, as this shooting did. Aside from assaults in front and behind Kress’ store, there are only two assaults, south of 125th Street.

There is no information on the circumstances of the shooting. Windgate lived at the opposite end of Harlem at 7 East 114th Street, a section mostly occupied by Puerto Ricans and whites. He may have come north to frequent one of the theaters on West 145th Street; the Roosevelt was on the corner of 7th Avenue. Or he may have been visiting friends. There is no evidence of any disorder nearby that might have attracted his attention or brought police into the area. So while the other black men shot and wounded in the disorder seem likely to have been hit by police shooting in response to looting that does not seem to have been the case with Windgate. Given the location and limited evidence, there is some question about whether this shooting is part of the disorder.

The shot hit Windgate in the abdomen (only the New York Post located the wound elsewhere, in his right shoulder), and was serious enough for him to be admitted to Harlem Hospital – and be included in the list of those “near death” in the New York American, Afro-American, Atlanta World, and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and the New York Evening Journal’s list of the “dying.” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and New York Herald Tribune simply described his condition as “serious.” His injury is different from others shot in the disorder; only one is hit in the abdomen, with the remainder suffering injuries to the legs or hands.

Being admitted to Harlem Hospital might explain Windgate’s consistent appearance in newspaper lists. However, he does not appear in the hospital records provided to the MCCH.

Windgate does appear in another record gathered by the MCCH, information extracted from the Aided Cases book of the 32nd Precinct, based on West 135th Street. Procedure required police to record all incidents reported to them in that book. Only three other cases appear in the 32nd Precinct book for the period of the disorder, the assault on a white man, Julius Narditch, by a group pf black men at 8th Avenue and 147th Street, the assault on Thomas Suarez on 134th Street and the injury of Herbert Holderman on 132nd Street.

The police record does not identify Windgate’s race, but newspapers do. The New York American, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Home News, New York Daily News, New York Post, New York Times and New York Sun all include his race; the New York Herald Tribune and New York Evening Journal do not. Four of the six others shot and wounded in the disorder were Black men, one of unknown race, and one white police officer.

No one was arrested for shooting Windgate, as was the case with all of those shot and wounded (Detective Campo’s alleged assailant was shot and killed).
Patrolman Michael Kelly assaulted Patrolman Michael Kelly, a thirty-year-old white officer, was hit on the leg "by a stone thrown by an unknown person" at the rear of Kress’ store on 124th Street, according to the record of the ambulance that attended him. Dr Russell of Harlem Hospital treated Kelly at 7.15 PM, so the assault likely took place around 7.00 PM. That was the time newspaper stories reported that the crowd pushed from the front of Kress' store on 125th Street moved to the store's rear in response to the appearance of a hearse they assumed had come for the body of the boy rumored to have been killed in the store and began breaking windows. Kelly was one of the officers listed in a story in the New York Times as injured after "a barrage of missiles fell on the ranks of the police who had caught up with the crowd" after it moved from the front of the store. A similar account appeared in the New York Age, which described police arriving at the rear of the store as being "greeted with a fusillade of stone hurled by the crowd," as a result of which Kelly was one of two patrolmen "forced to undergo treatment for injuries." He was assigned to a radio car, the Medical Attendance record detailed, which may have allowed him to get to the rear of the store faster than other officers. The street had a narrower roadway and pavements than 125th Street, making officers easier to target with objects thrown from roofs as well as the street level. One other officer, Detective Charles Foley, was seriously injured enough to be attended by an ambulance after being hit by a stone thrown at him at the rear of the store around the same time as Kelly.

The Medical Attendance report described Kelly's injury as "contusion of muscle and right leg," serious enough that he was taken to Harlem Hospital for an x-ray and "surgical observation." The lists of the injured in the New York American on both March 20 and 21 and in the New York Herald Tribune, as well as the story in the New York Times echoed that information, while the lists in the Home News and New York Evening Journal reported the injury as a sprain without noting that Kelly was taken to the hospital. A story in the Daily Mirror, and lists in the Daily News and New York Post replaced the injury to the leg with a more dramatic head injury. The New York Age did not specify the nature of Kelly's injury.

No one was arrested for assaulting Kelly, as was the case in seven of the nine assaults on police.
Detective Charles Foley assaulted Detective Charles Foley, a thirty-two-year-old white officer from the 28th Precinct on West 123rd Street, was "struck by a stone thrown by some unknown person while at scene of riot in rear of Kress’ Store" on 124th Street, according to the Medical Attendance record of the ambulance that attended him. Dr Sayet of Harlem Hospital treated Foley in front of Blumstein's department store, on 125th Street, at 7.30 PM, so the assault likely took place around 7.15 PM. Around the same time a second officer, Patrolman Michael Kelly, was hit by an object at the rear of the store, where police had followed a crowd drawn to 124th Street around 7.00 PM by the appearance of a hearse they assumed had come for the body of the boy rumored to have been killed. Foley was one of the officers listed in a story in the New York Times as injured after "a barrage of missiles fell on the ranks of the police who had caught up with the crowd" after it moved from the front of the store. The street had a narrower roadway and pavements than 125th Street, making officers easier to target with objects thrown from roofs as well as the street level.

The Medical Attendance record described Foley's injury as a "possible fracture of left shoulder." Lists in the Home News, New York Herald Tribune, Daily News, New York Evening Journal, and a story in the New York Times identified him as having a shoulder injury. Three other papers, the New York American on March 20 and 21, Daily Mirror, and New York Post, instead listed a head injury, the most common injury resulting from being hit by objects. According to the New York Times, Foley "refused medical attention." Given that an ambulance attended him that claim is likely a misstatement of the fact that he was not taken back to Harlem Hospital, as Kelly was, but treated at the scene.

No one was arrested for assaulting Foley, as was the case in seven of the nine assaults on police.
Arrow Sales store windows broken The Arrow Sales 5 & 10c store at 2318 8th Avenue is one of the businesses in a list of those with broken windows made by a reporter for La Prensa who walked along West 116th Street, Lenox Avenue and West 125th Street on the day after the disorder. After walking north on Lenox Avenue from West 116th Street, the reporter turned left on West 125th Street, and walked west to 8th Avenue and looked a block north and south of that intersection. The Arrow Sales store is midway down the block between 125th and 124th Streets. Three other stores in the building just north of this address on the southeast corner are also identified by the La Prensa reporter as having broken windows: Andy's Florist on the corner and vacant stores at 2324 8th Avenue and 2320 8th Avenue. Police arrested Viola Woods for allegedly smashing the windows of a a third vacant store at 2314 8th Avenue, to the south of this store. It is possible that other stores in this area suffered only minor damage; the La Prensa reporter concluded their list by noting they had not included others as they had only suffered minor damage ("y otras mas que por ser los danos ocasionados relativamente pequeños no creimus de interes catalogar entre los establecimientos ya mencionados").

In the first hours of the disorder, crowds around Kress' store on West 125th Street moved down 8th Avenue to 124th Street, to the rear of the store. Later, after 9.00 PM, Inspector McAuliffe ordered police to establish a perimeter around the main business blocks of the street, from 8th to Lenox Avenues, from 124th to 126th Streets, according to stories in the New York Times, Daily Mirror, New York Herald Tribune and Pittsburgh Courier. The presence of such large numbers of police does appear to have resulted in only isolated looting of stores around the corners of 8th Avenue and West 125th Street, even if it came too late to protect store windows. Only the Danbury Hat store north of 125th Street was reported as being looted.

No other sources mention Arrow Sales, and no one arrested during the disorder is identified as breaking the business' windows. The MCCH business survey does include the white-owned business, which it described as an "Independent 5 & 10c store" at this address. Advertisements announcing the opening of the store appear in the New York Age on November 10 and November 17, 1934, the later noting it had a staff of four black women and two black men. The Tax Department photograph shows a one-story building constructed after 1935.
Everett Breuer and Joseph Martin assaulted Everett Breuer, a twenty-eight-year-old white photographer working for the New York Daily News, was taking images of the crowd at 7th Avenue and 125th Street when a rock hit him in the head. It was likely one of several objects thrown in Breuer’s direction as the office boy carrying his plates, Joseph Martin, was also hit on the face. Breuer’s own publication reported he was “beaten” not hit by a rock, as did the New York American, but the Daily Mirror, Home News, New York Herald Tribune and New York Times all reported him being hit by an object, while the New York Evening Journal and New York Post reported only the resulting cuts. According to all but the New York Evening Journal, Breuer’s cuts were bad enough to require a trip to the hospital. Press accounts disagree on where he received treatment, with the New York American, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, New York Times and Daily Mirror reporting Harlem Hospital, the Home News Sydenham Hospital on Manhattan Ave and West 124th Street, and the Daily News the Hospital for the Ruptured and Crippled on 42nd St and Lexington Ave.

James Martin attracted less attention than Breuer. Other than a mention in the story and an appearance in the list of the injured in the New York Daily News, Martin appears only in the list of injured published by the New York Evening Journal. Both sources describe him as having cuts on his face, with the later recording that an ambulance treated Martin.

The area around 7th Avenue and 125th Street saw a cluster of assaults during the disorder, with six other assaults reported there, including the beating of another reporter, Harry Johnson of the New York American. It was also at this location that Andrew Lyons was shot and killed. All those events occurred despite police emergency squads being deployed at the intersection from 9pm.

A photograph Breuer took immediately before the rock struck him became the most widely reproduced photograph of the disorder.

When it initially appeared in the Daily News, the caption noted “After making this picture, The News photographer was struck down and went to hospital. He suffered lacerations to the scalp.” In later editions that information is omitted, and it does not appear in the caption of the photograph when it is reprinted by other publications. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle list of the injured did report Breuer was "hit by a rock while taking pictures of a riotous group." The scene the photographer captured shows two black men apparently trying to move away from a uniformed police officer; one man has fallen, while the officer is trying to hold the other. Neither they nor the three men and two women in the background look poised to throw anything at the photographer.
Clarence London shot Sometime shortly before 1 AM, Clarence London, a thirty-four-year-old Black man was shot in the leg while walking on the street near 7th Avenue. London lived in north Harlem, at 676 St Nicholas Avenue, so was far from home when shot, likely drawn to the disorder around 125th Street at some point in the evening. Dr Payne attended London at Harlem Hospital at 1.00 AM.

The location of the shooting is recorded in hospital admission records as West 122nd Street and 7th Avenue, while reports in the New York Times and New York Herald Tribune put it three blocks north, at 125th Street and 7th Avenue. Both locations saw multiple acts of violence during the disorder, including an assault on a white man, John Eigler, at 122nd Street around the time London was shot also attended by an ambulance from Harlem Hospital. The assault is mapped at 125th Street as that is where the weight of the evidence puts it.

The New York American reported London had been “shot by an unidentified man” but offered no other details. Other newspapers simply listed him as “shot.” The hospital records further obscured the circumstances by describing London as “wounded.” His wound was consistently reported as in the right leg, although the Home News did report it was in the left leg.

The New York American, New York Post, Home News, New York Herald Tribune, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and New York Times all identified London as a Black man; only the New York Daily News and New York Evening Journal did not specify his race. Four of the six other individuals shot and wounded in the disorder were Black men; the others were one man of unknown race, and one white police officer. Given the evidence of both looting and the police response to it at the time, and the lack of any evidence that Black individuals on the streets during the disorder used guns, London was likely hit by shots fired by police – as were the other men reported as shot and wounded.

No one was arrested for shooting London, as was the case with all of those shot and wounded (Detective Campo’s alleged assailant was shot and killed).
Danbury Hat store windows broken and looted Some time during the disorder, the windows of the Danbury Hat store at 2334 8th Avenue were broken, likely allegedly by David Terry, a twenty-eight-year-old Black man, and, around the same time, James Hayes, a sixteen-year-old Black youth, allegedly took a baseball bat from the store window. There are no clear details of the circumstances of the damage to the store or the men's arrest. Police had pushed the crowds that gathered in front of Kress' store to the intersection of 125th Street and 8th Avenue early in the disorder, and groups of people remained in the area for several hours. Nearby stores on either side of the hat store had windows broken: the Liggett's drug store chain to the south, on the northeast corner of 125th Street; and a seafood restaurant to the north at 2338 8th Avenue. Neither store was among those reported looted. Other isolated reports of looting and arrests on 8th Avenue occurred further north, around 127th and 128th Streets.

The Danbury Hat store was one of the businesses with broken windows identified by the reporter for La Prensa who walked along West 116th Street, up Lenox Avenue and across West 125th Street to 8th Avenue on the day after the disorder. The business is also likely the storefront that appears in a photograph published in the Decatur Review. Although the caption does not identify the business, hats are visible in the display window, together with the last few letters of the store name on an unbroken section of glass at the bottom of the window: "RY HAT CO.." (The only other hat store recorded as having been damaged or looted is Young's Hat store). Two white men pose in front of the damaged store; white bystanders are most likely to be found near West 125th Street, where the Danbury Hat store was located. A large basket sits inside the display window, perhaps a trash bin taken from the sidewalk. The stock just visible behind the basket suggest that the store was not looted.

Hayes taking a baseball bat from the store was reported in a story about his appearance in the Magistrates Court in the Home News, which gave only the address of the store. The name of the store is confirmed by the Harlem Magistrates Court docket book, which recorded the complainant against Hughes as Wilbur Montgomery, living at 951 Woodycrest Avenue. Montgomery is identified in the 1933 City Directory as the manager of Danbury Shoes. He was also recorded as the complainant against David Terry. There are no sources with details of the circumstances of Terry's arrest, only the charges brought against him.

Officer Balkin was recorded as the arresting officer of both Hayes and Terry, suggesting they were arrested at the same time. James Hayes appeared in the 28th Precinct Police blotter, his name misrecorded as Hazel, as charged with burglary, with the note "Broke store window, burglarized store." In line with that entry, he was among those charged with burglary in the lists published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the New York Evening Journal. However, when Hayes appeared in the Harlem Magistrates Court on March 20, the charge was recorded as petit larceny not burglary. That charge did not require evidence of breaking in and entering a store as burglary did, indicating that he allegedly did not break the store windows.

Instead, it appears that Terry allegedly broke the store windows. In the Harlem Magistrates Court he was charged with malicious mischief, an offense involving destruction of property used against the other individuals arrested during the disorder for allegedly breaking windows. IN court that charge was reduced to disorderly conduct, the previous charged crossed out, "Red to" written above it, and the new charge stamped in its place. It is that reduced charge of disorderly conduct that appeared as the charge against Terry in lists published in the Atlanta World, Afro-American and Norfolk Journal and Guide, and in the New York Evening Journal. The charge recorded against him in the 28th Precinct Police blotter was inciting a riot, which police appear to have frequently used as the initial charge against those arrested during the disorder, and was often replaced by other charges in the Magistrates Court.

Police pushed the crowds that gathered in front of Kress' store to the intersection of 125th Street and 8th Avenue early in the disorder. Later, after 9.00 PM, Inspector McAuliffe ordered police to establish a perimeter around the main business blocks of the street, from 8th to Lenox Avenues, from 124th to 126th Streets, according to stories in the New York Times, Daily Mirror, New York Herald Tribune and Pittsburgh Courier. The presence of such large numbers of police does appear to have resulted in only isolated looting of stores around the corners of 8th Avenue and West 125th Street, even if it came too late to protect store windows. This was the only store looted in this area. Other isolated reports of looting and arrests on 8th Avenue occurred further north, around 127th and 128th Streets.

Magistrate Renaud transferred him to the Court of Special Sessions and held him on $500 bail. The 28th Precinct Police Blotter, which also recorded the charge against Hayes as burglary and misspelled his name as Hazel, is the only source for the outcome of that proceeding: a conviction and suspended sentence. Hayes lived at 476 West 141st Street, on Black Harlem's northwest boundary, further from the location of his arrest than most of those caught in the disorder, most of whom lived south of 125th Street or near Lenox Avenue south of 135th Street.
Clara Crowder injured Around 5PM, during the struggles between police and customers who remained in Kress Store after Patrolman Raymond Donahue took Lino Rivera into the manager’s office, Clara Crowder, a twenty-year-old white woman employed as a clerk in the store fainted. According to the hospital record, she had been aiding another store employee at the time.

Crowds of black women customers had remained in Kress’ store after Rivera was led away, concerned about what had become of the boy. Some wanted the boy to be produced to show he had not been harmed; others simply wanted some explanation of where he was. Store staff and police offered no information. After several hours, sometime after 5PM, when some reports put the size of the crowd at around 500 women, police appeared and began to clear the store, still refusing to respond to questions about Rivera. Louise Thompson, who had arrived in the store around 5PM, told the MCCH that the women became disorderly only in reaction to being moved out by police, knocking over displays of pots and pans knocked over, and smashing dishes and glasses as they left. By contrast, the New York Times reported that police arrived in response to the customers going “on the rampage, strewing merchandise on the floor and shouting.” Once police had emptied the store, they blocked the store entrance. Soon after an ambulance arrived to attend to Crowder; many in the crowd reacted to its appearance as a sign that Rivera was injured or dead.

Standing outside the store, Louise Thompson had no way of knowing that Crowder had fainted. In fact, only three narratives of the events in Kress store mention Crowder. The HT included her in its account of the store being cleared, reporting “As police beat the crowd back it was discovered that Miss Clara Browder, twenty, a clerk, of 473 West 158th Street, had fainted.” The story went on to say she was attended by the same ambulance as attended the two store employees bitten by Rivera. The Medical Attendances records indicate it was a second ambulance, carrying a different intern physician, that attended Crowder. The NYDN did report that a second ambulance came to Kress, but offered a vaguer account of the circumstances, noting only that Crowder “fainted after the boy had been released.” The DM mentioned Crowder without making clear whether she was in the store or on the street outside, but did sensationalize the circumstances, reporting she “fainted in that crush and was trampled upon until rescued, by a football wedge of police.”

While not including Crowder in their narratives, the New York American (March 20 only), New York Evening Journal and New York Post did list her among the injured. As in the narratives and the hospital record, her injury is recording as fainting, other than by the New York Evening Journal, which listed her as “treated for shock,” which is also her injury in the New York Daily News list. Crowder, one of three women among the injured (33%) is the only individual reported as having fainted. After being attended by the physician, Crowder left for home, 473 West 158th Street, beyond Harlem to the north, an address emblematic of the disconnect between Kress’ largely white staff and its largely black customers.
James Wrigley assaulted At 12.45am, forty-nine-year-old James Wrigley, a white security guard from Teaneck, New Jersey, suffered a serious head injury. Several newspaper reports identified Wrigley as an employee of the Holmes Protective Agency, which apparently provided private police officers (security guards) for one or more of the stores on 125th Street.

Press reports offered conflicting accounts of how he came to be injured that put the case in different categories of assault. As only the New York Times provided a specific time for the assault on Wrigley, and a detailed account of his injuries, Wrigley has been categorized as having been hit by rocks. The newspaper’s story included Wrigley among the victims of “stone-throwers,” “struck by a stone at 126th Street and Seventh Avenue, receiving cuts about both eyes and a serious head injury, possibly a concussion of the brain.” The Home News likewise cast him as “another victim of the rock hurlers,” but then proceeded to report Wrigley was “set upon by several colored men [and] beaten into unconsciousness before he was able to draw his gun.” The New York Evening Journal also reported Wrigley had been “seized and beaten,” an attack that apparently did not draw attention as the story went on recount that “Radio patrol cars found him lying on the pavement, unconscious, suffering from concussion of the brain.” The Daily News, which published no details of the assault, is the only other publication to report Wrigley was found unconscious in an alley. The AP reporter’s brief summary opted for this second narrative, reporting that Wrigley had been attacked by a gang. The New York American, Daily News, New York Post, New York Evening Journal, and Home News only included Wrigley in their lists of the injured. He also appeared in lists of the injured in the Afro-American, Atlanta World, and Norfolk Journal and Guide. Wrigley's injury was apparently serious enough that he was one of the eight men that the New York Herald Tribune reported as still in hospital on March 21.

The area where Wrigley was struck down saw a cluster of assaults on whites throughout the disorder, including other civilians and police hit by rocks, as well as crowds breaking windows and looting. Those hit by objects commonly suffered head injuries, as Wrigley did, although no others are reported as having been knocked unconscious.
Victor Fain shot Victor Fain, a nineteen-year-old Black man born in South Carolina, was shot in “some unknown manner during [the] disorder” at 128th Street & 7th Avenue, according to a hospital admission record. Dr Payne attended Mitchell at Harlem Hospital, on Lenox Avenue and 136th Street, at 2.30 AM, so he was likely shot sometime around 2.00 AM. The shooting was the last reported assault on 7th Avenue, and one of last of the disorder. After midnight violence had moved up 7th Avenue from 125th Street, including the shooting of Clarence London at 125th Street, but switched to Lenox Ave after 1 AM.

As this shooting was not part of a cluster, and there is no information on the circumstances, it is possible Fain was shot by police patrolling the streets in radio cars and emergency trucks seeking to control looting – as was Lloyd Hobbs at the same corner an hour and a half earlier, and James Thompson on 8th Avenue three hours later. Fain was shot some distance from his home: he lived fifteen blocks to the south, at 315 West 113th Street, in a section on the southern margins of Harlem mostly occupied by whites and Puerto Ricans (although some time later in 1935 he relocated to the heart of the neighborhood, lodging at 208 West 141st Street, where he still resided at the time a census enumerator called on April 30, 1940).

The hospital record described Fain as having been shot in the left ankle. All the newspaper lists of the injured, in New York American, Home News, Daily News, New York Post and New York Evening Journal, and a story in the New York Times, agree on his injury, an unusual consistency that likely reflects that he was admitted to the hospital after being attended.

The hospital record did not identify Fain’s race, but newspapers did. The lists of the injured in the New York American, Home News and the story in the New York Times include his race; the lists of injured in the Daily News, New York Post and New York Evening Journal do not. Four of the six other men shot and wounded in the disorder were black, one of unknown race, and one white police officer.

No one was arrested for shooting Fain, as was the case with all of those shot and wounded (Detective Campo’s alleged assailant was shot and killed).
Black women arrested for breaking windows (3) Three Black women are among the twenty-six individuals arrested for breaking windows. They represent just under half of the women arrested, with three women arrested for looting and another for inciting a crowd. (No women identified as white are among those reported as arrested during the disorder). Few details of their arrests and alleged actions are recorded, but the outcomes of their prosecution indicate that at least two did not actually break windows. Rose Murrell and Louise Brown were both arrested in the same area, on 8th Avenue, around 127th Street, by the same police officer. However, the the different outcomes of the women's prosecutions suggest that police only produced evidence that Murrell broke a window. She was convicted in the Court of Special Sessions and sentenced to one month in the Workhouse. By contrast Brown had the charge against her reduced to disorderly conduct, a broad offense that likely required evidence only that she had been part of a crowd on the street. While Magistrate Ford convicted her, he suspended Brown's sentence, further indicating a lack of evidence she had been responsible for damage to a store. Although newspaper stories reported that Viola Woods, the third woman, had broken a window, when she appeared in court the charge was only disorderly conduct. Police again appear not to have produced evidence Woods had broken a window, but in this case Magistrate Renaud discharged Woods. That Woods was not instead convicted of disorderly conduct might be the result of being represented by a lawyer, a rare occurrence in the Magistrates Court.

The presence of Black women in the crowds on Harlem’s streets is recorded in most accounts of the disorder, but they are only rarely mentioned as participants in attacks on stores (and looting). The Daily News, New York Evening Journal, New York Times and Norfolk Journal and Guide all included women and men in their general descriptions of the crowds. Other papers such as the New York American, Home News, New York Sun, New York World-Telegram and the Black newspapers the Afro-American and Chicago Defender included women only in the initial crowds inside and outside Kress’ store. Their presence at the outbreak of violence distinguishes the disorder in Harlem from those that followed in subsequent decades, in which Marilynn Johnson argues women became involved after men had initiated the violence. Women's early involvement in Harlem resulted from the disorder beginning in a store, at a time when only women were present to witness what happened to Lino Rivera. (Women are not mentioned in stories about the events of the disorder published in the New York Herald Tribune, New York Post or New York Age).

Women are explicitly mentioned as participants in breaking windows in only four newspapers. The Daily News published a headline, “Women Join Mob of 4,000 In Battering Stores,” but did not include women in descriptions of attacks on store windows. The New York Times described a “a riot in which roving bands of Negro men and women smashed 200 plate-glass store windows.” Two general descriptions of the disorder included women, making them participants in both breaking windows and looting. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle's description of the disorder included "smashing more than 200 windows" among other activities of "Bands of men and women, in some cases joined by whites." In the Black press, the Atlanta World included women in crowds that broke windows in a similar manner: “the members of the mob needed little provocation to start on the rampage. Using whatever weapons that were to hand, men, women and children in the mob broke hundreds of plate glass windows in stores belonging to white merchants, scattered and stole merchandise and destroyed fixtures.”

While these stories, and the photographs that accompanied them, indicate that women were part of the crowds on March 19, it remains unclear whether those women did not participate in breaking windows or did and were not recorded by reporters or arrested by police focused on men they likely considered more threatening. From a broader perspective more removed from the events of the disorder, the MCCH appears to have concluded that women did participate, noting in its Report: "Even some grown-up men and women who had probably never committed a criminal act before, but bad suffered years of privations, seized the opportunity to express their resentment against discrimination in employment and the exclusive rights of property." However, this section of the report was part of an effort to frame the disorder as less violent and threatening than it appeared in the initial newspaper stories. While noting that "it seems indisputable that the criminal element took advantage of the disorders," the previous sentence argued, "it seems equally true that many youngsters who could not be classed as criminals joined the looting crowds in a spirit of pure adventure." An earlier discussion of crowds in the disorder made a similar claim, that "Some of the destruction was carried on in a playful spirit." Including women as participants in 'playful' behavior did not run counter to gender roles and stereotypes in the way that their participation in violence did. The only other place women appear in the MCCH Report's discussion of the events of the disorder is as shoppers in Kress' store.
Wilmont Hendricks shot Wilmont Hendricks, a twenty-five-year-old Black man, was shot on Lenox Avenue near 128th Street. Dr Payne attended Hendricks at Harlem Hospital, eight blocks north on Lenox Avenue, at 1.30 AM, the hospital staff recorded, so he was likely injured sometime around 1.00 AM, not around 2.00 AM, as a New York Times story reported. No details survive of the circumstances of Hendricks’ injury: the hospital record noted that he had been shot in “in some unknown manner,” while newspapers only reported he had been shot. There was considerable disorder on the blocks of Lenox Avenue north of 125th Street around this time, including other assaults and looting. The outbreak of looting led police to begin shooting more indiscriminately than earlier in the disorder, and it is likely that Hendricks was shot by police.

After being seen by Dr Payne, Hendricks' injury was sufficiently serious for him to be admitted to the hospital, and to still be there a day later, according to the New York Herald Tribune. While the hospital recorded his wound as being in his left shoulder, only the list of injured in the Home News echoed that report. The lists in the New York American, New York Post, Atlanta World, Afro-American, and Norfolk Journal and Guide instead locating the gunshot in his chest, and the lists in the Daily News and New York Evening Journal, and story in the New York Times reporting it was in in his back.

The hospital record did not identify Hendricks' race, but the newspaper lists in the New York Post, Home News, New York American and New York Evening Journal did. Four of the six other men shot and wounded in the disorder were black, one of unknown race, and one white police officer. When he was shot Hendricks was some distance from his home at 214 West 146th Street, which was almost twenty blocks to the north on 146th Street.

No one was arrested for shooting Hendricks, as was the case with all of those shot and wounded (Detective Campo’s alleged assailant was shot and killed).
Patrolman Charles Robins assaulted Patrolman Charles Robbins, a member of the 6th Emergency Squad (a riot squad), was "struck over head with an iron bar by some unknown person,” according to the record of the ambulance that attended him. Dr Russell of Harlem Hospital treated Robbins at 124th Street and 7th Avenue, at 10.15 PM, indicating that that assault took place sometime earlier, around 10.00 PM. The location of the assault was the "scene of the riot," in the Medical Attendance record, likely where Robbins was treated or a block north on West 125th Street between 7th and 8th Avenues. By 10.00 PM time police had established a perimeter around the block of 125th Street between 7th and 8th Avenues on which Kress' store was located, producing crowds on those corners and causing some groups of people to move up and down 7th Avenue. Emergency trucks were part of that perimeter, and while newspaper stories differed over precisely where they were stationed, both the New York Times and New York Herald Tribune located at least one truck on 125th Street between 7th and 8th Avenues. (The New York Times put the others on 124th Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, 126th Street between Lenox and Seventh Avenues, and at 130th Street and Lenox Avenue, while the New York Herald Tribune had them at Lenox Avenue and 125th Street, and 7th Avenue and 127th Street).

Robbins was included in lists of the injured published in the press. Four of those lists provided details of the circumstances in which he was injured. The Home News and the New York American on March 20 described the injury as caused by an iron bar, following the Medical Attendance record. The New York Herald Tribune and Brooklyn Daily Eagle, which listed the injured policemen separately, included the detail that Robbins had been hit by a brick. An iron bar was not a typical weapon during the disorder; bricks, however, were frequently used as weapons. The New York Evening Journal, New York Post, New York American (on March 21) and Daily News all listed Robbins among the injured without details of the circumstances. His injury was listed as a “possible fractured skull,” but the Medical Attendance record described Robbins' injury as only a "laceration of scalp." Nonetheless, it notes that Robbins was "removed" to Harlem Hospital for further treatment, which may account for newspapers identifying a more serious injury.

No one was arrested for assaulting Robins, as was the case in seven of the nine assaults on police.
Busch Kredit jewelry store windows broken The Busch Kredit jewelry store at 128 West 125th Street is one of the businesses in a list of those with broken windows made by a reporter for La Prensa who walked along West 116th Street, Lenox Avenue and West 125th Street on the day after the disorder. After walking north on Lenox Avenue from West 116th Street, the reporter turned left on West 125th Street, walking west toward Kress' store where the disorder originated. The store is simply identified as "Bush Kredit" in La Prensa.

The jewelry store is midway along the block. That he recorded no stores with broken windows until that store suggests that fewer stores suffered damage in this block of West 125th Street than the block to the west. It is possible some other stores in this block suffered minor damage; the La Prensa reporter concluded his list by noting he had not included others as they had only suffered minor damage ("y otras mas que por ser los danos ocasionados relativamente pequeños no creimus de interes catalogar entre los establecimientos ya mencionados"). However, there are no other reported events of any kind on this section of the block, only on the corner and blocks of Lenox Avenue to the north. That was likely due to the presence of police. Inspector McAuliffe did order police to establish a perimeter around the main business blocks of the street, from 8th to Lenox Avenues, from 124th to 126th Streets, after 9.00 PM, according to stories in the New York Times, Daily Mirror and Pittsburgh Courier, taking in this area. An emergency truck was stationed at the intersection of West 125th Street and Lenox Avenue at some point during the disorder, the New York Herald Tribune reported. Harry Piskin found police stationed at the intersection, officers who would not leave that location.

No other sources mention this store, and no one arrested during the disorder is identified as breaking the business' windows. The MCCH business survey taken between June and December 1935 did record the white-owned business, and it is visible in the Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941, as is a painted sign advertising the store on the side of the taller building to the west.
John Hademan assaulted John Hademan, a twenty-six-year-old Black man suffered a fractured skull at 126th Street and 7th Avenue. The circumstances in which he was assaulted are uncertain. The New York Herald Tribune and New York Times, the two reports that gave a location for the assault on Hademan, suggest other violence occurred at the same time: the New York Times described Hademan as being assaulted “in a melee,” while the New York Herald Tribune described the context as “rioting.” Neither gave a time for the assault on Hademan, but this intersection saw clashes between crowds and police around 10PM that seem likely to have been when he was assaulted. In that case, it seems likely that police assaulted Hademan, but he could have been assaulted by an individual, a group or hit by an object.

After being assaulted, an ambulance attended Hademan, and took him to Harlem Hospital, according to the report in the New York Times and the lists of the injured in the New York Evening Journal, New York Herald Tribune, and New York American However, he does not appear in the hospital records. Those lists, and that in the New York Post, noted that no address was given for Hademan. The New York Daily News identified him as a resident of Castle Point in the Bronx (but did not identify his race, was alone in recording his injury not as a fractured skull but as lacerations of his face and head, and spelling his name differently). As with all the Black men assaulted during the disorder, no one was arrested or charged for assaulting Hademan.
Vacant store windows broken (2320 8th Avenue) A vacant store at 2320 8th Avenue is one of the businesses in a list of those with broken windows made by a reporter for La Prensa who walked along West 116th Street, Lenox Avenue and West 125th Street on the day after the disorder. After walking north on Lenox Avenue from West 116th Street, the reporter turned left on West 125th Street, and walked west to 8th Avenue and looked a block north and south of that intersection. The empty store is midway down the block between 125th and 124th Streets. Andy's Florist on the southeast corner of West 125th Street and another vacant store at 2324 8th Avenue in the same building just north of this address are also identified as having broken windows in La Prensa. In addition, the Arrow Sales 5 & 10c store at 2318 8th Avenue on the south side of the vacant store is listed as having broken windows. Police arrested Viola Woods for allegedly smashing the windows of a a third vacant store at 2314 8th Avenue. It is possible that other stores in this area suffered only minor damage; the La Prensa reporter concluded his list by noting he had not included others as they had only suffered minor damage ("y otras mas que por ser los danos ocasionados relativamente pequeños no creimus de interes catalogar entre los establecimientos ya mencionados").

In the first hours of the disorder, crowds around Kress' store on West 125th Street moved down 8th Avenue to 124th Street, to the rear of the store. Later, after 9.00 PM, Inspector McAuliffe ordered police to establish a perimeter around the main business blocks of the street, from 8th to Lenox Avenues, from 124th to 126th Streets, according to stories in the New York Times, Daily Mirror, New York Herald Tribune and Pittsburgh Courier. The presence of such large numbers of police does appear to have resulted in only isolated looting of stores around the corners of 8th Avenue and West 125th Street, even if it came too late to protect store windows. Only the Liggett drug store on the northeast corner was reported as being looted.

No other sources mention the vacant store at this address, and no one arrested during the disorder is identified as breaking the business' windows. The Tax Department photograph shows a one-story building constructed after 1935..
Vacant store windows broken (2324 8th Avenue) A vacant store "on 125th Street and Eighth Avenue" ("esquina norte de la Octava y 125") is one of the businesses in a list of those with broken windows made by a reporter for La Prensa who walked along West 116th Street, Lenox Avenue and West 125th Street on the day after the disorder. After walking north on Lenox Avenue from West 116th Street, the reporter turned left on West 125th Street, and walked west to 8th Avenue and looked a block north and south of that intersection. The vacant store was not located on any of the corners themselves: a branch of the Liggett drug store chain on the northeast corner and Andy's Florist on the southeast corner appear in the reporter's list; an Optima cigar store on the northwest corner, and the Lazar department store on the southwest corner appear in the MCCH business survey and Tax department photographs. The La Prensa reporter listed damaged buildings on the east side of 8th Avenue both north and south of 125th Street, but this vacant store appears with those on the south, so is likely 2324 8th Avenue, which is recorded in the MCCH business survey as an "Empty store." (Police arrested Viola Woods for allegedly smashing the windows of a vacant store at 2314 8th Avenue, but that address is closer to 124th Street than 125th Street).

In the first hours of the disorder, crowds around Kress' store on West 125th Street moved down 8th Avenue to 124th Street, to the rear of the store. Later, after 9.00 PM, Inspector McAuliffe ordered police to establish a perimeter around the main business blocks of the street, from 8th to Lenox Avenues, from 124th to 126th Streets, according to stories in the New York Times, Daily Mirror, New York Herald Tribune and Pittsburgh Courier. The presence of such large numbers of police does appear to have resulted in only isolated looting of stores around the corners of 8th Avenue and West 125th Street, even if it came too late to protect store windows. Only the Danbury Hat store north of 125th Street was reported as being looted.

No other sources mention the vacant store at this address, and no one arrested during the disorder is identified as breaking the business' windows. The Tax Department photograph shows a one-story building constructed after 1935.
Hobbs dress shop windows broken Hobbs dress shop at 150 West 125th Street is one of the businesses in a list of those with broken windows made by a reporter for La Prensa who walked along West 116th Street, Lenox Avenue and West 125th Street on the day after the disorder. After walking north on Lenox Avenue from West 116th Street, the reporter turned left on West 125th Street, walking west toward Kress' store where the disorder originated. The dress shop is near the intersection with 7th Avenue.

That the reporter recorded only one store with broken windows before the dress shop, the Busch Kredit jewelry store at 128 West 125th Street suggests that fewer stores suffered damage in this block of West 125th Street than the block to the west. It is possible some other stores in this block suffered minor damage; the La Prensa reporter concluded his list by noting he had not included others as they had only suffered minor damage ("y otras mas que por ser los danos ocasionados relativamente pequeños no creimus de interes catalogar entre los establecimientos ya mencionados"). That was likely due to the presence of police. Inspector McAuliffe did order police to establish a perimeter around the main business blocks of the street, from 8th to Lenox Avenues, from 124th to 126th Streets, after 9.00 PM, according to stories in the New York Times, Daily Mirror and Pittsburgh Courier. Emergency trucks were stationed near the dress shop, at the intersection of West 125th Street and 7th Avenue, according to the New York Times, Daily Mirror and Pittsburgh Courier, and one at West 125th Street and Lenox Avenue according to the New York Herald Tribune. Each truck had a “crew of 40 men and [was] equipped with tear gas and riot guns,” the Daily Mirror reported.

No other sources mention this store, and no one arrested during the disorder is identified as breaking the business' windows. The MCCH business survey taken between June and December 1935 did record the white-owned business, but it is not visible in the Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941.
Seafood restaurant windows broken The seafood restaurant at 2338 8th Avenue is one of the businesses in a list of those with broken windows made by a reporter for La Prensa who walked along West 116th Street, Lenox Avenue and West 125th Street on the day after the disorder. After walking north on Lenox Avenue from West 116th Street, the reporter turned left on West 125th Street, and walked west to 8th Avenue and looked a block north and south of that intersection. In La Prensa the business is identified as a fish shop ("pescadería"), likely because the reporter saw the "Sea Food" sign that hung over the pavement visible in the Tax department photograph. Also visible in that photograph is the "Lunch" sign in the store window. The MCCH business survey taken between June and December 1935 fits with that sign, recording the businesses as a white-owned lunchroom. The La Prensa list included two other businesses on the block to the north with broken windows: the branch of the Liggett's drug store chain on the corner; and the Danbury Hat store at 2334 8th Avenue (partially visible on the far right of the Tax department photograph).

Police pushed the crowds that gathered in front of Kress' store to the intersection of 125th Street and 8th Avenue early in the disorder. Later, after 9.00 PM, Inspector McAuliffe ordered police to establish a perimeter around the main business blocks of the street, from 8th to Lenox Avenues, from 124th to 126th Streets, according to stories in the New York Times, Daily Mirror, New York Herald Tribune and Pittsburgh Courier. The presence of such large numbers of police does appear to have resulted in only isolated looting of stores around the corners of 8th Avenue and West 125th Street, even if it came too late to protect store windows. Only the Liggett drug store on the northeast corner was reported as being looted. Other isolated reports of looting and arrests on 8th Avenue occurred further north, around 127th and 128th Streets.

No other sources mention the seafood restaurant, and no one arrested during the disorder was identified as having broken the business' window.
Fifth Avenue Coach Company bus hit by rocks A Fifth Avenue Coach Company bus was struck by rocks at 127th Street and Seventh Avenue about 11pm. According to the New York Times, none of the passengers was injured.

Objects struck vehicles traveling on 7th Avenue at several different times during the disorder, including a Boston-bound bus and cars driven by whites and at least one black man. Seventh Avenue was the most heavily trafficked roadway north of 59th Street, a major route in and out of the city. While blacks owned and drove cars, automobiles and other vehicles driven by whites made up most of the traffic that passed through Harlem, especially on 7th Avenue.

The attack occurred not long after the disorder moved away from 125th Street, and is the vicinity of a cluster of events, many from around the same time as this attack, that included broken windows, looted stores and individuals hit by rocks. The bus was likely a convenient target for crowds that moved two or three blocks up the avenue.

Those who bombarded the bus may have been targeting the bus company or driver rather than the passengers. Speaking to reporters the day after the disorder, Rev. Adam Clayton Powell of Abyssinian Baptist Church singled out the Fifth Avenue Coach Company for its refusal to employ blacks on buses running through Harlem (NYT, 3/21/35, 1) as an example of "continued exploration of the Negro [that] is at the bottom of all this trouble." Given that reputation, throwing objects at the bus could have been akin to an attack on a white business – liking breaking store windows not assaulting individuals. It is not clear if such a distinction could be made. Certainly, as a city bus, it seems likely that the passengers on board would have been black. It is not clear if that was the case with the Boston-bound bus, attacked two blocks south, which certainly had some white passengers on board, one of whom was injured.
Sylvia Dress shop windows broken Sylvia Dress shop at 162 West 125th Street is one of the businesses in a list of those with broken windows made by a reporter for La Prensa who walked along West 116th Street, Lenox Avenue and West 125th Street on the day after the disorder. After walking north on Lenox Avenue from West 116th Street, the reporter turned left on West 125th Street, walking west toward Kress' store where the disorder originated. The dress shop is one building from the intersection with 7th Avenue. The reporter noted broken windows in the Regal Shoes store on the corner; that store was looted, according to other sources.

That the reporter recorded another dress store with broken windows just west of the dress shop at 150 West 125th Street, and only one other damaged business further west, the Busch Kredit jewelry store at 128 West 125th Street, suggesting that fewer stores suffered damage in this block of West 125th Street than the block to the west. It is possible some other stores in this block suffered minor damage; the La Prensa reporter concluded his list by noting he had not included others as they had only suffered minor damage ("y otras mas que por ser los danos ocasionados relativamente pequeños no creimus de interes catalogar entre los establecimientos ya mencionados"). That was likely due to the presence of police. Inspector McAuliffe did order police to establish a perimeter around the main business blocks of the street, from 8th to Lenox Avenues, from 124th to 126th Streets, after 9.00 PM, according to stories in the New York Times, Daily Mirror and Pittsburgh Courier. Emergency trucks were stationed near the dress shop, at the intersection of West 125th Street and 7th Avenue, according to the New York Times, Daily Mirror and Pittsburgh Courier. Each truck had a “crew of 40 men and [was] equipped with tear gas and riot guns,” the Daily Mirror reported.

No other sources mention this store, and no one arrested during the disorder is identified as breaking the business' windows. The MCCH business survey taken between June and December 1935 did not record any business at the address, and the storefront appears vacant in the Tax Department photograph taken between 1939 and 1941.
Shoe store windows broken A shoe store at 2100 7th Avenue is one of the businesses in a list of those with broken windows made by a reporter for La Prensa who walked along West 116th Street, Lenox Avenue and West 125th Street on the day after the disorder. After walking north on Lenox Avenue from West 116th Street, the reporter turned left on West 125th Street, walking west toward Kress' store where the disorder originated. The shoe store was in the building on the corner of West 125th Street and 7th Avenue, next to the United Cigar store on the corner. While all the stores in the building facing West 125th Street also had their windows broken, the shoe store is the only business in the building on 7th Avenue reported as damaged.

Businesses on the other corners had windows broken during the disorder; Regal Shoes on the southeast corner was also reported looted, while Herbert's Blue Diamond Jewelry store and the branch of the Chock Full O'Nuts restaurant chain on the southwest corner only had windows broken. Police trying to clear people from West 125th Street around Kress' store to the west had pushed the crowd toward this intersection, creating large crowds, some of who broke away and threw objects at the windows of stores on 7th Avenue. After 9.00 PM, emergency trucks were stationed at the intersection, as part of the perimeter Inspector McAuliffe ordered police to establish around the main business blocks of the street, from 8th to Lenox Avenues, from 124th to 126th Streets, according to stories in the New York Times, Daily Mirror, New York Herald Tribune and Pittsburgh Courier. The presence of such large numbers of police does appear to have resulted in only isolated looting of stores on the corners even if it came too late to protect store windows.

No other sources mention the shoe store, and no one arrested during the disorder is identified as breaking the business' windows. It does appear as a white-owned business in the MCCH business survey taken between June and December 1935, but is not visible in the Tax department photograph.